Return to Lochinver
by Donald S Murray
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: A girl who is a misfit in a Hebridean port discovers the truth about her origins.
_____________________________________________________________________
She was walking past Somerfield when she started to hear the voices.
‘Sadie …’
‘You’re one of us.’
‘Come and join us.’
‘Sadie …’
She stopped, looking round the harbour. The tide was out, revealing a wide stretch of boulders and dark, grimy sand. A group of seals were basking there in the chilly sunlight, as if they were enjoying a day out on the outskirts of town, watching people making their way to the bus-stop after work, the old castle, too, in the distance. One of them barked just like a dog, the animal to which their old science teacher had said seals were related. Even the shape of their noses seemed to suggest some kind of family connection.
‘Sadie …’
‘You need to come with us. Learn our ways.’
She shook her head, wondering if all that was happening in her life was beginning to drive her mad. It could only be the seals talking to her. No one else was in sight.
She quickened her step to escape them, feet clicking along the pavement. It wouldn’t do to stand there as if she were talking to them. Things were bad enough already. She didn’t want to make them any worse.
It was her classmates’ voices that really annoyed her.
‘Something really fishy about that one,’ one boy had declared, nudging up behind her in the history class.
‘It’s as if she’s gone off. Such a shame. At her age.’
‘Especially as she’s never been, well …’
‘Ripe for plucking. Or for …’
They left the last word unsaid, sniggering as they pretended to look at their jotters.
There was the time, too, when she had heard two girls in her music class whispering about her.
‘Mam says she’s a half-caste. Something of the night about her, she told me the other day.’
‘And my Mam told me that no one has any idea who her father is. Or where he came from. All she’s ever said is that it’s someone out on the west side. Where her Granny’s croft used to be.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know that …’
A sudden glance in Sadie’s direction and their talk came to an end. The silence was interrupted a few moments later when their music teacher, Mrs Bayne, began to speak once again, her voice sharp with irritation after another teacher had just left the room.
‘’Young ladies, it is time to return our attention to the words of the Gaelic song I have just handed out. Remember you’ll be singing it in the Mod…’
Sadie squinted at the sheet in front of her, trying her best to make some sense of the words. It was just as well there was a translation printed below.
‘S mairg ‘ an tir seo, ‘s mairg an tir,
ag ithe daoine ‘n riochd a’ bhiadh;
nach fhaic sibh ceannard an t-sluaigh
goil air teine gu cruaidh, cruinn …’
‘Sad the land is, sad the land,
eating people for its food;
see how the chief of all our men
boils on fire that’s hot and round ….’
Reading the sheet, she felt her eyes water. There was no doubt she shared much of the sorrow of that song, that sense of being an outsider. It was as if she did not belong anywhere on the island. Not within the school. Not inside her home. Even though her mother took her every Sunday to the town’s Free Kirk. Even though her uncles, aunts and cousins lived all around her, joining them often for dinner on that day, whispering prayers above large, white tablecloths all but hidden by plates of roast mutton, Pyrex dishes piled with potatoes, peas, carrots, turnips, jugs filled to the brim with orange juice.
‘Oh, Lord, we ask you particularly to guard this young person in our midst and not allow her to be led astray as so many are in the days of youth …’
She would place a few slices of meat, a roast potato or two on her plate, turning down their offer of vegetables, ignoring them, too, when they complained of the amount of salt she sprinkled on her meal.
‘Not good for you, Sadie. Not good for you at all.’
Her taste buds were different from theirs. Just like her appearance. She looked like no one else in the school. Not even her mother’s family. They were all grey and pallid. Hair and eyebrows faded grey or white. Eyes, too, vapid, almost without colouring. Her mother’s neck long and grateful; breasts and backside modest, as if she could slip into any shadows, conceal herself in any corner of the room. The clothing she chose for herself was almost as featureless. Pale shades that prevented others from being aware of her presence. The only time she had probably drawn their attention was while she was pregnant with Sadie, her roundness then an alien intrusion on her body, giving her a weight and purpose she probably despised.
