Perhaps Mam had meant I should wait down there off the drop, safely filled as I was with the breath of the pearl. Perhaps she’d waited all night in the kelp forest for me to prove myself, but I hadn’t trusted in her. I’d stayed up in the air, on the shore, and shown I had no faith. I hadn’t trusted her and that’s why she hadn’t come.
I can’t easily tell what happened next. I suppose it seemed to me that she was playing some trick I couldn’t win, or giving me some test I couldn’t pass, because I turned and shouted at the sea. ‘Where are you?’ The rumbling had passed away and there was just me and the sound of my voice. I was surprised how loud my voice could be. ‘It’s time,’ I called. ‘Mammy…it’s time.’ The sea took my words without any sign of hearing them. No arm rose above the waves, no slippery body whipped about me. No lonely voice called back.
She wasn’t coming.
It just wasn’t fair. I’d fought with Auntie Ushag for her. I’d never believed the stupid market stories about her. I’d stood up for her, and made everybody angry with me. Well, not Ma and Scully, but Ushag and most of Shipton. I wanted to lie down in the sea and pull the waves over me; to close my eyes against the speckled light and know no more of it all. My head hurt and without a warning I puked. A strong hand took my arm and another my waist and I fell into them. My head was swimming.
I felt myself carried back to shore, where I lay drenched and scoured — and empty. The bubbling inside had stopped. Ushag and Ulf leant over me, their faces full of trouble.
‘What were you doing down here?’ asked Ushag.
‘I was waiting,’ I told her.
‘Waiting? In the middle of an earthshake?’ She looked around at the ruined cliffs. ‘What for?’
‘I was waiting for Mam,’ I said. In spite of my aunt having seen the proof and now being a believer, I was still somewhat windy telling her. However, she didn’t fight me. She just sent Ulf for the jug and some dry clothes. And when he’d gone she took me in her arms and we rocked back and forth for a while. The mother seal had come back into the cove and was watching us, her head bobbing above the water like a dog’s and her whiskers drooping. I was too well-grown now to fit in my aunt’s lap, or any other part of her, but she managed somehow to hold me and slowly the sickness settled. She sighed from the heels of her feet up.
‘The thing about the Others is they’re not like us,’ she said finally.
‘I know that,’ I muttered, feeling prickly now. ‘Obviously.’
‘I don’t think you do.’ She sat by me in the wet sand and I couldn’t help noticing that the face on her was the face of another, altogether softer woman. Something in her had gone; something else had come. I couldn’t say what. ‘You think your mam will come for you. You think she misses you, like you miss her. You think she wants what you want.’
She was right, but it didn’t stop me feeling like slapping her. A person’s mind should stay their own and here she was telling me what I had in there.
‘What do I want, then, if you’re so all-knowing?’ I asked her.
‘You want to belong,’ she said quietly and looked sideways at me with her black eyes like a gull. For some reason I felt shamed by that sharp glance. ‘It’s natural to us,’ she added.
I saw where she was headed. ‘But not natural to them?’
She was thoughtful. ‘No, I don’t think so. They’re wild, see, not trained like dogs…or horses…or us for that matter. We think they’re something to do with us. We put them in stories…but they’re our stories, not theirs. They’ve never even heard them.’
I didn’t know what to believe. ‘So the stories are wrong?’
‘Well, not wrong exactly,’ she said, thinking deeply. ‘But surely mistaken about the nature of the Others. It seems foolish to blame them for not fitting in with our stories.’
Now I was truly all at sea. ‘But Mam’s human. Part-human, anyway.’
‘When the Otherness in a person is forced out into the open, there’s no putting it back.’ She sighed and I thought, for a person who two days ago was nothing but scornful of ‘all that earwig’, she seemed to know a lot about it now.
‘But she’s my mother,’ I said.
She knew what I meant; mothers, human or otherwise, should be there — not cold-bloodedly swanning about in the sea. Mothers should want to be with their children. They should not leave them to grow up all anyhow. I pointed into the cove. ‘Even the seals know about mothers.’
