You rolled your pretty eyes. Do I always say that?

It was after you left that I got my book out again—the first time for a couple of weeks. I have been too sick to write, lambsie. And tired. I don’t know how much more I can give you.

I looked at my list again, the list at the front, and scratched a few things out. Not in that way of something done but to be—what’s the word? Ruthless. Aye. Now it’s just the things I have to write, while I still have the words.

But the next thing on the list … well. I keep putting down the pen, putting it off.

Forgive me if I’m brief, if I leave out the details. You are a smart girl, lambsie, you can fill them in for yourself.

14

Magnus Tulloch, winter 1924

Only name and dates are on your grandfather’s stone in Fremantle Cemetery.

Magnus Tulloch

b. 1889 d. 1924

Every time I looked at that stone, I would say the words I wished were there: With the breath, smiles, tears of all my life. But there was no money to have them carved then, and later … well, it didn’t seem to matter. They were in my head, and that was enough.

There was a time I used to go to the cemetery every month to hang chains of yellow flowers over those letters and numbers. I never cared that they were weeds because he never did, no. He told me once they reminded him of the Knab. D’ye remember, Meggie, when we would climb up there on Sundays? Aye, to talk and eat our jeely pieces in the sky. It made me yearn to take a sharp pair of shears to memory, snip away the pain from it and leave behind just those days when Magnus Tulloch’s love for me was everything and bigger than it all. He used to say that the most beautiful thing he had ever seen was a flight of purple silk into the sky that carried his heart with it. That’s what I wanted to remember, too. But I thought of the Knab and there they were, those small arms flailing like wings, that flightless bird flung from the edge and let to fall because I couldn’t catch the fabric of his shirt.

As time went on I’d not go to the cemetery so often.

I took you with me once when you were little. Do you remember that? You walked through the stones as solemn as an owl, looking all around you, your head cocked as though listening for something.

Why do the dead people need flowers? you asked me.

Oh, it’s just another way of talkin’, I think. We speak with flowers an’ hope the dead will hear us.