Folk Read online

Gad flicks up the lid. Inside is something grey, swirling, like cobweb in a draught.

  Her mother is nodding, her grimace gone for a moment. ‘Gently now.’

  Gad dips in the tongs and lifts them. The shred of grey web that trails from them is light as air. It brings a chill into the room. Strands of it swirl up towards her face. Sil stretches out a finger to hook it, and with a curl of her arm has it wrapped around the baby. She sighs and shifts on to her back. The shawl of cloud rolls and settles over the baby on her chest.

  Gad’s mother is not from Neverness. Gad’s father was born on the island, and he is just as craggy and windswept, but Sil is different. She does not smell quite the same as anything else. In their house, there are warm smells, burned porridge and sheep’s wool and chimney soot, and there are cold smells, like Father’s rainy boots, and muddy flagstones, and sodden thatch. Wherever Sil has been, though, there is a trace of seaweed in the air, of salt sea-fog and the insides of shells.

  When Gad asks where her mother grew up, Sil only says ‘not here’, and slams down a pot or shuts a door too fast.

  Sil is not even her real name. It’s the one Gad’s father gave her. Sil for her silvery hair. Sil for her silky skin.

  ‘A nickname?’ Gad asked when she learned the word.

  ‘You could say that.’

  Sometimes, it is hard to see what her mother means. Sometimes, it is hard to see her mother at all. Sil is able to drift quietly out of the house without anyone noticing, and slide back in hours or even days later, leaving clammy footprints on the floor. When the sea breathes up a good thick mist like a fisher hoiking his pipe smoke and the islanders all swaddle themselves against the chill, Sil’s eyes grow bright. Gad follows her out into the clogged-up world and shivers while Sil slings her hammock made of fishnet between the two hornbeam trees on the ridge. She climbs inside it and vanishes, her silveriness lost in the swirling white.

  The baby, whose first blanket was that chilly wreath, turns from blue to a kind of whimpery grey. It is not the pink, bright-eyed thing Gad hoped for. When Gad first learned she would be a big sister, she had bragged to her friend, May, who had no siblings either. They used to play at sisters, pretending to be the Lightfoot girls. Gad would be Madden Lightfoot, because she was eldest, and she would pretend to teach May, as Clotha, to ride a horse, scolding her when she did not keep up with her own galloping. ‘Now, I’ll be the real big sister,’ Gad had said, while they sat in the hornbeam together. ‘I’ll play with my own little sister instead.’ But Gad has not played with the baby yet. It leaves damp patches where Sil lays it down. When it is not screaming, it never gurgles, only whines. Its tiny star hands that reach out, and its curled-up feet, smell of sand after it has rained.

  Gad’s father has not taken to it either. He took one look when he reeled in from the ale room, and said to Sil, ‘I suppose you’ll be off, then.’ When Sil didn’t answer, he mumbled something about taking the flock to higher ground. Gad has not seen him since. When she asked where the higher ground was, Sil only said, ‘A long walk,’ and went back to hushing her squally bundle.

  Gad spies on her mother and the baby through the split in the bedroom door. Sil is sick, grey and puffy like she gets when the weather’s too warm, only worse. She wedges herself in the window seat with the casement wide open, so autumn leaves fly in. Even the air on Gad’s eye is cold. The baby only stops screaming when Sil digs that weird piece of cold smoke out of the chest and lets it spread over the baby’s head.

  ‘Did you cover me with the cobweb when I was small?’ Gad asks, bringing in the cold water Sil asked for.

  ‘It’s not cobweb.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  But Sil is choosing not to listen. She sits with her feet in the water bowl, her eyes closed, breathing in deep, deeper, as if air is not enough.

  As she often does when her mother is drifting off, indistinct, Gad wedges the door to her room shut and wriggles into the dusty shadow under her bed. Shoved into the darkest corner is the old hamper, its weave broken and spiky. She undoes the impossible knot she made up herself to keep it shut, and feels inside. In the hamper, Gad has gathered proof that Sil has been here, being her mother, for nearly eight years now. That is almost all of Gad’s life.

