by Molly Aitken
They were soon breathing heavy but I kept thinking how Aislinn had drowned her husband. Did he still live under the waves with the sea-fairies? Many fishermen said they had seen ghosts across the sound, between Inis and Éag, and on the still air their voices begged to be buried so they could rest.
I lay and watched the dark until a cry from the other room broke my thinking. A fear slithered into me that the fairies had finally got in. Mam never put the feet-water out like Bridget and the other island women, as she said it was superstition and unchristian. I climbed out of the warm nest of my bed and into the bitter air of Mam’s kitchen. Moonlight poured through the two windows that faced the sea. I stepped towards the hearth, peering into the dark. The doors were all shut. Not a whisper of the little people. A black shape by the dead fire was shifting. A strange groaning. Sour rose into my mouth. My feet were stuck and I couldn’t run away.
‘Aislinn?’
It lifted a head swinging with long, dark hair and it was Mam. She held out a shaking hand. Red. All the water in me chilled.
‘Oona?’
I collapsed down to her.
‘Mam? I’ll get Dad for you. You’ll be all right.’
‘No.’ Her voice was made of flint.
A wetness pressed against my skirt. Mam quietly sobbed and I stroked her hair. She shook under my touch. I was too afraid to hold her hand.
‘Mam,’ I whispered. ‘It’s blood. I need to get Dad.’
‘No.’ Her breath was harsh and fishy. ‘If you tell a soul, I’ll kill you.’
Winter entered me, crawling through my door and chilling every corner of my body. I focused on stopping the tears, on wiping Mam’s face with my nightdress. We sat a long while.
‘Help . . . help me outside,’ she said.
I took a deep breath as I stood and she slowly pulled herself up, using me as a post, leaning so heavily on my shoulders my legs shook. As we walked towards the door, a small thing flopped out of her dress.
Outside, Mam turned her face to the wind. The water barrel was by the little room’s window and she dipped her hand in it, lifted her skirt and began running the wet up and down her bare legs.
Shivering, I splashed my hands too and washed her feet but no matter how much water I used there was still more blood. It was pouring out of her like rain.
‘I’ll get a cloth.’
She didn’t hear me. She shook, staring into the barrel like she had dropped her wedding ring in it.
I left her balancing against the barrel and went back inside, keeping close to the wall, eyes up, away from the floor where I might see it, lying there still. I grabbed a bit of soft cloth from the rag basket and backed outside again, holding my breath.
Mam’s blood had slowed so I could wash it away from her legs. When the stains were wiped, she went back into the kitchen and I watched the ground soak up the dirty water.
Close to the dead fire, she pulled off her dress and I bundled it into a knot for washing. Then she stood naked, her hand over her eyes, and her fingers had a dark crust. I walked her towards the big bedroom and put my palm against the door, ready to open it.
‘Oona,’ her voice cracked. ‘You’ll clean the floor. Before anyone wakes.’
‘I will, Mam,’ I whispered. There was a lump in my throat so big I couldn’t say a word more.
She grasped my wrist and bent it so I had to bite my tongue to stop the yelp. ‘Don’t leave it somewhere people would find it.’
‘I’ll not—’
‘What if they guessed I meant . . . ?’ she mumbled. ‘I prayed and prayed. I did, and I found an answer then, a way.’
The sharp taste still burnt my mouth. ‘What are you on about?’
‘Don’t speak to anyone,’ she said with the quickness of her own voice again. ‘Not a word. It’s our secret. Me and you. If they knew, they’d tear us apart.’
‘Mammy, did you kill our baby?’
‘God’s will.’ She was all calm. ‘His will. I’m not meant to be a mother again.’
