‘You are a girl-child,’ I said.
She gave a small hiccup of a laugh. ‘No joking!’ she said. ‘Good thing that you told me.’ And she swung her legs some more and looked about at the legs and bums and baskets and bustle. ‘I’d’ve gone on thinking myself a jee-raff for who knows how long.’
‘You are, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘A girl?’
She looked me up and down. Her breath was white on the air, air that smelt strongly of the smoked-meat stall nearby, and not at all of the sea. ‘Are you touched, or what?’
‘I haven’t ever met one before,’ I said.
She snorted.
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘We don’t have them on Rollrock.’
Her face got more startled, and prettier. ‘You’re from Rollrock Isle?’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘My dad brought me over this morning.’
‘For the first-ever time?’ Now I was interesting, and she seemed to have stopped disliking me, which was good.
‘First ever,’ I said.
‘You’ve been on that island all your life?’
I searched her face for why she should sound so astonished. ‘I have,’ I said. ‘And on lots of sea around it.’
‘I’ve never seen the area yet,’ she said. ‘My mam and dad won’t take me. Say it sends men potty. Is your dad potty?’
‘Of course not.’ I looked about for him. None of these legs were his, none of these hatted heads, fuzzy-rimmed against the sunshine.
‘Are you potty?’ said the girl.
‘No!’
She laughed at me, but not unkindly. What a lot of hair she had, and it was not straight and silky like a mam’s. If you took that band off, undid that ribbon, loosed it from those plaits, it would stand straight out from her head, or possibly get up and walk right off her, or catch fire from the combination of so many hot red strands together.
‘You might be anything,’ she said, ‘with your great eyes.’
I turned from her embarrassed, and again she laughed. These girl-children were certainly unsettling.
‘What brings you, then,’ she said, as if she had a perfect right to know, ‘you and your dad, to Knocknee?’
‘My dad has business here, he said.’ Again I searched the crowd, for I rather wished he would burst out now, perhaps with something for me to eat, some mainland fancy.
‘Cloth, maybe?’
‘He has to find someone. A girl, like you.’
‘Do you really not have girls there, on Rollrock? Is it all potty boys and men?’
‘We have women,’ I said, stung. ‘We have very beautiful women, all our mams.’
‘Ye-es.’ She narrowed her eyes at me again, and breathed more breath-smoke. ‘That is your specialty out there, isn’t it?’
‘What do you mean?’ I stiffened further, not knowing how insulted I ought to be.
‘I’m trying to remember. I’ve heard mams talking. There’s something about those Rollrock women, isn’t there?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But they’re our mams, so don’t you say anything that might get you popped on the snout.’
‘Well, they must be unusual, to’ve begot an unusual like you,’ she said sensibly, looking me up and down again.
‘They’re usual for our town,’ I said. ‘Perfectly usual.’ And I turned back to the crowd, to the sun.
Dad came then and rescued me, for finally he’d had some success with his questions. He knew where to look for the girl now.
He took me there, and it was a very smelly part of the town; some kind of offal was piled and straggling in the drain outside her family’s house, and inside, in a wall corner, lay a cat that at first I was sure was dead, until it lifted its mean triangle of a face and showed me eyes whitened by some dreadful town disease.
Dad talked to what I thought at first was the girl’s grandmam, she had so few teeth and was so weathered – but it turned out to be her mam. She watched my dad as if he might snap at and bite her, as if he were there to trick her and she ought to be very careful.
The girl herself was orange-haired like everyone here, but she was not so clean as the market girl, or so slender. She had something of the twitching of the mam about her, and a sneaky manner that was all her own. She sat listening closely, pursing her lips, her glance flicking from Dad to her mam and back again. She had tied her pinafore strangely; as well as the straps crossed on her back she had brought the waist-ties around and crossed them over her stout front. It gave me a very uncomfortable feeling to look at her; who would make a pinafore with such long straps? It was as if her head was on backwards. She ignored me as too young to be of any account, and I was glad of it.
