The Brides of Rollrock Island

by Margo Lanagan

  On the second attempt, my hand sliding on the greasy fabric of her sleeve, her claw painful around my wrist, I managed to pull her to her feet. She swayed there, steadying herself with the stick. I could not believe she would not topple, her bare feet with their ragged toenails were so small.

  She set off as though I were not there, and quickly I stepped aside to make way. Her rising had released from her clothing a strong sour smell from her body. I stifled an exclamation and followed her, straight down the beach towards the water swimming with moonlight. What did she mean, testing the limits of Kitty’s kindness? Would she throw herself into the waves, maybe, and expect me to save her? Why did she think Kitty would care about the fate of a mad old woman, and one so closely allied with the sea-wives she despised? Perhaps I should flee, back along the beach – look how hard Misskaella found walking! Surely she could not catch me up. But what might she do instead – lightning-strike me? Throw up a magical stone wall in my path? I lagged behind her, to one side, and veered slowly towards the town.

  And then I stopped, unable, from surprise and something else, to take another step. Some of the moon shadows in the sea revealed themselves to be swimmers, and as they gained the shallows I saw that they were seals, several now plunging forward out of the waves. A long string of their followers led out beyond the surf, north around Forward Head towards Crescent Corner.

  She sang, the witch, indistinctly against the wave-noise; I held myself back bodily from walking closer to hear the words. Her feet squeezed darkness into the shining sand. The ripples ran back to the sea, ran back and made splashy ruffles against the chests of the three leading seals, which forged towards Misskaella like dogs to their master. She put out her hand and moved her fingers as if scattering seed for birds. The seals came up around her; beside them, above them, she was neither so enormous nor so strange as she had seemed before.

  I tried to step backward, preparatory to fleeing, for what if she should set those beasts at me somehow? But her song, whatever it was, held me, its sense unfathomable, its play both horrid and beauteous, unlike any tune I had heard before. Another pair of seals coasted up on a wave, and then began their caterpillar-rippling on the firmer ground; all my skin came alive and rushed about on my trapped body, but Misskaella tottered among the beasts quite unafraid, her feet and calves shining wet, the hems of her rags dragging in the water and dripping moonlight upon it.

  Matter-of-factly she chose a seal, one that lay between her and the water. She tucked her stick under her arm. She pressed her hands together and bent from the waist as if begging, as if praying, as if bowing reverently. She sang, she sang, and the song was no less senseless than before; it was like tethered kelp on the tide, its ribbons reaching and reaching, never obtaining what they reached for. The chosen seal rolled onto its back – I felt that roll as if I were seal myself, though I stood slender and fearful here on the sand. An invisible knife pierced the flesh under the beast’s chin and pulled a dark line down its body. I cried out, my voice feeble, quite without magical force, as the seal opened bloodlessly, parting like giant lips. But instead of teeth appearing and a tongue, the skin convulsed, and from its darkness and its glistening a girl sat up. Misskaella put out a claw to her, and the girl laid her long white hand in it, and allowed herself to be lifted from the shrinking seal-flesh. She was as white as bone, as narrow as a sapling tree; her hair tumbled black from where it had been pressed in a mass to the back of her head. It fell and spread, darkness and gloss together like the sea-waves, like the sea-rinsed seals.

  I took several steps forward, then stopped myself. I was a-hum with Misskaella’s song, mazed with the light off the girl, the sight of the shape of her, swaying so tall beside the hunched fat witch. Out of her coat and onto the silvered ground she stepped, guided by Misskaella. She stood among the seals, afraid neither of them nor of the crone before her, and seeming not to feel the cold. Her coat, no more than thick cloth now, shrivelled and curled on itself beside her shapely feet.

  The sea fell silent, as it sometimes does. Out from the creak and slither of the seal-bodies came Misskaella’s voice, low and crafty. ‘Dominic Mallett?’

