The Brides of Rollrock Island

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘Stop it, Billy,’ said Ann Jelly. ‘It is not Misskaella’s fault some old grandpa’s taken to her.’

  ‘Or a grandmam,’ I said indistinctly, poking stuck bun-scraps from my teeth with a finger. ‘A grandmam could have made that bun.’

  ‘Never,’ said Billy. ‘That’s a mainland bun, that sort. That’s a Cordlin baker bun, that Fisher gets in sometimes.’

  I tried to enjoy the last tastes of exotic Cordlin. Was it some old man acting fond? Was that better than the bun’s being something to do with the seals, and my attraction for them?

  When we came home that afternoon I went straight in to Mam. ‘Can I see that paper,’ I said, ‘that came with the bun this morning? Did Dad show you?’

  ‘Whatever do you want that for?’ Mam looked up from scrubbing the table.

  ‘To examine the writing. I never saw it properly. Only Dad and Tat got to see it.’

  ‘Too late; I have burnt it in the stove. You will have to wait until he favours you again, whoever it was.’ And she went back to scrubbing, hard.

  On my birthday, a pair of thin socks, shop-bought socks with roses embroidered on the cuffs, was left on the little snowdrift at the door.

  ‘Your lover-man has left you a present, Missk!’ Billy carried the socks in high over his head, and deposited them by my porridge-bowl, from where Tatty immediately snatched them up.

  ‘Oh stop, Billy,’ said Ann Jelly. ‘It’s Ambler’s granny has put them there.’

  ‘She would have had Ambler bring them,’ said Grassy, ‘as she did before.’

  ‘Besides, she is dying,’ said Bee. I looked up, shocked. ‘Or so I heard,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘Praps she is hoping Missk will come and cure her?’ Billy went noisily to his porridge.

  ‘She would have said, then,’ said Grassy. ‘She would have sent Ambler to ask. How are we to know that, from a pair of socklets with no name on them?’

  ‘Well, someone wants something from our Missk. Who else would these fit? Look at them!’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Lorel. ‘For all the rest of her roundness, she does come down to tiny feet.’

  ‘Like a seal.’ Tatty was so taken up in her nastiness, she did not see Mam start towards her from the stove. ‘The way they—Ow! I was only saying!’ Her spoon dropped and spilled porridge on the table, and she held the back of her head, and glared in outrage at Mam, who ignored her, taking up the pot-ladle. ‘They have those tiny tails, I was going to say, to push their great fat selves along!’ And for great fat selves she turned her glare to me, as if I had hit her.

  ‘Ask Fisher who bought the socks,’ said Bee to me across the table, ‘and we will know who is your admirer.’

  I would not, and so that afternoon Bee and Lorel went down with the socks to Fisher’s store themselves. They came back disappointed. ‘He says they were not bought from him,’ said Bee. ‘He has never carried that style, he says; perhaps they were bought in Cordlin.’

  ‘They look quite fresh,’ said Mam, taking the socks from Lorel and examining them. She put them to her face and sniffed. ‘Lavender. And camphor. They have lain for years in some old lady’s camphor-chest.’

  ‘See?’ said Ann Jelly at Billy, all smug. ‘Ambler’s granny. A last gift before she passed on.’

  Finally the socks arrived back at me, everyone having had their fondle and wonder over them. I smoothed them on my knee, imagining them lying on the sunlit snowdrift awaiting me, trying to see the shape of the person who had come along, perhaps before dawn so that no one else would spy them, and left them there and hurried away.

  Fisher’s great-grandfather was a little wizened man who sat blanketed by the fire in the store. I idled nearby. It was hard to get him alone, for everyone who came in made chat with him – but if I had chosen a quieter time people would have remarked on my visit.

  He farewelled Granger’s dad. His gaze fell to me, but skimmed straight past, for I was of no account to him, some staring girl-child.

  There was a good disguising noise of Missus Fisher making hearty talk with Blair Gower at the counter, and for the moment no one else was in the shop. ‘I was wondering,’ I said, standing forward.

  The old man set his jaw, his face showing none of the cheerful creases he had presented Mister Granger with. ‘You were wondering? Yes, these are all my own teeth. That is what most children wonder, whose old ones keep their teeths in a jar, or manage without.’

