At home, there was always work to do, just more of it since Kitta had gone. Granda didn’t go out to sea for days any more. He couldn’t manage the lines without a strong crew; the weight was too much for him. But every few nights he’d take out the Lily Maud with his straggler-helpers and return next morning with a modest haul. Before school we’d scrape the fish clean of scales with twigs of birch, knife out the insides and take off the heads, and then split each fish to dry. If the weather was good, they’d go on racks outside, but more often we’d hang them in the chimney. Ooh, the smell of them there, smoking lightly, scented with fir cones burnt to ash in the grate! The dried ones were called speldings and the ones in the chimney were smokies. I wish you could taste them, lambsie. Nothing like that today, no.

Reddin’, now, that was always women’s work, and Granda left us to it. After school, Liza, Elspet and I would clean the hooks—a stinking job! Pinching off bits of rotten bait, checking the knots of horsehair that tied each hook to the snoods of the lines. And before Granda took out the Lily Maud again, we’d to gather bait for the wily bottom feeders: cod, haddock, whiting. Whelks were best, scraped off stones in briny pools, but even in April we’d oftentimes be breaking a crust of ice to find them. When whelks were scarce, we’d pluck limpets and mussels from rocks in the shallows. Shelling—another job I couldn’t abide. Always there were enormous mounds of empty shells along Tiller Street and right down to the boatie shore. Whelks and limpets, those were parboiled first and then shucked, but mussels had to be prised out of a slimy sea syrup. Horrible! The smell of shellfish has forever made my nose run, my eyes itch. Agony, it was, not to scratch the burning till my lashes fell out.

And it was a job made the worse for the absence of my Kitta. Wasn’t that I didn’t like my cousins—oh, but that Liza! If she wasn’t whining she was prattling fit to give us all a pain in the peenie.

One day she fixed us both, Elspet and me, with a wide-eyed stare I’d come to mistrust.

So, what d’ye think they told me, those tinkie lasses, up by the peatie bog?

I shrugged. Elspet looked at me and shrugged too.

Go on, think of what, Liza urged.

I rolled my eyes at Elspet and carried on shelling.

How ye get to be preggernant, that’s what! And Liza sat back and waited, her bug eyes smug.

Elspet made a clicking noise with her tongue. Everybody knows that, she said softly.

I looked at her, surprised. Imagine Elspet knowing something like that, something I didn’t.