Selkie Summer, page 8
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I don’t,’ said Cal. ‘But I’m told your people do, and I think that’s what it’s like. Anyway – we’re from outside the Earth, we eat plenty and nothing eats us, so perhaps over the long term we do upset the balance of nature, or whatever they call it these days. How would I know? I’m not a marine biologist.’ He glanced sidelong at me. ‘Was that the sort of thing you were wanting to find out?’
‘No!’ I cried. ‘It never crossed my mind. If you’d given me a chance to explain, after that idiot ex-boyfriend of mine…’
I sniffed hard, and said nothing for long enough to notice.
‘Yes?’ he said.
I hesitated, as if on a high board, then took the plunge. ‘You’ve got this all wrong. I don’t want to research on you, it’s not about that. It’s got nothing to do with marine biology.’
‘What has got nothing to do with it?’
My mouth was suddenly dry, my palms damp.
‘What I feel about you,’ I said.
The muscle at the angle of his jaw stood out. His knuckle whitened on the wheel.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘The glamour got you. I’m sorry about that, Siobhan. I did not mean for that to happen.’
He sounded so apologetic I almost felt sorry for him. Then I felt angry.
‘But how do you feel?’
‘About you?’
‘Yes, about me!’
He kept his gaze on the road.
‘The glamour works on us both,’ he said. ‘I fell for you as you fell for me, Siobhan.’
My heart lurched.
‘Why me, and not all the other girls who –’
‘I could flatter you about that, and there would be some truth in it’ – he smiled sidelong –’ but the real truth is that none of them had the affinity. And as I just heard the other selkie tell you, you do. I felt it the moment I saw you on the ferry, across that car roof in the rain.’
He slowed the car as we entered Broadford, passing the nuclear power station on the shore. ‘But I can’t act on how I feel.’
‘Why not?’ I cried. ‘If we both feel the same way, why not?’
‘Because the glamour cares nothing for our happiness, and I do. And besides’ – he risked another sideways glance, and his voice became more cheerful – ‘you and I, we have something far more important to do.’
I could have killed him. He was driving, and past a hospital at that, so I didn’t.
We stopped in Portree for lunch. Cal parked the car and took me to a pub by the main square where, he said, they did very good fish and chips. I looked askance as he ordered pints for both of us while we waited.
‘Drinking and driving?’
Cal smiled. ‘Metabolism varies.’
‘Oh.’
Cal scanned the crowded bar and made a bee-line for the one vacant small table. The surrounding hubbub gave us privacy to talk.
‘So what,’ I said, mutinously, ‘is this far more important thing we have to do?’
Cal leaned forward, our foreheads almost touching. It was like being inches from a Van de Graaf generator. I felt as if at any moment my hair would spring into a mad-scientist frizz.
‘We have to find someone to talk to, someone in authority, and bring the concerns I mentioned to their attention. I could not do that on my own, because… Well, I would have no idea how to go about it. And you could not, on your own, because why should anyone listen?’
‘What do you mean, you have no idea? You read books, don’t you?’
‘Only old ones. But yes, I could look it all up in a library, I suppose.’
‘Or online?’
He shook his head. ‘We don’t have a good relationship with electricity,’ he said. ‘In either direction, you could say.’ He looked grim for a moment, and I recalled the old pictures of rubber troughs and Faraday cages. ‘Electronics is worse. On the old phones, the interference was there, but you could hear and speak above the crackling. If I use a phone now, the battery dies in my hand before I can finish entering the number. I can drive all right, as you know, but the car radio or the CD player – forget it. And if I sit down in front of a computer, the screen goes to snow. But even if I read all about the institutions on paper, I would have a problem approaching the authorities. I don’t have the right documents.’
‘You must have something,’ I said. ‘You’re employed. You must have paperwork.’
Cal leaned back, and rubbed the nape of his neck.
