Snake Ropes (12 page)

Across the palms of my hands the key hums.

At the touch of it I feel old, because the key is old. I could sit by this fireside for years, holding this key, hearing the memories of the women what’ve touched it; the stories locked inside its metal. I could sit here for the rest of my life … but I need to find the right touch, the right memory, so it’ll show me who knows where Barney is.

It’s usually the most recent touch metal remembers first. But sometimes it’s not just the most recent touch, but an older one, the one the metal itself remembers the deepest – the moment the person holding it felt something them’re trying to hide and the metal caught the feeling and stored it up inside itself, because all things metal can keep secrets.

The feeling of the key confuses me; it’s been touched by so many. It shows different colours, different sounds – hammering on metal, a band playing an old tune on fiddles, the sound of the sea, all tangle and tilt around my thoughts. Smells of moss, lavender, seaweed, metal smelting at the smithy, yeast, leather, birdskank, rosemary, sage, burning peat, clover wine, frying onions. It has inside it something of all the hands it’s been
through. Like a riddle, where I’ve got to work out who’s left thems imprint the deepest on it.

The key rings in my hands, is ready to speak. I’ve got a whole list of questions to ask. It hears this thought and rings hard, sends a judder through my palms. It throws my questions into a blank place: I can’t think what them are. The key pulls a picture from me – it rises up through the tangle from other people’s hands, the twists of colours and sounds get dull, the smells fade away.

A memory of the first time I felt the secrets kept in metal. I’m small, wandering on the beach. A ring glints in the sand. I pick it up. As soon as I ask it who it belongs to it tells me. Valmarie’s wedding ring from Bill. I see her pale face, black eyes, long dark hair, her full lips.

I take it to Mam, tell her, ‘You can’t have it, it’s Valmarie’s.’ Mam dun believe me, but I tell her over and over that it is. She takes me to Valmarie’s house, says on the way, ‘That’ll show you, you’re wrong,’ for she wants to trade it.

But Valmarie says, ‘Yes, it’s mine,’ and takes it back. She slips it in her pocket. She’s stood there in her doorway with her arms folded. She’s interested I can hear her voice in it. Asks me sharp questions. Mam wanders off, picks leaves off her bay bushes. I want to follow her, but Valmarie’s talking to me:

‘All metal or just rings?’

‘I think it’s the metal, if I listen close.’

‘Just
metal – or can you hear the call of other lost things?’

‘Just heard the song of the metal and your voice when I touched it.’

Mam came back and said to Valmarie, ‘Just let her alone. She’s got the hands of a broiderer, just like her Mam.’

Valmarie never asked us in.

When we were home, my hands dun know what to do. Them were restless, like them missed the metal of the ring. My fingers kept twitching and I dropped near on everything I picked up.

But Mam must have been watching my hands. She said, ‘Set yourself down by me, Mary, and I’ll set them wrong fingers of yours to right.’ She began to teach me to broider, just the two of us, sat by the fire with the flamelight flickering on the threads. And each stitch I made, though to me them seemed wonky, she looked at them close, nodded and told me I were stitching the best stitches she’d ever seen.

‘What do you want to tell me?’ I listen to the sound of waves from outside.

The key hums, comes alive in my hands. This is the question it wants. It picks up the wash of the waves and the salt water is in this room with me, swirls around me in circles, starting at my feet, rising over my belly, up to my shoulders. Grey, blue, dark, drowning in air, then breathing underwater. Plunging down. Twisting. Dark. Cold.

The waves swash around me.

‘Show me.’ My hands frozen. A feeling of gulping for air, of limbs thrashing, of salt water, filling my eyes, my mouth.

‘Show me.’ The key pulses in my hands – it’s pushing off the cold with some warm heartbeat deep inside its metal.

Not pushing – a pull, a twist, longing. The deep ocean surges in the key. It’s a ringing from one of the women’s hands, a yearning the key has locked away. The touch of a woman, weeping for cold. For the taste of salt and the dark of the deep ocean. Transformed, tricked or trapped here. Her secret is here in the key: a woman who used to have a different shape, a Silkie;
a seal on the outside, a woman on the inside. The skin of a seal and the heart of a woman. On land, she has the skin of a woman and the heart of a seal. Never content, never at home. A Silkie with a lost pelt is tied to the land in human form, till she can find it and go back to the ocean.

