I looked at her this morning and thought: I have a daughter of fifty-two years. Why should this thing I know already knock the breath from me? But the age of a child seems a greater marker of time than a person’s own age, and it holds a special grief that comes with having walked already the path they are coming upon, knowing, suddenly, there are not many paths, just this one. My Kathryn. Isn’t that her face is lined overmuch, she is silk-skinned, and beautiful still, but age is doing the pushing and pulling it always does, aye, and she is no more the quinie I still think her. Her hands, though, I like to look at her hands, smooth from the clay she works with.

How suspicious she was when I told her I wasn’t ready to take my books back to the library yet. She gave me a Look—oh, how like Ma she can be! Had I been going to town on my own again, she wanted to know, when I’d promised her I wouldn’t? No, I said, and for once it was truth. I haven’t been to town, nor anywhere. But I didn’t tell her what it is that’s taking up all my time, I haven’t let her see me writing in my book. She wouldn’t like that, no indeed.

But I am forgetting, lambsie, drifting off the track, writing as if to a diary of the day, instead of writing to you of the past.

What a strange thing it is, this looking back, remembering. There was this girl that was me, and she did this thing and did that, and I watch her in my memory. I know she was doing the right thing here, lost her way there, should have recognised dangers that seem so clear now. I wince when I see her do what she will regret, say things I know will hurt her in the end. I see her like a girl in a story. Someone a bit like me but more foolish, more wise, more brave, more this, more that. A bit like me but not me. And you’re thinking: of course, that’s how everyone remembers, like watching a film of their lives.

But sometimes I’m inside that girl, I’m inside the story. And I have no more idea of what she should do than she does herself—no wisdom to see from the outside—because I am the girl and the story will do as it will.

4

Meggie, Kitta whispers, her head low over a slate of chalky sums. Meggie, hear. I’m goin’ to the fish!

Ye’re not!

Am too, Ginger Meggie. And she produces a shilling from the pocket of her skirt, turns it over in the palm of her hand like it’s a magic-man’s trick. As well it might be for the way I gape at it.