*
There is more bad weather on the way. I can see it gathering far out at sea. Behind me the sun sprays yellow light across a fractured landscape, and the wind blows strong enough to knock you off your feet if you don’t have them planted right. The tormentil and bog cotton are flattened by it, and I can hear it howling through the standing stones beyond the ridge of the hollow above my head. Even in the shelter of the hollow itself, the tough, spiky beach grasses that bind the sand bend and fibrillate, almost singing in the wind.
I am crouched on a stone, and might be carved out of the same gneiss myself. I don’t feel the cold. It would be difficult to be colder on the outside than I am within. I stare out at the whitecaps blowing in ahead of the coming storm, and feel waves of icy emotion breaking over me.
‘Hi.’ Kirsty’s voice rises above the roar of the wind and the sea as she jumps down smiling into the hollow to join me. I can hear the happiness in her voice, and I try not to let it affect me. She stoops to kiss my cheek and I turn my head away to avoid it.
I feel her tension immediately. She stands up straight. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Your father’s what’s wrong.’
I don’t look at her, but I can hear the immediate anger in her voice. ‘What do you mean?’
I stand up and turn to face her. ‘Do you know what he’s doing?’ She just stares back at me, her face a mask of confusion. ‘He’s forcing people out of their homes and setting their houses on fire so that they can’t come back.’
‘He is not!’
‘And he sends constables and estate workers to force them on to boats to sail them off across the Atlantic against their will.’
‘Stop it! That’s not true.’
‘It is.’ I feel my own anger fired by hers. ‘I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Folk I know beaten and kicked. Neighbours at Sgagarstaigh, kids I was at school with, made to leave the houses they were born in, and forced to watch as the bastards set them on fire. I saw them ferried out to a boat in the loch and put in chains if they tried to escape. Just ordinary folk, Ciorstaidh. Folk whose ancestors have lived here for generations. Folk whose parents and grandparents are buried here on the machair. Forced to leave it all and sent off to some godforsaken place on the other side of the world, just because your father wants to put sheep on the land.’
I see the shock on Kirsty’s face. Her hurt and bewilderment, her desperate desire for it not to be true. ‘I don’t believe you!’ she shouts in my face, giving voice to that desire, but I have no doubt, too, that she can see in my face that it is.
The tears that have been brimming in her eyes spill from them now, and are spread across her cheeks by the wind. Her hand comes out of nowhere, its open palm catching me squarely on the cheek. I almost stagger with the force of it, and feel how it stings my skin. I see the distress behind her tears. And as she turns and climbs back out of the hollow to run off between the stones that stand proud on the hill, skirt and cape flowing out behind her, I realise that I have just destroyed her world. And mine.
I so dearly wish I could run after her and tell her that none of it is real. But I can’t. And I understand fully for the first time how both our lives have changed, and how nothing will ever be the same again.
*
It is low tide, and the smell of the sea fills the air. A rich, rotting seaweed smell that is so familiar. For once there is no wind and the sea is a placid pewter reflecting a sky that lies low above my head, a sad, unbroken grey. It laps tamely along the shore, licking around the ragged tendrils of Lewisian gneiss that invade it from the shore, ancient hard rock encrusted with shellfish and made slippery by the kelp that grows here in profusion and covers it so abundantly.
I have two wicker baskets that sit at angles on the rock as I hack at the seaweed with a long, curved blade, shredding my fingers on shells like razorblades as I pull it free of the rock to throw in the baskets. My back aches, and my feet, which have been in the water off and on for hours, are frozen numb. The baskets are nearly full and I will shortly make the return trek to the croft once more to spread the kelp on our lazy beds.
I have not been aware of her approach, and only now as I glance up do I see her standing there on the rocks looking down at me. She wears her cape buttoned for warmth, the hood pulled up over her head, and with the light behind her as she stands silhouetted against the sky I cannot see her face. It is some days since our confrontation in the hollow and I had thought I would never see her again.
I straighten up slowly, stepping out of the water and on to the rock. Crabs scuttle about in the pools that gather there, scraps of reflected light scattered randomly amongst the sombre green seaweed.