I was not so good at haggling with the farmer wifies who bought our smokies. I had watched Ma do it, but it wasn’t as easy as it looked, no.

Smaller than afore, said the wifie at Peterslie Farm, looking down her nose and setting her fists on her hips.

I frowned. I don’t think so …

Canna give ye more than four dozen, an’ ye can tell your ma so from Lochie’s Katie. And she took a step back as though to put an end to the bargaining and I could go if I wished.

Aye, I said, knowing she’d not be budging an inch when she had one so green as me to deal with.

They had this way about them, those wily women, and I wasn’t their match, not even near to it. How Kitta would laugh and call me plucked like a chuckney.

All the way home, I feared Ma would look at my load and think it less than it ought to be, but she unpacked it all on the table, the neeps and tatties, the butter, the eggs padded in straw, and pulled me to her, wheezing. Ye’ve done well, Ginger Meggie, aye. Well enough for your first time out. She reached over and smoothed my tangled hair. Ye’re our Fish Meggie now.

It was the finest praise she could give me, and I couldn’t speak for pride. I tried it on myself for the feel of it. Fish Meggie. And I wondered would it stick, this new name that spoke of what I had managed to do instead of the curse I was born with?

~

I couldn’t find Crusoe that night. Ma had not seen him nor heard his bark for more than a day, and she’d been cross that I might have taken him with me to the farms when she’d warned me never to.

We searched all along the boatie shore for him, Elspet, Liza and me. We called his name, we clapped our hands, but we dared not whistle so close to the boats because of what the fishers always said: Whistle an’ ye never know what will answer!

Nothing.

I stood up above the scaur where you could see right along the boatie shore and across to Tiller Street, and the other way up to the moors beyond. There was Elspet on her hands and knees, peering under a barnacled hull. Liza, kicking along the shore, her feet bare and her long skirt and apron tucked up into her drawers, calling for Crusoe from time to time when she remembered. A figure out on the water, on the Lily Maud, scrubbing the timbers with a stiff brush: Brukie’s Sandy. Over there, Unty Leebie, spreading ganseys and seaboot stockings over the gorse to dry.

No Crusoe.

On the walk back home, I passed Granda. It was foolish to ask but I did it anyway.