She disappeared into the bedroom and I watched moonlight swirl at my feet. I didn’t want to look up. I breathed deep. I was brave. I was brave. I was—
The small white-red thing was closed like a flower bud. I stepped closer. Her arms and legs were thin and fine. I put my ear by her face but heard no breaths. She was still as if she’d never once moved. There were no rags soft enough in the basket to wrap her in so I went into the little room where the boys still snored, and fumbled around my bed until I found my skirt and shirt. In the kitchen I tore off my nightdress and pulled on my day clothes; I laid my nightdress beside her and lifted her by her tiny, finger-length arms and placed her on it. She was so small I was afraid to break her. Her face was damp so I smoothed away the wetness. Her eyelashes were as wispy as an insect’s wing. She was tiny, perfect and clean.
Eyes were on me. I looked up. The Virgin watched me from above.
‘Please, Mary,’ I whispered. ‘Bring her back.’
I waited but the small girl curled up like a white shell inside my clothes didn’t move. I left my prayer with the Virgin, but I knew she’d do nothing. She was only ever silent, judging.
Stones cut my soft shoes. I held her close. My sister. She was light as a mackerel. I stopped at our cows’ field. Purple flowers burst from the walls there. I could place her beneath them so the petals would fall onto her closed eyes to kiss her awake. But no, someone would find her there. They’d hear her cry when she woke. They’d steal her.
Breathing came rough because of the tears. I couldn’t wake the cottages all around. I couldn’t scream.
Mam had killed her.
She had killed my sister.
I was running, along the top road to the other side of the island. I passed the beach and kept running, tripping but catching myself with speed before I could crash to the ground. I cradled her in my arms, holding her close so my warmth would pass into her.
I went through the garden, all the flowers shut, rapped on the door and opened it. The fruity air hit me. I stepped inside and the black turned greyer. Near the gaping hole of the hearth was the lumpy mound of a floor bed.
‘Aislinn,’ I called, and my voice sounded as strangled as Mam’s had been. ‘Aislinn.’
A slippery movement. Two heads or one? And then she stood and crossed the small space.
‘Child? It’s the night.’
‘I— I heard you were a healer. Bring my sister back.’ I held out my nightdress parcel and for a moment I felt her search my face but there was nothing an eye could see in the dark. She took my sister.
‘Be gentle.’
She glanced at me and placed my nightdress on the table and unwound the cloth. She sucked in her breath.
‘The baby is dead.’
She rewrapped my tiny girl.
The tears stung my eyes. ‘But you could . . . you could bring her back. You change the sea with your wanting. You took Felim’s daddy’s life. You could bring her life back. You could.’
My hand rested just above the little parcel.
‘She was too small to live outside your mam.’
The voice was distant. A small head bobbed up from the sea of blankets on the floor. Felim. A hand stroked my shoulder and I pushed it away, lifted my sister from the table and ran. The wind screamed in my ears.
I was on a long flat rock that slipped into the sea. Water sprayed us. Cold, gentle. I heard Bridget once say a baby lives like it’s underwater inside a woman. She could swim, escape for ever. Go to America. I laid her on the rock and freed her from my clothes. In my open palms I cradled her and held her like a wish. I waited for my prayer, for Mary to bring her back. No one else could. I waited and waited until I was hard as a stone and couldn’t move. I waited and then I cursed Mary. I cursed myself. I cursed Mam most of all and dropped my sister in the sea.
The Cave of Dead Children
Mam did not appear in the morning and I wondered if all her blood had dripped away, leaving her empty, clean, ready for a
wake.
I stepped out the back to get the eggs and found the small white parcel tied with string on the ledge of the little room’s window, just where the bird wing had been left before. The night’s bitter taste seeped back into my mouth, but it wasn’t a tiny sister hidden inside the cloth. It was a bunch of dried herbs and it could only be from Aislinn. I’d been awake all night, knowing I would never sleep again. Lying just below the window until sunrise, I heard nothing. Aislinn could have hovered there through the dregs of the dark without me knowing.
