Watch Over Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

with a glass in his hand, and another, and another. He seems to thaw a little when he’s with Maisie, but she’ll grow and build a family of her own, and Jamie will be one of those men you see in pubs up here, a whisky in their hand, not wanting to go home to a cold, empty house.
    He has shut the world out.
    My lovely son, who has so much to give. I am determined I will not go until I’ve helped him.

    One night I was sitting on the rocks, listening to the water lapping at the shore, when something startled me. A wave of sadness washed over me, like a shiver, from my forehead to my spine. It was as if I’d been looking out to sea and suddenly saw a distress signal, cutting the sky in a burning arc.
    As a ghost, there are a million souls floating in mine, a million voices whispering their thoughts, their memories. That voice, I knew.
    It was Eilidh, the granddaughter of my childhood friend Flora McCrimmon, crying out her sorrow in her sleep. But she wasn’t calling me, she was calling Flora.
    Flora couldn’t hear her – she had rejoined the sea of souls and she’s not Flora anymore. But I could hear her, and I would listen .
    I closed my eyes and called her.
    I called and called, picturing the child that Eilidh used to be, the sweet girl with thoughtful eyes, so different from her brazen sister Katrina. Kind Eilidh …
    Walking home from school in her blue uniform …
    Dancing at the village ceilidhs, her brown hair flowing …
    Eilidh on the swings …
    Eilidh helping in Flora’s shop, in her little maroon apron …
    Sitting on the stone wall at the edge of the play park, daydreaming …
    Sitting in our kitchen, chatting to me as I baked, Jamie coming in from fishing and them exchanging a few awkward words, the way children do when they are nearly teenagers and don’t see each other with the same eyes anymore.
    Memories of Eilidh kept flooding back as I called her, trying to seep into her dreams. I finally found her consciousness amid the million minds that floated in mine and stepped into it.
    I recoiled. Such pain and sadness, it broke my heart.
    ‘Come home, Eilidh, come home child … Come to Glen Avich …’ I repeated over and over and over again.
    I’m not sure she heard me. I hope so because she needs to come home.
    And maybe, just maybe, she could be the answer to my prayers.
    I’d never been much of a matchmaker when I was alive, I never meddled in other people’s business, I was always too reserved, too quiet for that. Flora and Peggy, out of all the women of my generation, were the born matchmakers.
    However, here I am now, trying to set my son up. Life can be surprising. And as I’m finding out, death can be quite surprising too.

4
LIFE AFTER HOPE
     
Eilidh
     
    The next morning, I woke up to a silent house, as the muted, milky light of autumn seeped through the curtains.
    For a few seconds I didn’t know where I was. I looked up at the low ceiling and around me. The wooden wardrobe, the old-fashioned dressing table, the paintings of fields and whitewashed cottages on the walls and, finally, the patterned carpet.
    My gran and my aunt’s house, still unchanged since I was a wee girl.
    I waited for the usual pang of grief and sadness, the one I got every single time I opened my eyes, after a fitful sleep, since I lost my baby.
    It came, but it was somehow less sharp, less cruel. As if something, or someone, was standing between me and the terrible pain I felt. Like it was being cushioned off, softened.
    When you are a child, no pain is so harsh that the ones you love, the ones that look after you, can’t ease it. Even the worst of days look up when someone tucks you in, brings you a cup of warm milk and a biscuit, and sits at the edge of your bed to read you a story. You look at their well-known faces, breathe in their familiar scent, listen to the voice that you have heard since you can remember, and something inside you just unknots. For some of us, the person to do this was their mum. For me,