I am Kate, named for my grandmother who died just before I was born, which meant that when I was a newborn baby Mum was still grieving for her own mother. Mum likes to tell me that my grandmother, Kate, did see me once, kind of: the small, grainy photograph taken at the thirteen-week scan of me as a tiny foetus inside Mum’s womb. So she knew about you, and was happy that you were on your way, and she would have loved you very deeply.
I am small and dark-haired like my grandmother in the old photos of her, and like Mum too, whereas my sisters, Bonnie and Hannah, are both fair and tall like Dad. They are five and seven years older than me: I was the surprise baby.
Every birthday I have, Mum thinks about Grandma and remembers her death all over again. She says it often happens in families, that there’s a death and a birth very close together, as if one soul makes room for the other. Or as if . . . and she looks at me, as if . . .
As if what? The soul of my grandmother is reborn in me, or something? That’s a weird thought. Like recycling people. Dad has this phrase: what goes around comes around. I suppose it’s like believing in reincarnation and karma: you might come back as an insect or a bird or something worse. But I think I am uniquely me, not a version of my grandma, or anyone else for that matter. Newly arrived when I was first made. When I die, I’ll disappear for ever, not be reborn in a different body. That’s what I think.
There is going to be a lot of time for thinking on the island. Too much. I’m writing things down in the notebook Dad gave me on my birthday. My thoughts come out quite randomly sometimes. Like one idea runs into another and then they both skip off somewhere unexpected, and I have to pull them back and make them be sensible and stay on the lines. (There aren’t any lines really: it’s a notebook with creamy blank pages, and a copper, black and gold hardback cover, very beautiful. Dad knows how to choose stationery at least).
I decided that I would write down everything that happens in this, my sixteenth summer, at least until the pages run out. Today is July 27th, but I’m not going to put all the dates. I have even given it a title: The Story of My Heart. It’s borrowed from a real book, one with a leather binding and old-fashioned print, which lives on a shelf in Dad’s office. I haven’t read it or anything: I just like the title. I like the feeling of writing things down too. It anchors me, this act of writing, and makes me feel more substantial and real, part of things. Especially now, with everything falling apart. It stops me from feeling as if I’m nothing and nobody, as if I might simply be blown away by the wind.
Almost dark: the sky through the skylight window is a thin blue-grey. Wind rattles the frame. It’s starting to get at me, that wind. It never gives up. Now I’m lying down I’ve got that rocking feeling again as if I’m still travelling, bobbing up and down on water.
Dad is reading downstairs, Mum went to bed ages ago. I don’t understand why she doesn’t make at least a bit of an effort. Even at supper she seemed quiet and distracted, as if her mind was elsewhere. Dad had cooked lamb chops and new potatoes and beans and there were raspberries and cream for pudding and she didn’t say anything at all about how nice it was.
Someone – Mum? – has put a pile of books on the shelf by my bed – nothing I want to read – plus a load of random DVDs. I scan the titles. Deep Blue; Juno; Into the Wild, Cinema Paradiso, Fargo; My Summer of Love. On the other shelf there’s a collection of pebbles and fragments of polished sea glass: blue, amber, green.
I remember that boy from the Manse. Maybe I’ll walk over there in the morning.
Just to see what the house is like.
Just because it’s something to do, that’s all.