And then she was in it, a naked back and bottom in the middle of a white fan of water. And then the green-white froth passed over her and her hair wasn’t wild any more but pasted flat to her head. Thank goodness! I thought. The seals will come and fetch her and she never will have to flounder ashore and face our kindness and our ridicule. And she was embracing the waves, and swimming there so strongly, you could tell they were her home; she was not clumsy there.
“She want to stay within the lee of the mole,” said Prentice Meehan above me. “It’s dirty farther out.”
A howl of the wind turned to the howl of a man, the howl of Bannister running out the house ends. “Aggie!”
“Look at him! He has her coat!” Which made him look somewhat octopus
-ish, all its arms and flaps a-flapping.
“Don’t you expect me to do that for you,” muttered Arthur Sack to his missus. He was standing his hand locked around hers, glaring at her, while she gazed now towards lumbering woeful Bannister, now out to the water, where Aggie was a dot of black, a momentary shining white haunch, a white foot splashing, and now hidden behind the green glass upshelving of a wave.
Along the mole ran Bannister. All our men is taciturn, when not angry; I cannot describe to you the uncomfortableness of seeing him so come out of himself, his mouth wide in his face like a bawling bab’s, his arms reaching. His bellows were torn up by the wind and waves and thrown at us in shreds, some strange animal’s cry, not a man’s, not a grown man’s.
Right out to the end he got, and still he yearned farther. He made to clamber down the end point.
“Don’t be daft, man!” said some man.
“He will be swept away!” a woman said dreamily.
But the sea jumped up and smacked the mole-end, a great fanfare of spray, and Bannister staggered back in it, soaked with it. And there he stood a moment, clutching her coat and staring out to where she came and went, came and went, bobbing and struggling now among the wilder, dirtier waves.
A spot of sun came then, poked a hole in the clouds and cut a bar through the spume and lighted on them both as he flung the coat, as it flew—not far, it was so heavy—as it lumped out into the air and splatted on the water and was gone there, then was there again, struggling, just as she was, to stay above water.
And the laugh-and-chattering here against the rail stopped, because coat and Aggie were so far apart, and neither of them were swimming towards the other. We saw the coat edge at the surface, the shadow of the coat within a big sunlit wave; we saw her face, her mouth, her arm and breast, and a different wave crash down, folding her down into the sea. Bannister knew not to dive in; even mad with grief he knew. He stood instead a little way down from the mole-top, stood with legs bent and red hands claws upon his knees, bellowing out to Aggie not to die.
She did not obey him. She lay slumped in the water when next we saw her, only her back, and then the sun went away and the sea brought her in behind the mole again. Through the gray rain-beginning, through the green-gray waters, the rows and curling rows of them, up and down it brought her slow—mams ushered some of the littler boys away. It deposited her not three yards from where it had thrown up the empty coat, a welter of black flesh and stirred pebbles, onto Potshead beach.
“It is all our faults,” shivered little Thomas Davven, left behind with me on the rail while the men ran, while the woman pushed children away, while here came Messkeletha with one of her blankets for a shroud. “If we had not faddle-arsed around in that coat room . . . ”
“It is all their faults,” I said and savagely. The witch cast me a look in passing, and I waited till she had gone, one blanket-corner dragging as she went. “Stealing our mams out of the sea in the first place,” I hissed to Thomas.
“Oh, you cannot blame them that.” He clutched himself and bowed and bent in the cold wind, without the shelter of the crowd any more. “You had the choice between women like that raddle-witch and our beautiful mams, which would you choose?”
He had me. That was no fair choice, that was. “Still,” I said through my teeth, clamping them tight against their chattering. “Still, they never ought to done it. They dint belong here. They belonged under the waves.”
Down there, we could see it all well; we were like birds stopped above them in the wind. Only Aggie Bannister was normal length, white and awash until they pulled her by wrists and ankles up out of the shadows; the rest of them were all cap-tops and coat-shoulders, with boot toes popping out, popping away again. And Messkeletha hurried up, a snarl of red-streaked white hair above a trailing clump of knitted seaweed, and her feet were bare and blue, the toenails long as the teeth of some old neglected dog.
I went home to Mam. I did not care if she talked or wept of slept or hid from me under her seaweed; I wanted only to be in the room with her, to see the mound of her and know she was not drowned and naked before the Potshead populace.
I sat by the window and the sun now and again broke through and lit the sea silver, and lit the ceiling with silver reflections, and the wind outside was one breath and the sea, rushing, pausing, falling, was another, and Mam’s was another—though mostly I could only see it in her rise and fall, not hear it among all the others. And then there was my own breathing, which at first when I sat was all raggy and half into speech, and after a while was soothed, by Mam’s ongoingness, by the wind’s being outside and by the distance of the dirty sea and of the people round Aggie Bannister, to something that fit, that fell into peaceful pace, with all the other beings’. The furniture sat plain and hard in its place; the rug that I remembered her making—her twisting fingers with her singing face above—lay finished and in place by the bed, and her hair was a black salty tangle on the pillow, beyond the table where lay her shells, and her stones that meant something, and her sea-glass, red and blue and powdery white, smoothed to harmlessness, beaten to something beautiful by the sea, taken from the sea before it were quite beaten away into nothing but more sand.