Her face flashes into the dark place behind my eyelids, a pale outline growing brighter.

Valmarie’s voice speaks:

Dry people live on dry land breathing dry air in dry homes. On land, they love fire. Their homes are full of fire and flakes of dry skin they can’t even feel scratching off. Salt is for jars, for food, for preservative, while fish are sent away to the mainland to be eaten after they have been decayed, rotted, drowned in air
.

The room with a candle lit is where the heart beats in each home. I have seen into the heart of every home on this island and taken the things I want. Called a vision to me, and then the desire comes – to hold whatever I want, and make it mine. I am from the water, so my powers lie in fire. People believe me to be powerful, so I have become powerful
.

Belief is an infectious disease
.

No one would understand if I were to speak of how I miss the pull of the ocean’s currents. They would say I should accept this woman’s body. No one knows how it feels to have been something more instinctive, more vital
.

They can see I am different, so they call me witch, but it is instinct that calls me, even on land. To become powerful, believe it, and others will follow. To fall into love: fall out of yourself. To become the best at anything: be the worst at something else. To feed others: starve. To punish: make some guilt
.

On land, I still have traces on my body of the seal I was. The paleness of the moon reflects in my face. My hair is as black as a thickening of water. This land-mirror-beauty is nothing compared to the beauty in movement, in strength and power, the love and the ache in the wide black eyes of a seal. And yes, power. There’s power in beauty, whether the woman wants to be beautiful, or not. Without my sealskin, I am trapped here being beautiful. Always searching, trying to find something more
.

Something in one of these rooms shimmers at me. I see what I want, I take it. I go to their home when they are sleeping and steal it
.

Then I don’t want it any more
.

What is a diary, a letter, a child’s toy, a box, a necklace, a coin or a flower when what I really want is my home. What good can come from the theft of someone’s hope, their secrets or their love, someone’s grief, when I can’t get what I need?

Each night I dig the graveyard as if my hands have claws. How can this be allowed to happen, that dreams die down, rot among the corpses, to nothing? Look underneath the soil, where the roots hang down, tangled in bones. Where earth rains from my spade
.

Out in the graveyard, buried among the dead, is my sealskin
.

I try to move my hands, put down the key. It freezes. Heavy on my palms. I open my eyes, the room is full of seawater. Pebbles are scattered across the floorboards. A herring flicks past my face. In the fireplace, tendrils of seaweed stretch up the chimney. I’m like a rock, fixed, not able to move.

Valmarie is a thief.

I ask, ‘Has she got my brother?’

The key pushes the question away and a bell sound clanks, muffled, underwater.

My eyes close.

This is not the end of Valmarie’s story. The air in this room feels dry in my throat, and my feet sink in cold sand.

Valmarie’s voice speaks low:

My sealskin was stolen when I was seventeen, washed up in a storm. The man called Bill found me. I fell out of my sealskin, and lay as a woman, trembling and naked on a rock on the shore. My sealskin lay beside me, though I didn’t yet have the strength to climb back into it. He said my eyes were stars, my hair the night, my skin smooth as cream. Some such falseness. He couldn’t see I would have been far more beautiful inside my sealskin, that the light from the sky bounced off the fur, that the curve of my back met the shape of the waves, that the surges and ripples of my muscles inside it could twist and turn my whole body spiralling through currents, into the depths
.

I reached for my sealskin. Bill’s eyes burned me. He picked it up, said he’d take me to his home to recover, said that later he would help to get me back to the ocean again. My sealskin was soft and delicate, its fur dark and silver-tipped like glints on ice. He threw it over his shoulder. It was nothing to him, but when he carried me up the hill to his house, I stroked it on his shoulder with my fingertips
.

I never saw it again
.

My sealskin was my strength. The only way I could get back home. Inside it I was myself
.

