by Molly Aitken
Sometimes, Mam spoke in ways I didn’t understand. I’d learned not to listen and never ever to ask questions.
This road was new to my feet. Mam always took the sea way on the odd days we went visiting but this one ran along the top of the island’s hill that rose behind our cottage. The castle stood at the highest point of the island up there and looked out at the four villages, ours being the biggest with over fifty people, and across the sea towards Éag as if it was watching out for the old people to know when the next deaths would come.
We were further away from home than I’d ever been. Starlings darted up in front of us into the freedom of the sky. I shut my eyes and I was with them, skimming the air, the green cut out by grey walls below and the wind to guide me wherever I chose.
‘Oona, wake up. We’re going back.’ Her face was as drained as leached earth and her hand shook in mine. I never thought to ask her how she knew the way to Aislinn’s.
‘If you’re not there, they’ll talk,’ I said. I was young but I knew Mam’s fear of being the one that Pegeen whispered loudly over walls about.
‘Stay beside me,’ she said.
I didn’t answer. Sweat from her hand dampened mine.
Cries rose above the smash of waves and rushed up to meet me. We reached the end of the road where it fell into the sea. Below, on the grey shore, a crowd hung close to the water, gathered around a great black mound as high as the men’s waists. I yanked free of Mam’s grip, and even as she shouted after me I dropped down the overhang and slithered along the green-slicked rocks. Jonjoe waved at me and I looked down at the ground again, heat in my hand. The men’s voices slapped like wet ropes against each other. Washed up in the storm, someone said. Another called that it was a bad sign. But most were laughing.
I pushed between their legs to get to the black creature that lay like a sleeper on the stones, the small waves rippling around her. I touched the cold, slippery skin and a sadness, deep as the water, washed into me and I wanted to cry. Inside the glassy eye, I saw myself reflected back: a small, wild-haired girl.
‘She’s dead,’ a smooth voice said behind me.
I turned and the sun shrank from the shine of a boy’s hair. Even though I’d never seen an angel, I knew I was looking into the face of one. I looked at him and, as all children must with beautiful things, I loved him. Completely and unquestioningly, the way Mam loved the Virgin on the dresser.
‘This morning, she was alive,’ he said, faltering, his Irish a little unsure of itself. ‘When she washed up she was alive.’ He gazed up at the tall figures all around us. ‘They’ve killed her.’ No one looked down. Like all adults, they were deaf to everything below the waist.
The feel of her cold skin still pressed into my hand.
‘I saw her baby,’ he said.
‘Did you really?’
‘I did. Believe me or not. I don’t care.’
‘I do believe you.’
‘I’ll show you.’ He ducked away from the crowd and I scrambled after him.
There was no sign of Mam. No sharp fingers reaching out to grab me, but my heart leapt about. I’d never separated from her outside the cottage before.
‘Let’s run,’ I said, glancing about.
He ran and I chased after him, along the rocks, and pressed my hands over my ears in case Mam was shouting after me. We climbed the ridge and, panting, walked along the rim. Ahead, a huge white stalk grew from the rocks on the edge of the waves.
‘What’s that?’ I called.
He glanced up. ‘The lighthouse. It stops men from drowning.’
Enda once described it to me as like a fairy lantern to lead children down to Tír na nÓg.
We passed a small cottage clinging to the cliff edge, the old thatch sprouting grass and purple and blue flowers. As we walked by the high wall that surrounded it, a sweet smell drifted up.
‘Do you know who lives in there?’ I asked.
‘Me and Mother.’
‘Your mam. Aislinn? Is she home?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Let’s go in and see her?’
‘No.’ He turned and his eyes on me were bluer than the summer sea behind him.
‘She won’t like you,’ he said.
Everywhere the rocks were sharper than I’d noticed. ‘Why wouldn’t she like me?’ I had dreamed of Aislinn and she was always my friend in my dreams.
‘She doesn’t like the islanders,’ he said. ‘But they hate her too, most of them.’
