Dogsbody used a single broad paddle to steer us. It went better than the rowing I’d done all the way from Strangers’ Croft. The coracle skimmed back-and-forth, in-and-out the drag and the rocks. We skittered in the wind over reefs and sandbanks, with only a handspan to spare. Dogsbody whooped and cheered. Then of a sudden we were in open waters with the island behind us. Then we went like the porpoises; full of grace on the rush of the sea, using the water like birds use the wind. The old man stood firm in the bellying boat with his lice flying out from him and his eyes set ahead. He bounced on his knees. One braid loosed in the wind as we went. His nose cut the air like a prow. He was plainly sea-going folk.
Quirks weren’t.
But maybe Perkynses were.
Maybe that’s where I got it.
I wondered what Moo would say when I gave him back to her.
‘Me and Pa dug your book up,’ I said, slow and loud against the wind.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Your brother said.’
‘Why did you leave it?’ I asked him.
He smiled on me, rocking on his scrawny legs and ploughing the paddle.
‘I was in a hurry,’ he told me. ‘I was always in a hurry.’
‘Me too!’ I said. ‘Boson was never in a hurry.’
I remembered my brother but this time he came back to me changed.
He was a slow-going boy. When we went about the mire together, he always had time to stop and see what was there. He could sit a whole day with the spiders as they hatched and took to the wind. He could wait for days to see the puffin offspring fall to the sea in flarks. He could wait for just the right moment of the evening to hear the frogs and see them jump. I was always wanting to see what was just ahead, just up along the path, just around the corner.
‘What’s the point?’ he’d say, pointing at some sheeny thing in the water. ‘Look here.’
I’d look to make him happy but I was all itches to be off. I’d be full of squirms and away I’d go, all for the next thing. All for the new thing.
‘Come back, Fer,’ he’d call after me in his soft way. ‘Wait. Wait for me.’
It gave me the irrits but I always waited. Nothing was quite as good without him. He saw the small things that life was made of; leaves, bugs, birds. He liked to draw them. In clart, in sand, in ashes. On our house.
‘Did you make the book yourself?’ I said to Dogsbody.
‘I did,’ he said.
‘What kind of book was it?’ I asked. ‘When it was new done, I mean.’
‘It was a Book of Beasts,’ he said and he laughed.
He was a big laugher.
It made me laugh too.
We laughed until we howled, and Dogsbody had to sit. We laughed while the waters split and spat flying fish like birds about our heads and the loons plunged down into the depths and swam there like fishes. I laughed until I wept. I can’t say why but I wept all the way home, quietly leaking like Cara in the summerbed when I told her the true story.
Watching me Dogsbody said Salt to Salt.
I didn’t mind the weeping, then.
My tears were twinned to the sea.
In the long shadows of late afternoon we closed in on the kelp forests. Dogsbody stirred the paddle to turn the coracle. Minnow hordes came up under like silvering storm-clouds. We bumped into the mounds and rocked there sidewise.
‘There’s a man,’ Dogsbody said, pointing to the mounding walls of kelp.
There was.
A man in a tiny craft.
Tipping and rocking, raising sea-mites and cursing.
‘Maggoty hell,’ he bellowed, walloping the weed. ‘Let me arsing-well through!’
I couldn’t stop myself.
‘Pa! Pa!’
I stood straight-up.
I threw myself right into the sea to get at him.
I sank straight down like a stone. But my hurry gave me heart and fins. I rose spluttering, flapping my arms and kicking, crashing through the water, smack, right into the kelp. I hauled myself onto the lolloping weedbank and scuttered crabwise like I had any number of legs and arms.
And then he was there above me, dark against the sky and his face like a risen sun.
‘There you are,’ he said and there wasn’t anything more to say about it.
He hauled me out like he was a fishing Quirk and I was some Hunger-breaking catch. My hacked-off braids were hanging from his belt. He smelt like home.
‘I found the missing things, Pa,’ I told him with my face stuffed into his shoulder.