  ‘I wondered if you knew anything about seals and seal-people.’

  Only now, when he went still, did I realize how much all of him had been tinily, busily moving. He ceased blinking; I looked into his staring grey eyes and thought he must have blinked most of the blue from them. In them I saw a Fisher I’d never suspected was there, from the time before he knew everything, when he could still be surprised or frightened. Just for a moment I saw that Fisher, before the granddad-Fisher covered him up, blinking several times to make up for the pause before.

  ‘I am not that old,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t mean you were,’ I said. ‘Only, things you may have heard, from your old folk.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said quickly. ‘I was never privy.’ He pulled his blanket higher on his lap. ‘Missus Fisher!’ he cried out, and I stepped back from him, startled.

  ‘Yes, Pa?’ came from the counter, and Missus Fisher and Gower glanced across, patience in both their faces.

  ‘Some tea, if you’d please, when you have the time.’

  When Gower had gone out the door and Missus Fisher to the back room, old Fisher shafted me a look and said in a low voice, ‘I know nothing, girl, about any of that, nothing.’

  I did not believe him; nobody so old could know nothing. I waited in case he should say more, but he ignored me, and then I must stand aside to let Missus Fisher through with the rattling cup and saucer. There was an amount of fussing to do, to set the tea where the old man wanted it, and warn him of its hotness, and be told not to think him a fool, and during this I lost heart, and eased myself away along the rows of sacks and barrels.

  Bustling back to her counter, ‘Girl!’ called Missus Fisher. ‘Here.’

  She unlocked the money drawer and took out a coin; it shone silver. ‘He says you’re to have a shilling.’

  ‘A shilling?’ I was so astonished that I all but forgot what a shilling was. The word’s sounds flew out of my mouth, the thing shone in the air. I felt a crashing shame. How would I hide the coin from Billy and my sisters, from Mam and Dad? And now Missus Fisher knew, too. She might not know why her great-grandfather-in-law was being so generous, but she would know that he did not give shillings out to every child who came by. I had marked myself; she knew there was something odd about me – and how many other people would she tell?

  I shook my head.

  ‘He’s quite insistent, my darling,’ she said unfriendlily. ‘Come, take it.’ She shook it. She neither smiled nor frowned, but her eyes worked on me. If I refused or ran away, she would think me even more peculiar. ‘It won’t bite you. There.’ And the thing, all cold except where Missus Fisher’s fingers had held it so long, was in my hand. ‘Now run along and put it somewhere safe.’

  Slowly, numbly, I walked up the town through the fine grey rain. What had I done, what had I brought on myself? Back home, I slid the shilling into the toe of one of the Cordlin socks; it was as if I had stolen it, the uncomfortable feelings that clustered around it. I was confused by its very shillingness; farthings and ha’pennies were all I had ever bargained with. Such a quantity of sweets was available to me now, I could hardly do the sums of it, and when I attempted them, I knew that I could never hide so much, or eat it all myself. And if I shared, everyone would ask me how I came by such a feast, and hear about Mister Fisher’s favour, and wonder aloud what kind of nuisance I had been, that he had paid me so handsomely to keep away from him.

  I had not been down to Crescent Corner in a while. After Ambler’s visit and the Cordlin bun and the socks and the shilling, I was
too conscious of the town’s eyes on me.

  But I did miss seeing the seals, however embarrassed I had been by their pursuing me into town. Whenever I took off the bands to wash myself, in among the earth’s up-pouring and the sea’s, I felt the knowledge that the herd was there, an itch upon my mind; this faded in the autumn as they left on their great migration, but the following spring it returned, when they assembled at the Crescent again.

  When the sisters suggested walking down to the seal-nursery, I thought I might risk going too. I dawdled along behind them on the field road, careful not to seem too eager. I stood along the cliff-top with them, and closed my lips on the suggestion that we go down to see the seal-babs closer. Grassy uttered it, though, and down we went.

  At the bottom Ann Jelly and Tatty danced out across the rocks. The others stood at the foot of the path, Bee calling out warnings and Grassy and Lorel encouragement – ‘Go up and touch one! Pick up a bab, and we’ll take it home!’

