Sea Hearts (23 page)

We stood at the rail in the biting autumn wind. Mam had combed me with hair-polish this morning; I had watched in the mirror as she made two slick curves of my hair, either side of a raw white parting. My whole head had felt scraped and cold, and now the wind had chilled my scalp and ears to a numb helmet.

Slowly the land rose and unrolled out of the horizon: two rounded hills with others either side like attendants. The sea slopped and danced below us. The sky blued up stronger as the sun ascended, and shapes emerged on the land, forested parts and fields. Roofs and roads glinted. Then the black cliffs lifted and obscured all this awhile, before splitting apart head from head to show it all again, closer and more dazzling between them.

Nothing, I thought, could be more exciting than chugging between the Heads. Cordlin Harbour spread out wide either side, serene and glossy after the tumbled sea, after the beating of the waves at the cliffs’ feet. Rank after rank of boats was moored alongside the piers, and others lay looser about the more open water, each ketch and trawler kissing its morning reflection, each little pleasure-boat. Cordlin Town lay thick around the harbour and on the nearest slopes, thinned away higher up the hills to single cottages and barns like drops of milk around porridge in a bowl. Closer windows winked at us and the great granaries and woolstores stood with their barred windows and red-and-white brickwork, and I saw for the first time how humble my home island was, beside this centre of wealth and commerce.

‘We will catch the bus,’ said Dad to me. ‘It goes right from the pier. See it there?’

‘So we’ll not see this town, so much?’ I said. It seemed so rich in sights, with its wall of warehouses along the front, its several steeples beyond and its flagged castle at the top. Shining trucks and motors glided along by the water.

‘Can you not let the lad at the fleshpots of Cordlin Harbour, Mallett?’ laughed Fisher. ‘Even to the extent of a raspberry lollipop at Missus Hedly’s shop?’

‘We’ve business.’ My dad shook his head and smiled. ‘Knocknee Market will have to be excitement enough for the boy.’

All the jollity fell from Mister Fisher’s face. ‘Of course. You’re not here for treats and dilly-dallying, are you?’ He gave me a guarded look and Dad a worried one. ‘Best of luck with that, Dominic.’

And when the boat was tied up by the pier, among the shuffle of passengers towards the gangplank Fisher let his hand fall heavily to my shoulder, as if he were seeing us off to a funeral, or to a surgeon whose treatment it was doubtful we would survive.

The bus was a marvellous shining thing, painted cream and green, a crest on the side of it and a number-plate behind. People, Cordlin people, people who rode buses every day, sat in it waiting for Dad — and me holding fast to Dad’s hand — to climb on and pay our fares, and sit in the glossy red seats.

The trip to Knocknee was all new sights and events, one piled on the next so that my telling of them, which at first I tried to rehearse to Mam in my head, fast became garbled and then fell to silence. I hung onto the windowsill, grateful that Dad looked over me, and would see the important things, would collect any details that I might miss. Presently the overwhelming town with its too-many faces, its too-many curtains and gates and grand trees and window boxes, sank away and we were flying among fields, and this I could follow more easily, the fields in their emptiness, and the hills in their billowing roundness being much like the sea, which I was well used to gazing on.

The engine must have been right below our seat, it shook our bottoms so. I turned to Dad: ‘Such a noisy way to get about.’

‘It is indeed,’ he said. ‘Noisier than a boat, and certainly noisier than a man’s own legs. But fast,’ he added. ‘And fast is what we’re wanting, to reach inland and back in a day.’

Once we were at Knocknee — which was less grand than Cordlin, but busy still with the market day, and just as overwhelming to a Rollrock lad — my dad went through the crowd, asking this person and that a question. I could never quite hear what he said, but it made their eyes slide aside, their heads shake and their bodies turn away. I ran about after him, and the running, and the noticing of everything — dogs, red hairs and red faces, improbable piles of vegetables, excessive rows of meat butchered and hung — eventually tired me, and chilled me to shivering. Dad put me on a bench against a wall of the market square that was lit with the weak autumn sun. ‘Wait here while I search on, Daniel; I’ll be back to fetch you when I’ve had some luck.’

Before long someone else was put there, at the other end of the bench, someone in skirts, and with a great deal more hair than I had. I had got my breath by then, and was beginning to thaw out in the sunshine. When we had caught each other glancing several times, ‘I know what you are,’ I said to her.