Mam appeared long after sunrise, whiter than fishbone. Nothing passed her lips. Not food or tea or words. The guilt made her mouth full. She just stared at the hearth. I had scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed it the night before, but I couldn’t get rid of the dark stain. Dad lifted Mam’s hand and covered it with his own. She never met his eye and he never once looked down at where his dead daughter had lain, so he couldn’t have known. As they were all leaving, Enda whispered I was to keep a good eye on Mam and let her rest. I watched him to see if he knew but he glanced at her with only worry but not fear or anger dragging at his cheeks. The words were rubbing against my teeth to tell him she was evil but I caught sight of the shadows under his eyes from late-night Bible reading and realised it would be too tiring for him to know she was a murderer.
The day went slow. Mam didn’t move from her stool. I tidied and sewed up the holes in Kieran’s socks. When I came back from getting water, she’d lit the dry dung and was bent over, prodding a white bundle into the flames.
‘Mam! That’s my nightdress.’
She poked it with a stick. ‘You got it all bloody.’
We watched the flames devour it, then she walked into the big bedroom and bolted the door behind her. I didn’t even know it had a bolt until I heard it clunk into place. I sat on the floor and let the tears come.
* * *
The sitting still and lying in bed went on for days. After a week, in the afternoon when no one was about, I boiled water and made the herbs into a tea in the pot the way Bridget did with Aislinn’s flowers when I was small. The smell of it brought her out. She strode up to me as I poured a cup and grabbed my arm, making the water slosh across the table. Her dark eyes sparked with light again and her fingernails drove into my skin.
‘You went to see that woman.’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you lie to me.’
‘The tea was outside on the windowsill. That’s where I found it.’
‘I won’t touch another drink from that woman. It’s poison. It’ll kill me this time.’
I knew then how it’d happened. A great darkness had come into Mam to make her walk across the island to Aislinn’s and drink herbs that killed babies. I decided I would never let it into me.
I looked down into the yellow depths of the liquid. Petals floated near the rim. I took a deep breath, stared straight into her twisted white face and drank.
She snatched it from my hand, fixed her gaze on me and lifted the cup to her mouth. I looked right back at her. We said nothing. Silence was agreed between us and the dead weight of all the island women dropped on me. I gritted my teeth.
For days I waited for Mam to come to me and ask where I had laid my dead sister down to sleep. She would weep and make me pray with her by the sea, asking God to bring the baby’s soul up to heaven. I waited and waited but Mam behaved as if her child, my sister, had never been.
* * *
My sister visited me most nights. She wafted in through the shutters and soaked into my chest. We ran the fields, her as tall as me with wispy hair like a crown and me hanging on to her hand because she was so thin that if I didn’t she’d drift away. Sometimes in my dreams we were drowning and I would wake gasping.
Mam sat all day spinning or staring out at the water in summer and the shut door in winter. At first I was sure she must know where I put her baby but when I looked closer I saw that her eyes were dull. She wasn’t looking at anything at all.
In the past year my limbs had grown as quick as the grass in the summer and they carried me faster than ever before. Growing meant it was easier to escape from Mam’s silence, and she didn’t seem to bother when I left.
I was sat on a wall, far from the village and alone. Below me was a beach I’d not been to before and at the far end, carved into the cliff, was a cave. Kieran had told me it was where women left changeling babies. He said if you walked along the road at night you could hear them crying.
‘I’ve been looking for you.’
I jumped, scratching my hands against the rough rocks of the wall, and blinked in the blinding sunlight until Felim took shape before me.
‘Did you follow me?’ I asked.
‘No.’
I waited for him to ask about my coming to his cottage in the dead of the night. Dead.
‘I’m going to Éag today,’ he said.
He’d seen the baby. He knew Éag was where I should have taken her.
I swallowed. ‘Why do you want to go there?’
‘My mother and me could live there just us, no one to talk about us and say bad things about her.’ He smiled and it was all wrong on his face, like sun shining at night. I had to look away.
‘How will you get to Éag?’ Fear was turning my arms and legs stiff.
‘Daithi will row us,’ he said. Old Daithi and Bridget never had their own children so I believed that to make one child smile, even Felim, he would take his fishing boat into dangerous waters.
I peered across the water but Éag was hidden in clouds. ‘It’s too far and I can’t even be seeing Éag just now. Daithi would never find it.’
