THE
SEALWOMAN
Wishing Night
Down, deep in the green they swam, Mhairi and her sisters, sliding through the currents like silk through a wedding ring. It was dark down there, murky, with the salt sea stippling their skin and the hissing sound of their flippers swishing through the water. All round the north they had swum, and down through the Western Isles, where the beaches were white as bone and the waters turquoise and purple and as green as seas in the warmest corners of the world. Now they were returning to the flat island out in the middle of the ocean. Not that it was more beautiful here, or the waters clearer, or the fish more plentiful. But it was here that they had started out from and here they always came back to. They had been gone too long and Mhairi wanted to see it. Her head surfaced from the water like a chubby periscope, her brown eyes taking in the rocky bay, the scrubby slope stretching back from the beach and then the distance where she could not see. ‘The land beyond’, she thought of it, and it held a powerful lure for her. There was a world beyond this watery world of theirs, a world she glimpsed but could not reach. Mhairi had swum many miles but this island was her home, this and the seas around it. ‘Mhairi,’ called her sister, and she followed in pursuit of a shoal of fish, dipping her head and allowing the currents to pull her
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down into the water’s depths. They worked fast, searing through the silvery creatures and snatching them in their mouths before swallowing them whole. But later Mhairi came back to the bay. She could not stay away. The land was dark now. From the water, the beach and the rocks and the slick of green land beyond all merged into one indistinguishable smudge. Brown eyes slowly traversed the landscape. Looking. Longing, on this twilight evening, for the sound the woman made, the sound of human music. There was none here when they were growing up, but since the woman had come the music had started. She would stand on the rock and coax the music from a curious wooden box for them, just for them. Mhairi’s sisters tried to shut their ears to it – they thought it sounded screechy – but Mhairi couldn’t. On nights when the woman was happy, the music was fast and gay, tripping out of the instrument the way water bubbled up sometimes across the rocks. On nights when she was sad, the music was low and sweet and plaintive and filled Mhairi with feelings that were too large for their life beneath the water. The night darkened and the moon grew full, a huge silvery sphere standing solid in the sky, its pellucid light rippling over the land and making it seem as insubstantial as the water. Morna, the oldest of the sisters, warned Mhairi to stay away from the woman on the rocks. ‘It’s dangerous tonight,’ she said. ‘Tonight is the wishing night. Far better to come with us and swim round to the fishing grounds on the other side.’ Wishing night, the scariest and yet the most exciting night of the year, when seals could shed their furry pelts and dance on the beach in the form of humans. Sometimes, in the old days, young men would wait for that night and steal the pelts, hoping to find a seal bride, but nowadays the human people seemed to have forgotten many things they once knew. The seals were never observed in their ritual. When the people looked at them now they saw only
the sealwoman • 5
animals or economic opportunity, not the people of the water. Some humans even brought whole boatloads of their own kind to watch the seal colonies, without ever understanding who they really were. Mhairi and her sisters never took part in wishing night. They came from a family famed for centuries for its swimming prowess, and they had no desire to shed their sleek water bodies and take on the clumsy, two-legged carcasses of land people. Many of the seal people shared their distaste and the practice was gradually fading away in a quite natural manner. Many were simply afraid of the humans, with their loud, rackety boats and the scummy oil they left floating on the water. It seeped into the seals’ pores and left them feeling dirty and sluggish. Nowadays many seals only felt safe in the company of their own. But Mhairi was fascinated by the humans. She always went closest to the shore when they swam near a village, and once, oh once, she had even swum away from her sisters and upriver into a big city. She heard the others furiously calling her, but on she swam. ‘The water’s dirty. Your skin will peel and scab,’ Morna screamed at her, but she knew two porpoises had been there the week before and she pressed on. The city was beautiful, with large, elegant buildings down by the riverside. But there were horrible things there, too. She saw a girl being mounted by a man in a dark, dank spot under one of the bridges. It was a gross and ill-matched coupling, the girl so young, the man so old. Further on, a couple of scruffy men were swigging out of a wine bottle and singing rough songs. They looked so dirty and hopeless Mhairi could hardly bear to look at them. If this was life, human life, perhaps it was wisest not to look at it. But then a little boy saw her and called out. He was so excited by her that she came half out of the water and looked straight at him with her dark, lustrous eyes. He gawped at her, mouth open in wonder. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Look, Mum, look.’
