boat shelter, usually cut into a bankSATURDAY,
31ST OCTOBER
This morning, Sandy had to help Emma’s father with the killing. The lambs were ready, and the day was dry. Last week, he’d promised he would be there to lend a hand, to do what needed done. But he hadn’t known then that Emma would be gone.
He poured a bowl of cereal and boiled the kettle. He ate at the table, then stood by the window to drink his coffee. From there he could see the valley laid out in front of him, the brown thread of the burn unspooling through the crook of the land. Starlings squabbled on the stone dyke in the corner of the garden. Sheep grazed and gossiped in the nearest field. Outside Maggie’s house, at the end of the road, a cockerel announced itself to the world. Beyond, the valley slipped into the sea. A glaze of salt on the glass made everything look further away than it ought to be.
Yesterday, Emma left, with a bag of clothes and a few things from the bathroom. Her toothbrush was gone. Her shampoo and conditioner. The hairbrush from their bedside table. The little stick of lip balm. She’d be back next week for the rest, she said, and after that, who knows? She would look for a place on the mainland – Edinburgh again, most likely – and in the meantime she’d be staying with a friend in Lerwick.
The timing had been a surprise, but the leaving had not. They’d talked about it for months, on and off, until Emma had tired of talking. In the end it was hard to say whose decision it had been. The thread of those conversations had grown increasingly tangled and incoherent, until it seemed the only escape was to cut loose. And though Emma had made that cut, it was Sandy who had pulled the tangle tight. He had engineered his own abandonment.
After packing her things, Emma had driven the few hundred yards up to her parents’ house to tell them she was going. She’d been dreading that, he knew. The weight of their disappointment loomed. Sandy was uneasy for that hour, as her car sat in the driveway at Kettlester. He wanted to be there to defend himself, to explain things from his side. But he wasn’t sure that he could explain. And it wasn’t his place to do so. So he just waited, rubbing his palms together, glaring at the floor.
In the kitchen the clock was ticking – an American ogee, with a sailing ship on the front. Once it had belonged to Sandy’s grandfather, now it belonged to Sandy. Emma always hated the intrusion of that noise, but he liked to hear it. Sometimes, when his thoughts were elsewhere and the sound had been erased, Sandy would stop and listen just to find it again, as though it were new. It brought him right back to where he was.
He shifted himself, then tried to loosen his shoulders. He rolled them a few times, moved his head from side to side. The night still clung to him like damp wool, but a walk up the road would help. It would make him feel awake. He set the mug on the draining board and took a boilersuit from the back of the door. He grabbed a coat, too, just in case. Outside, the air was calmer and quieter than he’d expected. It was one of those mornings when you could hear someone talking on the other side of the valley, if there’d been anyone there to talk. Sandy’s boots clopped on the tarmac, and the sheathed knife in his pocket chafed with every stride.
‘This is home,’ Emma had said, the first time she’d brought him here to meet her parents. Her arm had motioned all around, taking in everything they could see, and she’d laughed. This was the place she was brought up, the place she knew best, and the place she wanted to come back to – though she hadn’t told him that yet. But that first time, as they’d stood together in front of the house, with the smell of her mother’s cooking behind them, he couldn’t see what she saw. Hills, fields, sheep, birds: that’s all there was in this valley, and he’d felt no tug of connection to it. ‘Let’s go in,’ he’d said. ‘It’s cold.’
His own home might have been twenty-five miles away, in the grey ex-council house in Lerwick where he’d spent his childhood, and where his father still lived. Or it might have been the flat he shared in Edinburgh. He’d never thought that much about it. The question just didn’t seem important.
He and Emma first met in their mid-twenties, when both of them were living in the city. They’d been in different year groups at school, and they’d had different friends. He’d heard her name before – that’s how it was with this place – but he didn’t know anything more than that. She was a tiny part of a picture he no longer cared that much about. Until, having met, the focus of his care was dragged towards her.
‘We’re tied to da islands by elastic,’ she told him once. ‘Du just has to decide how du lives wi it. Either du goes awa and stretches that elastic – gradually it’ll slacken aff and du can breathe easier – or else du just gives in. Let it pull dee back. Let it carry dee hame.’ He’d laughed at her then. He’d never felt that pull since he’d moved south. Not once. The pull, always, had been in the other direction, away from the place where he began.
But two years after his first visit to the valley he had been carried back here, together with Emma. This had become his home, and for three more years it had been their home. And now she was gone.
David was standing at the entrance to the shed, a basin of hot, soapy water in his hands. Setting it down on the workbench, he turned and nodded at Sandy.
‘I wis up early, so I got da lambs in afore brakfast.’
‘That’s good,’ said Sandy. ‘Hoo mony have we to do?’
‘Juist eight da day. I hae things ta be gettin on wi later. We can dae da rest da moarn, if du’s able. Else I can manage mesel, if du haes idder plans.’
Sandy shrugged. ‘Tomorrow’s fine.’ In the stock box, the animals shuffled nervously. ‘Ready to start, then?’
‘Aye,’ said David, walking towards the trailer. He paused, as if he’d forgotten something, then laid a hand on Sandy’s shoulder. ‘Ah’m sorry, boy,’ he said, and nodded again. ‘Ah’m really sorry.’ Turning, he undid the catches and lowered the ramp to the ground. ‘Ah’m ready when du’s ready.’
David stood aside as Sandy pulled open the gate and stepped into the box. The lambs were six months old now, stocky and strong, and they huddled against the back wall, their eyes all turned to him. There was no panic at first, just a wire-tight expectation that hummed as he moved forward, waiting for the choice to be made. One step more and they broke. A stubby-horned ram dived to Sandy’s right side, trying to escape. He reached and caught it by the shoulders, then hauled it to the gate. There, David took a front leg in each hand and walked the animal towards the shed, while Sandy turned around for another. A ewe this time.
With the second lamb
