Song of the Selkies

by Cathie Dunsford

  ‘To conceive of such a work of creation amidst the destruction of war blows my mind.’ Uretsete stands in awe of the curved structure above her head holding the most moving frescoes she has ever seen.

  DK reads that when the prisoners came back to see the chapel again in 1992 they were moved to tears and one, Bruno Volpi, said, ‘People cannot be judged by their precarious situations. Their culture, spirit and will to express themselves in creative thoughts and deeds are stronger than any limitation to freedom. This is the spirit that gave birth to the works of art on Lambholm.’

  ‘That says it all.’ A tear slides down Monique’s cheek.

  At the Ring of Brodgar at dawn, they could not imagine any man-made structure that could equal this combination of creative effort working alongside nature but, they agree, the chapel, set amidst a field of sheep grazing among the rocks and wildflowers and looking out over the dazzling waters of Scapa Flow, could be a contender. They walk about, sit, meditate and enjoy the atmosphere, finding it inspiring to know that such an act of pure spirit could be created amidst the destructiveness of war. What courage it took these prisoners to negotiate for the necessities to enact their vision and what flexibility on the part of their captors.

  ‘If Skara Brae showed no archeological evidence of the inhabitants having any weapons at all in the Stone Age, then this is our twentieth century contribution to peace. Long may it be preserved.’ As they wend their way reluctantly from the sanctuary of the chapel, Monique drops coins into the preservation box and the others follow suit.

  ‘If we cannot get permission to perform talkstory at the Ring of Brodgar, then I would opt for this as a possibility,’ suggests Uretsete.

  ‘It’s been used for performances during the St Magnus Festival, the most recent in 1999 when Maria Chioccetti returned for services at the chapel after Domenico died, and it is dedicated to the people of Orkney and all visitors, so it may be possible.’ Camilla has noted this as next on her list after Brodgar. She’s already made contact with a local farmer who will let them use the land nearest Brodgar for their festival.

  They drive over the historic Churchill Barriers to South Ronaldsey and begin a tour of the artists’ galleries on the island. A wild, stone-clad beach just before the rise to the Hoxa Tapestry Gallery offers an appealing place for lunch and they spread their smoked haddock, Swanney cheese, fresh Argos bread, Orkney butter and tomatoes, peppers, shallots, chives and Sasha’s blue cheese dip in containers and boxes onto the old tartan blanket they’d found in the van and tuck into a delicious feast. Cowrie wishes there had been some clapshot to smear over the bread as well, but all the others know of this dawn feast is the absence of a few tatties from the huge sack they’d bought from an Orkney potato farmer.

  The sun sparks dazzling silver lights from the calm blue sea, tinged with aqua as it curves around the bay. Red, yellow, brown and cream sandstone rocks carpet the beach, with a sandy edge near the water. Many of the rocks have been sculpted by the sea and feature scenes as wild as the imagination likes to conjure. The swirling designs, often raised above the surface of the rocks, show dragons with fiery smoke and tails trailing under the rock, dolphins leaping from the waves, whales floating on the surface, lizards and geckoes creeping along the brown slits, a turtle with a piece of kelp in its mouth, a seal frolicking in the deep, another lying in a rocky crevice.

  They comb the beach collecting rocks and shells that appeal to them, driftwood for art work and the fire, old discarded fishermen’s nets, useful for the garden they are planning as a surprise for Morrigan, and also find a perfect fish skeleton which DK adds to her collection. The Orkney beaches offer so much and they are inspired by the work of the prisoners during such devastation in Europe, that they agree they will never bemoan the lack of materials or inspiration again.

  ‘Hey, let’s do a beach storytelling workshop, where stones and rocks and shells and found objects are used as a starting point for stories from the participants.’ The idea takes off like wildfire, and they begin the process now, each one bringing a new perspective to the beachy artefacts, coaxing them to life with memory and imagination. After talkstory and beachcombing, they make their way back over the dunes to the car and continue up the hill to the Hoxa Tapestry Gallery.

