But will they remain, too, my memories? And will I remember how to write them? I am afraid that words I have loved all my life will be carried away from me like flotsam on the tide.

I must write faster, while I still can, and I must choose, lambsie, choose for you. I canna write it all, I know that now. After I came home from hospital, I made myself this promise: if ever I am well enough to go back to my notebooks, I will not just begin the story from where I left off, what came next, and next after that. No, I will try to write for you the things that matter. And I will try to write them all.

1

I had seen cornflowers and the North Sea and every kind of sky. I had seen Magnus Tulloch’s eyes. I thought I knew blue. And then I saw Fremantle.

Of all the memories I have of arriving, finally, in this stranger-place, the furthest place on earth from the cold north, it is this one, lambsie, this memory that is the strongest, the brightest, the one to catch my breath even now when I think of it. Wasn’t just that the sky was blue but that there was so much of it. A blue that began at the horizon and went on forever, deeper here, brighter there, but all blue, unbroken. I did not think of the word relentless then. Later, when I knew what blue could be, when I’d felt its heat, the jangle and glare of it—aye, then I did. But we arrived when summer had passed, and it was a while before I met this other blue.

On the weekends, Magnus Tulloch and I would walk from our hostel in Fremantle to the edge of the Indian Ocean, just to look, to exclaim to each other: Was there ever sand so fine, so white? Water so pure? Black an’ blue with fish, I’ll wager, Magnus Tulloch said, and I wondered what manner of fish they would be. I knew they would not be herring. No drifters here, no farlins, no gutting girls. It made me think of Clementina, her big laugh, the way she used to scowl … Clementina, my sister now. And I’d wipe the sun from my streaming eyes.

Magnus Tulloch liked to peel off his shoes and socks and let the bubbles left behind by waves foam over his toes, and he would pick up slippery ropes of brown weed and pop the berries between his fingers, a smile on his face. But not me, no. I did not want to look at seaweed swilling in the shallows. Look up, I told myself, look up and learn to unremember.