Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  Tredwell, with her gory, empty eye-sockets.

  I gave up wearing the wedding ring not long after we were married. It was too tight one day and too loose the next, cluttering up my hands, interfering with circulation, dexterity and mobility. Being expected to wear a metal band on a specified joint felt as alien and antiquated as foot-binding or compulsory tight-lacing. You might be happy to wear too-tight shoes or a satin corset when you choose – I wore both on my wedding day – but all day? Every day? For the rest of your life? I kept taking the ring off, putting it down, mislaying it, and was in danger of losing it altogether. So the ring went silently away into a little drawer in my jewellery box, with my engagement ring. I hadn’t minded wearing that one, but almost as soon as the wedding ring had gone on to my finger I began to feel a tightness under my sternum which has never really left me. Certainly putting the ring away was no solution.

  I agreed to take my husband’s name in part because I already had my doctorate, I’d been overjoyed to relinquish the clunky title of Ms, to dispense altogether with a gendered identity; and it never occurred to me that anyone would ever address me as Mrs. But we would fill in forms as Dr and Mr, and back would come the completed paperwork addressed to Dr and Mrs. It felt like a slap across the face. Get back in your box. The algorithms governing load distribution on the thirty-six-seater planes that fly in and out of Orkney’s airport at Grimsetter are programmed to calculate weight difference based on gender, so I am in their system as Mrs. The local authority which manages the college, despite having numerous highly qualified academic staff, regularly writes to me as Mrs. I am sure no insult is intended, but every time it feels as though those passionate, engaged, formative years of working on my PhD thesis are being deleted from my CV. I am being assimilated, digested, depersoned. Forcibly regendered.

  The disquiet set in from the start. At our wedding, my brand-new father-in-law steered me towards his wife and his mother, women I barely knew, shouting, ‘Let’s have a picture of all three of you together.’ Three women, all labelled with the same name. My barely suppressed nausea should have told me straight away I’d made a mistake. The hugeness of the promises I’d just made began to bear down on me before we’d even got to the reception. The traps into which we wander are so often of our own making.

  I changed my surname after marriage in part because I’d never felt particularly attached to my own father’s very ordinary name, and I knew it would please my husband and his family. But now the dull, abandoned syllables of my maiden name smell like the first hint of rain after drought. I think of being that name again, and my mouth starts watering as though I were parched and imagining sucking lemons.

  I also changed my name because I wanted to forge a new family in the aftermath of my mother’s death, for both parents to have the same name as any children we might have. But I know now it takes more than a coincidence of syllables, and that my child would love me just as much if my name were different from hers. I flinch when I hear families being referred to collectively, The Smiths, as though they were all stamped out identical with the one gingerbread cutter. Ragged edges trimmed off and eaten. Dead black raisin eyes.

  I felt that I was being pressured to pass, to masquerade as a successfully married woman. None of this was my husband’s fault. I waded into this current with my eyes wilfully shut: no one to blame but myself if I got swept away.

  It’s no coincidence that the crisis in my marriage coincided with my compulsion to swim in the sea. I must be careful here; hindsight is wonderful in part because it is misleading: it gives you the illusion that all roads had to lead to the here and now. And I must not mistake causation and correlation: just because two distribution maps show the same pattern it doesn’t mean that the data-sets stem from the same underlying root. But I watch myself running to the sea as I would to a lover, sneaking out of the house in the half-light, throwing myself into the water, seeking extreme sensation. Afterwards I creep back in, sated with guilty pleasure, take a scalding shower and scrub the evidence from my body.

