Dad bore the girl forward by her hand and elbow. They made a monstrous bride-and-groom in the doorway of their church, our shabby shed. The seal-girl moved all long and relaxed like a queen or a heron, or indeed like a bride trailing a heavy train behind herself.
Mam and I shrank across the flags before them. We retreated just as stiffly slowly as we’d advanced, into the house, through to the kitchen, back up against the kitchen chairs, Dad thrusting the maid at us all the way.
And now I saw a seal-girl’s face, straight on and lamp-lit, for the first time. Not quite human, she was all the more beautiful for that. Her dark features sat in the smooth skin like a puzzle of stones and shells; I wanted to look and look until I had solved it. The mouth began hesitantly to smile, full-lipped and shapely.
‘Pack your things, Bet,’ said Mam. ‘Everything you will ever need. Wake your sister and the boys and tell them to pack theirs.’
I peeled myself from Mam, and hurried to the bedroom.
I shook Geedre hard. She was wide-eyed in an instant, and I hissed Mam’s command in her ear. ‘Light the candle,’ she said.
The boys complained more when I woke them, but as soon as they heard what had come upon us, they went silently to the task of gathering all that they owned, that they could carry.
‘But where are we going?’ Geedre said softly, casting about for what to take. ‘And for how long?’
‘Forever, is my thinking.’
She stared at me across the candle.
‘Looking at Mam’s face,’ I said. ‘So take it all, coat and boots and all.’
‘That smell!’ said Byrne, awestruck.
‘Don’t breathe it,’ I said. ‘Block your nose, or you’ll be bewitched. I nearly was myself.’
‘Bring your blanket,’ Mam said, pausing at the door as we gathered. ‘Sophie has few enough.’ And she was gone again.
‘Sophie?’ murmured Geedre. ‘We’ll never all fit at Nase and Sophie’s.’
‘Nase won’t be there,’ I said hollowly.
‘She must mean just for tonight,’ said Snell, ‘and the boat in the morning.’
We all paused silent at that, looking among ourselves, disbelieving one moment, knowing it was true the next. Then Geedre snatched the blanket from the bed and folded it quickly, badly, as if she were stealing it.
We carried out our bundles to the front door and stood there hugging them, our hairs all awry. The sea-smell poured down the hallway from the kitchen, almost a wind. Nase and his girl sat at the kitchen table, their chairs pulled close together. Dad held his sea-maid on his lap, a shield between him and the rest of us, between him and Mam. Naked still, she had laid her arms loosely about our father’s neck.
Then Mam obscured them, stepping from the bedroom into the hall. Snell went and brought her to us with her bundles, and I did not look towards the kitchen again.
Mam searched and silenced each of our faces; she seemed both greatly tired and freshly flowered. Then she proceeded among us, and we gathered in after her. She opened the door and walked out onto the step and down into the street, and all we could do was follow.
A CLUMP OF us lads was fighting on the northern mole. The wind carried the first bite of winter in it; the water fussed and jostled on three sides of us.
I had Harvey Newsom down and was sitting on him. I’d no advantage of weight, but he’d clouted me on the side of my head, and my rage was pumping from that. And he was laughing at me – that made me stronger, and him weaker. His bright red cheeks and his orange curls glowed against the wet black cobbles. He flung up names: piece of tripe and cat-meat and fingerling. His mouth was a mess of half-grown teeth, like all of our mouths lately. I sat over him shaking his shirt, punching his shoulders into the ground.
Then he stopped, and looked up at me sharply through his watery eyes. I saw the next insult occur to him, saw him hesitate, saw him throw caution to the winds. ‘Your dad is old as a granddad,’ he said. ‘And your mam has hair like a man’s, and the biggest arse in Potshead.’
Well, it didn’t matter what size I was then: I laid into him and didn’t stop. His words poured power into me, poured size, made a brute of me, a brute with fine fast sight, seeing openings and throwing my fists and feet in, my knees. At first he kept laughing, delighted to have enraged me, and then he was too busy to laugh, trying to cover himself – and then, when he saw how much I still had boiled up in myself to deliver, he began to beg for mercy.
