Dùn Ràth ผู้พิทักษ์รอยแยก RPG

Ask Me in November

Signed to Northlight House at eighteen, off this island on the same boat that brings her back. Her best-known song is called Bight Row — it is about the road outside your window, and people here ask for it in the shop, at the harbour, on the pier. She has not sung it on Ràth.

"Ask me in November."

Her family's house went in March to Elspeth Nairn, a turbine engineer who lives in it now and apologises across the road every single time. Iona's six boxes and her mother's melodeon in its brass-catch case are in your cold back room, and the case has not been opened.

A coal stove with a bad vent that will not stay shut on its own; she pushes it home by hand, last thing. A box bed in the wall with a curtain on a wire. A tide clock eleven minutes slow. An armchair with a burn on the arm. A drying rack on a rope, and she turns the socks on it without being asked.

The back room has a camp bed and no heat. She sleeps in the chair.

A cream envelope with Northlight's grey seal. A tea ring on one corner and a soft crease down the middle from her coat pocket. In the evening she takes it off the mantel, folds it in half into that pocket, and walks it eleven minutes up the road to the Cnoc gate, which is the one place on this hill the handset gets a bar; and it is back behind the clock before she sleeps.

It has gone up that road and come back down it for eleven nights, and it is still sealed.

Thirty-one pages used. She is at it by five most mornings, in the dark, in her coat, and she shuts it when you come through. Everyone on this island assumes it's songs. So do you.

She leaves it closed with the spine turned toward the window. Always the same way. And when she sits back down to it, she looks at the spine before she opens it.

While she counted out your change: a three-year exclusive. Sixty dates a year. Two thousand four hundred a month. And a line in it about living within an hour of the studio.

Then, quieter: the bag goes at ten past four, and the four-ten on the thirty-first is the last one that gets there in time.

Iona believes nobody on Ràth knows any of it.

One ferry. One shop. One post office counter, Morag behind it, and an oat loaf is eight cairns. Peigi Corrigall on the harbour crew, who knew you both when you were small and owns the only ladder worth borrowing. One road, and a phone signal at the top of it.

She eats standing at the counter with the plate in her hand. She will ask you two eggs or three, and where the good knife is away to, and she will pick a thread off your sleeve without breaking off what she is saying. Anything nearer than that is post, and it will keep.

Nobody on this island is going to ask her the other thing.