Night fell and the full moon rose. I unfastened my crossed bands, rolled them up and pocketed them. I picked my boy up, and I wrapped him close, and I took him down through the teeming night to Crescent Corner. Only a few seals greeted me as I came down the cliff path, but more bobbed out in the water, their heads like shawled women’s.
I knelt with Ean, unwrapped him and kissed him. Fresh weed I took from the lip of the sea, fine as lace. I bound this round him as he gasped, around his tiny goose-fleshing chest that would not breathe enough, that would not broaden and fatten like my niece and nephew’s. Two X-es I made on him, front and back, to make sure he always fled witches and men, to keep him safely in the sea.
I kissed him again, and then I wrapped him head to toe in clean breech-cloths like a shroud; he moved inside them, inside his sleep. Around the cloths I wrapped a weed-blanket, freshly wetted. I sang all the while, one of the odd-tuned lullabies I had made for him without intending — it had come up out of me, as they did, one long winter night or day, just for this little one and no other. The song and the sea-sound came together; the seals waited and watched, bobbing. I sang and I sang, and I tied him into the blanket. And as I tied, the leaves of the weed clung and clamped to the white cloths underneath, and the woven stalks sank in; my singing and my weaving and the seal-gaze and the moon and water all worked together to combine the weed, the cloth, and the bab. Magic rose from the rocks and the sea like locusts from a summer crop; power welled up in me like tears, and was held in check as tears must be held, for this business must be done right. I must make of myself a pure channel for the magic to tumble along at its right pace, in its right depth exactly.
When my boy was quite sewn away, down I carried him — already he was heavier — to the narrow curve of sand that showed here at the lowest tide. The seals had nosed a little closer through the water; I sat and took off my shoes and hailed them: ‘Are you ready, beautiful women, to take charge of my Ean?’ I knotted up my skirt, lifted the bundle, waded out.
I laid him on the wavelets, held him there awhile, unable to move for fear of what I was about to do. I glanced up from my armful, the sea rocking cold about my knees, lapping at one elbow and one hand. The seal-mothers were still some yards off, but I could hear their breath, and I could smell it; I could see their whiskers bristling; I could feel their attention to my song and my activities, like cords stretched tight between us, heavy with seawater, drenched with starlight.
I gave Ean a little push towards them. I let him go, and he sank, and I could not see him below, only water-shine. In a panic, I bent and wet the front of my dress, reaching down. I pushed him again, and he was smoother, and at once livelier. At my fingertips moved all the vigour I had longed for him to show while he lived with me. This heartened me to strike up my song again. Ean wriggled; he sprang away from me; two of the seal-women dived to meet him. I straightened and stepped back, my cold wet hands to my mouth. I imagined their meeting underwater, the two large beings and the one tiny.
I backed from the wavelets watching. The water busied as they brought my son into the group of them. His round head bobbed up among their larger ones, and his sleek side shone as he threw himself over in the water in a game, to their amusement. He broke my heart with his celebrating — how little he needed me, how perfectly happy he was now, as he had not been before, in my house, at my breast! I was glad of his gladness, and that he would be cared for, but how would I live without him, the little prince who had ruled my days and nights?
Empty-handed, empty-armed, I watched my son play among his new mams and be taken away. It was heavy toil to watch, the heaviest I had ever done, yet I felt I had to stay and see all there was to see. He grew littler and littler, leaping among them, till he was no more than water-gleams on the darkness. They too shrank, until they were only mistakes of my eyes among the waves. Then I crouched and hugged my bare knees, and laid my face on them, and I was incapable, for a long while. All the years to come crowded into that time, and I lived them, long and bitter and empty of him. The rightness of what I had done, and the wrongness both, they tore at me, and repaired me, and tore again, and neither of them was bearable. I did not know how I would ever lift myself from that crescent of sand and that water’s edge, and make my cold way home.
I spent a wretched spring. I did not go down to the Crescent; I did not want to recognise my son among the young and to remember that I had had him, that I held him no longer, that I never would again.