  Gad is not silvery and silky like her mother. She has the same swarthy skin and straw-tuft hair as Father, and the same distrust that Sil will stay. Her father’s question echoes: ‘I suppose you’ll be off.’ She doesn’t know why he said it, then, with the baby coughing against Sil’s breast. She does know that Sil was not always here. She thinks she remembers the first time Sil’s arms folded around her, the chill that seeped from her skin. If there was a different mother before that, when Gad was as small as the creaky baby is now, then she must have gone and not come back. Her friend may has always had the same mother, with the same dark eyes as her. Gad has never told May that Sil is not wholly hers.

  Each time Sil is gone from the house, Gad searches out something to prove that she is real, and hides it in the hamper. There is the cup on a long piece of string, which Sil tied to Gad when she was little in case it tumbled from her pudgy hands. There is the head of a doll they made together, the straw body rotted away. Mostly, there are things Sil has knitted with the wool from Father’s sheep: a sock, a bonnet, an unfinished mitten.

  With her hand in the basket, Gad touches each little piece of Sil. She can’t be sure it wasn’t Father who made the string cup. Perhaps even the doll was his idea. But that cold smoky thing, the cobweb, is somehow entirely Sil. If Gad can just know what it is, if she can hold it, have it, she will be more sure of her mother.

  Gad creeps to her mother’s bedroom door. She waits for the draught to grow colder and the baby to settle, its breath like raking tides under Sil’s sighs. Then she sneaks in, to the crib, scoops the cobweb shawl under her arm and runs as quietly and as quickly as she can, out of the house, along the hill crest. As she runs, aiming for the first hornbeam, she stuffs the cold cobweb inside her dress. It clings to her skin, and by the time she is climbing the tree she can feel wetness against her chest.

  She wedges herself on a knobbly branch and peers inside her dress. There is nothing left but a damp patch, a greyish stain. The baby’s cries rattle from the house, growing louder, and she hears Sil yelling her name. Gad puts her hands over her ears.

  ‘What have you done, Gad?’ Sil shouts.

  The wind through her wet dress is making Gad shiver, and her mother’s angry voice sends the chill deeper.

  ‘Gad. Get back here.’

  She slides from the branch and drops hard to the ground. Her feet ache with the thump.

  Inside, Sil beckons her into the bedroom. Her face is smudgy with wet, as grey as a raincloud. She looks at Gad’s damp dress and closes her eyes.

  ‘That was my last scrap.’

  ‘Scrap of what? What is it?’ Gad says.

  ‘We’re going to get more. You’ll have to help.’

  Gad crosses her arms. But the baby’s coughs are so pitiful and her mother’s face so strange and blurry, she cannot refuse. When Sil stands, Gad lets her lean on her shoulder.

  ‘Take those,’ Sil says, kicking at the fire tongs that still lie on the floor. Gad feels her mother wince with each step as they leave the house.

  Sil has soaked a cloth in the water bowl and swaddled the baby to her chest. Gad can hear its dry croaks, a frog too far from a pond. They take the path down the seaward side of the hill, where the bare trees are bent from the wind that hurdles the high cliffs below. They have never been this way together.

  The high cliff drop is one reason Gad is not supposed to come this way, but she is allowed to follow the gorse-maze paths on the headland, which is just as high. The real peril on this side of the hill, she knows, is the Cleft. There are five Clefts around the pleated edge of their island, deep furrows that begin high up where the hill moss is dry and cut down through rock to the sea. Rain water from the crags trickles down them, but trees also slide and sheep c
rash down their steep sides. All are forbidden to Gad. Each has a tale of woe, told at the bard house, meant to keep children and fools away. One has a drowned tower in the sea at its mouth, which has gold buried in it but also a dreadful curse. Another is where folk say a water bull comes up from the sea and steals pretty girls away. Each has a name that sends prickles of curiosity over Gad’s scalp. Riddling, Hurling, Scowling, Humbling; the one below them now, as they skid down the hillside, is Swirling. In the tale about Swirling Cleft, it is clogged with a mist so thick that it drowns foolhardy wanderers.

  Sil is walking slower and slower, the weight of her arm heavier across Gad’s shoulders. She comes to a halt and leans against a crooked tree.

  ‘No further,’ Sil whispers. She is swaying in the wind. ‘You’ll have to go. The two of you.’

  ‘I don’t know where we are going.’

  Sil points down the slope.

  ‘But Father says never to go there.’

  Sil is already unwrapping the cloth from her body. She kisses the baby’s ashen cheeks. Envy twists in Gad’s throat.

