Witches Sail in Eggshells

by Chloe Turner

  This was too much for Barney, of course. And as I ushered him away towards the warmth and light of the rainforest exhibit, I saw that my mother’s words had disturbed others too. My husband Martin was caught in a coughing fit. Reuben was grasping at the rail around the stingray pool as if he might otherwise lose his footing, and Hannah had lost the colour in her cheeks. I put my hand on her arm as I passed.

  This was at the time when discussions around my mother’s future care had just begun—the illusory independence of the aquarium’s wide halls was just that, and Reuben and I had been trying for years to persuade her out of her isolated cottage while she had time to make friends in a new place. Recently, with neighbours ringing us with stories of her wanderings and confusion, we had begun to feel that we had no choice but to intervene.

  Now I heard Reuben remonstrating with her before we had got out of earshot, and her unrepentant protest. Barney’s distress was an unfortunate by-product of her anger. She resented our encroachment on her privacy, she said. She would defend her independence to the end. I had been feeling guilty about booking a visit to a care home—a small place, with a faded grandeur I thought she’d appreciate, and mature gardens that looked over the estuary—but hearing her fierce denials, and the spiteful words she used against my brother, my heart hardened around the decision. All storytellers elaborate, but this tale had deviated far from its source. There was a lobster in the tank as I walked up towards the light with Barney, its hulking blue-black claws laid lightly on the pebbles, and I thought of that German woman and the strange precision of her scissors, about how she might feel to have her story manipulated in this way.

  My mother told the story one more time, though it wasn’t from her lips I heard it. It was a few weeks after we’d moved her into Maple Lodge when the police came knocking. They came late one Sunday night. I was watching a period drama, listening out for Barney’s cough. Martin was away with work, and the children had gone up hours earlier, so I slid the chain across to answer the door.

  They barely gave me time to write a note for Hannah, to hand a protesting Barney over to a confused and yawning neighbour. The overfed tabby from the big house on the corner stared at me through the wound-up window as the panda car rolled towards the headquarters behind the town hall. When I got there, it became apparent there was to be no charge, for now. They acknowledged my mother’s age and the notes that had quickly built up in the care home’s file, making reference to unreliability and excitability. Nevertheless, the story she had told had struck a chord.

  It is true that I went missing as a girl around the time of a number of unusual events in the town where I grew up. To make any connection between those happenings and my fit of teenage angst would be laughable, but enough of the events were real, provable by reference to the archives of the local rag, that the police had not dismissed my mother’s story at once. The bout of scarlet fever, if that’s what it was, had closed the primary school for a week or more, and a mouse infestation got into the flour sacks and cost the patisserie on Market Street its profits for a month. A dog, an ugly old mastiff that belonged to the owner of the gun shop in the next town along, came back weeks later with ribbons braided into the short fur of its tail. Bright lights were spotted hovering over the plastics factory up on the hill, though this phenomenon was proved later to be the work of a couple of boys with a stunt kite, torches strapped to its cross spar. Then came the clincher: a dead girl. Rebecca Haynes. We all knew her: she went to the Catholic school in the valley, but she was always in the park with the boys from ours. A dead girl found floating face down at the wooded end of the estuary, just feet from where the Historical Society was reconstructing a Saxon fish weir. And my mother—my own mother—had confessed to the police that she’d always suspected I had something to do with it.

  They let me go after an hour or two since there was insufficient evidence for any charge. I was home before Barney even woke, though Hannah was slamming doors and playing Gaga at a volume even the Lady herself would object to, so it was evident that she’d come down and found me gone. For weeks after, I played with the idea of visiting my mother, challenging her on what she’d done. But I found I could not. Even Reuben, the dutiful son, left it the best part of a month before he could bring himself to visit Maple Lodge. Sometimes he seemed angrier than me. When he rang me afterwards, he reported that she was rambling, incoherent, but that she sobered up long enough before he left to say that she’d been joking. She’d wanted to teach me a lesson. She was apologetic but ultimately unrepentant. Perhaps now I would understand how she felt.

