by Kirsty Logan
Mara didn’t think that she and Pearl and Islay constituted a lot of people, but the spiky feeling in her belly was back, and the smell of the rotten pear was caught in her nose, and she wanted to seize her mother and hoist her onto her shoulder and swim with her to the mainland before the island swallowed her up forever.
‘I know it’s hard,’ said Mara, ‘being here without Dad.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Peter is here.’
Mara couldn’t help it: she looked around the empty room.
‘Not here here! I’m not a crazy person, Mara. He’s up on the cliff. He hasn’t gone anywhere.’
To Pearl, listening outside the kitchen door, it seemed that those two things – he’s up on the cliff; he hasn’t gone anywhere – were opposites. In her mind, going up to the cliff meant going away forever. After you’d gone up to the cliff, you weren’t actually on the cliff any more, because you weren’t there. Your body was stone and your brain was stone and the rest of you was – well, she didn’t know, but not there.
To Mara, though, Peter had been on the island, and he was still on the island, and he would be forever on the island. She didn’t agree with Signe – she was afraid of what Signe was saying, because while her dad was still on the island he certainly didn’t need a place set for him at dinner, and there weren’t lots of people in the house, and anyway the house – the whole island – was a ramshackle pit of junk that was turning them all to stone.
‘Silly me! I didn’t leave the corkscrew anywhere after all.’ Pearl, having heard several seconds of silence through the gap in the door, breezed back into the kitchen. ‘It was here in the drawer all along!’ She brandished it unnecessarily.
‘Right,’ said Mara. ‘Right. Let’s …’
And Pearl poured the wine, and Mara served the dinner, and Signe pushed the food around on her plate, and they all said lots of things without saying anything, and after that Mara washed the dishes and Pearl dried them, and Signe sipped coffee and looked at the window without seeing through it, and later still they all went upstairs and lay sleepless in their cold beds, and the generator hummed and the trees crept closer and the mice scratched hectic in the walls and the persistent tide rolled in and in and in.
Pokey-hat
THEIR FIRST SUMMER on the island, Peter took Mara out for an ice-cream sundae. The harbour cafe didn’t usually serve such exotic fare – it was pots of tea and tuna sandwiches, and perhaps a cherry scone if you were very lucky and Angela the owner was feeling flamboyant. But it was summer, and summer meant tourists, and tourists meant money – and tuna sandwiches weren’t going to cut it with mainland folk. To avoid wasps, Peter and Mara took a table inside. Mara’s elbows stuck to the plastic tablecloth and the chair back was broken, but Peter didn’t care and Mara didn’t notice. She only had eyes for the new picture menu propped between the salt and pepper: lusciously lit photos of plastic-looking sundaes, bright as new toys, unmelted as an iceberg.
After much deliberation Mara chose butterscotch with toasted nuts, whipped cream, and a glacé cherry on top. When the waitress brought it over, it was even better than she’d hoped: the perfect dream of a sundae, exactly like the photo. She beamed at Peter – who seemed happy with his cup of tea – and reached for her spoon. She could almost taste the ice cream melting on her tongue.
‘Look, Mara!’ Peter pointed out of the window. Mara forgot all about her spoon and felt her eyes open just as wide.
Trotting past the cafe, through the brightly scattered tourists, came the most beautiful horse that Mara had ever seen. Part of her recognised that it was only Peggy, Chris the carpenter’s brown mare. Peggy spent her days snorting and whisking her tail up in the top field, kept company by a surly Shetland pony, both refusing to accept anything but the sweetest new grass no matter how flat you held your hand and how loud you clucked your tongue.
But the other part of her knew this was something more. It was Peggy the brown mare, but also it was not. This horse was perfect, like an illustration from the fairy-tale book, a picture framed in curlicues. Her braided mane shone like the sun on the sea. Her coat, instead of a chalky dirt-brown, was brushed to a glossy mahogany. Rows of tiny silver bells were set along her bridle, shivering a chime with each delicate trot. She even wore a crown of daisies – a touch which, when Mara thought about the event later, she must have imagined.
