Secrets of Carrick: Merrow

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  Scully turned his face to me and his eyes looked straight into mine, milky in the candlelight and amused.

  ‘My mother leaves nothing to chance,’ he said. ‘And that’s a simple fact.’

  Chapter Three

  Roundhouse

  ‘STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!’ Auntie Ushag slopped the rag around in the bowl, spilling both water and wort into the dust of our yard. ‘What a face,’ she muttered.

  I lowered my eyes and watched the drops drying in the heat as she turned her back to me and remixed the cure. Dust and leaves rose in tiny spirals and settled again without a sign of having moved. I didn’t dare look up. We had a plague of irritableness in the yard.

  Looking away toward the cliff, I tried to arrange my face. I didn’t know what she meant by like that. I tried out a little smile but I could feel it dying before I could lift my head. I tried widening my eyes in a show of interestedness, but my aunt just took one look at me and sighed. Behind me Bo skittered around the yard pushing her nose into everything, eventually pushing her head under my arm and licking my face with her rough, milky tongue. I was thankful to have something friendly to look at. Ushag wrung out the rag and pressed the cure to my skin. Bo licked at that too but my aunt slapped her on the shoulder and said in a piercing way, ‘Wheesh! Gerchaaa!’ and Bo scarpered.

  Summer had brought on my Scale. It starts with a Heat, followed by a Prickle, and then the Reddening sets in. My forearms often look like sizeable redfish when it comes on, and this time I’d been scratching so hard as to bring blood. Ushag said I was too old to be so weak-willed but still she tended me, as she always has. My aunt has a gift for such things, and an uncommon sickness or rash was then the only thing that could make her smile.

  This Scale has always been somewhat of a mystery, at first being put down to an overheating of my already warm humours, and then to an overabundance of fish in my diet, and finally to an unhealthy attachment to the sea in my mother. The cures have been many and none have yet rid me of it. I’ve been rubbed daily with boiled pearlwort, which turns to a disgusting sort of jelly, and fed for months on nothing but pig-meat and clover, but the worst cure was being kept from the sea. Ushag said I needed to clear my mind of salt and scales and maybe my skin would clear too.

  So, for two weeks last summer my aunt gave me work only around the house and yard, and up at the hives and orchard, and I was an exile from the cove. It had always been my nature to be easy so I did as she said, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  I dragged myself around the house for a week with my body leaking its liveliness, and the world growing greyer with each day. I sorted the skins, saving only those that were still whole enough to work. Decayed herbs, corrupted salt-fish and meat, and rotted bottom-of-the-basket apples and onions were all I knew for seven days as I sorted out our stores. There were roots growing through the roof, and dangling into the hanging meats, that needed trimming. I had nightmares of damp rags and buckets, and I daydreamed of being allowed to collect even stinking weed and razor-shells again if it meant I could go to the shore.

  All the bleached timber and rusted bolts we’d hoarded from the beach, where bad weather always lands us useful goods, were finally put to use. Some of it had been sitting there from the time before my birth. We patched and rebuilt some of the wall around the door. We made a new stall in the cow-byre for Bo. We even built me a new bed as I’d grown too long for the other one. Finally we sewed together the rabbit-and-hare skins I’d saved from ruin and made a fine winter rug.

  At last, our newly swept and washed house was done. I’d never been anywhere so clean. Ushag and I stood among the baskets of sweet apples and crisp onions, and looked into the smoky roof where hung all that fresh green kale, the sharp herbs and hooks of dried fish — and we were both silenced, entirely. It was unsettling, almost unnatural.

  It was stranger still because, I discovered that week, my aunt had a secret. Over the years she had gathered not only useful, but beautiful, things from the wreckage that turned up on our beach. The trunk that held it all sat in its dark corner and we stacked firewood on it. During that great house-scouring, from curiosity I prised it open. It held heavy, stitched fabrics that we could have hung at wind-rise to keep the warm inside. There were shining metal platters and jugs we could have eaten from instead of our ordinary trenchers. There were gold hoops such as some women in the towns wear in their ears. There were even two twisting silver candlesticks, but we never used any of it. My aunt had never mentioned the trunk.