  I sat where the path ended in a wide step, and watched the silver-blue sweep of the ocean. When all the sisters had their backs to me, I loosened the tied bands on my shoulder, and took a long, deep look at the seals, and let them see me. Up they reared, ready to surge at me. My nearer sisters screamed at the sudden motion, the sudden attention, which they thought was directed at them, me being behind them. Tatty and Ann Jelly screamed too, and leaped back towards us, dodging the woken seals.

  I tied the ties again as they squealed and laughed. I had seen what I wanted to see. Throughout each seal, what I had thought randomly scattered lights, each as bright as the other and all doing the same thing, were in fact different parts, in bud, of the human system. Solider, brighter buds lodged in the seal’s joints. Smaller, paler ones, perhaps for the fine skin and hairs, floated closer to the surface, out to the tips of the tail and flippers, and some even out along the seal-whiskers. Middling ones swam about between, and among them ghosted all-but-invisible lights, which must be compressed forms of mind, maybe, of spirit or feelings. With a little more looking – but the herd’s movements would have given me away if I’d watched much longer – I would have seen how they all came together, the paths they must be drawn along if they were to assemble rightly into human form. For now, I only saw that there was a system to them – and that it was a complete system, that to make a woman within a seal, every last one of those buds or stars, those flickers or ghosts, must be gathered to the centre. I saw the size of the operation, how complicated it would be.

  But it could be done. And the very looking had done something to me, calling out some budding thing inside me, too, the lights and lines of a braver and steadier Misskaella who floated all potential inside my thick-set, unpromising shape. Contemplating the seals, and, eventually, bestirring myself to bring those seal-lights together, would form that new Misskaella just as surely as it would form the shapes of women from the blubberous matter of seals.

  ‘Look at Missk!’ called Tatty from among the sisters. ‘She is under the spell of these seals.’

  ‘Oh, do you wish you were a seal, Missk?’ crooned Bee.

  ‘She’s about the right shape for one,’ said Grassy Ella.

  ‘So unkind!’ But Lorel was laughing as she pushed Grassy off the rock.

  Grassy splashed into a shallow pool and occupied them all with her complaining, which I was glad of, for it took their eyes from me. They did not see, then, the sting of Grassy’s insult, or the worse shame of the truth in Tatty’s words, and the flush both sent across my face. The crossed bands might protect me from seal-enchantment, but they left me as vulnerable to my sisters’ barbs as I had ever been.

  For a time, when I went each morning for my visit to the privy I hurried up the side of the house, bending to scuttle unseen below the window. I checked our step for gifts, and most days it was blessedly empty. But once I snatched up a lace-edged handkerchief, the letters ‘MP’ embroidered into its corner with a great deal of effort and grime. Another time a shining pointed tooth, of a whale by the size of it, stood there as if grown from the step, with a picture scratched into its side and black rubbed in to show it, a rendition of the garth-wall woman coming out of the seal-skin.

  I hid the handkerchief in my pocket, but the whale tooth was so heavy I must weasel my way back through the house and hide it with the socks and the shilling, up the back of my drawer. When I found a moment to take it out again, in private, I saw that a second woman was carved into the side of the whale tooth, a hooded figure, her face all wrinkles, her hands reaching around the curve of the tooth, clawing towards the seal-woman. A line was incised around the whole tooth, making the horizon; in the sky a full moon hung, and that was the best carved part of all the picture, the pitted face of it; whoever had scratched it had sat under the moon itself, and by its light had matched it mark for mark.

  Some time elapsed, then, with no further gifts arriving. I told myself hopefully that the tooth’s magnificence and mystery meant the end of the gift-giving, because nothing could be more exotic or expensive. And I ceased my morning ritual.

  But in late spring a bunch of cornflowers was left, tied with a blue ribbon.

  ‘Ooh, ooh!’ said the girls, as Bee turned with the flowers from the morning door. ‘Misskaella’s sweetheart has been by again!’

  ‘Take them, take them, Miss! They’re for you! See? They have an “M” on them for Misskaella.’

  But I clasped my hands together behind my back when Bee thrust the flowers at me. The shaky curls of the old-fashioned ‘M’, pencilled on a paper-scrap tucked under the ribbon, looked like a thread of my own fear unravelling; the flowers bristled at me. ‘I don’t want them.’

