The Brides of Rollrock Island Read online

  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 open-mouthed, 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 dishtowel. ‘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 hiccupping 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 mid-morning, 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 lollopped 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 sea front, 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, manoeuvred 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 towards the seals. And I took to my bed again that afternoon. My sisters left me to my miseries, which bored them now.

  Towards 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 l
amplight’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 before?’

  ‘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.’

  ‘Crossed?’

  ‘To protect you from seal-love, she says. Theirs of you, and you of them.’

  ‘What do you mean, crossed?’

  ‘Crossed is with crosses tied on you, front and back.’ He drew a big X on his chest, and sketched one on his back with a thumb.

  ‘Tied of what?’

  He shrugged. ‘Bands, she says, crossed bands. Whatever bands are made of. Anyway, that’s what she said; I’m just telling you. She’s as old as Rollrock, Gran-Nan, and she knows an awful lot.’

  ‘I seem to have heard of this.’ Dad nodded. ‘This crossing. I’m sure I remember some old ones, men and women, who wore those crossings over their clothes.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ve never heard anything of the like,’ said Mam, her face made frightening by a shaft of lamplight. ‘What has Misskaella’s illness to do with these seals? And is everyone out there gossiping about my daughter?’ she said to Ambler. ‘And having opinions?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It’s only Gran-Nan has this bee in her bonnet. Dad and Mam have sent me up so’s she will stop her nagging at them, bless her. She’s worked herself right up, I tell you, full of fear and nonsense.’

  I looked at his calm bright face. How different other families were, the shape of them, the things they presumed, the children that grew up in them.

  ‘Well, I thank you,’ finally I said. ‘Go about crossed. I will remember that.’ I held onto the toffee box, and like everything else in the room, and beyond it the house, and beyond that the town, it seemed to be part of a very odd dream. I was grateful for its hardness and heaviness, its decorative surface; I held to these in the uproaring-inaudible storm.

  ‘Grand,’ said Ambler. ‘I’ve done what I was told, then.’

  The parcel’s shine and detail disappeared as the lamp withdrew, Dad thanking Ambler all the way out and sending respectful good wishes to his grandmam.

  Mam stayed, a stiff-standing shadow above me. ‘Did you really do all this?’ she said low and venomously.

  In among all the noise, I clawed in vain for her meaning. ‘All what?’

  She threw out a hand and I flinched away, but she only meant to point towards the front lane. ‘Bring these … creatures. Have you that power?’ Yellow light slanted and swung on the hallway wall; Dad must be holding the lamp high to show Ambler his way among the seals. ‘And bring us the attention,’ she went on, even more incensed, ‘of Doris Cartney and such old blitherers? Sending up her grandson? For everyone to see?’ She puffed with rage next to me.

  ‘I did not mean to,’ I said humbly. ‘I did not intend—’

  ‘But you did.’ I twitched again as Mam swept away to the door. ‘You did anyway, whether you meant it or not.’

  Then she was gone, and Dad was back in the doorway. I lifted the toffees into the lamplight, showed them to him. We looked helplessly at each other.

  Then Mam returned; she showed him something. ‘From that gash Billy had,’ she said, ‘down his leg, mucking about in the mole-rocks that time.’ She threw it across to my bed, and the bandage unrolled, and would have gone off the side if I had not caught it. ‘Tie it up like he told you,’ she said shrilly, ‘crossed front and back. And wear it day and night. I’ll not be shamed like this again. Leave her the lamp,’ she said to Dad, her voice low again, as if it came from a different person. She snatched the lamp from him and put it just inside the door as if she were too afraid or disgusted to come farther into the room. With a last glare at me she pulled the door closed, and I heard them go away to the kitchen, and my sisters’ breathless questions begin.

  ‘Toffees,’ I whispered, the word as weighty and rich in my mouth as the box felt in my hands. I put it aside and picked up the roll of bandage. I remembered Billy’s cut shin. He had not cried or dramatized over it, but only admired the length and depth of the injury, the gleam of bone at a couple of places in the sponged wound. He had hissed through his teeth as Mam had bound him up, bound the sides of the wound together to heal. He had been such a boy about it, dry-eyed, set-jawed, smudged with blood.

  I shook out the length of bandage, found the middle point and put it upon one shoulder. Aslant down to my waist, front and back, I took it, crossed the bands and brought them about my middle, slanted them up the other way.