I felt I would never finish with him, but I could also feel tears coming, and only my mam was ever allowed to see me cry. I leaped up, gave him a couple of kicks for good measure, and ran away along the mole, his words on fire in me, hissing and crackling, pleased with themselves.
The truth was, I had never noticed, before I heard it from Harvey’s fat face, that my mam was round and small, when everyone else’s mams were lean and tall; that her hair was not black silk like other mams’, but red curls, as men’s was if they let it grow; that her skin freckled like a dad’s if she caught any sun, rather than honey-goldening as most mams’ did in the summer. It was only as I ran up the lanes with a sob ready in my throat that I properly saw these differences, and felt dismay that they could be used against me. And why was Mam so different in shape and colour? Why was her way of cooking, and speaking, and houseworking, different from the other mams’? I had never realized, so I had never asked.
I ran up home. I flew in, and straight to her at the sink in the scullery; I flung myself at her bottom as if I would cover it forever from the taunts of such as Harvey Newsom; I grasped her waist and buried my face in her. I was cold and windblown and full of rage and terror; she was warm and solid and smelled of home.
‘Oh, my gracious! What is this?’ She dealt with the plate she was washing, then put her warm damp hand to my head as she turned in my arms. ‘Are you hurt, Dominic?’
I shook my head in the cushion of her front.
‘What, then? Are they teasing you, calling you names?’ She laughed somewhat through her sympathy, at my passion.
I shook my head even more fiercely. I could not have held her tighter. I didn’t know what to want, whether to hide myself away inside her, or to squeeze her down to a size where I could pocket her and protect her forever from any insult or other boy’s laughter.
‘Are they calling me names?’ she said with even more amusement.
I pulled away to look at her, my face fallen open in surprise. How could she know that? And how could she not mind?
Out sprang my tears; up burst the sob I had been containing, and another followed it, and another. I wept spots and splashes onto her pinny and skirt. My father came from the yard. ‘What’s up with the boy?’ And she explained to him above me – I did not look up, did not want to see the agedness of Dad that Harvey had drawn to my attention. They talked it back and forth between them and chuckled together, not at me but at the source of my tears, so that I knew, even as I sobbed, that we maintained our own customs and conventions here in this house, and that all was well in it, that nothing could injure either Mam or Dad, and certainly not the lip of Harvey Newsom. I was relieved for them, yet still cast away from them somehow. No matter how hard I clung here, or how soothingly they spoke overhead, I could never make Harvey un-say what he had said, so closely to my face that I had felt his spittle on me. I could never un-hear his words. I could never repair my mind to close over what had been opened up in it, the questions and the worrying, and the shame.
My dad and I sat before the fire. I was closer to it, right on the hearthstone, soggy with heat; my dad was more grown-up in his armchair. Mam had nipped down to Fisher’s, and then the rain had started; we were listening to it ticking against the window, wondering if it would worsen and strand her down there.
It worsened. Drops collected on the window-glass and streaked down; the patter and trickle on the roof-slates, sounds that had been so cosy when she was here in the house with us, were alarming now that she was out in them.
Dad sat forward, ha
nds on his fire-lit knees. ‘I should take her coat down to her,’ he said.
‘I can do it.’ I sprang up.
But he stood too, and pressed me back down onto the hearth. ‘I will. Can’t have you catching cold.’
With a whisk of his own coat and a bundling of Mam’s he was gone. He passed the window, downhill, in the cold grey afternoon.
I was too hot now. I climbed into Dad’s chair, and the sting when I sat back against my heated shirt and jumper made me gasp. I sat and waited and listened for the two of them outside. The house around me was one large comfort in the middle of the rain.