The thief Bill carried me home, dosed me with some bitter herbal tea to soothe my drying throat, night after night. Stole my memory. I forgot all of who I was, lost myself in Bill’s words. Hung onto them as if they were ropes thrown from a ship, and
I would drown if I let go. Bill and this island claimed me as a possession. He told me his story. I was born on this island, I knew him all my life, loved him and only him. He hid my sealskin and married me. When I stopped drinking the tea, and my memory came back, it was too late
.

I tried everything to get him to speak of it. To tell me where it was. He said he didn’t want to lose me, he couldn’t remember, he was drunk when he hid it. It was stolen, someone tore it up, it was destroyed. I seduced him, flattered him, cried for days, fed him, starved him, shouted, begged, tore at my hair. He’d never say
.

I realised that a part of me still carried it with me – a fragment of it shielded my heart. It kept the coldness safe deep inside me, where it could never be touched. This coldness spread, for the currents of the sea still surge in my blood
.

He followed where I led him. Took favours granted as signs of hope or love, some such gifts. His hope allowed me to lead him into the worst kind of currents – the ones of self-deception. From those currents, sooner or later, there are no ways to journey back
.

I let him believe I loved him, showed him by lying with my body. He got me pregnant. The young nearly tore me apart clawing his way out of me, yet I loved Dylan from the moment I melted into his black eyes. Bill watched me with him, said I spent too much time feeding him. I saw jealousy in his face
.

But at last I had someone to love
.

I stopped speaking to Bill. Stopped dreaming, wouldn’t look at him when he came home, was never in his bed
.

After a time, Bill said, ‘You’re silent like you’re already in your grave. I’ve lost you and no one is mourning but me.’

After years, he told me, ‘Buried your sealskin somewhere in the graveyard. It’s been there, rotting all these years.’

Fragments, pieces that were once a part of me
.

Dylan disappeared the day after Bill told me where he’d buried my sealskin, when I finally knew. My Dylan, my young. Not long turned thirteen. I left him lying on his bed in his room, went outside to stare at the graveyard. When I went back inside, he was gone
.

I said to Bill, ‘Another piece of me has been taken.’

Then I cried
.

This loss is as deep as the loss of my sealskin. All losses open doors into older grief
.

Bill took my hand. He said, ‘Now you’re in tears, showing me this, I feel closer to you than what I ever have.’ I snatched my hand away
.

Naked and stolen all over again
.

I told Bill how much I hated him. Told him I never loved him, and shipwrecked his self-deception as he buried my hope
.

My sealskin’s fate, but not yet mine. I want justice
.

Kelmar’s son gone, then mine. Then Annie’s son, and now Beatrice’s. With Beatrice buried, and Annie devoted to Martyn, it’s down to me and Kelmar to call up the help we need. Take whatever truth it brings
.

Mum unlocks my bedroom door, comes in, folds her arms and says, ‘You haven’t washed up. There’s a stack of dishes left, I can smell them from here.’

Her voice doesn’t belong here.

I put down my book. ‘How can I wash up, when you’ve decided I need to be locked in my room and don’t even …’

She glares at me. Taps a finger on the door. Strokes a whorl in the wood. Waits.

‘All right!’ I push past her, stamp down the stairs to the kitchen. There’s a cold cup of tea on the floor in the hall, so I take it into the kitchen.

The washbowl has dirty plates stacked in it. I go out of the back door to the well in the garden, and like an overworked kitchen girl, I sigh as I fill a bucket with water, bring it in and pour it over the plates till the washbowl is full. I plunge in my hands and it’s freezing cold. I’m a serving girl in a grand castle, seeking something precious to steal that will buy me my freedom.

On the mainland, our house was full of everything we could ever possibly want, but none of it felt like it belonged to us. I watched Mum pace the rooms while Dad was out, spied on her as she stroked the grand piano that none of us could play; she
opened a rosewood trunk and lifted out a beaded wedding dress that she’d never worn and wouldn’t fit her; she fingered the embossed spines of a collection of antique hardback books, printed in a language that none of us could read.

I pick up a plate gently, run my fingertips over it and pretend it’s made of ivory.

