Seals SealsFly soar swoop fly. Fly soar swoop fly. I had to keep myself up. I had to concentrate on her. The house was silent but I was sure she was at home. I went into the hall and listened. The stairs led away up to my right, and a dark passage beside them ended in a door which stood open a crack. Daylight shone through. The bathroom was opposite me; to the left, at the far end of the hall, the front door and before it one other closed door. I went down that end and listened – nothing. Was the man still in the woodshed? Were the pair of them sitting in silence somewhere listening to me creeping about? I went down the dark passage alongside the stairs, listened at the door (nothing) then pushed it wider open. I was expecting emptiness but she was frozen at her kitchen table with an eye-dropper in her hand squeezing drips into a small brown bottle. When she saw me she gave a tiny shake of the head and started whispering aloud, finishing counting off the drops. ‘Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.’ She carefully screwed the lid on the bottle and emptied what was left in the dropper into a white bowl.
‘What is it?’ she asked impatiently, as if I was interrupting something vital.
‘I wondered if you could tell me where to get supplies – eggs, milk – is there a farm nearby?’
There was a handwritten book on the table in front of her, she kept glancing down at it. Instructions? A recipe? She had blue pouches under her eyes and loose creased skin, never in a million years would I have picked her out. She didn’t look at me but concentrated on shaking the tiny bottle then emptying a saucer full of brittle dead leaves onto the table in front of her and mashing them with a miniature rolling pin.
‘Get everything at the post office. Where you saw my card.’ She didn’t even glance up.
‘What about fresh fish? Can I buy that any–’
‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’m just in the middle of–’ She turned quickly to take the kettle off the stove behind her and pour a little boiling water into the white bowl. I stepped back into the hall and pulled the door to. Rude cow. ‘You’ll have to excuse me. I haven’t seen you for twenty-nine years and I’m a bit busy mixing witches’ brew right now, come back in another twenty-nine why don’t you?’ You deserve what’s coming to you lady.
She was skinny and fragile she would be easy to beat but where was the father lurking? Not with her in the kitchen. Upstairs? Gone out?
I got my bag and set out the back way to go to the store – I noticed the woodshed door was closed so there was nobody left in there. A skinny grey cat ran past me and in through a cat flap in the kitchen door. Right at the back behind the kitchen there was a wild-looking garden plot without a single flower, with things in pots stuffed between things that were planted – scrawny straggling plants that looked diseased. Bunches of shrivelled leaves hung outside the kitchen door, and strings of old seaweed and a branch of withered berries.
I bought tea, milk, bread, butter, eggs, beans and biscuits. When I got back the house was just as deathly quiet as before. I went across the hall to the toilet – not a peep. I didn’t even know if they were upstairs or downstairs; the kitchen door was shut. Listening for them to move was like listening in an empty house and I made myself go out again, to walk and plan.
It was five o’ clock. The sky had clouded over but it wasn’t cold. I went up the lane past Calum’s dump, heading for the island’s north. Then there was a path to the left so I took it down to the sea and tried to walk along the shore. It was low black rock – no beach – but it ended in a sheer cliff that jutted out into the sea, and I had to scramble up to a field. I kept going but there was no path. It was horrible walking – inlets and soggy streams and barbed wire fences and patches of gorse and brambles, you couldn’t stick to a direction at all. Eventually I cut back across to the lane and just walked up that.
Planning. Next time I saw her – tonight probably, or else tomorrow – I’d ask for her help with my project. Invite her for a cup of tea, since she was clearly incapable of basic social skills like friendly chatter in passing. I’d do a bit of probing into the man’s comings and goings. I needed to know when she would be home alone. A car crept up behind me and I had to stand in the ditch so it could pass. The driver was a hundred years old, minimum; the whole island was an old folks’ home. After the car I heard footsteps on the lane; Calum was hurrying after me, foolish grin on face, ancient rucksack on back. Like a big eager dim dog. ‘Going for a w-walk?’
No I’m painting my toenails what does it look like you thick git? I didn’t want him near me. Was it congenital, what he’d got? Had I got some of the same crap genes? Might I one day have a kid and find it a grinning shambling Calum-idiot? Another great legacy from Mama.
The lane forked and he led off to the right. Then stopped and waited for me.
‘What’s up there?’
‘Y-you can see the mountains. On the mainland.’
