I sat beside him. My fingers found the stranded kelp, gleaming where the tide had left it overnight. Just offshore, I could see Dr Gideon on deck arranging his equipment. He threw a weighted net off the side and it made a satisfying chrrk on the surface.

‘You must stop drinking the supplies,’ I said to my father, as evenly as I could.

‘Don’t start again, my love,’ he replied, then added: ‘Was just a sip. Others had the same.’

‘No, they didn’t. No one else drinks like you do.’

He creased his face a little. ‘Everyone drinks more or less the same, especially at sea. You’re too young to know anything about it.’

‘I’m thirty-two, father.’

A look of confusion crossed his face, then was gone. ‘Well, you don’t know, anyway.’ He pushed himself to his feet with a grunt, threw off his trousers and shirt and edged forward in his breeches. The downslope guided him to the water’s edge; he felt the shallows lick his toes, then walked confidently into the water. Some creature pulsed away as his feet advanced.

Once the sea had reached his hips, he lowered himself to chin-depth and submerged his head, shook it underwater and came up scrubbing at his hair. He had his back to me as he did this: the muscles of younger years hung slack from his shoulders. Beyond him, Dr Gideon was hauling the net. The Connollys watched as he did so, pulling at folds of it as they came within reach but always with a hand clutching the shrouds. Both of them, despite their strength, were wary about leaning over the edge.

My father rolled over and floated on his back. I tried to feel that moment as he did: the cool salt water lifting him, the sky above registering not as brightness but as warmth. And his memory, feeding him some recollection of what the sky looked like, back when he could see it. I hoped that he saw a glorious memory.

~

When we returned to the Moonbird, a Connolly took my hand and hauled me over the bulwark. He held it a moment longer: I thanked him, called him Angus and he grunted that he was Declan. ‘Doctor asked that you visit him in his cabin,’ he said. His brother—Angus, I suppose—yelled at him from the windlass: ‘Cannae work it, aargh,’ and I saw my father and me in the two of them.

I made sure I stalled a little on deck before I went below. The gloom of the passageway ended at a glow where daylight entered beyond the open cabin door. I called out and the doctor summoned me, in that warm voice of his.