Page 10 of The Sirens

9

MARY

The other women’s voices seemed to Mary one awful, endless sound, like a creature had stowed away with them in the hold. The moans and cries and whimpers melted together, pulsing with the waves.

Everything was louder in the dark.

How she hated it, this blackness. When the night was at its deepest – when no light shone through the cracks between the floorboards above – she no longer knew where her body ended and the darkness began. Sometimes, she was grateful for the cramping hunger in her belly, the rawness of her skin. It reassured her that she still existed.

It was Eliza who taught her how to tell the women apart, how to navigate this world of dank wood against her body, of creaking ropes and sloshing bilges.

‘You must learn their voices,’ she whispered, lacing her cold fingers through Mary’s. ‘Each has a difference, a tell. Start with those in the berth above us.’

Mary listened, and realised Eliza was right. Slowly, different voices emerged, like a river splitting itself into smaller streams.

‘That is Bridie,’ Eliza whispered, as a woman laughed when the ship pitched, upending the slop buckets. ‘I think she must be very beautiful. That laugh – rich as the pouring of ale into a glass.’

Mary recognised the laugh, realised that she’d noticed its owner before: had seen the fingers of light pick out the fire of her hair, the milky curve of a cheek.

‘Yes,’ she told Eliza, squeezing her hand. ‘She has red hair; I have seen it.’

Together, the sisters listened, learning the rhythm of each woman’s voice. For the first time, Mary noticed what Eliza must have always known, that a voice had valleys and crags, telling you of sadness or delight. You could almost feel it under your fingers, like it was land.

This was how her sister knew things before they were said. The secret hurts and joys.

And so when Bridie told of the crime that had seen her transported – the Englishman she and a friend had robbed on the road from Cork to Dublin, the coins that shone in the grimed palms of their hands – Mary heard something else beneath the swagger, beneath Bridie’s insistence that she’d do it all again, ‘just for the look on his fat English face’. She heard regret. Grief.

In the berth next to theirs was a woman called Sarah, with lilting Leinster vowels. She was travelling with her young daughter, Annie, and spoke in a high, uncertain tone, so that everything she said sounded to Mary like a question.

Her husband had died two years before, she told them, fighting in the rebellion. ‘I tried, God knows, to make ends meet,’ she said. ‘Laundry, linen for weaving. I thought of stealing, I’ll own it now. But I had my girl to look after, didn’t I?’

Mary didn’t need Eliza to point out the way Sarah’s voice thickened as she told of how a man had tried to buy what she wasn’t willing to sell, and then had accused her of stealing from him. ‘When I said no, he called me whore .’

The story reminded her of what Da had said, when she and Eliza got their first blood. It had happened to Eliza first; the crimson wings on her shift made Mary scream, terrified her sister was dying. Later, over bowls of stew that Mary had burnt, distracted by worry, Da had told them that the blood wasn’t something to fear. Mary felt a shameful heat in her cheeks at the glisten of tears in his eyes. Under the table, Eliza’s fingers had searched for Mary’s. (‘He was thinking of Mam,’ Eliza said later, in the scratch of blankets, Da’s snores washing over them. ‘It would have been up to her, to explain such things.’)

‘You’re becoming women,’ he’d said into his stew. ‘From now on,’ his hand tightened on his spoon, ‘I don’t want either of you going anywhere alone. Not the market, and certainly not the stream. Do you understand, so?’

Mary and Eliza had both nodded, but for her part at least, Mary hadn’t understood. Not then. Da had made becoming a woman sound like something dangerous.

The oldest voice came from Aoife, the woman who shared the berth above with Bridie. Sometimes, the buck and lurch of the ship pushed her half out of the berth so that her hair hung down the side, crinkling against Mary’s nose. It smelled of dead, bleached things spat from the ocean. But her voice was all forest, rasping against Mary’s ears.

Aoife was from the Blasket Islands. Unlike Bridie and Sarah, she would not say what she had done, why she was there. All her words she saved to hiss curses at the sailors, the captain they’d glimpsed briefly when they were brought on board. Mary had been struck by the slightness of him, how the rich navy cloth of his uniform swamped his thin body. He made her think of an animal that has been born a runt and bares its teeth all the fiercer for it.