‘It’s because she’s English.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘And they think I am too, but I’m not. I’m an island boy.’
‘Sure you are.’
He said nothing, not hearing the tease in my words, and I realised he knew less Irish or less about people than I’d thought.
He sat on a bit of cliff that poked out over the water. A good ways off, I could still make out the crowd on the beach. I settled beside him, letting our shoulders touch, and the thrills fluttered up inside me like midnight moths.
‘Are you an angel?’ I asked.
‘What’s an angel?’
‘Well,’ I said, happy I knew and he didn’t. ‘They work for God. Deliver messages like the one that brought the news to Mary saying she would have God’s son. I don’t think she was all that happy about it. But anyway, my dad told me some angels were thrown out of heaven when they were bold and sided with the Devil and they became the fairies. That’s what you’d be, a fairy.’
‘I don’t know if I’m one,’ he said. ‘I never met God.’
‘No one’s met God, especially the fairies, so you might well be one. People probably didn’t want to upset you by telling you. Fairies aren’t liked. They’re dangerous, you know.’
He rubbed his nose with a grubby hand. ‘No one talks to me much.’
‘Me either,’ I told him. ‘It’s because we’re children. But as you’re a fairy they’ll never talk to you. They’ll be too afraid.’
He began tugging grass from the stone cracks and letting it sail off on the wind.
‘It’s my birthday today,’ I said.
‘I know. We’re the same age.’
‘Do you always go about on your own?’ I asked.
He nodded. Boys were all free while girls were tied to the hearth and kept sleepy inside like gentle calves in spring.
He stared at the water and so I did too, picturing him running along the beaches and hunting and fishing with no one to wear the ear off him if he stayed away all afternoon.
‘If I was your sister we’d go wherever I wanted.’
‘I’d like a brother,’ he said.
I scuffed a rock with my foot. ‘Kieran pinches me and ignores me when I talk but Enda’s my friend. He’s not much older than me, only a year, well, a bit more than that but, you know, we’re nearly the same.’
‘He’s an angel too,’ Felim said, all thoughtful.
‘No, he’s not like you.’
Felim shrugged and hummed to himself, staring out at the sleek blue sea. The silence was long and we kept watching the water, waiting for the baby monster to show itself.
‘What’ll it do now its mam’s dead?’ I asked, searching the jagged surface.
‘He will die too.’
I could only make out the side of Felim’s face, but he wasn’t unsmiling or smiling, just blank and smooth.
‘No, he won’t,’ I said. ‘And it could be a girl.’
‘It’s a boy.’ His eyes were on me and they were fierce. ‘They die without their mothers.’
‘Even monsters?’
‘It’s a whale.’
‘Fish that breathe air. I heard of them before from Liam. He and his wife Pegeen are our neighbours.’
‘I know them.’
‘But why did the mother not breathe on the shore if she doesn’t need water?’
He shrugged. ‘It killed her to be apart from her son.’
‘That doesn’t sound right,’ I said. ‘My mam doesn’t mind being away from m
y brothers at all. It’s me she doesn’t like going off. That whale’s baby is a daughter.’
‘You don’t know,’ he said. He scrunched his fists.
‘We won’t ever know for sure unless we see it.’
It began to rain on us and I was starting to feel cold when he stood and pointed.
A small shoot of water spurted from the grey swell and a smooth black back curved up and under again. I jumped to my feet and opened my eyes wide, but we waited and waited and the baby didn’t rise to see us again.
When I began to shudder and think of the praying Mam would make me do for running off, I stood up and glanced at the shore where the villagers were gathered. The sea was red. It spilled from the beach and into the water like a gash in the side of the island.
Felim flashed from my side and again I chased after him, past the cottage with the sweet-smelling garden and along the cliff, watching my feet so I wouldn’t fall on the sharp rocks below. Scraping my legs against the cliff edge, I slipped down the short drop to the shore. When I turned I saw her, his mam, running down the beach with hair flying behind her. She was even more beautiful than he was, distant, unreal, and in a breath I loved her more.
