Sea Hearts (9 page)

He lowered me to stand by the fire. He put his arms — long, strong and lean — about me. I stood to my toes and he bent from his heights and we met in the middle very sweetly, I thought, very neatly. And then I thought the kiss had finished, but still he pressed me there, and when my mouth softened wondering at the surprise of that, oh! In he slipped his tongue a little way! I exclaimed against it. I tested and tasted him; I put up my own arms and held him down to me, and up his hot neck and into his slithering hair my fingers found their way, and in among his teeth my own tongue darted, and up and down our bodies we were fast together.

He let me go as gently as he’d taken me up, soft smaller kisses finishing off the larger. He pushed back the curls on my forehead that would never submit to being tied back. I fizzed and rushed with that kiss, quietly thundered to myself. How would I bring myself, at the end, to send all this back to the sea?

But why think of that? I sat to the rock, drawing him down with me. I pushed him back, and lay alongside him, quite unafraid. I roamed over him, exploring the hills and vales of him, the roads and towers, with my small, plump, work-red hands, wondering at all his different degrees of hairiness and smoothness, of warmth and chill, tying and loosing his hair, which was dark as night, slippery as water.

And here was a wonder, that a man so well-conformed himself should be so eager to embrace what I had always been told was a poorly made body, laughable, even disgusting. But I delighted him; he travelled my curves, weighed me in his hands, pressed me and gasped with me as I yielded. Open-faced he looked into me, his eyes empty of the scorn I was used to seeing, in women’s faces as well as men’s. Instead he was only another creature discovering skin, discovering forms of limbs, folds and fancies in the fire- and moonlight, all of them laughable, all gravely serious. He pushed the dampening hair back from my temples, and kissed me again with that wide, that white-teethed, that smiling-serious mouth.

We barely spoke, beyond a muffled cry here and there, a little laugh, a gasp. What was there to say as we did what we did, or even as we floated in its aftermath, curled around each other in the fire’s warmth, in the night’s cold? Exultant, I watched as my life tore free like a kite from its string and flung itself up into the windstorm that was the future. I had been so small, and stuck so fast in my little round, my puny terrors! Why had I cared so much for people’s opinions — people even smaller than myself? Ha! It hardly mattered why, did it, if I cared no longer? Look what I could have! Look what I could do!

The stars teased cloud-veils across themselves and twinkled out brightly again afterwards; the ample air of spring spread above, salty, green, teeming with life; the sea lipped and popped at the rock’s rim, sighed farther out in its swells and tides and darkness. I turned in my lover’s arms and pulled his mouth to mine again.

At last we reached what I knew was our end. He had given me a new body, modelled and magicked it up with his hands and mouth and manhood. For the first time in my life I had been beautiful, and lovable, whether Potshead people thought so or no. I felt cleansed of the rage and misery that had made up so much of me in pettier company, in prettier. I felt freed to please myself, to find my way as I would, in a world that was much vaster than I had realised before, in which I was but one star-gleam, one wavelet, among multitudes. My happiness mattered not a whit more than the next person’s — or the next fish’s, or the next grass-blade’s! — and not a whit less. How piddling I was, in the general immensity! And how lovely it was to be tiny and alone, to have quickened to living for a moment here, to be destined soon to blink out and let time wash away all mark and remembrance of me.

We went down together to the cold, stinging sea and swam there; I rinsed his seal-ness from me, and he my earthliness from him. He came to me and stood against me; I reached barely to his chest, and he held me, and played my hair about my shoulders, wringing the sea from it and scattering it with his big hands, beautifying its messy wet masses by only touching and looking. He kissed me once more, a deep, long, drinking kiss upon my sore lips, involving my aching tongue.

And then he let me go. Naked I followed him, through the seals, up onto the rocks. His skin lay there, all the magic asleep inside it. For a moment as he bent, it trembled below him, and was indistinct in the wash of upflying life. He reached for it, and it woke and leaped to him. He hoisted it up, and it thickened and sagged, and the first lights went from his fingertips into the seal-flesh. He fell to his knees, the skin clapped down, and the man was gone. How had he ever been? Aghast, I watched the rearing blubber-mass tip itself off the rock, into the crowd of crying mams.

Shivering, still bathed in up-flowing magic, I went back to the fire and crossed myself with my bandage. Peace fell around me, and I was alone at Crescent Corner with the sea and the moon- and starlight playing upon each other, and the seals sinking back to their rest. Slowly I hid my new self in my same old blouse and kirtle and boots, kicked over the embers and crushed the heat out of them. I walked, warm now and thick-shod, across the rocks and up the sandy path. At the top of the cliff I stood in the grass under the stilled stars that had so dithered and streaked above me before. I had been ugly once; I must remember that, remember how to be ugly again now that I knew I was beautiful, remember how to be ordinary now that I’d seen the wonders inside me.

I walked home through the unmagical night. I changed into my nightdress in the privy and went into the house, and my old life greeted me there, ready to box me straight back in, to pack me tight among my old chores and irritations. My new eyes looked around at the shadowy kitchen; it would never hold me again as it had. I was here, but I was no longer
trapped
here.

As I went along the hall, Mam grumped from behind her door. ‘What’ve you been so long for? Have you the squitters, or what?’

‘I fell asleep there.’ I shuffled onward as sleep-clumsily as I could pretend.

‘A person could lie here
bursting,
’ she said.

