Folk Page 9

  And now her mammy is swallowing earth as if it’s the best of a big catch, the finest of all the fish they’ve not eaten for so long that Iska can’t remember when it was Pa went out on the boat. It must be full by now, it must be rocking under a mountain of plump silver bodies, slithering in the heave of each wave. There between the drooping beans she thinks out the words her mammy used to say for every supper: ‘Sea be calm and tide hurry fishermen home.’ It’s a hot day, but the cold creeps up under her ribs when she can’t remember either the last time she heard her say this in her soft song voice.

  This morning Iska has been waiting for Granny Turpin to come like she used to, and scold her mammy and make her get spick and span and the house too. She’d hoped Granny Turpin would stop her mammy from eating the earth, but she has hoped this for many a morning, and her granny has not arrived to bark her name at the gate.

  Iska crawls backwards through the bean plants and idles through the dunes, the sand warm under her toes. She does not like to play alone in the cave at the far shore end, because there are ghosts in there, her mammy says. So, she wanders away from the shore, and up the sheep track that climbs the hill to the Rincepans’ whitewashed house.

  Her friend Pud is sprawled on the step in the sunshine, cracking last year’s cobnuts and prising the shrivelled hearts from their shells. When Iska tells him what she’s seen, Pud chews and ponders.

  ‘Maybe make your mam a mud pie for supper, then,’ he says. ‘Or snail stew.’

  When Pud has stopped his snigger, Iska says, ‘She won’t do a proper supper for me neither. I get green leaf mush, not even a fish or anything.’

  Pud has a good stare at Iska’s bony knees next to his own, which are like fat browned potatoes. He swallows. ‘And does she look the same, or has she gone all wrinkled or ugly-faced?’

  ‘Ugly yourself,’ says Iska, and she flicks the nut she can’t crack at Pud’s head. But there is something odd, now she thinks, about how her mammy looks. She’s getting fat as an ale man on green slime and soil. And she’s not worn a Mam dress like usual, not even when Iska’s old nurse, Werrity, came to visit and she hooted at her mammy draped in one of Pa’s shirts.

  ‘Remember that tale we got from your old nurse Werrity once,’ Pud starts, ‘about when the bab gets swapped for a fairy one that’s all grisly and greedy?’

  ‘The changeling,’ says Iska.

  Pud stamps his foot and crunches a nut to bits. ‘You got a changeling mam.’ He looks sidelong at Iska. ‘Remember how she said you tell? Changeling babs are pretending, but they can’t do it proper. They look dog ugly and act all wrong and they only want changeling food. If you came out of the hill where it’s all mud and roots, then you’d want to eat that too.’

  ‘That was only a story. And anyway, it was a bab, not a mammy.’

  ‘It’s not only babs. You seen Gad’s ma? She’s likely a changeling mam, too. Always cold and foggy like she’d rather live in a fairy hill full of mist than here. No good at pretending, neither.’

  ‘My ma’s not misty,’ says Iska. ‘She used to be pretty.’

  ‘Muddy, though,’ Pud says, narrowing his eyes. ‘She goes off wandering about the marsh, you said, and won’t let you go with her.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Plenty of mud there. She must be going to see her fairy babs. ’Stead of you.’

  Iska picks up a handful of cobnut shells and showers them down over Pud’s brown head.

  The waft of Ma Rincepan’s cooking through the open door is so rich and meatily good that Iska lingers, finding as many games to play with cobnut shells as will last until Pud gets called in. All the while she thinks over what a changeling might pretend wrong. It’s true that her mammy won’t sing to her any more like she used to of a glowery evening with Pa home off the sea. She hardly whispers a word unless to scold. The house is so quiet that all Iska hears is Skipper whining with his nose in the grate. The worst thing was when her mammy took the hare skin and threw it in the fire. It was an old thing, worn half bald and with raggedy ears, but her mammy used to wrap her in it every night in her bed, even though she’d got so big lately it would only go around her shoulders. The hare skin smelled of her real mammy. It was the only thing in the house that didn’t stink of fish and sea, and now it has gone.

  She is wondering if all changelings hate fur because they love mud, when Ma Rincepan reels them in with a yell. When she spies Iska she slaps a hand on top of her head and gives her a turn right round.

