The Brides of Rollrock Island

by Margo Lanagan

  It was quiet once I shut away the noise of Jerrolt tuning up again, the tide of talk rising again. The hall was empty, and smelt only slightly more sea-ish than usual. I hurried along to the cupboard, with the padlock closed in the hasp as it ought to be. I lifted the lid of the chest by the door, and there as promised was my mam’s bundled skin, which they had not conveyed to her in case she went straight into the sea without me. I pulled off my apron, snatched up the skin, closed the chest-lid and left by the rear door, wrapping the bundle in the apron as I went.

  It was uneasy weather. The secrets gusted about the streets with the leaves and litter, thick enough in the air to choke me. I tried to walk and look calm, but there was no one about, and before long I was running. House after house that I passed, that should have had a light in the window, was dark, and I heard no noise of movement or conversation within any of them, and this terrified me. I became possessed of the senseless fear that my own house would be as empty and dead, my mam gone never to return, that not only had all the mams and lads gone, but all the fathers too, so that I was the last person on the island, running from no one to no one, never to find companion or family again.

  But our house was lit, and I burst into our front room, and there was Mam pacing. She scooped me up and squeezed me, tightly and for a long time. ‘While I have arms to do this,’ she said.

  She put me down and I thrust the aproned bundle at her. ‘Ah!’ She hugged it to herself, pressing her lips and nose to the edge to draw off the scent.

  ‘Do you remember it, then, from when you jumped out of it?’ I patted the slithery skin with my bottle-washed hands.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But it is me and mine, very distinctly, by look and by smell. Let’s get on, then.’ She fell to whispering. ‘Everyone else is gone, Daniel. Let us shut up house and follow.’

  I had left my coat up at Wholeman’s. Mam took hers down from the peg, put it on, but did not button it. She picked up the tied skin, and the patch-skin she had made for me, and I put my hands on the latch and doorknob. We looked at each other, my dad’s absence thunderous around us. So as not to hear it, I lifted the latch and pulled open the door. We went out, the two of us, into the night, and I closed the house behind us.

  She took my hand as we started walking, and hers was cold and tight. I thought she smiled down on me out of the stars, but the light was not good and her hair shadowed her face; she might just as easily have been wincing.

  Down slippy-slap we went, the wind skirling and twiddling around us, caught in the narrow ways. Every now and again a strong breath from the sea would push at our faces, green and alive and massive. When that happened, Mam would almost run a few steps, as if being summoned more sharply.

  The water was rucked up and difficult-looking between the moles. I thought I saw seal heads out there, two or three, but when I looked again I could not find them. I thought, then, that seals were strewn along the stony beach, all shades of them – but no, those were clothes, coats and dresses, trousers and jackets. ‘Oh!’ It was as frightening as if they had been bodies there, of all the boys and mams I knew.

  Mam squeezed my hand. ‘Let’s go along,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to leave from here. I want wilder sea.’

  ‘Wilder than that?’ I stumbled after her, eyeing the crisscrossing foam between the moles. I hoped this was a dream; certainly I had never felt such terror except in dreams.

  Mam was entirely sure of herself, though; if I stayed right with her, perhaps I would catch some of her confidence. I waded down the sand dune at the end of the harbour-front, and ran out after her across the sand of the northern beach. The town’s windows, its eyes, rose behind us, tightening the skin of my back; I glanced up, and there were the two orange squares that were Wholeman’s against the hill. The wind blew strongly with no more buildings in its way; the water shouldered up and smashed itself on the sand before us.

  Let us run home, I wished I could say, and all go on as before. But clothes were scattered about here too, half in and half out of the shallows, and lengths of twine from Grinny and Batton’s bundles. So many mams and boys had already gone! And Mam knelt before me, humming, unbuttoning my shirt, and her face in the moonlight was clear – alight as the moon, it was – and I was at first too cheered by her happiness to voice my doubts, and then I was too shocked by the sea-wind and the floating spume on my naked skin.