  With halting steps I approached the two upright people, one shadow, one shining, among the prone wet seals. Kitty Flaming, I told myself desperately, my wife-to-be. Kitty. But the words were nothing against Misskaella’s singing; Kitty was nothing, a frail flag blown to tatters by a magical wind. Her face blurred and faded in my memory, while the seal-girl’s grew clearer and clearer in the moonlight, serene, dark eyed, full lipped, a pale oval, her night-black hair moving around it, breathing of warm sea. She watched me soberly, fearless, unsmiling; she could no more look away than I could. No one, no woman or man, had ever regarded me so steadily, so trustingly. Kitty herself never looked at me this way; always her own next purposes and plans moved somewhere in her eyes and readied words behind her lips. This girl only waited, her whole being, her whole future, fixed on me.

  I felt as if I had been doused in cold fresh water from the sweetest spring. It had washed away the anxious, busymaking man I was before, whom Kitty had been satisfied with; now I felt worthy to face this purer creature, unsullied yet, uninjured by the world. She put me at peace in a glance, and I went to her eyes, to her mouth as a swimmer lost in the night ocean makes for the only light he sees. The rest of her I all but ignored – the fine breasts, the narrow hips, the shadowy cleft of her, the lean legs leading to the sand-swirled half-buried feet, her black fall-and-fall of hair shifting around her like a frayed silk cloak. All those things I registered, but they were for later. Misskaella grinned, off to the side, the old crow, she sang and laughed at me, gloated over my plight. She too I ignored, falling into the dark eyes’ attention, longing to press my lips to those full, slightly open and uncertain ones – but restraining myself, until we should be alone together, unobserved by witch or weather.

  ‘What is your name?’ I asked the seal-girl.

  She answered with the sea, with her comrades’ huffing and whining.

  ‘What is her name, Dominic Mallett?’ said the witch. ‘It’s for you to give her one, to use here on the land. What would you like her to answer to?’

  I listened in my heart for the right name. I put out my hand, and her warm palm met it; her warm fingers intertwined with cold ones. ‘Dominic Mallett,’ she said, just as Fametta had, but more curiously, experimenting with the first words to come from her new throat, to pass across her new tongue.

  ‘Her name is Neme,’ I said, because I wanted to see her tongue move on an N, her lips on an M, again.

  ‘Neme?’ rasped Misskaella from the glare off the moonlit sea. ‘There, then, her name is Neme.’ And she handed Neme forward to me, and I took the girl’s other hand, and we stood spelled together on the sand, the seals moving about us like monstrous dark maggots, helpless, harmless, huge.

  Next day I rose, and dressed what felt like an entirely new body, an entirely new man, in the ordinary clothing of the old. I kissed sleeping Neme, and took up her skin that had lain folded all night on the blanket-chest, and tucked it into my coat. I went out into the world, which greeted me wet and windily, full of a cruel and exhilarating light.

  Up the town I climbed to Wholeman’s inn, and peered in at the window. Wholeman was at work in there, wiping down tables. I knocked on the window, then met him at the door.

  He squinted up at me. ‘I know you, I’m sure,’ he said, ‘though it’s very early for a welcome-home drink.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m after. May I speak with you a moment?’

  ‘Why, certainly! You’re Mallett’s boy, aren’t you, that his mam took off to Cordlin years ago?’ He stood back for me and I stepped in. The empty room smelt of men and pipe-smoke and ale; it had no ornament beyond mounted fishes and a stag’s head on the walls.

  ‘That’s me: Dominic Mallett,’ I said, with the smile of a man who has had his name whispered in his ear all night. We shook hands. ‘And I have come into a fortune.’


  ‘You have? Well, you’re very welcome to spend it here,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Oh,’ he then said as I pulled Neme’s skin-parcel free of my coat. ‘It must have been quite a fortune, to persuade Misskaella out so late in the season.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I found my lady on the beach last night, just this side of Forward Head, singing on the rocks there.’ This was the story Misskaella had advised me to tell. I owe you money, I had said foolishly, not even looking at her, because that would mean tearing my gaze from Neme’s. But, Let me give you a gift, the witch had cooed, just to see what that feels like.

  ‘Found her?’ Wholeman took the skin from me, and looked up wide-eyed. ‘Singing on the rocks? For the taking?’

  ‘She is at my house now. She has agreed to stay awhile.’