When they came back, I peered around under the chair’s wing to watch them fuss and exclaim at the door. Dad took Mam’s milk-bottle that she had bought, and she shrugged off her coat, and exchanged coat for bottle. The raindrops fell from both their hems to the rug there, and her hair straggled crimson on her cheeks. They were laughing about her having to be rescued, and how quickly and hard the rain had come on. ‘Specially to wet me, you would have thought, Dominic! See how it’s stopping, now that I’m home and safe in the dry?’
She carried the milk away to the kitchen, and Dad shook out and hung up their coats. I slid from his chair as he crossed back to the fire. I sat in Mam’s chair, which was smaller and of smoother cloth, with flowers. He resettled himself, and I waited for him to say one of the things he always said, Two old codgers by the fire, then, maybe, or Oh, it’s a wild night to be out in, which he would say whether it stormed or sat perfectly fine outside.
But he sat silent a while, searching for his thoughts in the fire and smiling on them. Then he saw me watching, and his smile grew serious.
‘When it comes to marrying, go to the mainland,’ he said. ‘Get yourself a Cordlin woman, like your mother. That’s the proper kind of wife for men like us.’
Men like us? Could he not see my legs stuck out here, the ankles only just off the seat? Could he not see how I had to lift my elbows almost level with my shoulders to rest them on the chair-arms? Still, I was proud that he would call me a man in spite of these, would regard me as like himself; he charmed me with the idea of the two of us fronting up at life together in his mind.
I was so pleased and preoccupied with men like us that I let the rest of what he said stay mysterious. It would never come to marrying, for me; I would always be a boy, running and fishing and fighting and mucking about in coracles. I would never want more than that.
‘Harvey Newsom is a turnip,’ said Neville Trumbell.
We were up on Whistle Top, with the whole town below us, and no one coming up the path. There was a springish wind about – maybe its warmth, and grassiness, and sea-salt, had made so much talk fountain out of me.
‘Everyone knows,’ Neville went on. ‘Newsoms will say anything to hurt you. They’ve all got that nastiness. Their dad was always picking fights up at Wholeman’s – you know that. That’s why he has to drink at his home.’
‘It’s true.’ I admired how Neville could dismiss Harvey’s words, how he did not let them stay and burn in him. They had never stopped burning in me since Harvey had said them.
‘Everyone knows, too, about the mams. All the mams were like your mam once, and like our dads. They were of a piece, women and men the same.’
‘They were?’ I could not imagine such a thing.
‘Oh yes. Didn’t your dad tell you? Or your mam, more likely? Course, she wasn’t here then; your dad went to mainland and fetched her in. But she was from an old Rollrock family – Trenchers, they were; she knew what she was coming to. Back in our dads’ times, it was, and our granddads’, some of us. None of these other mams were about then. They were in the sea, being their sea-selves.’
I stared down upon the rumpled little jigsaw that was Potshead, with Meehan’s cherry tree coming into blossom in the nearest yard. I did know that, about the mams; I had heard and known about it all my life, that older world, that angrier. But somehow I had never properly listened and thought and put it together.
‘Where did they go, then, the red ones?’ I asked. ‘What happened to them?’
‘Oh, they left,’ said Neville. ‘All of them, of their own accord, in a great temper.’
‘What did they have to be angry about?’
‘Nothing,’ said Neville. ‘They were just like that, says my dad. You’d only to give them Good morning and they’d go off at you like a cracked hen. They hated everything and everybody. We’re well rid of them, he says.’
‘Hmph,’ I said. ‘But my mam is not like that.’
‘I know.’ His face was clenched to hold a grass stalk in his lips the way some old men hold their pipe. ‘I said that to him once. Dominic’s mam is peaceable enough, I said. But look to Misskaella, he said. You cannot get much fierier or fiercer than that. He said your mam must not be full red-woman. She must have seal in her somewhere, he reckons.’
‘You think?’
‘I don’t think, no. Or why would your dad have gone all that way to get her, if he didn’t want her pure? That was the whole point.’
I nodded, though I had no idea. I’d no idea about any of this, and I did not like to think of my mam and dad being passed about as ordinary Potshead gossip and legend.