I was not waiting for anything. I had forgot I was there; I had forgot, indeed, who I was. Being with Mam often made me this way—how much did it matter, after all, that I was crossed of land-man and sea-woman? Time could pass unwatched; it need not lead away from good times so that I yearned back, or push me towards a future that I dreaded. I could just lounge, and breathe like this, and the silver lights of water and winter could move above me.
There is labor in getting a boat through the sea. Either you pull it with oars, digging and hauling the water back, or you dance and scrabble with sails and sheets, begging the wind to cooperate with your work. Or some men engage with grease and metal, propellers, stinking fuel, and carve up the sea behind them with an engine.
Looking from that labor to the seals, you can tell they are magical. All they have is those slender hands, those fine feet like a limp plant hanging off their back end, like a tail. I have watched men struggle with the washed-up body of one of those, reduced to cutting it to pieces and moving it with hooks. They are such a stubborn, slippery weight. And yet they fly under water, and spin and sport and somersault, all the while we chug and beat and swear above.
First the mainland was a black fingernail’s-edge between the pale sea and the pale sky. I pulled Dad’s sleeve as he talked to Mr. Fisher, who was coming over to buy some tins and vegetables for the store.
“There, yes,” Dad said to me, and gazed at it a little, first to satisfy me and then because some thought had caught him about it.
“Don’t you be fooled, young Dan’l,” Fisher said around Dad’s front. “It may look like the land of promise, but Killy’s best, home is best.”
Dad squeezed my shoulder, invisibly to Fisher. I didn’t know whether he meant me to listen carefully to Fisher or ignore him and flee to mainland as soon as I ever could. Mam had combed my hair—I had watched in the mirror—so that it was two slick curves either side of a raw white parting. My whole head still felt scraped and chilled.
Slowly the land grew; slowly it rose and u
nrolled out of the horizon: two main rounded hills with others either side like attendants. The sea slopped and danced below us. The sky blued as the sun got up higher, and we began to see shapes on the land, forested parts and fielded, and the glint of roofs and roads, and the black cliffs with the dazzling break between them, where we would chug in and find safe harbor.
“We will catch the bus in to Knocknee,” said Dad. “It goes right from the pier.”
“So we’ll not see this town, so much?” I said, disappointed because it seemed so rich, with its warehouses along the front like a wall, with its several steeples, with its shining vehicles gliding along by the water.
“Can you not let the lad at the fleshpots of Cordlin Harbor, Mallet?” laughed Fisher. “Even to the ’stent of a raspberry lollipop at Mrs. Hedly’s shop?”
“We’ve business.” My dad shook his head and smiled. “Knocknee Market will have to be excitement enough for the boy.”
I did not see how anything could be more exciting than motoring in between the heads. Cordlin Harbor spread and spread out, serene and glossy after the tumbled sea, after the beating of the waves at the cliffs’ feet. Rank after rank of boats was moored here, alongside the piers and also punctuating the more open water, each little pleasure motor, each ketch and trawler, kissing its morning reflection. Cordlin Town lay as if spilled in the valley, thickening towards us in the bottom, thinning away to skerricks, a cottage here, a barn there, higher up the hills like drops of milk around porridge in a bowl. Windows winked at us and the great granaries and woolstores stood all barred windows and red-and-white brickwork, and I saw for the first time the humbleness of my home island, in contrast to this center of wealth and commerce.
“There’s our bus,” said Dad, and I noticed the marvelous thing, painted and polished, a crest on the side of it and a number-plate behind, and with people, Cordlin people, people who did this every day, already in it waiting, for our boat to come alongside, for Dad and me to walk up the gangplank with the other islanders, for us to climb on to the little glinting box of the bus, and pay our fares, and sit.
I held fast to Dad’s hand. Mr. Fisher clapped my shoulder, and the surprise of the blow made my heart jump hard in my chest, and ran across my scalp like a wind-gust through damp grass.
The trip to Knocknee was all events, one piled on the next so that my telling of them, which at first I tried to rehearse to Mam in my head, fast became garbled and then fell to silence. I hung onto the windowsill, grateful that Dad looked over me, and would see the important things, would collect any details that I might miss. Presently the overwhelming town with its too-many faces, its too many curtains and gates and window boxes, sank away and we were in fields, flying among fields on the back of our grinding, squashy-wheeled monster, and this I could bear more easily, fields being more like the sea in their emptiness, in their roundness and billowyness, Cordlin fields being very much like Killy fields, such as those were.
