‘We lied to you. That was why. Twenty-five years ago, a man did die here. He drowned.’ His gaze moves over my shoulder, up towards the bluffs. ‘And his name was Andrew.’

CHAPTER 4

End of September 1993

Robert

We’re all guilty of something, my father always said. But the biggest sin is fear. And never facing it. That was not his sin, of course. Only mine. This morning, the sun is high. It lights up the occasional sprays of spindrift in silver-white sparks. From this height, the ocean looks endless like the sky. Blue and quiet. But the storms are coming. I can see them in the spray blown from the crests of waves and in the scattered whitecaps out towards the horizon. In the slow steady leaching of light from the sky, a little earlier each day. And I can feel them in the air and against my skin. A prickle. A shiver of old fear.

Today, there are no boats on the horizon, but I can see the red-and-white-striped Unity returning to the slip at Bàgh Fasgach. Calum sees it too and races along the shoreline, kicking up water, his high giggles catching and riding the wind. And something inside my chest gets tight with hope.

Once, many years ago, I stood on a headland just like this and looked out at the same ocean. I was alone and afraid and full of despair. But I vowed even then that I would come back again. I’d come back in spite of the storms. In spite of the fear. In spite of the despair. I had hope. Because somehow I knew that one day things would be different. One day I’d stop being afraid. I would come back. And all would be well.

And so, here I am.

On days when I’m less certain – when I wonder why I returned to the islands at all – I walk the length of this headland, to the very limits of my own leased land, and I remember how it was in Aberdeen. That cavernous windowless building, full of noise and blood. Stainless-steel worktops and the stink of fish guts that I could never scrub off, no matter how I tried. The claustrophobia – the suffocation – that I feel when I look out at that ocean is not the same. And it’s no match for the feeling I get when I walk Àrd Chreag; when I look at the land, my flock alongside or out in the pasture beyond, their black Hebridean coats bleached brown by the sun.

No son of mine will ever be a farmer.

And maybe that’s true, because I don’t feel like much of one. Breeding season is less than one month away, and already I’m certain it will go badly; that I’ll find some way to screw it up. The summer was wet, and the bere barley and small oat yield too poor; neither will provide enough fodder to see us through winter. Too often when I’m rounding up the flock to move pasture, I find myself looking out at the sea instead. Watching for the high masthead lights of the pelagic and whitefish trawlers out of Steòrnabhagh and Port Nis in the pink-silver of dawn; their radars, stacks, and gantries silhouettes against the horizon. Listening for the rattles and shouts of the smaller, nearer creel boats from Bàgh Fasgach, A’ Chàrnach, and Miabhaig. The low diesel rumble of their engines; the high impatient shrieks of the gulls. They are the sounds of my memory, my childhood. Just like my father’s voice: low, slow, and always angry.