  ‘Hup to it home with you. And we’ll take your poor ma a plate. She must be starved, and in her state.’ Ma Rincepan has Iska’s hand gripped a bit too tight in her rough red fist as she stamps along, just so fast as to make Iska run every few steps to keep up. The steam from the plate smells so good it hurts her insides and the thought of losing her morsels of meat to Skipper along with that last egg is too much to bear.

  ‘Please, Ma Rincepan,’ she says, when they have come down the hill and are passing the dunes. ‘We can stop here. Mammy doesn’t much like meat for now anyway.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Ma Rincepan bellows, and there is no sign of Skipper as she bustles right through the door and into the darkened house, past the cold hearth, and creaks up close to the box bed.

  When Ma Rincepan pulls the curtain open, Iska can just make out the bump of her mammy asleep in the big box bed, the sheet tucked round her neat as pastry. She looks across at her own little boat of a bed, under the eave where her wooden gull hangs, turning slowly in the draught. She takes a step closer. The bedclothes twitch and two glowing dog eyes rise up to meet her. Did her mammy put Skipper to bed in her place? As Iska glares back she feels a thought slide, cold and terrible as December sea water. Only a changeling mammy would put a dog to bed instead of a girl. Pud said they pretend wrong. They wouldn’t know the difference. The changeling mammy must have kissed Skipper’s wet nose and made the little boat rock and set sail, just as if it were her in there. Or would this soil and twigs and boiled leaves mammy not even know to do that?

  Ma Rincepan lets her take the warm plate and creep back out to the garden, and while she munches the juicy meat and spludges fatty potatoes around in her mouth she can hear them murmuring inside. It makes her shudder even as she eats, that careless, muddy thing leaving soil all over her mammy’s sheets.

  Next day Pud finds her nestled against their favourite dune in the soft morning sun, chewing on raw beans. ‘They good?’ he asks, eyeing the pods scattered in the sand.

  Iska winces as she swallows. Raw beans are not good at all, her throat hurts, but they were the only thing she could find in the garden that looked like food. ‘You said I’ve got a changeling mammy,’ she says, letting Pud pick the last bean from her palm.

  ‘So?’

  ‘She laid the dog in my bed.’

  ‘That’s bad.’

  ‘And she’s not washed a thing, not for ages. My real mammy was always wanting to wash the fish smell out of the house.’

  Pud puffs himself up serious as the schoolmaster. ‘And does she ever talk of your pa or wish him home to you?’

  Iska shakes her head.

  ‘Then it’s certain as summer. A changeling mammy wouldn’t notice the fish smell, and she wouldn’t know you should even have a pa, would she? If he were already gone when she came.’

  Iska tries to bite the wobble out of her lip.

  ‘Come on. I want a look at her,’ says Pud as he hauls Iska up from the tuft of dunegrass and they shuffle down the path, ducking as they get near the house.

  They crouch below the front window, knees in the grit and green-staining weeds. Pud slowly raises his head until his eyes are above the sill and squints against the glass.

  ‘Fat as a cow,’ he whispers.

  Iska thinks of all those plates of green slime, the earth under her mammy’s fingernails.

  ‘She’s knitting,’ says Pud, ‘and not even looking at the needles.’

  Iska kneels up and peers into the gloom. It’s true, the needles in the ch
angeling mammy’s hands are dancing up and down and she is gazing clear out through the opposite window pane towards the sea. The wool that trails over her big moon belly and on to the floor is the fine blue wool her real mammy has been saving, she knows, since Iska was a bab herself. She said it were only for skin that wants softness, and she left it shut up in the sea chest, not even using it when her pa wanted a new vest for the worst of winter.

  ‘What’s she making?’ Pud asks.

  There, below the skipping needles, dangles a small blue sock, so small it might fit on a big toe.

  ‘For her pixie bab, under the marsh where she came from,’ breathes Pud, and the glass at his mouth mists up.

  Iska picks a spot on the black harbour rocks. She will watch for her pa with his silvery mountain on the blue boat and as soon as she’s helped carry in the enormous catch she’ll tell it all and Pa will know how to get her real mammy back.