  ‘I find tapestries as boring as knitting,’ admits DK and opts to walk the surrounding cliffs with impressive views out over Scapa Flow.

  Monique eyes some ruined stone houses with grass growing into the turf on their roofs, and a few black-and-white cows munching in the field next door, while the sea startles with its deep blue under the rare Orkney sun. ‘I’ll check out those ruins.’

  The others walk into the gallery and are stunned by the combination of poetry and visuals, with the tapestries often weaving words around the edges or inspired by poetry. The artist has made cards of the woven magic and the work embraces a wonderful mixture of everyday life and inspired universal themes. Cowrie moves slowly around the tapestries, noting the different stitchwork, and admiring one where the artist walked down to the beach at night and focused on the moon’s trail over the water and up the sand. She turned around and then saw it connected with her shadow moving out behind her, as if she were also a moon casting a glow over the land. According to the notes, she then walked back to sketch the idea and began work on the tapestry soon after.

  There are two women deeply involved in discussing the patterns and each tapestry draws another story from them. Cowrie turns to face the final wall and is knocked out by the design. Here lies her recurring dream of selkies, flowing in and out of the water, with flutes, violins, calling to the sea and the land, acting as a bridge between two worlds. One selkie has hair flowing from her head like seaweed and into the landscape, forming the clouds above the scene.

  It is a commissioned work and different from all the others. It leaps out at you from the wall and takes you into a deep dreamspace where the lines between reality and fantasy are blurred, where the separations between human and animal are no longer relevant, where the seascape blends into the landscape and the borders between land and sea and sky merge.

  Her knees weaken and she has to sit down. She feels her legs turning into fins, her fins flowing through the sea, her body moving along a bed of kelp. It touches her undersides and runs along her belly to the tip of her tail. Above her, squid dance in the sunlight, playing with the patterns it casts on the water. Below her, a seal seems caught in the kelp. She dives toward it to help. A shadow is cast over her body, moving like a cloud over the sea. She looks up to see a great white shark swimming over her head, circling and returning. She ducks into the seaweed, hoping her fins will pull her fast enough to escape. She hovers amongst the swirling branches, and looks up to see giant jaws coming towards her through the kelp. It is aiming for the seal trapped below her but she is caught between them.

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  Layered sandstone crags rise up from the swirling waters like tufa from Lake Mono, each with its own design and story. A castle tower in one, a surfing dolphin in the next. The sea splashes up the sides of the rocks, each time trying to reach higher on the incoming tide. A pink thrift pokes a tufted head out from the cliff edges and fulmars nest in the rock ledges below. Ahead, an ancient fisherman’s hut, made of dry stone walls and flagstone roof, now covered in turf and sprouting a thick head of sea-green grass, hides among the wildflowers, sunk into the cliff and looking out over a rocky bay. Up the sides of the banks leading from the bay, the shapes of fishing boats, their prows rested in the sandy loam, are etched into the hills. You can see them now, braced by the rocks below, proudly waiting for the dawn and their launching into the wild seas off the Skipi Geo near the Brough of Birsay.

  They clamber down to the beach being careful not to disturb the nesting fulmars on the rocks beside and above them. The geo forms a sheltered bay with huge layered rock stacks either side and a naturally sloping beach of rounded pebbles and sculpted rocks. Rusty remains of an old winch, used to draw the boats up the beach, lie about
and between the rocks with old bones and limpet shells, their flesh once used for bait. The nousts where the boats once lay make it easy to imagine a bustling community of fishers, each helping the others with their boats, setting off for the day’s fishing, and returning to winch up their dories, clean the day’s catch, set it up to dry or smoke, then retiring to their stone cottage to down a mug of home-brewed whisky. For so many fishers, estimated up to sixty at a time, to share a bay so small, they must have created a communal working system, much of which survives today on the islands.

  ‘Check this out!’ DK holds up the skeleton of a bird’s head, possibly an oystercatcher, which has aged with time and been stained a deep brown by the tangle flown in on the waves and drying on the rocks.

