Bull Running For Girlsl (2 page)

She noticed dark pools of water over in the centre of the wooden boards and the curtain billowed unexpectedly despite the window being closed.

The cold had gotten into her bones and she started to shiver. Under the window was a small chest of drawers. Brid rummaged around in the bottom of one and pulled out a half-empty bottle of gin. She took out the stopper with some difficulty. She always felt guilty when she drank, and when she had enough she always drove the stopper home with the intention of making it more difficult to get at the next time. It never was that difficult, for she always managed in the end.

Brid slept badly that night. It wasn’t a sweet repose, more a dream with the dead.

The wind was howling around the outer buildings, screeching around the rooftops and chimneys like a scavenging, northern wraith. Even the
fi
shermen and their families slept fitfully in their cots. Brid fumbled at her bedclothes and cried out in her sleep. In her dreams she floated beneath the viridian sea, fighting off the levellers of the deep and losing.

She was unaware of the green phosphorescence in her room that clung to the floor, wove its way along the boards and then stretched its tendril fingers towards the crumpled sheets
—
then beneath.

In the morning there was blood on her nightgown. She made excuses that it was badly soiled because it was a heavy month and her mother let it be when Brid helped with the washing.

Each hour of her existence was an agony of delusion and nightmare. The future was something Brid rarely thought about now
—
only working and sleeping, and barely being bothered to eat. She could simply walk into the sea and never come out. What was the point of living if it was this hard?

Families helped one another out in Baytown. The Moorsoms and the Eskells (originally an old Scandinavian family) had married each other for generations and Brid’s marriage was one more, intended to strengthen the bond between them. She gathered bait and helped with the fish, and the Eskells helped Brid and her mother in little ways. Tom would have been her brother–in–law and he still felt an obligation. He lived three doors along with his pregnant wife.

The cold, wintry morning called for as many layers of clothing as Brid could find, to wrap around her and still work in without being too restricted. And then it was down to the shoreline, and across to Boggle Hole and beyond, to get the limpets at low tide. As she made her way past Eskell cottage she caught sight of Jenna, Tom’s wife, through the small dark window. There was no mistaking that it was Jenna due to the size of her swollen stomach
—
she was due to give birth any day now. Brid bit down hard on her bottom lip, trying to push aside her jealousy; she might have had been with child now if the sea hadn’t taken her Benjamin.

Unlike the rest of the flither girls, Brid preferred to gather the bait on her own and on that particular day she lingered around Boggle Hole rather than follow the rest of the girls over the hills. They travelled away from the sea-beaten cottages and down to the other bays. Also, she was tired of their incessant gossip. Her heart wasn’t in anything
—
she could only think of Ben. She caught glimpses of his scowling face, framed by the brown seaweed, in the rock pools, and imagined she felt the light touch of a hand on the back of hers as she prised the limpets off the rock.

Brid stabbed at the limpets, venting all her anger on them, until she caught her left hand with one lunge and her blood splashed the dark shells. Ignoring the pain, she stood up, threw a handful of the limpets into a basket, arched her aching back and looked out at the black sea.

The sea was almost as dark as night and the sky was only a shade lighter
—
just enough to work by. Out there was where the fishermen came to grief, near landmarks called Farside’s Out and Ower Robin a Trum, and she wondered if it were possible for dead fishermen and sailors to return from the sea.

The wind whipped up and the ocean began to get rougher, flinging spray in her face as the tide came in. She imagined herself cut off by the tide—part of her wished it would—freeing her of her drudgery. The rain pelted her arms and legs and she pushed her black hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. Salt had dried her lips and made them bleed. Just as she was turning to go back along the shoreline, just to her left a little of the soft, clay cliff face fell away. Brid looked up to see if more would follow but nothing else looked as if it was going to slip. There was just a small channel of mud and water sluicing down.

Something solid caught her eye. Most of it was sticking out of the cliff face and, at
fi
rst, she just thought it was one of the rocks. Taking care not to slip on the sea-worn boulders, she went to investigate. The rain fell harder and the cold sting of it on her face made her curse under her breath. She reached up on tiptoe for the small, wooden casket and gave it a pull. It didn’t budge with the first tug and she almost slipped. However, with the second pull the soft wet clay came away, and she caught the box as it fell. It was less than her arm’s-length long but quite light, so she placed it in her large flither basket and made her way back across the foreshore before the tide cut her off from the Wayfoot, just below the Bay Hotel.

When the tide was out you could walk all the way across Stoupe Beck Sands to Ravenscar; she’d done that often enough, but not today. Many a wreck lay off the Ravenscar headland, hundreds of years of them. Sailors and fishermen had been washed up on that shore; their bodies harvested by the scavengers of the deep. Men in their pale mottled skin with slivers of flesh hanging from them. They were so rotten you could peel out the spine of the fishermen as easily as with fish.

The flither basket with its tiny cargo began to feel heavy. Brid slipped on the stones as she hurried to beat the tide, but she managed it well enough across the water’s edge and up the cobble causeway to the Bay Hotel. The sea had more than once pounded the hotel in the terrible winter storms and hurled the tiny coble boats against the windows of the inn. But not today, although the sea was getting rougher. It was at the hotel that Brid sought shelter. Once through the door, which banged loudly behind her, she moved silently over to the fire and sat down beside it. She took off her wet shawl and her black jacket, and placed them over the basket to hide the contents.

The Bay Hotel was empty; there was no one behind the old, oak wood bar. For a time she sat alone. Either the bad weather had kept the rest of the flither girls down the coast or they had made their sodden way back to their homes. None of the locals were around. None had come down to the Wayfoot to see that their boats were still tied up. It was a while before the landlord came into the bar.