  The blanking out of self, the pleasure/pain boundary, the making myself wholly vulnerable: cold-sea swimming has taken over that part of my identity I once identified with sex. The house is cold too, but arid, like a high desert, like the far reaches of space. There is nothing to breathe. My husband and I steer around each other, polite and brittle, planets on different orbits, creatures too alien to understand each other’s needs. In most fairy stories the prince is driven by passion to kiss the unconscious girl, or the princess is angry with the cold-skinned frog; they communicate strong emotions to each other, and in the dénouement they are transformed by love. But he and I have fallen too deeply under our respective enchantments to communicate, and the stories that lure me now are the ones in which the protagonists find their way out of the cage. Reading the Grimms again, it is now not the rude, ungrateful princess with whom I identify, that spoiled girl who breaks her promises and throws her devoted frog/lover across the room, but Faithful Heinrich, the prince’s follower, so grief-stricken by his master’s transformation into a frog that he had the blacksmith fasten three iron bands around his ribcage. It was the only way to stop his heart from breaking.

  How different things are in the sea, in which every inch of my skin tingles and thrills, where I am tossed and buffeted, taken to new places – out of the comfort zone, as the pedagogical jargon has it, into the learning zone, touching on the margins of the panic zone. The salt and cold saturate me, the waves throw me around, my sinuses and throat sting with the seminal taste of brine. Sure, I can’t breathe freely here either, but instead I gasp, gulp, splutter, always something exciting, always something new. The sea is a reliable lover: always there for me. The sea is an unreliable lover: one day it may kill me.

  And the seals give a human face to the sea. No wonder they are always the sexual partners of the humans in the selkie stories, rather than the spirit guides or magical helpers or existential threats. The best-known stories may be those of rape and conquest, of a man stealing a woman’s freedom and her access to the sea, but Orkney is also rich in tales like that of the Great Selkie of Sule Skerry, stories of lovers from the sea who fulfil a human woman’s needs. The story sometimes has a tragic ending; sometimes, but not always.

  There’s that tale about the proud young woman on Stronsay, one of the north isles. She was rich and she was beautiful, and she was in love with the big handsome lad who did the grunt work on her father’s farm. Mucking out. Hauling. Silage. Slurry. She couldn’t show her love, so she suffered in secret, and took it out on the lad with the edge of her tongue. But the day her father died she told him to get himself washed and brushed, off with his boiler suit and on with his Sunday clothes, because she was going to marry him.

  It was the scandal of the year. But the marriage didn’t make either of them happy. It turned out he was as stubborn as she was, and he didn’t like being pushed around. After a few years of him ignoring her and refusing to eat or drink with her and never coming to her bed, her love for him died. But she was full-blooded and restless, longing for a warm body next to her, so she went down to the ebb, kilted up her skirts and waded into the water, and there she wept seven salt tears into the seventh wave of the salt sea. They were the only tears that proud girl ever shed.

  Up pops a handsome bull selkie, saying, ‘What’s your will with me, fair lady?’ And their children were born with hands like a seal’s prehensile flippers, webs of skin between their fingers.

  We’re not told what the human husband thought of this arrangement. In telling her story the Orkney antiquarian Walter Traill Dennison changes her name, he says, ‘because her descendants are still living among us; and if any of them should read these lines, let them not think that aught offensive was intended. If the lady was their ancestor, she was also a near relative of ancestors of mine.’ In one version of the story she is Brita, in another Ursilla. Her real name has been left to fall through the gaps, in case her grandchildren are as prickly as she wa
s. I wonder where exactly Traill Dennison thought the potential offence to her descendants lay: in the adultery, or the seal strand in their DNA?

  Brita/Ursilla was too proud publicly to admit the mistake she had made in marrying the man she did, but not so proud that she wasn’t going to find herself a workable solution.

  Selkie women are proud, too: that surely is part of their charm. They are as unselfconscious as children, dancing on the sand, and the Peeping Toms who steal their skins cannot bear their unlicensed beauty. The selkies are not dancing naked to delight the male gaze: their only audience is each other, their motive the sheer joy of being alive, wind and salt and moonlight on bare skin. Even to say they are naked is a misnomer: they cannot be naked because they never wear clothes, innocent as Eve in Eden. The sealskin is not a garment to hide the shameful body or to assert status or even to keep off the cold: it is their true sea self; just as the human skin is their true land self. The sobbing of the selkie-woman when she realizes her skin is gone, and then her abject pleading when she realizes that a man has taken it and plans to keep her from the sea: these are always part of the story. She is forced to knuckle under, choose slavery over death, even when she already has a husband and children in the sea. She is always a dutiful wife and a good mother.