They were talking about money; the mam wanted some, and Dad was saying how Rollrock oughtn’t to have to pay, giving board and accommodations to this girl as we would. He seemed to be buying this girl, buying something she could do. Truth told, she didn’t look capable of a lot, she was such a funny, grey-fleshed lump. She looked like the sort to sidle out of any job going.
Dad took a deep breath. ‘You have eleven of her, Missus Callisher. Aren’t you glad to get the burden of even the one of them off your shoulders?’
‘This one eats mouse-rations, for all the size on her,’ snapped the mam. ‘Why don’t you take one of the taller girls, my Gert or my Lowie? Thin as pins, they are, though they put away food like heifers.’
‘You know why: this is the one with the touch on her, who can be taught up to be useful by our Misskaella.’
Misskaella? What did the old crow have to do with this, flapping around Potshead, coughing and snarling?
‘Useful for what? Useful for catching mermaids, is what. And stuck on blimming Rollrock Isle the rest of her life, for nowhere else in the world needs mermaids fetched.’ She slid a glance at me. ‘I don’t want grandsons with tails,’ she said. ‘Granddaughters with fins.’
What was she on about? I thought they both must be mad, she and her daughter.
‘We will pay for a yearly journey home, how about that? Boat and motor-bus to visit you every spring.’
The mam sucked at the inside of her discontented face. ‘And no one to marry.’
‘She might well meet a man here, one of her visits. I don’t know, Missus Callisher. These terms are reasonable. I’m sure Trudle would be very content, a room of her own in the old woman’s house, and a livelihood.’
The girl Trudle gave a kind of a whinny, and was no less ugly for laughing. If anything her face looked more weaselish, creased up like that.
Her mam shook her head. ‘She’d be happy on a dungheap, that one. She’s touched more ways than the one.’
‘Ask Fan Dowser how touched I am,’ said Trudle in a rasping voice.
Swiftly the mam stepped over and smacked Trudle’s head. The girl rubbed the spot and glared up at her.
‘Very well, take her,’ said the mam with great carelessness. ‘Don’t come blubbing back to me, though, what she gets up to with your pretty lads.’ She shot me a look, her lip curled but fear in her eyes. ‘As I say, there’s not a lot up her top. Why a person cannot be touched and have brains I do not know.’
‘ ’Tis straightforward enough work,’ said Dad.
‘Hmph. Nothing of this nature is straight. Go fetch your box, girl.’
Trudle insisted on dressing up for the journey in some ancient hand-me-down ruffles and a big dark-blue bonnet, her weasely face in the middle. Dad transacted with the mam, and we left.
I was glad to be out of that house and away from that woman, but unhappy having Trudle with us. She walked in a funny rocking way, her legs wide under her stoutness as if she had wet herself. People watched us go by, breaking off conversations to do so. My dad preceded us, Trudle’s box on his shoulder, a bed-coverlet pillowing up in the top of it. He walked quite fast, making Trudle rocky-rock along ridiculous. It was a nightmare, this big town and the hurrying, people’s glances and opinions peppering us, and the late sunshine flaring coldly along the damp lanes. Trudle did not speak a
nd nor did I; we only struggled along separately and together. I would have liked to walk with Dad, but I could never quite catch up with him.
Then the crowds cleared, and the bus was there alongside its shelter. The door was just shutting, but my dad hoyed and waved and ran, and the driver opened it for us again.
Trudle bustled up first. She chose a seat halfway down the bus and sat very straight and pleased there. She glared at Dad when he made to sit by her, so that he came with me to the seat behind her instead.
‘That was close,’ he said as the bus’s starting threw him back into his seat. ‘Any more bargaining with Missus Callisher and we’d have been stuck here the night.’
I could smell Trudle, the oldness of her clothes, and the fact that she had not bathed in a while.
‘I see you got talking to a maid, there in the market?’ said my dad politely when we had recovered our breaths.
I nodded, watching the last of Knocknee town whirl by: a cottage with a yard full of uncut branches, a dog with a plume-y tail, water shining in bootprinted mud.
‘What was that like?’ he said.
I shrugged – it had not been like anything, and I did not know what to think of it, what to say.
