The Sea House: A Novel (31 page)

We stopped by a bed pushed into a bay window. ‘You’ve got a bed with your own window,’ said Carole, the house mother. I sat on the bed with my coat and my bag on my knee and waited while they talked, ran my hands over the thin cotton cover. It looked pale and washed-out. I heard the crackling of gravel in the driveway outside, and saw a van drive up. With the slamming of doors, girls started to jump out.

‘They’re back,’ said Terry.

The grown-ups drifted to the door, talking.

‘Well, come on then,’ said Terry.

In the kitchen I met the other girls. They were all about two years older than me and wore dishevelled school uniforms. I thought their faces were closed or sort of slapped-looking, like something bad had just happened and they had to rush off and sort it out. They grabbed at the biscuits, took the mugs of tea and left.

I went out into the gardens and walked around. There was no one else out there. I went right up to the top lawns, and found a stone birdbath in the middle of a flowerbed covered over by creeping grass. You could see it would have been a grand garden once, but now it was rubbed away by the thick blanket of dead grass. It was getting cold, my breath like smoke in the air, a glimmer of frost hardening in the shadows.

In the kitchen, Carole was ripping open packets of fish fingers and lining them up under the biggest grill pan I’d ever seen.

‘Here,’ she said, and I began helping her to open the cold boxes and lay out the rows of frozen sticks. They were covered in knobbly orange breadcrumbs and dusted with frost. She got out a red washing-up bowl from a cupboard, poured in four pints of milk and began ripping open packets of Butterscotch Instant Whip. She let me hold the mixer and I watched the streams of yellow dust make a milkshake, then thicken into a bubbly froth. She stuck in a finger, licked it and made a naughty face, then nodded at the bowl. So I did the same.

Two girls came in and began laying the table with metal beakers and plates, slinging them down with a clattering noise, but Carole didn’t seem to notice or mind. She stood at the grill turning the fish fingers and watching a huge pot of frozen peas. She was tall with a long face and long hands, and so calm. A faraway smile as if she was half in a dream. I practised saying ‘Mum’ to her in my head.

After a few days, I noticed that no one ever did say ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ to them. Carole was so serene and gliding, loving her was a bit like trying to love a tree, or a huge cloud passing by in the sky. Terry was more straightforward: he didn’t like kids – except for the older girls. He let them steal cigarettes from him, giggled with them while they smoked, but mostly he was irritated about something, especially if you knocked on the door of their flat in the evening. Then you’d get a blast of the TV, a vinegary smell of beer on his breath, his arm holding the door ready to shut it.

One chair, one bed, one side cupboard. A heavy stone on my chest as I waited for sleep in the dark, listening to the noises of so many girls coughing, their snores.

A year or so later, Terry began to tease me, pay me attention, bring me little treats. He’d ask me round to the flat when Carole was out. We’d have crisps in front of a video. I couldn’t believe my luck. Somebody really liked me, really understood me.

If you ever told, he said, he’d make you disappear. He’d done it before, he said. The girls who had run away, not all of them had gone to London. He knew where they were, he told me, as he stopped the car next to a wood, putting out his cigarette.

Where do you go when you’re the sort of person anything can happen to and no one cares? The sort of person where just thinking about her makes you melt with shame.

Sometimes, as I talked to Susan, it made me so angry, the loneliness that child had lived through, and sometimes the sadness she carried was all but unbearable, but I told her story. I told all of it. There were some things that went on at the girls’ home that, even as I spoke them, I still couldn’t believe they had really happened. And as I sat recounting those days to Susan, I could have stood up and gone out and killed Terry – for the things he did, for all that he stole.

It was hard, really hard, but gathering up all that had happened to that angry teenage girl was a way of giving her back her dignity.

One night, I dreamt about a girl. She was waiting outside on the machair grass, the wind blowing her hair. I went outside and took the child’s hand. She looked up at me, hesitated, and then we came home together, walking into the hallway.

When I woke, the sun was bright through the curtains, the sound outside of Michael up and digging the garden, the crunch of a spade turning the soil. I remembered, this was how it used to be, before, to wake up and feel this excitement at the start of a new day.

