Billy Drummond stood at the door, panting. His mouth was moving, but no words came out that I could hear. Then something came through my fog. ‘The Birkenhead’s gone down.’ I still didn’t follow. ‘ Going to the Cape. With the Argylls the 91st Reserves. With your boy.’

I shut the door in his face.  Later some of the women came. I shouted at them to go away, that no, I wouldn’t hear it. But I knew. My folks had once been fishers. We ken what the sea does. I thought soldiering was safer.

They stayed with me. Feeding me like a baby. Washing my hands and face, wrapping me in a blanket as if I’d come out of some wreck myself.

There’s no grave, no place to go where I can tuck him in, wish him goodnight.  The minister says I should recollect King David, ‘I shall go to him but he will not return to me.'’ He says at the end of time the sea shall give up its dead. He preached a fine sermon, I’m told, on sacrifice and how that must be my consolation.

I do not want consolation or waiting till the end of time to find out what happened to him. So I tell myself the story. That he never woke, that the water covered him like a sheet there in his hammock, and that he sank to the seabed as quietly as he lay in his own little boxbed at home. I don’t want him there on the deck, shivering, waiting for the sea to seize him. I can’t bear to think of his poor, bare feet.

Billy Drummond brought me a cutting from the newspaper. I’ve worn it smooth and faded with my fingers, like the blanket my boy had once that soothed him to slumber. The minister read the paper to me, over and over, his finger poking the words into life, like coals in the grate. I like that my boy’s name is there. I think I know which it is.

Kate Durie