Close Knit

Prologue

T he small community of Carso, in the very North of Scotland, would be straining at the seams to call itself a town, but wildly insulted if you referred to it as a village.

After all, it has a secondary school; tiny (and the next nearest is Kinlochbervie, 75 miles away, which makes it very inconvenient to date and/or fight other pupils) but it is a school nonetheless. It also has a ScotNorth SuperMiniMarket, which is absolutely almost a co-op (but not, alas, a fabled “Big Tesco”).

It is a pretty town of long, low-roofed, whitewashed cottages, joined together up the cobbled main street; small pubs, and a very fine old kirk that is subsiding into the graveyard but everyone politely pretends not to notice.

The north side of Carso is entirely bounded by the sea. It is on the roof of Scotland, where the Arctic and Atlantic waters meet, and swirl and churn so it can look like the water is filled with whirlpools where the tides duke it out.

From the shoreline, there is an archipelago that dots its way up into the distance, its tiny eruptions—Cairn, Inchborn, Larbh, and Archland—like charms on a bracelet.

The light on the North Coast is flat and golden and wide; you can see, on the water, where the swirling seas all meet, from the west and the great Atlantic Ocean, to the east, which leads you to the Baltic Sea and the Scandinavian cousins of its residents. The weather changes dramatically fast; careering up from the northern tips of the Highlands to your back, pouring down fog, rain, or bright clear frosted sunlight at any time of more or less any day.

The wild sea grass waves, and the beach is bright, long and white, the water always dangerous and punishingly cold, but fine for paddling; the clear water of the rivers that open out there are perfect for bathing, if you don’t mind occasionally being brushed by a large trout, or getting too close to the otters, who do not like you in the slightest. Seals pepper the coastline of course, with a lot to say to each other, and to you, if you go out to catch any of their fish. Fishing is the town’s main industry—it was once the herring capital of the world—though tourists also stop on the North 500 to stare at the very tip of the country, and dairy farming stretches far across the flats.

The water and the air are clear, the people friendly and close-knit and it is considered by many who make their lives there as the friendliest, safest, best place in the world, particularly to raise a family (if you don’t mind the odd wet day, and seriously, why would you, when you can watch kestrels lazily circle, or herons stalk the beach, or baby lambs hop spring puddles and all you need is a jacket and a bunnet).

There is a book van that comes round with your reading, and a tiny plane that goes up even further, to the islands of the north, or, if you are feeling intensely cosmopolitan, Glasgow, which connects you to the rest of the world “down below.” It is a special and singular part of the world, with more animals than people, and even if it is not for everyone there are many who find it freeing. A place where you can’t hurry the tractor on the road and, anyway, it’s rather nice to look at the stocky Highland coos, with their absurdly luxuriant hair, or the shifting sands on the dunes, or the many many castles tucked away in every bay. Everywhere the evidence of centuries of kings and tribes and battles and fortifications; when this rough land was covered in blood. Now it is as peaceable as a place that still gets Amazon deliveries can be. Plenty of people spent their lives there and had never been further south than Glasgow. Why would you?

O N THIS DAY, Gertie Mooney was walking home along the waterfront and, as usual, she had her head in a dream.

Gertie Mooney having her head in a dream was not a state of mind that would have surprised anyone; not her mum, Jean; not her teachers; not her boss, Mr. Wainwright, at the ScotNorth supermarket, of whom Gertie—whenever she popped her head out of a dream—was terrified because he was gruff, even though he was rarely gruff with her (apart from occasionally telling her off for daydreaming) and ran charity fun runs.

Gertie’s tolerance for men being gruff with her was quite low. She had been raised more or less entirely by women. She lived with Jean and her grandmother, Elspeth, in one of the tiny whitewashed Shore Cottages, which look so small you can’t believe people live in them instead of, say, hobbits. Today her daydream is of a new apartment, as currently her home is full of wool. It is not just home to her own family; it is also the base of Carso’s Knitting Circle, also known as the KCs, a posse of women both feared and admired for their ways with a set of size 00s, a skein of angora, and an extremely strong side-eye game.

Jean and Elspeth had been everything to her, after her father had moved on when she was a baby and gone back to his other family a long way away, the existence of which came as rather a shock to Jean, who did not like talking about it one little bit. And the KCs had helped, every step of the way, from Gertie’s first learning to walk (swathed in yellow wool, which would suggest the twins, Tara and Cara, had a hand in it as they loved yellow); first school uniform (knitted scratchy cardigans Gertie loathed with a fiery passion, but when trying to explain this was met with indulgent tuts that she was showing herself up); to her first time on a bike with Auntie Marian’s strong hands to guide her.

