by Kirsty Logan
There must be another way in. Maybe she could find a rock to bash the door open. Maybe she could walk around the hill and look for a vent that she could dig around. There must be some sort of chimney for the fire. Maybe if she –
The door opened. Pearl stood in the doorway.
‘Mara,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry for coming here,’ shouted Mara against the roaring wind, against the squall of blowing pages. ‘And I’m sorry for letting you leave. And for being shitty to you, and for not listening to you, and for –’
‘Shut up, Mara,’ said Islay. She pushed her sister out of the way and stepped into Pearl’s house. She shook her wet hair. ‘It’s ridiculous out there!’ She pulled Mara inside, shutting the door behind her. ‘You can do your bloody apologies when we’ve dried off and had some tea. I’m sure Pearl won’t mind. Right, Pearl?’
Pearl shrugged. She reached into the cupboard and handed clean towels to Mara and Islay. ‘Kitchen,’ she said. ‘I’ll make tea.’
Inside the house, the storm was nothing but a distant knocking. The air was warm, the candlelight soft. Islay disappeared into the bathroom to dry off her hair. In the kitchen, Pearl filled the copper kettle with water and put it on the hob.
Mara patted her soaking hair with the towel, taking a moment to let the memories throb through her. The fire flickering in a wood-burning stove, the music swooning from a record player, the buttery-soft light from the candles. And Pearl, Pearl.
Her seal-sleek hair. Her shined-penny skin. Her sweetness, her bravery, her strength. How could she have forgotten this? How could she have endangered it? She was an utter fucking idiot.
‘I’m sorry. Pearl, I’m so sorry.’
‘I heard you before,’ said Pearl. ‘Don’t lurk in the doorway like that. You don’t have to ask to come in.’
Mara sat at the kitchen table. ‘I thought you’d left.’
Pearl sat beside her. ‘I meant to. I was going to. I was all ready to, and then …’
‘Then?’
‘Then I didn’t.’
Mara took her hand. ‘At the end of the story. In that book you gave me.’
‘You remember?’
‘I always remembered. The end could be happy or sad, and I didn’t like that. I wanted them to love one another still.’
‘But they did, Mara. They do.’
‘Is that enough?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Pearl. She squeezed Mara’s hand. ‘But it’s something.’
Cowp
MARA AND ISLAY and Pearl were all safe from the storm – but what did that matter to the storm? They were not what it wanted. Just as Mara and Islay reached Pearl’s door, rain slip-sliding their steps, airborne books flapping around them, the storm reached the door of the Ross house. It did not knock. It did not ask. It went inside.
The storm raged like fire through the house. It flung open doors and smashed every window. It raged up staircases and through rooms, surging along hallways, swinging light bulbs and shuddering furniture. The last thing it did as it left the house was rip the front door off its hinges (it did, though, leave the shark’s jaw). Now the house looked exactly the same as the day the Ross family had first moved in, all those years ago. There was no front door and no back door. There were no windows in the downstairs rooms. Dead leaves blew along every corridor.
When it was finished with the house, the storm headed for the bridge. It toppled stonework and whipped out cables and bent railings, then forced whatever debris it could lift over the rest. It destroyed as much of the bridge work as it could. Islay, had she not been wrapped in a ball of blankets in her sister’s lover’s house, would have been reluctantly pleased, as would the rest of her Landlovers protest group.
Next the storm went for the cliff. It gathered its forces, creeping up to the highest point of the island, holding its breath. It let out a tiny puff of air. The heavy layer of grass and soil on the clifftop scattered across the sea like a blown dandelion. The storm exhaled with the full force of its lungs, with the rage of years, with the burning of a wish unfulfilled. The cliff crumbled into the sea. Dozens of stone figures took flight, flipped spinning across the water. They landed with a staccato of splashes. A statue of a burly man holding an elegant woman in the air was thrown the furthest, airborne the longest, getting closest to the sky. They were flung far from the island, their bodies still attached. Together, weightless, they flew.
Land fights with sea, just as stillness fights with change. But in this storm, in this fight, both won. The change was that everything went back to how it had been once, long ago.
The wind dropped, the sea calmed, the sky cleared. As quickly as it raised up, the storm was gone.
After
WHAT HAPPENED TO Mara and to Pearl and to Islay? I’m sorry to tell you that I don’t know, because when the storm left, I did too.
When people are just stories, they’re easy to predict. Their behaviour has to follow logically from what they’ve done before, has to follow a proper story arc, and so there’s only one possible ending. But in real life, people can always surprise you. There’s no telling what they’ll do next.
Maybe Mara and Pearl got married in the library bus, with one celebrant and no guests, and Islay as their witness. They moved into the wreck of the big pink house, and slowly they built it up again – starting with repainting it so it wasn’t pink. In the meantime the bridge was rebuilt, and by the time the tourists began flocking to the island, the guest house was perfect. It was a success, and Mara and Pearl lived there for the rest of their lives, and finally retired, leaving the guest house to their two sons, Peter the landscaper and Barra the cartographer.
Or maybe Pearl left the island and rejoined the mermaid show. Islay and Mara built the house up again. They kept it pink. The bridge was rebuilt and lots of tourists came and stayed at the house; or it wasn’t rebuilt and only a few tourists came but paid lots money to stay there, because isolation can be valuable, and sometimes we’re all willing to pay just to make everyone else go away for a while.
Or maybe Islay took Mara and Pearl’s place in the mermaid show. She was just a girl, like the other girls, and she couldn’t breathe underwater, but she grew out her long red hair, and it was so beautiful, burning there under the water, and everyone wanted to see her, and was happy to pay extra to do so, and every marquee shouted her name – her new stage name, of course, not the old name she abandoned – and she was wildly successful until the day she retired to somewhere warm and dry and many miles from the sea.