Tourist children flocked to the horse, their sticky hands holding up sugar cubes taken from the cafe tables. Chris the carpenter, who Mara had just noticed leading the horse by a black silk rope, brought her to a halt. The horse stretched her pink-brown lips and disappeared the sugar cubes.
Chris the carpenter led the horse in a neat dance, trotting figure eights between the children, the bells chiming. Horses couldn’t smile, Mara knew, but this horse was definitely smiling. Finally the horse seemed to tire of her audience. Raising her gleaming head, she set her sights on the horizon. Off she trotted, and Chris the carpenter with her. The children turned back to their tasks of chase and hide-and-seek and ripping up daisies.
Mara turned back and reached for her spoon. But when she looked at her sundae, it was gone. In its place was a formless, liquid mess studded with pale flakes of nuts.
She knew that it was the same as before. When the waitress first brought it over, it had looked solid, but the ice cream would have melted in her mouth and ended up looking like this. She knew that if she just spooned it up, it would taste fine: the memory of a sundae rather than the dream, but still good. She pushed the bowl aside. It was not what she wanted. She would rather have nothing at all.
Dreich
MARA’S BED NO longer felt empty without Pearl. She liked the way that when she stretched out her legs, the sheets were so cold that they felt damp. Her toes were always numb, the tips white.
Midnight came, and with it Pearl. Mara opened her arms and let her in. This single bed was just big enough for Mara; now, with Pearl added, it felt claustrophobic, choking. Above them, the scrabble of birds’ feet as they pecked at insects in the mossy roof. Every now and then came a screech, a scrape, as they tried to force their beaks into the edges of the windowpane to get at the wriggling things that lived in the decaying wood frames.
‘I miss you, Mara.’
‘I’m here. I’m with you every day.’
‘You’re not here. Ever since we came back, it’s like we’re never in the same place. Even when we’re in the same room. Even when we’re –’ Pearl smoothed the covers down, pulling at a loose thread. ‘Even when we’re in bed together.’
Outside, the steady throb of the generator. In the hallway, the light flickered.
‘We’re not like we were,’ said Pearl.
‘We can’t be,’ said Mara. ‘Because things aren’t like they were. It’s too complicated. We don’t fit in the real world.’
‘Why is this the real world? Why only the island, and not the rest of it?’
‘We fight,’ said Mara.
‘Everyone fights. You think people shouldn’t fight? It’s normal, Mara. We’re normal. We are a normal fucking couple who have fucking fights and fuck to make up after, okay?’
Pearl reached for her, and Mara let her. Her cheeks were damp and salty with tears.
Afterwards, Mara lay beside her, her whole body beating a fast pulse. Pearl, cradled in her arms, already drifting into the depths of sleep.
Pearl, her voice sleep-drowsy, said: ‘I don’t think we should stay here much longer. It’s not good for you. There’s magic here and it’s dark as tar. It sticks.’
How strange Pearl was. How mythical. At first Mara had thought Pearl, with her one blue eye and one brown, was a mix of sea and land. But she saw now that that wasn’t true. The blue-green veins twisting through her wrists. The cool, heavy silk of her hair. Each hand the complex movement of tiny bones. The salt of her kiss. Pearl was the sea, through and through. Always changing, never staying.
Since coming back to the island, Mara’s sleep was light and fleeting. She was up
with the dawn, shuffling downstairs to put the kettle on. She’d been reading more of the fairy-tale book. There were more stories about selkies, and ones about mermaids too. Some of the phrases and images felt familiar, like something she remembered from long ago. Signe must have read the stories when Mara was small, and although her conscious mind forgot it, the tiny beating heart of the tale stayed there inside her until she needed it. And she needed it now – she felt it throbbing inside her, louder each day.
One story was called ‘The Mermaid’s Revenge’, and it went like this:
There was a grand house, and inside it lived a wealthy couple, and outside it was a large black rock. The rock was worn smooth by the generations of mermaids who slid up on it to sing every night. The last mermaid was as vengeful as she was beautiful, and every night as the moon rose, she’d slide up onto the rock and sing her lonely song. Though the sound was eerie, the couple grew to enjoy it as a lullaby. But that changed when they had a child.