But it was getting too much. And since the pandemic, the wool had begun a mission creep. Jean had stockpiled it, even though it was toilet roll—not Black Isle yarn—that had been in demand, and it was still stacked up in Gertie’s tiny tiny bedroom like a soft reproof.

Today she was daydreaming about getting her own place. Let’s see. Some rich handsome millionaire moved to the town and decided to build... some luxury penthouses along their cold and wild shore. It could happen. And the most beautiful one at the top had a hot tub and he was moving in there and was ever so lonely, having come to get away from it all, and said darling Gertrude...

Gertie sighed. She hated her name. It was not a sexy, romantic name. It was the kind of name, as she had often complained to Jean, designed to make sure she never met anyone. Jean thought Gertrude was wonderfully exotic, having been a Jean all her life, and anyway, it suited her, being quirky, and Gertie scowled and said, well, what did that mean, exactly, and Jean had said “nothing” very quickly, because the house really was too small to fight in more than was strictly necessary.

Gertie turned into her own street, the dusk falling, the spring lights just starting to show in the tiny windows. It was pretty, she thought. And back in those days... she softened her gaze on the street; blurred her vision of the council wheelie bins and the Ford Fiestas... and she lost herself in a dream suddenly, the modern world vanishing as she imagined herself back to the days when the handsome local fishermen would come join the knitters to mend their nets...

In the summer they would sit outside and knit in the long light nights that stretched till midnight, and if the men were home they would join them, stitching up their sails, and they would toss compliments and barbs between them all and drink rough mugs of tea, a dram of whisky for special occasions, and look out on the waves just beyond the end of the gardens, and the aprons flapping in the fresh breeze, and watch young... maybe a handsome Iain, thought Gertie, in an open-necked ghillie shirt—oh yes. Flirting again with... let me see. A pretty name. Rosamund? No. You didn’t get many of them in the Highlands back then. Let’s see. Maggie, the horseman’s daughter. Yes. Pretty Maggie. And Maggie laughing so with her head tilted back as they shared a hunk of rough cheese, and thought, all things considered, there were worse ways to pass an evening—to pass a life, maybe—than living in the Shore Close cottages, knitting in the garden, as smoke passed over from the pipes of the men, and someone would start up a fiddle in the corner because, well, running your needles is always easier when you’re on a rhythm, isn’t it so.

And as the herons took off across the bay, Gertie could almost see them, dancing and circling in the smoky haze of the evening, new grass sweet in the air, the laughter, and the click of needles, and handsome young Iain has grasped Maggie round the waist, now, of her rough linen dress, with its Tuesday-clean apron tied around her, small and neat as a pin, and he has her turning in a circle and some of the older ladies look up to watch, because it’s a happy place to be on a night like this with the birds coming back, huge flights of swifts and sparras above their heads, the water so thick with fish you could walk on their backs to the New Found Land, and Maggie and Iain would be in the kirk before the weather turned again, Maggie with a coronet of late summer roses in her hair...

And Gertie found herself thinking, well, times were tough then, as indeed they were, but then people will think that about us one day: “Well, it must have been awful in the 2020s; it took a day to get to Australia and people used to die in car accidents!”

And, thought Gertie, drawing close to their little front door, which opened right onto the street, it must have been easier in those days to meet someone down the road you quite liked at seventeen, and to just decide to get married and stick with it. Hard, but compared to her life of endless crushes, awful online apps, Instagram, and modern dating... but Gertie wouldn’t, she told herself quite often, rather die exhausted in childbirth than deal with the hellish modern dating scene. But you could buy a house for less than a zillion pounds back then, and actually live in it, rather than do what people did now: pay a fortune for anywhere remotely nice, then come up and visit it once a year for a fortnight, complain about the weather, and act surprised that local people weren’t happier to see them.

After all, pondered Gertie, still dreaming of another time in the same place, in those days the air was clean and the seasons were more or less predictable, and they ate good fresh clean food from the land and not only had they never heard of Instagram, or celebrities, many had never seen their own faces in a mirror. They had a saying we still have today: “ èist ri gaoth nam beann gus an traogh na h-uisgeachan ,” which means: “Listen to the wind upon the hill until the water abates,” which means: “This too shall pass,” which means: “It is what it is.”