Читать книгу The Silver Dark Sea - Susan Fletcher - Страница 10

Of all the sea creatures – whales, turtles, lobsters with their intricate, grooved tails that can slide into themselves like a fan, the jellyfish, the squid, the octopus that I reckon knows far more than I can ever know – it is the seal I love the most. I always have. And it’s hard to be sure if I love the seals for the stories I have heard of them or for their expressions – quizzical, trusting. Both maybe. Both is most likely.

The first seal I ever saw was near Tap Hole. It was winter or late autumn, at least, for I wore woollen gloves with a matching hat. I had the hat pulled down very low. It covered my ears and brushed my eyelashes.

The seal looked human at first. I thought someone was swimming. But then I stood on the edge, squinted and thought I know what that is … Its head was glossy, its eyes were round. Its body was freckled, slick.

Sea-hounds, Emmeline called them. For how they barked at night.

Or they are the souls of the drowned men … So Nathan said. He knew his stories and told them, from time to time.

Me? I liked Abigail’s version most of all. In her well-worn armchair and with her Earl Grey tea she unfolded her book called Folklore and Myth and said, in the beginning, when the world was made, the seals were given human hearts … I asked why – and she’d looked up, surprised. I don’t know why! It doesn’t matter why … What matters is that it says so. She tapped the page – see? I like this because it is fitting; it seems a tale that’s right. For seals are drawn to human voices, after all; they bask on rocks, human-like, and they have eyes that are expressive as human eyes can be and I might easily believe that seals speak our language and feel our private human pains. That they grieve as we do at the world’s sorrows – at its wars, famines, its loneliness and bombs.

Also, they can fall in love. There are tales of seals loving a person so much and so deeply that they wish for that human to join them, at sea. They wait, offshore. They sniff the salty air, and call. And so it has been a form of consolation, in the past: she didn’t drown, not really. Her soul lives with the seals, now … Where she is loved, and well-cared for. Where they dart, dapple-bodied, through shafts of light.

* * *

Abigail Coyle believes this. For her, it is the truth.

Her sister was loved by the seals. Thomasina was loved for she looked like them – with eyes so black that Abigail could see her own face looking back at her. She has a faded photograph that she keeps by her bed – both of them, in matching pinafores. They do not look like twins. They never did. Abigail is the shorter, plumper girl – her dress is straining at the buttons, and one sock is rolled down. Thomasina is taller, with her hair untied so that half of it covers those seal-eyes. But it does not hide the look of suspicion, the narrowed stare as if she does not trust this moment or the person who is saying good … Hold it … On the count of three …

Abigail turns in bed. She looks at this photograph now.

Thomasina. Who was openly called the beautiful one.

She drowned at fifteen. She floated in that pinafore – a damp, patchwork star. And she is buried in the ground but Abigail believes – knows – that her sister’s soul is not in Parla’s graveyard, in a wooden box. Instead, her soul – her, Thomasina’s true self – rolls with the seals that loved her, and which she loved in return. In that cave, they found her. Join us, they said, gentle-eyed. Come and swim at our side. So her twin sister – the elder by nine minutes, the taller by three inches and who could do backbends and walk on her hands – lowered her nose and mouth underwater, closed her eyes, and did.

Abigail pats the pillow. She sorts out the blankets, tucks them round her.

When she heard of this strange, bearded man, her first thought was of her twin. The sea is Thomasina’s. All things that come from it belong to her – the pearled insides of mussel shells, or a squid’s dark ink. And her second thought? It had been of a story she knew. Kept in a leather-bound book.

It has been a long time since she took Folklore and Myth of Parla, Merme and the Lesser Isles off the sitting-room shelf. But this evening she bent down to it, blew off its dust.

It was her mother’s book. In Abigail’s childhood, it was hauled off the shelf in Wind Rising after stormy days or days of such hardship that her mother cried. They read it at bedtime. Its pages were turned very slowly, and they sounded like a person saying hush, now … So many stories. Their mother read them over and over: the whale that answered the foghorn, the gannets which gave their fish to good people, the changing wind of the north. They became friends and they became the truth, for Mercy believed them absolutely. We only know the foam, she’d say – meaning this human world is merely the very surface of it, and there is more, so much more, that we lack the vision for.