The baby slept fine during the day, but as soon as the mermaid began to sing, the child opened its tiny pink mouth and cried loud enough to wake the whole island. All night the mermaid sang, and all night the baby wailed. Finally, the desperate father braved the dark and walked out along the shore to the mermaid’s rock. He asked her, as politely as he could, to stop. The proud mermaid liked that not one bit. She turned her back and sang louder. Each time she was asked to stay quiet, she sang louder still.
The child’s mother grew desperate and delirious from lack of sleep. One morning she gathered a pack of men and ordered them to smash the shining rock. They worked all day with pickaxes and hammers until there was nothing left but a pile of jagged black stones.
That night, the mermaid’s fury was wild enough to sink ships. She opened her mouth – but instead of song, she shrieked a throatful of wild curses, prophesying the end of the family. Unseen in the nursery, the force of the sound began to rock the sleeping baby’s cradle to and fro, to and fro, hard enough to shake the house. When the last note had died, the mother rushed upstairs – only to find the cradle upturned, and her child dead beneath it. Away swam the mermaid, her terrible curse made true.
Mara jolted to her feet, her left leg ablaze with pins and needles. Without realising, she’d been leaning on a splintery windowsill, lost in thought, the long-boiled kettle forgotten. The island was speaking to her, and she hadn’t even heard. It was all around her: the shush of the sea, the whispering of the leaves in the wind, the gentle dunt-dunt of a bee buffeting against the window. And something had snapped her awake. She held her breath.
There – a quickening overhead, the light staccato of feet. Mara gasped for breath. It was a sound pulled straight from her memory. Bee, her little Bee, so excited about life that he couldn’t bear to just walk through it. How long had the sounds been going on? How much had she lost in daydreaming about mermaids? How could she have let Pearl keep her away from here for so long? Pearl, always, dragging her to the bottom of the sea.
All the stories say that selkies will make you die of love. They’ll flay you alive for loving them. Being in love with a selkie is like stepping on glass all day, every day. And it was true: Pearl did make her feel like she was dying. She felt dizzy at the thought of Pearl’s desire, the abyss of her wanting. She was always asking and asking and asking. I want to leave, I want to talk, I want this and that and everything. No matter how much Mara gave, it would never be enough.
Couthie
‘MUM WILL BE here soon,’ said Islay as a farewell to Peter, her voice sing-songing. ‘We all will, I think.’
She pulled in a sea-cool breath and held it in her lungs as she walked away down the cliff. At the bottom, she turned away from home and towards the loch. There was an old library bus there. Mr Pettersen in the shop had told her that he used to be the librarian and drive the bus around the island, delivering books to people’s houses. But things change. Or, rather, things revert to how they were.
She took the long way home, wandering across the island from point to point and cove to cove, following generations of crofters and sailors and penitents, following those long-forgotten steps that made the veins and bones of the island. Bothies, cairns, burial mounds; old tombs, defences, gods. The island wasn’t remote or empty at all. It was a city peopled by ghosts. It was so easy to get lost here, where you could never really be lost. It was so easy to be alone here, where you could never really be lonely.
In the lee of a grassy hill, a squat bothy with thick stone walls and a turf roof. Islay pressed her fingers to its mossy walls, feeling them come away damp. Perhaps once it had been a burial chamber, perhaps a jail cell. Perhaps a home. Now it was a shelter for shadow-dwelling flowers and stray sheep and ramblers caught out in storms.
Islay would never be a true child of the island the way that Bee was. Since Signe had brought him home from the hospital on the mainland, he’d never spent a night off it. They’d been over for day trips to cities, riding tour buses and traipsing round museums. But they’d never stayed overnight. Every night of his life Bee had been home in his own bed, the waves lulling him to sleep.