Fascinating. Riveting. Where did he think I’d just come from? The island looked a dump to me. There were no trees here, just bare lumpy pasture and stupid sheep that stood staring with their yellow eyes until you got close then clattered off in a panic. The lane was going vaguely uphill, there were no houses no cars no people. Wow! There was a tractor! Yes a red tractor parked in a gateway, exciting stuff here Nikki, and Calum pointed it out and said something incomprehensible (Macpherson? Macintosh? MacBurger?) referring to the owner no doubt so I nodded and he grinned to show how brill he thought it was and we toiled on up the grey lane. The light was a sodden grey and even the green of the fields was greyed. He was walking fast, swinging crooked like a broken gate.
‘He’s drowned.’
‘Drowned?’
He nodded.
‘But – when did he drown?’
‘S-seven years ago.’ I caught up with him. He was entirely unconcerned, walking along as if he owned the place.
‘But you said it was him. In the woodshed.’
He turned his head and his good eye looked into mine. ‘He comes there sometimes. There’re some planks from his b-boat.’
‘He’s dead?’
‘Yes, in the sea.’
We walked quite a long way in silence. Mentally I went through the contents of the hall and bathroom. No male things in the bathroom; no big shoes or coats in the hall; no sound of heavy footsteps upstairs. She hadn’t mentioned a husband, only a son. Perhaps there had never been a father, perhaps he was entirely fictitious. I hadn’t seen the guy in the woodshed, all I’d heard was a noise. I had no way of measuring how cracked Calum was.
‘What did he do?’
‘Fisherman.’ He stopped abruptly and stepped into the shallow ditch at the side of the lane. Bent down and started scrabbling through the brambles and ferns. ‘Shiny,’ he said. Then triumphantly pulled out a whole wing mirror on a twisted metal stem and placed it reverently in his rucksack.
‘What’re you going to do with that?’
‘Keep it.’ He straightened up and set off again. We went through a gateway and across a rough field, it was curving away down to the sea now, the sea on the eastern side. It wasn’t any different to the sea on the western side; just as brown and flat and sloppy, no waves no foam no golden beaches. Thick low grey cloud squatting on the mainland hills in the distance – a thoroughly dismal sight.
‘Why aren’t there any waves?’
He looked at me as if I was the thick one. ‘Big waves.’ He chanted a verse like a nursery rhyme. ‘The Blue Men are breast high/with f-foam grey faces./When billows toss,/oh who would cross/the Blue Men’s kyles.’
I knew he wasn’t capable of trying to impress me but I was deeply irritated all the same: I hate the way people who know things act as if it’s incredible that you don’t. Why assume there are certain god-given bloody things everybody’s born knowing? ‘What’s kyles?’
‘The c-crossing.’ He waved his arm at the channel between the island and the mainland.
‘OK.’
‘B-big waves–’ He put his hand up above his head. ‘This high.’
In his dreams. The channel looked like a puddle in a ditch. He led the way on over the uneven ground, past exciting events like a rock sticking through the soil or a boggy bit we had to skirt. I thought the shoreline was crap. A pebbly shelf, narrower or wider according to the tide – and nothing there. We didn’t even see any gulls, it was like after the end of the world. ‘Look.’ He stood like a post.
I looked. Nothing. Flat sea with low brown rocks. ‘What?’
He muttered something I didn’t catch and a hump of rock detached itself and plopped into the sea. ‘Seals,’ said my genius brother. Half-brother. More brown lumps shifted themselves and slid into the water. He grinned at me as if it was some major pyrotechnical display he’d arranged especially for my benefit. I gave him a thumbs-up. Fantastic! And we carried on down towards the water. If that was the high spot – a brown blob falling into the water at 300 yards – I was ready to turn back. We went slithering down the muddy rocks to sea level and then he perched on a boulder and carefully took off his rucksack. He extricated a big old check-patterned thermos and with great concentration poured a cup.
‘Does your mum make that for you?’
He shook his head and passed me the cup. It was sweet tea but I drank it anyway, then I rolled us both a cig.
‘Did your dad catch them?’
He looked gormless.
‘The seals. Did he catch them?’
‘He took – he took people out to see them. In his boat. The tourists.’ He had the crookedest teeth I’ve ever seen.
‘Very good.’
‘He told them the story and they l-liked it.’ Come on then, might as well have the full entertainment package since I’ve paid my fare and I’m sat here with an idiot staring at a puddle of brown sea and sipping lukewarm tea. ‘What story?’