  Wholeman shook his head slowly. ‘I have heard of such luck, women coming up by themselves,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never known a man to have it, not in my time.’

  ‘Well, now you have, Wholeman,’ I said. ‘But my fix is still the same as every man’s, to keep the skin where she cannot find it, for she says she does not trust herself to resist the lure of the sea, if she knows of the skin’s whereabouts, or finds it accidentally. Do I remember, you used to have a locked room out the back here?’

  ‘I did and I do. Shall I hang this there with the others?’

  ‘Would you? And what do I owe you for it?’

  ‘Owe me? Why, a little custom now and then, that’s all.’

  ‘No fee, for the keeping? Are you sure?’

  ‘There’s enough debt in this town without my taking men’s pennies for a bit of hanging-space I’d not use otherwise. If you don’t owe Misskaella, you are one of the few who doesn’t. You must drink twice the amount for your good fortune.’ But he was laughing at me, and he clapped me on the arm. ‘I will put it away safely right now, lucky man.’

  Next I went to Fisher’s store and bought milk and foodstuffs, and a dress that Neme might leave the house in without shame, and so on. There was no means of keeping my luck and my decision secret there either, any more than there had been at Wholeman’s. Fisher was much more excited by it, though, than Wholeman, and brought his wife Darely out to tell her the news directly; he expressed hearty congratulations, and was in awe of how well things had turned out for me, that I had not had to pay as others had; Darely, more quietly, asked whether I had hidden the skin, and did I intend to marry Neme, and when would I bring her to meet the rest of the wives? She helped me buy underthings for Neme, and forced the loan of a cardigan and coat on me ‘to keep the poor maid cosy’; she asked after the state of my firewood and food, in between Neepny throwing questions at me as they occurred to him: ‘What will you tell your betrothed, though, back in Cordlin?’ and ‘How will you keep yourself? You will have to get a place on one of the boats.’

  They sent me away laden with gifts and necessities, even coming to the door to see me off. Darely wrung her hands as if she wished she could come with me and see my new wife settled. I climbed the hill much encouraged – relieved, in fact, that now I had company. Potshead was full of Dominic Malletts, each devoted alike to his strange wife, each intent on keeping her, and keeping her happy as far as he was able.

  Back at the house I showed Neme how to dress, and we breakfasted, amid many small adventures of discovery and misinterpreting. I took her down to Fisher’s, then, and to Shy Tyler’s and Fametta’s, where she was welcomed with many embraces and exclamations. Fametta and Darely promised to care for her while I attended to my Cordlin business. They talked of wedding-preparations, and gatherings of the wives to welcome Neme among them, and I nodded, and thanked them, and felt a little panicked. This was the day my mam and dad had brought me up to avoid, yet here it was, folding me compliantly into itself as an octopus folds a fish towards its mouth.

  Then I took Neme and we walked, out beyond Crescent Corner to Six-Mile Beach, where you can stride the sand forever if you’ve a temper or a mood to pound away. We walked, and sometimes we talked, about my predicament and her new life, and about the people we had just met, and the little I knew of them, from long ago. How different it was from conversing with Kitty! With each utterance Neme and I must seek ways to make sense to each other, speaking out of our different pasts, our different worlds above and below water, our different beings. Kitty and I had always been turning over matters and objects familiar to both of us; by comparison, that had been like talking to myself, I was so easily understood. From here, on the beach, with Neme questioning me and her slim foreign hand in the crook of my arm, the conversation with Kitty seemed a dull one, revealing nothing, taking neither of us anywhere new.

  I told Neme of my intention to go to Cordlin and tell Kitty face to face what had happened.

  ‘But Dominic Mallett,’ she said. ‘Once you see Kitty, might not your love for her rush back upon you? I fear you will stay and marry her as you said, simply because you are there and in sight of her. Just as you could put her aside and love me on first sighting, won’t you be able to put me aside, when she is there before you, ready to kiss and marry you?’

  I stopped on the sand, open-mouthed. ‘You think me so fickle?’ I said. ‘You think I have had … nights such as we have just had, with Kitty? You think my loyalty and love shift so easily to whichever woman is before me?’

  ‘Why would they not?’

