CHAPTER 1
The Grey Town
MORVEN
Iwas eighteen when I left Cairndhu. I told myself I was leaving for the ballet. The truth was I was leaving before it swallowed me whole. Three years later and I’m back, dragging a suitcase with a broken wheel and a knee that hates me, and the town looks exactly the same. Grey. Wet. Unforgiving.
The train pulled away behind me with a long, metallic shriek that scattered the gulls off the platform railings. I stood at the top of the station steps and looked down at the town I’d sworn I was finished with, and the town looked back at me with the same flat indifference it gave to everything – the rain, the tourists who never came, the ships that had stopped coming thirty years ago.
Cairndhu smelled the same. Iron and salt and the vinegar ghost of the chip shop on the corner of Harbour Street. The rain wasn’t heavy – it never was, not properly – but it was the kind that got into your bonesthrough your collar and your cuffs and the gap between your scarf and your jaw, and by the time you noticed you were already soaked. I pulled my coat tighter. My left knee registered the cold with a dull, grinding protest that I’d learned not to limp through – or rather, I’d learned exactly how much to limp. Enough to explain the suitcase going slowly. Not enough to invite questions.
The platform was almost empty. A woman in a council hi-vis waited for the Glasgow connection with her face buried in her phone. A boy of maybe fifteen kicked a crushed can along the concrete with the dedicated boredom of someone who had never been anywhere else.
I dragged my suitcase down the ramp and the broken wheel shrieked against the wet tarmac. Across the water, the Clyde sat heavy and pewter-coloured under a sky that couldn’t decide between cloud and fog, and the dockyards stretched along the shoreline in their usual state of rust and resignation. Behind me, higher up, the old Merchant Villas sat on the hill in their wrought-iron fences and overgrown gardens, watching the town the way money always watches labour – from a comfortable distance. But there was something new on the waterfront. Rising from the far end of the old shipyard, a block of glass and red brick caught what little light the afternoon offered. The Dockyard Lofts. Somebody had spent serious money converting one of the Victorian warehouses into flats – industrial windows, steel balconies, the kind of development that looked like it belonged in Leith, not here. It gleamed against the grey like a gold tooth in a tired mouth.
I stared at it long enough to be late for the bus. Notthat it mattered. The bus came when it came, and nobody was waiting for me.
My father’s flat was a second-floor walk-up on Clyde Crescent, above what used to be a laundrette and was now nothing. The entry buzzer didn’t work. It hadn’t worked the last time I was here, either, which had been for my mother’s funeral – three days of stiff black clothes and the held-breath silence of a town that doesn’t know what to say to a girl who got out and came back for a coffin.
I let myself in with the spare key Dad kept under the broken planter on the communal landing. The stairwell smelled of damp rendering and someone else’s cooking – onions, maybe, and something fried that had given up being food and become atmosphere. The carpet on the stairs was the same balding tartan it had been when I was fourteen. I counted the steps by habit. Twelve to the first landing. Thirteen to ours.
The door stuck. I shouldered it open and the smell hit me before the light did.
Whisky. Old whisky – not the kind you drink, but the kind that accumulates. Bottles left open, glasses left standing, the sweet-sick scent of alcohol that had been breathing in a room nobody had aired in weeks. Under that, the musty weight of clothes that needed washing and food that needed throwing out and a flat that needed someone to come in and sayenough.
I stood in the doorway with my bag over one shoulder and my broken suitcase behind me and I looked at my father’s life.
The sitting room was a geography of small failures. Three empty Whyte & Mackay bottles standing in a careful row beside the television, as though he’d arranged them on purpose. A stack of that morning’s post, unopened, sliding off the arm of the sofa. Mugs. A towel on the floor that had no business being in a sitting room. The curtains drawn, badly – one side caught on the radiator, letting in a stripe of grey daylight that fell across a plate with toast crumbs and a fork and nothing else.
I put my bag down. I opened the curtains. I ran the tap until the water stopped looking brown and filled the kettle.
Then I cleaned. I always cleaned. It was the only language my body had for this feeling – the one where love and fury and grief all sat on top of each other and none of them could be spoken, so I wiped surfaces and stacked plates and put the bottles in a bin bag and tied the neck tight and set it by the door. The flat gave up its debris in layers. Under the sofa cushions: two pound coins and a betting slip from Ladbrokes dated three weeks ago. In the kitchen bin: a tin of Scotch broth, scraped out to the metal. On the windowsill: a card from the GP surgery reminding him of an appointment he’d certainly missed.
And on the kitchen table, half-buried under a gas bill and a Domino’s leaflet, a letter.
It was on good paper. Heavy, cream-coloured, the kind that comes from a solicitor or someone who wants you to think they are one. Across the top, in precise navy type:Clyde Holdings Ltd.Below that, a reference number, a date, and three paragraphs of language so dense with legal terms it read like a second language. I caught the wordsoutstanding obligation,collateral agreement, and a figure – £10,000 – underlined once in what looked like my father’s hand.
I didn’t understand it. Not fully. I knew what a debt notice looked like – I’d watched enough of them arrive during Mum’s illness, the brown envelopes that piled up on the same table until she stopped opening them. But this wasn’t a council letter or a credit card statement. This was something else. Something with weight to it.
I folded the letter and put it in my bag. Something to deal with later, when my hands weren’t full of his mess.
Dad appeared at half five. He came through the door already talking – “Morven, hen, I saw the suitcase on the landing, I thought –” and then he saw the clean kitchen and stopped. He was thinner than he’d been at the funeral. His jumper hung off him and his cheeks had that hollow, papery look that comes from not eating properly for long enough that your body starts borrowing from itself. But his eyes were the same. Pale grey, same as mine, and full of something warm and shiftless that I’d loved my whole life and could never rely on.
“You cleaned,” he said.
“It needed it.”
He stood in the kitchen doorway and rubbed the back of his neck and looked at the bin bag and the stacked plates and the open curtains. “You didn’t have to do all that.”
“I know.”
A pause. He smiled – the Duncan Gault smile, the one that had charmed my mother and every barmaid on Harbour Street and precisely nobody at the benefits office. “Staying long?”
“A while.”
He nodded, as if this answered something larger than the question. He moved to the kettle, checked it was full, and set it boiling. His hands needed something to do – I could see that much. “Your knee,” he said, not looking at me. “How is it?”
“Fine.”
