Sea Hearts (7 page)

At the bottom Ann Jelly and Tatty danced out across the rocks. The others stood at the foot of the path, Bee calling out warnings and Grassy and Lorel encouragement — ‘Go up and touch one! Pick up a bab, and we’ll take it home!’

I sat where the path ended in a wide step, and watched the silver-blue sweep of the ocean. When all the sisters had their backs to me, I loosened the tied bands on my shoulder, and took a long, deep look at the seals, and let them see me. Up they reared, ready to surge at me. My nearer sisters screamed at the sudden motion, the sudden attention, which they thought was directed at them, me being behind them. Tatty and Ann Jelly screamed too, and leaped back towards us, dodging the woken seals.

I tied the ties again as they squealed and laughed. I had seen what I wanted to see. Throughout each seal, what I had thought randomly scattered lights, each as bright as the other and all doing the same thing, were in fact different parts, in bud, of the human system. Solider, brighter buds lodged in the seal’s joints. Smaller, paler ones, perhaps for the fine skin and hairs, floated closer to the surface, out to the tips of the tail and flippers, and some even out along the seal-whiskers. Middling ones swam about between, and among them ghosted all-but-invisible lights, which must be compressed forms of mind, maybe, of spirit or feelings. With a little more looking — but the herd’s movements would have given me away if I’d watched much longer — I would have seen how they all came together, the paths they must be drawn along if they were to assemble rightly into human form. For now, I only saw that there
was
a system to them — and that it was a complete system, that to make a woman within a seal, every last one of those buds or stars, those flickers or ghosts, must be gathered to the centre. I saw the size of the operation, how complicated it would be.

But it could be done. And the very looking had done something to me, calling out some budding thing inside me, too, the lights and lines of a braver and steadier Misskaella who floated all potential inside my thick-set, unpromising shape. Contemplating the seals, and, eventually, bestirring myself to bring those seal-lights together, would form that new Misskaella just as surely as it would form the shapes of women from the blubberous matter of seals.

‘Look at Missk!’ called Tatty from among the sisters. ‘She is under the spell of these seals.’

‘Oh, do you wish you were a seal, Missk?’ crooned Bee.

‘She’s about the right shape for one,’ said Grassy Ella.

‘So unkind!’ But Lorel was laughing as she pushed Grassy off the rock.

Grassy splashed into a shallow pool and occupied them all with her complaining, which I was glad of, for it took their eyes from me. They did not see, then, the sting of Grassy’s insult, or the worse shame of the truth in Tatty’s words, and the flush both sent across my face. The crossed bands might protect me from seal-enchantment, but they left me as vulnerable to my sisters’ barbs as I had ever been.

For a time, when I went each morning for my visit to the privy I hurried up the side of the house, bending to scuttle unseen below the window. I checked our step for gifts, and most days it was blessedly empty. But once I snatched up a lace-edged handkerchief, the letters ‘MP’ embroidered into its corner with a great deal of effort and grime. Another time a shining pointed tooth, of a whale by the size of it, stood there as if grown from the step, with a picture scratched into its side and black rubbed in to show it, a rendition of the garth-wall woman coming out of the seal-skin.

I hid the handkerchief in my pocket, but the whale tooth was so heavy I must weasel my way back through the house and hide it with the socks and the shilling, up the back of my drawer. When I found a moment to take it out again, in private, I saw that a second woman was carved into the side of the whale tooth, a hooded figure, her face all wrinkles, her hands reaching around the curve of the tooth, clawing towards the seal-woman. A line was incised around the whole tooth, making the horizon; in the sky a full moon hung, and that was the best carved part of all the picture, the pitted face of it; whoever had scratched it had sat under the moon itself, and by its light had matched it mark for mark.

Some time elapsed, then, with no further gifts arriving. I told myself hopefully that the tooth’s magnificence and mystery meant the end of the gift-giving, because nothing could be more exotic or expensive. And I ceased my morning ritual.

But in late spring a bunch of cornflowers was left, tied with a blue ribbon.

‘Ooh, ooh!’ said the girls, as Bee turned with the flowers from the morning door. ‘Misskaella’s sweetheart has been by again!’

‘Take them, take them, Miss! They’re for you! See? They have an “M” on them for Misskaella.’

But I clasped my hands together behind my back when Bee thrust the flowers at me. The shaky curls of the old-fashioned M, pencilled on a paper-scrap tucked under the ribbon, looked like a thread of my own fear unravelling; the flowers bristled at me. ‘I don’t want them.’

‘Take them!’ Tatty said louder. ‘We must get on!’

‘And do what with them!’

‘I don’t care — trample them underfoot if you want!’ And she strode out past me and glared back from the lane outside.

The noise brought Mam, and she snatched the bothersome bunch from where Bee was using it to press me to the wall and enjoy my discomfort. ‘She won’t take them!’ Bee whined.

‘And neither she ought. Presents from strangers.’ She frowned at the initial, examined the back of the paper, the M showing like the curled legs of a dead spider between her fingers.

‘It’s
not
from a stranger, though,’ said Bee. ‘It’s some old man we know; we just don’t know which.’

‘I think
I
know which,’ said Tatty archly. ‘Creepy Arthur Baitman that snuffles about up at Wholeman’s.’ As the others crowed and fell about, she nodded to me: ‘I think he thinks he has a chance with you, Missk.’

‘I hate the way you smutch and smirch everything!’ I shouted. ‘It’s only flowers. It might be from anyone’s mad old granny, taking pity on me for having to live with
you
, you nasty nest of
snakes
!’

They all fell back from my noise, it was so unusual.