  I never saw my mother again. I did intend to visit, but Maple Lodge rang the day before I was due to go. They’d found her on the carpet outside her room, though it wasn’t clear where she’d been headed, as the corridor led only to the laundry cupboard and the kitchen stores. Her right hand was closed in a fist, and when they prized her fingers apart, they found them wrapped round a tiny pair of pink scissors, hung on a golden chain. In her room was some hand-written poetry—flowery doggerel, in the main—about birds, and cloud forms, and the view from a cruise ship. One strange little piece, more crossed out than left written, about how much she loved her children. The day my mother was buried, rain showers were interspersed with bright spells as if even the weather couldn’t make up its mind.

  My mother is gone, and the story of the girl is gone with her. She was right in one way; there was more to that story. It didn’t happen how she told it, but every story changes with the teller. Ribbons of light over plaster rocks—check as many times as you like, it’ll never look quite the same. Her story is gone now, but perhaps one day I’ll tell you mine.

  The Wetshod Child

  It was a strange sort of day when I found her. Summery, but with these sudden chills that would sneak up on you. A queer sort of feeling round the place, like things were on the move. A catcheldy day, as my old Dad would have said—changeable, like, neither one thing nor the other. With the bore due up the river, you never knew what the night might bring.

  It’d been a busy week, though, what with the church festival bringing in a coach load more tourists slap at the end of June, and I’d had a family from the caravan park out in the boat all afternoon. A wild goose chase for a pod of dolphins that the Watchet marina boys claimed they’d seen near Steep Holm. We’d not got a sniff of the pod, mind, but the tourists had kept me out later than I’d planned, taking snaps of the cliffs at Kilve beach. I wouldn’t have cared any other day, but Sal had me worried. More of that red clover fertility nonsense came for her through the post this week, and there was a new crystal hanging in the kitchen window pane. I didn’t like to leave her for long.

  She seemed okay, though, if distracted, when I got in. I sat with her awhile, shucked some early peas together, but she wasn’t in much of a mood for talking. In the end, I decided to head back to the beach. I’d left the dinghy down by the rocks at the foot of the waterfall when I’d brought the tourists in, and with the bore on the way, I’d started fretting about that and all. So I left Sal staring at a cookbook, like she was reading right through to the grain of the table, and went back down to pull the boat in.

  The car park was empty when I got down there, save for old Tom’s Focus, and he was outside his fish and chip hut, manhandling its slatted shutters in the half-dark.

  ‘You done for the night, Tom?’ ‘Aarr. All gone.’

  He closed the final shutter and brought the metal clasp down hard.

  ‘Been three lasses playing ducks and drakes out at the end of the reefs for the last hour, so I stayed awhile. Two little ‘uns and one girt big dollop. Taken themselves off back to the campsite now, so that’s me done.’

  ‘I’m back for my boat.’

  ‘Thought as much. It’ll get a hammering down there tonight lest you move it.’

  ‘I’ll bring it up to the lew.’

  ‘Aarr. Tie it twice, mind, Lewis. It’ll be a big ‘un tonight.’ ‘That’s what they’re saying. See you up the pub for l
ast orders?’

  ‘Aarr. Dare say. If the wife’ll have it.’

  The tide was on the turn when I got to the ramp: you could feel the wind twitching as it prepared to shift gear. And there were clouds building out to sea, a great stack of them. Grey lumps jostling for space on the horizon. Copper-stained streaks across the sky, crowding out the light. People call this dimpsey, round here—when the light is fading like a switch turned low.

  The beach looked empty enough, and I made my way across the sand to the waterfall. It was splashing and chuntering to itself, just like always, making the rocks gleam at its feet. The singing started up while I was lifting the dinghy free, but I didn’t take notice at first. The Zodiac’s heavy enough for one man, and it wasn’t till I stood up that I fully took in the sound. Sweet singing, but no words that you could make out. I thought it must be those girls at first, come back for a skinny dip in the dark, but the shallows over the reefs were empty as far as I could see.