‘Well, yes, but she’s not a seal, is she? And she’s not a mother anymore, Neenie. She’s forgotten.’ Strained now by the long conversation, Auntie Ushag used my child-name. ‘She’s not my sister. She’s not your mother. She’s not a woman; she’s not even human. From the moment she went over, we lost her just as surely as if she’d died. They do not live for our benefit. They belong to Themselves.’
I remembered the rolling otter and its sweet-looking paws — dashing that urchin with the rock and the blood staining the water. I remembered the jewel-red crab — dragging that scavenged flesh into the sea-grass. I’d found them comical, and pretty, but they were their own creatures too, just as my aunt said, and busy with the job of living. They probably didn’t even see me. I remembered the way the cave spiders and suchlike scurried to hide from me in the rocks.
They were not there for us. They had their own mysterious life living inside them. Their world was not my world, their story not mine; they had otter thoughts in an otter world; red crab thoughts in a red crab world. Thinking about it made me light-headed.
‘I don’t know how a person gets to turn fully Otherwise,’ Auntie Ushag went on. ‘Perhaps they have to have the blood to begin with, and then a shock pushes them over. That’s how I see it, anyway. That’s how it was for Ven. And I don’t know how much they remember from before. We could talk of that forever, but the truth is, once a person’s gone over they can’t come back…they must live the Other life or die.’
‘But what about the merrow-wives?’ I asked. ‘They come in from their Other lives and live a human life. With children,’ I added. ‘They live happily-ever-after. Everybody says.’
‘Do they?’ she asked right back at me, sharp. ‘Have you truly listened to those stories?’
I didn’t know what to say then and, as Ulf returned with the warmed jug, my aunt finished up. ‘What we do know is that your mam still lives, somewhere in the sea, and that by itself is something to be drinking to, eh?’
I tried to feel happy for it as Ushag plainly did and I managed a small smile.
‘To Ven,’ she toasted. We each took a swig in turn, and the spice filled my belly with heat. ‘But, Neen, now it’s time.’
Suddenly I was cold in spite of the warm mug. It’s what Mam had said.
‘Time for what?’ I asked.
‘Time to stop waiting,’ she told me. ‘Ven belongs to the Otherworld now.’ She turned to face the cliff and looked up toward the yard. ‘And you belong to this one,’ she said to the rock and the path. ‘You belong to the cove — and to me. You belong to your mam’s blood, to our blood, but mostly you belong to yourself…and to what will come.’ With that she started up the sand toward the cliff-path and home.
There’d been no pearl, I knew that now. It had all been a dream in a fever at wind-rise. That’s what I got for swimming in tunnels of ice-water and then spending a whole afternoon dripping wet in cold caves. Ulf put a rug around my shoulders.
‘Orraht, Nin? Goð pika,’ he said, his big freckly face all bothered and pink. He really was the sort of person you could get very fond of. I traced the merrow skin-picture on the back of his broad hand.
‘Sea-girl,’ I muttered to myself.
Ulf wrinkled up his brow like he didn’t know what I was saying. I thought he was suffering a Deafness now, on top of everything else.
‘Sea-girl,’ I bawled into his ear, and pointed at the skin-picture.
‘Nei,’ he said. ‘Nei.’ No. He waved his hand toward the water. ‘Sea-girl.’ Ulf swept the mother seal a deep b
ow. ‘Denk-yoo, sea-girl. Denk-yoo.’ She took absolutely no notice of him.
Chapter Fifteen
Moulting
AUNTIE USHAG HAD A WHOLE NEW FACE on her. She kept giving me the knowing eye, and petting me whenever she passed, and she was talkative too. In fact, she was downright chatty. She went on about the eaves-warblers in the roof, the longtails breeding in the stores, and the seals moulting in the cove, and cheerfully too like these ordinary things were marvels. Flashing from one matter to the next, she would change heading like a school of sprats. She’d never talked about the weather before but now she seemed tickled pink just to have some.
‘I’ve never known the sun to have such heat in it,’ she said, which by any measure is a foolish thing to say. What else was it going to have in it? She said things that could be plainly seen by anybody with sense, such as it being a bright morning, or that I was growing. She even sang, and tried to make me sing with her. Once she danced a jig around the steaming pot on the fire, raising ashes and dust that brought on coughing and more laughing. She was changed. She was happy. I didn’t like it.