But Tatty looked on my passion coldly. ‘Oh, it’s not that they
like
you, Missk — don’t flatter yourself. They’re only
afraid
of you, that you’ll bring the seals again.’

Mam shouted, then, at Tatty and at me, but I could not hear her for the clanging of Tatty’s words in my head. Whatever power I possessed, Tatty’s face — all their faces — told me that it would never win me friends. My family would pretend it was nothing, or but a nuisance; the rest of the town would only ever shy from it or make the sign against it, and a few of the older folk leave these gifts — and secretly, so that I should never know who tried to appease me, and never bring any of my magics upon the town, out of consideration for those unknown givers.

‘I’m going to
school
!’ I turned away from shouting Mam and pushed through my sisters. Billy tried to stand and stop me, but I booted him hard in the shin. He howled and stepped aside; because Mam was there, he could not boot me back. I flung myself out the door. I knew I was ridiculous, my fat bottom flouncing away from them up the street. But I was always ridiculous, wasn’t I? That was my place among the Prouts, to be always the smallest and most foolish, to have their attention only as far as they could milk me for laughter, and otherwise to count for nothing at all.

I sat sorting shells on the edge of the sea-front road; several other girls, and a littler boy or two, still staggered about down on the beach, collecting. It was a clear summer evening except in the west, where the sun, in a festive fit before it went to bed, sprayed pinks and reds about among a few streaks of cloud.

A clutch of men walked by, gathered from the sea-front houses to go up to Wholeman’s together. From being entirely busy with my shells, I looked up to find all their eyes on me.

‘Clear enough where that one’s great-pa dipped his wick.’ Whoever had said it, deep in the group, lowered his head so that his cap brim hid his face.

‘Prouts,’ said another, to my face. He would never have spoken or looked so confidently on his own, but with five men behind him, he could say what he liked to any girl.

‘Yes.’ Another took courage. ‘Prouts were at it, bad as Cawdrons and Strangl’olds.’ They were all blush-coloured head to toe with the sunset, and their eyes glittered. ‘Not that
my
great-folk stayed about to watch.’

‘Nor mine.’

‘Nor mine, neither.’

I bit my lips in, turned to the sunset. I wished I were the sun up there, bloodying up the sky, with such small matters as men’s ill-will and a girl’s embarrassment never approaching my vast-burning mind.
Prouts.
The disgust in that voice.
Prouts were at it.
I remembered, too, Gert’s awed tone:
Our greatest shame
. That was the key, wasn’t it, to the shadings of meaning of things said around me down the years at the school, in the town, glances passed and laughs stifled, hundreds of instances that I had not understood before?
Prouts were at it, Cawdrons,
Strangleholds.
It was clear to me, suddenly, coldly, why Mam was always angry. All of Potshead was divided up like this; there were those who had had with the seal-women, and those who had not, and Mam had been born among the latter, and had married into the former. Perhaps she had not cared at the time, but she cared now, oh yes. It was written in every word she bit out, every impatient movement she made.

I turned from the sunset, which was fading from its greatest glory. The men were legging each other up to the higher path so that they could cut up Totting Lane. They were quite a way from me, clambering shadows, laughing; they had forgotten me.

Prouts.
The shells I had collected were faded dry on the paving stones before me. Why had I brought them all up? Why had I thought them so wonderful that I must collect and sort them and take them home? I waited until I could no longer hear the men’s voices over the slap and swish of wavelets down on the gravelly shore, and slowly I scraped all the shells chink-chiming together, and pushed the dull-coloured herd to the edge and then over; they tinkled to the stones and shells below, and instantly vanished among the others.

There came a long dark winter, and Rollrock lost many of its older folk. Among them went whichever men or women had been leaving the gifts for me, or arranging for them to be left. Which was it? Nothing came for me through those dark short days, so it could have been any of seven old men or women. Some of those had been kindly to me as they were to all children, and some’s faces had changed to watchfulness when they saw me, and others had been shut away as Nanny Prout had shut herself away, so that I hardly knew what they looked like.

Whoever it was, they had abandoned me, and I felt it sorely, for now I began to grow, up out of childhood and into a time of life when all the town, all of Rollrock, took a greater interest, not just in me, but in all the other rising young women about me, and they set us against each other as you set chickens at a market, comparing their feathers’ gloss and the brightness of their eye, their temperament and general breeding. The boys they watched too, for signs of fecklessness, but boys’ bodies and looks mattered less than did girls’, however much my sisters compared them one to another. The girls’ company had long had dull moments this way, but it was only as I grew towards marriageable age myself that I realised that if I did not join that marriage-conversation, there was nothing else left for me to do. I could not go out on the boats like the men, or run away to Cordlin and find a living there — what skill did I have to sell? But I hardly dared turn my mind to the kind of marriage I might make, for from the one time my sisters had shrieked to each other about my possible prospects, and from Mam and Dad’s uncomfortable silence on the matter — let alone the looks and jests that actual boys and men felt free to loose at me, out on the public street — I knew that I had little enough to offer. ‘Perhaps if you looked more cheerful,’ Mam would say hopelessly after a space of glumly regarding me. But I had seen my sisters going about smiling at nothing and tossing their hair. It was grotesque; I would have none of it. I was an unhappy pudding and I would not pretend otherwise. Why should I try to win the favour of one of those boys? If they had not grown up tormenting me, they had never stepped forward to prevent those who did. Even Bee’s anxiously listing the men who might be expected to take an interest in me — defective in brain or looks or manners, or aged beyond caring whether a wife had a fine face and figure — could not move me to attempt to improve myself, try different ways with my hair or affect an interest in the lives about me.