Sea Hearts (16 page)

He pushed himself up from the chair like a spider launching itself high onto its legs, and sidled around the table. He wore a joyless grin; he looked entirely a stranger. He caught Mam’s arm above the elbow. I cried, ‘Let her be!’ and leaped to her side and took her other arm.

But, ‘Hush.’ Mam watched him, and rose from her seat, and went where he drew her, slowly, resisting him, but going with him still. I held to her, and followed.

He forced us, crept us, through the scullery, out the back door, from the dim warm lamplight into the moon’s bright frosting of everything. We crossed the moony flags to his tool shed. He let go of Mam, and I went close and held her, shivering. My father, eyes wide and teeth bared, opened the shed and backed into it.

Some weeks back, he had built a cupboard against the side wall. I had watched him build it. The door opened to the back of the shed; I had told him how foolish it was.
It cuts off all the light,
I’d said.
You’ll never find anything in
there!
He had only smiled and done as he pleased, and now I saw why. He had only ever intended keeping a single object in this new safe place, and he needed no light to find it. Now he reached in, and drew that thing out among us by its narrow white hand.

‘Come out, Helena-Grace,’ said Dad, his voice softening, saddening. Mam jolted and trembled; I held her tighter and tighter. I squeezed my eyes shut, as if by not seeing the woman emerge, I could make her not be there. The summer-sea smell rolled out the shed door; Mam gasped, and so did I, at the loveliness of it, at the awfulness.

‘We can close this now,’ said Dad to his sea-maid. ‘You need never go back there.’

Now it seemed cruel to hide my eyes and make Mam endure the sight alone; as well, the smell promised cleansing, and horizons, and sky, a flying-out from this, a floating-out, an altogether larger, fresher way of living than we’d so far been cramped up in. I looked around in hope as much as in horror.

Side-on to us, Dad kept grinning, kept eating up Mam’s distress. The sea-maid watched us more calmly. One breast announced itself through the fall of her hair; a patch of blackness sprouted at her cleft, as unconscious as the breast of how it should be private. She was narrowly built, yet what curves she had were full, and her narrows were beautiful too, her wrists and hands, her ankles, her neck. Her face was as lovely as that other’s, Nase’s girl’s, and just as unaware of what it was doing to our Mam, to our family; she looked out on us with the same shy lack of enmity or vanity, expecting neither harm nor welcome from us, and needing nothing. I wished I was her, in this little group of us, rather than myself clinging to my mam, rather than my dad waiting gleeful and horrified for Mam’s rage to crash down, rather than Mam herself, shuddering in my arms like a lidded pot on the point of boiling and gushing over, drowning the fire beneath it.

Dad bore the girl forward by her hand and elbow. They made a monstrous bride-and-groom in the doorway of their church, our shabby shed. The seal-girl moved all long and relaxed like a queen or a heron, or indeed like a bride trailing a heavy train behind herself.

Mam and I shrank across the flags before them. We retreated just as stiffly slowly as we’d advanced, into the house, through to the kitchen, back up against the kitchen chairs, Dad thrusting the maid at us all the way.

And now I saw a seal-girl’s face, straight on and lamp-lit, for the first time. Not quite human, she was all the more beautiful for that. Her dark features sat in the smooth skin like a puzzle of stones and shells; I wanted to look and look until I had solved it. The mouth began hesitantly to smile, full-lipped and shapely.

‘Pack your things, Bet,’ said Mam. ‘Everything you will ever need. Wake your sister and the boys and tell them to pack theirs.’

I peeled myself from Mam, and hurried to the bedroom.

I shook Geedre hard. She was wide-eyed in an instant, and I hissed Mam’s command in her ear. ‘Light the candle,’ she said.

The boys complained more when I woke them, but as soon as they heard what had come upon us, they went silently to the task of gathering all that they owned, that they could carry.

‘But where are we going?’ Geedre said softly, casting about for what to take. ‘And for how long?’

‘Forever, is my thinking.’

She stared at me across the candle.

‘Looking at Mam’s face,’ I said. ‘So take it all, coat and boots and all.’

‘That
smell!
’ said Byrne, awestruck.

‘Don’t breathe it,’ I said. ‘Block your nose, or you’ll be bewitched. I nearly was myself.’

‘Bring your blanket,’ Mam said, pausing at the door as we gathered. ‘Sophie has few enough.’ And she was gone again.

‘Sophie?’ murmured Geedre. ‘We’ll never all fit at Nase and Sophie’s.’

‘Nase won’t be there,’ I said hollowly.

‘She must mean just for tonight,’ said Snell, ‘and the boat in the morning.’

We all paused silent at that, looking among ourselves, disbelieving one moment, knowing it was true the next. Then Geedre snatched the blanket from the bed and folded it quickly, badly, as if she were stealing it.

We carried out our bundles to the front door and stood there hugging them, our hairs all awry. The sea-smell poured down the hallway from the kitchen, almost a wind. Nase and his girl sat at the kitchen table, their chairs pulled close together. Dad held his sea-maid on his lap, a shield between him and the rest of us, between him and Mam. Naked still, she had laid her arms loosely about our father’s neck.