  She has to learn that nakedness is shameful. What did it feel like to put on clothes for the first time, to force your feet into shoes? My own skin flinches, newly aware of the dead, alien weight of wool and linen and leather.

  How can her husband live with himself? Does he look at her as she gazes at the sea with the salt water welling in her eyes, and feel a pang of remorse? Or does he hug to himself in secret glee the knowledge of that soft bundle of speckled fur tucked behind the boarded ceiling, in the rafters, gathering dust and cobwebs?

  This desire to entrap is always associated with the men. Brita/Ursilla had no interest in enslaving her selkie lover. She wanted good sex and a relationship of equals. Freud banged on about not knowing what women want, calling us ‘the dark continent of psychology’ – but he could have asked. Virginia Woolf might have enlightened him, in ‘A Room of One’s Own’; and so could Brita/Ursilla. When I first read Traill Dennison’s story I was frustrated that he censored her real name: I felt he was over-squeamish, disrespectful to the truth of her experience. But maybe her having two names, neither of them her own, is just a sign that she stands in for all of us.

  Eight years into our marriage an assault on my name came from a completely other direction. My first novel was about to be published, and the editor told me she felt that it should come out under my initials. ‘Men won’t buy books by someone called Victoria.’ I gaped at her. A truism in commercial fiction apparently, but new to me. ‘No specific prejudice against Victorias,’ she said, laughing. Women will buy books by men, but not vice versa. My novel had men in it, and swords. Men might well buy it, but not if they knew it was written by me. And when I told her my middle name was Jane she sighed and shook her head again. ‘V. J. No, think of something else.’ When I pressed her for an explanation she gave her complicit laugh, and squirmed a little, and said it reminded her of vajazzle, vajayjay. Those words will date this book. I hope. There was a peculiar humiliation in being told by a young woman that my very initials evoked female genitalia and were therefore unacceptable. I felt as though I had been caught on the way to the loo with a tampon poking out of my handbag.

  And I wonder: did anyone try that line on Dick Francis?

  My middle-aged, battle-scarred, female friends shrugged and sighed and said go with it, they know the market, what do you expect? Some tried to console me, mentioning Charlotte Brontë’s male pseudonym of Currer Bell, George Eliot… Hey, it worked for J. K. Rowling!

  But my cousin Thom, in his early twenties, was incandescent with outrage on my behalf. How I love him for that.

  It was a strange, prolonged process of alienation of public from private self, first to lose my surname, then my given name, and then even my initials, like being buffeted by waves, dragged and rolled by the undertow, suddenly realizing that this is a rip current and that the water is carrying you further and further away from where you want to be, out into unknown, annihilating seas. I peer through a looking glass darkly, per speculum in aenigmate, through the riddling mirror (or maybe the enigmatic speculum), through the accretions of soot and grease: where has that girl gone? What would she say to me now?

  Standing on the pier watching the ferry depart, the gap of choppy water widening.

  The layer of hardened tissue laid down by repetitive microtrauma, each wounding moment too small to register.

  *

  Air temp 14, sea 11 C. Many many curlews flying low over the water. Wave-skimming wing-tips. Coming so close, uncaring whether I am a seal or a rock or a lump of weed. Stiff southerly breeze, palpably incoming tide.