‘You should have followed and knocked,’ I said mildly, and caught back a laugh into my throat, at the thought of what her knocking would have led to.

I closed my door, undressed and laid down my clothes, and put myself to bed. I did not want to sleep, to see the end of this night, to wake into the humdrum tomorrow and think it all a dream. But as I’d seen, lying beside the seal-man on the Crescent rocks, what did my wants count for? Nothing and less than nothing. I watched the ceiling’s swirling shadows, happy to matter so little. When my thoughts ran down at last, with a sigh I wrapped my own arms around myself, and stroked my own damp hair as I sank to sleep.

Life went on as before. The feeling of the seal-man’s hands faded from my skin, and the sight of his face from my memory. One day after midsummer it struck me that life had gone on, for quite a time, without its usual monthly event, and that he had left me more than my torn virtue and my new peacefulness.

I looked coolly on this realisation. The town would condemn me, and Mam would rant and rail, but I would still have this bab, half-magical, entirely mine.

Now that I had admitted it, I felt the child growing inside me. But I did not become spectacularly ill, as both Grassy and Bee were now, embarked upon their next babs — as they had been for every bab, trying to outdo each other with their suffering. I did not have to sit about green with a puke-bowl by me, fighting to keep food down. Sometimes a vague wisp of sickness floated through me, and once or twice the smell of fry-fat brought a lump to my throat; any but the weakest tea tasted foul to me, and the house sometimes had so close a fug that I must go and gasp on the step if I were not to faint away. But Mam did not notice these small discomforts, and no one else watched me closely enough to remark the difference.

And then the discomforts went away, and there was only the knowledge, the growing weight right deep down in me, the occasional fluttering movement. I waited for someone to notice, for voices to snap and eyes to turn on me. But there had always been a lot of me, and I was not much larger, only firmer. The outward change was hardly to be remarked, beyond what Mam always carped about, beyond what men like Garter O’Day watched sidelong when they had the chance. The months went on, and the weather closed in,and I sat by the fire curiously unfrightened. I would go back in my mind to the night I had had with the seal-man, to the dark of the spring moon; I would listen to the movements of his child in me, and it would all make a sense of sorts. There was no need to tell it, to surrender it up for gossiping, to cheapen it so. Let people realise when they would; it was no concern of mine.

Deep in the winter when the ice knocked in the harbour and Potshead pulled in its elbows under the snow, Grassy and Bee both were brought to bed of their babs. Mam went up to stay with Grassy, so as to tend to them both without having to take that slippery hill every time, leaving me at home with doddering Dad trapped in his bed unable to speak, or possibly even to think. Then only, with the larder as full as it could be and no reason to venture from the house and be seen, out popped my belly, and for a few days I was clear as clear a mam-to-be. And no one came, and Dad did not care. And then, one afternoon while he slept, in my own room I paced back and forth, and held to the bedpost and exclaimed myself through the pains, and after not very long a labour, I brought forth the being that had swum and somersaulted in me these last months.

I wrapped it and lifted it and held it against my own heat. It was corded to me still; I crouched over the chamber pot and waited for the followings to follow when they would. I stared at the bab’s face in a wondrous terror, as it pinched and frowned and then gasped up a breath. The shock of that, of having a life of its own, woke it, and it opened sticky eyelids. I thought it must be blind; I had never seen eyes of that smoky, stormy blue.

I unwrapped it to see if it was well-formed, to count its fingers and toes, and I discovered that I held a boy-child. There, now, I thought. There’s two good men in your life. I covered him quickly, to stop any more of his warmth escaping.

I gasped and rocked there and held him fast against me; if I could, I would have taken him back in through my bosom, and carried him about there warm and next to my heart. This was not the child I had planned, as separate from me as a badge or a brooch. I wanted to hide him, to keep him from harm; no one yet was aware of him, and I wished that no one ever need be. Must I let Potshead at him, as they’d gone at me? Must Mam pass her judgments on his tiny head, and my sisters gape and prod at him, weigh him in their practised arms, hope aloud that he would grow up handsomer than I had? Could he not grow entirely himself, unharassed and unshaped by their scorn? How could I watch as they pressed and pummelled him, as he shrank under their blows, and grew extra flesh, as I had, thinking to protect himself but only offering them an easier mark? How could I engineer for him to find his own shape — small, slender and fragile as it might be, or wild and fierce and rude? Already I could feel his purposeful working inside the cloth, his feet bracing against my arm. His face knew nothing and yet he was discovering already how to breathe, how to yawn — and sneeze! — how to surrender to sleep, one hand resting its little warmth against his cheek.

Dad made his noises in the other room, needing me. I woke from the spell of the bab, rose, and laid him in the hollow of the bed. I pinned cloths around myself and dropped my skirts to cover my drizzled legs. And I went out to Dad; it was toileting he wanted, and my new body went slowly about the tasks of that. I was glad to care for him, and to have tended him so long; now, no one was better equipped than I to serve that bright tiny being in the other room, so helpless, so entirely mine to help.

If it had not been winter, and if I’d not been so ugly and friendless, I would not have been able to keep the bab hidden. But no one visited, except Mam once or twice, to fetch more sewing things and to leave me laundry that she could not manage up at Grassy’s in such volume. She only cared whether Dad was clean and quiet and taking food, and the house in good order; whatever else I did was my own business. And my boy, while Mam visited, was whisper-quiet, or the squeak he uttered was straight away followed by a cat’s outside the window, and my secret stayed close.