I cared for Dad; Mam seemed to despise him now, and did very little for him. When he slept, though, and I had got the house more or less in order, I went to my bed and hid away in sleep, for to be awake and unoccupied was to be filled with a leaden and unending sorrow.
‘At this time of the day!’ Mam cried, throwing open the door to my room one afternoon. ‘What kind of lazy lump lies abed mid-afternoon?’
‘A tired one,’ I said.
‘Tired? What have you got to be tired for? Come up to Grassy’s and Horace breaking through a new tooth and you will know what tired is. Your bab’s the peacefullest of all this lot and the least bother. You should be ashamed!’
She could not embarrass me out of bed, though; I was too sunk in mourning. I hardly knew which I missed worse, my son or the solitude in which I’d enjoyed and suffered with him. I hid my head under shawl and bedclothes, and readied my stick-like arms for if she should try to drag me out bodily, as she had done before.
Instead she only stood closer. ‘Are you dying of something? Are you ill?’
‘Perhaps I am,’ I said dully. ‘Perhaps this is what dying is.’
And that struck us silent. Quite cheered, I was, at the thought of an end to my suffering, and I closed my eyes ready to welcome it. From Mam’s breathing I could tell that she gazed on me less happily. Perhaps she wondered how her world would be without me, how much work she would have to take on.
Summer rose to its peak, and fell away, and still I did not die. Indeed, I found myself able to sit in the sun against the laundry wall for longer and longer each day, without too great a pain descending on me. The time came in the autumn when, unbandaging myself, I knew that all the seals had left Crescent Corner on their great migration. I washed, and tied the bands on again, and stood a long while staring at nothing. Next day, mid-afternoon, I escaped the house and walked a little, out into the town, unpropelled by any particular errand.
‘Look at you,’ said Moll Granger. ‘Hardly more than a bundle of sticks.’
I gave her a wan smile and kept walking, so as not to be scolded again, or questioned, or given recipes for sustaining foods.
I was leaning over the sea-rail, lost in the sight of the sea, which seemed to have grown wider, and greener, and more mysterious in my absence, when a child’s voice piped behind me: ‘Oh look, Mam; she’s not fat any more!’
It would have been wise to pretend I had not heard, but I seemed to have forgotten whatever wisdom I’d once had, and I turned to see Mattie Kimes, her hand out towards her son, who had paused in his running to stare at me. ‘Come, Donald!’
‘Does that mean she’s not a witch any more?’ said the little boy, gazing at me as if unaware that I had ears or feelings.
‘Oh, Donald, you daft one. What a thing to say!’ She went to him and seized his arm, all but pulling him off his feet. At the same time with her face fired up blushing, she sent me a terrible smile, mortally embarrassed, begging me to ignore him.
‘But you said — ’
She snatched him up, so violently that he cried out, but it did not stop him.
‘You said, you could tell she was a seal-witch, because she was fat like a — ’
Mattie cut him off with a hand over his mouth, swung him around out of my sight, strode away.
As if determined to hurt myself, I glanced about, at two small girls smirking at me on Trumbells’ step, at the curtain whisking across Havemeyer’s upper window, at a woman scurrying away along the sea-front, both hands to her mouth, in search of someone
to tell what Donald Kimes had just said — Fisher’s wife, perhaps, for the tale would travel fastest that way.
I strode off, myself, not caring where I went, deciding no more than to move myself on from that place and moment. By the time I was able to see anything but Donald’s bright face or Mattie’s red one, to hear anything other than the little boy’s sharp, innocent voice, I was well out on the field road.
Along to Crescent Corner I went, empty though it was of seals, and down the cliff path. I loosened the bands as I stepped out onto the flat rocks, and I searched the sea around, but no seals came up to me, none came out; only the usual wings beat about me, the wings of the earth, the wind of them. I paced about, wishing that wind would take me up and away. I unlaced my boots and kicked them off, hoping to make myself lighter for the rescuing.