It was time to start talking to Michael. From the first moment I met Michael in the warm damp of the laundromat, I’d feared that once he really knew me, he’d walk away. For him, I’d worked and vowed, daily, to be a better person.

I made my confession to Michael. I told him who I really was, the story of the lizard girl with the claws and rages. I told him about that small ghost, wandering lost in the hallway of our home like a refugee; how she’d stood her ground, made me listen to her story. I told him about the years in the home.

He listened. Then he was angry and upset. I watched the hurt of those years go out and claim another victim, thought how wrong I had been to tell him everything. And then, he didn’t turn away.

‘But I think I see now, what you’re saying, what it must be like,’ he told me, nodding. And then, fierce now, ‘We’re going to get through this, Ruth; together.’

He responded with such love, with so many small kindnesses. By then I was severely weighed down by the rounded bulge of my middle. The skin of my belly was silvery with rivers of stretch marks, my ankles like pale dough. During those weeks while I was working with Dr Montgomery, while we were waiting for the baby to arrive, Michael did a hundred kind things, and then a hundred more: bringing me cups of tea in bed; cooking meals; getting the baby’s room ready; listening; talking. I don’t think I’d ever really understood who Michael was till those weeks, his kindness and tenderness.

*   *   *

It wasn’t a perfect cure, talking to Susan. She was keen to work on what she called a ‘spirit of bitterness’. I found it hard to understand what she wanted me to do. Yes, I was angry with Mum, for the mess she left behind, for the way she had chosen to abandon me. But I didn’t see how it could help to pretend I wasn’t angry with her.

‘But why not try and think about how your mum did care about you? She must have done really,’ Michael said when we talked about the impasse I’d reached with Susan. He got into bed beside me, leaned his cheek against my belly. I sighed and moved him away with my hand.

‘She didn’t care enough to stick around though, did she? I can see it, Michael. I can see what Susan is asking. You know, look on the bright side, but if I let go of that anger, then she’s won. I don’t count. How can I live like that?’ I switched off my bedside lamp and rolled over, wrapped in the duvet.

I thought of the yellowing scrap of paper that was still on the dressing table. It was the telephone number that I’d finally got round to collecting from Christine MacAulay. I hadn’t managed to call whoever it was. I think it was part of how angry I was with Mum that I couldn’t bear to take a step forward towards finding something out, not when she’d chosen to take herself away. I crumpled up that slip of paper. Dropped it in the bin. It would be a dead end anyway.

Later, I found that Michael had fished it out again. He’d tried to flatten it out and had left it lying in front of the mirror like a crumpled reproach.

*   *   *

We got back from Tarbert Co-op late one morning to find a brown paper parcel on the chair in the hall. The handwriting looked like Lachlan’s. The postman must have been and left it with Leaf, while Michael and I were out getting things ready for our first actual guests in a few days’ time.

‘But what if this baby arrives the same time as the guests do?’ I’d asked Michael as we all sat at breakfast wondering if we should say yes to their enquiry.

‘Don’t worry, me and Leaf will be fine holding the fort if the sproggit arrives early,’ Jamie chipped in.

I’d rung the people back and accepted their booking, hoping the sound of someone knocking a stepladder over upstairs wasn’t going to alert them too much to their status as our first guests.

I carried the parcel through to the sea room and carefully undid the tape. Inside, a ream of yellowed paper tied together by a green cotton ribbon. The title on the front was written in brown copperplate: ‘The True History of the Selkie’.

Lachlan had been promising that the book was going to arrive for a couple of weeks now, but you never knew with the ferry mail.

‘You’ll see, Ruth,’ he said over the phone when he called to tell me he’d posted the manuscript, the line from Edinburgh crackly with static as our words travelled along a phone cable deep on the seabed. ‘Your Selkie people lived and breathed, as real as you and me.’

So why not, I thought, why not? I was ridiculously excited. I turned the front page, my fingers tingling.

CHAPTER 37

Alexander

Holding on to the sides of his lectern, MacIntyre continued with his lecture, working against a current of murmurs.