I halted on the seaweed line as she reached the crowd and began howling. The men had turned to her, glints like fish silver in their hands. My stomach twisted. They were cutting the mother whale to pieces. Aislinn wrenched a knife from a hand and hurled it into the waves. The men were still, in the grip of her shouts. She ripped another blade from another hand, but this woke them. Pegeen grabbed Aislinn’s arms and forced them behind her back. Aislinn struggled, yelling, ‘You’re murderers, all of you.’ The blood spilled onto the villagers’ shoes. The priest was there, talking loudly, and she laughed at him, a cold, broken laugh. Pegeen’s husband Liam wrapped his arms around Aislinn to hold her still and in his grip she wilted. Felim ran to her and gently, it seemed, pulled Liam’s fingers from his mother’s wrists and she sank to the blood-stained stones. Felim’s lips moved with words only for her and I wished I could hear the magic of them because they changed her. Slowly, she folded around him, and all the time his mouth kept moving. As I got close, he led her away. They passed by me and her eyes shone on me with fury.
It was a good while before the men went back to their hacking. Dad and Kieran, their faces spattered, and a saw between them crunched through the bones. Enda loosely held a knife, the tip dripping black drops. Behind them all, the sea turned redder.
I watched and watched. Mam took my hand and we walked home. I was shook with the sight of all that blood and the burning anger of the beautiful woman. Mam would never blaze like that and tell everyone what she thought of them, because she always kept her thoughts the same as everyone else’s. She tucked her outsider self so deep inside everyone had forgotten she wasn’t one of them. She was the most skilled liar.
I glanced up at her. Dark wisps of hair were escaping from her bun, but she hadn’t tucked them back. She was quiet, thoughtful. Halfway along the road she stopped and hunkered down, gripping my shoulders. I tried to look away but her eyes were cold as winter, freezing me to her.
‘You won’t see that boy again, Oona.’
‘But—’
‘He’s the Devil’s child.’
‘All right, Mammy.’
Inside me a bird was hammering her wings against my bones, trying to escape.
Unholy People
‘How do babies appear in their mams’ stomachs?’ I asked Mam.
She marched across the kitchen; four days of whale meat seemed to have given everyone more speed. I hadn’t let a bite of the mother whale in me. For the first day Enda didn’t eat it either, to support me, but he was thinner than me and hungrier and on the second day he was spading it into his mouth. My evening plate only had potatoes, but every time I saw the pink flesh I thought of her baby, alone in the sea.
‘Mam?’
Once the baby whale swam inside its mother and in a scarier unnamed way I lived and swam in Mam.
She picked at the broken skin around her nails. ‘Did that boy put thoughts in your head?’
‘No, but I was wondering about babies.’
‘Jesus was put into Mary by an angel.’
‘Did an angel deliver me?’ Mam’d once said a golden-haired angel had cut me out with a silver knife.
‘This is no talk for a Sunday, or any day, Oona.’ Mam said to Mary on the dresser, ‘Children are sent by God to test and punish us, as everything is. You were a torment in your coming.’
‘Why did you let me in your stomach at all then?’
She spun to face me. ‘Do you think I had a choice, Oona? Do you?’
‘I don’t— I didn’t.’
‘Brush your hair. It looks like you’ve been dragged through a bush backwards.’
Mam went to the dresser and began arranging the cups. Her skin was blotchy, bun uncoiling at the top of her neck, but her skirt was smooth and neat. I often wondered what Mam was like when she was little. I wondered if my grandmother kept her tight at home. Did Mam long to escape? Was that why she said yes to Dad all those hundreds of years before?
Dad came out of the big room, whistling, fixed his hat at an angle and tousled my mess of hair. He called for Kieran, who strode in from the back, grabbed a dry hunk of bread and the two of them left without Enda, not that he was around as he’d already gone to church to talk to the priest before Mass. None of us knew why Enda was close to God. Dad only went in winter, as it was the best place to natter with the men from the other villages, and Kieran followed the old man everywhere, except into the big bedroom. We never went in there. It seemed a holier place than church. Not to be touched. At night, noises crawled out from under the door. Kieran said in the dark Dad turned into a sea monster and chased Mam around the room until she collapsed from tiredness. What happens then? I’d whisper. He eats her, Kieran would say. He laughed.
