Sea Hearts (30 page)

Mam gave me lunch, and likewise we barely met each other’s eye, let alone spoke of what was to happen so very soon. I walked up to Wholeman’s again. As I passed Cartwrights’, out of their window issued a stream of seal-woman song, and the way the mam held some notes and ran others together made me shiver and flee, stamping hard on the cobbles of my childhood, hurrying past the sunlit cottages of my friends, and their dads, and their lives that I knew so well, every one.

That afternoon I was sure someone would notice the difference in me, put it together with other odd happenings in the town and be wise to us. Every time a man glanced at or greeted me in the snug, or bid me bring him this or take away that, I must control a startled movement and swallow a gobbet of fear. Had he seen that I was not the boy Wholeman thought me, the one that could be trusted, the one in league with them against their wives, our mothers?

Grinny and Batton met me out the back as arranged, and I shut them in the coat-room, hooking the padlock on the hasp as before, but not quite snapping it closed. With only a pair of candles for light, they were to take down the coats and tie them, so that boys could more easily carry them away after dark. I was sure that they would set themselves on fire in there, or stack the tied coats poorly so that they tumbled from their stack and made a noise, but I heard not a sound all afternoon.

As night fell I found a moment to tap the cupboard door in the agreed pattern. The response tapped back through, softly but clearly, and I hurried away, out to the yard beyond the pisser, where Angast was posted, both to give him the nod and to tell him who had turned up for drinking tonight, who was likely to stay and who might leave and be wandering the lanes at the hour appointed for running all the skins to their respective mams.

The snug clock had a chime that could be heard in the hall. The plan hung now on my keeping any man from going to the pisser between ten-fifteen and ten-thirty. In this I was aided by the fiddler Jerrolt, of whom I requested all the songs that were slow and funereal, and that it would be rude to get up and piss through: ‘The Night My Mother Died’ and ‘Low Lay the Boat in the Harbour’ and ‘The Fiercest Storm’. While he held the men perfectly steady and somnolent there, some of them joining in singing, some of them weeping, I hovered behind the bar where I could deliver the signal knock through the cupboard wall, if any man sprang from his seat between songs. But Jerrolt outdid himself that night with the emotion of his playing, and all of them controlled their bladders as if they were fully aware of, and determined not to disrupt, the game of fire-buckets going on out the back, the tied skins passing along a chain of lads to Lonna Trumbell, who sniffed each one and told the next runner whose it was.

Ten-thirty struck during the storm song. At the end of it, Nerdnor Prout sprang up and made for the hall door, and I knocked out the signal, just in case Grinny and Batton had run over time in their emptying of the cupboard. Surely fifteen minutes had not been enough time. All those mams! All those coats!

‘Give us a cheerful one now, Jerrolt!’ cried someone. ‘A jig or something — “Frugal’s Ball” or “The Elf-King’s Daughter”, one of those!’

I all but held my breath waiting. Nerdnor reappeared, and came up to the bar, and in a terrible fright I waited for him to deliver the news to Wholeman that the back hall stank of seal-skins and the yard was full of shrieking children carrying mysterious bundles.

But all he said was, ‘Another nip o’ the Gorgon, Storn,’ and began to search about himself for the coins for it.

Was it done, then? Had we managed it? Were mams even now hurrying down to the waterside, singing and sewing their boys into patch-skins and swimming away with them? And what was the more terrifying, that our plan had run up against some unforeseen nosey-bones or circumstance, or that it was carried out faultlessly, that the wish I had had for my mam’s happiness had now emptied Potshead of every wife and son?

I went around the snug and gathered, then hurried to the scullery and washed and washed, wishing I had never begun this plan, wishing that the coats were still in their rows behind their padlocked cupboard door. I stacked the bottles and pushed the rack of glasses through to the bar, and then I ducked out into the hall myself — and to everyone in the snug it would have looked as if I were only going to relieve myself, but in truth I was abandoning my post, abandoning my job, abandoning my dad chatting there with Fernly Ashman and Michael Clift, leaving behind the only life I knew.

It was quiet once I shut away the noise of Jerrolt tuning up again, the tide of talk rising again. The hall was empty, and smelt only slightly more sea-ish than usual. I hurried along to the cupboard, with the padlock closed in the hasp as it ought to be. I lifted the lid of the chest by the door, and there as promised was my mam’s bundled skin, which they had not conveyed to her in case she went straight into the sea without me. I pulled off my apron, snatched up the skin, closed the chest-lid and left by the rear door, wrapping the bundle in the apron as I went.

It was uneasy weather. The secrets gusted about the streets with the leaves and litter, thick enough in the air to choke me. I tried to walk and look calm, but there was no one about, and before long I was running. House after house that I passed, that should have had a light in the window, was dark, and I heard no noise of movement or conversation within any of them, and this terrified me. I became possessed of the senseless fear that my own house would be as empty and dead, my mam gone never to return, that not only had all the mams and lads gone, but all the fathers too, so that I was the last person on the island, running from no one to no one, never to find companion or family again.

But our house was lit, and I burst into our front room, and there was Mam pacing. She scooped me up and squeezed me, tightly and for a long time. ‘While I have arms to do this,’ she said.

She put me down and I thrust the apronned bundle at her. ‘Ah!’ She hugged it to herself, pressing her lips and nose to the edge to draw off the scent.

‘Do you remember it, then, from when you jumped out of it?’ I patted the slithery skin with my bottle-washed hands.

‘No,’ she said. ‘But it is me and mine, very distinctly, by look and by smell. Let’s get on, then.’ She fell to whispering. ‘Everyone else is gone, Daniel. Let us shut up house and follow.’

