Chapters (43)
- Pronunciation
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Acknowledgments
Like now, sitting here in this big empty lounge, chairs drawn up. Everyone looking at me. I don’t know what they expect. Have they come to take me home? I recognize Marsaili, of course. And the young man with the fair curly hair looks familiar. The name’ll come to me. It usually does.
But the other gille. I don’t know him at all, with his round red face and his shiny black hair.
Marsaili leans towards me and says, “Dad, what happened to your folks? Did you have any uncles or cousins that you never told us about?”
I don’t know what she means. They’re all dead. Surely everyone knows that?
Fin! That’s it. The young man with the curls. I remember him now. Used to come round the farm winching my wee Marsaili before either of them was even old enough to count. I wonder how his folks are. I liked his old man. He was a good, solid sort.
I never knew my dad. Only heard tell of him. He was a sailor, of course. Any man worth his salt was a sailor back then. The day my mum gathered us in the front room to break the news was a pretty black one. It wasn’t that long before Christmas, and she’d put in some effort to make the house seem festive. All we cared about were the presents we would get. Not that we expected much. It was just the surprise of it.
There was snow in the street. There hadn’t been much of it, and it had turned to slush pretty quickly. But there was that grey-green gloom in the air that comes with snow, and there wasn’t much light came down between the tenements anyway.
She was a lovely woman, my mum, from what I remember of her. Which isn’t much. Just the softness of her when she held me, and the smell of her perfume, or her eau de cologne or whatever it was. And that blue print apron she always wore.
Anyway, she sat us down on the settee, side by side, and knelt on the floor in front of us. She put her hand on my shoulder. She was a terrible colour. So white her face would have been lost in the snow. And she’d been crying, I knew that much.
I could only have been four years old, then. And Peter a year younger. Must have been conceived on a home leave before my father was finally sent off to sea.