‘I can’t explain it,’ I say now. ‘Where it comes from. Because it’s not just fear in me. It’s hate. The Norsemen believed in spirits that lived under the sea, the Sjóvættir, that could, on a whim, pluck you from the ocean’s surface and pull you down to your death. They would make sacrifices to Ægir to keep themselves safe, and carve dragonheads into their bows and sterns.’ I shrug, my face hot. ‘That day on the boat, I had to be force-fed three measures of rum before I calmed down enough to just speak.’

There had been no sorrow in my father’s eyes that day. Only rage. And shame so deep, it turned him to stone: a statue hunched and weighted down. I remember the wind whipping around our heads; wailing echoes through the gantry and wheelhouse. The deck vibrating under my feet as the power block pulley hauled in the net and its lead ropes and neon buoys. Bulging, writhing. Reeking of the sea. I remember my father throwing the first fish he could catch back into the water. The second, he sliced open at the belly, and I willed my stomach to stop churning as he held that dying fish in his fist, sprinkling its blood into the waves. A sacrifice to the sea gods for luck, for a good catch.

I drain my whisky. My swallow burns. ‘And then, one day. There was the storm.’

When they left at dawn, the sky was pink and clear and cloudless. I watched them from my bedroom window, tracing their shapes through cold condensation. Three boats rigged for fly-dragging: coils of seine-net rope and cages of headline buoys stacked on the side decks in place of the long wooden rollers for hauling drift nets.

‘He didn’t like fishing for bottom-feeders like haddock or cod, but this was during the herring ban; no one had a choice. And pretty soon they were having to go beyond inshore waters to find them.’

Charlie only nods. Moves a finger around the rim of his mostly empty glass.

‘It was my tenth birthday the day before they left.’

The peat has burned down to smoking embers. A chill has crept under my skin. Mamaidh had baked a sponge and wrapped two weighty encyclopaedias in brown greaseproof paper – one, an archaeological study of Skara Brae; the other, Norse Mythology and Legends II. She knelt on the kitchen floor and held the backs of cold fingers against my cheek.

Hide them from your dadaidh. Tell him I got you that instead.

A fly-fishing rod and reel leaning against the back door.

That night, after mooring the boats at Na Bàigh, he came back to the house and up to my room. And when he found me reading one of those encyclopaedias, he didn’t take it from me, he didn’t rip its pages from its spine. He didn’t even pull open his buckle and slide the belt from its loops. He just fixed me with that hard, weighted look; watched me with it long enough that I started to shake. That next morning, after I’d watched the boats leave, my stomach tight and cold, I went downstairs and found the fly rod still leaning against the back door, splintered into three pieces.