by Molly Murn
When the sleeplessness began, when Pearl thinks back to its beginning, the realisation she could not switch off came suddenly. She was in this very room, the sea surging outside, Nell busy somewhere in the shed, and she was aware not that the bed enclosed her, protected her, but that it could spit her out. She fussed with the bedclothes. Pulled her socks off then back on; plaited her hair and then unplaited it. Turned her pillow over. She bit her lip hard. She prayed to Jesus because she knew of other girls that did that. It was a feeling of being engulfed. Of not knowing her place in the universe. And once she submitted to the rising sense of panic, she could not control it. Her mind raced in an effort to calm down. You are okay. Yes, you are. You are a baby in your cradle. You are being sung to sleep. She sang, but her voice clanged. You are in the womb of the world. The rain is soft on your cheeks. The sun is warm on your back. You are cloaked in a sealskin. But the more she tried to reassure herself the more untethered she became. Next morning she was ragged and her body ached. Nell had noticed something was off.
You look worried.
No, I’m just …
Nell smiled. Sleep in my bed tonight. If you want to.
Pearl wondered how she knew. Did she know?
Take your book down to the dunes. It’s perfectly still. It’ll do you good to get outside.
And that was how she recovered from each night’s terrible struggle to be in her skin. Every morning after breakfast, she took her book, a hat, an apple and a bottle of water down to a little sheltered valley in the dunes. The warm sand took the ache from her spine. The upturned dinghy, long abandoned, was a windbreak and a shelf for her things. She buried her feet and she was safe. A hawk circled every day and she imagined it was watching out for her. Protecting her from snakes. She imagined the snakes lying undisturbed nearby, like dark jewels. And Pearl would get so thirsty lying there with the sun massaging the long bones of her limbs and drying out her lips, but she just kept reading and reading until her eyes were heavy. She slept in small sun-melting moments. It was enough to make up for the nights.
One afternoon Nell joined her and when Pearl woke, Nell had placed a small stone on each vertebra of Pearl’s spine. Pearl was lying on her tummy, using her book for a pillow, and the stones radiated such heat into her sleep-deprived joints that she wanted to weep. But that was a kind of letting go that she wouldn’t allow. She was becoming reptilian. She craved only warm sand.
Nell leant back on her elbows. What are you reading?
Pearl had plucked the book from Nell’s own shelf. She still has the book now. An old friend.
The Bone People, she said. Pearl rolled onto her side and the stones slid off. She fished the sand from the crevices between the pages of the book.
Nell nodded slowly. You can keep it. Do you like it?
Pearl wasn’t sure. She was only reading it to keep anchored, the words on the page a life rope that she inched along. I’m worried about the little boy, she said.
Yes. Well it only gets worse.
Pearl knows now she loves the book, and is able to recall vividly certain scenes from it even twenty years later. What is it about some tracts of writing that are able to seep into our cellular memory that way, she wonders. And then she pulls the thought back, letting it diffuse into a blue expanding flame—a getting to sleep technique that sometimes works. But the thoughts roll in. Every few years she reads the book again, each time finding something she hasn’t noticed before. She found the insight into Maori culture and resistance revelatory and the writing candescent. But really the book is associated now with the incredible and terrifying openness of her mind during that sleepless year, and the little rafts she clung to. Reading was one of them. Lying whole body to the earth or sand or creek bed was another. Do you remember, Nell, when you used to tell the selkie story? Seal Brother. All because of this dinghy. Pearl picked at its flaking paint.
Nell threw her head back and laughed. Oh, yes. Of course. Been telling it for years. True story that one. She winked at Pearl.
Pearl knew that it was sort of true in the sense that Nell needed the story. Diana needed it. Even Pearl did. Why that was she didn’t know. But Nell was their storyteller, and she made things alive for them. Her stories inhabited the island. And Nell told the Seal Brother story again as they sat there in the dip of sand with the cliff in the distance like a great hunched shoulder reddening in the sun, as their own shoulders were. And the story was a raft that day, so that when the desolate night came on, she would try to take herself back there to the spreading sun, and Nell’s slow voice and the hulk of the dinghy hard on her wing bones, and the croon of the wind in the she-oaks. She was practising visualisation.
The dinghy belonged to a brother and sister who were very close and lived on an island with their parents, who were fisher folk. The children were excellent swimmers, especially the boy, who could swim like a seal and wanted so badly to be one. Every day the brother and sister would play on the beach and swim off the rocks and the sister teased the brother about his crooked toe. It really is ugly that toe, she would say. And he would dive into the water and disappear and then come back up, and say, Oh well, I’ll just have to live with it, seeing as it’s what I’ve been given.
One day the father thought that he’d take the children out fishing, but the sister didn’t want to go as she was happy enough rambling and playing on the rocks. She didn’t feel much like going out in the dinghy this day. But the father and the son went and it was such good fishing that they kept going further and further out, until they realised the weather was turning and they were much too far out to turn back easily. The father was worried and he said to the boy, We’re going to try and turn back but the storm is coming. And then they were caught in the storm and the boat overturned and the father said to the boy, We’re going to have to swim back, but you’re a strong swimmer so I know you’ll be fine. Forget the boat, forget everything. Let’s save ourselves. And the father was a great swimmer himself being a seaman. And he swam. When he came into the beach he stood up and looked all around. There was no sign of his son. His son was gone … his heart was broken.