Sadie looked and acted nothing like that. Her hair was thick and black, almost like a mare’s tail or the bushy tail of a dog. Her dusky skin was practically mauve in shade. Her top lip was finely drawn; her bottom lip plump and creased, set in a permanent pout. It was only her dark eyes that softened – what might otherwise have been – a look of discontent. Their intensity made her look supremely self-possessed, as if she had no need of help from anyone.
Her shape, too, was different. Her shoulders sloped; her breasts and bum far fuller than any of the rest of her family. There was also a restlessness about her that seemed at odds with their placidity. One glance at the mirror was all that was needed to spark off the question she had asked a number of times over the previous few years.
‘Who was my father?’
And each time she said this, there was a different reply, her mother sighing as she spoke.
‘He was a kind of sailor.’
‘Restless soul. We’re all better off without him.’
‘A fisherman of sorts.’
‘A bit of a tinker in his way. Moving from place to place. Shore to shore.’
It was almost as strange as some of the rules she insisted upon in the household. She had never, for instance, allowed Sadie to step into the barn behind their home on her own, giving the strangest reason for her refusal.
‘There’s bad things in there. Things that might give you nightmares.’
Yet the day the two of them had entered the barn together, there seemed little odd about the place. A few pieces of driftwood lay in one corner. An old cement mixer rusted in the middle of the room. A pile of brightly coloured fishboxes were stacked high against a wall; the words ‘Return To Lochinver’ or ‘Property of the Mallaig Fisherman’s Co-operative’ printed on their sides. She noticed a strong tang of the sea coming from them. A salty, rotten smell.
‘Why aren’t I allowed in here?’ she asked again.
‘Oh, the electrics.’ Mam said. ‘They’re dangerous. And the roof isn’t all that safe either.’
She got better answers from her dreams.
They were becoming more and more vivid with each year. It was as if when she entered sleep, she kept looking through water, seeing dark breakers crested white. Bubbles. Seaweed. A pale orange smudge. Great forests of green, brown, black swaying back and forth. A jellyfish drifting from wave to wave without coming any closer. Silver darts shoaling. A fleck of foam another breaker rolls away and obliterates.
She was conscious, too, of something large and indistinct nearby. A dark, diffuse shadow moving towards her, stirring and unsettling water as it does. For the first few times, she was terrified of its approach, as if that shape was something she had only glimpsed through her tightly squeezed fingers on a TV screen before. A terrorist perhaps. The dim outline of an extremist, menacing and threatening the world she has almost known. She imagines seeing its whiskers, the dark tones of its skin and shoves out her fist to push it away.
‘Fuck off!’
But that reaction was only in the beginning. After the first few times, she begins to be aware of the kindness of its two dark eyes, the solidity and strength of the intruder, its warmth towards her. And though the sounds are blurred and indistinct, she starts to hear much the same words as she heard that day near Somerfield.
‘Sadie … You’re one of us. Come and join us. Sadie …’
‘A bloody menace, these beasts are,’ a young man in an orange boilersuit declared as she brushed past him in the entrance to Woolies. ‘These bastards in the city should and see the damage they do to fish, taking one bite and then spitting the rest away. They might stop being so bloody sentimental about them then. Bloody menaces, they all are. Just like that fucking Greenpeace that try and protect them. That fucking crowd. We should go out and kill the beasts again. Just like we …’
She made her way to the CD shelves, tripping her fingers through them to find if there were any of the groups or titles she enjoyed. ‘Bullets For My Valentine’. ‘Chemical Romance’. ‘Panic At The Disco’, ‘Nine Inch Nails’… She was clutching a CD by the last band when a voice disturbed her.
‘Is that the kind of stuff you enjoy?’
She looked across. In front of her was the first girl she had ever seen who looked like her. Older perhaps, but the same rich, dark hair, tawny skin, even the set of her shoulders, the fullness of her breasts. For an instant, she was startled into silence.
‘It wouldn’t be my type of music,’ the stranger grinned.
‘No?’