  ‘Ooo. How revolting.’ Camilla turns her face away. ‘How can you touch that thing, DK? Don’t you know that germs live in old skulls and even on feathers. You should not touch them with your bare hands.’

  DK grimaces and holds the bone skeleton close to her face, nose-to-nose and pretends to tongue the beak. ‘But look, Camilla. She’s such a sweet creature. Look at her beak. I could kiss her.’ DK does exactly that and Camilla turns away and walks back from the surf towards the safety of the cliffs. DK grins, delighted to get such a strong reaction from her. She enjoys baiting Camilla, sees why so many English escaped to the wildness of Scotland or Orkney or America or New Zealand in search of freedom from such a rule-bound civilisation, so disconnected from nature, in life and in death. What could be more beautiful, reasons DK, than the shapes of this bird’s head and the textures of the action of sea and tangle in colouring its skull, a work of art created by nature and thus honouring this creature after her death.

  Uretsete throws her a glance, as if warning her not to upset Camilla any more and then distracts her by scrambling over the pebbles with some interesting shells she has found. Among the limpets, ranging from cream to dark brown, are bright yellow shells that look like they might have been used by hermit crabs for a home, and two beautiful crab carcasses, one in varying shades of green and one whose back holds red and ochre designs, with some moss-like greenery around its eye sockets. DK is immediately attracted to the crab shells and holds them up to the sun to see the patterns through their sea-washed and now thin structures. In the centre of the green crab lies a heart with rays of sun shooting out from its orb. She nudges Uretsete. ‘Is this our shell, then?’ and throws her a charming grin. Uretsete nuzzles into DK’s shoulder and smiles. Above them, the fulmars, who nest for life, squawk in affirmation. One leaves the nest and swoops around them, skimming the tops of the waves then returning to its mate, with a fishy surprise in its beak. Uretsete and DK admire the grace of its flight, and its agility in landing back on the small rocky ledge, less than a foot wide, that serves as their home in the cliff-face.

  Above them, Sasha and Cowrie continue walking along the cliff-edge out to the end of the Point of Nether Queena. Facing the sea, the giant wing-span of a whale in flight, as if its flukes are suspended in mid-air, grows out from tufts of soft pink thrift and stems of wavy sea-green grass. Beyond, rocks lead out into the wild Atlantic Ocean. They lie under the gigantic whalebone in a hollow carved into the grass, and look up at its cracked surfaces, covered in yellow lichen, and its mysterious wing-like form. ‘What part of the whale do you reckon this is?’ asks Cowrie.

  ‘It’s the first vertebrae, or atlas bone,’ explains Sasha, admiring the shape as it stretches out and down like a bird in mid-flight. ‘But what I am wondering is how it got here.’

  ‘Ah, I can tell you that,’ replies Cowrie, ‘since I read about it in DK’s guidebook. It was washed into the bay at Doonagua Geo over a hundred years ago now, then found and mounted onto a rib bone and placed here, looking out to sea.’

  ‘Almost like a guardian of the cliffs?’

  ‘Exactly. I reckon it protects the coasters. So many fishermen were lost at sea in Orkney. I noticed this visiting the graveyard in Finstown one day when Morrigan was repairing her lobster pots.’

  ‘She seems to be recovering from the death of the seal.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. She has her good days and her off days. But I’ve seen her more than once bending over the grave site in the dawn hours when I get up for a pee and she returns from her fishing.’

  ‘You mean she buried the seal somewhere near us?’

  ‘Sure did. Down by the farm shed. She even made a driftwood cross for the grave.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Cowrie blushes. ‘I saw her burying the seal. My Woolworth’s bladder had me up again in the dawn. I watched her digging the grave.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go and help her?’

  ‘I remembered what you said about leaving her to her own devices and felt she needed time alone to grieve.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re talking about her burying her lover and not a seal,’ laughs Sasha.

  ‘What if they were one and the same?’ asks Cowrie, amazed she has voiced the suspicion that had been swimming through her subconscious for days.