They searched the next day. And they searched far and wide. But the boy never turned up. He was lost at sea. A week passed. Two weeks passed. And then a strange thing began to happen to the girl.
She would not look at her parents. She would not eat. She would pick at her food. She lost weight. She would not go to the town. All she would do was walk along the beach when she had spare time, staring into the sea. And of course her parents were very worried about her. Their hearts were broken for their little son but they knew he was gone. As for the sister, she became a changed girl. She could hardly go on without her brother. Years passed this way.
One day, many years later, she took a walk along the beach. The tide was out. She walked the beach with her hair straying behind her, staring into the sea. The tide was full out; the gulls were crying. She walked where she had walked many times before with her little brother. By this time she was sixteen years old. The beach was very clear and the sand was very soft along it. Nestled into a cliff was a cave where the sister had played many times with her little brother, but she never visited it anymore. Then walking along the beach this evening she saw an odd thing. She saw flipper marks coming out, as if a seal had come up onto the land. But then there was something uncanny. The flipper marks gave way to footprints.
She followed the tracks. But there was something unusual about them as she looked. She followed them as they were quite plain in the soft sand. And just for curiosity she counted—one, two, three, four. On the right foot there were only four toes. Then she counted the left foot. And she saw one, two, three, four, five. She followed the footprints gradually along the beach. And she felt excitement in her heart. Something was taking place. Then she walked along the shore and came to the rocks. And she climbed up over the rocks, and followed the wet prints to the cave. When she entered she was in for the biggest surprise of her life, for sitting in the cave was
a boy. She looked, and she saw, she stared. He stood up. He threw his arms around her.
Tell me, she said, where have you been?
He had grown tall; he had grown stout. His eyes were dark and glinting. And his dark hair was streaming down his back. And she looked at his hands, and she saw that in between his fingers were like a duck’s foot, with webbed fingers. Then she looked at his foot. She said, What’s happened to your foot? For his crooked toe was gone.
When the seal people rescued me, I had to give them something of myself. Before I became one of them. And I knew you hated my crooked toe. So I gave them my toe, the only thing you didn’t like about me.
I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it, she said.
It didn’t hurt. They took it off. It didn’t hurt! I feel fine without it.
Brother, please come home. Mummy and Daddy are dying to see you.
I can’t come home to Mummy and Daddy tonight or any other night. And I want you to make me a promise. You will never tell them that you’ve seen me. Promise me right here and now you’ll never tell you’ve seen me.
I promise. But will I see you again?
You’ll see me many more times. But you must never, never tell our parents. Because you see I’m happy. This is the life I want. I must go now. But I’ll see you again. You know where to find me. And then they walked to the sea. He bade her goodbye and dived in.
But she stood there and watched. About ten metres out, up came the head of a great big seal. It shook its head and then was gone.
This was the happiest moment of the sister’s life. She was completely changed. And for many, many years the sister would go off on her long trips along the beach at night-time. Every time she came back from her walks on the beach she was brighter and chattier. Her brother told her about his life among the seal people. He told her how they transformed and how they walked on the land, and how no one could recognise a seal person. But they always returned to the sea. And the sister, she just wrote everything her brother said down in a little red book, so that she wouldn’t forget. This was her secret. She never told a soul.
The years were to pass by, and the sister kept her own reclusive way of life. When she was an old lady and came to die, her wishes were carried out by her neighbour, and she left the neighbour her little red book. She was laid to rest in a grave not far from her parents’. And the neighbour got a small stone carved in the shape of a heart. And on it were the names of the brother and sister, forever marked together.
There were always wildflowers on the grave. Sometimes people visiting the cemetery saw something strange in the dirt—the mark of two bare feet. The strange thing was one of the toes was missing from the footprint. People wondered where the marks had come from. Only one person knew, and that was the neighbour who read the little red book. She read that book many times. And one evening she could not keep it to herself. So she told some friends in the town the story. She had to before she died—otherwise the story would be lost forever.
And this story was passed along and passed along and passed along, and now, Pearl, I give it to you. The strange and true tale of Seal Brother.
Pearl stood up on the hump of the dinghy, the wind flapping at her clothing. This day the waves were small and whipped like meringue. She could just make out the pitted shadows between the peaks—mercurial shadows like seal faces appearing and disappearing.
Darling, if it ever gets too much, coming here. Travelling back and forth. I’ll understand. It might be harder when you get further into high school. Nell rubbed her shins vigorously. Unfolded her brown dry legs—shapely from all her clifftop walking.
Pearl didn’t answer. She couldn’t imagine not being here, but felt herself getting stretched into long tenuous threads between Nell’s and the mainland. Lucy had stopped coming and Pearl wondered if this was the beginning of a kind of fracturing. And from then on, she only had to think of that first night of being shipwrecked in her bed, sleepless, at Nell’s and her body would remember and she couldn’t make the panic stop.
