The Brides of Rollrock Island

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘What am I up to? Why, I am drinking.’

  ‘So I see. Won’t your dad thrash you, taking his spirit?’

  ‘Maybe he will,’ said Toddy cheerily. ‘Maybe I will thrash him back – and maybe my granddad too – and maybe my great-granddad, for having made the mess we’re all in. Here, Daniel, have a slosh of it. It is like carrying hot coals in your stomach. It warms all of you, right out to the toenails.’ He twisted out the cork and offered me the flask.

  I lifted and tipped. The air off the stuff rushed out the neck and nipped my nose; the spirit itself ran cold and stinging across my tongue; a little spilled out the side and dripped to my collar, leaving a line of cold burning down from the corner of my mouth. ‘Wo-hoah.’ I gave it back to him, and wiped my chin.

  He swigged again. ‘And it makes you forget. It blurries out your brain. You can just sit here and sing. And then a friend comes along!’ He flung his arm about my shoulders and growled with satisfaction, and we both laughed at his pretending. ‘And everything is just fine and champion! Look at the lovely – the water, Daniel. And is that an albatross I see? Isn’t that good luck?’

  ‘An albatross is, but that is a gannet.’ I was still negotiating the spirit into myself; it felt as if it were eating holes in my gullet, making lacework of it.

  ‘ ’Tis a fine bird, your gannet, no?’

  ‘It is a very fine bird.’

  ‘ ’T’s a very fine bird.’ He took his arm away, so as to smack the cork back into the neck. Then he collapsed somewhat. ‘How is this, Dan’l? It is in-suff’rable the way things are, do you not think?’

  ‘With the mams, you mean?’

  ‘With the mams, with the dads, with everyone.’ He spread his arms, as if those people were out there seaward, not behind us, and as if he would embrace them all.

  ‘None of us is happy any more,’ I conceded.

  ‘Was any of us ever happy, I’d like to know? It seems to me that Rollrock lads are only happy for as long as we’re too little to see that we oughtn’t to be happy. Soon as we find that we might have sisters, but don’t, as soon as we see that our mams and grandmams are only our mams and grandmams by witch-work, why—’ He shook his head at me impatiently, then waited for his eyes to catch up. ‘I don’t see why everyone’s fussing so,’ he said more pettishly. ‘Who wants girls anyway? What are they good for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I haven’t ever known any besides Trudle’s.’ Well, there was that red girl at Knocknee, her hair fizzing and flaming, her inquisitive eyes looking me up and down. But I could not be said to know her, exactly.

  ‘And as babs? Gawd, that last one! Yawped all day and night until Mam took her down. Dad was glad to be rid of her as much as I was, the racketing. We could all get some sleep.’

  We listened to his cruel words in our shelter there. Then doik!, he pulled out the cork again and thrust the bottle at me, as much apologizing as daring me to drink more.

  The second pull of spirit was gentler; it soothed the damages caused by the first. Watching Toddy’s throat jump around his next swallow, I told myself I must not do this again too soon. It was far too pleasant, too warming against the weather. Enough of it, and I should be agreeing with Toddy Marten; I should be agreeing with every Toddy Marten of this town; I should be blabbing out everything about my own mam and how she lived alone in her room under her weed, how we were helpless to help her though we had tried every remedy we knew of, and how hard it all was and oh the great burdens women were, were they not?

  After the third pull I found it in me to take no more; I only kept Toddy company while he over-drank, and stopped him making too bad a mess of himself. When next he could in any way stand, I helped him up and wheedled and carried him home.

  When we reached his door, ‘Just go in,’ he said from his hung head. ‘There’s no point trying to get my mam up.’

  I left him in his front room curled up in an armchair with a cup of water by him and a bowl to be sick in if he needed. The house smelt as ours did, as if a sea-fog had got into its bones, sour and cold. I was glad to leave it, as I’d been glad to avoid my own.

  I took myself hill-walking, not wanting to present myself at home with spirit on my breath. Up over the top of Watch-Out I went and down, and right the way across the Spine and to Windaway Peak, as far as that. I stood in the rain there and listened to the chattering of my teeth. Did my head ache from the drink, or from the cold rain’s drumming? Should I go back to my home, to my town, to those unhappy people, or should I stay here in the weather, the size of it and the cruelty, and the lessening light? The one choice seemed as unpleasant as the other.