  *

  Names and naming strategies are always powerful magic. The name of Orkney itself is a mystery: its similarity to orca is haunting, although philologists are sceptical about their having a direct connection. I’m less sure; meaning inheres in the mind, not in the word. Puns and echoes, homophones and folk-etymologies, these all have their own magic. ‘Orca’ just means ‘whale’. Carl Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist who largely invented scientific taxonomy and the convention of giving species two-part names, called the orca the Delphinus orca; in Middle English it had been the grampus, from French for fat fish, although of course it’s not a fish but a mammal. Linnaeus is said to have pointed that out, definitively, in 1758 when he invented the category of cetacean, although Olaus Magnus’s map made more than two hundred years earlier shows the orcha suckling her calf, right next to Orcadia. It hasn’t yet become the orcine whale, the whale belonging to the god Orcus: that would happen in 1860, when the Austrian naturalist Leopold Fitzinger redrew the borders of knowledge yet again, establishing the genus Orcinus and Orcinus orca as its only extant member species.

  Like a recurrent motif in a piece of music, like the Jaws theme, like the forever-and-ever-Amen that closes the rosary, this stuttering heartbeat, this insistent reminder that I am safe: no wild orca has ever attacked a human being. Maybe it’s my guilty conscience, my fear of being pursued for my broken promises, but the sea’s choppiness this morning means that my eye is caught over and over by little dark triangular shadows, shapes and splashes in the water. What was that movement? Just a wave? A shag, diving? A seal’s head? Or the stubby recurved triangle of a female orca’s dorsal fin, Mousa or one of the others, slicing the surface? Every twitch of my cornea is accompanied by a little thrill, my sympathetic nervous system releasing cortisone and adrenalin, my heart pounding, mouth dry, the blood loud in my ears. We are pareidolic, pattern-making creatures. Pareidolia: the capacity for perceiving meaning when no meaning is there. Our brains identify features in abstract forms, the face of Christ in a slice of burned toast, camels and weasels in clouds, killer whales in the waves.

  We see what we want to see.

  Freud’s construct of the Lustprinzip, the pleasure principle, the pleasure/pain binary pay-off, is predicated on the idea that when mature and healthy we are rational creatures who can perform a minute-by-minute cost–benefit analysis of the potential outcomes of our actions, and that we choose the outcome which will maximize pleasure and minimize pain, subject always to the further restraints of the reality principle. To do otherwise, to take unnecessary risks, to return over and over to the source of pain and fear: this is neurosis.

  The warning leaflets issued by the coastguard tell me only to swim on patrolled beaches; that water this cold is a danger to life within thirty to sixty minutes; that currents are unpredictable and often invisible from the shore. That I should never swim alone.

  They do not mention Orcinus orca.

  I almost always say orca, not killer whale. A friend accused me recently of cutesifying them by using this name: ‘That’s what SeaWorld calls them. What’s wrong with killer whales?’ Nothing, of course. I agree
with him: names matter. But there’s nothing cute about the words Orcinus orca. Poke beneath the surface and there’s a long narrative there of terror, the uncanny, guilt and the fear of the deep.

  Who is Orcus, and why does the orca belong to him? I’ve been teasing out the connections, with the suspicion that there’s a lot going on deep under the surface, down in the hadal zone, rather than the sunlit zone where philologists feel entitled to play.

  Classical writers called these islands both ‘Orkas’ (singular) and ‘the Orcades’ (plural). In Old Norse it’s ‘Orkneyjar’ (plural). (And yet now if visitors refer to ‘the Orkneys’ we hiss and suck our teeth: it’s become a shibboleth that marks the outsider, you have to say Orkney or the Orkney Islands.) Orkney as it stands is a perfectly clear Old Norse word. Orkn-eyjar – the Islands of Seals. But the name is much older than the Vikings, and they must have reinterpreted what they found: there are plenty of parallels for such misunderstanding and misappropriation in colonial history. Even during the Viking Age the islands are referred to in Irish sources as ‘Innse h-Orc’, Orc Islands, and the Picts must surely have called them something that sounded similar. But where did that name come from? Tracing the name back through early medieval and classical writers takes us to Bede and Adomnán in the eighth century and Pliny in the first. We have already met Pliny’s contemporary Tacitus, describing Agricola’s circumnavigation. Before him there was Diodorus of Sicily, and the trail finally runs into the sand with Pytheas of Massilia in the fourth century BC.