“Well Brid, there’s not many out today. Do you want a drink to warm you up?”

“I haven’t got any money, nothing for now.”

Josh Brannislaw, a man of extraordinary height for a local and a widower of two winters, laid out two glasses and poured himself and Brid some brandy from a jug. She knew that it was from the fine cask, from one of the ones the excise men never found. The excise never found anything in Bay Town
—
there being too many secret hiding places. Brid made to get up from the fire.

“Stay there, Brid. I’ll bring the drink over. I’ve got some bread and cheese in the back too?” he enquired with a raised eyebrow.

“Thank you. That’s most kind of you.”

He was not long out of the bar and seemed in a hurry to bring back the food for her. As he placed the bread and cheese down on the table his hand moved as if to touch her arm
—
but he seemed to think twice of it. She looked at him with watery, grey eyes and then past him to another table
—
where Benjamin sat looking out to sea with a caul over his white face.
If only I had given him the caul,
she thought.

Ben, with his old navy jumper, shabby through years of use. Ben, with his hair washed back by the sea and the caul stretched thin over his face
—
not the tiny dried thing that lay in the small box, but this made of a harsher material
—
its edges now twisted into hooks that seemed to dig into his skin, piercing it but with no show of blood. Brid had seen him in this state twice now, as if mocking her because she hadn’t given him the caul. She glanced at Josh to see if he had seen Ben. He had not.

Brid ate the bread and cheese slowly and sipped at the brandy.

Josh methodically carried out his work behind the bar, spoke little and just raised his head from time to time as if expecting a customer to burst through the door at any minute.

The proximity of the fire did little to take away the chill, and as Brid put up her hands to draw in the warmth her eyes fell upon the covered box in the flither basket. Thanking Josh for his kindness she got up wearily, picked up the basket and left the inn.

Once at the cottage she placed the basket outside the door. Later that afternoon her mother would take the limpets out of their shells and bait the lines. Brid took the small casket, wrapped it deeper into her shawl, and crept into the dwelling. The main-room door was firmly shut against the cold weather so it was easy for Brid to climb the stairs unseen, although one step creaked under her weight
—
“Is that you, Brid?”

Brid greeted the call with silence.

“Brid, is that you?”

“I’m just going to change my wet clothes, Mother. I’ve left the flithers outside.”

“Fine, Brid. So long as I know it’s you.”

Brid realized she wasn’t the only member of the household who was more than a little jittery at the moment.

At the threshold of her room, Brid hesitated. The candle
fl
ame flickered as she passed over. Once inside, candlelight caught the
profile
of an old woman, and then rendered her into the darkness. She saw the rest of them, too; phantoms in the mirror, in the patterns of the old faded red curtains, on the grey bed throw, even in the pattern of water damage on the ceiling. The worn bedposts bore a resemblance to worm-ridden, charnel house heads.

Each night the phantasmagoria left their lair, where they waited for her during the day, and then they crept towards her, pressing their deformities closer to her so that she could hardly breathe in that room
—
lest they followed the intake of her quickening breath. She had told no one about them and even though they were driving her into madness (if she were not entirely mad already) she would keep their secret.

There was one face that would terrify her more than the others, and that was the one in the wooden lid of the old sea chest in the corner. It looked like the face of a drowned sailor bloated by death and days in the sea, with no eyes: just gnarls were those should be. Whilst Brid lay frozen in horror, the diabolical faces crept out of the shadows and hovered close by her pillow. An hour before dawn the last vestiges of mist would swirl to nothing beneath her bed and patterns became fixed on the surface of things.

There was a dead baby in the casket.

That is what she realised it was, bound in some foul green bandage. Its withered form could still be recognised, and within its mouldy shawl were charms and black tokens made of jet for the older, half-forgotten deities of the sea. Perhaps someone as grief-stricken as Brid had cast it to the ocean years before. The sea, through countless storms had cast it back up long after the spell had been fulfilled, and driven the offering into the soft cliff face. It wasn’t the only baby in the row of small cottages that night because Brid could hear the first cries of a newborn, not far away.

That infant gave a plaintive mewling, a weak cry of alarm, and Brid stared at the dead one cradled in her arms. She snatched the charms from between the rotten bandages then put back the swaddled, mummified
thing
in the tiny casket and replaced the lid. Reaching above her head she put the small treasure with her other tokens in the large fisher net, and dressed quickly. As she left the room, she remembered to take one of her best woollen shawls from the bottom drawer. Brid hurried downstairs and lit an oil lantern with a taper from the dying fire.

The fisherman families rarely locked their front doors. There had never been any need, theft being such a rare occurrence. And Brid had no trouble entering the Eskell household. Once upstairs she could hear Tom’s gentle snoring in the shadows and by the candlelight Jenna lay face-away from her baby, with her arm around Tom. The baby opened its eyes and looked at Brid. Even a newborn might cry at a stranger’s touch. But the infant didn’t make a sound when Brid placed one hand under its neck, the other under the body, and lifted it gently out of the cradle. She made it down the dark stairs with the assurance of one who knew she was guided, and slipped quietly over the threshold with the baby firmly bound in the green shawl. She clutched the child to her breast with one hand and picked up the heavy lantern with the other.

In her attempt to climb the pathway to the clifftop Brid only slipped once. The baby did not fall from her grasp, but the stumble caused the infant to cry momentarily.

“It’s fine, little one. I won’t fall again.”