‘I can see that,’ he said.
Dogsbody paddled alongside. Pa reached out his hand and the Uncle-Brother took it. They shook, and it was like seeing good business done.
‘Well. Uncle Perkyn. Will you be coming in to see herself?’ Pa said, like the old man had just come from Merton.
‘I will,’ said Dogsbody in likewise tones and in we went, together.
I helped Pa with his paddles. He really was no sailor. It was lucky I came along when I did.
Back inside the breakwater, Mungo was the first to put his feet to the ground. He was out before we could even pull the coracles up onto the pebbles. He’d been altogether cured of boats.
As we made landfall I saw Lily Fell on her evening watch, hunting the sea for answers. She stood lonely and faraway by the nesting-rocks, just a black-clad speck in the whirl of fledging and moulting. It just about tore the heart out of me to see her.
I thought hard for a moment.
It wasn’t really my secret to tell, I thought.
If they’d wanted to tell, I thought, they would have already.
What if some pizzletwang like Dolyn Craig got hold of it, I thought.
But none of my thoughts could match the feeling in my chest. A small bird had set up singing in there, soft and pure. And this time it stayed put.
‘I just have to tell Mrs Fell something,’ I said.
‘Can’t it wait?’ said Pa. ‘Your mother’s beside herself.’
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t wait. My feet were already carrying me up the waterline to Lily Fell. I was in a hurry.
Chapter Nineteen
Walking on Water
I FOUND THE UNCLE-BROTHER out on that other island.
Everybody thought he’d gone for good but there he was, lice and all, with faraway eyes like Boson, and my mother’s nose grown out to its obvious end. It was me that brought him back.
It was me that found him.
As soon as I crossed the threshold my mother went me. It was all Where did you Go? and What were you Thinking? and You lot will do for me one Day! She said I was the worm that tortured her in the pit of her body, the imp of hell sent to torment her, the thankless child that is sharper than something she’d forgotten, and a whole rigmarole of other things. I was a monster, a liver-spotted toad, altogether engorged with my own self. She came at me like a windmill, batting and slapping. She landed a few about my shoulders but only managed to mess my hair. It was just like old times.
‘Wipe that grin off your face,’ she said, holding my head so tight I couldn’t breathe. ‘Or you’ll be laughing on the other side of it.’
‘You’re talking, then?’ I said into her chest.
‘Course I’m talking,’ she said. ‘When there’s something worth saying.’
A little shyly, gruntle-first, Dogsbody stepped over our threshold into our lightless snug. He rocked from one foot to the other, a manky shadow against the sharp light.
‘All right, Moirrey?’ he said.
At first Moo didn’t know him. She gripped my arm and drew me back into the shadows like he was another one come up the moaney with the boring tool and the list of demons. Her hand went to her pale-stubbled head and her eyes stared like some creature in a snare. She put me behind her and held her there.
‘Moirrey,’ said Dogsbody, seeing her shrink into herself. ‘It’s just me.’
He dropped the cowl from his head. Moo blinked like a hen surprised in her broody box. She went to h
im and touched his face, soft. Then she gripped his whole gruntle between her hands and he snorted like he was blowing it. At that disgustful noise her face opened to him and they clasped hands, rummaging with their eyes in each others’ faces and crowing over what they found there. That Dogsbody was a big one for weeping and he did now. My mother, though, she just laughed right up into his dog’s face. After that, she lit the hearth.
She took the besom and swept the mud and leaves back into the yard where they belonged. Pa fetched milk and she warmed it with honey. She brought it to us, and me and Pa sat and drank it. It was the best thing I ever tasted.
When the fire was burning strong Gilpin came up from his hole. He crept into the house like a longtail and Pa said to leave him be. He said he’d run somewhat wild and he needed time to become a person again. My brother sat in the woodpile under the eaves for a time. Then he snuck inside to the dark corner nearest the door. We pretended not to see him as he crawled closer, and soon we heard him sucking at the milk-pail. At last, he crept into Moo’s lap and fell asleep there. Pa and Moo and Uncle-Brother talked of weather and family and changing tides. Nobody mentioned shaved heads or angels or demons. Or the body up at Redcliff.
