Inside he was sitting at the table, scaling a fish. His large hands worked quickly, scraping my old gipper against the grain, showering scales left and right onto sheets of newspaper. The skin of the fish gleamed red and silver-white, and I looked down at my hands. I could almost feel the salt gritty in the bitter syrup of guts and blood, my fingers closing around the shape of a herring in my palm, the diamond back as dark as wet slate, the white belly glittering.

Scales spat and flicked from the gipper as Magnus Tulloch worked.

He hadn’t heard me. His eyes squinted in concentration and his lips were moving, as though trying out words he might later say aloud. Practising them on a fish that didn’t have a lot to say.

Late afternoon light warms through the slatted windows. I have been given a new pair of eyes, or younger ones have been given back to me. He is beautiful, Magnus Tulloch, he has always been. Strong, and beautiful, and kind. The knife pauses; he pushes back with one elbow that long sweep forever falling in his eyes.

Look at you, the man you have become, the boy you still are. Do you love me like you did when I was your Fish Meggie? Do you love me now that I am a biscuit factory girl who works because she is too frightened of more loss to risk more love? Do you love me when I cry at night for a home I could not wait to leave, that no longer exists because everything that made it home has gone?

Yes, says the boy, his eyes never leaving the knife, yes and yes. The man is silent, has too many questions of his own.

I let the door close behind me and he looked up, and the history between us rushed in to seal all the little cracks.

I folded my apron and hung it over the back of a chair. Cup of tea?

Aye, he said, brushing scales from his hands and shaking them onto the newspaper. He held up the fish by the tail, and grinned.

Just look at this beauty!

The Greeks?

Aye. An’ cheap!

I wondered what would be best: light the oven and bake the fish whole, or do a fillet and fry. But Magnus Tulloch had a better idea.

I could hang it in the chimney ta smoke?

Ooh, imagine! The taste of a smokie! Or Cullen Skink, the milky soup made with mashed potato and smoked haddock. I nodded, hungry for cold-water fish, fish from my mother’s creel.

While he was splitting the snapper in two along either side of the backbone, I sat at the table, waiting for the kettle to boil, chin in the cup of my hands. I watched as he cut along the gills and scoured out the guts with my gipper.

So ye’re a gutter now, are ye, Magnus Tulloch?