Mum comes in. She leans against the solid kitchen table; it creaks under her weight. I feel her eyes like a scratch on the back of my neck. ‘Don’t leave the kitchen in such a mess next time.’

The room fills with her heavy thoughts.

I’m not a serving girl any more.

‘What is it?’ I ask.

Her eyes watch my back. ‘I saw what you wrote on your window.
I have to leave.’

I wipe another plate clean, turn away from the washbowl and put it on the kitchen table, get a dry cloth and put it next to the plate. I pretend I’m a queen and Mum’s my servant. I announce, ‘You should dry,’ and go back to the washbowl.

Mum doesn’t notice I’m being a queen. She says, ‘Writing things down doesn’t make them true.’

‘Stealing things from under other people’s mattresses doesn’t make them yours.’

‘What about me?’ I know she’s squeezing tears up in her eyes.

‘I can’t breathe …’

‘You’re selfish, Morgan. You know, there was a time I couldn’t breathe. Giving birth to you – do you think I could breathe then? Your father didn’t have to go through that. You’ve been talking to him, haven’t you? What have you been saying about me?’

I’m not a queen any more. I say, ‘You
chose
to give birth to me …’ I put another plate on the table.

She says, ‘When you talk about leaving here, do you think
I
can breathe? Who’ll look after the twins? And do
this
…’ She waves her hand at the clean plates. ‘I’ll shrivel. Is that what you want?’

I wipe another plate and wonder what shrivelling might feel like. But I say, ‘The twins are fine, they’re so … involved with each other, they don’t need anyone—’

‘You’re weedy. I don’t like looking at you.’ She folds her arms and the table creaks.

The washbowl looks far away. My arms seem really long. I watch my tiny hands scrub at a fork. Three choices: Angry. Silent. Walk away.

She says, ‘At your age girls think they know everything. You’re wrong. You wouldn’t survive anywhere else. You’re too sensitive, you’d get hurt. You’d have an accident. Someone would kidnap you. They like long blonde hair, they like thin women because they fall over easier than fat ones. Can you imagine how I’d feel, you not here, worrying about you, all the horrendous things that can possibly happen, I’d think of all of them, every single one, I’d never stop worrying, never sleep for caring. It would cripple me. You couldn’t find a job. You’re all book talk and attention-seeking. The only thing you’re good at is reading, and no one gets paid to read. We shouldn’t have taught you. You read too much, all those words have got stuck in your head, making you think you could belong anywhere but where you’re standing. It’s ridiculous.’

A hammering of words.

I spin round with the fork in my hand. ‘Mum, the only place I’m ever standing is at this washbowl. I could stand at a washbowl anywhere.’ I gesture through the window at the fence outside. ‘Nothing happens. Nothing but the paint chipping, and the whispers on the other side.’

‘Put that down.’ She points at the fork I’m pointing at her. ‘What whispers? There are no whispers! I’m protecting you from them!’ she shouts, her voice is a knife. ‘They wouldn’t understand you – and they’d say hateful things about me to you! I can’t trust you not to listen to them, not when they’re telling you lies about me, and then where would I be? A daughter who hated me, that would be terrible.’

I put the fork on the stack of clean, dripping plates. I say, ‘They call us three “the hidden daughters”. I’ve heard whispers on the other side of the fence.’ I wash up a handful of spoons.

‘When will you stop making up stories about yourself? Hidden daughters. One day I’ll tell you about hearing voices—’

‘You
have
told me about hearing voices! You’ve told me that you don’t, but that you’re special and you’d be the one to hear them if anyone could. There aren’t any voices in this house, not the whisper of a ghost. Even if there were, you wouldn’t hear them, because you don’t listen!’ I crash the spoons on top of the plates.

Her hands shake. ‘Stupid girl!’ She bangs her fists on the kitchen table and I hear a clank of metal. ‘You belong with us.’

I turn back to the washbowl. A silver knife gleams under the water. I wash the surface with a cloth, the silver glistens. I say, ‘I don’t belong
anywhere,’
and slice my thumb. The scarlet blood seeps out. I put my thumb in my mouth.

Mum walks out of the kitchen. I run the cloth over the knife and wipe it clean.