  The wind burns her face through the long, white summer days. At home, Skipper stays still as a rug in the hearth, and the sea chest fills up with tiny clothes for the pixie bab. The changeling mammy hardly moves from her grimy bed. The fish stink in the house, already stale, begins to fade.

  One afternoon, a shore fisher sidles along the harbour and sits down beside Iska. He tells her his name is Gill Skerry, and he offers her a catfish. The man’s face is hidden behind a wad of brown beard, but his voice is kind and he shows Iska how to cook the fish on a stick over a fire he starts up with dry dunegrass. When they scrape the hot flesh from the bones it tastes of smoke.

  ‘Out to see the boats?’ he asks.

  Iska nods.

  ‘And which one counts for you?’

  Iska knows the name because it is the same as her real mammy’s name. ‘The Ervet,’ she says.

  The shore fisher pauses a moment. ‘You sure of that?’ His voice has lost its cosiness.

  ‘It’s my pa’s boat. He named it for Mammy, and he said he’ll name the next one for me.’ Iska feels sturdier just for saying it.

  The shore fisher stays silent a while. He turns a thin spool of line between hands as cragged as the rock they sit on. The wind doesn’t seem to touch them. ‘I’m sorry, Iska,’ he says, in a crackle. ‘Your ma all fine up there?’ He nods back through the dunes.

  Iska feels the cold sluice again through her belly. She can hardly tell about the changeling mammy, silently fattening on soil.

  ‘Might I pay a visit then, Iska? I got more in my basket today than’ll do for me and your ma might want to share.’

  ‘No,’ she says quickly. ‘No, she’s sleeping. She’ll want leaving alone.’

  ‘Well, you take these two, then.’ The shore fisher opens up the basket at his feet and scoops out two silver slithers smeared with red.

  Iska forgets her lookout plan, with the fish cold in her palms. One for her, one for Skipper, and the sooner she’s home, the sooner she can get the grate warm like her mammy does and have them crisping up.

  ‘And luck to you,’ she hears the fisher call as she hurries over the black rocks and into the dunes.

  ‘Skipper!’ she shouts on the path, and again at the door. There’s not even a whine. ‘Skipper!’ she tries again when she sees the room empty.

  There is a long, high shriek from behind the box bed curtain. As Iska steps forward she feels the slabs slippery under her feet. The thin trail of blue wool from the chair is turned pinky red where it lies across the rug and all around, and daubed on the slabs near the box bed, is more red. Something heaves inside the bed. Something whimpers. She runs then, away from the line of wool, away from the sounds and the certainty of something more dreadful than she’s ever thought before.

  Her sticky hands are empty by the time she is at the Rincepans’ step, and she leaves a red print as she pushes at the door. They are all round the table, Ma and Pa Rincepan and Pud’s grown brother Sandy, their brown arms lifting bowls and bread, but it is Pud that Iska looks for.

  ‘She’s got Skipper,’ she pants, ‘she’s got him.’ But she’s lost the rest of the words like she’s lost the two fish, somewhere on her way.

  ‘What’s this mess?’ Ma Rincepan has hold of her wrist in her huge red hand and is poking at her palms. ‘Has it come now?’

  Iska stares into her frowning face.

  ‘Mercy, what do you do with a girl?’ she huffs, and Iska watches her turn and root around in the cupboard, pulling out sheets and flannels. ‘Go on then!’

  Iska is swept out of the door in the billow of Ma Rincepan’s enormous skirt and they are all the way down the hill and along the shore path, sweating and stumbling the pair of them, when she hears another long shriek from her house. She yanks her hand from Ma Rincepan’s grip and dodges into the dunes, scrambling against sliding sand, tearing up the whipping fingers of dunegrass. Her pa will help, the boat might be in right now, if she can get to the harbour quick enough, and she skids down the next dune right into the shore fisher’s legs.

  She feels the rocky hands on her shoulders and sees the wad of brown beard as the fisher crouches to look at her.

  ‘Iska,’ says the cosy voice. ‘Stop here a moment.’

  Her legs wobble as she lets the hands hold her steady. They sit right there in the sand. The breeze still brings howls from the house. Iska wants to tell the shore fisher that it is not her real mammy, that there’s a marsh monster in there, but her throat is trapped shut and her lips only shake.

