We have a sandy garden with a rickety fence and in the garden are patterns of seashells, and rocks that mum has painted with lovely faces. Mum sells models made from shells – sailing ships and mermaids’ thrones and fancy cottages – in The Lyttle Gyfte Shoppe next to the Slippery Eel. She sells her painted rocks there, too. When I was little I thought that these rocks were the faces of sisters and brothers and friends that had been washed up by the sea for me. This made Mum laugh.
“No, my darling, they are simply rocks.”
Then she lifted one of the rocks to her face and showed how all things, even rocks that have lain for ever on an ordinary beach, can be made to turn to tales.
“Hello,” she whispered to this rock, which bore the face of a sweet dark-haired little boy on it.
“Hello,” it whispered back in such a soft, sweet voice.
“What is your name?” Mum said.
“My name is Septimus Samuel Swift,” replied the rock, and Mum held it close to her lips and let it look at me as it told its tale of being the seventh son of a seventh son and of travelling with pirates to Madagascar and fighting with sea monsters in the Sea of Japan.
“Was that you that spoke the words?” I asked.
She winked and smiled.
“How could you think such a thing?” she said.
And she stroked my hair and set off singing a sea shanty, the kind she sings on folk nights in the Slippery Eel.
She finds tales everywhere – in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, “Where did you come from? How did you get here?” And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own. Mum is good with tales. Sometimes she visits Stupor Primary School and tells them to the young ones. I used to sit with the children and listen. The teachers there, Mrs Marr and Miss Malone, were always so happy to see me again. “How are you getting on?” they asked, while the children giggled and whispered, “She’s dafter than ever.”
Long ago, they tried me at Stupor Primary School. It didn’t work. I couldn’t learn. Words in books stayed stuck to the page like barnacles. They wouldn’t turn themselves to sound and sense for me. Numbers clung to their books like limpets. They wouldn’t add, subtract or multiply for me. The children mocked and laughed. The teachers were gentle and kind but soon they started to shake their heads and turn away from me. They asked Mum to come in for a chat. I’d been assessed, they said. Stupor Church of England Primary School couldn’t give me what I needed. There was another school in another place where there were other children like me. I stood at the window that day while they talked at my back. I looked across the fields behind the school towards the hidden city where that other place would be. It broke my heart to think that I must spend my days so distant from my mum and from the sea. “It’s for the best,” said Mrs Marr. That was a momentous moment, the moment of my first fall. My legs went weak beneath me and I tumbled to the floor and the whole world went watery and dark, and wild watery voices sang sweetly in my brain and called me to them. I came out of it to find Mum weeping over me and shaking me and screaming my name like I had drifted a million miles away, and the teacher yelling for help into the phone.
I reached up and caught Mum’s falling tears.
“It’s all right,” I whispered sweetly to her. “It was lovely, Mum.”
And it was. And I wanted it to happen again. And soon it did. And did again.
There followed months of trips to hospitals and visits to doctors and many, many tries to go past my strangeness and to find the secrets and the truth in me. There were lights shone deep into my eyes, blood sucked out of me, wires fixed to me, questions asked of me. There were stares and glares and pondering and wondering, and medicines and needles, and much talk coming out of many flapping mouths, and much black writing written on much white paper. I was wired wrong. The chemicals that flowed in me were wrong. My brain was an electric storm. There had been damage from disease, from a bang on the head, damage at my birth. It ended with a single doctor, Doctor John, in a single room with Mum and me.
“There is something wrong with Annie,” said Doctor John.
“Something?” asked my mum.
“Yes,” said Doctor John. He scratched his head. “Something. But we don’t know what the something is so we haven’t got a name for it.”
And we were silent. And I was very pleased. And Mum hugged me.
And Doctor John said, “All of us are mysteries, even to us white-coated doctors. And some of us are a bit more of a puzzle than the rest of us.”
He smiled into my eyes. He winked.
“You’re a good girl, Annie Lumsden,” he said.
“She is,” said Mum.
“What’s the thing,” said Doctor John, “that you like best in the whole wide world?”
And I answered, “My mum is that thing. That, and splashing and swimming like the fishes in the sea.”
“Then that’s good,” he said. “For unlike most of us, you have the things you love close by you. And you have them there on little Stupor Beach. Be happy. Go home.”
So we went home.
A teacher, Miss McLintock, came each Tuesday. I stayed daft.
We went back to Doctor John each six weeks or so. I stayed a puzzle.
And we walked on the beach, sat in the sandy garden. Mum painted her rocks and glued her shells, and told her tales and sang her shanties. I swam and swam, and we were happy.
“I sometimes think,” I said one day, “I should have been a fish.”
“A fish?”
“Aye. Sometimes I dream I’ve got fins and a tail.”
“Goodness gracious!” said Mum.
She jumped up and lifted my T-shirt and looked at my spine.
“What’s there?” I said.
She kissed me.
“Nowt, my little minnow,” she said.
She looked again.
“Thank goodness for that,” she said.