  ‘If you won’t go it’ll be the end, Gad, for the poor mite.’

  Now that she is being ordered into Swirling Cleft, the warning tales seem more real. She pictures herself tripping on bones, drowning in fog, falling. Sil reties the swaddle cloth on to Gad so the baby is pressed against her chest. It is not only the wet cloth that chills her.

  ‘If you fall, fall backwards,’ Sil says. ‘Go right to the bottom. Bring as much as you can. Use the tongs.’ She tugs Gad’s hand to her for a moment and then gives her a little push towards the path. ‘I’ll wait.’

  Sil’s face is hard and weary. Gad does not dare to say no. She lets her feet carry her, faster as the path steepens, until she slithers to a halt and looks down at the swags of mist that hang heavy in the throat of Swirling Cleft. She cannot see Sil any more. The baby’s creaking cries wind around her ears. Gad takes a gulp of grassy air, and steps down into the grey.

  The mist films her face. Gad swipes it away and watches it roll up like loose sheep’s wool, making a cave around her head. By sweeping her arms as if she is swimming, she keeps a space ahead of her to breathe. Wispy trails flow from her hands.

  The mist is stickier and colder as she goes lower into Swirling Cleft. It creeps into her ears and muffles her footsteps. She cannot tell if she is stepping on moss, or stone, or sand. Down and down she goes, on an endless hidden staircase. Her skin is wet where the mist has touched her, and she is shuddering with cold when she feels the path narrow to nothing beneath her feet. She cannot clear enough mist to see what is below her. Gritting her teeth, she turns around and slithers feet first. She finds footholds in rock and ivy, and grips with arms stretched around the rasping baby, trying not to drop the tongs.

  She hears the hiss and hush of the sea behind her, and when her feet finally land on sand and she turns, there it is. She has come right to the bottom of Swirling Cleft. The air here is bright beneath the cloud. There is a sparkle in the grey sand, and in the pushing, tugging waves.

  Ropes of the thick mist hang down like tangled creeper over the ledge she has climbed. Coils of it lie on the rocks. The baby on Gad’s chest is no longer crying, only breathing the soft sighs of sleep. She walks around the edge of the grey cove. Where the ivy reaches down over the rocks, its leaves are white. She finds festoons of thick, deep mist hung there like her mother’s hammock, and mounds of mist like grey clothes dropped on the floor.

  Gad unwraps the baby and lowers it into one of the hammocks. It opens its eyes and gurgles at her. When Gad holds out a finger for its tiny ones to grasp, the baby smiles. It looks more like it should. The baby does not get wet where the mist touches it, but rolls happily as if it were in fleece. Sil would love it here, Gad thinks. She would be at home. Gad lets this thought fill her with a silvery shiver.

  Beyond the hammocks, Gad sees a mist curtain hanging. She leaves the baby and goes for a closer look. It seems to cover the opening of a cave, and she is about to push it aside when she hears a soft clack-clacking sound from within. She knows that sound. She tries to think, her head fuzzed with the hazy air. It is the same sound her mother’s needles make when she knits, but fainter, like bubbles breaking water. She hears a voice singing, a glimmery echo in the cave like the sea in a shell. The song is one she has heard Sil sing, to her when she was small, and to the baby. She thinks of her mother up there on the windy hill, the scrap of mist she stole from her. The singing and the gentle clacking soothe her, and she sits on the grey sand with her back against the rock, listening, drifting.

  Gad wakes with a start. She leaps up at the sound of the baby’s babble and goes to lift it from the hammock, its little star hands grasping at the vapour. She should not have stayed so long. But there beside the baby is a great bundle, mist that seems to be folded like soft wool garments, packed into a pile and tied up with ivy twine.

  With the baby on her chest, Gad stands by the cave curtain. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers, not sure she wants to be heard. Then she hurries to where the white ivy hangs lowest and begins to climb, holding the bundle out with the tongs to keep it from her skin.

  There is no sign of Sil on the path. Even out of the mist, Gad is juddering with a cold that has sunk right into her. The baby feels so much heavier now against her wheezing chest, but she hurries uphill, carrying the misty bundle to her mother.

  When she reaches the house, she finds Sil by an open window, her feet in the water bowl. She blinks at Gad for a few moments, and then with a gasp leans and wraps her arms around her. Gad buries her shivers deep in her mother’s chilly hug.