I kept trying to catch Ulf’s eye but he was too busy watching this new singing, dancing Ushag and it was plain he didn’t know what to make of it. She’d been his prickly nurse, grumbling and growling over the cures; she’d been his grave and silent friend, and now here she was singing and laughing and wearing hats from the wreck-trunk to get a laugh. He watched her like sailors watch the sky. And he fetched and carried for her, as I did.
My aunt had set her mind to a feast with the Slevins to mark the finding of the merrow-bones. All morning she’d been roasting and steeping and the house was all steam and smoke. She moved about in it, tasting and spitting, stirring and spicing, like the meat in her own broth. Being a busy sort of person herself and liking it, she naturally tried her best to give us a share of that pleasure too and set us to work. Already I’d scrubbed the steps, Ulf had chopped more wood than we’d use in a month in the heat, and we both had searched the yard and plots, the orchard and even up toward the wood, for the eggs our hens lay wherever they like. Now, I’d had enough.
I couldn’t stand it anymore. Taking a sack I said I’d go gather any useful bits of the seal-moult on the shore, and when Ushag said she’d come with me and help, I told her not to. I said she was never going to get all that meat and drink done by sunset anyway, and that set her to proving me wrong. Once she was busy again, I could creep away. I didn’t know why I wasn’t happy. I should have been.
All summer I’d known the truth about the merrows, hadn’t I? And wasn’t this what I’d longed for; to be proved right about Mam, for my aunt to believe me and to have the wit to change her mind? Well, now I was right and Ushag did believe, so why wasn’t I content? Auntie Ushag’s change of mind hadn’t changed my humour. In fact I was even darker in my heart. What was the matter with me?
Everything was changed but not as I’d expected. Since yesterday’s sickness I’d started to feel that I knew something else that was important, but I couldn’t put a pin in it. Whatever it was, it slid around inside my head. Every time I tried to look at it straight, it would change shape or slip away. If I could just calm myself I could winkle it out; I could know what this new thing was.
Along with Ushag, Marrey Cove was changed, too. It had a new face of caves and rubble. Black sand from the top of the cliff was now dirtying the sand at its base, and it was different in other ways too. There’d been some sort of monstrous tide in the night, in spite of it being the wrong moon for such things. The high-water mark was right up at the cliff itself, marked by a wall of thick and tangled weed. I had to climb over it to get down to the sea and the stench was like Shipton harbour at the end of a summer market.
It looked like a slaughter on the sand, with some creatures gaping their jaws and flapping now-and-then and others not moving at all. There were all the common fish and crabs but in uncommon numbers; pollack, dogfish, tope and conger wrecked on the sand and already greening in the sun. There were creatures I’d never seen, such as a tiny thing like a shrunken kraken whose eyes were half its body, and a sort of fish like a lump of wood and with a bucket-mouth as big as its whole head and full of needle-teeth. There was one of these with a smaller one of its kind stuck to its side through some type of pipe. There were giant turtles and washed-up at the end of the cove, right at the waterline, there was a whale.
It was a terrible thing to see them all stranded like that. I felt as I did when Auntie Ushag skinned rabbits, pulling them wholly out of their hides in one go and throwing their small, bare bodies into a basin at her feet. I always wanted to slip their coats back on and see them scut away back to the hills and hollows, living again. Soft feelings butter no parsnips, my aunt would say in those days watching me battle between my sympathy and my hunger. Of course, then the stew would come and those feelings would fade with good smells and a grumbling belly. I didn’t know what she would say now, before such waste.
I moved around the broken cove gathering bits of the moult. Much of the hide had been torn in last night’s violent tide, but there were still some strips that would be useful enough. Following the waterline, I found the mother seal sheltering in a nest of rock in the cliff’s shadow. Her fur was hanging from her in festoons, and the hind-skin was sore and angry-looking. I didn’t see her pup. She didn’t move away, only lay gazing at me with big, black eyes, as I fetched from by her side a sizeable piece of her own speckled hide.