Then Mam obscured them, stepping from the bedroom into the hall. Snell went and brought her to us with her bundles, and I did not look towards the kitchen again.

Mam searched and silenced each of our faces; she seemed both greatly tired and freshly flowered. Then she proceeded among us, and we gathered in after her. She opened the door and walked out onto the step and down into the street, and all we could do was follow.

A
clump of us lads was fighting on the northern mole. The wind carried the first bite of winter in it; the water fussed and jostled on three sides of us.

I had Harvey Newsom down and was sitting on him. I’d no advantage of weight, but he’d clouted me on the side of my head, and my rage was pumping from that. And he was laughing at me — that made me stronger, and him weaker. His bright red cheeks and his orange curls glowed against the wet black cobbles. He flung up names:
piece of tripe
and
cat-meat
and
fingerling.
His mouth was a mess of half-grown teeth, like all of our mouths lately. I sat over him shaking his shirt, punching his shoulders into the ground.

Then he stopped, and looked up at me sharply through his watery eyes. I saw the next insult occur to him, saw him hesitate, saw him throw caution to the winds. ‘Your dad is old as a granddad,’ he said. ‘And your mam has hair like a man’s, and the biggest arse in Potshead.’

Well, it didn’t matter what size I was then: I laid into him and didn’t stop. His words poured power into me, poured size, made a brute of me, a brute with fine fast sight, seeing openings and throwing my fists and feet in, my knees. At first he kept laughing, delighted to have enraged me, and then he was too busy to laugh, trying to cover himself — and then, when he saw how much I still had boiled up in myself to deliver, he began to beg for mercy.

I felt I would never finish with him, but I could also feel tears coming, and only my mam was ever allowed to see me cry. I leaped up, gave him a couple of kicks for good measure, and ran away along the mole, his words on fire in me, hissing and crackling, pleased with themselves.

The truth was, I had never noticed, before I heard it from Harvey’s fat face, that my mam was round and small, when everyone else’s mams were lean and tall; that her hair was not black silk like other mams’, but red curls, as men’s was if they let it grow; that her skin freckled like a dad’s if she caught any sun, rather than honey-goldening as most mams’ did in the summer. It was only as I ran up the lanes with a sob ready in my throat that I properly saw these differences, and felt dismay that they could be used against me. And why
was
Mam so different in shape and colour? Why
was
her way of cooking, and speaking, and houseworking, different from the other mams’? I had never realised, so I had never asked.

I ran up home. I flew in, and straight to her at the sink in the scullery; I flung myself at her bottom as if I would cover it forever from the taunts of such as Harvey Newsom; I grasped her waist and buried my face in her. I was cold and windblown and full of rage and terror; she was warm and solid and smelled of home.

‘Oh, my gracious! What is this?’ She dealt with the plate she was washing, then put her warm damp hand to my head as she turned in my arms. ‘Are you hurt, Dominic?’

I shook my head in the cushion of her front.

‘What, then? Are they teasing you, calling you names?’ She laughed somewhat through her sympathy, at my passion.

I shook my head even more fiercely. I could not have held her tighter. I didn’t know what to want, whether to hide myself away inside her, or to squeeze her down to a size where I could pocket her and protect her forever from any insult or other boy’s laughter.

‘Are they calling
me
names?’ she said with even more amusement.

I pulled away to look at her, my face fallen open in surprise. How could she know that? And how could she not mind?

Out sprang my tears; up burst the sob I had been containing, and another followed it, and another. I wept spots and splashes onto her pinny and skirt. My father came from the yard. ‘What’s up with the boy?’ And she explained to him above me — I did not look up, did not want to see the agedness of Dad that Harvey had drawn to my attention. They talked it back and forth between them and chuckled together, not at me but at the source of my tears, so that I knew, even as I sobbed, that we maintained our own customs and conventions here in this house, and that all was well in it, that nothing could injure either Mam or Dad, and certainly not the lip of Harvey Newsom. I was relieved for them, yet still cast away from them somehow. No matter how hard I clung here, or how soothingly they spoke overhead, I could never make Harvey unsay what he had said, so closely to my face that I had felt his spittle on me. I could never un-hear his words. I could never repair my mind to close over what had been opened up in it, the questions and the worrying, and the shame.

My dad and I sat before the fire. I was closer to it, right on the hearthstone, soggy with heat; my dad was more grown-up in his armchair. Mam had nipped down to Fisher’s, and then the rain had started; we were listening to it ticking against the window, wondering if it would worsen and strand her down there.

It worsened. Drops collected on the window-glass and streaked down; the patter and trickle on the roof-slates, sounds that had been so cosy when she was here in the house with us, were alarming now that she was out in them.

Dad sat forward, hands on his fire-lit knees. ‘I should take her coat down to her,’ he said.

‘I can do it.’ I sprang up.

But he stood too, and pressed me back down onto the hearth. ‘I will. Can’t have you catching cold.’