  Last of all she took off my boots and trousers. I steadied myself with my hands on her shoulders, steadied myself against the thought that she would not have shoulders much longer, we would neither of us have shoulders or hands. Now I was clothed only in the night cold and my terror of the water, shivering and goose-fleshed top to toe.

  ‘Step in,’ she said and then I was preoccupied, wasn’t I, with fitting myself into the sheepskin suit with its scratchy seaweed seams, trying to keep my balance with my feet thrust into the narrow tail of the thing. I had grown by the tiniest amount since she made it; I gasped but did not complain as she laced me in, for she sang as she did so, and in a particular way, building and building on the same repeated pieces of tune, and I feared that if I interrupted, she would have to begin again. Then I would be trapped even longer in this cramped stiff suit that stank of mutton and sea-rot. Both of us would be further delayed on this nightmare-strewn beach.

  She checked that my toes and then my fingers were pushed fully into the suit’s tied sleeve ends. She pulled the ragged hood-mask down over my face and set to fixing it at the neck. It was as if she stitched my mouth shut and my chin to my chest – she had never been so brisk and firm about her sewing before. I stood there with my neck pulled into an ache behind, my little whimpers nothing against her singing, determined now and perhaps a little mad, louder to me and more frightening than the sea’s snorts and crashes.

  Through the eyeholes I watched her as well as I could, so as not to look at the waves, so as not to think too clearly about what we were doing. She flung down her dress among the others, took off her underthings and held them up and with a joyful laugh let the wind snatch them out of her hand, and then she was just flesh and fur and flying hair, unworried by the cold, uncluttered by the trappings of land-clothing.

  She pulled the knot of the coat-bundle undone in a single joyful movement. The skin fell open on the stones, and with a shriek to myself inside my mask I jumped back from it, so lively did it settle and so blackly shine there, fattening and smoothing out as I watched. I gasped inside my dry leather mask, and my flattened hair crawled with sweat and fear.

  She lunged at me and kissed the mask of me, and shouted something – perhaps in seal-language, for I could not hear sense in it. Then she lifted the swelling coat high, and it sank upon and encompassed her, clung on close, clung to its own edges around her. Clap and clop and zlip, it went, and snick, until she was disappeared within. And then she fell, from standing, foot-fins together, straight into the wavelets, where she was now seal, and she flung herself down towards the deeper water.

  She turned and there was enough of my mam left in the seal that I as her boy could not refuse to follow, so I too fell and floundered through the curdled air and into the foamy edge of the sea. There the water, and the magic, overtook me, and what was seal of me supplanted what was boy. I ceased to think and to intend or decide, in any way that makes sense in a story, but only followed my mam, crying after her into our dark world, alive to the tides now and the temperatures. I sought the bubbling trail of her with my whiskers and went after it, to the depths and wonders and fellows and foes disposed on all sides of us, and before us, and below.

  During the time I lived in the sea, nothing happened in the sense that humans know happening. Seals do not sit about and tell, the way people do, and their lives are not eventful in the way that people’s are, lines of story combed out again and again, in the hope that they will yield more sense with every stroke. Seal life already makes perfect sense, and needs no explanation. At the approach of my man-mind, my seal life slips apart into glimpses and half-memori
es: sunlight shafts into the green; the mirror roof crinkles above; the mams race ahead through the halls and cathedrals and along the high-roads of the sea; boat bellies rock against the light, and men mumble and splash at their business above; the seal-men spin their big bodies by their delicate tails as lightly as land-lads spin wooden tops, shooting forward, upward, outward. Movement in the sea is very much like flying, through a green air flocking with tiny lives, and massier ones more slowly coasting by.

  Seal-men I found to be very like our land-dads, possessive and anxious, patrolling the borders of the clan. When we went up on a beach, they must always be seeing other seal-men off, coming back blown and bloodied. Sometimes my fellows and I played at this man-work, but for us it was two rubber heads bouncing off each other, no teeth and no purpose, and the mams laughed lounging around us.