‘The seal girl.’ He was staring out to the rocks, his mouth a bit open; you’d think if his mother cared an iota for him she’d have taken the poor sod to a dentist.
‘Go on.’
‘Some crofters, they were thrown out of their c-croft. They went in their boat going up the kyle and in a storm it was, their boat overturned. Right near Seal Rock.’ He stopped and looked at me.
‘That it?’
He shook his head perfectly seriously. ‘They all d-drowned but the baby. The baby was taken up by the seals.’
Of course it was, taken up by lovely cuddly furry bewhiskered seals and fed and tickled and cuddled and cared for and the mummy seal knitted it booties and the daddy seal caught a fishy-wishy for its diddums tea. Calum had stopped to try and remember what he was talking about. It was like waiting for paint to dry.
‘She sucked milk from a mother with pups. She learned to squeak and bark like a seal. Sh-she learned diving and swimming instead of walking.’
‘Yeah and how did she get on in winter in the ice?’
His good eye widened in surprise. ‘No ice here. She caught fish and ate them raw, p-people saw her on the rocks playing with the seals. Her hair was long like a mermaid. The fishermen tried but no one could ever get near her.’
He stared at me stupidly for a minute then started snapping a twig of heather into fragments. It was enough to make me grateful for what I’d got – at least I could fly and fall, instead of creeping on my belly through the dirt.
‘Well? What happened?’
‘Sh-she’s still there.’
Sure. Like his father in the woodshed. He packed up his thermos and we set off again. He wasn’t going to tell me the end of the story. I didn’t even want to hear the stupid thing in the first place but now he was offended and not speaking. He was making me feel bad, unkind to a dumb animal. Why should I feel sorry for him? Why the hell should I feel sorry for him?
We plodded along in silence again. Clearly he was capable of talking. I asked about his mumsy and dadsy and their idyllic island life. It was like dealing with a child; once he started he couldn’t stop. Turned out Daddy MacLeod kept a lot of lobsterpots. Sometimes he took men with big rods out deep-sea fishing; he had sheep too which had passed on to Calum.
‘Did you get his boat? Do you take tourists out?’
He looked at me with a strange face. ‘It sank. It broke up. I’m not allowed–’
‘On the sea?’
‘Near the water. No Calum.’
Well what a nice protective mother caring so deeply for her son’s well-being.
I realised then that I could pump him all I liked. ‘Why?’
‘They were fighting and he j-just – he went out and banged the door.’
‘What happened?’
He shrugged. ‘Bits of the boat washed up around the shore.’
When I let myself back into my room there were lights on in the house. I opened my door to the hall a crack and I could hear the quiet burble of a TV. She was shut up somewhere watching telly. The room at the end of the hall, nearest the front door – that’s where I reckoned she was.
I ate beans on toast and paced and listened and heard every move she made which was few. At 10.15 she turned off the TV and went along the hall to the kitchen; she was in there maybe a quarter of an hour then I heard her shuffling back along the hall. There was a bitter herby smell. She drew the bolt on the front door and turned off the downstairs lights then went slowly up the stairs, a couple of them creaked. I could hear her moving about upstairs also the sound of running water and toilet flush, she had another bathroom up there. There was definitely only her in the place. The last noise I heard was about 10.45; after that she was quiet, sleeping the sleep of the ignorant who don’t yet know what’s coming to them. I noted down the times. A murderer would need to know all her moves; know her little routine. I imagined going upstairs when she was out, I would look in her room for traces of me. The fact that she didn’t know I was here, the fact that I had her in my power – it was a physical pleasure. It swelled me, making me tingle with pleasurable anticipation.
About an hour after she’d gone to bed I crept out into the dark hall in my socks. The floor was tiled it was cold. I stood at the bottom of the stairs listening then went to the TV room. After I’d turned the handle the door swung open on its own. The floor was wooden and warmer as soon as I stepped on to it. There was a little glowing ash in the fireplace. My mother’s sitting room. I closed the door and waited. But my eyes couldn’t make sense of the inky blackness and after a minute I turned on the light. Sod it. If she found me I’d deal with her.