  Staying away from the sea for a week didn’t help my skin. The Scale neither spread, nor did it go away. At night I lay awake and listened miserably for the waves, and all day I sniffed sadly at the salty air while I worked, until finally Ushag couldn’t bear me any longer. One morning, one early morning of sunbeams and motes, she just said ‘Go!’ and I went before she could change her mind. My Scale is just a part of me now, and we live with it.

  It took weeks for the house to regain its homely air once more, and neither of us slept well again until it did. A strange smell of nothing comes off such cleanness and it freezes up the nose and throat. I sneezed for days. Who knows what unhealthy humours rise in all that emptiness and shine? At last, though it took the whole winter, we were settled back into chaff-dust and pollen once more.

  Ushag put the cloth to my arm and I had to look somewhere, anywhere but at her, so I watched as the cure ran over my peeling skin and back into the bowl. I watched closely at first to head off my aunt from being irritated by my face and to make her think I was interested in the cure, but then because another notion occurred to me. When I looked closely and really saw it, the fact is that Scale of mine could be scales.

  Real scales.

  Fish scales.

  They looked just like them.

  They could be the outward sign of my true self, I thought while studying them. They could be a sign from my blood, the Marrey blood writing itself on the pages of my skin. I didn’t know if such things were possible but I supposed that if my aunt were able to read a look on my face I didn’t even know I had — then there could easily be other secrets inside a person’s body. It didn’t seem any less likely than murders or madness, or running away from your own child just because a husband dies.

  When I first conceived the thought I felt as I do on the dawn sand, its crust perfect, before I take the first step of a brand-new day. I felt as though suddenly my life made sense; all the motley stories about my mother, the sea and me formed into a perfect circle. Without thinking, I raised my eyes to my aunt’s and straightway she saw my face and the new thing in it; she said, ‘What?’

  ‘In town they say Pa married a merrow,’ I said as simply as I could. I didn’t ask her if it was true, I just said it, and quietly too. I wanted her to talk to me and she wouldn’t if I seemed to be questioning her.

  ‘I know.’ She squeezed the compress and we both watched the cure flow. ‘They mean he drowned.’

  ‘They say that Mam went after him.’

  ‘I know that too.’ She lifted my arm and picked at the tough, red skin. It didn’t really hurt, it just felt tender. ‘They mean they don’t know what happened to her.’

  I felt myself grow hot. ‘Well, why don’t they say what they mean then?’

  My aunt shook her head. ‘That I don’t know. Maybe they just enjoy telling stories.’ She wrapped my whole arm in a cloth. ‘Maybe it makes the hard things easier.’

  I suddenly wanted Ushag to tell me, as she did when I was little, that our family had a simple story. I wanted her to tell me that we were ordinary people and, like it or not, ordinary people were born and had children and died. They came and they went away. I wanted her to tell me and I wanted to believe her again.

  ‘Tell me.’ I picked at my hands and peeled off one perfect scale. I held it up in the light, a tiny silver flake.

  ‘You’re getting too big for all this.’ My aunt crossed her arms and looked at me. ‘I’ve told you a hundred times.’

  ‘On
e more time.’ If it hadn’t been for the Scale I don’t think she’d have given in. As it was, she was distracted by tending it and began to speak. Her sing-song tone told me she would tell it and tell it all, as she used to.

  ‘It’s a simple fact that Colm Breda died strong and dutiful while fishing in his own waters from his own boat. There’s many worse ways of dying. What of those who die alone in strange seas? Or those bound by barbarians and heathens and burnt far from home? What of those hanged, or made to swallow poison, or worse?’

  I’d never been able to imagine what might be worse, but my aunt’s list of these possible ways to die somehow managed to make my own father’s death seem a reasonable, almost pleasant thing.

  ‘People, still living and known to be decent, truthful folk, found his coracle washed up by Strangers’ Croft, empty of line and bait and man. His woollen had washed up around at Merton and we recognised by its pattern of Breda coils and knots, which is the usual manner we know any of the drowned. Faces are the first to be eaten in the sea.