  I had to explain to her, then, that men were not like bull-seals, with their many wives, that we mated one-to-one like bird-pairs and many other animals. ‘I can never put aside the thought of you,’ I said, ‘now that we have met.’

  Into my hand she pressed a sea-penny, one of those shells worn flat on one side, grooved on the other like the inside of a person’s ear. ‘Hold this in your pocket while you talk to Kitty,’ she said, ‘and remember me.’ She folded my fingers around it, a measure of doubt still in her eyes.

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. How can I tell you so that you’ll believe me? This is different, this is a proper love; I am helpless against this, whereas Kitty, I now discover, I can take or leave.’

  ‘Who knows what else you may discover?’ She pushed the hand with the shell in it into my coat pocket.

  I dropped the shell there and took Neme in my arms. I tried, with all the warmth that I wrapped her in, with all the force I could summon to an embrace, with the length and depth of all my kisses, to convince her as I was beyond convinced, as I knew in my bones, to my deepest innards and my heart of hearts: that I was hers, flesh and soul of me, for as long as I lived, that I would not forsake her, because I could not, but was helplessly hopelessly hers forever.

  ‘At this hour?’ said Mrs Flaming at the door. ‘We are all but abed!’

  ‘I’ve important news for Kitty,’ I said. ‘It cannot wait.’

  ‘You young people, you always think it cannot wait. Come in, then, into the parlour.’ Annoyed, she looked, and inconvenienced – and this was as kindly as she would ever look on me again. I watched her hurry away up the hall, and then I stepped into the parlour, which was aglow with the new electrics that the family were so proud of.

  Every candlestick, every silk flower, every landscape on the wall, had once held and increased the glamour of my love for Kitty, but now each object only seemed to speak, and rather smugly, of well-earned comfort and a kind of terror of not being thought tasteful. Look at those drapes! How many layers of cloth did you need at a window, how many tassels and fringes, to keep out the light and the cold, to thwart prying eyes? I crossed the room slowly towards the screened fireplace, the mantel loaded with pictures and figurines. I felt as if I carried the weight of it on my own back. How had I made sense of such things before? My little time on Rollrock had emptied my head of rooms like this, the detail of them, the fuss and filling of spaces. What more did you need than a chair and a fire, and another chair with Neme curled up and dreaming across at you? What gave lovelier light than a spirit-lamp, which left some mystery to linger in the darker corners?

  Kitty’s hu
rried footsteps sounded in the hall; dread flooded my head and churned in my stomach. Then she was there in the doorway, and I lifted my eyes to hers. Her face was fresh and unguarded, as if she had been asleep, her hair hastily gathered up, fine curls falling from it. She had never looked prettier. She was pleased to see me, and surprised, and amused. She thought I had come because I could not bear to betake me to my rest without seeing her, holding her, asserting our bond once more.

  I might reassure her with a smile. I might cross to her and embrace her – I knew exactly how she would feel, the bold curves of her that had once excited me. I could choose, coldly, to undo everything I’d done on Rollrock. I could confess to it, or I could keep it secret; I could invent an excuse to return to the island, give Neme back her skin and send her home to the sea. I could do my duty to this woman before me, and no one in Cordlin need be any the wiser.

  I couldn’t put it off a moment longer. ‘I have taken me a sea-wife,’ I said – softly, as if it would hurt her less that way.

  All pleasure went from her face – I would never see it there again. She gave a little cry – ‘I knew it!’ – and bent in the middle as if struck. Softer and flatter she spoke: ‘I should not have let you go.’ She straightened, took a few steps into the room, then retreated and sat in the upright chair by the door, and put her face in her hands. ‘Tell me,’ she said into them. Then she looked up at me, haughty, white-lipped. ‘What has happened.’

  ‘She came up from the sea.’ I pressed my shoulder-blades against the mantel. ‘Of her own choice.’

  ‘Saw you standing there, did she? Could not resist you?’ I could see how Kitty would be as an old woman, with this roundedness gone from her face, with this bitter tightness about her mouth.

  ‘I found her on the beach.’ I saw Misskaella bending to the seal praying, the flesh splitting deeply, shining wet in the moonlight.