  And then there were those sister-seals, our size, but not fighters. Those whiskery sea-maids, some part-human, most entirely seal, they slipped with us among the columns of sunlight. They blinked beside us through the roof of the world into the windy air, the new breath rasping in our nostrils. Like flung seeds or stones they moved, like arrows or bullets through the water, and like weed undulating away along the tide or teasing your face with a leaf-end.

  I don’t know how to tell it all. Seal feelings are different from human ones, seal affections, seal ties with other seals. The best I can do is overlay a skin of man-words on the grunt and urge and song and flight and slump of seal-being.

  Our mams belonged better under water than they ever had belonged above. Our mams found their wings, is how you might put it. They did not glory or revel or make any particular celebration, but only slipped back to rightness, went back about their business. The bulk of our mams was not beautiful as a man sees beautiful, but to seal-eyes as their black teardrops fell fast, flew fast, twisted through the home depths, they were lovely in their solidity and their speed. Each had her own self, with her own pattern of blotch and freckle, her own manner and song – each seal was clear-marked friend or stranger.

  The days were long and unformed; the seasons beckoned us, then pushed us away behind them; stars rode over us, as did the moons in their boatishness or bulbousness; towns were a crust on the edge of our world’s eye and people were mites that crawled there. If I saw my father in that time, I don’t recall it, or recognizing any man of Potshead – or Potshead itself! I would be hard pressed to know that it was Crescent Corner where I lounged or fought; recognition of a place, for a seal, takes count not of the landscape above but of the sea surrounding, the rocks and depths and kelp-beds nearby, the approach and escape, the presence already of friends and rivals. As the sea, beyond the point where men can see bottom, becomes to them only depths that hold their loves and livelihoods, so do the heights become to seals only wastes of dry blaring light from which weather and occasional dangers descend.

  I felt no pull to the land. I barely knew that I knew the land; land thoughts deserted me and I neither reflected on the past nor anguished about the future. I only was; I only knew – or I learned by following and doing – where to go, how to behave; I only followed flurries of friends and of fish, took flight from enemies, sang what songs seemed to require to emerge. I came ashore and basked in the sun; I slipped back away from the lumberous, slumberous earth-life, and took flight again, took life, in the under-sea.

  * * *

  ‘Sealers found it out,’ says my dad when he has re-lit his pipe. ‘As you’ve probably heard.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Or sealers knew already – sealers’ grandpas and great-grandpas had all told them. I dare say stories last better on those boats, they are so long off land and must amuse themselves.’ The room brightens as the window light catches in his puffs of pipe smoke. ‘At any rate, the first seal they saw for what he was was Will Canker. You could not mistake him, they said – he was all over stitches, stretched out, where his mam had made them in the rabbit or the lambskin. So they did what they do: they cut along those lines, but not deeply, and they let the seal bleed out. And then when the skin clung close and Canker inside started to kick, they cut him free and put him on the boat. The skin went back to … to lambskins, it was, with Will. He had it with him when he stepped onto the dock here at Potshead six weeks later. So they didn’t need a witch with them for that, we learned from sealers; all it is is knives and the beast itself, its double nature coming out.’

  The pipe smoke has spread into a cloud around Dad’s head. Evening is coming. I am glad we have the fire going, to counter the cheerless grey-blue light.

  ‘So you didn’t know this before Willem Canker came back,’ I say, ‘that lads could be cut out of seals?’

  ‘We hadn’t even known that lads could be put in!’ he says with a bitter laugh. ‘If we had, we might have kept our wits closer about us. No, when you went, we had no hope, Daniel, ever, of getting any of you back. Willem stepping off that boat was like the world starting to spin again. Men came back to life, put away the drink and the weeping, smartened themselves up thinking their sons might arrive from the sea and find them in this shameful state. There were men went down spring and summer to Crescent Corner with their knives, eye out for young bulls with the seams all over them, but only your friend Raditch and Feenly Cooper ever came up there.’