  As Sil unwraps the baby and takes the bundle, Gad sees she has laid fleeces and blankets in the armchair, making a woolly nest.

  ‘Get warm,’ Sil says, guiding her to the chair. She tucks Gad into the sheepskins and folds over layers of knitting, then kisses Gad’s knees through the wool.

  Gad’s chills begin to ebb away. She watches Sil untie the bundle and wrap herself and the baby in the hazy garments. Sil smiles at Gad from her own misty nest in the window seat.

  ‘Why don’t you live there?’ Gad asks after a while. Her mother has been dozing with the baby at her breast.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Swirling Cleft.’

  ‘Because of you,’ Sil says.

  Gad’s cheeks are the warmest part of her.

  ‘Your father,’ Sil says, peering out of the window as if he might be right there, back from the higher ground. ‘He had you on his back when he came down the Cleft one day, following some foolish sheep. You were a little thing, wailing to break a heart. I watched him while he kept searching, you crying all the while.’ She shifts the baby in her arms, but keeps her sleepy eyes on Gad. ‘I followed him, listening to you, all the way here.’

  ‘But you stayed?’

  ‘Babs need mothers. You needed me. Your father, well, he needed me too. Are you warm now?’

  Gad nods. Sil wriggles deeper in her cloudy heap. Through the window behind her, Gad sees the mist rolling in. She feels the chill drift in the room, but she is warm, wrapped in the wool of Sil’s knitting. She breathes in the salty fog scent and watches the baby stretch its star hands to grasp at the swirling mist.

  I’ve heard it said, a strong wind can send a man’s mind sailing out of his head. It’s that way with horses. Perhaps a storm, the kind that shifts trees and blows out new caves, can do worse. A storm like we had, that autumn, might be enough to possess a person. It might send a girl’s sense skittering out of her head and leave only thunder in its place. That would be one story.

  But I said I wouldn’t tell. I promised, and I’ve kept it. Nothing good would come of it, for folk would take the tale their own way. Madden Lightfoot, my young stable hand, calm as can be now with the horses. Taken up where her father left off, so sudden.

  I said I wouldn’t tell, but I’d like to ask her, ‘Do you remember, Madden? Or was it the thunder got in your head?’

  At noon, whi
le Madden and her father Pike were at work on the Prowds’ High Farm, the sky had turned to twilight, and the storm rolled in. By the time they had trudged down from the farm, the lower slopes and lanes were pouring new rivers to meet the gnashing sea. Madden shuddered at the might of the water, at the wind that urged her towards it. All through that twilit day, the west wind rampaged, hurling curds of sodden sky against the earth, soaking it through.

  All night, Madden, her little sister Clotha, her ma and father stayed awake, to watch the roof in case it should slip, to watch for water seeping through the walls. The storm filled them with a kind of fearful glee, and they did not think of resting.

  Now, after another day shut up in the house, Madden is dulled by the lack of sleep, but restless still, the throb the wind left in her matching the storm outside. It is dusk, but there is no light to fade away. There have been no shadows today. The roar that still echoes around the house is lulling. Clotha has given up poking at her sister with her bony feet.

  All day their ma has flitted in and out to help neighbours scoop belongings from the torrent in the village below, or tie down the ones that might blow away. The gossip is that the waves have turned to monsters of scum and broken fish, and have churned the shore up so the rocks, when they can be glimpsed, are all in the wrong places. Madden longs to see this, to feel the sea’s wrecking strength.

  It is not only the shore that the storm has whipped cock-eyed. With the earth turned to loose mud, trees have begun to slide. The copse at the river bend is bunched together at the bank, her ma said, and soon the trees will slither into the torrent one by one, like reluctant horses into a ford. This Madden also wants to see. Even Galushen’s great oak, her ma told with a gleam in her eye, has fallen and clipped off the chimneys from his huge house. ‘Picture the look on his snooty wife’s face,’ Ma grinned. ‘We’re all the same in the eye of a storm.’

  The sight of the headland, though, Madden is glad to be spared. Only a week ago, the villagers burned the gorse, and her ma told how the rain has washed the soot right down the rocks, turning the whole headland black. Madden had not been there for the burning, for she still mourned Crab Skerry, lost forever in the gorse fire of four whole years ago. Her memory of him is secret, like the kiss she never gave.