THE SEAL WOMAN ©
by Tim Morrison
That was a fine evening. Golden light of the late summer, the shadows each distinct and whole. Life and silence, rather the absence of human noise hang heavy in the air. This place has not changed since the archipelago was first drawn upon the waters. A variety of islands. The first tirrick stumbles from a northern sky.
The three have been sunbathing all day on a piece of shoreline they believe to be remote chosen because of its great beauty, Perpendicular cliffs rise hundreds of red feet from sea level to the clouds both north and south of the main beach. A small fishing and crofting tounship straggles along part of the shore a handful of miles until it fades out amongst the dunes.
Here people do not walk. Should they, thick clumps of rushes along the top of the dunes would obscure the clean line of the sea from their view. From the beach itself only the line of the horizon is clear where only the sun walks, its long golden shadow forms the path on the grey water, our road to the Land of the Ever Young.
The three laugh over memories of friends and humanity encountered: a fisherman fell into the water from his boat. Unable to swim, he needed their assistance to get back to his own secure ground. They remembered him a clumsy, gallumphing thing all limbs and floundering, simply ridiculous, beyond the telling. An abandoned child comforted by a mother of another kind. The hunter. A multiple sorrow. The ones who do not return.
To break the mood grown sombre, they strip off and running back down into the shallows making great splashes kicking up the spray before them with their toes, their heels, their knees; their pelts left safely above the tide line. They scoop up water with unfamiliar hands and throw it each at other. Fake shock and outrage compels them to ever greater daftness. One falls forward on her face and a wave covers her, the whole wide world becomes white and stinging green. Flufluthert, she forgets for a moment her species and tries to pull herself up by her elbows. The other two see her mistake and almost weep with mirth, doubling up and screaming with delight.
The glimling light, each wave casts its own shadow, air turns chilly. An initial pleasant pang of hunger warns them that the day is getting late. The setting gold on the waters tempts them in. They want to go home. All three head up to the thrushes to find their skins but the pile has been tampered with. Two pelts are still lying as they had been left but the third has gone. Blind fear takes hold of the selkie women. They hunt the breadth of the shore turning over the kelp with hand and snout but to no avail. One lumbers up amongst the reeds beyond safety. She scents out the track of a man. Foot prints. The dreadful realisation: the skin has been stolen by a hunter: the code of the shore that nothing above tide line can be taken has been broken. A dishonest beachcomber cannot be welcomed in any place. The three cling together for a little warmth against the gathering night, howling a mixture of human and animal tears that run together down the sleek flanks falling upon the water, salt upon salt.
Already the sun is well down. Every wave becomes sharp against its own shadow. The two who have become seals have no choice but to head out towards the Sound. They are all together in the water, waves of the incoming tide break over them. Cold and fear shakes the young woman with sobs. They try to comfort her moving in as close to her as possible kissing her with fish seal breath.
Her feet hates the rock scraping them. She would be with her sisters soaring over the seabed but instead is locked onto the land as surely as pain. Seal heads watch. Distance grows.
Sudden noise. Oystercatchers set up a panic skreek. The dozing eiders are rounded up by their mother and driven onto the water. The whole shore is outraged by an alien presence. The two seals move in as close as they dare to the shore, scared to lose sight of the woman. She crouches on her heels, rocking backwards and forwards , great hysterical sobs tearing through her. She watches them and sees nothing else so I am almost upon her before she scents me.
What does a man like me do who has never seen a woman naked before him, not even in his dreams? I turns my head reluctantly to protect her modesty and takes off my great coat to allow something to cover her shame with saying only;.
'You'll be needing this.'
She permits me to hang the garment around her wet shoulders feeling for the first time the artificial textures of human defence against both wind and rain.
She has almost no awareness of the walk through the village street and beyond it to the croft house. Nor has she perception of eyes at window and ears at door. They walk along a little further. the dirt track becomes a grass sheep path An orange star is set against a hill. A stone wall, the smell of peat warmth. That which she later learns to be a door opens and she is bathed in the brightness of human made light for the first time, a curious yellow and white world. I indicate to go through the space before me, she hesitates the realisation is bitter that she is where she is and there is only the going forward into the terrible brilliance, a single step across a threshold. But, it is less terrible for a woman, to be under a roof, in a room where there is a fire and a smell of broth, a diligent flame on hearth, than on the hillside with only the skua and rabbit.
