Song of the Selkies

by Cathie Dunsford

  ‘If it’s more of this selkie gossip, then I don’t want to hear it.’

  Morrigan blushes. ‘Not exactly. But I think you need to know. It’s high time a few things were explained and I ken your father would have wanted this.’

  Shelley notices another spoot on the run and swoops down to grab it with her net. ‘This one’s not getting away.’ She picks it up in her hand, and throws it toward Morrigan. ‘Here, this’ll do for your breakfast.’

  The spoot, sensing it is now out of its natural watery home, sends a spout of water into Morrigan’s face. She recoils and throws the spoot back into the sea water. ‘Save it for the orders.’ Morrigan begins walking away then calls back over her shoulder, ‘See you at the inn at twelve and thirty tomorrow.’

  Shelley yells back ‘maybe’, and plunges her net into the water after the spoot, catching it as it is about to shoot under the oysters. ‘Gotcha, young laddie. Good work!’ She lets it go, thanking the spoot for doing what she has wanted to do for years, spit in Morrigan’s face. Shelley blames Morrigan for the bad tension between her parents and knew the gossip about Morrigan having an affair with her father. She saw them several times leaning on the sea wall, fixing nets together, and once kissing in the alley. She wanted to tell her mother but feared it would mean the end and shut her mouth against all the gossips, helping her mother build a wall around them. After her father was lost at sea, and all the selkie stories began, she blamed Morrigan for taking her father away, coaxing him from his home.

  In fact, the huge geo that had formed in the rift between her father and mother had begun long before Morrigan was on the scene. One night, she recalled an argument that began in the kitchen while her father was filleting the haddock. Her mother came in and complained about the smell and asked why he didn’t do it outside like the other fishers. He replied it was too bloody cold out there and in any case this was his house too. She said it was hers and not his ever since he’d been seeing that fisher-hussy, and if push came to shove, then she would fight for it in a law court and news of their affair would be broadcast about Finstown and all over Orkney. He seemed shocked she knew and he begged her forgiveness, saying he’d never do it again. But he did, because just days later, Shelley saw him kissing Morrigan behind the fishing cottages. Another time, they were humping on a blue dory, upturned against the wind and rain. She recalled their bare bums floating through the air in an almost hypnotic movement and being entranced and horrified at once.

  She ran away and refused to come home for two days. The old stone barn on the hill had provided her a welcome refuge. She wailed and wailed, knowing the end would be in sight and one day her mother would just walk out or order him away. But just three days later, he did not return from fishing and his dory was later found drifting alone, his lobster pots still intact. It was as if he’d jumped into the sea and left them floating. She saw the boat after it was recovered. It had not overturned nor lost its catch. Dead lobsters were strewn about the boxes on the floor of the boat and birds had tried to peck at them through the holes in the creels. It was creepy. And it was all Morrigan’s fault.

  Since then, Morrigan had tried to befriend her, especially after her mother was lost at sea. Maybe it was her guilty conscience, but Shelley would not have a bar of it. Morrigan always came to her school or later her workplace so she had to be reasonably polite. Once she had gone to the inn to talk with her, but afterwards she felt angry, wished she’d yelled at her, spat in her face as she made the spoot do. She grins, just thinking about how good that felt. Everyone always said how nice Shelley was, and how good she was. Well, she’d show them a thing or two when it came to defending her family. Too many tales had been slushed around town already. She’d remained silent through it all, but today, for the first time, she’d answered back. She felt okay about it too, but just a little guilty, since she knew Morrigan regretted her actions, otherwise she wouldn’t want to be kind to her, would she?

  Shelley muses over the invitation to meet, curious to know if there is any substance to Morrigan’s urgency or whether it is simply another vain attempt to make friends. She brushes the seawater into a grate in the floor and decides she will make up her mind tomorrow whether to see Morrigan or not. Keep her waiting. Besides, she is looking forward to the storytelling workshop and is not sure she wants to draw herself away from that just to see Morrigan.

