On this, Magnus Tulloch was quiet. He would push the hair back from his forehead and his towering body would hunch down, shrink a little. I learned to douse the questions in his sighs with silence.

Maybe when we are somewhere else, he said. A warm place, new.

Maybe.

Such a small, mean word. It was all I had to give him.

August 1973

August 1973

In 1910 we emigrated to Western Australia, a young colony in an old country. They wanted hard workers, wanted skills such as Magnus Tulloch had.

Every fisher and cooper family seemed to have a third or fourth cousin who had forged the way there before us, so we were busy, Magnus Tulloch and I, finding out what we needed to know. How to apply. What to take. Making our preparations for a journey of one way. Such a long way, lambsie.

In that flurry of months came a day that Clementina Slater would always after call The Madness. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, lambsie, how strange it is that sometimes we manage almost to erase the memory of pain to spare ourselves, and other times it’s as though we’ve taken to it with a polishing cloth. That day in August 1909 is one of those memories. I can pluck it from the past, brutally whole and clean. All those years and I can still feel the sun on my skin when I think of it.

Many years later, Clementina would press, try to get me to talk about that day. Ach, I would say, I was only eighteen, I canna remember, can I?

27

A clear, blue Sunday afternoon, a rare late-summer warmth, and we have decided to forget all else and follow the sun. I walk with Clementina up on the Knab while Magnus Tulloch is at Lerwick. The Ann Rose is in port. Stivvy.

The sky is the blue of Magnus Tulloch’s eyes, I think, and Clementina Slater snorts.

I look down, embarrassed. I’d not meant to speak my thoughts aloud.

Blue skies every day, where ye’re goin’, she says. Ye’ll be sick of them, ye will. Ye’ll be sayin, ‘Eh, another bloddy blue sky, ho hum, yew know.’

And we laugh, Clementina and I, with the sun on our faces and a wee pinch of panic that it is a long way away, this place of blue skies, and we won’t have many more such times together.

The Knab is alive with people this day. Sailors in port. Groups of gutting girls from Gremista and Garthspool. Coopers and fishers enjoying the Lord’s day. Lerwegians and the folk they call strangers alike. I remember what Clementina had asked me after I’d been here past a season:

So what are ye now? Are ye a Shetland lassie? A Ler-wee-gee?