The island was inside him even before he was born. Islay remembered Signe telling her that when she was pregnant with Bee she wanted to eat soil. She’d said Islay and Mara were her little fishes, meant to have water all around them; that with her girls she’d believed that all babies were fishes until the moment they were born and their lungs choose air over liquid. But with Bee, it was not sea, it was soil. She’d said it was more than wanting. She needed it. Everything else tasted of air but she knew that the dirt would be the most delicious thing she’d ever eaten. Islay had read somewhere that pregnant women can crave coal, chalk, soap – all sorts of things. The books said it was to do with a lack of certain nutrients. But she liked to think that Signe’s desire was because of Bee. It was because he was an island boy, through and through, and he wanted to get as close to the land as he could. He would always be a part of it. Sometimes, between the house and the cliff, Islay was sure she could feel the weight of his steady gaze, the tug of his insistent little hand in her own.
She slipped inside the bothy. It smelled of earth and cold stone. The murky light caught at her memory, and she was thrown back five years, smoking Signe’s stolen cigarettes in the shed with her sister. She’d asked Mara about their first night on the island, creeping out of their beds and into the starlit sea. Mara had said she thought maybe this was what dying felt like; to let the sea keep lapping at you until you were only bones.
How strange Islay had found that. Dangerous even; morbid. Now she didn’t think it was morbid at all. How could she not have understood what Mara meant? It wasn’t about death at all. It was about belonging, being part of something bigger than yourself. It was about home.
At home Islay found Mara, making tea in the kitchen.
‘Not hanging out with your girlfriend?’ The words were out of her mouth, spiky and sour, before she knew what was happening, and why did she say it like that? Pearl wasn’t so bad really. In other circumstances, Islay might even have been her friend.
Mara didn’t deign to reply. Probably going for a high-and-mighty thing, trying for elegance like some woman in an old novel.
They stood together at the kitchen worktop, Mara waiting for her tea to steep, Islay staring into the cupboard she’d just opened so she could pretend she was looking for something. Her sister was a joke, but she was still her sister, and Islay didn’t mean to be cruel. But apologies – ugh. It was easier to talk like this, not looking at each other. Islay was trying to shape her mouth to the word sorry, but Mara got in first.
‘Who did you love?’
‘Sorry,’ said Islay, surprised. ‘I mean, what?’
‘When you were away, you must have been in love at some point. But you came back alone. How do people make it work?’
Islay slammed the cupboard and looked at her sister. ‘Jesus, Mara, I don’t know. Do I look like I know?’
‘It’s not like in b
ooks, is it? All those love stories – they weren’t about love, really. Why did we never hear any stories about actual love? Then maybe we’d know what we were supposed to do. I just can’t – I don’t know – never mind.’ Mara squashed her tea bag and threw it into the sink. ‘Forget I said anything.’
Islay picked at the chipped paint on the cupboard door. ‘Maybe there are other things besides loving another person.’
‘Do you think that’s true?’
‘I don’t know, Mara,’ said Islay. ‘I’m sorry.’
Ramassé
ONE EASTER, NEWLY pregnant with Bee, Signe got up early so she could lay out everything she needed to make painted eggs with her daughters. She set out the equipment: paints in pastel shades, chunky plastic brushes, cups of rinsing water. She put four eggs in a dish. With a sewing needle, she poked a hole in each end of the eggs and blew the wet insides out into a bowl. She’d whisk them all up and make an omelette for the girls’ breakfast. No, not all of them: she’d set half aside, then add sausage and onions and red peppers and make a special omelette for Peter. She blew the last egg out into the bowl. A pinprick of blood in the centre of the yolk. Signe tried not to look at it. With a fork she reached for it, tried to lift it out. The yolk burst. The red threaded out, spreading, gelatinous, ruining.
Signe ran to the downstairs bathroom, vomited twice, flushed the toilet, then rinsed her mouth and went back into the kitchen. She tipped the bloodied eggs down the sink and turned on the tap as far as it would go. She placed a box of cereal and a pint of milk on the kitchen table.
‘Girls,’ she called up the stairs. ‘Put your slippers on and come for breakfast.’