‘No. Think I got stuck in my era. Some twenty years ago or more. T.Rex. David Bowie. ‘Space Oddity’. ‘Ziggy Stardust’. There was even an Elton John song I liked. The words keep going round my head even these days.’
Sadie looked even more strangely at the girl, wondering how her era had been all that time before. There looked as if no more than five years difference existed between them.
‘I’ll sing it to you if you like,’ the girl said.
‘Here?’ She gazed all around her, noting all the customers in the shop. Even the man in the orange boiler-suit was looking at the DVDs, picking up a copy of ‘Silence Of The Lambs’ to bring home with him. ‘No, not here.’
But she had already started, her voice hushed and low.
‘And tell me grey seal
How does it feel
To be so wise
To see through eyes
That only see what's real
Tell me grey seal…’
Sadie shivered. The music sent a chill through her, reminding her of the dreams that had troubled her sleep, the voices heard on the shore. ‘Where did you learn that?’ she gasped.
‘Oh… In another lifetime.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The one I had before I found myself. The one I had before I became a wanderer. A nomad. A bit of a tinker in my way. Moving from place to place. Shore to shore.’
The echo of her mother’s words startled Sadie. She had heard them the last time she had quizzed her about her father. ‘A bit of a tinker in his way,’ she had said. ‘Moving from place to place. Shore to shore.’ Her nails clenched the ‘Nine Inch Nails’ CD she was holding.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Mara.’
‘The Gaelic for sea?’
‘Yes. That’s where I come from. And that’s where you come from too.’
She shook her head in disbelief when she heard these words. Crazy. No one lived in the sea. Mad. The whole notion made her choke and gasp in much the same way as water would when it closed above your head, depriving you of air and life. She dismissed the whole idea, panicking at the thought she was in the company of some madwoman who had just suggested it. It was clearly nonsense. Ridiculous. A bad dream like the ones she had been suffering over recent months, when the waves seemed to welcome her, embracing and surrounding her body.
But Mara persisted. ‘Think of yourself as mixed race,’ she whispered urgently. ‘Part a creature of this earth. Part a creature of the sea. Part settled. Part wanderer. It would explain so much, wouldn’t it? Why you feel you don’t belong. Why the people around these parts don’t seem as if they’re like you in any way.’
She tried her best to deny all she said. ‘No. I’m happy here. No. I feel as if I belong.’
‘That’s what I said the day a girl first approached me. On my way to school. But it’s not true, is it, Sadie? You belong elsewhere. Not here.’
‘No …’
At the same time, she knew she was lying. More to herself than to the girl. She did not feel as if she was part of life here. Whether they were aware of it or not, the rest excluded her. It was as if they possessed a different skin to hers, belonged and breathed in another kind of element. Any time another human touched her, it was as if their fingers chafed and bruised her skin.
She heard Mara continuing to talk, mentioning how she had been brought up in the English Midlands – ‘about as far away from salt water as my Mum could get in this country.’
‘I remember the school. The family. Even the thought that someday I might have to work in a shop or a factory or office in the town. It didn’t matter. It all filled me with despair. It was as if I was caught in a net and there was no getting out of it. And then that girl came up to me. Told me that there was this other kind of life inside of me…’
She shook her head, her black hair gleaming. In her eyes, Sadie was sure she could glimpse the Pole Star, the Plough, all the clusters of light that must grant direction and bearing to a sea-creature’s existence.
‘Now I’m in the water, it’s a different kind of life. I go where I want to. Wherever the tide takes me. Whichever direction the current or my own strength and efforts might choose.’
Shaking her head, Sadie could hardly believe her words, yet she knew it all made sense. She remembered being at school the day the teacher handed out the form for Work Experience. Her pen had hovered over it. The Fisherman’s Co-op. A fish farm. Somerfield. The Council. BBC. None of it had any shape or meaning for her. Against all this, there were Mara’s words. They should have been complete fantasy. Fanciful. Nonsensical. Yet they carried within them a conviction and truth reality did not even begin to possess for her.
‘If I decide to go with you …’ she muttered.