‘I would like to propose to you this evening, gentlemen, a second example of oral history passed down to us in the form of a legend. I would like to suggest that the Selkie fable, particular to the shores of northern Scotland, in fact holds within it a historical memory of an ancient polar race, a race that travelled in sealskin canoes and from time to time visited our western seaboard.’

He now held up the small skin canoe, no bigger than a toy. In the centre a small wooden figure, his painted eyes eternally patrolling the seas.

‘Consider the kayak of Eskimo design. Long and slender, light in the water, and with the superlative seamanship of the polar sailors, it may put to sea in the roughest of weather. But most tellingly, the vessel is made from seal skin; the occupant wears a hooded jacket made from seal skin, so that with the jacket tied fast at the wrists, and the waist securely tied round the opening of the kayak, the seated kayaker is in a completely waterproof condition. It is important to also understand that with long exposure to the water, the skin of the kayak becomes waterlogged and heavy, lying just below the surface of the sea until the boat is dried out again.

‘Now imagine how this boatman must appear to a man standing on the shore, a man who has never seen such a craft before. Our observer sees a creature covered from head to waist in seal skin, but with the face of a man. And our observer on the shore sees not legs, but lying slightly beneath the water’s surface, a long, tail-shaped appendage appearing to move with the refraction of light on water. Based on all previous knowledge, our shore dweller is observing a seal with a man’s face. Or perhaps, as he gazes at the human torso, the long tail-like appendage moving beneath the water, our observer believes that he is seeing a mermaid.’

As MacIntyre spoke, the kayak model continued its journey up and down the rows of benches, and finally came into my hands. I saw then what Ishbel must have seen: her seal skin kayaker, his waterlogged craft lying just beneath the shine of the water as they stood and gazed at each other with equal curiosity. I continued to examine the taut seal skin stretched over the tiny wooden frame, the small figure seated within, and I saw her Selkie man, smooth-skinned and with the Asiatic features of the Eskimo tribes, as he lay half drowned on the beach until Ishbel found him. Ishbel would never before have seen such a face, and as she peeled off his waterlogged seal skins, she would have assumed that she was looking on one of the
sliochd nan ron
– the seal people. But the talk was not yet finished, and I returned my attention to the speaker.

MacIntyre continued. ‘So watertight is his apparel, the kayaker is able to submerge beneath the waves, and thus travel some distance before re-emerging. He can, and must, haul his light craft onto a rock from time to time and dry out the skin and so prevent it becoming waterlogged to the point of sinking. He must then launch the vessel back into the water while still seated within it. So as our observer watches the kayaker dive beneath the surf, or rest on rocks inaccessible to man, then slide back into the sea, he must conclude that he is watching the specific antics of seals or of legendary mermaids. And what could be more natural than that the female kayaker, pausing to dry out her canoe on a sea-bound rock, would pull down her hood, shake out her hair and comb it through, the very picture of a mermaid?’

As he spoke, it was as if I were watching all the diverse fragments of my research come together like the pieces of a puzzle. I held the boat before me, staring into the pinprick eyes of the tiny wooden kayaker’s face, the figure like some token passed down through generations, and given into my hand so that I might understand my own history.

And yet I was also appalled, because, in the space of a moment, all my theories of a fish man, so publicly researched amid the university halls, had become entirely redundant. I had a strange impulse to cover the item with my coat, deny that I had ever seen it and continue with building my own hypothesis. I heard applause ringing and saw myself stand up to speak at the Linnean Society on my theories of transmutation. But here, in my hands, was the truth I had sought, more humbling and commonplace than I had hoped – and yet how infinitely fascinating, to finally gaze into the face of my own people.

‘But our polar kayaker does not always remain upon the sea,’ continued MacIntyre, raising his voice above a background of murmuring voices. ‘We may well imagine the astonishment of the land population on seeing a seal man arrive on shore, divest himself of his garments, and appear before the observer entirely as a human. And it is always the case, in the Selkie tales, that once the seal man’s skin or belt is stolen, then he is helpless to return to his seal state, just as a kayaker whose kayak and seal skin jacket have been confiscated would be unable to return to the sea.’