The pier kept the light

Morag MacInnes had switched on the pier light at Arinagour every evening for thirty-one years, and for the first twenty-eight of them it had meant something, because there was a boat coming in out of the dark that needed to see where the island ended and the concrete began. The light was on a grey pole at the far end, above the steps, and the switch for it was in a metal box on the wall of the waiting room, behind a door that stuck in wet weather, which on Coll was most weather. You had to lift the door a wee bit as you pulled it. Her father had shown her that when she was eleven, and she had shown it to the three men the council had sent over the years to replace the box, and every one of them had nodded and said they'd sort it, and none of them had, and she had come to think of the sticking door as a sort of handshake the pier gave you if it knew you.

The big boat used to come in from Oban past the Cairns of Coll and round into the bay with its lights all on like a hotel, and you could hear it before you could see it on a still night, a low sound in the water more than in the air. Half the island would come down. Not for anything, mostly. To see who was on it. To lift a parcel. To stand by the rail with a cup of tea from Jean Kennedy's flask and say it was a grand night or a dirty one, depending. Morag had the ropes and the gangway and the little office with the kettle, and when the boat had gone again and the bay was quiet she would walk to the end of the pier and look at the light on its pole, burning away over nothing, and feel that she had done a day's work.

The big boat stopped coming in the spring of the year Ruaridh turned seven.

It didn't stop all at once. Nothing did, after that. There was a consultation first, with a booklet that came through every door on the island with a photograph on the front of a small white boat on a flat blue sea, and the words Connecting Every Island, Every Day in a soft green font. The small white boat was the first of what the booklet called the Island Shuttle fleet, and the people in the photograph on page four, who were laughing on its deck with their hair blowing about, were not from anywhere Morag recognised, though the booklet said they were from Barra.

The boats were electric. They had no crew. They were about the length of two buses, and they could take forty people and a dozen bikes and a pallet of whatever needed taking, and they charged off the new turbines that had gone up on the hill above Totronald, and they were run, all of them, from Inverness to Campbeltown, by a system that Transport Scotland had bought or built or been given, nobody on Coll was clear which, and which was called Sound.

The thing about Sound, the booklet said, was that it listened. That was why it was called that. Under the old timetable, a ferry came three or four times a week whether anybody wanted it or not, and it went back half empty, and the islands paid for that in the end, in fares and in the boats wearing out. Under Sound, you asked for a crossing when you wanted one. You put in on your phone, or on the tablet that came free with the booklet, or by ringing a number and talking to it, and Sound gathered up everybody's asking, Coll's and Tiree's and Mull's and the rest, and it worked out the sailings, and a boat came. More sailings, the booklet said. Smaller boats, more often, to where people actually were. Every island, every day.

Morag read it at her kitchen table with her glasses on and her tea going cold, and then she read it again, and she couldn't find anything in it that was wrong. That was what she said to Jean when Jean came round with her own copy folded in her coat pocket.

"It's not wrong," Morag said. "It's just they've never stood on the pier in February."

"Donnie says they'll not take the beasts," said Jean.

"There's a bit about freight."

"There's a bit about freight windows," said Jean, and turned to the page, and pointed. "Windows. Like the cattle are going to climb in."

They kept her on. That was the first surprise. The council letter called her an Island Connectivity Ambassador, which Ruaridh thought was the funniest thing he had ever heard and said in a deep voice at every opportunity for a month, and the job was to be at the pier for sailings, to help people who were not good with the tablets, and to report anything that Sound needed to know about that Sound could not see for itself. The money was the same. The kettle stayed. The light stayed on its pole, because the little boats, it turned out, didn't need it, but there was a rule somewhere about a pier having a light, and nobody had got round to changing the rule.

And the first summer was good. She would say that to anybody, after. It was good.

The little boats came in more often than the big one ever had. You'd ask for a crossing on a Tuesday night for the Wednesday, and by breakfast your phone would buzz and tell you Your sailing: Arinagour 10:40, Oban 12:55, and at 10:35 there it would be, coming round the point with no sound at all, white and low and tidy, nosing in against the fenders as gentle as a dog putting its head on your knee. The ramp came down on its own. A voice that was nobody's voice said Good morning, Coll, every time, in a way that made the children giggle and the old men grunt. Morag stood by with her hands in her pockets and found there was not much for her hands to do.