No scorch or smudge showed on the rock where I had lit my fire last spring; no special power blazed up where I had lain and loved with the nameless seal-man. I had been such a fool in my momentary bliss, thinking that things would change for me! All I had known since then was grief; to pay for that night’s pleasure, my heart had been cut out and thrown into the sea, to be grieved after forever. I had thought myself all-powerful, above caring what others thought in this town — but look at me now, shrunken, miserable, and stinging at an insult from a child’s lips, parroting his mother — parroting, perhaps, the whole town. I was not above caring; I was not above longing for relief from this unending shame, from this relentless loneliness.
My rage grew cold, and I sat to the low shelf of rock above the fire site. I could not stay still; I reached out and plucked tiny black periwinkles from the damp rock-seams around me, and began to lay them in a design. If I’d been crossed, this would have been only idle play, but with earth-breath flowing up into my foot-soles, out from my shoulders like wings, it took on a different force; each little shelled animal I laid down in a line or curve or corner set a knot in the rock beneath, from which trailed a trembling strand in the up-flow. This knot and strand remained even when the snail wobbled away; it was as if I burned this design into the rock, and the smoke of the burning trailed forever into the air above.
I do not know how long it took; as I placed and straightened, the sea-sound washed away my sense of time and care-of-time. There was only care of placement, a fierce intention to make this shape rightly.
When I was done, there lay outlined — in parts with the black shells, in other parts only with the knots and filaments they had left — a round-headed, faceless figure. She had arms but no hands; her two round breasts each bore a periwinkle-nipple; her legs came together, then separated, not into feet, but into two lobes of a fishlike tail. This blunt personage regarded me, and I her, while one by one the periwinkles crept off, leaving her burnt to the rock, burning into the wind. I turned to face the sea, to feel the real breeze blow through the up-pouring mysterious one; I watched the sun coast slowly down and tip-touch the horizon. The periwinkle girl held firm to the rock behind me, streaming upward, changing everything.
Dad died not two weeks later, his lungs filling up and drowning him. With the first winter storms Mam sickened, too, first in her stomach. Then her mind began to go. She took to her bed as if she never intended rising again. Both events brought with them a great deal of quarrelsome sister-business. Bee and Lorel and Grassy Ella felt free to descend on me almost every day, with or without an armful of bab and a trailing of older children. They scolded me and their eyes went everywhere, looking for new evidence of neglect and carelessness that they could tell to each other. Give them a funeral and they blew in like thunderclouds — the noise of them! The combined ill-will! I had forgotten how they took over a house, how they took over my mind. With their pecking and remonstrations, my own will disappeared, and I went about dully, obeying this one’s commands, that one’s counter-orders. I drudged through the winter and, as I shivered through washing myself those half-frozen mornings, joylessly I registered the return of the seals to Crescent Cove as spring approached. I all but forgot what I had done there, the lure I had left in the rock.
It was after a thorough nitpicking by Bee, as she swept out the door into the well-puddled slush, that Arthur Scupper’s children came running up the street, crying: ‘Come to Fisher’s! They’ve found a mermaid! Come and look!’
Bee stood out from the step to stop them. ‘A mermaid? But the boats did not go out today!’
‘She walked into town, with not a stitch on!’ cried Hex Scupper. He ran on, then called back over his shoulder. ‘Up from Crescent Corner!’
‘A mermaid!’ Bee exclaimed after them.
I hid the shaking of my hands in my apron. ‘What can they mean? Perhaps it is only some kind of malformed fish.’
‘A fish that walked into town?’
‘Let us go and see, then.’
I went to Mam’s doorway, pulling on my coat. ‘What’re you want?’ she said. ‘Fetch that daughter of mine.’
‘I am off down Fisher’s a moment, to see a sea-girl,’ I said. ‘I will lock you in, just in case you take a mind to follow me.’
She glared and did not know me still — her knowing had come and gone a great deal lately. I could talk nonsense to her, or insult her outright, and she would forget a moment after.
I locked the door and Bee and I set off for Fisher’s, falling in with a crowd of others who spilled from their doors, donning coats and pulling on shawls. I was glad of Bee, for she could take care of the talking — which she did, for along with all the other betrothed or married women, she had a great deal of anxiety to spill out, about this mermaid. I went quietly among them, nodding at what they said and making the right faces so as not to be noticed.