‘How did you find her company?’
I slid my bottom back, to sit straighter in the seat. Cows flew by, some of them watching us with their great heads raised. ‘She was fine, I suppose.’ Did I have the right to like or dislike such a stranger? Today I was just a big empty trawler-hold, with the world’s fish and sea-worms tumbling into me. ‘We only talked a little while.’
There’s something about those Rollrock women, isn’t there? I saw the girl’s narrow eyes, her hair-wires glowing around her head. Suddenly, sharply, I wished I were among those Rollrock women; I was sick of this adventure. I wished I was tiny again, and curled in Mam’s lap with her singing buzzing and burring around me in the quiet room, Dad gone to fish or to Wholeman’s.
Trudle looked out the window all across the mainland countryside. She did not seem to feel the need to talk to us; indeed, she might have been travelling quite alone, for all the notice she took of us. When we reached the wharf she boarded the boat ahead of us as if she owned it, and she stayed upright and cheerful-looking all across the Strait.
As soon as we had disembarked at Rollrock my dad sent me up home. Mister Fisher gave me a lemon for my mam, and I dug my fingernail into the rind and sniffed lemon all the way up the town, to clear out the Trudle-smell.
From what I later gathered by overhearing, Trudle was given over to Misskaella just as promised and no fussing. And after that the two of them went about a pair, like a flour- and a tea-caddy. They both wore witch-dresses, tight to their arms and waists, then springing out like flower-bells, nearly to the ground – cages and flowers, as I had seen on the women in Knocknee and Cordlin, very presenting of themselves. The one’s hair was dirty orange in the sunlight, the other’s mostly frost, only a few reddish stains in it to hint at what it had been. And Misskaella kept her thinning hair short, while Trudle grew hers, making the point that she alone had such colour, and could bear about such quantities of it.
Misskaella never was polite, never greeted you even if she met your eye, and Trudle learned the same ways fast, or at least towards mams and children. For men she would raise what might have been called a smile if it had not been so sly and ambiguous. She enjoyed teasing our men, anyone could see. They would rather have not seen her, but she would keep planting herself in their way and greeting them. ‘Mister Paige,’ she would say, but it would come out Pay-eeshsh, too lingering, and Paige would seem to dodge and weave without taking a step in any direction, would seem to bow and touch his cap-brim without taking his hands from his pockets.
But mostly Trudle followed her mistress about the town and country around. We had been frightened enough of Misskaella on her own; now there were two of them, the small caddy tripping after the big one, taking on and amplifying the old witch’s herbaceous, privy-aceous smell. Two bells on feet, they clanged fear into our spines; two ragged flower shadows, they crept along the sky on Watch-Out Hill. Or they would be on the south mole, Misskaella peering out to sea or up to town, Trudle bent bottom-up collecting fish-scales for their magics. Or the two of them would be horrors together on the field roads, glowering ahead, pretending not to see us boys as we hugged the wall opposite, greeting them feebly as they passed us by.
Come a fine day, the mams would go down together to wash their crying-blankets in the sea. They would sit about on the rocks at the start of the south mole, with their feet hooked in the knitted seaweed. The water would rush in, and swell up and fizz in the blankets, and rush away again. They were always happy then, and we boys liked to be among them, clambering about at our own play while they talked, mixing their languages to make each other laugh. They sat so solid, and watched the crowding sea so attentively, you could imagine them staying like sea-rocks there, all night even, searching the black waves as the water and knitted weed bobbed and sucked around them.
Misskaella would stump up and down along the mole, Trudle would skip there, both women with bunches of seaweed in their belts like strange sideways tails. The mams, each moving her blanket slowly across her knees to examine the weave and wear of it, ignored them except to call out for a length of weed now and then. Some boys were always among the mole rocks playing; these would take the lengths of weed from witch to mam, and the mams would pinch their cheeks or kiss their heads for their trouble.
It was a fine sunny morning, then, early, and the mams had ooched and ouched over the stones in their bare feet and flung their blankets wide onto the water and now were settling on the rocks around, when what should come in at the pier uncommonly early but the Cordlin boat, and what should fall off it but some Cordlin people, picnic people, baskets with them and the ladies with parasols, and the gentlemen with gentlemen-type hats on and boots that shone like mirrors.