  ‘If it was a selkie then it would have changed form once it was out of the water and back on dry land,’ Sasha notices the whale-bone, its shape suggesting flight, as if it might dive, bird-like, back into the sea.

  ‘Not necessarily. What if it was so wounded it could not muster the strength to shed its skin?’

  ‘Possible, maybe. You really want to solve this mystery, eh Turtle?’

  ‘What d’ya mean? Of course I do.’

  ‘Just that some mysteries are best left alone. Watch your finscape, Turtle. You may find out more than you want to know.’ Sasha twines her fingers around Cowrie’s and pulls her close. ‘Besides, I have other plans for you.’ She kisses Cowrie gently on the cheek, working her way to her ears and back down her neck. Her hot breathe excites Cowrie, and her nipples harden beneath her shirt. She responds, running her tongue over Sasha’s lips, tenderly vibrating the lower then upper lip until Sasha is wet with desire, then slowly entering the inside of her mouth which opens up to her like a rainbow cave, showered with sunlight through its moist wet walls. Their tongues play, dancing on the surge of their tides, swirling with the ebb and flow, surfing onto the wet rocks of their teeth and sliding under their swelling tongued waves, rising and falling with the flow. Their bodies entwined in the grassy hollow, they follow their instinctual desires, urged on by an oystercatcher with nothing better to do than watch as she waits for the tide to turn, revealing tasty morsels for her lunch.

  By the time the others reach them, Cowrie and Sasha are sitting under the arched wings of the ancient whalebone, looking as if they are about to soar out into the wild ocean beyond, their arms entwined around the back of the bone, their bodies leaning against its strong embrace. The deep blue Atlantic beckons them and one by one, DK, Uretsete, Monique and Camilla perch on the cliff edge, their legs dangling over, while the oystercatchers screech warnings not to come nearer to their nesting young, hidden among the rocks strewn below. Beside them, the sea washes up the layered ledges surrounding the geo, one large structure looking like the ‘Titanic’, listing on its side, the waves licking its once magnificent interior, its carcass now used as a home for fulmars.

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  Spoots spring forward in thrusty jumps and land in crevices beneath a mound of Orkney oysters and between the rows of live scallops, lapping up the salt water stream that bursts out above their heads in the live seafood pools at Finstown. Women walk about in large yellow rubber boots, plunging into the ponds with nets to scrape up a dozen scallops for this or that restaurant or local fish shop and packing them into polythene bags within boxes, ready to be driven to their destination within minutes. Morrigan stands watching the spoots, behaving as if they are still in the sea. She leans against the doorway and nods to one of the workers who comes over. ‘Is Shelley aboot?’ she asks, dangling her pipe from her mouth.

  ‘Aye. Loading the truck.’ The woman yells at the top of her voice. ‘Shelley. There’s a fisher come to see y
er.’

  Shelley replies that she’ll be there in a tick and Morrigan thanks the woman and turns toward the sea. A few dories bob up and down on the tide and most of the fishers are back from their night raids of the ocean, with a few late risers still sailing toward Finstown in the distance. A couple of sheldros poke their red bills into the sand, their black-and-white feathers ruffled by the wind and their pinky-red feet covered in mud and traces of tangle. Nearby, one of the fishers is repairing his cottage which is among a line of similar ones right on the seashore, and he braces himself against the wind as he stands on the roof, spreading tar with a tall mop. Some of the tar runs down the slope and drops off in gluggy splashes onto the flowers below and his missus runs out of the house and scolds him for being so careless. The fisher just grins, unable to be seen by her, and continues his tarring.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asks a voice from behind.

  Morrigan swings around and catches the look of annoyance in Shelley’s beautiful sea-green eyes. ‘I’m sorry to bother you Shelley, but there’s some news I need to tell you. Can we meet for lunch at the inn?’

  Shelley shrugs her shoulders. ‘I’m busy today. Got two lorries to load and a heap of orders. Maybe tomorrow.’

  Morrigan looks concerned. ‘If you wish. But I think we should talk as soon as possible.’