  Morrigan ambles along the waterfront, smoking her pipe and wondering how she will explain everything to Shelley, and if she will be given the chance to do so. How much should she tell her? Maybe it’s best to let sleeping seal pups lie? She looks over to the boats tied up in the safety of the inner harbour and sees her own dory bobbing about on the tide. She recalls the day she named her. Squiddy was there and he thought it’d attract more trouble after all the stories going about town. ‘Yer dinna want to call her ‘Selkie Too’, Morrigan. Yeel be askin for trouble,’ he said. Morrigan stood back, con sidered his comment, then leaned forward with her brush and painted a blue border around the brown lettering, telling him it’d give them something to talk about then. But maybe Squiddy was right? Maybe she should leave well alone. She puffs on her pipe then weaves left up the road and heads towards the Pomona Inn. She knows Squiddy will be holding up the bar and onto his fifth Scapa on the rocks by now, and bleating on about the bloody Tories and what they have down to ruin the life of the workers. But he’s always a good ear and reason able company and that’s just what Morrigan needs right now.

  She walks into the inn and sure enough, there is Squiddy leaning on the bar. His torn sweater, with holes in the elbows, is the same old brown one he’s worn for decades, ever since Morrigan has known him. He is surrounded by other fishers and his hand is raised, his finger pointing to the heavens. ‘And them up there,’ he says, as she draws near, ‘them up there will not know the bloody difference between Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. Once there was a keen rift between the Tories and Labour and now their shiny boots are tarred with the same bloody feathers. How’s a bloke to vote at all? Might was well stay out fishing.’

  ‘Or swig a Scapa, eh, Squiddy,’ one of the fishers says, ordering another pint of Dark Island and making sure the barmaid pours it with a decent froth on the top.

  Morrigan joins them and orders a Scapa and another for Squiddy, who looks dangerously close to finishing his glass of whisky. ‘And as for those scroungy Lib Dems, I don’t reckon I’d trust a slithering spoot more than their spiel,’ adds Squiddy.

  ‘Aye, but the opening of the Scottish Parliament didn’t exactly fill us with pride, now did it, with all them fancy politicians filling their own coffers and claiming all sorts of expenses and upping their salaries before they’d even got mud on their boots.’ Finn dashes his mug onto the counter as if to emphasise his point and orders another Dark Island.

  ‘Give ‘em a chance, laddie,’ says Scotty. ‘When yer’ve lived through the number of English botch-ups I have, and their hacking away at Scottish rights, then yer’d be pleased to have as many Scots with bums on seats as possible.’

  ‘Too true, Scotty, at least we’ve got the boys back to Edinburgh. The poms stole our hearts and souls as well as our voting rights and our land in the seventeen hundreds, and we’ve done well to rip ’em back again, this time by legal vote. We should support those buggers fool enough to give up a good days fishin ter don a bloody uncomfortable black suit and tie and be crammed indoors all day with people screamin’ at each other. Me, I’d rather wear a sealskin than be sucked into one of those skin-fitting suits. Whadya reckon, Morrigan?’

  Morrigan points down to her dungarees and yellow rubber boots. ‘Luckily, I have the choice, Fergy,’ she replies, enigmatically. They think she means simply the choice of women’s or men’s clothing, and laugh.

  ‘Buggered if I’d wear a skirt, girlie. You’re welcome to it,’ replies Squiddy, knowing it is guaranteed to blow the wind up Morrigan’s sails.

  ‘All you’d need was a good Orkney gale and yer balls’d freeze off Squiddy,�
� grins Scottie. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it either.’ He laughs at his own joke and the others join in. Morrigan does not deign to reply, though she thinks a bit of deballing would not hurt some of these fellas when they get too tanked up on Scapa.

  Gradually, the conversation moves off smut and back onto politics, to the day’s catch and back to local council politics, to re-ordering rounds and back to the laws controlling the fishers and making their lives harder by the day. Morrigan drinks with the best of them, downing at least as much in as short a time, which endows her with honorary balls in their eyes, along with her strong skills as a fisher. She’s known as a hard worker and a hard drinker by them and she knows how to stand up to authority as good as any fisher born. Though she’s a strange one too. Scottie watches her fill her glass like a bloke and wonders, again, if she is one of those dykes. But then, she never would’ve shagged Kelpie if that was true. He refills his glass and looks out the window of the inn. In the distance, young Shelley from the fishfarm is wandering along the sea wall. She’s a dreamy one that lassie. Always with her head in the clouds. Never recovered from the deaths of her parents. Or maybe it was the selkie gossip afterwards. That’d be enough to kill some folks, he thinks, as he stretches his neck to down another mouth of liquid gold, then burps.