'She was on the shore, without clothes. I thought it best to bring her here.'
A silence takes holds of the room, a still eternity. There is no movement save from the eyes. She who is from the sea stolen undergoes an interrogation; the son's heavy coat dripping wet, the black hair knotted, mangled and torn hanging like so much kelp.
As if with great deliberation, the old woman gets herself to her feet: 'she cannot be from here ' Anxiety ridges her forehead, she has seen the webbing between the fingers of the seal woman's hands and toes of bare feet but says nothing. She looks at her son sharply, I feels my veracity being laid open like a herring in the hands of the woman gutting,
'from a shipwreck, no doubt.'
I say nothing.
The quiet heaviness lies on them unbroken until a heavy fit of coughing wracks the seal woman. 'The pair of you, you men out of this room now. I will call you in when she is decent' The two get up and retreat to the other of the two rooms in the house. The old man looks vaguely hurt but goes, the collie, its snout dislodged follows him, I do too. The women are alone together for the first time. The Old looks the Young in the eye, an understanding. She put out her hand and guides the Seal to the fire. Gently she removes the heavy wool from rigid shoulders. The nakedness of the cold night, the blueness of the chilled seal human skin dissipates before the red glow. Another fit of coughing. A chest by the box bed is opened and from it a clean linen night dress is pulled out. It takes some effort for the Old to get the Young to understand its purpose or the manner of its wearing but succeeds. The young woman is sat down on a low stool made from half a fish box. The old woman stands behind her and gently begins to untangle the fankled hair so skilfully that there is no pain, no tugging or hardship. The constant attention soothes the memory but not the fragrance of the seal sisters about her. When she had finished the carding of the hair, the Old One led the Young One to a box bed and opened the doors for her. 'He will be giving up this, his bed for you. He will not be coming in to you. We a real Christian household. No matter what you may be you are safe here. Sleep.'
Closeness. Doors sealed with an absolute shutness. But not an absolute silence. The voices of the woman and of myself making plans for her. Whilst her understanding of what is happening is not important, she can follow the gist of what is being said. With human form comes human speech. It would have been better for her to not to know. The conversation takes much time most of which is silence. Eventually the Old Woman is weary and needs to rest. She says with some resignation:
'If she is not to be able to go back to her own folk she must bide amongst us for a piece I suppose.'
I say:'Her hands will be useful to you'.
'Indeed.'
A bargain is made. In return for her clothing and board she will work. Her hands become indeed useful to the Old Woman. She is keen witted and learns quickly the skills needed for a woman on the croft. To bake. To cook. To card and spin the coarse wool. To knit. To make the fine woollen lace to lay by for the shawl for the first born.
She even learned the science of fire. To lay the kindling and the peat, to smoor it with ash that it should lie dormant the whole night, the runes of blessing too, the names of the saints and the encompassing of the sacred house, the warding off the fey and unwieldy. Yet, despite this she lived amongst us, though this can never easy for a selkie woman. Little things tend to give you away or at least be a little difficult. She never felt comfortable with eating fish in front of others. Her instinct was always to play with it. A wee nip. To cook it seemed distasteful, to drain the fish of flavour and to break down its flesh.
A hot summer day she is sitting with the cool, clean smell of the peat burn around her, the white brown foam of the little waterfall holding her eyes seal senses arise. The raw trout is in her hand and her mouth living a choking fit, a laugh, the undamaged fish back in the water affrontit and away. So her secret pleasure became, when the wind stifled all other sounds outside to disappear to the byre with a brace of raw herring and nothing but her teeth to eat them with.
The biggest problem was that the seal vision which never complexly left her. Like dogs they can see most, though not all of the other folk who live amongst us but are invisible to our eyes. This would sometimes cause difficulty and even distress. We have mentioned already that she would never attend the church. There was good reason for this.
Her first sabbath, she knew from the early morning that this day was different for the men had not gone out to the field or the boat. She did not understand why for the weather seemed to her fine, a high sun and a clear sky, the kind of lithesome day that both seal and human kind love for sunning, basking and perhaps a little work.
The three landed people had put aside their normal clothes and we had dressed in heaviness. She looked at us men and laughed for under the black we were wearing what she called stiff whiteness. To her we looked like self important puffins in a row upon the rock, preening and strutting with no idea how daft they seemed to the rest of creation.