‘Besides.’ Neville’s whole face changed, grinning, becoming boy again. ‘I like your mam’s arse. She makes a change, to walk along behind, the way she flubbles.’
I sprang at him with my fists, and he parried me laughing, and that was the end of that conversation.
* * *
I was rising twelve when my dad died, one dark winter. He took the heart out of us, Mam and me, for a good while there; we washed and buried him, and then we sat about. Though the island thawed and seeped around us, still we stayed frozen, she and I. We could not be apart, each alone with this changed arrangement of things; we could not be together, knowing what we had lost with Dad.
People who were not Malletts, their lives went on around us, and they had never looked more peculiar to me than they did from within the cold shell of our mourning. The rude red men strode about, the dark silk-haired women with their soft smiles and their sea-singing moved vaguely about the town, and all of them seemed foreign, as did the boys, my fellows, who were mixtures of their mams and dads. Some were completely red after their fathers, and others had hair that fell flat, or that drink-of-water build of their mother, or her big dark eyes, or something of her floating manner. Whether red or black, they seemed quite distinct in nature from me, they were so energetic and enterprising, they laughed so easily, and brought such passion to anything they talked about.
I was out of doors in my restlessness, in a little crowd of such mixed boys, when Nicholas Kimes brought his new wife up from Crescent Corner. Some of us wanted to watch the actual extraction of her, out of the seal-body, but that crow Misskaella had scowled and cawed at us to be off before she and Kimes went down there, and some lads would not go against her. They held us back from the cliff-top, who might otherwise have spied on the magic over the edge. Brawn Baker had said you could feel the moment if you held yourself attentive enough, so we sat quietly in the grass against the wall and waited for that. Some said they felt something, a prickling of their skin and such, but nothing they claimed could not be sheeted home to the chill of the spring breeze, or the thrill of being here, so near to what was forbidden.
And all of us were surprised alike when Nicholas’s copper curls showed so soon, in the sunlight at the top of the path. He walked slowly, leading his lady. She was learning to balance and to walk as she came. She wore a land-dress, a plain shift, somewhat stiff in its newness. Her hand was locked in Nick’s, and she leaned to him in all her movements. The salt-and-seaweed breeze blew her shining hair, but could only lift strands of it, not the full weight, which fell as far as her thighs. Behind these two the witch struggled up into view like a block of cliff-face come to life, stone-footed and clumsy yet.
As the three of them drew near, only the seal-woman seemed to see us – and then she l
ooked to Nick to explain us, to give her our names. When he did not, but only gazed wondering and wordless back into her beautiful face, she seemed to accept that too, that we were to be nameless for now, a crowd of gawpers to be passed on by. So on they went, as solemn a procession as if they came out of a church, as strange as if they had straggled off a shipwreck.
In my present deadness of heart, it was not so much the seal-woman who impressed me as Nick himself being so enchanted. I wished I could be as distracted as he, as readily taken up with another person. And there was no doubt she was beautiful; they all were, of course, but this one was fresh-risen from the sea, fresh peeled into white wonderfulness. My skin goose-fleshed at the sight of her, at the knowledge that magic had brought her. I could see a day when I might want a woman as willowy and bewildered as that, with such silken hair and such dark eyes, and such an inclination towards me as this one had towards Nick. The lads either side of me must have been thinking the same thing, the way they joined me in my silence, gazing after Nick and his bride walking, bound fast together and passing into their new life.
Fearsome Misskaella, her wrappings trailing, rocked along stiff-legged behind them, her red and white hair wisping from where she had quickly knotted it up out of the way while she did her magic work. She was the only red-woman on Rollrock besides my own mother. I was not, like these other lads, born of seal-maids. And I was not to marry one, hadn’t Dad said? Men like us, he had said, separating me off from these boys. Placing us above them, was he? Or did he feel, as I felt – sitting back so that, beyond Misskaella’s rags, I might see more of the new bride’s cloak of black hair, shivering at the sight of it shining and sliding across itself – that neither he nor I would ever be fine enough for such wives as this, long-limbed and foreign from the sea?