  [34]

  Fiona skulks in her cave, letting the shrimps eat off her back and face and belly, not caring how ticklish they are and not even finning them away. She recalls the day Sandy came to call her into the sea, how lonely she had felt among the upper class of Orkney, how she often longed to be dragged out into the ocean and never seen again. She resisted his advances at first then fell under his sealy spell, took to the water like she was born there, began a new life in her underwater world, the kind of life she dreamed of having in her earthly existence but could never attain. Her father had her life mapped ahead of her. She would marry an earl he had lined up who owned a castle in Scotland. She would be taken away from the Orkney she loved, the sea which had nourished her soul since her birth, the rocky beaches she walked along at night when the others were asleep. She would rather drown than accept that fate.

  Sandy had also known loneliness. He had come from a poor family whose crofts had gradually been abandoned and left to ruin. One by one, all his family members flew Orkney to pursue their lives elsewhere. They’d sailed to many parts of the globe, from joining the Hudson Bay Company in Canada, to goldmining in Australia and fishing in New Zealand. From the far south, they talked of endless sunlight and sea and nights that closed in around nine even in the summer. At first they couldn’t even sleep. The rhythms were all wrong. Then they got used to it. They talked endlessly about the weather and how warm it was. No harsh winds off the Baltic or bashing seas from the Atlantic. Few treacherous waters like the Pentland Firth to negotiate, although a few boats had sunk in Cook Strait, they said.

  She once suggested to Sandy that they swim as far south as the Pacific, see what it was like for themselves, and he agreed it could be fun if they did it in stages and followed the currents to make it an easier ride. But now she would never go alone. She could barely raise the energy to swim from her cave and move out from the Bay of Skaill, let alone get to Marwick Head and the Brough of Birsay, never mind the South Pacific. The shrimps munch around her eyes and Fiona flicks her head to send them flying off in all directions, just to return and try again a few seconds later.

  Around her, life goes on as normal, as if the shark had never attacked and ripped away one of their community. The seahorses sway on their ferny fronds of tangle, the mackerel play games amidst the dabberlocks, the saithe munches on tiny rock cods at the edges of her ledge. Hermit crabs clamber over the rocky ocean floor carrying their huge shell homes on their backs. A few haddock cruise by as if they own the sea. Sandy liked to bait them by telling them their brothers and sisters were fried with tatties and served up all over Scotland and Orkney in various oatmeal and crumbly batters, but the haddock would simply turn a blind eye and swim in the other direction. They would be free to pursue their dreams now Sandy is gone.

  Fiona moans and rolls over, flicking the shrimps from her face. Their darting back and forward and eating from her skin annoys her and she moves so she can flick a fin and get rid of them.

  But she hits something hard instead, something oily. She opens her eyes but cannot focus.

  Between the rocky ledges, a vision appears. It is Sandy, resplendent and strong, but with a battered fin still oozing blood. His eyes are so full of love, Fiona knows his spirit must still be alive somewhere. His whiskers had been brushing her face and she had tried to flick him away as if he were a shrimp. He looks amused and sways his tail to and fro, swanning away the mackerel gathering at his side to see what morsels might fall off. He skims his body along the edge of the ledge as if to urge her out of the crevice. Fiona closes her eyes. She cannot bear to feel the pain of separation from Sandy. The shrimps close in on her again. She flicks her fins and again touches solid skin. This time, Sandy yells, ‘Ouch. Cut it out, Fiona! I’ve had enough of a scare with the great white let alone my own lover attacking me!’ She opens her eyes with a start. Maybe this really is Sandy and not a vision. But how could it be?

  She tentatively reaches out and touches his beautiful oily skin. He motions her to swim out of the cave. She floats out skimming the water with her tail and keeping her fins by her side to avoid scraping her skin and Sandy nudges his nose the full length of her body and up the other side until he reaches her face again. He floats with his cheek on hers, nuzzling her affectionately.

