Granda, have ye seen where the fulpie be?

It was in my head that maybe he’d kicked Crusoe again, but he wasn’t likely to say so, now, was he? But I’d asked everyone else in the village, and none had a thing to tell me.

Granda spat on the sand. Pah! he said, folding his thick arms across his chest. I don’t know where your wretched beastie be. A long way from here if God be good!

I didn’t like what I saw in his face. Something mean, it was. Something satisfied.

October 1972

October 1972

Today your mother caught me, lambsie. It’s a dismal thing to be old, always having to explain yourself.

I canna say she was encouraging about the birthday gift I am writing for you. She glanced at my book and frowned. How long has this been going on? she wanted to know. Not long, I said, though it’s been months of not long. She didn’t ask to read it, no, she just looked at me with that way she has and shrugged.

What’s the point in raking up the past?

It made me wonder: what past does Kathryn remember?

And she told me I shouldn’t be upsetting myself. Nor you.

It’s her story, too, I said, and how prim that sounds when I think of it now. Aye, listen to me, taking the high moral ground, defending a daughter’s right to know.

The truth is this: your mother knows only a fraction of the things it will upset me to write. She doesn’t know because I’ve never told her.

12

I had nursed to myself hopes that Kitta would soon be home. That her spell away at the fish would be a temporary thing. That it was a way of getting her out of Roanhaven for a wee while and then she would come back. But it was a boom year for the herring, and the curers needed every team. Messrs Nicol & Mair sent word: Kitta’s team would be kept on after the Lerwick season, following the shoals like the drifters did. Da and the boys were being sent to Rosehearty, Kitta’s team to Fraserburgh.

Why the Broch? I grumbled to Ma. Why could she not be sent to the Gadle, closer to us? Even in Roanhaven we knew Gadlehead was overrun with fishworkers. The town folk were frantic, and gleeful too—it was one of the best herring seasons ever.

They go where they be told to, Ma said. The curers have thousands of workers, they canna be bothered about families.

Glum, I was. Kitta away. Crusoe still missing, not a sign of him anywhere. Every morning, every night, I would go looking, calling him—up and down the grid of streets, along the boatie shore, up to the scaur, all along the braes.