  Dad lays aside the pipe, clears his throat. ‘We went to Misskaella, a crowd of us, to ask if she could bring you up – only as seals, mind. We didn’t want any strenuous magic of her; we would do the cutting ourselves. Well, I don’t know, maybe the bringing is the wearisome part, but she would have none of it. Any more than she would consent, right after you left us, to bringing up new wives, for those few men who could afford them. We lost our younger men at that time, all our marriage-ables, as well as our boys. All off to mainland they went, the bachelors, and the ones that found wives did not bring them back to Rollrock, but found occupation there, with Cordlin’s fleet or on Knocknee farms. And I am glad to say, neither would Misskaella bring up one single sea-maid, contributed for with pooled bits of money from low sorts in the town, with the idea that they would all use her, pass her from man to man. She had had her fill of us, the witch said. We were not to come moaning to her. She was done with seals and seal magic.

  ‘You cannot blame her; she was already quite old and ill. She was owed money, too, by some of the men; they had gone back on their agreements once the wives were lost to the sea; they drank away their wage and she saw none of it. Not that she was in need, her nor Trudle nor Trudle’s girls. Misskaella has made her fortune out of us – you’ve seen her house on the hill, haven’t you, so stuffed with treasures a person can hardly step inside? And Trudle had wanted for nothing once she birthed that first bab. So she had no reason, did she, to put herself out for us? All that we found of you we had to find on our own. So some, as I say, kept an eye on Crescent, and others, as you well know, went by the Skittles every chance they had when the seals were there, and other dads went farther a-sea and searched the other islands. And every season since, some of you have come back, skins in your arms to show what you were, from wherever the sealing-boats docked once they took you off the ice.’

  I shudder. ‘Toddy Marten still has nightmares of those boats. Though they locked him up below decks, he said, still there was the smell.’ Mams being rendered down, he said to me, and the words toll in my head, but I cannot speak them, just as Toddy could hardly get them out.

  ‘We could as well stop the seal-trade as hold the sun down in the morning,’ says Dad. ‘And some of us it tortured, the thought of what they did, and some were glad, I am ashamed to say, that mams and colonies should suffer as we suffered. But all of us went down to meet the boats each day, in hope of some word, or of some actual boy, our own boy, stepping off the gangplank to us. I did go there, every day, until you came, and if a sealer had brought you, Daniel, instead of our own fellows, even if that sealer were slathered all up and down with sea-wives’ blood, with a bloodied pick at his belt and a seal-tooth neckl
ace on him, still I would have embraced him, and called him my brother forever.’

  There’s a glint in his eye, and he lets me see it a good long minute before it passes into a twisted smile. ‘We never really owned those women,’ he says, ‘however much we married them and called them wives to the death. But our lads, well, you were at least half ours. I suppose we thought we had a right to claim you back. Otherwise,’ and he leans forward, pipe in hand to me, ‘who would we have to fill our pipes for us, and bring us grandchildren to brighten our old age? Oh, there’s plenty have no one,’ he continues, watching me knock out the bowl against the fireplace and pick up the pouch. ‘But they’re still hoping, mark my words. The ones who gave up hope, they went, off Chisel Top or swimming out Six-Mile in the winter storms. The others, though they might not go out and search themselves, still meet the boat each day, never knowing when their lad might show.’

  I was born again and I came out crying – a lot of us did, they say. There never was such a race as the seals for mawking and moping. Out into a driving rain I was brought, part bound tight and part bursting from the lambskin Mam had made for me. All sounds hurt my ears, the rain-hiss on the rocks and the men’s voices: ‘Daniel Mallett! Welcome home, boy!’

  ‘Mallett? That’s the boy that worked up Wholeman’s, no? That stole the coat-room key the night they left? We should throw that one back, and without his skin, too.’

  ‘Shall you take the skin to Dominic Mallett, then, Clift, and tell him his son fell over the side?’