Abigail’s mother was from Merme which is an isle known for its strangeness. They ate many things but not seals, never seals – for seals have human hearts.

It is a well-thumbed tale. The seal that has been drawn here lies on its side, one flipper raised as if in greeting. But Abigail keeps turning …

She goes to the fourteenth page.

The Fishman of Sye. It is barely a story – merely a description of this part-man, part-fish. He is tall and strong, it says. He is dark-haired and does not age. There are two drawings of him. In the first, he is in the water: his shoulders are grooved and muscular, and the tip of his tail can be seen. In the second he is on land. He walks on white, capable legs and he is watched by others who are amazed and smiling. Beneath this, it says he comes ashore to restore hope and wonder! He is bearded, and black-eyed.

Hope and wonder. Abigail smiles. She can hear her mother saying it. She can see her mother’s long, straight hair falling down onto the page as she followed the words with her finger. Once, long ago …

The northerly window frame rattles to itself. Jim lies beside her, breathing through his mouth so that he makes a soft, popping sound.

Abigail has not always believed. She did in the beginning. She believed absolutely just as her mother did, and so did Thomasina who claimed she’d seen his tail. They believed all the stories entirely – why should they not be true? If we exist, why shouldn’t they? And it made Abigail feel safe, somehow – to know that seals understood her and a shell that knocks against your foot as you walk is your shell, meant for you, and that nobody actually ever really dies. She’d smile in her bed, to think of this. But then Mercy did die. And a little after, Thomasina died too, and Abigail’s faith was swept out of Wind Rising and lost like autumn leaves are lost – scattered and not coming back. Where is the Fishman, with his bright eyes? Where are the whales that speak of love? How she wanted to see them. How she wanted proof. She’d cry so that her tears dampened her bed-sheets; she’d wear her twin’s coat to bed and snuffle into its sleeves. And one night, Abigail looked at the pictures in her mother’s book and thought please … Send me a sign. Something to prove that the people she loved were not truly gone; something to show her that yes, there are souls, and yes, there is magic, and there are reasons behind everything so that nothing is ever over, or lost. Please … And as if the Fishman heard her or as if the seals heard and passed the message on, there was a new sighting of him. Not by Abigail; Abigail didn’t see him. But the lighthouse-keeper’s son did. The awkward, slightly spotty boy called Jim confessed that yes, he had seen him – a bearded man and a mirrored tail, near the cove called Sye.

Over six decades have passed since then. Six decades, and Abigail can’t climb over stiles any more. Her feet tend to be blue-coloured so she has to prop them on a stool, when she sits. So much has been and gone. And for six decades she has believed in something she herself has never seen but has longed to. And he is here now.

I have been waiting. That is how it feels – as if the Fishman has always meant to come to her and this – now – is his chosen time.

Abigail settles back, closes her eyes.

Hope and wonder. There has never been more need for a touch of that. These are not good days – with all the world’s troubles that she hears on the radio; war in dusty countries, abductions that chill her to the bones. Who is making money on this island, now? No-one is making money. They count coins like beans. Fleece and meat make so little; lobsters do not always come and tourists are the same. No-one seems to have plans as such – no little dreams that may one day be made tangible – and when did that happen? When did the dream-making end? The ambitions, however small? Hers had been small, but she’d had them: a husband, a safe place, a solid Parlan life. Good health for the ones she loves.

And there is so much sadness too. It is a sad isle, for certain. Abigail sees it, and feels it: it is on everything and left there, like salt.

He will come ashore for one or for many.

He will only stay until the next full moon.

She turns out the light. Folklore and Myth lies on the floor beside her; twice in the night she will visit the bathroom, and both times she will bend down to feel its leather edges. It is more than a book to her, as this man is far more – far more – than just a man.