In her bonnet the mother resembles some sort of guillemot, she looks with one eye closed at the youngster in the borrowed shift with her long leg and her foot showing. She squawks;
'Fegs', It is just not decent.
She goes to the great clothes press and takes out more appropriate apparel. The selkie woman is helped into a heavy dress of stiff cotton imprisoning her thighs and keeping the good air from them. For good measure her thighs and feet are cocooned in black stuff and then her feet are pushed into things like the eggs of the dog fish. They are tight and uncomfortable. She tries to stand up but falls immediately. A horrid sensation of height and isolation, sheer unreality overcomes her like the stench of fulmar bowf. She reels in disgust. She cannot feel the ground, either the coolness of the stone or the dampness of the grass. She is above the earth but from it separate. An understanding of human cruelty dawns: 'if they knew the feet against the soil they would not wound it'
They all leave the house together and her with them.
From the other crofts people in the same unfamiliar black are moving to her surprise and delight in a file along the road that seems by an indirect route to lead to the shore. Yet they do not go down to the dunes.
A kirkyard. Some graves and stones raised amongst the machair flowers. A stunted rowan hides behind the shelter of a wall. The kirk itself stands on the site of the forgotten dwellings of the Iron Age. Far beneath where once the altar stood before the Cleansing is an ancient well, its waters neither sweet nor sufficient for the thirsty people gathered.
The present building had been raised on viking foundations by the labour of the people and the money of the Earl. In its tower he had placed a black bell bearing his name to summon the people to obedience. It now tolls. The vibrations in the air hurt the seal woman's ears. The double doors stand open. Just beyond the threshold, two elders stand beside a plate in which all the worshippers put a little money, a coin, a note, a little envelope. They look at her, a silent question but she has nothing to give them.
They take a pew in the central aisle about half way down. The hard backed seat is not mitigated in the slightest by the red velvet cushion.
The ritual begins. The beadle carries the large Bible into the kirk from a door at the back. He lays it on the red breasted lectern. He leaves and returns momentarily followed by the minister whom he shows up the narrow steps into the pulpit snecking the door behind him. A third figure follows, unseen by the other two. He is a tall-ish man with swarthy skin, perhaps a continental look. The Earl of Hell himself takes the place of Honour in the minister's high seat beneath the pulpit. Two attendant imps fall from his shoulders and grow rapidly until they are big enough to take the elders' chairs one to the left of their master and one to his right. They compose their faces into serious and appropriate expressions. The master looks with his two different coloured eyes straight at the seal woman and bows his head in greeting. She returns the gesture. The Old Woman beside her looks quizzically at her. A vague alarm.
The service proper begins. The bidding words. Opening prayer. The Lord Below pays particular attention to the gospel reading following it very closely in his own little testament book. The hymns seem to grate on his ears. He tries to stop out the din with a great spotted handkerchief that he tries to stuff into both ears at the same time. The seal woman giggles a little under her breath.
The sermon begins. The congregants seen and unseen settle themselves into boredom save for the Left Imp who forgets itself momentarily and begins to pick at its snout. A sharp slap, a shrug and a duck. A whiff of sulphur.
Lord Sandie removes from his greatcoat pocket a delicately bound book with black pages. He begins to take detailed notes in it with a white pen occasionally nodding agreement with the minister's discourse. He seems particularly moved by an erudite passage on the universal sinfulness of humanity.
Something unexpected happens. The minister looks up from his text and peers over the lectern light, his expression something between anger and fear. The boredom of the congregation is dissipated like summer snow. The seal has begun to laugh. At nothing. Perhaps at the hairs on the neck of the old man in front of her or the way the light falls on his bald head. Perhaps with the simple pleasure of being alive. The Earl and his entourage begin to laugh too. The smaller of the devils, the one on the right falls from his chair and rolls under the communion table snorting little flames and drumming his hooves against its sacred wood. A very small child who has gone quite pink with the effort of behaving cedes defeat and begins to guffaw loudly. The skelp it receives from her mother turns its noise into tears but the people’s minds are set all tapselteerie. There is no prospect of regaining order.
The only people not laughing are the Family. Mortified with shame, we bundle the woman out of the kirk door into the kelp scented air and immediately begin to upbraid her all at once.
'Has she no religion, respect, decency, morality, gratitude?'
'The minister is a very learned, great, dignified, respected man.'
