Sea Hearts (4 page)

‘Why don’t you have her on the wall?’ I reached out and rattled the wire. ‘She is all ready for hanging.’

‘She’s a secret, Mam says. She is our greatest shame. She must stay hidden away.’

‘What’s her name?’ said Ann Jelly.

‘No one remembers, she’s so long ago in our family. Isn’t she beautiful?’

‘She looks like a Spanish queen,’ said Ann Jelly thoughtfully. ‘Out of Mister Wexford’s story-book, up at school.’

‘Yes!’ Gert sounded pleased. ‘Perhaps she was royal there, under the sea.’

They pulled the curtains wider, examined the woman more closely. ‘Her delicate hands,’ said Ann Jelly.

‘See, they have made her smile here, just a little?’ Gert waved a finger over the lips in the painting, and I bit my own away again. ‘But her eyes are still sad.’ She covered the curvy mouth; the eyes gazed out mournfully over the edge of her hand.

‘We must put her away. Mam mustn’t know I showed you. And you mustn’t tell — Misskaella won’t tell, will she?’

‘Not if I tell her not to.’ Ann Jelly widened her eyes at me.

‘I won’t say a word.’ But she didn’t need to caution me. I had not the words or the worldliness to describe the Spanish-queen lady, and how new she was to me, yet how familiar.

They slid the picture back down behind the blankets, and closed the lid; I pretended to help, although I was really too small to be of much use. I only wanted the chance to touch the wood, so old, so ornamented — the perfect container for a secret. My plump little hand looked so impertinent among the carved flowers! I snatched it away.

We went out and sat as we’d sat before, along the step. We hardly spoke until Gert’s mam came back, and called us monkeys in a row, and freed us to run off and play. Gladly we sprang away from our naughtiness and solemnity, and from the stare of the lady in the picture.

I woke one day to find everything stretched and reaching, as if the world were a pot on the boil, and someone had taken its lid off and let the steam pour up wildly. I must be ill, I thought, but I felt no pain, no turmoil of my stomach, and I could get up and move about much as I always did. No one else seemed to notice how high or heightened everything had gone, how the essence of things rushed and flapped in my heart. My sisters chattered among themselves as usual, cried at me to hurry along.

When it came my turn to cross the threshold to go to school, I was as fearful as a field-mouse about to dash from under a rock, the huge sky over me threatening hawks. Nobody seemed to suspect the act of will it took me to move from hallway to step. Once out, for a moment I felt myself to be a queen stepping stately from my palace, my subjects cheering that I glorified their world by walking upon it; then I was only wretched Misskaella again, and walls and chimneys twitched and flickered when they should stay still.

I hung back from the others, their bent backs as they climbed, their turning aside to speak; now they laughed, faces pale against the slope of damp cobbles. How lucky they were, not to have gone raw like their sister!

‘Do stop dawdling, Missk!’ cried Tatty to me.

Time and again I must force myself to see that no actual wind frayed or bent the air. I feared that at any moment I would be caught up bodily and thrown high away, or dissolved grain by grain up into this invisible wind. Surely my mind would break soon from seeing this, from seeing through the skin of things to the flesh and the bone, to the breath gusting through and the blood pouring about? I would die of it, or fall into some kind of terrible fit. For the first time I was seeing life truly, and the truth would overwhelm me; a person couldn’t bear this sight for long — a girl of nine should not be
expected
to bear it. Look at the power all but bursting from every cobblestone and grain of grit between! See how it was loosed in dribs and drabs so measuredly, moss crawling there in a corner, a schoolboy here running along his lane to join us, his greetings peeping within the roar-that-was-not-a-roar. Oh, the sky! I was glad of the clouds, the glowering light, for they seemed to my timid eyes to contain this ongoing event, though another, fresh-born, braver Misskaella behind those eyes knew that cloud or clearness was nothing to the purposeful flaring. It would leap regardless, pushed on outward by the forces from below.

The schoolhouse stood as solidly dreadful as ever, in a sea of children whirling excited. Invisible flames poured through them. The bell rang, and its chimes sent a ripple across the air, which crossed and combined with the energy fountaining from below, and flew off as bright-curling streamers into the grey.

Inside, all day, my mind’s flames kept burning up the world, never consuming it; its winds howled and yet moved nothing and took nothing away. Each action and object in this tiny schoolroom seemed a marvel to me — Mister Wexford so certain of himself, the rows of us so willingly chanting this, imagining that, writing the other thing upon our slates. At moments everything’s solidity quite gave way, and the schoolhouse seemed constructed of dream-matter, plastered with illusion, the heavy desks as liable as all the rest to be snatched up and poured away into the sky. When would I fall in the fit or faint that would end this?

That afternoon I waded through the spangled air and handled all the dazzling objects necessary to completing my chores. When they all were done, ‘I am going down the town,’ I told Bee, ‘to walk on the mole, if Mam asks.’

‘Very well,’ said Bee from inside her book on her bed.

I had chosen to tell her because she was the most distracted sister, and the least likely to find another chore for me, or to insist on coming too.

I let myself out of the flickering house. Outside, cobbles and houses shuddered, rain spat and the clouds glared; the air was bitter, empty of spring promise. I descended the town all eyes and ears and goose-fleshed skin. I stayed composed, though I felt like running, leaping with the leaping stuff, calling out, encouraging it and being encouraged.

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 colourless 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 clumsy or ridiculous at all. 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 towards the cliff-top, then peered over it. There the seals lay like bobbins in a drawer, greys and silvers, fawns and browns, some mottled, others smoothly one-coloured 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 sea-scape, 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 duelling 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 centre of the seal-being, into a man-like or a woman-like 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 towards 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 towards 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 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.