Hurry home, Kitta, I prayed every night. Hurry home for Hogmanay and the world will be put to rights again. Everything will be as it should.

~

Kitta did not bring her kist with her, just a new bag made from canvas. It looked heavy, or perhaps it was just the way she carried it—held away from her body, as though the bag was itself a body that might easily be bruised. Inside were gifts she had brought home: some apples all the way from The Sooth, some knitted caps and mittens. I didn’t know what else was in her bag but I would have liked to find out.

There was little time for us to talk, Kitta and me, because Hogmanay kept us flurrying. All the day Ma had us sweeping and cleaning, taking out ashes, emptying buckets, and at night the whole village waited for the Auld Kirk bell to ring in the New Year. Then it was ‘Auld Lang Syne’, handshakes and kisses, and waiting for the first footing, the first to cross our door with a lump of peat for luck. Bannockies and black buns, a wee glass of whisky for the men and a well-watered thimbleful for the women, which they poured into their tea. The New Year day was for the rounds—visiting neighbours and having them visit in return—and for some in the village it was ceilidh time. But not at number 8 Tiller Street. We’d to listen to Granda’s thundering on about the evils of singing and dancing, his judgment on those who invite the devil in with music.

No-one was up early next morning but Kitta and me. Even Ma, always first to rise, was still abed, her breathing riffled with the lightest snore. Kitta made porridge, and then inclined her head, a sign for me to follow. Out into the cold we went, up to the braes, Crusoe darting round our legs. I was slow about it, and she grabbed the sleeve of my gansey and jerked me along behind her like she would a dawdling child. Something was bubbling out of Kitta. She was distracted, her eyes sliding left and right as though looking for who might be watching. I couldn’t find her. Even when I looked her full in the face, she slipped away, preoccupied with secrets.

Change. More change. First with Granda Jeemsie. Then Da and the boys. And now Kitta—a girl from the town and no more a fisher lass. And I thought: when things change, something new enters the space you live in, something you must move with, turn to, chafe against, until you ease a new shape for yourself. But something is lost, too, in the changing, some small piece of your world gone for good.

In the months between Kitta’s fourteenth birthday and Hogmanay, I had lost a part of my sister that I could never get back. And for that I mourned.

~