I wasn’t lying to Kelly about what I do or don’t believe. It is complicated. I know I’m bipolar. But maybe I’m something else too. I might have spent my life disbelieving it, denying it, calling it only dissociation and delusion, but now things are different. Now I want to believe it. I want to have once been a man called Andrew MacNeil. I need it to be true. And if what I said as a child about him being murdered was true, then maybe all of it was true. Maybe everything Mum ever said was true.

Charlie is wrong. It’s not Robert’s story that I’m here to write. It’s my own that I want to rewrite. Because if I was once a man called Andrew MacNeil then I can live with myself. I can look in the mirror again and not hate who I see. It’s selfish, desperate, even ludicrous – and probably the most dangerous of dangerous roads, but a drowning woman will grab on to anything to stay afloat.

A sound – that same sound – indefinable but close, makes me whirl round with a gasp. My torchlight sweeps over half a dozen or more silver-bright eyes and I nearly shriek. Until I hear a very baleful baa-aa, followed by the muffled drum of hooves.

But once the sheep have gone, faded into the further away night, I can still feel it. Something. Someone. I shiver, remembering Charlie’s talk of thin places and spectre ships. I swing my torchlight around and around, seeing nothing at all but road and grass and bog cotton. But I don’t say Hello? this time. I don’t say anything at all. Because suddenly I’m too afraid – too absolutely certain – that someone will answer me. That someone is there, standing in the impenetrable darkness just beyond the reach of my light.

CHAPTER 7

Robert

Islanders will complain about anything. Everything. It’s a full-time occupation. The only thing perhaps that gives us any sense of control in a world where the weather is wild, the sea is cruel, and the soil is chalky-dry or peaty-gley. And so we all sit in our homes and our pubs and our churches, week after week, month after month, complaining. And absolutely nothing changes.

‘Right, so. We’re agreed then that we need at least two more volunteers to cover the pub and shop over the run-up to Christmas. Three would be better; last year it was busier than the Glasgow Fair.’ Kenny stands facing us like the wise leader he thinks he is, even though he’s younger than Charlie and less than a decade older than me. Broad-shouldered and clean-shaven, always in check flannel and jeans, he looks more farmer than fisherman, but most dawns he marches down to the Unity moored at Bàgh Fasgach like a martyred and grim-faced Captain Ahab never done with the sea. Or his own importance.

‘Ask around. I’ll put the rota up on the announcement board. If we’ve no more volunteers by next meeting, I’ll pick folk, and it’ll be their responsibility to find a replacement.’ He looks around the room, flashes a grin. ‘So, any other business before we get down to the more serious job of toasting Charlie’s big four-O? There’s a Macallan behind the bar with our name on it.’