I glance back at the sea – where the sea used to be before the fog arrived – and all at once, I see myself standing on a cliff edge – a black dress with white spots and striped tights, above too-big khaki-green wellies. My little hand stretched towards the disappeared sea, finger pointing. Out there! My heart stutters, mostly in relief. That memory had first come back to me in the Maudsley’s Psychiatric ICU when they started reducing the drugs. Then, it had been a tether, a beacon in the dark. But here, it’s real. A real memory of this place. Perhaps not this cliff. But definitely this place. I let out an undignified screech when something suddenly barrels out of the fog to race around me in excited yips.

‘Don’t mind Bonny. She’s too old to keep that up for long.’

Bonny is a black-and-white collie. And sure enough, before her companion even moves into view she settles onto her haunches, head cocked at an angle as she regards me half-kneeling in the mud, my fist still pressed against my chest.

‘D’you need a hand?’

I shake my head as I struggle to get up, boots sliding in the mud. The teeth in his smile are crooked, his grey sideburns as thick as the hair that pokes out from under a wide-brimmed tweed cap, his face ruddy and heavily lined. I recognise him from the pub – Kelly’s He’s like a hundred and fifty years old. Has an opinion about everything and everyone. Close to, I realise he’s probably only in his late sixties.

‘Charlie MacLeod,’ he says, holding out a hand that, when I shake it, is unfathomably warm. Like Kelly’s, his accent is soft and lilting, sounding more Irish than mainland Scottish.

‘Maggie Anderson.’

‘Aye.’ He nods.

The following silence stretches into awkward territory, and I pull the drawstring on my hood tighter. ‘I was just looking at these stones.’

‘Aye.’ He lets that one sit for an uncomfortable while too, and then he runs a thick-clubbed finger under his nose. ‘We’ve a monument to just about everything round these parts.’

‘Who are they for?’ Because I can feel another awkward silence looming.

Charlie nods at The Fisherman. ‘Most of us were fishermen round this coast all our lives. I crewed on my father’s boat and then part-owned one of my own, till fishery licences and quotas pushed us out and let the big corporations in. Used to be so much herring, mackerel, salmon, cod, haddock, and hake around these islands you never imagined anyone would’ve been able to fish them all.’ He shakes his head and rainwater runs off the end of his cap. ‘Sea out there’s taken a great many island men over the years. Rarely gives them back. That stone’s to say we remember them.’

He looks out at the curtains of fog. Runs his finger back and forth against the base of his nose for so long I wonder if we’re done talking to each other. ‘Little one’s for wee Lorne. Drowned out there at eight years old.’