  The instant they met at my ear, quiet fell inside me, and the lightless flaring went out of all things. My heart continued pounding hard for a time, but as the stillness went on, it too eased. I held the ties together, and I wept a little at the terrors I had undergone these past two days, at the relief from them, at the simplicity of the remedy, and with gratitude towards Ambler’s Gran-Nan Cartney who had been kind and bullheaded enough to have it brought to me. Through the wall to the kitchen came the murmurings of my sisters aghast and agog, the rumble of Dad reassuring them, quiet snaps now and then from Mam. I rose and undressed in the reawakened roaring, wound the bandage again and this time tied it, pulled on my nightgown over it in the wondrous peace, folded away my clothes and hid the toffee box among them. I laid myself to bed in the lamplight and the quiet and the blessed solitude, and before long was properly asleep.

  A high-summer morning. Tatty was first at the door.

  ‘Oh, but look!’ She let the door swing wider and bobbed down out of sight beyond the others. ‘What’s this? A delicious thing. Oh, there’s a note. Oh!’ The note must have dived off in the breeze, for she leaped out the door.

  We crowded onto the step and watched her chase it along the street, and stamp it stopped. She carried it back, in her other hand a glazed bun with jewels of rock-sugar scattered over the top. She scowled at the paper, straightening it with the littler fingers of her bun hand. ‘It doesn’t make sense – Oh, I have it upside down, is why. So: “For the … For the …” ’ She stopped to scowl some more.

  ‘Let me see.’ Ann Jelly tipped herself off the step.

  But Tatty held bun and note away from her. ‘ “Little”, is what it says! “For the little one.” The little one?’

  ‘That has to be Misskaella,’ said Lorel.

  They all drew away from me, looked down on me.

  ‘I’m not little.’

  ‘Not widthways, it’s true,’ said Billy. ‘But height-wise you’re the littlest in this household, not counting the odd mouse.’

  ‘There, then,’ said Tatty jealously. She pushed the bun and note at me and dusted off her hands. ‘Let’s get on.’

  ‘She can’t just take it,’ said Ann Jelly. ‘She can’t just eat it.’

  ‘Why not?’ Billy hovered, unable to take his eyes off the bun.

  ‘What’s on out there? Not seals again, is it?’ And Dad was there in the doorway.

  ‘Here, Dad, whose writing is this?’ Bee snatched the note from Tatty and held it up.

  ‘ “For the little one.” ’ He lowered the note, eyed me and the sparkling bun, took up the note again. ‘Someone very old, from that curling writing. And the shakiness. Someone very old and
frail.’

  ‘So someone very old and frail is soft for our Missk?’ said Billy in tones of hilarity, and the others prepared to laugh along.

  ‘Or wants to poison her,’ said Tatty.

  ‘Give me that,’ said Dad.

  I handed him the bun, and licked my fingers of the sticky sweetness they’d picked up from it. He broke the bun apart – silence fell around me at the sight of its soft yellow insides. He sniffed both pieces.

  ‘I will eat it, to test,’ said Billy. ‘If you want.’

  Tatty pushed him off the step. ‘As if he’d rather risk his only son, when he has all these daughters spare.’

  ‘Here, eat it, Misskaella.’ Dad handed the bun back.

  ‘Now?’ cried Billy.

  ‘She’s full to the brim of porridge!’ said Ann Jelly.

  ‘Where I can see you,’ said Dad. ‘And all the rest of you. Otherwise you’ll have nagged and badgered it out of her before you reach the end of the street. And it is for her.’ He flapped the note at them. Billy turned away and kicked a cobble.

  ‘Shouldn’t she be made to share?’ said Lorel longingly.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Dad. ‘Is there anything in the note about sharing?’ He pretended to read it again. ‘Why, I don’t believe there is.’

  ‘He doesn’t mind losing you, Missk,’ said Tatty. ‘As long as the rest of us aren’t poisoned.’

  It was a waste to cram the bun, so light and sweet, into my mouth so fast, to gulp it down under all those envious gazes without properly enjoying it. Dad shooed us off as soon as I’d secured the last mouthful. We went silently, me still chewing.

  ‘Who can it be,’ murmured Billy at my elbow, ‘so old and frail and in love? For the little one,’ he added sentimentally. ‘For the little one, that I would bounce upon my knee. For the little one, who I’d like to put my hand up the skirts of—’