‘Um,’ he said. ‘I have a union card.’ He fingered a laminated RMT card from his shirt pocket, and flourished it under my nose before slipping it back. ‘That’s it. I’m not officially on the payroll. I get paid the going rate, but in cash, and it’s listed under incidental expenses, running costs like diesel and so on. How can a company legally employ someone with no ID? I don’t have so much as a birth certificate, let alone a passport or a bank account.’
‘So, wait, you’re saying you’re employed illegally?’
‘I am not saying that at all,’ said Cal, sounding affronted. ‘All shipping companies, and the Navy for that matter, have like arrangements. It’s all square with the Revenue, too.’
‘But why?’
‘Well now,’ he said, ‘if we were on the books we’d need some kind of official recognition beyond the Treaty, and that’s a can that all concerned are happy to kick down the road.’
‘So why don’t your people tackle it from the other side?’ I said. ‘Like, you said the ones who work with the Admiralty are taken as representatives. Surely’ – there I went again, but I ploughed on – ‘you could change those representatives?’
Cal laughed, and took a deep swig of his pint.
‘It’s not a democracy,’ he said. ‘It’s not even a kingdom.’ He leaned closer, beery-breathed but I didn’t mind. ‘We are all kings and queens under the sea.’
Again came the sudden thrill, the pull like a rip-current, that I’d felt when the selkie on the shore had asked me if I wanted to hear his name under water. I recoiled so sharply that my glass slopped.
‘Don’t do that!’
‘Do what?’ Cal looked abashed, then closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘Sorry. Like I said, this sort of thing is not all my doing. It happens.’
The fish and chips arrived. We were both hungry. We ate in salt-and-vinegar silence.
‘All right,’ I said at we walked back to the car, justice done to the fish-life lost to the net and the deep-fat fryer. ‘You’re a selkie. I’m a student. Together, we fight bureaucracy.’
Cal looked at me across the car roof.
‘We don’t have to fight it today.’
‘What?’
‘It’s Sunday,’ he said. ‘We’re in no rush. And it’s a fine day to see the rest of the island.’
I gave him a wary look. ‘Somewhere inland?’
‘There’s hardly any “inland” on Skye, you’ll have noticed.’
‘Somewhere well above the shore, at any rate.’
Cal pointed north. ‘To Trotternish!’
An hour or so later we were driving through the most fractured landscape I’d ever seen. It was like another country, all jagged rocks and soaring pinnacles, with great sweeps of green grass and purple heather between the outcrops. We passed the Old Man of Storr, and stopped for a few minutes at a viewpoint car park to gaze at the pleat-like basalt columns of the aptly named Kilt Rock, until the closeness to the sea and the height of the cliff below the railing made me uneasy. We returned to the car, and Cal drove up the road over the Quiraing. At the crest of a saddle-back summit, Cal pulled over into the off-road parking area, and we got out. Sight-seers in bright cagoules dotted the wide hilltop like colourful deer.
The sun still beat relentlessly, but the air was colder up here, and the breeze stronger. It carried smells of heather and myrtle and sheep droppings. I followed Cal as he strolled to a nearby precipice. The cliff itself wasn’t high, but the fall of the land in front of it was. It wasn’t the height that was dizzying, but the vacancy before me, the chasms of air all around. Far below, little lochs glittered. Far across the sea, Beinn Alligin browed the clouds. Between it and me there was nothing but the same wind as plucked at my back.
‘Wow,’ I said, inadequately.
‘Far enough from the shore for you?’ Cal teased.
I turned, into the full beam of his windswept grin. It stopped my breath and skipped my heart, but something was different. Like seeing an actor in the flesh and not on the screen.
‘This glamour of which you speak,’ I said, ‘does it depend on your closeness to the sea?’
This was a guess, but it struck.
‘Yes,’ said Cal. ‘And more than the glamour, come to that. We cannot live for long far from the sea.’
‘How far? And how long?’
