‘No sin in it. No weakness either.’ Charlie shrugs. ‘One man can’t lamb an entire flock, Robert. Not even a man like you.’

That I do bristle at, but Charlie is quick to shake his head, refill our glasses. ‘You’re a Lewisman, so you know how things are done. Everyone helps. That’s all.’ He looks at me a little too long. ‘What is it you’re really afraid of, Robert?’

‘The storms.’ I say it without thinking, without reserve. Why, I don’t know. Perhaps just to say it. To someone. Because the endless toil, the uncertainty and worry, the perceived slights, the dwindling savings, all of it really is just the storms. We’re already long overdue, and in Àrd Shiadair that always meant the first one of the season would be a doozy. My father’s word; scornful and rolling-eyed. Let it fuckin’ try. The flash of anger I feel is a reflex too: old and weathered thin. ‘A fisherman should know better than me to be afraid of them.’

‘Aye, maybe,’ Charlie says, but I see the shadow that passes over his eyes. The fear that he pretends he doesn’t feel.

He picks up his whisky. Puts it back down, undrunk. ‘Why is it you hate fishermen, Robert?’

‘Fishermen hated me first,’ I say, worried now about the looseness of my tongue. ‘Why did you become one?’

Charlie shrugs. ‘The MacLeods of Cill Maraigh have always been fishermen. My father worked the pelagic fleet out of Port Nis his whole life.’

I look down into my glass, swirl the brown liquid around and around. ‘My father ran three boats. Seventy-foot wooden-hulled herring drifters and whitefish seiners. Just about every man in the area worked for him.’

Some of the whisky sloshes over the rim of the glass, splashing my hand. I was born when my father was at sea and the tide was rising. Both good omens for growing up into a good fisherman. If the tide had been on the ebb, I’d have been doomed to perish by shipwreck.

‘I was his only child. And instead of storms and boats and fish, I liked to stay indoors, I liked to read books. I wanted to become an archaeologist, a teacher, a historian – anything but a bloody fisherman.’

I think of that hard, lean face, weathered harder by the sun and the sky and the sea. The contempt in his grey-dark eyes. Sometimes, the sorrow.

‘He thought it was a choice. A rejection. But it wasn’t. I would’ve given anything to want the life he wanted for me. To love the sea.’

His belt had been made of thick cured cow hide. Its buckle, Sheffield steel. Sometimes he would cry when he hit me; I’d hear it behind his voice. There’s no salt in your blood. None. You’re fuckin’ hers, all hers.

I was eight, the only time I was ever on one of his boats. The Acair. We had to go as far out as the continental shelf, some sixty miles northwest. It was a good day, calm and sunny. But the minute we reached the edge of the shelf and the water turned black and deep, I filled up with dread like melting tar. I watched the nets and cookies and floats disappear down into that blackness, their luminous pink swallowed up – down – and when the engines started again, I imagined those nets dragging through that dark, over rock and wreck. All those things down there, things none of us could see, waiting to grab and yank. And sink.