  In the end I turned without deciding to, and reminded my legs how to walk. It was a trudge home, and more of a trudge, and more. I thought I would never get there. But of course I did, and of course it was no better than outside in the wild, only a little warmer, and without the promise, at the end, of death by freezing.

  I woke in the morning knowing what I must do. I ached all over, from my hair-ends in to my heart. I sat up and regarded the different ordinarinesses of my room and its furnishings, the spills of light on the wall around my window-curtain, as I moved around my idea, considering it from all sides. It held good – as far as anything could be thought good on Rollrock, in Potshead. At the very least, it would move us on into a different dreadfulness.

  That afternoon I walked home from Wholeman’s hearth with the first part accomplished. Dad had stayed behind with his pipe and pals awhile, to talk that special dreary eldermen’s talk that I could not bear, but that gratified dads so.

  Into our little house I broke, the seaweedy silence of it. I hummed part of a twiddling tune that Jerrolt Harding had been whistling up in the snug.

  I went in to Mam. She was a low dark dune there. She was awake, though; her breathing was full of thoughts and pauses.

  There was not much light; she still had the curtains across. I sat at her pillow edge beside her tear-salty hair. A scooped sea-heart lay in a saucer on the farther pillow, beginning to go rancid; the spoon was licked so clean, you’d mistake it for new-polished.

  ‘Mam,’ I said, and not lightly or cheeringly, ‘I have some news for you.’

  She burrowed a little deeper into the blanket.

  ‘Your son,’ I said, ‘has got himself a position, as bottlewash at Wholeman’s.’

  I had thought her still before, but now she was properly listening; not a leaf of seaweed moved.

  ‘I’m a good lad, says Mister Wholeman. He says they can trust me. Can’t they.’

  The dune quaked and her white face rolled up from under. There was not much light. ‘Did he take you to task,’ she said, ‘for last winter and that business with the coats?’

  ‘You heard about that?’ Which of the boys had spread it among the mams? ‘He mentioned it,’ I said. ‘I told him I would always show that room the proper respect.’

  She crawled up to me. Powerful from under the blanket came her warmth and the smell of the warmed weed. I remembered that sea-smell on me, in the coat-room. Perhaps no boy had blabbed; perhaps the mams had smelt on all of us what we had done.

  ‘Do you have a plan, Daniel?’ she whispered. ‘Are you scheming something?’

  ‘I am,’ I said. The sight of her so close, so alert, so present with me, made me breathless. I was frightened of the hope I had woken in her. ‘But I don’t know yet. I must work and show myself trustworthy, and watch and learn the habits and timings of things up there, and then scheme some more.’

  She nodded. ‘Where is your dad?’ she hissed.

  ‘Still up there,’ I said.

  Mam swayed on her hands and knees. Even with the slight window-shine in them her eyes were unclear, hardly more than holes in her floating pale face. Out of them, her attention poured and poured at me.

  ‘I know I don’t need to tell you,’ she said low. And then she whispered, half-strangled, ‘You must not say a word.’

  ‘Not to anyone,’ I said to her, as e
arnest as she could wish. ‘Don’t you worry. Not even to myself.’

  She laughed suddenly, and knocked me to the bed, and squashed the breath out of me the way we had always liked to fight. She was still the stronger, but I was grown-up enough to be bottle-boy, and I was beginning to see that I might soon have a chance against her. It was all darkness and strain and struggle a little while, and stifled laughter and threats. ‘You cannot hold me!’ ‘Oh, I can!’ ‘Weakling!’ ‘Land-lad!’

  She pinned and then released me, sprang back onto her haunches and the fight was over. ‘They will punish you, Daniel,’ she said. ‘Not for freeing me, but for showing other lads that it can be done.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said, panting. ‘You will be home by then.’

  ‘Foolish boy,’ she said fondly, and her thin hand reached through the dimness, pushed my hair behind my ear, tickled down my neck and along my collarbone. Then she slapped my cheek twice, lightly. ‘Let me think on this. Out of here, laddy-lad, before your dad comes. Just a glance at us and he’ll know we’re up to something. Go.’