‘That would be telling. A good day’s walk, let’s say, and a week perhaps.’
‘So you’re safe here,’ I said. ‘But the shine is off your glamour.’
It was as though his gaze turned inward. ‘So it would seem.’
‘Then you’ll accept,’ I said, ‘that what I’m about to do is from me, and not from the glamour?’
‘If I must,’ he said.
I stepped away from the cliff and the gulf of sky, and held out my hand. He took it.
‘This way,’ I said.
I tugged him back along the little ridge and then, bounding and laughing, down the side of the hill and around the corner of an outcrop tens of metres down-slope. We were sheltered from the wind and from the sight of anyone nearby. I didn’t care about distant walkers with binoculars.
I swung around as we stumbled to a halt, and let the momentum carry him into my arms. His lips joined to mine. We took it from there.
It’s none of your business.
Oh, all right. Here are the answers to your questions.
Yes.
With most of our clothes on.
Sweet and hot.
Tongues like fishes in mouths.
I fumbled with belts and zips. He was deft. Fingers that could unknot a sea-soaked rope in the dark.
Hard, yes, and tough, like a thick, live seaweed stem.
Salt and seawater and slippery, like oysters.
I didn’t count the waves that buoyed me up, and swooped me down, and after so many undulations rose to a crest that tumbled to surf and left me sprawled and spent like the hissing lace of a broken wave rushing up the sand.
Happy now?
I was.
Happy, yes, but with skin scratched and clothes with bits of heather and lichen sticking to them.
‘You have sheep shit on your bum,’ Cal told me.
‘So have you,’ I said, hand exploring. ‘Fortunately it seems to be dry – oh shit, no.’
‘That’s just moss,’ he said.
We lay on our backs and looked up at the clear blue sky. Then we tugged up our jeans and fastened our belts and stood up. Shaking, I leaned into his chest and hugged. He hugged back. We stepped apart and looked at each other.
‘Well,’ he said.
‘Um,’ I said.
‘That wasn’t the glamour working,’ said Cal. ‘I’ll give you that.’
I laughed. ‘What must it be like with the glamour working?’
Cal gave me a sudden wicked smile.
‘Do you want to find out?’
‘Oh my God, yes.’
We walked back to the car.
Cal drove down to the other side of the Quiraing, to a landscape flat and green and glinting with lochs, and then on over hills and moors, along main roads and then side roads and single track roads. On a crest of marram grass he stopped. We got out. There was no sound but the distant lowing of cows and the closer crash of waves. I followed him over a few more ups and downs, and suddenly we were in a small cove with a tiny sandy beach. Cal took off his T-shirt and undid his belt. I looked at him dubiously.
‘You want to swim?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘I warn you, I’ll be bloody cold.’
‘You won’t,’ he said.
We both stripped and ran into the sea.
I felt no cold at all.
The shadows were lengthening by the time we got back to Kyleakin.
‘Do you want me to drop you off?’
‘Not at the Crossing Lodge! In fact… would you mind showing me where you live?’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Cal. ‘But you might find it a bit disillusioning.’
‘As long as it isn’t a cave,’ I said.
He drove along the street where he’d vanished around a corner. He parked the car by the side of the road. I got out, lugging my rucksack. Right in front of us was a metre-wide gap between two adjacent garden fences. This must have been how he’d disappeared the other night. Down that narrow alley of trampled weeds we went, across some waste ground and down to the rocky shore. A small promontory lay between this part of the shore and the ferry slipway. Just above the strandline of seaweed and driftwood stood a shed with one square window. The walls were tarpaper and the roof was corrugated iron. The shed had an annexe, barely large enough to support a door, which I guessed was an outside privy. The roof had a crooked iron pipe sticking out, and a small pole at the gable onto which overhead cables ran into the hut.
Cal opened the padlock that secured the main door, and held it open.
‘Want to come in?’
‘After you,’ I said. I left the door open.