After the talk had settled and the men nodded in the firelight, she took me by the hand and we went out in the yard. The bog was quiet. The Lamps were gone.
‘I just ran out of things to say,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t make the words say it right.’
I knew just what she meant.
‘I knew you’d come back.’ She ran her hands over her stubble. Then she kissed me. All over my shaved head.
In the evening I went up to Boson’s grave. I told him I was sorry I left him. I buried my hair by his head. One long plait on each side, two ropes to keep him safe until we were together again.
Moo and me took Gilpin up the reedswamp early the next day. It was a morning of light-spears hurled into the thickets, of sickle-shaped rainbows in the scrub and still pools full of the sky. It took all morning to walk there. We went quiet, even my little brother who commonly talks the ears off you.
At the edge of the reeds I knelt to a grass-strap still drooping under the weight of dewdrop. I touched my tongue to it and the cool drop melted warm into my mouth. It tasted like goodness itself, and carried a taste of the bog too. Not the mud and rot, but the clear sky and fresh bogberries, and bright green wort. The swamp was full to brimming and the waterbirds half-crazed with all the beauty and the bugs. Straight-up, Gilpin waded out into them and had to be dragged back to put his skimmers on.
We sat in the reedbed, where the dead reed and rush pile up soft and dry. Moo took the woven-willow ‘pooties she’d made all those years ago for me and Boson. She strapped them like little coracle-shoes to Gilpin’s feet and stood him up on his legs. He wavered and sat down hard. She stood him on his legs again and this time he stayed standing. He stumped forward, lifting his knees high at each step and testing the ground.
Me and Moo watched him learn how they could carry him into the wet places where the eiders dabble. He learned quickly. We watched him walk out into the reeds until he was just a red head bobbing above the grass.
‘I should have been better than I was,’ she said, hands on her hips, rocking back-and-forth, waving at Gilpin. ‘Then the penance would have worked.’
There was a ruckus from the reeds and a whole flush of ducks clattered out, followed by my little brother’s laughter. My mother’s gruntle was huge against the sky, and now she gripped it hard and shook her head.
‘I should have saved him,’ she said.
‘Nothing could save him from who he was,’ I said, and I was right even if it was myself saying it.
There’s no saving anybody. There’s all the frights and joying you can do together, the journeys and the returns, the great fogs and whale-waves and hunts for gods and monsters, but there’s no saving anybody. There’s only watching them and maybe walking with them a little as they step off the paths, as they change from bog-dwellers to sea-going folk and follow their own dark purposes.
Later, there’s remembering them and how they were.
My brother and me did used to walk on water, it’s true. We loved marsh-skimming. As children, before we’d grown to useful, we’d come up the reedswamp almost every dry day. In spring and summer when Moo was too busy for us she’d sling our skimmers around our necks and send us off, telling us not to come back until we were walking in our sleep. Up the reeds we’d go, with a lump of meal-and-cheese, to gather the day and stop the hours. Walking on water’s not so hard if you have the right footwear.
Out in the lolloping reeds the world is a changed place. The ground is changed; it’s not dry but also not wet, not holding but also not sinking, it’s not the shore but also, not the lake. It’s someplace in-between, someplace you need marsh-skimmers to navigate. Without them you sink straight down, your own feet cutting a new path deep into the water. With them, you just bounce.
The only thing about it is you do have to keep moving. Even with your skimmers on, if you stop you’ll sink. You have to fix your eye on something ahead, it doesn’t even matter what it is. Then you make for it without thinking too much.
Of us two skimming Quirks, Boson was the bettermost. He took to it like a young wader. He went further in than me, into the scantest of reedbeds, the thinnest of rushmats, until it seemed to me there was only the water left for him to walk on. He never sank through the reeds into the lake, he never lost a skimmer in the soggy sedge; he just kept moving, slow, forward. His way of going took him right out to the reeds’ edge where the flarks break away and the water spreads big and glittering. I could never go out so far; my coward’s legs wouldn’t take me and that’s all there was to it.