People went over to Oban for the day in a way they never had. Jean went for her eyes and came back the same afternoon. The two young teachers from the school went to the pictures on a Friday night and were home for midnight. Calum, Morag's son-in-law, went across to price a second-hand quad and did it three Tuesdays running because he couldn't make up his mind, and each time Sound sent him a boat like it had nothing better to do. The tourists came in their bright jackets with their bicycles and their binoculars, more of them than ever, and they stood on the pier with Morag and asked her where the corncrakes were, and she told them, and it was very nearly like the old days except quieter.

There were things that were odd. A sailing you'd asked for at ten might come at quarter past eleven instead, because Sound had folded you in with somebody from Tiree. Coming back, you might find the boat going round by Mull first, because Sound had worked out that was better for everybody, and you'd sit an extra hour looking at Tobermory's coloured houses and thinking about your dinner. The freight window came on the first Thursday of the month, a bigger boat with no seats at all, and Donnie Kennedy got four of his young beasts onto it in the June after a great deal of shouting and a lot of help from Calum, and said he'd not be doing that again, and didn't have to, because he sold the rest of the herd to a man from Kintyre in the August.

He didn't say it was because of the boat. Nobody ever said it was because of the boat.

The tablets got a new page in the autumn. Morag noticed it because Jean came round with hers held out in front of her like it had bitten her.

It was a sort of dial, a half circle, like the speedometer in an old car. At one end it was green and at the other end it was a pale orange that wasn't quite red. Above it, in the soft green font, it said Coll: Community Connectivity, and the needle was in the middle, sitting on a word that said Sustainable.

"What's it for," said Jean.

Morag pressed the wee i at the corner, the way Ruaridh had shown her, and read out what came up. Sound, it said, used island connectivity scores to plan the fleet fairly across all of Scotland's island communities. Scores reflected how each community used its sailings. Communities could improve their score by booking ahead, by sharing journeys, and by choosing flexible sailing times. There was a wee cartoon of a boat with a thumbs up.

"How we use our sailings," said Jean.

"It means how many of us," said Morag.

"Well, it should say that."

"It should," said Morag. She put the tablet face down on the table, and Jean picked it up and turned it over again, and they sat and looked at the needle as if it might move while they watched.

It didn't move that day. It moved in the spring, after the Fletchers went.

The Fletchers had come from Leeds nine years before to do bed and breakfast at the old manse, and they had done it well and been liked, and they left because their daughter in Harrogate had her first and they wanted to be near. That was all. People left Coll; they always had. But the week after the removal lorry went over on the freight window, the needle on everybody's tablet slid a hair's width to the right, and the word under it changed to Sustainable – Reduced, and a message came with it.

To keep Coll connected, Sound has updated your sailing pattern. Guaranteed sailings: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Additional sailings will be scheduled when demand allows. Thank you for helping us connect every island, every day.

"Every day," said Calum, at Morag's table, reading it off his phone. "It still says every day."

"It means every island's got a boat somewhere every day," said Kirsty, Morag's daughter, who worked from home for an insurance company in Glasgow and was better with words like that. "It doesn't mean every day for every island."

"Then it should say that," said Morag, and heard herself sounding like Jean.

What Morag could never afterwards make anybody on the mainland understand, when they asked her, kindly, the way people do, what had happened, was that nothing happened. There was no day. There was no letter that said Coll was being closed. If there had been, there would have been a meeting in the hall and a man from Edinburgh in a fleece taking notes, and somebody would have rung the paper in Oban, and they would have fought it the way islands had always fought things, with petitions and stubbornness and Donnie Kennedy's cousin who knew an MSP.

Instead there were just the sailings.

The additional ones, the when-demand-allows ones, came less. You'd ask for a Tuesday and your phone would say Your request has been added to the Coll pool. We'll let you know when a sailing is confirmed, and then on the Tuesday morning it would say There were not enough requests to schedule a Tuesday sailing. Your nearest guaranteed sailing is Wednesday 09:15. And it was always perfectly polite, and it was always right, there hadn't been enough requests, and the next time you thought about going on a Tuesday you didn't bother asking, and neither did anyone else, and so there were never enough requests on a Tuesday again.

The two young teachers stopped going to the pictures. Then one of them went back to Paisley at the summer, and the council couldn't find another, because the advert had to say island connected three days a week, and the other one did both classes on her own until Christmas and then said she was sorry, she really was, but.

The school had nine children then. The rule was that below a certain number the council would look at it again, and the council looked at it, and in the end the council did not close the school. It was very clear about that. It consolidated provision. There would be a place for every Coll child at the high school hostel in Oban from Monday to Friday, and a teacher on video for the wee ones, and Sound would run a guaranteed school sailing, Sunday night out and Friday afternoon back, every week of term, without fail. That one had a lifeline flag on it. Kirsty showed Morag on the tablet: a tiny red heart beside the sailing. Lifeline sailings, the i said, were never subject to demand.