  ‘Take them!’ Tatty said louder. ‘We must get on!’

  ‘And do what with them!’

  ‘I don’t care – trample them underfoot if you want!’ And she strode out past me and glared back from the lane outside.

  The noise brought Mam, and she snatched the bothersome bunch from where Bee was using it to press me to the wall and enjoy my discomfort. ‘She won’t take them!’ Bee whined.

  ‘And neither she ought. Presents from strangers.’ She frowned at the initial, examined the back of the paper, the ‘M’ showing like the curled legs of a dead spider between her fingers.

  ‘It’s not from a stranger, though,’ said Bee. ‘It’s some old man we know; we just don’t know which.’

  ‘I think I know which,’ said Tatty archly. ‘Creepy Arthur Baitman that snuffles about up at Wholeman’s.’ As the others crowed and fell about, she nodded to me: ‘I think he thinks he has a chance with you, Missk.’

  ‘I hate the way you smutch and smirch everything!’ I shouted. ‘It’s only flowers. It might be from anyone’s mad old granny, taking pity on me for having to live with you, you nasty nest of snakes!’

  They all fell back from my noise, it was so unusual.

  But Tatty looked on my passion coldly. ‘Oh, it’s not that they like you, Missk – don’t flatter yourself. They’re only afraid of you, that you’ll bring the seals again.’

  Mam shouted, then, at Tatty and at me, but I could not hear her for the clanging of Tatty’s words in my head. Whatever power I possessed, Tatty’s face – all their faces – told me that it would never win me friends. My family would pretend it was nothing, or but a nuisance; the rest of the town would only ever shy from it or make the sign against it, and a few of the older folk leave these gifts – and secretly, so that I should never know who tried to appease me, and never bring any of my magics upon the town, out of consideration for those unknown givers.

  ‘I’m going to school!’ I turned away from shouting Mam and pushed through my sisters. Billy tried to stand and stop me, but I booted him hard in the shin. He howled and stepped aside; because Mam was there, he could not boot me back. I flung myself out the door. I knew I was ridiculous, my fat bottom flouncing away from them up the street. But I was always ridiculous, wasn’t I? That was my place among the Prouts, to be always the smallest and most foolish
, to have their attention only as far as they could milk me for laughter, and otherwise to count for nothing at all.

  I sat sorting shells on the edge of the sea-front road; several other girls, and a littler boy or two, still staggered about down on the beach, collecting. It was a clear summer evening except in the west, where the sun, in a festive fit before it went to bed, sprayed pinks and reds about among a few streaks of cloud.

  A clutch of men walked by, gathered from the sea-front houses to go up to Wholeman’s together. From being entirely busy with my shells, I looked up to find all their eyes on me.

  ‘Clear enough where that one’s great-pa dipped his wick.’ Whoever had said it, deep in the group, lowered his head so that his cap brim hid his face.

  ‘Prouts,’ said another, to my face. He would never have spoken or looked so confidently on his own, but with five men behind him, he could say what he liked to any girl.

  ‘Yes.’ Another took courage. ‘Prouts were at it, bad as Cawdrons and Strangl’olds.’ They were all blush-coloured head to toe with the sunset, and their eyes glittered. ‘Not that my great-folk stayed about to watch.’

  ‘Nor mine.’

  ‘Nor mine, neither.’

  I bit my lips in, turned to the sunset. I wished I were the sun up there, bloodying up the sky, with such small matters as men’s ill-will and a girl’s embarrassment never approaching my vast-burning mind. Prouts. The disgust in that voice. Prouts were at it. I remembered, too, Gert’s awed tone: Our greatest shame. That was the key, wasn’t it, to the shadings of meaning of things said around me down the years at the school, in the town, glances passed and laughs stifled, hundreds of instances that I had not understood before? Prouts were at it, Cawdrons, Strangleholds. It was clear to me, suddenly, coldly, why Mam was always angry. All of Potshead was divided up like this; there were those who had had with the seal-women, and those who had not, and Mam had been born among the latter, and had married into the former. Perhaps she had not cared at the time, but she cared now, oh yes. It was written in every word she bit out, every impatient movement she made.