She stopped swinging her legs. She looked at me and narrowed her eyes, which were pale like a dad’s. ‘Well, what?’

‘You are a girl-child,’ I said.

She gave a small hiccup of a laugh. ‘No joking!’ she said. ‘Good thing that you told me.’ And she swung her legs some more and looked about at the legs and bums and baskets and bustle. ‘I’d’ve gone on thinking myself a jee-raff for who knows how long.’

‘You are, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘A girl?’

She looked me up and down. Her breath was white on the air, air that smelt strongly of the smoked-meat stall nearby, and not at all of the sea. ‘Are you touched, or what?’

‘I haven’t ever met one before,’ I said.

She snorted.

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘We don’t have them on Rollrock.’

Her face got more startled, and prettier. ‘You’re from Rollrock Isle?’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘My dad brought me over this morning.’

‘For the first-ever time?’ Now I was interesting, and she seemed to have stopped disliking me, which was good.

‘First ever,’ I said.

‘You’ve been on that one island all your life?’

I searched her face for why she should sound so astonished. ‘I have,’ I said. ‘And on lots of sea around it.’

‘I’ve never seen the sea yet,’ she said. ‘My mam and dad won’t take me. Say it sends men potty. Is your dad potty?’

‘Of course not.’ I looked about for him. None of these legs were his, none of these hatted heads, fuzzy-rimmed against the sunshine.

‘Are
you
potty?’ said the girl.

‘No!’

She laughed at me, but not unkindly. What a
lot
of hair she had, and it was not straight and silky like a mam’s. If you took that band off, undid that ribbon, loosed it from those plaits, it would stand straight out from her head, or possibly get up and walk right off her, or catch fire from the combination of so many hot red strands together.

‘You might be anything,’ she said, ‘with your great eyes.’

I turned from her embarrassed, and again she laughed. These girl-children were certainly unsettling.

‘What brings you, then,’ she said, as if she had a perfect right to know, ‘you and your dad, to Knocknee?’

‘My dad has business here, he said.’ Again I searched the crowd, for I rather wished he would burst out now, perhaps with something for me to eat, some mainland fancy.

‘Cloth, maybe?’

‘He has to find someone. A girl, like you.’

‘Do you
really
not have girls there, on Rollrock? Is it all potty boys and men?’

‘We have
women
,’ I said, stung. ‘We have very beautiful women, all our mams.’

‘Ye-es.’ She narrowed her eyes at me again, and breathed more breath-smoke. ‘That is your specialty out there, isn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’ I stiffened further, not knowing how insulted I ought to be.

‘I’m trying to remember. I’ve heard mams talking.There’s something about those Rollrock women, isn’t there?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But they’re our mams, so don’t you say anything that might get you popped on the snout.’

‘Well, they must be unusual, to’ve begot an unusual like you,’ she said sensibly, looking me up and down again.

‘They’re usual for our town,’ I said. ‘Perfectly usual.’ And I turned back to the crowd, to the sun.

Dad came then and rescued me, for finally he’d had some success with his questions. He knew where to look for the girl now.

He took me there, and it was a very smelly part of the town; some kind of offal was piled and straggling in the drain outside her family’s house, and inside, in a wall corner, lay a cat that at first I was sure was dead, until it lifted its mean triangle of a face and showed me eyes whitened by some dreadful town disease.

Dad talked to what I thought at first was the girl’s grandmam, she had so few teeth and was so weathered — but it turned out to be her mam. She watched my dad as if he might snap at and bite her, as if he were there to trick her and she ought to be very careful.

The girl herself was orange-haired like everyone here, but she was not so clean as the market girl, or so slender. She had something of the twitching of the mam about her, and a sneaky manner that was all her own. She sat listening closely, pursing her lips, her glance flicking from Dad to her mam and back again. She had tied her pinafore strangely; as well as the straps crossed on her back she had brought the waist-ties around and crossed them over her stout front. It gave me a very uncomfortable feeling to look at her; who would
make
a pinafore with such long straps? It was as if her head were on backwards. She ignored me as too young to be of any account, and I was glad of it.

They were talking about money; the mam wanted some, and Dad was saying how Rollrock oughtn’t to have to pay, giving board and accommodations to this girl as we would. He seemed to be buying this girl, buying something she could do. Truth told, she didn’t look capable of a lot, she was such a funny, grey-fleshed lump. She looked like the sort to sidle out of any job going.

