I shift position for I’ve grown sore and cramped. I put a hand out to steady myself against the automaton and feel something give in her chest. I start guiltily, praying I’ve not broken anything, and when there’s nothing further to suggest I’ve destroyed Mr Ellingham’s pride and joy, I begin to whisper to the automaton, one of my favourites from childhood.
* * *
I was sixteen when he plucked me from the sea.
Caught in his fisherman’s net, I thought I would drown until he lifted me into the too-small boat and began to hack at the rough fibres to release me. I should have known then how soft his heart was, to see him ruining a net so, but I was terrified. In his haste he cut me, split the skin down by my tail a good eight inches and saw the two fine-boned ankles lying within. He sat back, astonished, and I fought my way free of the pelt until I was naked and shivering in my human skin, huddled at the bottom of that little, little boat.
His family told him to throw me back, to return my other skin and send me home. He refused.
I learned his language and gave him children, two boys and three girls, all in the space of ten years. We were happy, for a long time, in our cottage on the tiny island inhabited by no more than ten families. They were all related, his cousins at one remove or other. And they were dark, some of them, so I knew they had selkie blood for all they thought themselves better than me. It made me laugh to see his mother come a-visiting, mouth all twisted like she’d sucked on something bitter, she with her black-as-the-sea-depths hair and eyes so pitchy you couldn’t tell the pupil from the iris. She’d look at my children, her grandbabies, and something in her face would soften as she watched them frolic on the seashore like pups. Sometimes she’d look out to sea and she’d wear a longing expression that her mind didn’t know, but her blood did.
We were happy until my man began to drink. I’d made him prosperous for the shoals gather where selkie wives bide. His nets were never empty and the purse was always heavy from the sales at the mainland markets. The money it was, that led him astray. He would come home drunk, barely able to row across the short span of water separating us from the town, throw himself onto the bed and snore fit to bring the roof down.
When I begged him to stop he turned on me, called me fish and beat me for daring to question him. He was no longer the man who had saved me from a net.
I could simply have gone to the beach, knelt down and spoken to the waters, told the fish to go away. I could have pulled my old pelt down from the top of the cupboard where he’d hidden it all those years ago (as if I wouldn’t sniff out the scent of my own skin). I could have taken to the water once more and left them all behind, but my children held my heart. My pride yearned though, for revenge, and I called up a storm just as my mother and aunts had taught me long ago; called it up one eve as he rowed home, worse for liquor and new-found temper.
They say there had never been such a storm and there’s never been one since. I found him the next morning, when my anger burned low and regret took its place. He lay across the rocks, his clothes torn, his limbs broken. There was a skerrick of breath left in him.
I made my way to the cottage, ran back down to the rocks.
He was already very cold, limp, and for a while the selkie skin would not take hold. When I began to despair it took a grip at last, adhering to his shoulders, down his back, across his chest and limbs, and finally up his neck and over his face. He coughed; it sounded like a seal’s bark. Wriggling, he heaved himself out of my arms and flopped down the rocks to slip into the cold sea.
He comes often, not only when I sing. Our children swim as well as their seal blood allows and they play together; somehow they know it is their father, although I have not told them, and they seem not to grieve. Some nights, I simply sit there with him damp and warm beside me, and we speak of things beneath the sea, things I will never again see.
There’s no knowing who first wrote that one down in the big book, if it’s truth or a pretty lie. But there’s love and loss, revenge and redemption. I wonder what happened in her ever-after: how long she lived as a human, how long her children stayed with her, what happened after she died. Did she turn back to a seal then? Or become nothing more than sea foam, nothing more than dreams?
I think of the little poppet so briefly beneath Brigid’s mattress. It wouldn’t have done her any greater