  ‘Not uncommon,’ said Ushag. ‘Not very exciting. That’s how life can be, and usually is for most of us. Your father was not a hero or a legend. He was a fisherman and he died by the sea. It was all as it should have been.’ She stopped talking and placed my hands in the bowl. She was silent for such a time that I thought she’d finished.

  ‘And Mam?’ I prompted her.

  ‘Again?’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘This is the last time,’ my aunt told me. ‘I don’t want to talk about it again after this.’ She raised her eyebrows at me. I nodded. She dropped her eyes and began talking again. Her words ran together and the sing-song tone flattened.

  ‘My sister married for love. He was the youngest of the Breda boys from out at Merton and he came to live out here with us after they wed. The Bredas had plenty of sons but us Marreys had been all girls, six in my generation. We lost two sisters before they were weaned, one more to a Hunger and one to the travelling nuns. By the time Ven married Colm and brought him home, there was only our father and her and me left.’

  I did something I’d never done — I interrupted the story.

  ‘What was she like?’ I asked.

  ‘She was nearly fifteen.’ Ushag gave me a stony look. ‘I was nearly twelve. Within a few months my father died and you were born. We three were happy together.

  ‘Then one day your pa went out after pout and dab and he didn’t come back. At first, Ven waited, day after day and all day, at the harbour but Colm never came. After a few weeks, she took to sleeping day after day, all day, and took against talking. She wouldn’t listen to anyone. She just slept and shrank to a twig.

  ‘After they fetched his woollen to her and there was no pretending left, she took to taking her misery out walking. She walked it for whole days, only coming in at dark. Then days and nights would pass. They even saw her in the south, all over Shipton-Cronk and up the moaney and even around Strangers’ Croft. Scully’s ma was always bringing her home. She used to turn up at their place, and they’d let her just sit inside until she’d done. It was kind of them.’

  I was excited to be able to offer something more to the story. ‘She helped during Ma’s troubles,’ I said.

  ‘What troubles would they be?’ Ushag dried my hands and smeared them in red, fishy jelly.

  ‘The Others took all her children and only Scully came back but he came back blind from what he’d seen there and Themselves gave him the Othersight to make up for it and Ma says he sees things we don’t, and Ma said Mam could just sit quiet like no one she’s ever known.’ I said in a rush, and then asked again, ‘What was she like?’ I asked like it was nothing to me if I got an answer or not.

  ‘Well, she didn’t just sit here with us, did she? Not through our troubles.’ My aunt began folding up her rags and boxing the roots and bark and suchlike. Her face was such as I couldn’t read it, but the nose on her seemed to have been sharpened, and her lips were a line as she went on with her story.

  ‘One day your mother just kept walking and she never came home again. I don’t know where she went but she left the island. She must have because she’s not here, is she?

  ‘Your mother just left out of a broken-heart,’ she told me. ‘Sometimes it’s like that. She left because she couldn’t stay. You were nearly three. She was nearly seventeen. I was nearly fourteen. And that was that.’

  All those years stretched away behind us but I couldn’t remember them. Once there had been the four of us in the roundhouse and yard. Now there were two and only one of us knew how it had happened.

  With everybody gone, Auntie Ushag had taken over managing the place all by herself. She learnt its plots and orchard, its smoking and salting, and its dairy, and she never let the fire in the hearth die. She taught me well. We worked together at first, and when I was ready I did it alone. We fished the cove, and we foraged and gathered along the shore and in the woods. We grew greens, and tended to the herbs and honey that grow wild all around us. Eventually, we bartered enough to achieve a cow and Breck came to the yard. Then Breck was covered and she had Bo, and here we were; four of us again.

  My aunt never complained, though she had reason sometimes, and she rarely smiled, though she had reason for that too. She never said I should be grateful. Which was good because I wasn’t. This day I could smell the lies off Auntie Ushag, as strong as wild garlic. My face hardened against her, and she put her hands on her hips and gazed up into the sky. I felt a longing to poke her.