  Things fast went out of my control, as they will when a boy lets slip his secret, even to one other. First, Mam confided to me that Kit’s mam too must go to sea. And then all the mams must come, she said. Then, Kit’s mam must bring Kit, and then, yes, all the other mams must bring their boys too. ‘Especially you, Daniel,’ said Mam, ‘who are up for the greatest punishment. The only way I can protect you is to have you with me.’

  ‘You can do that? You can take me?’ A mad hope lit me. ‘How? I have no coat.’

  ‘Oh, any coat will do for you: fish, sheep, bird, rabbit, sewn together with seaweed.’

  ‘Will Misskaella magic it onto me?’

  ‘Misskaella?’ She laughed. ‘Oh, no! We’ve no need of her. I’ll do the same as I’d have done if you were a girl-child – sew you up in skin and weed, take you down to the water, sing you across, land child to sea. You are seal enough in yourself; the moon and the song will bond it to you. We all know how to bring that about.’

  She put me in charge of the boy-skins, of collecting enough to cover each boy, without telling them what we were about. The only way to accomplish it was to pretend to be preparing a secret costume-play for the dads, in which each lad large or small had a part, for which he must be costumed. The crafting of this play to the point where it convinced the players, the devising of song-and-dances, the deputizing of the littler boys to gather sewing-weed, the fighting off of propositions to costume us in cloth or crepe-paper – all this nearly broke me, especially in the face of scorn and resistance from some of the big lads. But our skin hoards grew, and the knowledge of our project spread so that even dads sometimes offered bits of leather that they had about, for use in our entertainment.

  ‘Stand still, Daniel.’ Mam’s hands were at my face, pinching, pinning. ‘Or I’ll have your eye out.’

  ‘It’s tight as tight,’ I said. ‘A boy cannot breathe in it.’

  ‘Not here,’ she agreed. ‘But once you touch water, it will soften, and you’ll grow great underwater lungs, so as to swim full minutes on a single breath. You’ve seen us.’

  ‘I have. And will my nose work the same, and close and open on top of my snout?’

  ‘It will, my sweet.’

  I tried to make my boy-nose do it within the hood, twitching and snuffling.

  ‘Tsk, wretched lad … There,’ she said. ‘Now, don’t dislodge my pins, taking it off. It must be sewn right if it’s to fit and form you.’

  I did not believe, particularly once the mams were consulted, that they would ever all agree on a plan. Once they had, I could not see how we would do everything that needed to be done to carry it out. Someone, surely, would betray our intentions to the dads, by accident or out of sympathy for them? I had come close to spilling everything to my own dad several times, so much did I pity him.

  But the time came. The moon entered the right phase for the thefts from the coat-room – and for our flight straight afterward, for once the mams had their coats in hand they could only go straight to the sea. And still, somehow, we remained undiscovered.

  My other main task had been to engineer for the cupboard door to be left unlocked. This must be done early in the morning, when Mister Wholeman was doing the books, when he would not be tempted to follow his son around, nagging and chivvying him and faultfinding every job he did. Then, as Rab put away stores, I must manufacture some small emergency for him to deal with, and finish the job for him, and hand him back the key just carelessly enough. This was not difficult; Rab was never good for much in the mornings, let alone spotting the sneakthieving of a blameless boy like me. Still, I felt relief when it was done, and neither Wholeman’s suspicions had been roused.

  At the same time, I was sick with terror of what was to come. I signalled that I had done my part, by hanging the rinsed bar mats out along Wholeman’s wall in the sun in a particular order. I didn’t know half of what the mams had planned to follow on from this signal; some things they had kept from me, so that I could not confess them if pressed by the men. There would be all the little businesses of making the day run along not too noticeably differently from other days, which was more difficult play-acting than anything we lads had done. And neither must Trudle or Misskaella suspect anything, or they would alert the men to our plan, or thwart it themselves.

  I went from Wholeman’s to school, and laboured there over my numbers and letters. Little rushes of goose-flesh ran over me, and I must remind myself to be calm and ordinary about things. The mams’ quiet work went on about me. Although it could not be seen or heard, I was astounded that no one else could sense the itch of it, the suppressed excitement. None of my fellows gave sign or word that the day had been signalled, that this night our lives would change – could it be that I’d devised and executed this whole marvellous scheme in an elaborate dream the night before?