‘Yes?’
‘How do I do it?’
‘You have to find your pelt. Do you have any idea where it might be?’
She knew exactly where it was. Its presence was the only thing that might explain these mysterious warnings not to step into the barn on her own. Even her mother’s face provided its own clues, its own sudden revelations. Her eyes had widened when Sadie stepped near the fish-boxes towering beside the wall. ‘Don’t go near there …’ she had cautioned. ‘They’re unsteady. They might fall.’ And Sadie’s hand had suddenly, mischievously shoogled it, noting how they stayed firmly in place. ‘Don’t do that!’ her mother shrieked.
‘I know exactly where it is,’ she declared.
‘Well… What are we waiting for? Let’s go and get it.’
Sadie was back at the harbour later that evening, not far from Somerfield. Inside her ‘Young Scot’ bag, there was the pelt she had found inside the fish-box near the bottom of the stack; ‘Return To Lochinver’ printed on its side. To find it, she and Mara had to haul down the other fish-boxes. Inside them, there was a strange collection of items. Old car parts. A set of sheep-shears and a castrating machine, complete with a packet of red rubber rings. A sledgehammer stained with either red paint or blood. Bolts and screws. A car-jack. It had taken ages for Mara and her to drag them all down, to find her own pelt lying there.
‘It’s beautiful …’ Mara said.
‘Yes.’
She touched it shyly with her fingers, her eyes smarting as she rubbed its sleek, grey surface, imagining how it might fit against her own skin. Soon she would see how she might move in it, darting through water as it topples towards shore. She anticipated, too, how the moonlight might reflect on ripples, the sand could be seen through its green shade, the dark edges of rock.
‘Do I put it on now?’ she asked.
‘No. You’ll have to wait till the water’s edge.’
She waited for that moment until evening. She sat down at the kitchen table with her mother, facing each other over a meal of fried haddock, chips and beans. It all tasted as pallid and colourless as her mother’s features, cooked so free of flavour that she could barely come to swallow it. And despite the way they barely talked, questions kept echoing in her head.
‘Why don’t you tell me who my father is?’
‘Why did you deny me the truth about myself? The skin in the barn. Why didn’t you tell me about that?’
Yet in truth, there were so many other questions that were going to be far more important to her in future. She had gabbled out so many of them when she lifted up her pelt for the first time, clutching it against her as she whirled it round and round like a partner in a waltz.
‘What do seals and selkies believe in? What do they think of men? What kind of man is my father?’
It was only the last answer she remembered obtaining, the words swirling in her own head as she swayed to the imaginary music.
‘He’s my father too. One of two daughters he’s given to human females. Don’t be fooled by his fierceness. He’s kind and warm-hearted below all that.’
She knew that he was the one calling as she slipped on her sealskin that evening, watching as the grey fur covered her bare toes, calves and thighs. She could see, too, the sleekness of her new form as the cloak took hold, tight against her waist. She stood up on the rocks for the last time, watching the unnatural light of the supermarket a short distance away, the streetlights that obscured so much of the open wonder of the sky.
‘Sadie … My Sadie … She is coming to join us at last.’
And she could not help the quiet shiver of repugnance that overcame her as he moved towards the shoreline. He seemed to be everything that she had ever been taught was ugly and repellent. He was dark and bearded, heavily jowled. A roll of fat hung from his huge belly. For an instant, she could not help but think of some of the images she had seen on the TV screen. The dark extremist. The shadowy figures with long, unpronounceable names that seemed only to live to threaten her, emerging from some of the deep and unknown undercurrents of the world.
For a moment, she recoiled from him, only to become aware of the ghost of a smile on his lips, the gleam within his eyes.
‘Hello, Dad,’ she said.
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: A girl who is a misfit in a Hebridean port discovers the truth about her origins.
_____________________________________________________________________
She was walking past Somerfield when she started to hear the voices.
‘Sadie …’
‘You’re one of us.’
‘Come and join us.’