Ruaridh was nine. He went in the August with a new holdall and his football boots tied to the handle by the laces, and he did not cry on the pier, though Kirsty did, and so did Morag later, in the waiting room, with the door to the switch box shut so nobody would see.

He was all right in Oban. That was the thing. He was more than all right. He was in the football team by October and he had a friend called Jayden whose dad drove a taxi, and on the Friday sailings he came down the ramp talking before his feet were on the pier, about the hostel and the pool and the boy from Lismore who could burp the alphabet, and Morag stood with her hands in her pockets and let it all go over her like rain.

Kirsty and Calum went over most weekends in that first winter, on the Saturday guaranteed when there was one, and then, when the guaranteed days went down to Monday and Thursday after the Kennedys finally went to their son in Dunoon, they went on the Friday school sailing with Ruaridh and came back on the Sunday one with him and spent the weekend in a room in a guest house in Oban that cost more than Morag liked to think about, and then in the spring Kirsty said it, at Morag's table, the thing they'd all been not saying.

"There's a flat," she said. "Off the Soroba Road. It's near the school. I can do my work from anywhere, Mum, I always could."

"And Calum?"

"Calum can get on at the fish farm at Dunstaffnage. He's spoken to them."

Morag looked at her tea.

"You could come," said Kirsty. "There's a room. There's a whole scheme for it, Mum, you'd get help with everything. Sound would do the move."

"Sound would," said Morag.

"It's not Sound's fault."

"No," said Morag, and found, when she looked for it, that she believed it. It wasn't Sound's fault. Sound had done what Sound was asked. It had taken everybody's asking and made the best boats it could out of it, fairly, for every island, and it had told them honestly every step of the way where the needle was. It was just that Coll had got smaller in its asking, a person at a time, and Sound had heard that, the way it heard everything, and answered.

The relocation page came up on her tablet the week after Kirsty left. Morag had not asked for it. It was very well done. It had pictures of sheltered flats in Oban with sea views and a lady of about her age laughing with a cup of tea, and it said that Supported Island Relocation would cover the move, the first year's rent, and a payment for her house set by an independent valuer, and it said that Sound understood this was a big decision and there was no pressure at all, and there was a green button at the bottom that said Find out more and a grey one that said Not now.

She pressed Not now. It came back in a month, with the same pictures and a different lady.

By the second winter there were twenty-six people on Coll, by Morag's count, which she kept in pencil on the back of the old sailing timetable that was still pinned up in the waiting room, because she liked to know. Fourteen in Arinagour and the rest spread out along the single-track road to the west. A good few of them were in their seventies. There was a couple from Kent who'd bought the old Fletcher place for the peace and quiet and seemed to be getting it. There was Iain at the shop, who had cut the shop down to two mornings a week and said it was the best decision he'd ever made and looked, when he said it, like a man with toothache.

The guaranteed days were Monday and Thursday. The needle sat in the orange now, on a word that said Supported, which Morag had decided was the worst word yet, worse than Reduced, because there was nothing in it to argue with. Supported. Like a wall that was leaning.

But the boats came. That had to be said too. On a Monday and a Thursday the little white boat came round the point at the exact minute it was meant to, in any weather Sound thought it could manage, which was most weathers, and it nosed against the fenders, and it said Good morning, Coll, and put its ramp down, and Morag stood by with her hands in her pockets. And when old Archie Maclean had his fall in November, Sound sent a boat for him inside the hour with a paramedic on it, out of nowhere, in the dark, and the paramedic said it was the fastest she'd ever been sent anywhere. There was a red heart for that too. Sound did not let people die. It was very good at that.

It was just that on the days in between, nothing came at all, and the bay sat flat and empty from one side to the other, and the pier light came on at dusk because Morag put it on, and burned over nothing until she went back down in the morning and lifted the sticking door and switched it off.

The Christmas show at Ruaridh's school was on the Wednesday before the end of term, at half past six in the evening, in the big hall at the primary in Oban. He had a part. He was a shepherd, the second shepherd, with a line, and he had told her the line on the video call on Sunday, and on Monday, and twice on Tuesday, and it was Look! A star, brighter than all the others!, and he said it with his arm right out and his finger pointing, and she laughed every time, and he got cross every time she laughed, and then laughed himself.

She asked for a crossing on the Thursday before, a week ahead, to be safe. Wednesday afternoon out, Thursday guaranteed back. She asked on the tablet and then, to be sure, she rang the number and asked the voice, and the voice said Thank you, Morag. Your request has been added to the Coll pool.