  Fiona fins him delicately, lovingly, unable to speak at first. Gradually she realises it truly is Sandy and a swelling tide of relief fills her from tail to nose. ‘How did yee escape the shark? I saw him swimming off with yee in his mouth.’

  ‘It wasn’t me. He chased me down into the tangle and I went deeper and deeper into the maze but he sniffed me out. Just as he went to attack, a turtle swam across banging her shell into his face. He was knocked off guard and I thought I was dreaming. Before he could regain his senses, the turtle had turned her back and smashed into his other eye. He lunged forward, but she deftly swam away and his jaws sank into the flesh of a giant octopus who swung around and wrapped all her tentacles over the shark’s face. He tried to wriggle free but the octopus was hanging on for dear life. She knew if she let go he would sink his jaws back into her. Blood was streaming from her body and one of her tentacles, but she clung on as he swam away. Sometime, he’d have to drop her or she’d see her opportunity and duck into a nearby cave where he could not enter. I surfaced from the tangle to see them disappear, then stayed low until I felt there was no chance of the shark returning. I scraped my fin on the edge of an oyster bed, but it’ll heal just fine. Then I began searching for yee, my love. I am so relieved to see yee safe.’ He nudges Fiona gently.

  ‘Sandy, my sweet, I love yee.’ Fiona’s eyes brim with tears that are soon washed away by the sea. She brushes against his fin, checking to see it really will heal.

  Sandy rubs his strong fin along her belly affectionately. ‘And I yee, my love. Thank yee for distracting the shark with that ink-shooting squid. That was a brave and brilliant move, if dangerous.’

  ‘I’d do it again if I thought yee’d come out alive. Sandy, let’s swim south next year, explore new seas.’

  Sandy’s eyes widen. ‘I’d love to, Fe, but just for one season. I have to return to Orcadian waters. I will not desert these islands as my kin did. I made a promise to meself on that.’

  ‘Me too. I’d just like one summer of warmth while it is cold up here.’

  ‘We both deserve it. But yee do realise that the great white haunts the New Zealand and Australian coasts too, Fe.’

  Fiona looks quite shocked, then laughs. ‘So long as there are squids and octopus there too, we’ll be safe, my love.’

  Sandy flings his body back, does a flip and roars with laughter. ‘Yee should’ve seen the sight of that shark swimming away with an octopus wrapped
around his ugly face. I tell yee, Fe, I’ll remember it to the end of me days.’

  ‘But how come a turtle intervened? I have not seen turtles around Orcadian waters ever, though I hear they existed when Orkney was once floating below the equator, in very ancient times.’ Fiona is convinced his fin will be fine and looks up into his face.

  ‘I must admit, Fe, I have never seen a turtle here either. She must have drifted off her natural course. The odd turtle has been sighted in colder waters but usually if a storm has interrupted her journey. But they are known to swim long distances and be very resilient.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope she survives. What an act of courage,’ replies Fe, beginning to munch on kelp and realising how hungry she is after this ordeal and her time in the cave.

  A dark shape floats over them and for one terrible moment they think it is the shark returning. They look up to see a school of passing Manta Rays, headed for warmer waters. Their fins glide like wings through the water, their movement as graceful as angels.

  [35]

  Sasha rubs coconut cream tinged with gardenia oil into Cowrie’s back. ‘Ouch! That bit hurts!’ Cowrie winces as her hand reaches the shoulder blade. She cannot recall bashing it against anything but it hurts as if she has fallen on it. Sasha works the sore area with her fingers moving deftly around the swollen patch, being careful not to irritate it further.

  ‘I thought Turtles had hard shells and could withstand pain,’ Sasha replies.

  ‘They don’t like pain at all in any way, shape or form,’ mutters Cowrie, her face still buried in the pillow.

  Sasha grins. ‘Then Turtle shells are softer than I thought. You shouldn’t go swimming into rocky ledges.’

  ‘No rocks this time. I can’t think how I bruised it so badly. Must’ve been when you were kissing me under the whalebone. You kayakers don’t know your own strength!’ Cowrie laughs.