Ach, I promised to tell you everything, lambsie, but I told you too that I would have to take my time about it. Some things … well, I just canna work out how to write them down. I picture your face as you read the words and I canna do it. I will have to find a way to make sense of it to myself before I can explain it to you, what happened next. On the Lily Maud. Brukie’s Sandy.

But I will try, lambsie, in time. Indeed I will. Because I have been thinking about this for a long time now, and I have a theory: that everything else that has happened since stems from that one terrible thing I canna tell.

NOTEBOOK 2

Notebook 2

1905–1909

AIR

Brukie’s Sandy

He was a one, that Brukie’s Sandy, a one with the grapplie hook, but this day the prize was just beyond his reach. Prize it was, too, the kind he always knew would come some day, if he was patient, if he kept both eyes on the sea.

A bottle.

And he saw, through the corked amber glass, that there was something inside it. A spiral of paper, a message from the sea. Imagine what faraway place it might have drifted from, what stories it might tell. Imagine!

So that boy, that Brukie’s Sandy, he leaned out over the stern of the Lily Maud, leaned out with the hook in his reaching hands.

January 1973

January 1973

Dearest lambsie, a new exercise book, but don’t be alarmed. I promise I’ll not be writing the whole of my life in these pages—everything that happened, every month, every year that passed. But as I look out of the glass doors onto my wee patio of bay trees and rosemary, I hear the old carriage clock ticking on the dresser, and I have to keep writing, I have to return, while I can, to that place and time I’ve not been to in my mind for a lifetime. Call back the girl I was and find a place for her in the order of things. Retrieve the things I have chased to the blurred edges of memory, hold them to the light, see the shape of them now that I have older eyes. Ha, lambsie, aye, I know. It is as much for me I’m writing as it is for you, but you are a smart girl, smart enough to allow that it canna be another way.

It would have been simpler to write for you the stories I promised when you were a little girl—of Fish Meggie, the Gutting Girl from the Top of the World. But we are both of us past fairytales now, lambsie, each for our different reasons. The story of where you come from is real, as real as memory can ever be, and not so easy as fairytales.

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