‘I can see her.’ He laughed and then stopped suddenly. ‘I need to go there.’
‘No one goes there unless someone’s dead.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m not right. I’m sick.’
I looked him up and down. He seemed to shine, blinking heavily under his own brightness.
‘Sick?’ I said, doubtful. I slid off the wall and prodded his arm. ‘Does that hurt?’
He shook his head.
‘You look fine to me.’
His face was such a blank it made me want to take his hand and squeeze it to force him to laugh or cry, but I didn’t, knowing it wasn’t right to touch someone like that without them wanting it.
‘Why do you think you’re sick?’ I asked, holding my hands behind my back.
‘Father Finnegan told me I was ill. He said God will kill me soon.’
‘He never said that.’
Felim shrugged.
‘You really shouldn’t listen to what the Father says.’
He stared at me, his mouth slightly open, revealing his yellowed teeth. ‘Father Finnegan speaks the word of God.’
‘Well, yes, but if there’s nothing wrong with you, you won’t die. He’s from the mainland so he has to make things up to keep himself from jumping off a cliff.’
My brothers would’ve laughed at this but Felim just looked at me all serious, like what I said was true and the Father would kill himself out of boredom.
‘You’ll be punished for that kind of talk,’ he said.
‘By who?’ I laughed, and he searched my face like he was looking for the reason I’d say such wicked words, and I had to look away.
‘You sound like you don’t believe in God.’
‘Well, he’s never listened to me. Has he ever done anything for you?’
‘Yes.’ Felim smiled a small smile just for himself.
Out at sea, bruised grey clouds piled while wind blew them fast towards us, over the waves, and for a moment I felt a thrill of terror. I had made the storm clouds come after all, but then I looked at the pale boy born on the beach to a murderer mother and I knew he’d done it. All my power fell away.
‘The cave’ll be dry.’ I was more afraid of returning home to the empty kitchen with its stained patch on the floor and Mam locked in the big room than the stories about the cave, the dead children, and how if you kept walking down the
passage the air would turn warm and you’d end up in hell.
Felim pressed his lips into a white line.
‘You’re afraid, aren’t you?’ I said.
‘I don’t like the dark.’ He wasn’t like other children. He didn’t seem to lie.
‘Enda says you’ve to face your fears.’ I jumped down and marched towards the shore.
I glanced over my shoulder at him, laughing, but his face was smooth as a stone, like he had no feelings at all now.
‘You’re queer, Felim,’ I called, as I strode away from him towards the beach. ‘You could just talk to people. They might like you if you did.’
I ran ahead, worried the fear would get me if I slowed, and already the rain lashed my face and cut through my clothes. Just inside the cave I waited for him, squeezing out the wet ends of my hair, knowing he would follow. The air was salty and the floor grey with pebbles and shells, but no tiny bones, no skeletal white fingers grabbing from the walls, and only the dark stood ahead. Felim arrived at the lip of the blackness and hovered there, stepping a little further in when I took a step backwards. The light vanished from him and the stones clacked under his feet.
‘Quiet,’ I hissed. ‘You’ll wake the ghosts.’
He sucked in his breath and held it in his mouth, then let the air out in one great rush. And he laughed, a short cackle, his eyes wild and wet with rain. I caught it and together we barked into the dark. But our joy echoed back from the depths and it was broken. We stopped.
We crept into the gash of the island, feeling our way along the wet walls until it became so black my eyes stung. I clung to the rough rock, afraid I’d fall through the earth and into nothing. I reached out behind me for Felim’s hand but there was only empty space where the angel boy should have been. I heard the clack clack of feet stop, then start again but quieter until there was no sound at all, only my heart battering inside my ears. And then I was falling, sliding down the slippery insides. I tried to shout at him but the dark had swallowed my voice. I listened for the babies crying but all I heard was the drip drip of water. I saw the row of those mothers, a hundred empty-eyed island women with their shawls pulled over their heads, leaving those baby bundles to die in the blackness alone.