I fell many, many times. It happened in the salty shack, in the sandy garden, on the sandy beach. My legs would lose their strength and I would tumble, and the whole of everything would turn watery, and it was like I really turned from Annie Lumsden into something else – to a fish or a seal or a dolphin. And when the world turned back into sand and rocks and shacks and gardens, I would find Mum sitting close by, watching over me, waiting for me to return, and she’d smile and say, “Where’ve you been, my little swimmer?” I’d tell her I’d been far away beneath the sea to places of coral and shells and beautifully coloured fish, and she’d smile and smile to hear the words loosened from my tongue as I told my travelling tales. At first, Mum was scared that I would fall and lose myself when I was in the water, and that I would drown and be taken from her, but we came to know that it did not, and would never, happen, for in the water I am truly as I am – Annie Lumsden, seal girl, fish girl, dolphin girl, the girl who cannot drown.
Then there came the sunlit day, the day of Benn. I lay on the warm sand at Mum’s side. My body and brain were reforming themselves after a fall. Every time it happened, it was like being born again, like coming out from dark and lovely water and crawling into the world like a little new thing. She was gently stroking my seaweed hair, and we were lost in wonder at the puzzle of myself and the mystery of everything that is and ever was and ever will be. I gazed at her and asked, “Mum, tell me where I come from.”
And she started to tell me a tale I knew so well, ever since I was a little one.
“Once,” she said, “when I was walking by the sea, I saw a fisherman.”
It was the old familiar tale. A man was fishing on the beach, casting his line far out into the water. A handsome man, in green waterproofs and green wellies. A hard-working man from far down south, taking a break at Stupor Beach. Mum passed by. They got to talking. He said he loved the wildness of the north
. They got to drinking and dancing in the Slippery Eel. He listened to Mum singing her shanties. He called her a wild northern lass. He wasn’t a bad man, not really, just a bit careless and a bit feckless. He stayed a while then quickly went away. He was searched for and never was found. Charles, his name was, or he said it was. To tell the truth, he wouldn’t have made a decent daddy. It was better like this, just Mum and me.
But that day I put my finger to her lips.
“No,” I told her. “Not that old one. I know that one.”
“But it’s true.”
“Tell me something with a better truth in it, something that works out the puzzle of me.”
“Turn you into a tale?”
“Aye. Turn me to a tale.”
She winked.
“I didn’t want to tell you this,” she said. “Will you keep it secret?”
“Aye,” I said.
She leant over and looked at my back and stroked my spine.
“Nowt there,” she said. “But maybe it’s time to tell the truth at last.”
And I lay there on the sand beneath the sun, and the sea rolled and turned close by, and seagulls cried, and the breeze lifted tiny grains of sand and scattered them on me. And Mum’s fingers moved on me and she breathed and sighed and her voice started to flow over me and into me as sweet as any song, and it found in me a different Annie Lumsden; an Annie Lumsden that fitted with my fallings, my dreams, my body and the sea.
“I was swimming,” she murmured. “It was summer, morning, very early – milky white sky, not a breath of wind, water like glass. Most of the world was deep asleep. Not a soul to be seen but a man in the dunes with a dog a quarter of a mile away. Nowt on the sea except a single dinghy slipping northwards. Gannets high, high up and little terns darting back and forth into the water for fish, and nervy oystercatchers by the rock pools. The tide had turned, and it went back nearly soundless, just a gentle lovely hissing as it drained away; and all around, the secrets of the sea were given up – the rocks, the pools, the weeds, the darting creatures and the crawling and the scuttling creatures, the million grains of sand. And as I swam I was drawn backwards and outwards towards the islands, and further from the line of jetsam and my things. Rocks began appearing all around. A great field of seaweed was exposed near by, with stems as thick as children’s arms and long brown rubbery leaves.”
“Were you young?”
“Fourteen years younger than I am today. A young woman, and strong, with strong, smooth swimming muscles on my shoulders. My things were high up on the beach beyond the jetsam – a red plastic bag, a green towel laid out. I remember as I swam and dived and drifted that I felt stunned, almost hypnotised. I kept trying to look back to the red and green, to remind myself that the solid world was the world I’d come from and that I must swim back again.”
She smiled at me.
“You know that feeling?”
I smiled.
“You know I know that feeling.”
“And as I drifted I felt the first touch on me.”
“The touch?”
“A gentle tender touch. At first I told myself it was the shifting of the seaweed, or the flicker of a little fish fin. But then it came again, like something touching, deliberately touching. Something moved beneath. It moved right under me. A flickering swimming thing, slow and smooth. And it was gone. Then I was suddenly cold, and tiredness and hunger were in me. I stayed calm. I swam breaststroke slowly for the shore. I knelt in the wet sand there and told myself that I’d been wrong, I’d been deceived. I looked back. The sea was empty. I started to walk up the slope of wet sand towards my things. A bird screamed. I looked back again. A little tern hung dancing in the air close behind me, beak pointing down towards the water. It screamed again, then wheeled away as the man appeared from the brown-leaved weed.”
