It might have been a room in someone else’s house but it was home for me, for a time. Home is where someone holds your eyes and doesn’t need to look away. And when there is that security there can be exploration and you don’t have to go out into the hail to have adventures. When one or other, turn-about, just takes as much pleasure in finding what’s giving pleasure. No-one keeping a score.

When you know most of a given territory intimately, then there’s a different pleasure in returning to the familiar.

Mairi, it was as if desire was its own fuel. No matter how much I let go to it, you would just need to look at me, or cup my balls and it would build again. But even less of a hurry. Just letting your words wash over, the Gaelic and the English and the ripe, ripe swearing. You’re the out-of-town alter-ego, and you’ve enough of the male to be a mate and you’re sex on wheels.

There wasn’t a shadow of the other mutual mate from Westview, not in that first bed. It was when it was time to get out of town, the problem was clear.

It made sense. It was your family house and set back from a fork of Loch Erisort. Not quite, up a creek. Everything including V-lining, painted in a grey-blue eggshell and bordered with the oiled beading of dense Oregon pine, reclaimed from the stripped interior of your own house. Remember he showed me it, your former paramour and joiner. All these hours of sifting and shifting and stripping paint from sufficient sound timbers to return some of the old to the renovated crofthouse.

That reinstatement of old parts of a house – it’s seldom done by locals. It’s more usual to let the old walls fall in and build the new beside it. So the blockwork gets coated in peely-wally Skye marble dash as new structures erupt from the heather by older layers of habitation. The new-build is probably on the site of the former outdoor chemical cludgie. And the rubble from the blackhouse is thrown in the found or else it becomes the basis for one of the outhouses.

I know it was your father and mother’s house. I know the market is currently depressed after a brief boom and you’ll probably never get back what was put into it. I even know that you probably have to live there. But I can’t let go to you there. Even though I just have to catch the steady blue in your eyes, so close that I’m aware that the colour also has traces of maroon and indigo. A really romantic Lewisman would say you had eyes with the hues of herring scales.

But I’m still not going down to Garyvard. Even if it does now have a nearly passable internet connection you can just about legally term broadband.

Every bastard I know would say it was a matter of time before it fell apart for you two. When Kenny F hits it, he hits it. But Kenny told me what broke him and what tore your relationship apart, long before you did. It’s like any other history now. There’s no way of knowing how it would have turned out.

Please know that our year together is replayed in my daft brain so often that it’s like there’s a tape inside my head between my ears. Do you remember, love, that line in the soulful ska rhythm of Mister Desmond Dekker. This weird memory of mine again. This is what sticks.

Fucking impressive. That’s a cove who knows where he’s coming from. He knows his grammar. It’s got its own structure and he’s cool with it and if any other bastard ain’t, it’s their own tough shit. But I don’t mind it being your home territory. Believe me, I’m clued up on the balancing act of looking after the domestic front and earning the money to finance it all.

But the cove who did the digging and the demolishing and the salvaging and the bringing together of something more than a shelter on your family croft, happens to be the cove I prayed with, over porridge with treacle, in Westview Terrace.

That’s a guy who knows he’s got to stay in London town. For now. There are warnings. He was home for the funeral. One of our gang. Don’t think you knew him. Kenny and me talked about menfolk and about mothers. Sipping tea and scoffing salmon rolls in the County when we came back from Sandwick. You lost your own mother too, not so long ago. Maybe that was more difficult for you because you were so close to your father. You’d be bound to feel guilty about not knowing her so well. I got to know the olaid better after the olman just dropped.

I called by once, to see Kenny’s mother. She kept asking what I was up to. I suppose next time I see the cove, we’ll be burying her.

She knew I’d split up with Gabriele and all that. She’s compos flicking mentis all right and a bit more. She still didn’t see why her own son left that girl from Lochs, the one with the steady job. ‘A bit wild all right but so are we all. Well maybe not me,’ she said, ‘but you boys still are anyway. Daft with it. You don’t know when you’re well off.’

She said Kenny was working at a Citizens Advice Centre in Brixton. You could say he was well placed. He must have experienced a lot of the issues.

I’m lusting after your way of speaking, Mairi, and I’m desiring the friendship of your body next to mine. You haven’t put on an ounce. You probably never will. And I never really noticed you’d caught up a bit, in height, till you were wearing the jacket, tailored for me. But I like you too much to ask you to do things like making plans. Maybe you’ve got to stay with that house in that place. And I’ve this strong feeling in my bones that it will need to be a cove from away, that stays in it with you. May I say that I think you’ve made an excellent choice of vessel. I was very happy to inspect the machinery aboard it, with no guarantee and at your own risk, of course. But I’d be surprised if you had much serious bother with that installation. A clinker crabber by McCaughey of Wick is built for working the Pentland Firth so it should look after you in the North Minch. That red Mermaid aboard is a marinised Ford and the spares are easy to get hold of. There’s an electric start and a heat exchanger so the sea-water cooling won’t come in direct contact with the aluminium parts in the engine block. It all looks clean and well cared for. The oil’s been changed recently.

She’s a beauty and a total bargain. If the famous personal advertisements ask for a picture of your own boat, you should do very well for admirers. You’ve even got the old Rana boat for a tender.

Logic is pointless. I know that there are formulae for deciding the value of a partner’s work and compensation for the opportunities lost while you’re slaving away at house renovations. Things that are negotiated in proper Settlements when one person doesn’t just admit quite suddenly that he’s got to get out. I know the need to stride away from all that aforementioned V-lining. Because emotion has entered between the very tongues and grooves.

And it wouldn’t do any good at all, presenting your ex-partner with a wad of digital cash as an acknowledgement of the labour he put into your project.

I’ve come up in the world again. Sold the olaid’s house and bought one right back where I started. Between the County Hotel and the Free Kirk. And there’s a low-roofed room at the top where a pile of papers and printouts is building up. But I’ve a feeling right in my weakening bones, that you won’t be able to cross this worn threshold, unless I can accept that history really is the past and it doesn’t matter who nailed planks on a wall.

But I don’t think that way.

Bits of wood have their own history. Some of that’s connected to a guy we’re both linked to. Remember, his uncle taught me the marks. Old Angus with the sellotaped glasses. Far-seeing Angus. I’ve learned something.

There are all too many camps of detention on this planet right now but let’s go back to 1945. This one was not designed as a death-factory. None of the camps within Germany’s pre-war boundaries were, though executions took place. The most efficient death camps were all in the occupied lands. Work camps were pretty good at that too, the ration calculated to keep the captives going for a few months till they dropped. Plenty more to take their place. Death by starvation and disease was a by-product of the concentration camp, not the main purpose. Two men who knew each other, both private soldiers, stood at the entrance to Bergen-Belsen. I’ve heard it said, but not from either of them, that the stench put the fear into you even before you saw what you saw.

These men had come a long way from their communities of crofts, on either side of Loch Erisort. I don’t know if they made their own pact together or if each came to the decision on his own. There were some things you wouldn’t talk about. Angus was one of them. And my uncle Ruaraidh was the other. My father’s own experience was different but he never talked about it either. At least, not to me. Your father kept his silence, too.

Ruaraidh never told me he’d helped to liberate Belsen. Angus never told Kenny, or me, what he did in the war. It took a bit of research to find this out. I know that fact now. But there’s no way I’m able to imagine what went through their minds when the gate was opened.