‘Sadie …’
She stopped, looking round the harbour. The tide was out, revealing a wide stretch of boulders and dark, grimy sand. A group of seals were basking there in the chilly sunlight, as if they were enjoying a day out on the outskirts of town, watching people making their way to the bus-stop after work, the old castle, too, in the distance. One of them barked just like a dog, the animal to which their old science teacher had said seals were related. Even the shape of their noses seemed to suggest some kind of family connection.
‘Sadie …’
‘You need to come with us. Learn our ways.’
She shook her head, wondering if all that was happening in her life was beginning to drive her mad. It could only be the seals talking to her. No one else was in sight.
She quickened her step to escape them, feet clicking along the pavement. It wouldn’t do to stand there as if she were talking to them. Things were bad enough already. She didn’t want to make them any worse.
It was her classmates’ voices that really annoyed her.
‘Something really fishy about that one,’ one boy had declared, nudging up behind her in the history class.
‘It’s as if she’s gone off. Such a shame. At her age.’
‘Especially as she’s never been, well …’
‘Ripe for plucking. Or for …’
They left the last word unsaid, sniggering as they pretended to look at their jotters.
There was the time, too, when she had heard two girls in her music class whispering about her.
‘Mam says she’s a half-caste. Something of the night about her, she told me the other day.’
‘And my Mam told me that no one has any idea who her father is. Or where he came from. All she’s ever said is that it’s someone out on the west side. Where her Granny’s croft used to be.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know that …’
A sudden glance in Sadie’s direction and their talk came to an end. The silence was interrupted a few moments later when their music teacher, Mrs Bayne, began to speak once again, her voice sharp with irritation after another teacher had just left the room.
‘’Young ladies, it is time to return our attention to the words of the Gaelic song I have just handed out. Remember you’ll be singing it in the Mod…’
Sadie squinted at the sheet in front of her, trying her best to make some sense of the words. It was just as well there was a translation printed below.
‘S mairg ‘ an tir seo, ‘s mairg an tir,
ag ithe daoine ‘n riochd a’ bhiadh;
nach fhaic sibh ceannard an t-sluaigh
goil air teine gu cruaidh, cruinn …’
‘Sad the land is, sad the land,
eating people for its food;
see how the chief of all our men
boils on fire that’s hot and round ….’
Reading the sheet, she felt her eyes water. There was no doubt she shared much of the sorrow of that song, that sense of being an outsider. It was as if she did not belong anywhere on the island. Not within the school. Not inside her home. Even though her mother took her every Sunday to the town’s Free Kirk. Even though her uncles, aunts and cousins lived all around her, joining them often for dinner on that day, whispering prayers above large, white tablecloths all but hidden by plates of roast mutton, Pyrex dishes piled with potatoes, peas, carrots, turnips, jugs filled to the brim with orange juice.
‘Oh, Lord, we ask you particularly to guard this young person in our midst and not allow her to be led astray as so many are in the days of youth …’
She would place a few slices of meat, a roast potato or two on her plate, turning down their offer of vegetables, ignoring them, too, when they complained of the amount of salt she sprinkled on her meal.
‘Not good for you, Sadie. Not good for you at all.’
Her taste buds were different from theirs. Just like her appearance. She looked like no one else in the school. Not even her mother’s family. They were all grey and pallid. Hair and eyebrows faded grey or white. Eyes, too, vapid, almost without colouring. Her mother’s neck long and grateful; breasts and backside modest, as if she could slip into any shadows, conceal herself in any corner of the room. The clothing she chose for herself was almost as featureless. Pale shades that prevented others from being aware of her presence. The only time she had probably drawn their attention was while she was pregnant with Sadie, her roundness then an alien intrusion on her body, giving her a weight and purpose she probably despised.
Sadie looked and acted nothing like that. Her hair was thick and black, almost like a mare’s tail or the bushy tail of a dog. Her dusky skin was practically mauve in shade. Her top lip was finely drawn; her bottom lip plump and creased, set in a permanent pout. It was only her dark eyes that softened – what might otherwise have been – a look of discontent. Their intensity made her look supremely self-possessed, as if she had no need of help from anyone.
