She took my disastrous hands in hers and looked me in the eye. Now, tell me, quinie, if ye’re so happy, where are the bairns for Unty Clementina?

The noisy arrival of Magnus and Stivvy spared me from saying what she already knew: that I wasn’t yet ready. That there was still a frozen part of me that even the fierce Fremantle sun couldn’t thaw.

~

I had brought home bread and cheese. But that Clementina, she’d conjured up a soup from nothing.

Good, Magnus declared, sopping it up with a hunk of bread, and Stivvy agreed with a nod.

I could taste dried peas and potatoes—all there’d been in our pinewood pantry—but as for the rest?

Whatever did ye find to make stock? I asked.

Potato skins. An’ some green onion things from the Eye-talun mannie, your neighbour, what’s his name? He called out to me an’ passed them over the fence, nice as ye please.

I don’t know. And I thought: How like Clementina to know more in a day than I’d managed in two years.

An’ a spoonful of flour from that Mrs Laskon next door.

Mrs Laskon! Mrs Laskon gave ye flour?

I asked her for some, aye, and she did. She wanted to give me two spoonfuls, make it thicker, she said, but one’s quite enough an’ I told her thanks, one’s all I need. And Clementina sniffed.

I was trying to imagine this conversation with our landlady, the same woman who wanted a word, please, Mrs Tulloch every time I saw her. Clementina Slater Ratter truly was a marvel.

The marvel looked at me curiously. What problem is it ye have with her?

Oh, no problem from where I see it, I said, looking across at Magnus, but he and Stivvy were deep in discussion again—clearing this, fencing that. I lowered my voice, all the same. Problem’s all with her. Turns up her nose, she does. At Magnus for the shame of his wife put out to work, as she calls it, as if I have no say at all. An’ as for me—well, Mills & Ware, ye canna get lower. Factory girl—yew know.

I laughed, but Clementina’s brows disappeared into fleshy furrows.

~

It was late when I pinched out the wicks of the thick tallow candles. Mrs Laskon objected to electric lights after nine; she wasn’t made of money.

My toes kicked something light that skittered across the floor. Something from the children’s bag of trinkets. I picked it up, turned it in my fingers. A small cone, smooth inside, the outside pitted with tiny corrugations. I took it to the window but I didn’t need moonlight to tell me it was a limpet shell.

How many limpets had I shelled in my life?

Faces in the dark—my beautiful sister, an old man, a slack-chinned lolloping boy … Furiously I rubbed them from my eyes.