  Job still needed doing, so I pulled the boat up the beach, well beyond the line of weed and litter that marked the highest tides. Last night’s was high enough—a string of net scrags and cola bottles and a still sodden sock marked the furthest paw-prints of the sea.

  I tied the Zodiac twice to one of the rings in the wall there, thinking of the old gaffer Tom, and turned to feel the breeze. The singing seemed to be getting louder as the waves rolled in. It can play tricks on you, this beach—the cliffs toss the sound around, so you’re never too sure where it’s coming from—but this sounded like it came from the rock pools on the far side. So I walked down there, wary of the dying light and no torch in my pocket. I could still see the rocks though, and I could see something else and all. Dark shapes amongst the pools, lying across the biggest stones, and all the time the singing was getting louder.

  Crack. A broken piece of a child’s bucket under my foot, and the sound rang across the beach. The singing stopped all at once, and I had the sense of a crowd turning towards me. I stopped still, but it was no use. A moment, and then those dark shapes began to slip away. Emerging from pools, and across the banks of bladderwrack, they shifted over the short sandbar into the darkening tide. By the time I’d taken my next breath, they were all gone, and I began to wonder if I’d seen them at all.

  I would’ve left then, wondering about seals and sea morgans, and whether those pills Dr Cabot gave me for my chest were turning my head backwards. I would have left, but for an old gull, a great big bugger, which swooped in from the cliff on the wind. It landed on the rock we always dipped for crabs from when I was a boy, and there was a strange sort of light going on because I could see its bright yellow eye quite clear. It looked my way for a moment, then started pecking at something in the pool there. And then I heard something. Something that sounded for all the world like the cry of a baby. So I ran over there quick as, to see what sort of hunky punk we had here.

  *

  ‘Sal!’ I shouted as I bumped through the door, the wind tearing up the hill behind me.

  ‘What you got there then?’ Sal barely looked up from the table as she said this, but a wriggle in the wrapping must have caught her eye because all at once she was on her feet and eyes bright and snatching the babe from my arms.

  ‘First things first, let’s get this stinky oil cloth off you, little mite,’ she said, stripping layers off the bundle like a kid with pass the parcel.

  I was wondering what we’d wrap her in instead, but it turned out I needn’t have worried: seemed Sal had a cubbyhole filled with baby bits of one sort or another, and I’d hardly handed her over before she was primped and rolled and looking like something they’d serve in The Creamery in Minehead. I swear Sal just stopped short at putting a doily across the poor mite’s forehead.

  ‘Will I call the police, then?’

  Sal was still hunched over the babe, making all sorts of cooing noises, and I didn’t get an answer at first.

  ‘Sal, the police? We ought to.’

  Sal looked up, her dark eyes on mine, that little bundle in her arms, and we both knew then that we wouldn’t. Given to us she was, our little Audrey, and we weren’t about to give her back.

  We needed a story though. It’s a small enough village, and people talk. So we came up with this one about Sal’s sister, who was working with the Red Cross in Chad, and how she’d left the child with us for safe keeping. A few people did ask, but we kept the details brief, and soon enough I suppose everyone just started thinking of her as ours, like we did.

  She loved the water, Audrey did—wetshod, my Dad would have called her, never happier than when she was having a splash—but the water loved her back, it seemed. Least you could never quite get it off her. You could have her wrapped in a towel for an hour, and her hair would still be dripping when you took it off. Drove Sal mad, trying to get her tidy to go out, and Audrey’s hair would still look like she’d just been for a dip in the tub. That would have turned a few heads too, so we didn’t go out too much. Did nothing so much as sitting in the garden out the back, watching our little girl in the stream that ran down beyond the veg patch, chasing minnows and splashing stones even when there was frost on the ground.

