And while Clementina and the children fussed about with chickens, I turned to vegetables. The seeds were a gift from Mr Brescianini on the other side of the fence. What miracles! I held them on my palm—some like glossy beads, some as etched as limpet shells. I marvelled that from such dry, lifeless trinkets could come something as precious as food. Beans and peas grew up against the fence. The carrots and marrows I sowed into furrows, like those on Mrs Laskon’s side of the yard. And from the first time I put my scarred, misshapen hands into the earth, to turn and prepare, to plant and water, I felt another of those shifts in the world. But this time it came from me. There she was, Fish Meggie, the Gutting Girl from the Top of the World, daughter of sea people, granddaughter of a fisherman with a caul in his pocket—insubstantial, like water, like air. But she was slipping away, aye, and in her place was someone stronger. Someone who, like Clementina, might be able to say finished, done, gone. And it seemed to me that it was something to do with the grains of sand between my imperfect fingers, fragments of all that is left when time wears away the living and the dead. I tried to tell Clementina how I felt, but she snorted, hands on hips. I’ve had my fill of plantin’, quinie, an’ it’s not my plan to be doin’ it again. Ye can have the garden all to yourself!

And so that’s what I did. I turned the soil and planted seeds and began to feel a different kind of strong, the kind that belonged to me and not just to what I’d come from. And I started thinking: When Magnus Tulloch comes back, will he even recognise me?

August 1974

August 1974

Oh, lambsie, I don’t know. I keep telling myself: Write the important things, there’s not time to tell it all. And I’m feeling it more and more, that I am running out of time, running low on whatever it is that is keeping me going. But they are bound together, the everything and the nothing, and disentangling them often seems beyond what I can do.

Today your Unty Jessie came for a cup of tea and brought me some pink roses from her garden. As I sit here now, looking at them, the memory that comes into my head is not an important thing, no, but it is clear and bright before my eyes, and I want to catch it before it floats away, write it just as I see it there.

Ach, lambsie, you’re probably getting used to me writing more, or less, than I promised.

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