I didn’t know about the gift of forgetting. This thing—what can I call it?—this rageful, tender thing, this body hunger, it makes you selfish, it makes you forget, for a time, scouring you clean like the North Sea wind, snatching important, unforgettable things into the howl of it and tossing them like plucked feathers, shaking you senseless like featherless skin, naked and open and many-limbed. For a time.

Of all the things unknown to me at age fifteen, this I’d not imagined, never guessed. A mystification.

It made me wonder, you know, lambsie. Wonder about God.

August 1973

August 1973

I know what you’re thinking, lambsie, aye, I can see you with your fingers laced across your eyes, your face screwed up. Seems to me the young believe desire a thing of their own making.

Well.

I said I would not spare you, but perhaps I will spare you any more details of my wedding night.

Here’s a funny thing, surprising. Thinking as I write these memories has made me feel a wee bit sorry for your generation, lambsie. New and free and unloosed from old ways. I don’t mean I would wish for you the prohibitions of kirk and village, demanding so much, forgiving nothing. Making of something joyful a thing of disgust. Punishing its beautiful young people with shame. Never, my Laura-lamb, never that. But … maybe I am wrong, but I wonder if there’s something missing, something given up for freedom. I remember what it was, that shiver to feel the brush of a hand. The gentle resting of an arm across a shoulder that made you impatient to be done with gentle. The sweet, clammy closeness of one body in a crowd, the one among many, the one whose heat you recognised and longed for, and knew to be as yours was too, and was for none but you, just you, just yours. Oh, lambsie … You canna imagine, you canna, and I am sorry for it, aye. Sorry you may never know that impossible, raddling thing. The sweetest anguish of waiting.

But I will say no more, and in truth it is for myself rather than to spare you. To keep for my heart alone those memories.

~

What I must write next is one of those things that comes from the blurred edges I have told you about. Sending it there all those years ago saved me from madness. Bringing it back … well.

I remember how I used to unwrap the dressings on my fingers. Fast. Without looking.

25

Magnus Tulloch returned to Lerwick before me, with the other coopers, his passage paid by Nicol & Mair. But I’d signed on at Gadlehead, and that was no longer near my home. So I’d to make my own way to my new home, Lerwick.

But I’d to do something first, the most important thing I’d ever done. Something only I could do.