But when I ran up the stairs and I saw one of my daughters, in her white dress, barefoot and totally distraught, there was no personality. Not at that moment. There was just one of the twins, shouting. And she was shouting Lydie-lo has fallen. And that’s what gave me her identity. Kirstie.
Could we have got it wrong?
I do not know. I am lost in the hall of mirrored souls. And again that terrible sentence pierces me.
Mummy Mummy come quickly, Lydie-lo has fallen.
That’s when my life cracked open. That’s when I lost my daughter. That’s when everything went black.
As it does now. I am shuddering with grief. The memory is so powerful it is disabling. Tears are not far away; my hands are trembling on the steering wheel.
Enough. I need to stop, I need to get out, I need to breathe air. Where am I? Where are we? Outskirts of Fort William?
Oh God. Oh God. Just STOP.
With a yank of the wheel I veer the car, fast and hard and straight into the forecourt of a BP garage, squirting grit with the wheels, almost smashing into a fuel pump.
The car gently steams. The silence is shocked.
‘Mummy?’
I look up at the rear-view mirror. Kirstie is staring at me in the mirror as I smudge the tears from my eyes with the heel of my hand. I stare at her reflection, as she must have stared so many times into mirrors, seeing her own reflection. Yet seeing her dead sister as well.
And now Kirstie smiles at me.
Why? Why is she smiling? She is mute and barely blinking: and yet smiling? As if she is trying to freak me out.
A sudden fear ripples through me. Absurd and ridiculous, yet undeniable.
I have to get out of the car. Now.
‘Mummy’s just going to get a coffee, OK? I just – just need a coffee. Do you want anything?’
Kirstie says nothing. Clutching Leopardy with her two fisted hands. Her smile is cold, and blank, and yet somehow, knowing. It is the kind of smile Lydia would sometimes do, Lydia the quiet one, the soulful one, the more eccentric of the twins. My favourite.
Fleeing my own child, and my own doubts, I rush into the little BP shop.
‘No petrol, thanks. Just the coffee.’
It’s too hot to drink. I stumble out into the raw, sea-scented air, trying to stay in control. Calm down, Sarah, calm down.
A hot cup of Americano in hand, I climb back in the car. I take deep, therapeutic breaths. Slowing my heartbeat. And then I gaze in the mirror. Kirstie remains quiet. She has also stopped smiling, and turned away. As she scratches Beany behind the ear, she is staring out of the window at the suburban houses that straggle the road, to and from the garage. They look foolish, and English, and incongruous, with their polite windows and twee little porches, set against the grandeur and immensity of the Highlands.
On, on, on.
I turn the key, and pull away. We take the long road towards Fort Augustus; to Loch Lochy, Loch Garry, Loch Cluanie. It is so long, we have come so far. I think about life before the accident, the happiness, so easily shattered. Our life was made of brittle ice.
‘Are we nearly there now?’
My daughter shakes me from my thoughts. I look in the mirror, again.
Kirstie is gazing at the summits of the mountains, which are veiled in grey mist, and returning rain. I smile in a reassuring way and say Yes and I drive my daughter, and Beany, and our hopes, along the dwarfed and single-track road that negotiates the endless wilderness.
But we are, indeed, nearly there. And now the distance I am putting between me and my old self, my old life, my dead daughter, her ashes scattered on Instow beach, feels right and good and necessary. If anything, I want to go further. This two-day journey from Camden to Scotland, overnighting in the Scottish Borders, has been so epic, it righteously underscores the life-change we are undertaking. This distance is so long there is no going back.
It feels like a nineteenth-century migration; as if we are pioneers heading for Oregon. So I grip the wheel and drive us out of the past; trying not to think who it is in the back of my car, which dancing and heraldic unicorn, which ghost of herself. It is Kirstie. It must be Kirstie. It is Kirstie.
‘This is it, Kirstie, look.’
We are approaching Skye. The family’s rusted Ford Focus is rattling through the touristic but rain-lashed port that is Kyle of Lochalsh – then we are steered along, by the high street, towards a great looping bridge. Abruptly the rain stops.
The grey, chopped-white waters of Loch Alsh flow beneath the soaring bridge – a gut-churning plunge. Then we swoop down onto a roundabout.
We have reached Skye. And the next little crowd of suburban houses soon yields to the emptiness.
It is a traumatized yet beautiful landscape. Islands and mountains are reflected in dark indigo waters to my left. Bow-backed moorland stoops down to the echoing shoreline. A boat drifts, alone. A plantation of firs is divided by a road that seems to go nowhere – disappearing into those dark, sombre regiments, then blackness.
It is harsh and daunting – and very handsome. Bright lozenges of late autumn sun blaze on the further hills, like organized fires, moving silently and very fast. And when we slow right down, on cattle-grids, I can see details: the way the dew in the grass is struck, by the sun, making tiny, shivering jewels.
We are just a few miles from Ornsay. The road is widening, and I begin to recognize the green hills and steely lochs from the pictures I have seen – from all those images on Google.
‘I can see Dada!’
Kirstie points, eagerly. Beany growls.
I slow the car to a crawl, and follow my little girl’s gesture, and yes, she is right. There are two men standing on a stone pier, in front of a big, white, gabled Victorian building, which is, in turn, staring out to the broad sea-channel. The men are recognizably Angus – and Josh Freedland. Josh’s red hair is particularly distinctive.
This is it. Must be. That’s the Selkie; and that’s the pub car park on the seafront. And Ornsay village is, surely, the scattered outcrop of orderly gardens, converted crofts, and glassy-walled new-builds that surrounds the tiny harbour.
And that in turn means, most importantly of all – I lift my eyes like a worshipper in a church – that the little island with the little lighthouse, out there, in the Sound – that islet humbled by the beautiful vastness of oceans and mountains: that is our destination.
This is my new home; and its name is like a tolling bell.
Torran.
Five minutes of narrow lanes brings me to the car park and the Selkie, and the tinkling sound of nervous boats, moored and anchored in the wind: lanyards, spinnakers, bowsprits; I don’t know what any of these words mean, but I will learn. I will have to acquire a new, maritime, seaworthy language, befitting someone who lives on an island. For all my anxieties, I quite like that idea. I want everything to be new.
‘Hello, darling,’ Angus is greeting Kirstie as she climbs, timidly, tentatively, blinking in the wind, from the back of the car; Leopardy is clutched, as ever, to her chest. The dog stirs, and barks, and follows my daughter, loping out onto the tarmac. ‘Hello, Beano!’ says Angus, and his smile widens. His beloved hound.
Amidst the sadness, I am pleased. Despite it all, I have successfully delivered the dog and the daughter.
‘Say hello to Uncle Josh, sweetheart,’ says Angus, as