The Brides of Rollrock Island (4 page)

So as to have told the truth to Bee, I did walk upon the mole, right out to the end and back again. My eyes lied to me: the town sat as it always did, they said, above the waterfront. But my mind insisted that the houses were in a continual slow scramble on its slope, and that colorless matter sheeted up between myself and that effortful movement, between myself and the tiny glinting windows, the town’s many eyes. Behind and around me the horizon shook in the upflying wind, as if the sea were on the point of bursting from its bowl, taking flight entirely.

I strode away north along the main beach so that no one
looking out from Potshead should know what I intended. When I was out of sight of the town I took the dune path up past Thrippence’s bothy, through and through the slipping sand. Across McComber’s fields I went diagonally; not a soul walked the road or hill there, only McComber’s cows stared, chewing their cud. Up and over the stile at the top I climbed, and then I was on the straight road. I ran; I had hardly run at all since people began to laugh at the spectacle, but now—oh, the joy of being alone and unjudged!—I all but flew along, not feeling in the least clumsy or ridiculous. The rain spat cold and gleefully in my face; the road ahead seemed as cheered to be empty as I was to see it so. To either side, high on the hilltop, far out to sea, the shaken-out cloth of creation took flashing fire here and there, and the flame rushed upward and away, and was renewed from below.

I slowed toward the cliff top, then peered over it. There the seals lay like bobbins in a drawer, grays and silvers, fawns and browns, some mottled, others smoothly one-colored tip to tip. The babies, very brown, were all movement and enterprise among the lounging mothers. I remembered crawling forth as a bab myself; I felt the same urge now as I had then, to run from the top of the cliff and fall in among the seals below. Surely I would be buoyed up by this fountaining air, like a coracle in the top of a wave?

Instead, I hurried, sister-free, alone in the land- and seascape, around the rim of the cove. I began down the path, and it was as if I stepped into a pool of quite a different temperature, or put myself in the way of a different angle of the wind. I touched my hair, but it was only fluttered a little by the natural wind, not streaming starkly upright as it ought to in this other flow.

Halfway down I paused, because the nursery had begun to boil
below me. The bull and the bachelors, out beyond the main crowd, had stopped dueling in the shallows, and now they sat up, alert to my approach. More and more heads rose among the mothers and the mothers-to-be. Slower I went now, down the path. The closer I came to them, the clearer I saw—distributed through the pearly-coated blubber-bulk of each seal’s body, and even along the delicate flippers and tails, like blooms across a spring field—the stars, the seeds, the grains that could be brought together. If time, tide and circumstance were right, I could persuade them to combine, at the center of the seal-being, into a manlike or a womanlike form. I saw that the creature on the garth wall, the woman rising from the skin of a seal, was no fancy, that the crumbs of story Potshead people dropped all fitted together, much as these grains did, and made a history—a history that might be repeated if such as I happened along. I had known it and never known it. I was astonished, even as so many questions were laid to rest.

I stood in the welter of power and shadow at the bottom of the cove. I gritted my teeth and stepped from path to rock; I lifted my gaze to meet the seals’.

The king, down in the shallows, yawped and snarled and swung his face in the sky. In front of him the restless mothers tipped and raised themselves and eyed me, one or two giving cry; from among them, struggling through their soft shivering hills and dales and tumbling forth onto the damp purplish rock, the young and the darker brown babies came, and when they had found flipper-footing they began to gallop toward me, as sheep hurry over their snowy field to a fresh-dropped hay bale, or pigs cross a sty at the clank of the slop bucket.

Some of the mothers lumbered to follow, hoisting themselves
up and rippling across the rock. What would they do when they reached me? Those babies’ eagerness alarmed me, and their clumsiness, and the mothers were so big! Did they aim to catch and crush me? Did they love or hate me? I could not tell from their black shiny eyes, from their rippling hides, from their pink mouths gaping and their gruff vague calls.

I stepped back up onto the path. On they came, the mothers enlarging toward me, the babies so fast! Their edges wavered and glowed, left trails on the air; I could not tell how much was the magic of the day and how much was the weather, working up toward a storm—or indeed how much was mistakes of my own eyes, born of this new illness.

