He doesn’t seem at all familiar to me. I see some of the other inmates sitting in their armchairs like Lord and Lady Muck, eyeing up this young boy with his odd, spiky hair who’s come to see me. They seem curious. How does he make it stand up like that? And why?

The nurse pulls up a chair and the boy sits down beside me. He looks uncomfortable. I can’t help it if I don’t know who the hell he is. “I don’t know you,” I tell him. How could I have a grandson? I’m hardly old enough to be a father. “What do you want?”

“I’m Marsaili’s boy,” he says, and I feel my heart skip a beat.

“Marsaili? Is she here?”

“She’s gone to Glasgow, Grampa, to sit some exams. She’ll be back in a day or so.”

This news comes to me like a slap in the face. “She promised to take me home. I’m sick of this hotel.” All I do all day is sit in some damned chair and look out the window. I see the children across the street leave for school in the morning, and I see them come home at night. And I can’t remember anything that’s happened in between. I suppose I must have had lunch, because I’m not hungry. But I don’t remember that either.

“Do you remember, Grampa, how I used to help with the gathering? When we brought the sheep in for the shearing.”

“Oh, God, aye! The shearing. Back-breaking that was.”

“I used to help out from when I was just four or five.”

“Aye, you were a bonny wee laddie, Fin. Marsaili thought the world of you, you know.”

“No, I’m Fionnlagh, Grampa. Fin’s my dad.”

He gives me one of those smiles I see people give me all the time these days. Sort of embarrassed, as if they think I’m daft.

“I’ve been helping out Murdo Morrison for a bit of extra pocket money. Gave him a hand with the lambing too, this year.”

I remember the lambing well. That first year on the island. You never got snow, but it could be bloody cold, and the wind on a wet March night would cut you in two. I’d never seen a lamb born before, and was very nearly sick the first time. All that blood and afterbirth. But what an amazing thing it was to see that skinny wee thing, like a drowned rat, breathing its first breath, and taking its first wobbling steps. Life in the raw.

I learned a lot of things that winter. I learned that however hard I thought my existence had been at The Dean, there were much worse things in life. Not that anyone treated us badly. Not really. But survival was brutal work, and you weren’t spared it because you were a kid.