Dad took a deep breath. ‘You have eleven of her, Missus Callisher. Aren’t you glad to get the burden of even the one of them off your shoulders?’

‘This one eats mouse-rations, for all the size on her,’ snapped the mam. ‘Why don’t you take one of the taller girls, my Gert or my Lowie? Thin as pins, they are, though they put away food like heifers.’

‘You know why: this is the one with the touch on her, who can be taught up to be useful by our Misskaella.’

Misskaella? What did the old crow have to do with this, flapping around Potshead, coughing and snarling?

‘Useful for what? Useful for catching mermaids, is what. And stuck on blimming Rollrock Isle the rest of her life, for nowhere else in the world needs mermaids fetched.’ She slid a glance at me. ‘I don’t want grandsons with
tails
,’ she said. ‘Granddaughters with
fins
.’

What was she on about? I thought they both must be mad, she and her daughter.

‘We will pay for a yearly journey home, how about that? Boat and motor-bus to visit you every spring.’

The mam sucked at the inside of her discontented face. ‘And no one to marry.’

‘She might well meet a man here, one of her visits. I don’t know, Missus Callisher. These terms are reasonable. I’m sure Trudle would be very content, a room of her own in the old woman’s house, and a livelihood.’

The girl Trudle gave a kind of a whinny, and was no less ugly for laughing. If anything her face looked more weaselish, creased up like that.

Her mam shook her head. ‘She’d be happy on a dungheap, that one. She’s touched more ways than the one.’

‘Ask Fan Dowser how touched I am,’ said Trudle in a rasping voice.

Swiftly the mam stepped over and smacked Trudle’s head. The girl rubbed the spot and glared up at her.

‘Very well, take her,’ said the mam with great carelessness. ‘Don’t come blubbing back to me, though, what she gets up to with your pretty lads.’ She shot me a look, her lip curled but fear in her eyes. ‘As I say, there’s not a lot up her top. Why a person cannot be touched
and
have brains I do not know.’

‘’Tis straightforward enough work,’ said Dad.

‘Hmph. Nothing of this nature is straight. Go fetch your box, girl.’

Trudle insisted on dressing up for the journey in some ancient hand-me-down ruffles and a big dark-blue bonnet, her weasely face in the middle. Dad transacted with the mam, and we left.

I was glad to be out of that house and away from that woman, but unhappy having Trudle with us. She walked in a funny rocking way, her legs wide under her stoutness as if she had wet herself. People watched us go by, breaking off conversations to do so. My dad preceded us, Trudle’s box on his shoulder, a bed-coverlet pillowing up in the top of it. He walked quite fast, making Trudle rocky-rock along ridiculous. It was a nightmare, this big town and the hurrying, people’s glances and opinions peppering us, and the late sunshine flaring coldly along the damp lanes. Trudle did not speak and nor did I; we only struggled along separately and together. I would have liked to walk with Dad, but I could never quite catch up with him.

Then the crowds cleared, and the bus was there alongside its shelter. The door was just shutting, but my dad hoyed and waved and ran, and the driver opened it for us again.

Trudle bustled up first. She chose a seat halfway down the bus and sat very straight and pleased there. She glared at Dad when he made to sit by her, so that he came with me to the seat behind her instead.

‘That was close,’ he said as the bus’s starting threw him back into his seat. ‘Any more bargaining with Missus Callisher and we’d have been stuck here the night.’

I could smell Trudle, the oldness of her clothes, and the fact that she had not bathed in a while.

‘I see you got talking to a maid, there in the market?’ said my dad politely when we had recovered our breaths.

I nodded, watching the last of Knocknee town whirl by: a cottage with a yard full of uncut branches, a dog with a plume-y tail, water shining in bootprinted mud.

‘What was that like?’ he said.

I shrugged — it had not been like anything, and I did not know what to think of it, what to say.

‘How did you find her company?’

I slid my bottom back, to sit straighter in the seat. Cows flew by, some of them watching us with their great heads raised. ‘She was fine, I suppose.’ Did I have the right to like or dislike such a stranger? Today I was just a big empty trawler-hold, with the world’s fish and sea-worms tumbling into me. ‘We only talked a little while.’