Up the cliff path I scrambled. Halfway, puffing, I paused to look down; the pups boiled at the bottom, and one had managed to climb the path’s first step. I felt not the least desire to launch myself in among them now. How much wilder they were than people! And even if they had been tame, their weight and numbers would have terrified me.

I fled, rushing for home, pushing the seals out of my memory, trying to ignore the fraught flying air about me, to only see real objects within their flaring. I threw myself down on our front step, and sat there panting, hoping to settle everything around me by settling my own body and its thundering fear. The cottages opposite towered in the grimy clouds. Bowes’s dog, watching me openmouthed, seemed one moment shrunken and hairy, the next the size of a donkey there, dream-large against the houses, its hip bone jutting beside the eaves. I looked away.

Bee and Lorel and Ann Jelly came up around the corner. My
gaze cleaved to their familiar faces—look how easy and comfortable they were in this nightmare street! Oh, to be one of them, never enduring such visions and sensations as I did! I ached to be as ordinary as I’d been only yesterday, as dull and frustrated and quietly beaten down. That smaller world, which I’d known only too well and found so disagreeable—would I ever be lucky enough to return to it?

“What are you up to, Missk?” said Lorel. “What have you run from, that you’re so blown and bothered?”

“I’ve not run from anything.” I shook away the picture of the galloping seal babs, the floundering mams. “I’ve only been running for running’s sake, out along the tops of McComber’s fields.”

“Running for nothing? Oh, you young things,” said Ann Jelly with a laugh. “So much energy, and nothing to use it up on. Come inside and scrub floors and make yourself useful.”

I followed them in; I hid myself in the Prout house and Prout life all afternoon and evening, determinedly ignoring the sick fear I bore about. Not once, even as I put myself to sleep that night, did I open my memory and let the seals flap and fall out of it, crying up the path after me.

Leading us out to school next morning, Bee screamed, slammed the door and pressed wide-eyed against it.

“What on earth?” Mam came to the kitchen doorway.

The rest of us stared at staring Bee. “Seals!” she cried. “Like great
slugs
! One right outside, and all along the lane.”

“Let me see, let me see!” Tatty clawed her aside. Mam came too, and the pair of them stuck their heads out the door and looked up and down. People were calling to one another out
there, laughing, astonished. Fear welled up hard in my throat. I wished I could crawl under my bed and hide there.

“They look so much bigger, don’t they, here than at Crescent Corner?” said Tat.

The others elbowed forward to see. Among them I caught sight of a seal’s rump, and it was near waist-high to me even lying on the cobbles beyond our step.

“What have they come into town for?” Bee clasped her hands at her chin.

“What do seals always come to land for?” said Mam.

“To squash Bees flat as pancakes,” said Billy, his head out the door.

Mam flicked the back of his head with her dish towel. “For a rest from the sea, a touch of the sun, or to raise their pups—which I hope they
don’t
choose, all up and down our streets. They’ve mistaken themselves, that’s all, and misread where Crescent is. There’s room to pass them. Slip by this one and keep to the far side of the others. They cannot move fast, look at them, and they’ve not come to
eat
you. Go on, Missk, go on, Tatty—little ones must lead if big girls are too frightened.”

We teetered on the step a moment, and then we ran, my sisters screaming between the seals and hiccuping past them, me silent, my stomach turning. Each seal lurched and swung its head as I went by. I would not meet their eyes; I would not show that I was linked with them, that I knew them. The main street was scattered with their pillows, all the way down; they must have swum around, rather than toiled up the cliff path and along the road. I ran uphill; there were no seals to trouble us that way. They had struggled as far as the Prout house and no farther.

When we were let out midmorning, the seals were thick in the main way, halfway up the hill. By the end of the school day, they had reached the gate, and one silvery lump had lolloped right in and lay huge there, and Mister Wexford must stand between us and it as we skittered and squeaked past, to keep the fainter-hearted girls and the tinier boys from refusing to leave altogether.