Or maybe Pearl and Islay left the island separately, and never came back. Mara stayed alone in the house. She intended to fix it up, to get rid of the ghosts to make room for guests. But the longer she stayed in the house, the heavier the air became. One day she went into a room to pull up some floorboards, then paused. When she blinked, it was night. She sat in her father’s armchair, and sometimes she stayed so still that she’d look down at her hands and see the silky powder left by moths’ wings.
Or maybe Mara and Pearl left the island together, and never returned. They rejoined the mermaid show and performed every night, saving all their wages in a copper coffee tin that they hid under their bunk. They stuck so many pins in their map that the names of the countries weren’t visible any more and the lines between them were completely obscured. They didn’t live happily ever after, like a couple in a story. But they were happy for a while, and perhaps that’s all we can ask.
Glossary of Chapter Titles
SCOTS WORDS
Bairn: child
Barra: a small child
Besom: broom; also a woman of loose morals, or cheeky child
Bidie-in: a romantic partner you live with but are not married to
Birling: spinning
Bonny: pretty
Brae: steep slope
Braw: fine, pleasant
Cannae: cannot
Canny: careful
Chapping: knocking
Clype: tell tales
Coorie: to cosy in
Couthie: sociable
Cowp: knock over
Dram: shot of whisky
Dreich: dreary, bleak (usually meaning weather)
Drookit: drenched
Drouthy: thirsty for a strong drink
Dunt: to hit something with force
Dwam: daydream
Fae: from
Fankle: tangle, mess
Fash: worry
Fouter: a fiddly, tiresome job
Gallus: self-confident, cheeky (usually derogatory, as in a rascal)
Glaikit: silly, senseless
Gloam: to become dark
Greet: cry
Haar: sea mist or fog
Hame: home
Haver: to talk incessantly
Ken: know, understand
Laldie: to undertake an action with vigour
Loupin: aching
Mauchit: dirty
Messages: groceries
Numpty: idiot
Pokey-hat: ice-cream cone
Scunnered: exasperated
Shoogle: wobble
Skelf: splinter
Skelp: slap
Skite: slip over
Sleekit: smooth and shiny; sneaky
Stooshie: uproar
Stour: dust
Stramash: a fight
Stravaig: to wander
Swither: to hesitate
Tae: to
Tatties: potatoes
Telt: told
Thrawn: twisted, obstinate, or sullen
Toty: very small
Tumshie: turnip, silly person; also term of endearment
Wheesht: hush or shush; telling someone to be quiet
Willnae: will not
BALLET TERMS
Balançoire: repeatedly swinging the leg from front to back; also tilting the upper body slightly forwards or backwards, opposite to the direction of the leg
Cabriole: caper
Détourné: turned aside; turning once completely around on both feet
Divertissement: enjoyable diversion
Ecarté: separated; thrown apart
Entrelacé: interlaced
Fouetté: describes the quick whipping action of a dancer’s leg or body
Ramassé: picked up
Répéter: to repeat
Reverence: an elaborate curtsy
Sickling: used to describe a dancer’s foot that is incorrectly placed
Soutenu: sustained
Volé: flying
BOXING TERMS
Bareknuckle: fighting without gloves
Palooka: a clumsy, second-rate boxer
Shadow-boxer: fights an imaginary opponent as a form of training
Sucker punch: an unexpected hit
Acknowledgements
Much of this novel was written and researched in libraries. Thank you to all the librarians I met, and the ones I’ve still to meet. I love your work.
Helen Flood, Elizabeth Foley, Bethan Jones, Cathryn Summerhayes: thank you for being the best publishing team I could have imagined.
Paul McQuade, Andrea Mullaney, Heather Parry, Angela Sutton, Ryan Vance: thank you for the writing dates.
Jen Campbell, Lynsey May, Susie McConnell, Katy McNair, Helen Sedgwick: thank you for first-draft feedback.
Alison Hennessey: thank you for advising me to cut that character from Part 3.
Catherine Gallacher: thank you for the ballet-dancer foot demonstration.
Mermaid Citrine and Hannah Mermaid: thank you for the mermaid information.
The Wellcome Collection Library: thank you for the dance and boxing information.
Eleanor Jackson, Ida Mantere, Reeta Pekkanen, Temu Räsänen, Helen Thurloe, Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: thank you for the month at Arteles in Finland.
Angie Crawford, Xavier Jones-Barlow and Caron MacPherson from Waterstones; and Markie Deleavey, Effie Flood and all the librarians at Langside Library: thank you for loving your local authors.
All the Logans, Bennetts, Cairneys, Jinkses, Adairs and Sopers: thank you for being my wonderful family.
And Annie, always.
Bibliography
The selkie and mermaid stories are adapted from versions in David Thomson’s The People of the Sea and Duncan Williamson’s Tales of the Seal People, as well as my own memories of stories I was told and read as a child.
For the boxing details I am grateful to Edith Summerskill’s The Ignoble Art and J. W. Graham’s Eight Nine Out: Fifty Years as a Boxer’s Doctor.
I am also indebted to Lennard J. Davis’s The Disability Studies Reader, Kenneth Laws’s Physics and the Art of Dance, Kimberley C. Patton’s The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils, and Dominick Tyler’s Uncommon Ground: A Word-Lover’s Guide to the British Landscape.
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Copyright © Kirsty Logan 2018
Cover Illustration © Dinara Mirtalipova
Text Ornaments © Felicita Sala 2017
Kirsty Logan has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Harvill Secker in 2018
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library