  Mam gave me lunch, and likewise we barely met each other’s eye, let alone spoke of what was to happen so very soon. I walked up to Wholeman’s again. As I passed Cartwrights’, out of their window issued a stream of seal-woman song, and the way the mam held some notes and ran others together made me shiver and flee, stamping hard on the cobbles of my childhood, hurrying past the sunlit cottages of my friends, and their dads, and their lives that I knew so well, every one.

  That afternoon I was sure someone would notice the difference in me, put it together with other odd happenings in the town and be wise to us. Every time a man glanced at or greeted me in the snug, or bid me bring him this or take away that, I must control a startled movement and swallow a gobbet of fear. Had he seen that I was not the boy Wholeman thought me, the one that could be trusted, the one in league with them against their wives, our mothers?

  Grinny and Batton met me out the back as arranged, and I shut them in the coat-room, hooking the padlock on the hasp as before, but not quite snapping it closed. With only a pair of candles for light, they were to take down the coats and tie them, so that boys could more easily carry them away after dark. I was sure that they would set themselves on fire in there, or stack the tied coats poorly so that they tumbled from their stack and made a noise, but I heard not a sound all afternoon.

  As night fell I found a moment to tap the cupboard door in the agreed pattern. The response tapped back through, softly but clearly, and I hurried away, out to the yard beyond the pisser, where Angast was posted, both to give him the nod and to tell him who had turned up for drinking tonight, who was likely to stay and who might leave and be wandering the lanes at the hour appointed for running all the skins to their respective mams.

  The snug clock had a chime that could be heard in the hall. The plan hung now on my keeping any man from going to the pisser between ten-fifteen and ten-thirty. In this I was aided by the fiddler Jerrolt, of whom I requested all the songs that were slow and funereal, and that it would be rude to get up and piss through: ‘The Night My Mother Died’ and ‘Low Lay the Boat in the Harbour’ and ‘The Fi
ercest Storm’. While he held the men perfectly steady and somnolent there, some of them joining in singing, some of them weeping, I hovered behind the bar where I could deliver the signal knock through the cupboard wall, if any man sprang from his seat between songs. But Jerrolt outdid himself that night with the emotion of his playing, and all of them controlled their bladders as if they were fully aware of, and determined not to disrupt, the game of fire-buckets going on out the back, the tied skins passing along a chain of lads to Lonna Trumbell, who sniffed each one and told the next runner whose it was.

  Ten-thirty struck during the storm song. At the end of it, Nerdnor Prout sprang up and made for the hall door, and I knocked out the signal, just in case Grinny and Batton had run over time in their emptying of the cupboard. Surely fifteen minutes had not been enough time. All those mams! All those coats!

  ‘Give us a cheerful one now, Jerrolt!’ cried someone. ‘A jig or something – “Frugal’s Ball” or “The Elf-King’s Daughter”, one of those!’

  I all but held my breath waiting. Nerdnor reappeared, and came up to the bar, and in a terrible fright I waited for him to deliver the news to Wholeman that the back hall stank of sealskins and the yard was full of shrieking children carrying mysterious bundles.

  But all he said was, ‘Another nip o’ the Gorgon, Storn,’ and began to search about himself for the coins for it.

  Was it done, then? Had we managed it? Were mams even now hurrying down to the waterside, singing and sewing their boys into patch-skins and swimming away with them? And what was the more terrifying, that our plan had run up against some unforeseen nosey-bones or circumstance, or that it was carried out faultlessly, that the wish I had had for my mam’s happiness had now emptied Potshead of every wife and son?

  I went around the snug and gathered, then hurried to the scullery and washed and washed, wishing I had never begun this plan, wishing that the coats were still in their rows behind their padlocked cupboard door. I stacked the bottles and pushed the rack of glasses through to the bar, and then I ducked out into the hall myself – and to everyone in the snug it would have looked as if I were only going to relieve myself, but in truth I was abandoning my post, abandoning my job, abandoning my dad chatting there with Fernly Ashman and Michael Clift, leaving behind the only life I knew.