But these loud, happy ceilidhs were no place for those sweet intimacies of learning what another thinks, who they are, the world they have come from. After kirk on Sunday—it was then I learned these things about Magnus Tulloch while we walked together to the loch, or along the sea road, or right up to the Knab.

He came from a crofting and fishing family in the south, near Sandwick. But the longline fishing was done, no future for him there. He’d apprenticed himself as a cooper to Messrs Nicol & Mair, and they would have him travel with the herring crews once free of his bonds.

So ye didn’t care to sign on to the drifters yourself?

Nah, he told me, shading his eyes as we watched the bonxies circling, circling. There be more than enough fishers already among the Tullochs.

I said no more. Old Boy Jackie had told me quietly that Magnus Tulloch’s father died at sea long ago.

Magnus Tulloch told me stories about his sister Grace, who’d once come to Lerwick on a bicycle ta see the big city and had managed to fall into Lerwick Harbour and had to be fished out by the Harbour Master’s boy. An’ now she writes me letters every week, bidding me away from the evil city.

Gracie had just married a boy he used to sit next to in school, Karl. Magnus Tulloch smiled when he told me this.

Have ye brothers? I asked, thinking of mine, somewhere to the north in the seas off Baltasound.

Aye, he said. Whalers, they are, away at the Faroes. They were older than he and Gracie by a dozen years or more, and he had not seen them for a good long while, nor expected to.

When he spoke softly of his mother’s death from influenza the year before, my hand reached out before I knew it.

It was only natural that Magnus Tulloch would want to know what I had come from, too, and it made me anxious. I wanted him to like me. How could he like me if he knew? I kept my answers brief, my stories few, thinking that the less I gave, the less I would need to lie. Magnus Tulloch waited for more, and when it didn’t come I think he was hurt a little. But he was patient, and he did not push, and I was ever grateful for that.