The inside was dark after the bright sunlight. Cal clicked a light switch and a fluorescent overhead strip flickered on. Despite its cold light the room looked cheery enough, if spartan: a single bed piled with blankets, a pot-bellied iron stove, a washbasin, a table stacked with battered paperbacks. More books were lined up on shelves, to which here and there jam jars filled with bits of sea-smoothed glass, odd pebbles and bright shells, added a decorative touch. The walls were pasted with yellowing newspapers. Sheepskins carpeted the stone floor. The whole place had a tang of wood smoke and fish.
‘It’s, uh, all right,’ I said.
Cal looked pleased.
I waved at the light tube. ‘How do you pay the electricity bill?’
‘I don’t,’ said Cal. ‘My feudal superior does.’
‘You have a feudal superior? Wasn’t that abolished back in the Nineties?’
Cal shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. I pay my feu at the castle every year, cash in hand, and that covers electricity and plumbing and council tax and all that.’
I didn’t ask which castle. There are lots.
‘Another of those arrangements?’
‘Well, yes. It’s of long standing.’
‘Uh huh,’ I said, gazing at a page of The Scotsman announcing Agassiz’s discovery of evidence in Scotland of ancient glacier movements, and a Daily Record front page recording the first Moon landing. ‘You’ve been here all this time?’
‘Oh no!’ said Cal. ‘Just… off and on. Others have used it.’
He didn’t say what others. I didn’t ask.
‘But it is your permanent address?’
‘Yes.’ He looked puzzled. ‘Does that matter?’
‘It does if we’re going to be communicating with officialdom,’ I said. ‘What is the address, by the way?’
‘I don’t get much post,’ he said. ‘But “The Shed, The Shore, Kyleakin” should find me.’
‘I’ll make a start,’ I said. ‘Tonight. When will I see you again?’
‘Tomorrow evening, after nine? Top of the slipway?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I opened my arms. ‘Kiss?’
He shook his head. ‘It could be dangerous here.’ He didn’t explain why, but he added: ‘We both have… a lot to take in.’
We had indeed. With some reluctance, I hefted my rucksack, blew Cal a kiss, and ducked out into the sunlight and crunched away across the shingle beach.
Back at the Crossing Lodge, I rinsed my snorkel and flippers in the sink, sloped off to my room and showered and changed. Then I took my swimsuit and towel and grubby clothes downstairs and slung them in the washing machine. I had just clunked the door shut and was twisting the dial when Jeanie manifested behind me.
‘You’ve been out all day?’ she said, cheerily.
‘Yes,’ I said, standing up and forcing a smile. ‘Swimming.’ I gestured apologetically at the snorkel and flippers, still drying above the sink like some exotic seafood preparation.
‘Aye, and gallivanting about on the hills with yon craitur.’
How had she known? To my annoyance, I felt myself blushing.
‘Yes,’ I said, more defiantly than I felt.
She looked a bit more serious, and then made a twitch of her mouth, a shrug of her cheek. ‘Well, I warned you, so on your head be it, as I said.’
‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘How did you know?’
Jeanie smiled, visibly relenting a little, and tapped the side of her nose. ‘It’s a small island.’
It’s nothing of the sort, of course, but I left it at that. I’d already seen how the gossip network worked, now with added internet connectivity.
Some of the guests were in the front room, and the television was braying with audience laughter. I took a cup of tea and a biscuit upstairs, fired up my laptop, and did a search on naval bases. It’s not easy to find the right person to talk to about selkies and submarines. After a good deal of thought I decided to use the MoD’s confidential hotline email facility, and composed a polite message titled:
Welfare concerns raised by marine Metamorpha – query
In it, I briefly explained who I was, who Cal was, my encounter with the other selkie that morning, and Cal’s explanation of what the selkies’ problems were. Then I signed off, hit Send, and closed the laptop in the warm glow of a good deed well done.
You know what they say about good deeds.
Seven