I don’t want to stop coming, Nell.
Tonight, though, her restlessness is something else. Not panic. She’s learnt to head that off. Tonight, she is honed to a diamond point. Alert. Aroused. So sad. She is not so much too awake as too alive. She thinks of those seal pup eyes, luminous and wild, that she and Ariel had witnessed on the beach earlier, and the longing those eyes revealed was the same as any human’s. She thinks of Nico and how he is so quiet with her now. Even when they argue, he clasps his hands and nods sagely. His heart breaks, she knows. He would protect her if he could. She would love him better if she could.
And so it has been more than a week now—I think. I am becoming lighter. There is a strange kind of absence of hunger, of need, but I’m making myself eat. Just now, a sandwich of wild rocket—it grows everywhere—and it is so weedy and bitter it keeps me sharp. Followed by a spoonful of honey. That one’s for Sol. Perhaps even for Mother. Poor Mother. The days run into each other as they do here in late summer. So much daylight. Too much. Long silver evenings, early lilac dawns. This is my daily practice now: wake, coffee, walk, write, lunch, write, coffee, paint, smoke, snack, sleep. I won’t be able to keep it up when the girls, Lucy and Pearl, and their fellas and urchins, come for the end of the holidays. And so this is fevered. Writing against time. I will finish it. I’m so very very close. William and Maringani are in my dreams now. I’ve asked Red and Marian not to disturb me. I’ve switched off my phone. But of course, Marian leaves me little packages by the door. Muffins, cakes, and last night a serve of risotto, even. She watches over me, and that is enough sometimes to hold the seams of me together. I am so very grateful to her for that.
But as I write this story other memories—even closer to home—break me open, and here I am spiralling back to the centre. I know now, it was a very wrong thing to keep Sol and Samuel so deep inside. I grew strange and hard around the hurt of them. It is only possible to write of love, even love grown strange, with a heart wide open—this I know—so I gather everything in now.
There was a time when I was unbelievably unkind to Reg. Diana was little and it was just after Mother passed away. I hadn’t expected to feel so bereft with her gone. But she knew my deepest secret, and it was like she took it with her when she died. Theft upon theft. And when I sobbed in the bath, remembering Mother washing my hair, combing it, braiding it, and remembering all those little things she did—looking down my top to check I was wearing a singlet, putting a hot-water bottle under the covers an hour before bedtime, picking jasmine flowers and putting them next to me in the day cot when I had bronchitis, letting me lick the spoon when she baked, teaching me about the bees—Reg came in and knelt by the bath and made soothing sounds and embraced me with his shirt on. You are not a handsome man, I said to him then.
He didn’t turn away; he didn’t flinch. Well I know that, Nell, he said, and kissed my forehead. But you love me all the same, don’t you? I did not answer but I let him help me out of the bath and dry my hair and comb it and put me to bed. Diana made me a picture and I heard the two of them in the kitchen playing cards, and thought to myself, I do love you Reg I did love you. What I know now is that it was because I did love Reg so much that I couldn’t say. I couldn’t tell because what if, afterwards, I was so changed, I was no longer recognisable? It was myself I was afraid of. Not Reg, not Reg at all. Without the slow burn of our marriage, I may have given up on everything long ago.
And another thing. Reg and I made a life together. It was real and we lived it. Whereas my love for Sol was a solar flare seared into my line of vision. For all time. It was a lost opportunity. A broken vow. It’s funny what a coveted thing memory becomes after so much time, and it’s funny how enduringly a path not taken becomes a kind of haunting. And so, of course, it is Sol’s body that I crave, always craved, and it is all that growing together we never did that leaves the widest gap. No one else knew my body in that brief and incandescent threshold between girl and woman. We were just
saplings. Just little seeds of hope. First love. And Samuel, I can barely utter his name. I worry for him every day of my life.
1823
Chapman River
William is picking tiny purple pigface flowers for the girl when he notices something strung from a low branch nearby that glints in the sunlight. All the presents William has left for her—stones, shells, glass, eggs, wood, flowers, feathers, the piece of whalebone and a dried snakeskin—are bound with a piece of twine into a kind of ornamental hanging. He runs his fingers over the decoration and examines how skilfully all the small knots have been tied. Beneath the hanging on a round woven mat is a pile of red currant-like berries of a kind that he has never seen before and about half a dozen seedpods that are split open to reveal shiny, black seeds. William puts down the flowers and rolls one of the red berries in his fingers. It is slightly firm and looks like the miniature rosehips he has seen growing at the Wallens’ farm. Henry Wallen is the self-appointed ‘governor’ of the island and William hopes to one day have a garden such as his with flowers and vegetables and real live hogs wandering about the place. The idea of it is something precious to hold.
Maringani walks noiselessly towards him. He sees her coming along the edge of the river and the river brightens. She is holding a knot of damper, which she breaks in two, handing half to him. They crouch in front of the crate and eat the damper together. She giggles every time he glances at her, which makes him laugh as well. He doesn’t want to frighten her. She has never sat this close to him before, so he utters not a word.