'He has been to the university and come back with the Latin, the Hebrew and the Greek and not to be laughed at by a scunner, gowk, daftie, foreign wee lassie who cannot even bake, sew, comb her hair, wash, properly.'
But still her laughter, hysterical screaming does not decrease but challenges the clouds. She tries to explain but can make no sense to us. To see the deil in the kirk indeed. We begin to think her touched, or fey. Eventually there is nothing left to do but hold our peace. We walk with her home and say nothing more of it. The next Sunday she does not go with us but stays in the croft. The door barred from the outside. But soon their vigilance slackens. She hardly notices. Where has she to run to and here at least there is meat and warmth of a kind.
The wind blows. Seasons pass. The old die. We married in the manse kitchen, One day we follow the old man first and then his widow on the walk home to the west. Children are born. If the midwife, the other women kept away from the births, noticed the webbing between the fingers and toes of the new born, then she says nothing. The custodian of the door of life is a woman with few words and a sharp way with the ill-tongued.
None can be held for ever or for long against their will. There is a Law. For escape shall be, even when there is no hope for it. And it is not possible to hold those of the nether world, those of the other world who walk amongst us unseen
The woman is alone save for our youngest one, a girl. She has hurt her foot and is mythering for her mother. The oldest children, scarcely children are with their father in the field. The middle ones are on the shore gathering limpets and whelks.
'What are you doing mother?'
'Looking for something soft to make your foot better.'
'Why not use Father's skin?'
'What skin is this?'
The wean looks surprised and defiant at the harshness of her mother's tone., 'The one he has hidden behind the chimney stone.
'The chimney stone?' What nonsense are you talking you wee daftie?
‘We were all asleep except me I was pretending and Faither he went to the fire and took a stone from the wall and he took out an old skin and he oiled it and kissed it. isn't that a funny thing to do Mither and put it back and the stone too, And then he went to bed and then to sleep.’
‘Ach dear you were dreaming. Why should Faither have a skin there?’
‘I promise you .Mither he did.’
‘I'll show you Mither. Come on please.’
‘You wee fibber. I have other things to do.’
‘Come on then.’
‘All right. Where is this skin of yours then?’
‘Come in ben mither come here.’
'See that stone. Aye, that one there, above the lintel. See, Mither, its loose. Give it a wee pull.’
'I believe you're right'.
‘There is something there indeed. It'll not come out though.’
She is holding the pelt in her own two hands. For the longest moment she just looks at it with no words in her mouth but her heart full. Gradually she unrolls it to its full length. Almost with affection she thinks that it is a good job he has made of keeping it. The seal smell still heavy about it sets her mind racing. She stoops down to the child and looks her fully in the eye.
' Mither has to go back now. To her own. You'll be good until Daddy comes back. He'll not be long now.'
As she stands up she ceases to be the woman with thick, heavy arms, her hair dried and broken by the sun. No, she is the girl with the straight back on the shore running to the distant ocean. Losing her shoes and the sharp stones against her feet on the road. She has not run in years. The wildness embraces, her hair no longer tied back in its bun but loose and stravaiging. Her clothes, she frees herself from all of them, the work apron, the woollen cardigan, the skirt, the corset, the knickers, strewn behind her on the ground or caught on the fence. And she is naked and beautiful no longer aware of the eyes of the neighbours and the vicious tongues, the legislators of her years falling silent with shock behind her. There is only the woman gone mad to the west running and the skin in her hands. Breath of the wind cold to the back of her neck and refreshes her nipples. The shingle and seaweed and shells laughing. And before her snout the waters divide and the stretch of her spine and her fins.
In the croft house the uncomprehending child tries to be brave and not cry until Daddy gets home.
'And she is gone from me.’
Tim Morrison is a free-lance trainer working across Britain delivering courses on health and social care with a speciality in drugs and alcohol issues. He has written a number of articles in sector magazines and recently had a book published, the Essential Drugs and Alcohol Worker.
Many of Tim's courses are delivered in association with DrugScope and all are advertised on www.alcohol-drugs.co.uk.
He is also looking at the possibility of looking at delivering courses online in the Second Life virtual world under the avatar name of Tim Mersereau. Visit Tim on-line at http://www.tim-morrison.co.uk/. Read more of Tim's stories at: http://www.tim-morrison.co.uk/stories.htm. Email him at: tim@alcohol-drugs.co.uk
The Seal Woman copyright © 2007 by Tim Morrison, all
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