Entry Island

In a drawer he found an old family photo album bound in dark-green cracked leather, and sat in her captain’s chair to open it on the desk in front of him. Its pages were thick grey paper turned brittle with age. Discoloured black and white snapshots in the early pages were slipped into slits cut to hold them, captions written in faded ink beneath.

The very first photograph in the album was an overexposed sepia portrait of a very old woman, the glaze cracked and flaking in places. Underneath it, written in a copperplate hand, the legend Great-Great-Grandmother McKay, so discoloured that it was almost unreadable. It appeared to have been taken in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and Sime thought that perhaps this album had been started by Kirsty’s mother collating old family photos. He flipped forward through the pages, taking a journey through time that brought him to the arrival of baby Kirsty, a round quizzical face peering at the camera from the arms of her mother.

And then Kirsty as a little girl, aged seven or eight, staring solemnly into the lens. He flicked forward through the pages, and watched her grow up before his eyes. An awkward smile with two missing front teeth. Older now, with pigtails and braces. Then wearing glasses, hair cut short in a bob.

He stopped mid-turn, a tingling sensation all across his neck and shoulders, and let the page fall back. This was the little girl whose cut-out head he had found lying on the floor of Norman Morrison’s bedroom. And he understood now why it was that the child had looked so familiar. In spite of the hair and the glasses and the toothy smile. It was Kirsty.

He turned the next page and saw the dark square left by a missing photograph. The others around it were all of Kirsty at the same age, and he wondered if the absent snapshot was the very picture from which Morrison had cut her head. If it was, then either he had taken it without permission, or Kirsty had given it to him. Though he could not imagine why she would.

He sat staring at it for a long time, before turning the next page to continue his journey. Kirsty stretching through her teens, transformed in a few short years from a cute but gawky ugly duckling to a handsome young woman with knowing blue eyes that seemed to reach through the lens and across the years. And then suddenly the pictures stopped. As she had grown up, so her parents had grown older. And now, presumably, with the death of her mother, the photographic record of a happy family had come to an abrupt end.

He turned back again to the shadow of the missing picture and felt confusion as the sleeplessness of days and weeks washed over him in a wave of almost debilitating fatigue. He rubbed his eyes and glanced at the facing page. A thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Kirsty smiled back at him. Just the age that the Ciorstaidh in his ancestor’s journal would have been when next he saw her. And something drew his mind back to the diaries, to the stories his grandmother had read to them as children. And he could almost hear his ancestor’s voice.

Chapter fifteen

I was, I think, about fifteen years of age when my father came back from the fishing that year.

In his absence I had been going daily to the moor to fetch the peats we cut in the spring and left drying in stacks called rùdhan mór. It was hard work loading the dried turves into wicker creels to carry the mile or so back to the village, but I had built a splendid stack behind our blackhouse. Peats laid one on the other in a herringbone pattern that allowed the rainwater to drain through. I had taken a great deal of care over it, because I knew my father would examine it critically on his return.

It had been a fine summer, but the first signs of autumn were in the air. And soon the sun would cross the equator, bringing the equinoctial gales that would herald the start of winter.

My father had been away for two months, as he was every summer for the herring fishing at Wick, and it always took him time to settle back into life on the croft. But he was in good spirits. It was the only season of the year when he had money in his pockets, and already it was burning a hole in them. Old blind Calum said to me that morning that it wouldn’t be long before my father would want to be off to Stornoway to spend it. And he was not wrong.

The day was hardly over before my father took me aside and told me to prepare myself for a trip to town in the morning. It was the first time I was to go with him. I knew it would take us a day or more to get there with our old cart and borrowed pony, but I was excited by the prospect. So excited I could barely sleep that night as I lay in my box bed in the dark of the bedroom listening to my sisters beyond the curtains, curled up together in their own bed, fast asleep and purring like cats.