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The woman walking with him clicked to a standstill. She had a long black coat and dramatically lined eyes, like some cats Mhairi had seen. ‘A seal?’ she said, astonished. ‘Right in the middle of Glasgow?’ Mhairi preened in the attention. She liked the way the two humans looked at her. After that she had even more of a fellow feeling for them. She never got the chance to go back into that city, but she had been to many villages and once had even sneaked off to another city in the north. She was such a strong swimmer, even among her legendary family, that none of them could keep up with her. This was a smaller, quieter place and you didn’t see the horrible things there, just a lot of people walking calmly around from place to place with their unfathomable sense of purpose. Mhairi wanted to know where they were going and what made them so confident. There was, she thought, something very beautiful about some of them, with their slender bodies and their intelligent heads, not at all like the bulky seal people with their sad, blunt faces. So as she swam into the bay that night, she was excited at the thought of listening to their strange music. Sometimes as she glided through the water she could hear snatches of it in her head, propelling her on. Sad, prickling with pain, it seemed to insinuate itself into her body, its vibrations rippling through her and merging with the currents of the sea, till she, the water and the music were one. The woman finally came to stand at the edge of the rock. Beside her was a man, dressed in dark clothes. Usually she was on her own, standing with the violin raised, one of her flowing dresses billowing round her. The one she had on tonight looked like a puff of smoke in the moonlight, made of some soft, drifting material that reminded Mhairi of the angel hair seaweed you found wedged between the rocks. ‘Oh, there’s my favourite,’ said the woman. The man laughed. He turned towards the woman and Mhairi couldn’t see his face.
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‘Don’t say you can tell the difference between them, Ursula.’ She lifted the violin to her chin. ‘Of course I can. Look at her beautiful eyes. You’d almost think she was human.’ She began to play, a lonely, aching sort of music that rolled across the water to Mhairi and back over the land too, way beyond the dark line of the horizon and up, up into the night sky. The man stepped forward to look at Mhairi and she saw his face. He was slender and dark, with a long neck like a swan’s and strong shoulders. His face was pale and kind, and his eyes … his eyes were a shock. They looked straight into hers as if he knew her. His eyes were dark brown and they were as deep and beautiful as a seal’s. If in that moment Mhairi had known what was to come, perhaps she never would have vowed to enter wishing night. But the music called her, and the land, and the man with the seal’s eyes. She slipped away from the bay when the woman stopped playing. ‘It’s cold, Jake,’ said Ursula. ‘Come on and I’ll make you some coffee at my house,’ he said. His voice was soft and light, with a different sound from the woman’s. Mhairi could tell he didn’t come from the island, maybe not even from Scotland. She had heard many people speaking there, none like him. He put out his hand to steady Ursula on the rocks. ‘Thank you, Ursula. That was one of the loveliest things I’ve ever seen in my life.’ Round on the other side of the island was another bay with a long, silvery cockle strand. Mhairi powered her way round there with sure, strong strokes, feeling driven by some unfathomable emotion she had not felt before. She was quite alone as she reached the beach. Her body scraped along the first layer of not quite powdery shell as she came into shore, and as it did so she could feel it changing, becoming lighter, whiter. She spat water from her mouth and felt a warm cascade of hair shoot from her head like a shoal of fishes darting from a rock. Then there were two round breasts pushing out of her body and the heavy rudder of her tail fell away.
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She felt her pelt float off into the tide as she climbed out of the water on two strong legs. Her skin was spangled with a light film of salt and seemed impossibly soft to the touch. Everything was smooth, with the exception of the dark hair flaring between her legs. It looked ugly to her, like an outbreak of black coral sprouting from the glistening side of water-polished rock. The feet on the human body fascinated her most. She seemed to be able to move the bits separately. She stared at them for a long time, laughing as she wiggled the toes in the sand. It was powdery and felt cold against her warm feet. But it was soft, and caressed this light, white skin of hers. There seemed to be so many joints and muscles in her new body. It didn’t have the strength of her seal one but was far superior in its flexibility. She had to try it out. With the moon high above the beach and Ursula’s music pounding in her veins, she sported herself in the pale light, lifting her arms, running, turning and twisting like seaweed in the water. The black land lay beyond her, the sea behind her, but here, on the beach between the two, she was happy.