  ‘Mam might come home.’ I watched my aunt closely. ‘You don’t really know where she went. You said so yourself.’

  ‘No, but I’m sure it wasn’t to the merrows and water-sprites, Neen.’ Ushag was cold-voiced and ugly with it. She only dragged my name out to scorn me. ‘I wish she would come back. It’s all very well for her.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It means I’m it for you and I wish you’d stop it. Ven is gone and I am still here. Just leave it be.’

  I watched her as she gathered together the rags and bark and leaves into their box, and emptied the bowl over the wall. She seemed sharpened into all elbows, knees and other bones. There didn’t seem to be any warm flesh to her anymore. She was like bones under a slim, rough cover. Without even looking at me she snapped again, ‘Stop looking at me like that’ and went toward the house.

  As she passed she whispered, ‘She was just like you.’

  Chapter Four

  Merrow

  MY OWN SNEEZING WOKE ME LATE. Too hot even to lie there napping until Ushag came to rouse me, and I sat up and leant back onto the cool stone wall. In the glare beyond our front door a hen was taking its dust bath, wings outspread and body rising and settling. I closed my eyes and listened.

  Nothing. Only the hens and their drawn-out, hot-day calls that sounds like cows and which a baffled Bo sometimes answers. No wind. No cloud. It was to be another blue day, another day when the sky ate everything. I would need to find shade. The beach is too bright on these days. I forced myself up and out. As I passed into the blaze, something small and dark fell at my feet. I bent to see. It was an eaves-warbler, still breathing but senseless. I pushed it into the wall-shadow with my toes.

  I shuffled close-eyed to the cow-byre, where straightways my aunt was face-to-face with me.

  ‘The birds are fainting,’ I told her. To anyone else it would’ve been the opening of a conversation, but not my aunt.

  ‘Up at last,’ was what she said. In her wide-brimmed basket-hat and long shift I thought she looked like a mushroom. I picked up the bucket and drank, the milk coating my mouth and only setting up another sort of thirst.

  ‘You look like a mushroom.’ With surprise, I heard myself saying it out loud. It was like I was somebody else speaking.

  Auntie Ushag made a show of ignoring me, but I knew she’d heard. She leant against the door watching me. ‘And you look like a girl who needs a job,’ she said as I buried my face in Bo’s neck. ‘
I know. I have just the thing for such a day. You should go up the woods.’ I shrugged. She threw the bucket to me and I was forced to catch it. ‘We need honey,’ she said and added, sugar-sweet, ‘Don’t get sticky.’

  Ma told me a story about the Little Brothers’ hell once, but it had too much hitting and burning for my taste. I like stories with a mystery and some comical talk. Also, their hell seemed nothing to do with me.

  My hell is the sort of place in which everything is always faintly sticky. It moves with you, travelling from everything to your fingers, to your hands, and from there to your face and neck, even to your hair, until every part of you and of the place is sticky. Moving it from place to place, part to part, doesn’t diminish the stickiness one jot. Getting honey from wild bees is like that. You find it between your fingers days later, in your ears, and once I found it between my toes. There’s always more of it to spread around. My aunt walked backwards into the sunlight, smirking. She knew very well about my hell.

  I dunked myself head first in the water-barrel and stuffed fistfuls of almonds and hazels and yellow cheese into my bag. My head was full of the things I would’ve liked to say to Ushag, and my heart grumbled darkly. The only brightness lay in the promise of the cool shade of the grove of bees.

  I dragged my feet through the dry yard, past my aunt stooping among the wilting greens, and beyond the wall with its vines and lizards. I didn’t take my hat and I knew she saw that I didn’t. I also didn’t take a cover for the bucket, or my net and gloves. Bitterness was in my belly, like nettles. Beyond the orchard, our cropping trees give way to alder, elm, ash and rowan, to hawthorn and pine, and toadstools in fall. Scully’s Ma would have it that every mound, tree and pond in the wild groves is an opening to the Otherworld, and every clearing one of their feasting places. I looked but just saw sunlight among the green leaves, and hard black shadows on the ground.