She asked again on the Monday, on the guaranteed sailing, when the little boat was at the pier and there was nobody on it and nobody getting off. She stood at the top of the ramp and said it out loud, because Ruaridh had told her once that the boats could hear you, and she felt a fool, and said it anyway. I'm wanting over on Wednesday. For my grandson's show.

Thank you, Morag, said the boat. Your request is in the Coll pool.

On the Tuesday night her phone buzzed, and she knew before she looked.

There were not enough requests to schedule a Wednesday sailing from Coll. We're sorry we couldn't connect you this time. Your nearest guaranteed sailing is Thursday 09:15.

And then, a minute after, another one, which she had not seen before.

We know some journeys matter more than others. The Oban Primary Christmas Show will be streamed live at 18:30 on Wednesday. Tap here to join from home. Ruaridh's family have been notified you'll be watching.

She sat with that for a long time. She went through it the way she used to go through the council letters, looking for the bit that was wrong, and she couldn't find it. It was kind. It was thoughtful. Somewhere in all its listening Sound had found out about the show and about Ruaridh and about her, and it had done what it could, and what it could do was a small square of light on a tablet. She thought about ringing Kirsty and didn't, because Kirsty would say Oh, Mum, and then say there was nothing to be done, and she would be right.

She rang Iain at the shop instead, and then the couple from Kent, and then Archie, who was back from Oban with a stick, and asked if any of them were wanting over on Wednesday, for anything at all, a dentist, a haircut, a look at the shops, and they all said no, they were sorry, and Archie said he'd have gone if he could manage the ramp, just for her, and she said she knew he would. Four people, she thought, putting the phone down. If there had been four people asking, would that have done it? Six? She didn't know. The i never said. She had the strong feeling it was a number she could have found out, if she'd known the right way to ask, and that it would not have helped.

On the Wednesday she went down to the pier at six.

It was a clear night, which was rare, and very cold, and the stars were out all the way down to the sea the way they only were out here, with no town anywhere to wash them out. The bay was flat and black. She lifted the sticking door and switched on the light, and it came on at the end of the pier on its grey pole, and she walked out to it with the tablet under her arm and sat down on the bench below it, the one the community council had put there for her twentieth year, with the brass plate that said Morag MacInnes, Twenty years on Coll's pier, Tapadh leat. She had told them at the time it was early to be putting up plates. She'd done another eleven years since.

At half past six she tapped where it said to tap, and there was the hall in Oban, very bright, from somewhere high up at the back. Rows of heads. A piano. A small boy in a tea towel doing something to a bigger boy's donkey ears. The sound came a fraction behind the picture, so that the children's mouths moved and then the singing arrived, like it was coming across water.

She found him on the second song. He was at the end of the row in a striped dressing gown with a tea towel held on with what looked like one of Calum's belts, and he wasn't singing, he was looking out into the hall, and she knew, the way you know things, that he was looking for her, though he knew she wasn't there, and that he'd been told she was watching, and that he couldn't work out where you looked if your granny was watching through a camera on a wall.

Out past the Cairns, a light came round from the south.

It was one of the little boats, she could tell by how low and steady it was and how it made no sound at all. It was well out, going north, towards Tobermory or the Small Isles or Mallaig, she couldn't tell. Somebody's pool had filled. Somebody had enough of them asking. She watched it go along the edge of the sea with the stars all round it, and the tablet in her lap sang a carol about shepherds a fraction of a second late.

When it was level with the mouth of the bay, the boat's light flashed. Twice, white, soft. She had seen them do it before, out on the water, and had asked the voice once what it was, and the voice had said it was a courtesy signal, used to acknowledge other vessels and lit navigation marks. It was being polite to her pier. It saw the light on the pole, and it knew from somewhere that a pier with a light on it ought to be answered, and so it answered, and went on north.

On the screen, the second shepherd stepped forward. He put his arm right out, the way he'd practised it at her on the call, and his finger, and he pointed, not at the star hung on wire above the stage, but straight up the hall, towards the back, towards the high place on the wall where the camera was, and he said it very loud and very clear, a little bit after his mouth moved.

Look! A star, brighter than all the others!

Morag held the tablet up so he would be able to see her, if he could see anything. Then she remembered that he couldn't, and held it up anyway, there at the end of the pier under the light, until the song was over and the screen went dark, and the little boat was gone round the point, and the bay was flat again from one side to the other, and the only thing on it was the light on the pole, burning away, the way it was meant to, for anybody coming in.