We met Doris Shingle, coming up. ‘Aye, she’s fair,’ she said. ‘Fair strange, you ask me. Foreign-looking — as you’d expect, I suppose, for she’s not of this country.’
‘Has she seaweed hair?’ joked Abby Staines. ‘Has she sucker-fingers like an octopus?’
‘None of that,’ said Doris. ‘Her sea-ness is quite gone. She’s fingers like you or me, only finer. And her hair is finer too, and as straight as if you took and ironed it.’
Pensive men we met, too, who would not be drawn so much. Their silence did nothing to improve the wives’ tempers.
Then we were at Fisher’s. They had put the sea-girl in his back room there; two doors led to it from the main store, and the whole town was filing in one and out the other very slowly. Those coming out were some of them eager to tell us everything we were about to see; others sidled away, or went head-down, and would not be pressed. The ones that did speak each had a different story — she was fair enough, she was ugly, she was the fairest thing ever made; her hair was like silk cloth, like rats’ tails, like a horse’s floppy mane; she was sulky, she smiled like an angel, she was the most radiant creature; she had swum from Spain, she was clearly of the sea, she had nothing about her of the underwater. I hardly knew what to expect when finally I pushed and shuffled into the back room with the others.
Fisher’s women had got the poor thing into a dress, but it did not fit her well; its puffed sleeves sat sadly out from her shoulders, and her long shins dangled below the hem, with the fine small bare feet that looked as if they would not hold anything up of substance. In the window-light her skin had a greenish cast, and the dress was a particular yellow that set it off badly.
‘She looks ill,’ Hatty Marchant whispered to someone, behind my shoulder.
I was crowded along from behind by those eager to enter, everyone breathing and murmuring. Mag Fisher was seated by the girl, looking about fiercely.
‘Has she a voice like us?’ someone ventured at last from behind me.
‘I’ve a voice,’ said the sea-girl, and I heard that clear enough. Her voice was low, and of course lovely, and held an accent of some kind, I thought. I wanted immediately to hear it again, to make sure.
‘Will she be staying?’
‘That’s enough of questions,’ snapped Mag. ‘I’ve a
nswered everything over and over. Go and ask those who already know. I won’t have the girl badgered.’
‘We’re not badgering her, Mag. We’re badgering you.’ A wicked titter ran among us.
This was how it would be, then: the women pretending this was every-day, that she was not much of a girl to look at, while her enchantment went to work upon the men. I could see it, their eyes fixing and following the length of her hair, of her limbs, of her slimness under the awful dress, their lips parting. I began to see the size of what I’d accomplished the other evening at the Crescent. What chance did these men have against my faceless, heartless periwinkle girl? Poor defenceless fools. And poor wives and mothers! They were no more than encumbrances now. They could titter and screech and weep as much as they liked, in the weeks and months to come. They would not be paid any mind.
Was she beautiful, the sea-maid? Fair strange, Doris had said, and I thought that was a fine assessment. I had seen her face before, of course, or very like it: the portrait in Strangleholds’ attic, the Spanish dancers on my brother’s postcard. Their hair, like hers, was neat dark wings either side of their faces; their eyebrows, too, were drawn clear-edged against skin that bore not a freckle or a fleck. This girl’s eyes, like those others’, were wide and dark; her hands were long, the fingers slender and longer than the palms. Her mouth was like my own, only beautiful; looking upon it I could see why whoever-it-was had asked could it speak, for it seemed to be made only for people to admire, for ornament: curve-edged, bruise-coloured, plump, heavy. I looked about me at the small mouths, hardly lipped at all, spattered with freckles, little pinch-slots into the women’s worried, or disagreeable, or frankly afraid faces. Any man seeing this maiden’s lips would want to lay kisses on them; he would want to roll in the cushions of those lips, swim the depths of those eyes, run his hands down the long foreign lengths of this girl. Oh, I thought, women of Rollrock, you are nothing now.
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