“The man?” I whispered.
“He was slender, but with great shoulders on him. Hair slick like weed. Skin smooth and bright like sealskin. He crouched at the water’s edge, poised between the land and sea. He cupped his hands and drank the sea. He raised his eyes towards the low milky sun and lowered them again. I could not, dared not, move. I saw the fin folded along his back.”
“The fin?”
“I saw his webbed fingers, his webbed toes. His eyes were huge and dark and shining. He laughed, as if the moment brought him great joy. He cupped his hands again and poured water over himself. Then he raised his eyes and looked at me, and after a moment of great stillness in us both, he left the sea and came to me.”
“You ran away?”
“There seemed no threat in him, no danger. I looked along the beach. The man with his dog in the dunes was a world away. The man with the fin came out. He knelt a yard away from me.”
“Did he speak?”
“There was a sound from him, a splashing sound, like water rather than air was moving in his throat.”
“What was he?”
“A mystery. A secret of the sea. He was very beautiful. I saw in his eyes he thought I was beautiful too.”
I looked into my mother’s eyes. What did I see there? The delight of memories or the delight of her imaginings?
“He was my father?” I whispered.
Her eyes were limpid pools.
“That was the first day,” she said. “We moved no closer to each other. We did not touch. I saw the water drying on him, leaving salt on his beautiful skin. When he saw this, he lowered himself into the field of weed again and he was gone. But he came back again on other early milky mornings when the sea was calm. The last day he came, he stayed an hour with me. He came onto the land. We stayed in the shade beneath the rocks. I poured water from the rock pools over him. He was very beautiful, and his liquid voice was very beautiful.”
“He was my father?”
“I touched his fin, his webs, his seaweed hair that day. I remember them still against my fingers. That last day we had to hurry back to the water. Despite the rock-pool water, his skin was drying out, his voice was coarse, his eyes were suddenly touched with dread. We ran back to the water. He sighed as he lowered himself into the water. We looked at each other, he from within the sea, I from without. He reached out of the sea to me. His hand was dripping wet, and in it was a shell – this shell.”
She opened her palm. In it was a seashell.
“Then he swam away.”
I took the shell from her. It was as ordinary as any seashell, as beautiful as any seashell.
“I’ll cut the story short,” she said. “Nine months later you were born.”
“And it’s true?”
“And yes, it’s—”
We heard a click. We turned. A man was standing close by. He held a camera to his face. He lowered it.
“Forgive me,” he said.
He moved towards us.
“But you were so lovely, the two of you there. It was just like the girl had been washed up by the sea.”
We said nothing, were still lost in the tale that Mum had told.
“Name’s Benn,” he said. “I’m passing through. Staying at your Slippery Eel. Came to take pictures of your islands.”
He asked to be forgiven again. He took our silence for coldness, a desire to be left alone. He bowed, continued on his way.
“Please,” said Mum.
He paused, looked back at us.
“We have few pictures of ourselves,” she said. “Could we have the one you’ve taken today?”
He grinned, and we came back fully into the world, and Mum asked him into our sandy garden for tea.
He told us of his travels, of faraway cities and mountains and seas. He said he loved the feeling of moving through the world, light and free, moving through other people’s stories. Sometimes, he said, when he got his photographs home they were like images from dreams and legends. He laughed with delight at Stupor Bay. He swept his hands towards the sea and the islands.
“Who’d’ve guessed a place like this was waiting for me.”
We
said we’d hardly ever moved from this place, and for the first time, as I looked at Benn, I found myself thinking that one day we might move away.
He told us about America, and the kids called Maggie and Jason.
“You got the perfect gifts for them,” he said.
He bought a rock painted with the face of a grinning angel and the seashell model of a mermaid.
He sipped his tea and ate his scone. He took more photographs of us and of the shack and the islands.
“I always take home tales as well,” he said.
He winked at Mum.
“You look like you might know a tale or two.”
That night Mum sang shanties in the Slippery Eel. I sat with Benn and drank lemonade and nibbled crisps. Between the songs he told me of all the seas he’d seen around the world. He dipped the tip of his finger into his beer.
“An atom of the water in this,” he said, “was one day in the Sea of Japan.” He dipped his finger again. “And an atom of this was in the Bay of Bengal. All seas flow into each other.” He licked his finger, laughed. “And into us.”
I swigged my lemonade. I felt the Baltic Sea and the Yellow Sea and the Persian Gulf pour through me. Rain pattered on the window at our backs. Mum’s voice danced around the music of a flute. We joined in with the choruses. We tapped the rhythms on the table. Benn drank and told me of his home and his family so many miles away.
“I’m happy when I’m there,” he said. “But then I travel, and I find so many places to be happy in.”
Mum’s singing ended and she sat between me and Benn, and her voice was edged with laughter. At closing time we stood outside. The rain had stopped, the clouds had dispersed, the moon was out. The sea thundered on the shore.