Five small bones on an upper arm

The gale took the lobster pots off the end of the pier on Tuesday, and your dad went down at first light to see what the sea had left on the shingle. He came back with his pockets full of wet stones and, in the tin where he keeps the spare hooks, five small bones wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth. A seal, he thinks, or a shag that had been picked clean. He laid them out on the kitchen table in a row, tallest in the middle, like a tuning fork someone had forgotten to strike.

I told him to bury them in the garden, but he said the sea had spent a long time smoothing them and it would be rude to waste the effort. So we sat there with the wireless turned down while he showed me how each one had a knob at either end where it used to fit into something that moved. He said the middle one was the foreleg of a seal that had once been the strongest swimmer off Skerry Point. I did not believe him, but I liked the way he said it.

The Morag Rose goes to the scrap yard in March. The skipper says the engine is finished and the hull has gone soft in the bilges. Your dad has said nothing about it, but last night he took the tin down and counted the bones again, then wrapped them in the oilcloth and asked me to post them to you in Aberdeen. Keep them on your windowsill, he said, until you find a place that wants them.

Write when the herring come in. Give the gulls my regards, they have been cheeky.

Love, Mum