That seal was so lazy and unafraid there, and I felt like I’d never rest again. At that moment, her peaceful harbour seemed to me the most desirable thing in the world. To have somewhere safe and right to call home, to be a seal among seals, and to be undisturbed by the presence of those who are otherwise; it seemed an impossible thing. I was sick of being this split thing, a human tormented by all the stories of her kind. I lay down in the cool sand near the seal and listened to her breathing.
Behind us the caves opened into the cliff. An onshore breeze picked up and gently blew the moult and flotsam around. I heard a whistling among the rocky halls, and then a hollow hum, and as I listened it grew into a low song. The caves were singing. I lay there listening and patting my hands into the still damp sand. I squeezed handfuls of the sand and when I opened them, saw the shape and lines of my own fist marked there. It calmed me and I thought perhaps now I could pin that slippery new thought of mine.
I sat up and felt the breeze strengthen. All around me were my hand-marks in the damp sand. As the cave-song waxed and waned, and caught now in the lazy humour of the seal I traced around my own hand-marks, and then idly I added to them. I turned them into anemone gardens, and tiny kraken. I turned them into stars, and starfish. I turned them into families of five, all with a thumb-mother. I drew webs between some fingers, and claws at the tips of others. Close by, the seal snorted and rolled onto her side to watch me.
Then, behind the wall of weed, I saw an odd fish.
I’d thought it was another rock, with its rough shape and lumpy skin. Its head was huge and flat like a grindstone, and it had tiny legs and arms just as if it were natural for some fish to do so. Its tail had been torn off somewhere, but the rest was so big and fresh I couldn’t leave it there for the gulls. The broth we made from it would feed us for a week. I crammed it into the sack with the moult.
The breeze that had picked up now dropped away, as is always the way these days. Sometimes I’d give anything just to feel a good wet wind and a fall of cold rain. I vowed to welcome the winter-hag this year without one whinge about ice or gales. Ushag would have a new wet-cloak made from the seal’s cast-offs, but I planned to go blue-toed and goose-pimpled right up until Christmas. It’s strange how in the middle of a hot spell you can forget what it feels like to be cold.
As I hefted the stinking sack back through the mazy rocks, I passed where I’d been sitting. My hand-marks stood out in the clear lines and shadows of summery midday. I couldn’t help noticing that the webbed ones were just like those in the
cave of hands. In a moment, the slippery thought that had been tormenting me stopped long enough to grasp — and my calm was gone.
What if?
What if the wind in the cliffs could have sung the merrow-song? What if the webbed hands could have been drawn there by some Old-one drawing a story, or just doodling like I had been? I raised my eyes to meet those of the mother seal. She nosed at the air and barked. Without warning her pup, now almost fully grown, appeared at my side. He pushed past me on his way to her and both creatures made sounds of welcome. I felt the old pain on the matter of mothers and children, but this time I was dry-eyed. There were more important things to think about.
What if the merrow-bones weren’t?
In some tricky reversal, whereas before I had been filled right up with knowledge now I was brimful with doubt. That slippery thought had upturned everything. I had believed there were no other explanations for all I’d found but with a doom-filled upside-down feeling, now I saw nothing but other explanations for everything. Like all those rotting sea-things in the wall of weed, my proof was falling apart.
On the way back, I was plagued by Auntie Ushag’s shining, we-share-a-secret face and her glad eyes, haunted by her petting and singing and laughter. I tipped that odd fish back into the piles of weed. I didn’t know what I knew anymore and that was a fact.
Chapter Sixteen
Undertow
THE SUN WAS NOW STRAIGHT overhead. If I didn’t know better I’d have sworn the world and it were drawing closer. Like the full moon, it almost filled one half of the sky and blazed so that I couldn’t even look at it sideways. I just felt it hanging there behind me, dripping heat like candle-wax down my neck as I walked. It had no pity and under its rays all the dead of last night’s great tide had shrivelled to black guts and silvery-fine fish-leather. The stink off them seemed to walk abroad like it was its own creature, with weight and a will of its own. It followed me along the shore poking me in the nose and mouth, tickling my throat with its stenchy fingers until I had to cover my face.
Secrets of Carrick: Merrow Page 12