I’d watch from the shore and he’d stand out there on one leg like a crane. His whole self quickened on the reedshore. He looked back at me as if I knew the same things he knew.
The secret language Moo thinks we shared was really only silence. In our silence we thought we knew each other better than anybody. But silence lies as much as any other way of talking.
Talking makes folk think they know each other. They think they belong to each other. They think they are all the same thing. Oh, he’s a Quirk, or a Fell, or a Craig, they say — as if that’s all there is to it. We always do this, and we never do that. People think families are the mud-bottom answer to everything about a person.
But there are strangers in families.
Families are tricky. There are redheads in dark families, and giants in short ones. Tall, cheerless, tidy people will of a sudden breed a cloddish and comical shrunk. Out of grog-blossomed hill-trows will come a tender princeling, and humble periwinkle families will sport some proud lily. There are plenty of folk that seem to come from another country, strangers living with us right in our own snugs.
Some are like ghosts in the family; not quite there, vapour traces either just coming or just leaving. Others make so much fuss, needling at everybody until you could just put them in a boat and send them off yourself. But most try to make a good fit, twisting themselves until they’re crook-limbed and all anyhow.
Then there are those who think they’re a good fit, but it’s a trick of the light. They dote on each other. They think they know one another.
It’s easy, these ones say, this family thing. It’s obvious. It’s safe.
And then one day everything changes and it’s a new world. It’s downside-up and full of strangers. Everybody has to change. Everybody has to start trying to find their way home again.
That’s what happened to us.
Moo, with her penance and her sorrows, tried. Pa, with his grog and clouting, too. Even Gilpin had tried, digging himself home through the mud. But something was gone from our family and would never come again. It wasn’t just Boson; it was all of us. Without him we’d all gone missing. And that was all there was to that.
This time it hadn’t been me who was in a hurry. This time he’d been the one to go ahead. He coul
dn’t wait for me.
Gilpin came back from marsh-skimming. He was done-in and lay down in the gold-flags with his face to the sky. The clouds scumbled in his eyes and he reached his little hands up to them, opening and closing his fists and humming a bit. His baby-nose was going, and I could see quite the gruntle growing on him. I picked him up by his fists and swung him onto my back. He gripped my ears and me and Moo gathered the marsh-skimmers from his feet and we left the reedswamp.
As we passed above the Cronkward we saw Lily Fell, hurrying westward in flurries of soft red wool. Her little coracle rested on her back like a bog-turtle’s shell. We called but she was settled as an owl, otherwise as a magpie. She was making a beeline.
She was all for the other island.
We went home by the Blackwater and the downward paths. As we passed the river I saw that Scully Slevin sitting on a flatstone, his feet in the water, tuning his instrument by feel. We greeted him as we passed and he looked right thankful for it. Behind us he started up a skipping, slippery sort of tune that tumbled over the ear like water over pebbles. I turned but he was gone. It was the river itself that was singing.
I should have known.
My brother was right. Things are exactly as they seem. There really are singing waters and talking mud. There are swimming birds and flying fish, birds that talk and folk that don’t. There is a knowing in the inward parts of a person and also, inside-voices. There are worlds we know nothing about tucked inside this world. It was him that showed me how to stop and see them. The spiders in their air-sacks under the water, the gembugs stuck green to deep mud-roots, the islands that come and go, and the monsters on them waiting to be called home.
Not only that, but I know some things he didn’t know.
There are strangers inside a person. Strangers inside who make landlubbers go to sea. Or make practical folk follow wispy Lamps into mists. Or just make mannerly people tell the Father where to go.
And there are monsters in there too. They take pleasure in fretting other people, making them shamed of what they can’t help. They want to sneer at the afflicted. They want to clout the dwindles. All of this.
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