The room was full of old stuff. Not the sort of room I’ve ever lived in. I’ve seen it – in films, on telly – but I’ve never been in it. The walls were full of books, old hardback books with plain cloth covers, dull blues and reds and dusty black. In the gaps between the bookcases were prints, crummy old maps and pictures of old sailing boats, a big star-map, and drawings of plants and leaves and cross-sections of flowers with spidery writing on them. The furniture was old and none of it matched, there was a faded red velvet covered chair with a very straight back, rounded like a coin. Two tall black wooden tables with twisted carved legs. One of those sofas with one arm missing, in a dingy floral print. The mantelpiece was crammed: candlesticks, a china shepherdess, bits of paper, stones, dried leaves and twigs in a jar, squat brown bottles of liquid with labels in Latin, a mug with pipes and spills in it, photographs in silver frames. Photographs.
Her about twenty years younger next to a big solid man, staring calmly out of the picture. She was holding a bouquet, it looked like a wedding photo although she was wearing a dark dress. Her with a kid in a garden. Calum. Her with a kid on a bicycle. The man in the middle of a huddle of posed and grinning people on the deck of a boat. The man holding up a big fish.
Family snaps.
Fucking cow. I sat on the red velvet chair facing the blank grey telly. The room was full of old junk like an antique shop or one of those rooms they have in a museum, typical interior from the 1930s. Where’d she got it? It was like a lifetime’s stuff. Parents’ and grandparents’ stuff. The rectangle of carpet on the polished wood floor was thin, it was worn and frayed under my feet where I sat on the red chair. But it didn’t feel poor it felt classy. There was a glass-fronted cabinet with stuff on display: thin old china painted midnight blue and orange; old pinkish wine glasses and a cut glass decanter, little crystal tumblers, all crammed in together probably worth hundreds.
Was it hers or the man’s, MacLeod’s? I pulled a book off the shelf. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal. Inside the front cover was handwritten ‘Phyllis Lovage’. I looked in another further along – it was in Italian – then one from the opposite bookcase, a book about identifying medicinal plants. Her name was in all of them. It was her stuff. As I closed the plant book I noticed something brown poking out from between its pages; I let it fall open at the centre and there was a squashed brown rose. I picked it up by its flattened stem, it was brittle and dry and impossibly flat. She was keeping a dead rose.
I pulled open one of the drawers under the display cabinet. It was overflowing with papers. Bills, letters, receipts. I started to read a letter from someone called Anita thanking her for the lotion and saying her skin had cleared up completely now. There were receipts for the sale of lambs; bills for sheep dip, mortgage information. The bottom drawer was full of knitting patterns, absolutely stuffed so it wouldn’t open properly. Mixed in with the patterns were more photos, of a fat-faced rather odd-looking toddler. Calum.
I sat on the floor next to the cabinet. All this stuff. All this life of hers. All this past that she had that was hers and not mine all gathered together and hoarded like it was something, like it meant something, that had been kept hidden from me so I wouldn’t know about it or have any of it. All these things she had done and people she had known all excluding me. I had one box of left luggage with nothing in it but crap, cheap paperbacks, some boots that hurt my feet and a pair of polyester sheets.
She had books she’d had since she was a kid; pictures, ornaments, photos. There are no photos of me except from school, a little face people skim over looking for their own children. To have photos, there has to be someone who wants to look at you. It was too huge to swallow it was too much.
On the ornate little table next to the red chair there were two brown prescription bottles with her name on. Good, she deserved to be ill. She deserved to have this prised off her all this accretion she’d coated herself in as if she had a right to some kind of happiness or meaning. What the hell right did she have?
When she was dead it would belong to me. All this stuff in this house. To me and dopey Calum. We were her heirs. I was shaking with fury. It would never be mine. I would never have a mantelpiece like that casually full of stuff accumulated over years. I would always be flimsy and unreal and not backed up by anything; nothing would ever stick to me.
A desire was growing in me a huge red flaming lust to pick up the poker and start smashing that room that complacent cosy lifetime of a room. Crash through the glass cabinet doors smash the china smash the glasses smash the vases and the toby jugs, rake the old prints off the walls and let them shatter in their frames, stab the poker through the thin fabric of the chaise-longue and chair, drag the drawers out spill them on the ground scuffle the papers and photos and trinkets with my feet swipe the poker along the mantelpiece hit at the pipes and shepherdess until they were in tiny fragments break it up and smash it all.
It was what she deserved.
I had to get myself up and walk stiff-legged to the door my mouth was dry my tongue was thick I was swollen with lust to lay about me and annihilate that room. I made myself switch off the light and close the door and edge down the hall to my own anonymous room. I made myself lie on the bed and I pulled the covers over me and I fell asleep immediately.