I had left my coat up at Wholeman’s. Mam took hers down from the peg, put it on, but did not button it. She picked up the tied skin, and the patch-skin she had made for me, and I put my hands on the latch and doorknob. We looked at each other, my dad’s absence thunderous around us. So as not to hear it, I lifted the latch and pulled open the door. We went out, the two of us, into the night, and I closed the house behind us.

She took my hand as we started walking, and hers was cold and tight. I thought she smiled down on me out of the stars, but the light was not good and her hair shadowed her face; she might just as easily have been wincing.

Down slippy-slap we went, the wind skirling and twiddling around us, caught in the narrow ways. Every now and again a strong breath from the sea would push at our faces, green and alive and massive. When that happened, Mam would almost run a few steps, as if being summoned more sharply.

The water was rucked up and difficult-looking between the moles. I thought I saw seal heads out there, two or three, but when I looked again I could not find them. I thought, then, that seals were strewn along the stony beach, all shades of them — but no, those were clothes, coats and dresses, trousers and jackets. ‘Oh!’ It was as frightening as if they had been bodies there, of all the boys and mams I knew.

Mam squeezed my hand. ‘Let’s go along,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to leave from here. I want wilder sea.’

‘Wilder than that?’ I stumbled after her, eyeing the crisscrossing foam between the moles. I hoped this was a dream; certainly I had never felt such terror except in dreams.

Mam was entirely sure of herself, though; if I stayed right with her, perhaps I would catch some of her confidence. I waded down the sand dune at the end of the harbour-front, and ran out after her across the sand of the northern beach. The town’s windows, its eyes, rose behind us, tightening the skin of my back; I glanced up, and there were the two orange squares that were Wholeman’s against the hill. The wind blew strongly with no more buildings in its way; the water shouldered up and smashed itself on the sand before us.

Let us run home,
I wished I could say,
and all go on as
before.
But clothes were scattered about here too, half in and half out of the shallows, and lengths of twine from Grinny and Batton’s bundles. So many mams and boys had already gone! And Mam knelt before me, humming, unbuttoning my shirt, and her face in the moonlight was clear — alight as the moon, it was — and I was at first too cheered by her happiness to voice my doubts, and then I was too shocked by the sea-wind and the floating spume on my naked skin.

Last of all she took off my boots and trousers. I steadied myself with my hands on her shoulders, steadied myself against the thought that she would not
have
shoulders much longer, we would neither of us have shoulders or hands. Now I was clothed only in the night cold and my terror of the water, shivering and goose-fleshed top to toe.

‘Step in,’ she said and then I was preoccupied, wasn’t I, with fitting myself into the sheepskin suit with its scratchy seaweed seams, trying to keep my balance with my feet thrust into the narrow tail of the thing. I had grown by the tiniest amount since she made it; I gasped but did not complain as she laced me in, for she sang as she did so, and in a particular way, building and building on the same repeated pieces of tune, and I feared that if I interrupted, she would have to begin again. Then I would be trapped even longer in this cramped stiff suit that stank of mutton and sea-rot. Both of us would be further delayed on this nightmare-strewn beach.

She checked that my toes and then my fingers were pushed fully into the suit’s tied sleeve ends. She pulled the ragged hood-mask down over my face and set to fixing it at the neck. It was as if she stitched my mouth shut and my chin to my chest — she had never been so brisk and firm about her sewing before. I stood there with my neck pulled into an ache behind, my little whimpers nothing against her singing, determined now and perhaps a little mad, louder to me and more frightening than the sea’s snorts and crashes.

Through the eyeholes I watched her as well as I could, so as not to look at the waves, so as not to think too clearly about what we were doing. She flung down her dress among the others, took off her underthings and held them up and with a joyful laugh let the wind snatch them out of her hand, and then she was just flesh and fur and flying hair, unworried by the cold, uncluttered by the trappings of land-clothing.

She pulled the knot of the coat-bundle undone in a single joyful movement. The skin fell open on the stones, and with a shriek to myself inside my mask I jumped back from it, so lively did it settle and so blackly shine there, fattening and smoothing out as I watched. I gasped inside my dry leather mask, and my flattened hair crawled with sweat and fear.

She lunged at me and kissed the mask of me, and shouted something — perhaps in seal-language, for I could not hear sense in it. Then she lifted the swelling coat high, and it sank upon and encompassed her, clung on close, clung to its own edges around her.
Clap
and
clop
and
zlip
, it went, and
snick
, until she was disappeared within. And then she fell, from standing, foot-fins together, straight into the wavelets, where she was now seal, and she flung herself down towards the deeper water.

She turned and there was enough of my mam left in the seal that I as her boy could not refuse to follow, so I too fell and floundered through the curdled air and into the foamy edge of the sea. There the water, and the magic, overtook me, and what was seal of me supplanted what was boy. I ceased to think and to intend or decide, in any way that makes sense in a story, but only followed my mam, crying after her into our dark world, alive to the tides now and the temperatures. I sought the bubbling trail of her with my whiskers and went after it, to the depths and wonders and fellows and foes disposed on all sides of us, and before us, and below.

During the time I lived in the sea, nothing happened in the sense that humans know happening. Seals do not sit about and tell, the way people do, and their lives are not eventful in the way that people’s are, lines of story combed out again and again, in the hope that they will yield more sense with every stroke. Seal-life already makes perfect sense, and needs no explanation. At the approach of my man-mind, my seal-life slips apart into glimpses and half-memories: sunlight shafts into the green; the mirror roof crinkles above; the mams race ahead through the halls and cathedrals and along the high-roads of the sea; boat bellies rock against the light, and men mumble and splash at their business above; the seal-men spin their big bodies by their delicate tails as lightly as land-lads spin wooden tops, shooting forward, upward, outward. Movement in the sea is very much like flying, through a green air flocking with tiny lives, and massier ones more slowly coasting by.