  I was out there one day, trying to tempt Audrey back in from the stream for her tea, when a great rumble of thunder came from the south-west. The wind was building, teasing the apple trees in next door’s orchard and plucking the telephone wires like cello strings. The bore was on its way again.

  Audrey wasn’t in the mood for eating, and she seemed right out of sorts, so I put her to bed soon after. Her room’s up the front of the house, but she was all of a skitter with the wind, so I put her down in ours at the back instead, which gets some shelter from the lie of the hill. Heard nothing from her till we came up ourselves a few hours later.

  Sal was ahead, but when she got to the top of the stairs, she stopped dead.

  ‘Where is she? Where is she, Lewis?’ She grabbed my arm. ‘Where’s our baby gone?’

  The bedside light was still on, but our bed was empty. The window above, which leads onto the flat roof, was opened wide to the wind. Who knew how she’d managed the catch—it was stiff enough for grown-up fingers. And there was a pool of water on the sill—if I didn’t know better, I might have thought the rain had blown it in.

  ‘She’s not on the roof.’ I leant right out, but there was nothing: just the mossy lead and the rip of the wind down the combe towards the sea. The bore was so close now.

  ‘I’ll go. I’ll find her.’ My heart was beating like a set of maracas.

  ‘Don’t you dare think to leave me here. We’ll find her together.’

  *

  I heard it said once that of the sixty-nine words in the Lord’s Prayer (least in our version), sixty-four of them are Anglo-Saxon, like most of the words from round here. I said all sixty-nine though, and a lot more besides, as we ran and jumped and skidded down those steps, even though I’ve not seen the inside of a church since Mum and Dad passed on. Not that it did us much good—seemed like He had other things on his mind.

  The wind was whipping up a mischief by now, bending those young maples back two-double, and there were bags and papers and all sorts flying round. You’d have stopped to watch any other time—they were like fine ladies dancing—but I was head down, going like the clappers, rain half blinding and the torch all over the shop as I jumped and scrambled down towards the beach. I lost my footing on the bend and scorched my arse right down to the foot of the ramp, and I heard Sal curse as she skidded to stop in time behind me.

  The clouds came off the moon for a moment, just as I was righting myself, and I could see the beach was empty. Empty as my heart was feeling. The tide was on the turn, well beyond the last of the reefs, champing at the bit to come up and do its worst. But there was no sign of a living thing.

  ‘Where is she, Lewis?’

  Sal’s breathing was fast and shallow. She hiccupped the words as much as said them. She’d assumed Audrey would be here, and I realised I had too; th
at she’d be down in the shallows paddling, those queer little feet set at a quarter to three like always. Maybe that they would be here too, the dark shapes on the rocks, singing their strange sort of song. But there was no barefoot toddler on the beach tonight. And the only dark shape on the rocks was my boat, tossed there by the tide, somehow snatched loose from its moorings.

  ‘Auds! Audrey!’ We were both shouting, but the wind pinched the words away like they were weaker than a baby’s cry.

  ‘You stand here, hold the torch,’ I said to Sal. ‘Hold it up so she can find you.’

  I left her and ran over to the pools, to the waterfall, to those big boulders where the cliff slides into the sea. I lifted the dinghy, strong as a madman. Threw it aside, to see if Audrey had hidden under. I ran through the shallows, shouting, hollering, on the hunt for anything floating in the rollers. Nothing. If the sea had taken her, it had taken her good and proper.

  I scampered about looking for footprints then, any sign that she’d been here at all. But the moon slipped away like it was teasing me. Sal flicked the torchlight over towards me, but it was a pinprick, worse than useless across that great field of sand. So at last, I just stood, staring round desperately, letting the wind hammer my eardrums. Wondering what we’d done to deserve this drubbin’.

  You’d think we’d have run back up to the village then, knocked on doors and got a search party going. She could have been anywhere, I hear you say. You didn’t just let her go? But we knew, even then. We knew she’d gone. She’d gone back to where she came from.