Late one night, when Kieran was snoring, Enda told me it was how Dad tried to make more babies. How? I asked. He was quiet for a while, and I thought he’d fallen asleep; then he said he didn’t know.
Dad and Kieran’s voices faded as they stalked down the road to the sea. Mam, still facing the dresser, raised her shoulders to her ears and dropped them with a sigh.
* * *
In church Mam’s cheeks were still flushed. She looked up at the priest with that love of hers she gave only to him and the statue of the Virgin.
Enda, sat on the other side of her, was unchanged by Father Finnegan’s words, but his head was cocked to one side, listening. The greasy God-man had only just begun but my legs were already bumpy with cold and the arse-ache of the hard bench had begun to bite. A rain-spattered light fell through the real glass windows, put in after the shutters were blown away during the storm that brought me and Felim to the island. Behind me, someone coughed and feet shuffled. A breeze rushed over my shoulders and I turned my head to see who’d opened the door.
The boy clung close to her side, a shadow. I hadn’t noticed their clothes four days before but in this place, where everyone wore their good set, they stood out. Every stitch they wore seemed more patched than new. His were too small, the creamy jumper creeping halfway up his forearms, but she looked even stranger. She wore the same red skirt as many of the older island women, but somehow on her it looked smoother, skimming off her legs and falling away like water, while her hair seemed to glow brighter even than the white of the altar cloth.
It was the first time I ever saw them in church, and Mam and I had never missed a Sunday. Them two standing there shattered the dullness of the church. Everyone seemed to hold their breath; even Father Finnegan had lost his voice. They all felt her swirling anger and sadness, even the few that didn’t look at her, their hands clasped tight and white in prayer. The guilt for killing the whale seeped like rain under their doors. I was glad I hadn’t eaten the whale.
Felim looked in our direction with his watery blue eyes and I smiled to show I remembered our baby whale, our secr
et, but his gaze fixed on someone else. I glanced about but there was no one near to me that might interest him. When I looked back he was staring hungrily at the priest, but he and Mam were the only ones. Everyone else was fixed on Aislinn or their own feet. Even Enda stared at Aislinn, his face partly hidden by Mam’s hands smacked together in prayer but I could see how he was in love with them too.
When the priest fell silent Aislinn walked out, her head high, prouder and better than all of us, and dragging her son behind her as he gaped at me, Mam and Enda.
Before the woman had a daughter, she met a man in a field and lay down with him.
She lifted her skirt for him and let him shove his way inside her, releasing his salt spray into her fertile belly. When it was done, she smoothed down her dress and turned to go.
‘Will you marry me?’ he called after her.
‘But we are already married,’ she said.
He looked down and saw the ring upon his finger.
‘But will you come across a river to my home?’ he asked.
‘It is beautiful there and we will be happy.’
At these soft words she laughed at him. ‘I have all I need from you,’ she said.
He hovered around her, watching her belly grow, but she pretended not to know him and when the babe was born a girl he moved on, to pastures greener.
The Parents
Across the kitchen I see the cradle. The fire’s been lit in the stove and I smell bread or is it wet pine? There is no sound, or just a gentle hum that vibrates against my left ear. My child is so close. I know they are asleep in their tiny bed, but I can’t see inside. Just a few steps and I will clap my eyes on the downy head and hold the warm bundle again.
Oona. I don’t turn to see who is calling. I must get to my child.
I take a step, another and another. I’m almost there; my hands reach out, but I know in my belly, my empty belly, the way I have always known, the baby’s bed is bare. They are dead.
‘Oona, wake up.’
Grey-black rolls beneath me. My cheek is pressed against glass.
It’s grey out, morning, and we’re speeding along a highway.