Turning the Stones (39 page)

A shriek sounded from the bank nearby. I had tumbled on to the flat of the strand and my doll had flown from my basket. I began wailing over its wreckage. Kitty tried to distract me by asking me if I would help cut a load of weed that would do as food for the potatoes. As Kitty hurried me to the lower shore, Nora felt, and not for the first time either, a twinge of irritation at her friend’s covetousness towards me – then she reminded herself that Kitty could not be faulted for an impulse that came out of loneliness.

Nora joined us on the shelves of rock where clumps of yellow-brown sea thong were heaped damp and heavy like clippings dropped by a titan’s hairdresser. Kitty’s hand rested on my shoulder. She bent to me, saying, ‘It would be a great help to us if you would fill a basket, jewel.’

Nora added, ‘We might get the yellow out of it, too, and use it to colour our cloth.’

I brought out the knife and crouched down with a purposeful air. ‘Mind that blade,’ Kitty cautioned. ‘It is that sharp you could shave a sleeping kitten with it.’

As I hacked a bunch of long, sappy, branching thongs from the rock, Nora cried, ‘Harvest it, child, don’t murder it.’ She pointed to the succulent discs dribbling at the ends of the stalks I was holding and said, ‘See? You have torn away the holdfasts and now the weed cannot sprout for another day.’

I tried again, my tongue working in the corner of my mouth with the effort of concentration, and made a meticulously executed stroke through a single thong. I laid it carefully in the well of my basket.

Nora laughed. ‘That’s a start, at least.’

Leaving me to my harvest, Nora and Kitty hung from their
shoulders the goatskins that they used to protect themselves from the chafing ropes of the creels. As they wriggled the bulky creels into place again, Nora looked towards the kiln. Josey was putting his back into his labour, going at a few big chunks of kelp clinker with a mallet.

‘God bless your work,’ Kitty said.

‘And yours too, friend.’

They splashed through the eddies until they drew parallel with the craggier reaches of rock, where the low tide had laid bare ruffs of glistening brown oarweed. They began to strip the laminate blades from the clawed holdfasts, working quickly while the water was low.

On occasion Nora glanced heavenwards to note the progress of the sun. What a morning. You would not want to swap it for Paris. A canopy of marvellous blue sheltered a shore that was more used to having its ears boxed by the savage winds and sullen clouds that stormed in from the Atlantic. Instead, the breeze was a caress and the sky compassion itself. And would you look at the rippling oarweed there, gilded by the sun like a meadow of liquid gold.

All morning Nora and Kitty waded ashore with creel after dripping creel of the stuff. When they tipped it on to the sand the weed sprang from its confines with a gasp as though shocked at its dislocation.

Eventually, swells of the incoming tide began to flood the rocks and the water rose until it was slapping at Nora’s thighs. Undulating tangleweeds wrapped themselves around her legs as though determined to pull her off her feet. The weeds came alive once they were submerged. When they were severed they gave out a groan that boomed eerily from beneath the water.

Nora hoisted a foot on to a shelf of rock and hauled herself and her streaming petticoats from the grasp of the sea. She cupped her stinging fingers around her mouth – they had been nearly rubbed raw by her work – and called to me. I was canted over a cleft in the rock watching ribbons of black weed as they stirred languidly in the sun-dappled water of a pool. I picked up a mermaid’s purse that I had found and waved it at my mother.

Bold waves were scrambling up the face of the rocks, and Nora shouted at me to retreat to the sand. Then she shrugged her shoulders to ease the groaning load on her back. ‘Kitty!’ she sang out. Kitty was returning from the shore with her umpteenth emptied creel. ‘It would not hurt to stop for a bite, I think.’

Kitty lifted a hand in assent.

The mermaid’s purse was lying where I had dropped it next to the rock pool. I had not gone far. I was sitting on a boulder waggling in the air a foot that had got something sharp and niggling in it. Nora gathered me up with an effort – I was nearly too big to carry – and brought me to the sand at the high-water mark, where Kitty had already laid out on her mantle a heaping of cold roast potatoes as well as the mussels that she and Nora had pulled from the rocks. Josey had scooped from the sand a bed for a fire and was filling it with stones and filaments of dried wrack.

