Kathleen Jamie

So I’m moving between rooms with a tray, advertising McEwan’s, the kind we took sledging those distant snow-bright afternoons

– or funereal lacquer, with peonies, or that classic of my mother’s: a view of Windsor Castle inside a wicker pale. Whatever

– a tray, and on it: two glasses of Vouvray, or better: croissants and cafetière, my lover outstretched on...

Piled in the corner of a second-hand store in Toronto: of course it’s an immigrant country. Sometimes

all you can take is what you can carry when you run: a photo, some clothes, and the useless dead-weight

of your mother-tongue. One was repaired with electrician’s tape – a trade

was all a man needed. A girl, well, a girl could get married. Indeed each case opened...

Until we’re restored to ourselves by weaning, the skin jade only where it’s hidden under jewellery, areolae still tinged, – there’s a word for women like us.

It’s suggestive of the lush ditch, or even an ordeal, – as though we’d risen, tied to a ducking-stool, gasping, weed-smeared, proven.

Out there...

A bleary chiel, monger o targes an dirks redds his windae. Neist Holyrood Kirk

a shop chock fu o fudge. Taxis judder on the setts. Naething mixter-

maxter here: some douce sea-maws tak these white-washed wa’s for a new Bass Rock;

a kiltie tour-guide on an open-top bus intones ‘Mary, Queen of Scots …’

to a wheen toorie-hattit tourists, huddlt and snell. The wan sun...

Monday. A pre-recorded announcement, a few words of welcome in Gaelic then the safety stuff in English, hangs in the air behind the departing ferry. Little else is moving but the clouds, and water slapping on the concrete slipway, and bottle-brown fronds of bladderwrack. There will be another sailing to Mull in an hour or so.

A car arrives, with Monaco numberplates. It stops and the occupants...