  ‘What a din a fishwife can make, eh?’ the man says. ‘We’ll wait for a bit of peace before we go.’

  He is so calm that Iska finds she can breathe it in and her judders calm too. She looks and looks at the lines on the shore fisher’s face, the places where there are flecks of white in his beard, the hands still as rocks.

  The breeze drops away and so do the sounds from the house. Still they wait.

  ‘Nothing to fear,’ the shore fisher says when Iska finally turns to look towards home. A thin whining starts up and she jumps as Skipper leaps in her head. She stays a few steps behind the shore fisher as they make their way up and down the sinking hills of sand, and hangs back at the bean patch while the fisher knocks. Iska hears Granny Turpin’s bark, calling them in.

  There in the box bed, swathed in Ma Rincepan’s sheets, and with Granny Turpin frowning fondly over her, is her mammy. Iska knows it is her because she is humming in that soft song voice, and when she looks up at her, a small smile curls. Iska peers at the bundle in her mammy’s lap that is making the whining sounds. It has a small crumpled face like a squashed red flower, its open mouth is the reddest part, and she can see tiny feet like curled red leaves poking out from under the blanket. She thinks of the tiny blue sock. Was it meant for this ugly thing? Where has it come from, and where has the changeling gone? Iska feels the surge of tears again behind her eyes, and looks up at the shore fisher, but this time her real mammy is ready to catch her against her shoulder.

  ‘Thank you, Gill,’ her mammy says, and the shore fisher smiles and gives her a bow. ‘Now, look, Iska. A brother for you.’

  Iska watches her mammy’s fingers stroking the wrinkled red face.

  ‘You take proper care of this one,’ says Granny Turpin. ‘Only one we got.’

  Iska stares at her sad face, her mammy’s smiling one, and wonders what she can mean.

  Galushen stands before the mirror and counts. Eighteen years, it has been, since Oline drowned. His love, lost to the river, while her sister Vina watched from the bank. Seventeen years, now, since Galushen and Vina were married. And tomorrow, it will be sixteen years to the day since their daughter May was born. Tomorrow, everything will change.

  ‘Why you bother to keep that mirror, I don’t know.’ Vina’s voice startles him as she sweeps past him in the hallway. She is carrying armfuls of pale green cloth, and when she shakes it out in the light to show him, it shimmers.

  ‘For May?’ he asks.

  ‘For my new dress. She’ll have quite enough gifts,’ Vina says, stroking the fabric, before she rustles aw
ay up the stairs.

  Galushen has tried to love his wife. He has given her gold and silver, a mountain of finery, rainbows of costly stones. He has filled the house he built for them with mirrors, so that Vina can meet her own admiring gaze whenever she wishes. The mirror he stands before now, in the gloom beneath the staircase, is mottled with age. It is the only furnishing in the house that was not newly made for his wife. Hidden between the backing and the glass is the picture of Oline.

  He looks past his reflection, the lined forehead, the black beard flecked with grey, at where he imagines Oline’s face looking back at him. Eighteen years. While this house has filled with gifts that have not dampened the echo, that have only cluttered the emptiness; while his daughter has grown and his wife has polished her taste in jewels, Galushen has crept to this mirror to grieve, secretly. The only gifts he brings Oline are stories. If the river had not been running so fast. If she had stepped along the bank more carefully. If Vina had been able to reach her sister’s hand. If the sisters had not walked out at all that day. All the stories end the same way, with his wedding to Oline, heart-whole, sure of the world and of his love. Vina’s head would soon have been turned by other suitors, and her jealousy forgotten. She was beautiful, after all.

  He is about to begin his silent talk with Oline when he hears May’s fiddle, the flowing notes of scale after scale, fast and perfect. The sound lifts him. He catches himself smiling in the glass. May, tall and restless, with her tangle of black hair, has become more and more like Oline as she has grown. But this sets her apart, the fierceness she has shown in her fiddle-playing. He listens to her stamp her feet, driving her fingers faster. She finishes the runs of scales with a piercing high note and launches into a wild dance. The music never falters. The playing is flawless. Still, he hears her huff of displeasure when it ends.