Her shape, too, was different. Her shoulders sloped; her breasts and bum far fuller than any of the rest of her family. There was also a restlessness about her that seemed at odds with their placidity. One glance at the mirror was all that was needed to spark off the question she had asked a number of times over the previous few years.
‘Who was my father?’
And each time she said this, there was a different reply, her mother sighing as she spoke.
‘He was a kind of sailor.’
‘Restless soul. We’re all better off without him.’
‘A fisherman of sorts.’
‘A bit of a tinker in his way. Moving from place to place. Shore to shore.’
It was almost as strange as some of the rules she insisted upon in the household. She had never, for instance, allowed Sadie to step into the barn behind their home on her own, giving the strangest reason for her refusal.
‘There’s bad things in there. Things that might give you nightmares.’
Yet the day the two of them had entered the barn together, there seemed little odd about the place. A few pieces of driftwood lay in one corner. An old cement mixer rusted in the middle of the room. A pile of brightly coloured fishboxes were stacked high against a wall; the words ‘Return To Lochinver’ or ‘Property of the Mallaig Fisherman’s Co-operative’ printed on their sides. She noticed a strong tang of the sea coming from them. A salty, rotten smell.
‘Why aren’t I allowed in here?’ she asked again.
‘Oh, the electrics.’ Mam said. ‘They’re dangerous. And the roof isn’t all that safe either.’
She got better answers from her dreams.
They were becoming more and more vivid with each year. It was as if when she entered sleep, she kept looking through water, seeing dark breakers crested white. Bubbles. Seaweed. A pale orange smudge. Great forests of green, brown, black swaying back and forth. A jellyfish drifting from wave to wave without coming any closer. Silver darts shoaling. A fleck of foam another breaker rolls away and obliterates.
She was conscious, too, of something large and indistinct nearby. A dark, diffuse shadow moving towards her, stirring and unsettling water as it does. For the first few times, she was terrified of its approach, as if that shape was something she had only glimpsed through her tightly squeezed fingers on a TV screen before. A terrorist perhaps. The dim outline of an extremist, menacing and threatening the world she has almost known. She imagines seeing its whiskers, the dark tones of its skin and shoves out her fist to push it away.
‘Fuck off!’
But that reaction was only in the beginning. After the first few times, she begins to be aware of the kindness of its two dark eyes, the solidity and strength of the intruder, its warmth towards her. And though the sounds are blurred and indistinct, she starts to hear much the same words as she heard that day near Somerfield.
‘Sadie … You’re one of us. Come and join us. Sadie …’
‘A bloody menace, these beasts are,’ a young man in an orange boilersuit declared as she brushed past him in the entrance to Woolies. ‘These bastards in the city should and see the damage they do to fish, taking one bite and then spitting the rest away. They might stop being so bloody sentimental about them then. Bloody menaces, they all are. Just like that fucking Greenpeace that try and protect them. That fucking crowd. We should go out and kill the beasts again. Just like we …’
She made her way to the CD shelves, tripping her fingers through them to find if there were any of the groups or titles she enjoyed. ‘Bullets For My Valentine’. ‘Chemical Romance’. ‘Panic At The Disco’, ‘Nine Inch Nails’… She was clutching a CD by the last band when a voice disturbed her.
‘Is that the kind of stuff you enjoy?’
She looked across. In front of her was the first girl she had ever seen who looked like her. Older perhaps, but the same rich, dark hair, tawny skin, even the set of her shoulders, the fullness of her breasts. For an instant, she was startled into silence.
‘It wouldn’t be my type of music,’ the stranger grinned.
‘No?’
‘No. Think I got stuck in my era. Some twenty years ago or more. T.Rex. David Bowie. ‘Space Oddity’. ‘Ziggy Stardust’. There was even an Elton John song I liked. The words keep going round my head even these days.’
Sadie looked even more strangely at the girl, wondering how her era had been all that time before. There looked as if no more than five years difference existed between them.
‘I’ll sing it to you if you like,’ the girl said.
