My dad worked on a fish farm on Loch Laxford. At the end of the day, we’d watch his boat bob into view – a tiny dark shape moving steadily toward the shore. We’d race down the hill to meet him, four pairs of wellies sliding through wet grass and sheep shit, yelling like gulls.
Sometimes we brought buckets and gathered mussels or winkles from the rocks. We knew where to look. The sea gave up its gifts quietly, if you asked the right way. Back home, we’d boil the winkles and dig them out with pins, eating them like sweets. We loved them – briny, rubbery, defiant little things.
My dad would gut fish in the sink, peeling back silver with stained fingers. The smell of it filled the kitchen: salt, blood, sea. Scales clung to the plughole like glitter. We crunched pearls in our mussels and believed we’d found treasure. And maybe we had.
We weren’t taught to create. We were taught to notice. To hold things in our hands. To get dirty. To pull life from water and know what to do with it.
There were lizards by the woodshed – quick little things that shimmered like fish. On boiling days, the ants would boil too, busy and black, dragging their eggs like ghosts when we poked at their nests. We were children. We didn’t understand the havoc we caused.
I’d lie on a sheepskin in the heat and feel the world hum around me. Everything buzzed: the air, the grass, the slugs slicking across the single-track road. We found hairy caterpillars in the bracken and let them crawl along our arms, believing they were lucky. Everything was magic, if you looked at it long enough.
There was a woman called Gisela – a German hitchhiker our parents picked up once. She stayed for what felt like years. She was part of us. I thought she had magic powers because she could take her teeth out. I’d never seen such a thing.
We wandered miles down the winding roads, through sheep fields and bog, past shot-up signs and bent gates. People used to dump cars into the loch- just tip them in and forget. We found pieces of them rusting on the beach, the bones of machines, and took great pleasure in pulling them apart.
One Mother’s Day, we tied a rope round our brother’s waist and lowered him down a cliff to pick a flower for Sal. He swung, small and grinning, the flower clutched in his fist.
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