When we reached home, Mam told us of the bull, who had come ashore and been flinging himself about on the seafront, terrorizing people and breaking one of Fisher’s little carts. Until then, I had had a plan to amble down to the sea and perhaps attract them out of the town, but this now became too terrifying to enact. I fell to bed, curling to the wall and covering my face, exhausted from being engulfed and poured-through by this invisible brightness. I refused to go to my chores or even to take my hands from my face. Sisters came and went, discussing me, feeling my forehead, scolding me for my laziness, but they could not shame or persuade me up. I slept, and that was some relief; I woke and lay with my eyelids tight shut against the flickering, listening to the seals gather in the lane outside, shifting and sliding on the cobbles, and every now and then one giving its horrible cry. Through the roaring of a wind that everyone else was deaf to, I heard my sisters and mother at the door, people outside conversing, a group of men come down from Wholeman’s and trying to herd the animals away with cries and switches. Would this never stop, this flaming and the shivering around me?

I lay there in my shame and fear all the rest of the day, except for some moments spent at the front door in terror at how thickly the seals lay now. People stood around them,
maneuvered among them, calling out to each other and laughing at this great joke.

“What about all their babies?” I said to Bee. “Back there at Crescent in the nursery. Do they not care that their babs will starve without them?”

She laughed and waved out over the crowded lane. “Clearly, they’re worried half to death!”

I went back and hid in my bed again. Mam made the girls brew me up her tonic tea. They made it exceptionally strong and bitter, and I drank it down without protest; it seemed only a fair punishment for what I’d brought on the town. Then I turned away again, and covered my face.

“Come, Missk, you have no fever,” Tatty said, feeling the back of my neck, seeing as my forehead was pressed against the wall.

“Everything’s jumping about,” I said. “My head is full of it, and it’s worse when I look around.”

There was talk of doctors then, and brain fever, and never had I wished so hard to be ill of something like that, some ordinary earthly illness. But as I did not rave or vomit or burn, Mam did not think my illness worth the bother of doctoring yet, and she and the sisters only came and went, regarding me suspiciously and making their suggestions. “She is certainly distressed,” I heard Mam mutter in the hallway. “Is someone at school tormenting her?” And Tatty said back, more loudly, “She is just a lazy lump and needs a whipping.”

I hardly cared what they said or thought, as long as they let me lie eyes-covered, out of sight of the seals, away from any light that would smear and flutter at the edges.

In the morning seals carpeted our lane. I got up, for if I stayed abed and the seals lay around me rather than struggling up to the school, it would be clear whom they were fixed on. So I suffered through another flaring day, grimly watched the fearful laughing and daring of the other children toward the seals. And I took to my bed again that afternoon. My sisters left me to my miseries, which bored them now.

Toward evening, through my half-sleep I heard a knock at the front door. Then the door to the bedroom was rattled and opened, and lamplight shone on the wall above me.

“Missk, Missk?” said Dad.

I turned to the blaze of the lamp, feeling all creased and unwilling. Mam stood there too, with a boy, quite a big boy. Ambler Cartney, it was, I realized as Dad carried the lamp in. Ambler was the kind of strong, handsome boy I had learned to steer well clear of if I wanted peace.

“Ambler here has a bit of something for you,” said Dad.

I drew awkwardly up in the bed, feeling like nothing so much as a seal hauling herself into a corner of rock. I squinted at them, blocking the lamplight’s glare with one hand. “A bit of
what
?”

“It’s toffees,” said Ambler watchfully. “They’re from Cordlin. They are quite old.” He held out a package to me, wrapped in bright patterned paper, a faded gold ribbon around.

“Toffees.” I took them, and regarded them in my lap.

“What do you say?” Mam said sharply.

I held the smooth parcel, fingered the worn ribbon. “I say, what are toffees for, at this time?” Ambler stood between Mam
and Dad quite straightly, leaning back and examining me as if he’d never quite seen me before—which perhaps he hadn’t, at that. “And from you, who’s never so much as spoken to me?”

“Oh, they’re not from me,” said Ambler cheerfully.

“They’re from his great-grandmother,” said Dad.

“Of all people,” murmured Mam.

“Who’s too infirm herself to bring them,” finished Dad. “Being such a great age.”

“She says to tell you,” said Ambler, “that you should go about crossed.”