‘Here?’ She gazed all around her, noting all the customers in the shop. Even the man in the orange boiler-suit was looking at the DVDs, picking up a copy of ‘Silence Of The Lambs’ to bring home with him. ‘No, not here.’
But she had already started, her voice hushed and low.
‘And tell me grey seal
How does it feel
To be so wise
To see through eyes
That only see what's real
Tell me grey seal…’
Sadie shivered. The music sent a chill through her, reminding her of the dreams that had troubled her sleep, the voices heard on the shore. ‘Where did you learn that?’ she gasped.
‘Oh… In another lifetime.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The one I had before I found myself. The one I had before I became a wanderer. A nomad. A bit of a tinker in my way. Moving from place to place. Shore to shore.’
The echo of her mother’s words startled Sadie. She had heard them the last time she had quizzed her about her father. ‘A bit of a tinker in his way,’ she had said. ‘Moving from place to place. Shore to shore.’ Her nails clenched the ‘Nine Inch Nails’ CD she was holding.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Mara.’
‘The Gaelic for sea?’
‘Yes. That’s where I come from. And that’s where you come from too.’
She shook her head in disbelief when she heard these words. Crazy. No one lived in the sea. Mad. The whole notion made her choke and gasp in much the same way as water would when it closed above your head, depriving you of air and life. She dismissed the whole idea, panicking at the thought she was in the company of some madwoman who had just suggested it. It was clearly nonsense. Ridiculous. A bad dream like the ones she had been suffering over recent months, when the waves seemed to welcome her, embracing and surrounding her body.
But Mara persisted. ‘Think of yourself as mixed race,’ she whispered urgently. ‘Part a creature of this earth. Part a creature of the sea. Part settled. Part wanderer. It would explain so much, wouldn’t it? Why you feel you don’t belong. Why the people around these parts don’t seem as if they’re like you in any way.’
She tried her best to deny all she said. ‘No. I’m happy here. No. I feel as if I belong.’
‘That’s what I said the day a girl first approached me. On my way to school. But it’s not true, is it, Sadie? You belong elsewhere. Not here.’
‘No …’
At the same time, she knew she was lying. More to herself than to the girl. She did not feel as if she was part of life here. Whether they were aware of it or not, the rest excluded her. It was as if they possessed a different skin to hers, belonged and breathed in another kind of element. Any time another human touched her, it was as if their fingers chafed and bruised her skin.
She heard Mara continuing to talk, mentioning how she had been brought up in the English Midlands – ‘about as far away from salt water as my Mum could get in this country.’
‘I remember the school. The family. Even the thought that someday I might have to work in a shop or a factory or office in the town. It didn’t matter. It all filled me with despair. It was as if I was caught in a net and there was no getting out of it. And then that girl came up to me. Told me that there was this other kind of life inside of me…’
She shook her head, her black hair gleaming. In her eyes, Sadie was sure she could glimpse the Pole Star, the Plough, all the clusters of light that must grant direction and bearing to a sea-creature’s existence.
‘Now I’m in the water, it’s a different kind of life. I go where I want to. Wherever the tide takes me. Whichever direction the current or my own strength and efforts might choose.’
Shaking her head, Sadie could hardly believe her words, yet she knew it all made sense. She remembered being at school the day the teacher handed out the form for Work Experience. Her pen had hovered over it. The Fisherman’s Co-op. A fish farm. Somerfield. The Council. BBC. None of it had any shape or meaning for her. Against all this, there were Mara’s words. They should have been complete fantasy. Fanciful. Nonsensical. Yet they carried within them a conviction and truth reality did not even begin to possess for her.
‘If I decide to go with you …’ she muttered.
‘Yes?’
‘How do I do it?’
‘You have to find your pelt. Do you have any idea where it might be?’