I turned to Dad: “Such a noisy way to get about.” I thought the engine must be right below our seat, it juddered at our bums so.
“It is indeed,” he said. “Noisier than a boat, and certainly noisier than a man’s own legs. But fast,” he added. “And fast is what we’re wanting, to reach inland and back in a day.”
And to see numerous people, not all of them friendly, and to ask them questions that made their eyes slide aside, made them shake their heads and turn away. I ran about after my striding dad, and the running, and the ways of people, eventually tired me. He put me on a sunny bench in the market square and bid me wait while he searched on.
Before long someone else was put there, at the other end of the bench, someone in skirts, with hair. I had got my breath by then, and when we had caught each other glancing several times, “I know what you are,” I said to her.
She stopped swinging her legs. She looked at me and narrowed her eyes, which were pale like a dad’s looking blue in this light but possibly green, possibly gray. “Well, what?”
“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.
“You are, aren’t you,” I said.
She looked me up and down. Her breath was white on the cold air. “Are you touched, or what?”
“I ant never seen one before,” I said.
She snorted.
“It’s true,” I said. “We don’t have them on Killy.”
Her face got more startled, and prettier. “You’re from Killy Isle?”
“I am,” I said. “My dad brang 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 been on that one island all your life?”
“I’ve been to St. Mark’s, and Ogben also. And on lots of sea.”
“I never seen the sea yet,” she said. “My mam and dad won’t take me. Say it sends men potty. Is your dad potty?”
“I don’t know,” I said, not sure what she meant, and not sure about Dad. None of these legs were recognizable as his, none of these hats, fuzzy-outlined against the sunshine.
“Are you potty?” said the girl. What a lot of hair she had, and it was not straight and silky like a mam’s. It looked as if, you take that band off, undo that ribbon, loose it from those plaits, it would stand straight out from her head, or possibly get up and walk right off her, or flame up and away, burn away in the sunlight, from the heat in its wires, from the combination of so many hot red strands together.
“I’m not potty.” I knew that much.
She laughed at me, but not all unkindly. “You might be anything,” she said, “you look so strange, with your great eyes.”
I turned my face 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?”
“I ant sure,” I said. “He 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, mebbe?”
“I don’t think so. He said he had to talk to someone.”
“Hmm,” she said considering. “Private, like, then, if he put you here. Was it a woman?”
“I think so,” I said, knowing for certain so, but not liking, somehow, to confirm what this girl might be thinking.
“Don’t you have womens there, on Killy? Is it all potty boys and men?”
“We have women,” I said, stung. “We have very beautiful women, all our mams.”
She narrowed her eyes at me again, and breathed more breath-smoke. “Ye-es,” she said and frowned. “That is your specialty out there, is it?”
“What?”
“I’m trying to remember. I’ve heard mams talking. There’s something about those Killy 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 got an unusual like you,” she said commonsensically, looking me up and down again.
I turned back to the crowd, to the sun, not knowing what to say to that. They’re usual for our town, I wanted to assert. Perfectly usual. But I could not say it. She would not find that convincing, and I did not want to feel more foreign than she had already made me.
We had come to bring home a girl, but not the girl from the market. This other girl we fetched from a smelly part of the town; there was some kind of offal piled and straggling in the drain outside her family’s house.
I thought her mam was her grandma, she had so few teeth and was so weathered. All the time they talked the woman 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 all of them, but not so clean as the market girl, and she had something of the twitchiness of the mam about her, and something a little sneaky, I thought. She sat there all pursed lips, her glance flicking from Dad to the mam to Dad, listening close and clearly understanding everything they exchanged, although to my ears it made no more sense than murmurings in someone’s sleep.
They were talking about money; the mam wanted some, and Dad was saying how he oughtn’t to have to pay, giving board and accommodations to this girl as he would. He seemed to be buying her, buying something she could do. Truth tell, she didn’t look capable of a lot, so skinny and gray-fleshed. Looked more like the sort to skip quick smart out of any job going.
Dad sighed. “You have eleven of her, missis. Ain’t you glad to get the burden of even the one of them off your shoulder?”
“This one eats mouse-rations,” snapped the mam. “Why don’t you take one of the big girls, my Gert or my Lowie, great heffers that they are?”
“You know why, Mrs. Callisher. This is the one with the touch on her. As can be taught up useful by our Messkeletha.” Ah, that was what he wanted. For when the oul witch died, of her awful coughing, or perhaps just the strength of her own evil.
“Useful for what? Useful for living on Killy, is what. Useful for catching and keeping mermaids. And stuck in that God-hole for the rest of her life, the amount she’ll be useful elsewhere.” She slid a glance at me. “I don’t want grandsons with tails,” she said. “Granddaughters with fins.”
“We will pay her a yearly journey here, how about that? Boat and carriage 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, missis. These terms is reasonable. I’m sure Trudle would be very content, a room of her own built special onto the oul-woman’s, and a livelihood.”
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010 Page 15