Straight away the ladies walked across from the pier and along to the south mole. There was not much of a breeze, and their voices were as clear to us as if we shared a room: Are these them, then? Are these the … creatures? The seal-ladies?
Why, I believe they are. What are they about, do you suppose?
Quite clearly washing of some kind. Washing …
Yes, washing what, exactly, Davina?
Well, let us go closer and see.
The mams’ talk had quieted; they lifted their faces curiously to the visitors. I sat among the mole boulders, so that the Cordlin ladies walking the path were a little above me. Such complicated clothing they wore! And all their bright hairs, brown and gold as well as red like some of us boys’, were so fancily packaged and structured on their heads! I followed their gazes to our mams below, the crying-blankets floating all about them, their faces not composed at all the way the town ladies’ were. They held their entire selves out, all their thoughts and feelings, as if on a platter for the ladies to take as they would. They did not seem to realize that the ladies might laugh, or not understand. The mams held to their blankets, some still stroking the weave as if examining it, even though their eyes were not attentive to the task. The wavelets rippled the wet blankets and made them twinkle in the sun. Some of the mams’ bare shins showed, dappled by the sun, greened and shortened by the water.
A silence fell among the Cordlin ladies too. Misskaella and Trudle stood far off at the mole end; if Misskaella could have hopped into the sea and swum away I’m sure she would have. All us boys glanced at each other, some of us making faces, some just waiting.
Finally one of the ladies, an older one with pink clouds powdered onto her cheeks, came to the edge of the mole. ‘What is it you are washing there, my good woman?’ she said in a clear, commanding way to the closest mam, Bessie O’Day.
‘Our blankets,’ Bessie said, her voice so plain after theirs that I was embarrassed for her. ‘And we are not washing them,’ she went on, ‘but soaking them. And mending.’ She waved towards the witches; Misskaella fol
ded her arms and turned away with a flick of her weed-tail.
‘What kind of blankets are these?’ cried the pink-cheeked lady. ‘I have never seen their like.’
Bessie began, but her older boy Sumner jumped up among the mole-rocks. ‘No, Mam,’ he said. ‘No, Mam. There’s no need to say.’ He cast a look over his shoulder at the Cordlin woman, then explained up to them: ‘They have a special use, in the homes here. But it is private.’
Private. I did not know that word, but immediately I grasped its meaning as a warning to the ladies.
The pink-cheeked lady eyed the blankets in the water. ‘What are they made of, though? Can you tell me that?’ She sent a look around her friends that seemed to ask, Who do they think they are, having private things? The friends tittered.
‘Seaweed,’ said Sumner.
‘Seaweed!’ exclaimed another woman. ‘How ingenious. This is a craft that they bring from the sea?’
‘Hush, Elgin!’ said one of them. ‘Whoever heard of seals weaving?’
Sumner pointed at Misskaella. ‘She makes them. She knits them. Our dads buy them off her.’
‘Don’t frighten them away!’ called a man’s voice. All heads turned to watch him hurry along the sea-front, along the mole, carrying a box on a stick – or several sticks, it was, bound together. He walked nearly to the Cordlin ladies, set his stick-ends down and surveyed the mams and blankets, then lifted the sticks again and hurried farther along the mole. ‘Here is better. There is a subtler light, a more artistic composition.’ And he pulled the sticks apart to make a stand for the box-thing. It had a circle on the front, like a flat black eye.
‘Oh, no,’ said Sumner, but softly, as if he knew he had no power over this bustling person from Cordlin. He turned to glance up to Wholeman’s, where some of the dads were, all unsuspecting because the boat had come in so early; he sought out someone at Fisher’s, but all the men there were in conversation with the Fey’s captain, their backs to us.
The man unfastened the box, and pulled out the front of it, folded like a concertina, shook out a black cloth over the box and legs. I could not take my eyes from him, he was so energetic and mysterious. What might he do next?