‘Will you look at Molly’s foot, Josey? She has a prickle in it,’ Nora said, setting me down. Then it was every kind of relief to let slip the creel from her shoulders. Josey lit the wrack in the fireplace with his flint, and turned to inspect my foot. Nora emptied the creel and wrung the seawater from the hem of her petticoat.

‘There’s the devil,’ Josey said. He squeezed the prickle from my toe to the accompaniment of my squeals and ordered me to hop down to the sea on my good foot and to give the other one a dunking. ‘Go on, hop as quick as you can, and if you fall, don’t wait to get up.’

While I bounded on one spindly leg towards the shallows, Josey fed the fire, and when the flames had calmed down, Nora threw the mussels among the smouldering wrack. She watched me stamp my foot in the lacy foam at the water’s edge. It was uncanny to find the sea so deserted. On such a fair day the waves ought to have been crowded with men rowing to their lobster pots or further out to lift their nets. I returned at a skip and Josey said, ‘You will be right as rain now.’

While we ate the potatoes and drank the water Kitty had brought with her, the wind dropped almost completely until there was hardly enough strength in it to trouble the air. In the strand’s muffled hush you could hear a sort of faint whistle, which was the sound of the mussel shells springing open. Josey snatched them from the embers and set them down to cool.

Kitty said, ‘What have you in your basket, jewel?’ I showed her a snarl of sea thong and soft straps of bladderwrack.

After we had eaten, we stretched out and watched the lazy, curling waves slide on to the shore and break and roll back, while gulls and terns swooped over the rush of foam, their cries falling and fading. Nora’s aching back and shoulders were glad of the rest. Josey wondered how the holy pattern was unfolding on the saint’s island and Kitty said she hoped the water from the well was abundant enough to duck those who came to it with afflictions, God bless them.

Nora began singing a song, but she went astray in it, distracted by her thoughts. Oh, the gorgeousness of a quiet, sunny day. The unquenchable delight of it was almost enough to make up for all the freezing, depriving days of which there were no shortage. It was the kind of day you sought to keep alive in your memory by making a song or a story of it as a counterblast to hardship. In that way the soul of yourself and your people would be unforgotten. On a day such as this you almost could not recall drudgery and the toil of gathering weed in a numbing rain and the icy winds that raced down from the north, and the discomfort of clothes that were always damp and salted so that they chafed the skin and sowed disease in the lungs. What could you do when faced with the heavy burdens of life but bend to them? Either that or surrender your life – and God knew there were those who did that through despair and drink.

I crawled on to my mother’s lap and looked up at her with a steady, soulful gaze. The colour of her eyes shifted between blue and green like the sea. She looked back at me and saw a clean, sunny world reflected in mine with not a bad thing in them. She stroked my hair.

For people such as us, my heart, she said in a silent communication to me, the spark of ourselves is all that we own and we must not give it up without a fight. The landlords of this world will try to extort rent from our spirits as well as our purses, because it is in their nature to accumulate, but their grasp cannot come inside us if we will not let it.

What was it that Kitty was saying? Nora turned to her friend. The salty light had a sort of scouring effect on Kitty, Nora observed. It rendered her almost transparent, like one
of those relic jars filled with frightening, agonised components that the occasional wandering priest would bring out from underneath his bog-spattered cloak to amaze the people. Kitty repeated herself. Ah, she had a thought to cross to the inlet at the western end of the strand to cut the yellow weed and bladderwrack for fertiliser.

Nora was reluctant. Strictly speaking, the inlet was not their ground. For as long as anyone could remember, the shore was divided among the people as far down as the bottom of a low spring tide according to their landholding. People veered now and then across one another’s territory, but still, it would be a discourtesy to the Molloys and the Maddens, who had the lion’s share of the inlet. But it would have mortified Nora to be picking limpets here and there, like an idler afraid of work, while another was all industry with the creel and the hook, and she found herself falling in with Kitty’s plan.

There was Kitty even now up on her feet, shaking crumbs from her mantle, smothering the fire with handfuls of sand. She had always been a propulsive woman – and the more despondent her mood, the more urgent were her deeds. Nora, however, tended latterly to dreaminess as if she wished things to stand still and even to evade the perturbing forward thrust of time and its spiteful surprises. Ah, to be a lingerer in the beauty of small moments, like this one … watching adorable Molleen as she popped the air sacs of the bladderwrack, the girl gurgling with delight. A smile unfurled across Nora’s face. That
pop
sounded just like the soft report of the kisses she liked to plant on her daughter’s plump cheek. She sighed and marvelled anew at the way in which love refreshed the world.