She knew exactly where it was. Its presence was the only thing that might explain these mysterious warnings not to step into the barn on her own. Even her mother’s face provided its own clues, its own sudden revelations. Her eyes had widened when Sadie stepped near the fish-boxes towering beside the wall. ‘Don’t go near there …’ she had cautioned. ‘They’re unsteady. They might fall.’ And Sadie’s hand had suddenly, mischievously shoogled it, noting how they stayed firmly in place. ‘Don’t do that!’ her mother shrieked.
‘I know exactly where it is,’ she declared.
‘Well… What are we waiting for? Let’s go and get it.’
Sadie was back at the harbour later that evening, not far from Somerfield. Inside her ‘Young Scot’ bag, there was the pelt she had found inside the fish-box near the bottom of the stack; ‘Return To Lochinver’ printed on its side. To find it, she and Mara had to haul down the other fish-boxes. Inside them, there was a strange collection of items. Old car parts. A set of sheep-shears and a castrating machine, complete with a packet of red rubber rings. A sledgehammer stained with either red paint or blood. Bolts and screws. A car-jack. It had taken ages for Mara and her to drag them all down, to find her own pelt lying there.
‘It’s beautiful …’ Mara said.
‘Yes.’
She touched it shyly with her fingers, her eyes smarting as she rubbed its sleek, grey surface, imagining how it might fit against her own skin. Soon she would see how she might move in it, darting through water as it topples towards shore. She anticipated, too, how the moonlight might reflect on ripples, the sand could be seen through its green shade, the dark edges of rock.
‘Do I put it on now?’ she asked.
‘No. You’ll have to wait till the water’s edge.’
She waited for that moment until evening. She sat down at the kitchen table with her mother, facing each other over a meal of fried haddock, chips and beans. It all tasted as pallid and colourless as her mother’s features, cooked so free of flavour that she could barely come to swallow it. And despite the way they barely talked, questions kept echoing in her head.
‘Why don’t you tell me who my father is?’
‘Why did you deny me the truth about myself? The skin in the barn. Why didn’t you tell me about that?’
Yet in truth, there were so many other questions that were going to be far more important to her in future. She had gabbled out so many of them when she lifted up her pelt for the first time, clutching it against her as she whirled it round and round like a partner in a waltz.
‘What do seals and selkies believe in? What do they think of men? What kind of man is my father?’
It was only the last answer she remembered obtaining, the words swirling in her own head as she swayed to the imaginary music.
‘He’s my father too. One of two daughters he’s given to human females. Don’t be fooled by his fierceness. He’s kind and warm-hearted below all that.’
She knew that he was the one calling as she slipped on her sealskin that evening, watching as the grey fur covered her bare toes, calves and thighs. She could see, too, the sleekness of her new form as the cloak took hold, tight against her waist. She stood up on the rocks for the last time, watching the unnatural light of the supermarket a short distance away, the streetlights that obscured so much of the open wonder of the sky.
‘Sadie … My Sadie … She is coming to join us at last.’
And she could not help the quiet shiver of repugnance that overcame her as he moved towards the shoreline. He seemed to be everything that she had ever been taught was ugly and repellent. He was dark and bearded, heavily jowled. A roll of fat hung from his huge belly. For an instant, she could not help but think of some of the images she had seen on the TV screen. The dark extremist. The shadowy figures with long, unpronounceable names that seemed only to live to threaten her, emerging from some of the deep and unknown undercurrents of the world.
For a moment, she recoiled from him, only to become aware of the ghost of a smile on his lips, the gleam within his eyes.
‘Hello, Dad,’ she said.
About the Author
Donald S Murray was born in Hamilton, spent his childhood on the Isle of Lewis and now lives in Shetland, where he works as an English teacher. In his spare time, he has always written; his work appearing in outlets ranging from literary magazines to BBC Radio, national newspapers to national anthologies. The author of And On This Rock and The Guga Hunters, he has also published books of short stories and poetry.
You can read Donald’s full profile on the Am Baile Literary Landscapes website. And you can go to his Author’s Page on Amazon.co.uk for a complete list of his works.
You can read Donald’s full profile on the Am Baile Literary Landscapes website. And you can go to his Author’s Page on Amazon.co.uk for a complete list of his works.