Having exhausted the wrack, I tossed one of the straps in
the direction of the murmuring waves. A gull snatched it up and dropped it again with a yelp of disappointment. The bird flung itself into the air and beat towards the tall stone that stood on one of the southward fingers of rock. The people used the stone to measure the ebb and flow of the tide.

Nora said, ‘There is that much of a dazzle I cannot make out where the sea has arrived at the marker.’

Josey lifted a callused hand to shade his eyes from the sharp light. He said, ‘I would say we have a little more than two hours before the tide turns.’

*

Nora led me to the dry sand below the kiln, where Josey could mind me, and said, ‘Stay back from the sea, won’t you, my heart? We do not want a water horse to come and take you.’

I brandished my knife. ‘If a water horse came I would kill it, so I would.’

Josey laughed. ‘That’s the spirit.’

Kitty said, ‘You are a fine, brave girl, God bless you. There would be nothing left of the creature but a pool of water.’

All at once Josey’s chin went up like a hound on the scent and he narrowed his eyes against the glare of the sea. ‘Who is that now?’ he wondered.

There was a solitary sail in the shimmering distance. They watched for several minutes as a single-masted vessel tacked with difficulty in the light air. It was not rigged like a smuggler’s cutter or one belonging to militia or revenue men, but Josey said it would suit him to keep an eye on it. He smiled at Nora as if to say, do not concern yourself, and yet, what way it came Nora did not know, but for the second time that day she was touched by a sudden chill, as though the wind
had got up, although it had not. It made her want to press close to Josey and never leave him – yet her work she must do, of course. It was with a sense of unease that she turned from her beloved and climbed with Kitty the rocky spur that hid the inlet from the big strand.

The granite jetties of the inlet enclosed a pocket of white sand that was still exposed when Nora and Kitty arrived. Time passed as they gathered the weeds on the rocks and eventually the tide ran up and began jumping at Nora and Kitty’s legs. The women carried their loads away to the bank near the kiln and emptied them. I was making a nuisance of myself – I was tired and tempestuous – and Josey complained that I was coming under his feet. Nora pulled me away on to the soft sand beneath the bank and made a roof for me to sleep under. It was done using Nora’s under-petticoat, which she slipped off and draped like a tent over a couple of sea-rods that Kitty rammed into the sand. A pushy little breeze made an abrupt arrival onshore and insisted on ballooning the petticoat, so that it pulsed like a sea anemone. Nora anchored the tent with a stone, lifted up the hem and I crawled inside. She reached in and stroked my hair. ‘Are you comfortable, my heart?’ I closed my eyes against the rosy light filtering through the frieze and snuggled into myself.

Nora got to her feet and called, ‘Hie, Josey!’ He appeared on the bank with his ash pole in his hand. ‘We are off once more. Molly is asleep.’

‘Right, so!’ Josey saluted.

On their return to the inlet, Nora and Kitty stationed themselves on the uppermost reach of the shore, where a population of spiral wrack remained exposed. It was a poor sort of wrack,
but worth harvesting to make caps to protect the seaweed cocks.

‘What is it?’ Kitty asked, looking up from the curly leaves.

‘Ah, it is maddening me, this skin.’ Nora reached behind to adjust the irksome goatskin, which had bunched up under her creel.

At that moment, a wedge of whooper swans, necks outstretched, cleaved the air overhead with long, strong wings and flew on into the western sky. As Nora’s gaze pursued them, scudding over the dark fringe of underwater rocks and a wide stripe of teal-coloured current, a ruffle of white water and the glimmer of an object caught her attention. At first she took it for a porpoise with the sunlight bouncing off its back. Then she realised what it was.

‘Kitty! Is that wreck-wood out there?’

Nora did not stay for a reply. She was already flinging off the creel. Kitty stood up and made an awning of her hand, the better to make out what lay in the blue distance. Nora untied her waist-cord, let her soggy woollen petticoat drop and wound the cord around her head like a diadem. She said, ‘I will get that wood, if the wind stays in this quarter. The tide will bring me in.’