‘Fool,’ Aoife had said. ‘Carrying so many of us. Four score women on a ship. Have you ever heard of such a thing?’

‘What do you mean?’ Mary asked. ‘A woman on a ship. Bad luck, so.’

Bad luck or not, the hold buzzed constantly with women’s voices like angry wasps. Everyone sharing their stories. There was pain, but laughter, too. Relief in speaking, in hearing your own voice and recognising it.

It didn’t matter that the ship tossed the women together as it foundered over the waves. That flesh knocked against flesh and hair knotted with hair. Talking – telling stories – was a way of keeping yourself separate from the mass of hair and limbs. It was a way of keeping yourself human.

‘Humans are born to storytelling,’ Da used to say. ‘Does the goat tell stories? The blackbird, or the sheep? No. Sure, it is God’s gift to us and us alone.’

But, Mary thought now, some had more of the gift than others. Da’s tales had a way of warming your belly so that, even on a biting winter night, you didn’t feel the cold.

Eliza said that Mam had told stories, too; about the merrow who dwelled in the tír fo thuinn. But Mary did not like to think of that.

The story Eliza begged to hear again and again was of Da first setting eyes on Mam – the red water in the dawn, the dark pools of her eyes – but Mary preferred the story of their birth.

They’d been born sixteen summers ago, by the sea in Ard na Caithne, County Kerry, at the very edge of the land. In a little cottage, Da used to say, not far from the rocky sweep of shore where their parents had first met.

‘Your mam swelled tight and round as a drum,’ Da’s story went. ‘The moon was so high and bright in the sky, bright enough that its white shadow swam in the water, so that there might have been two moons that night. Twin moons, for twin girls.’

At this point in the story, he would always pause to smile at first Mary then Eliza, drinking in their faces as though he still couldn’t quite believe the miracle of them.

‘Mam pushed and pushed, in time with the waves beating on the shore. You, Mary, came first – slipping into my hands like a wriggling fish; with eyes as big and dark as your mam’s and your hair seal-slick against your skull. Eliza, now – you took a little longer, as though you couldn’t quite bear to leave your mother’s belly. And you scared us, so you did; for your little mouth was blue as a winter berry. The cord had become wrapped around your neck and my heart raced as I cut you free.’

Da would pause again here, his gaze distant somehow, and Mary wondered if he was thinking of Eliza’s sight; whether, if he had cut the cord quicker, it might have been saved.

Da would finish the story with Mam cradling a baby to each breast, the four of them warm before the hearth. When she was younger, Mary wished that they were all still there, curled safely together in the cottage. That Mam had never left them.

Eliza liked to speak of Mam, liked to tell Mary her memories in exchange for Mary’s own, in the same way they might compare treasures gathered in the woods.

‘Do you remember how the sea tasted?’ she would ask. ‘Do you remember Mam taking us deeper and deeper? Do you remember the story of the merrow?’

Mary would shush her sister, looking around to make sure that Da hadn’t heard.

‘It was dangerous,’ she’d hiss. ‘What Mam did. Taking us into the sea. You know how the water hurts us. You know what happened to her.’

They’d been five years old when Mam drowned. Mary remembered waking in the old cottage, to the beat of the tide and the call of the gulls, and a strange sound she hadn’t heard before. A sort of keening, of the kind a woman might make in caoineadh , lament . But it was no woman – it was Da, sitting in front of the cottage with his eyes on the shifting waves, calling out for Mam.

Mary would never forget the sight of him, his shoulders slumped, turning a length of sodden fabric in his hands. At first, Mary did not recognise it, but then she saw the intricate stitching at the hem, noticed its colour: lichen green. Da was holding Mam’s cloak.

Mam went into the sea, he told them, and did not come out.

She was gone.

Not so long after that, Da packed up their little house, leaving even the fishing nets and the boat behind. He bundled Mary and Eliza into a donkey-led cart and took them north to Armagh, where he’d heard that a man might make his fortune in the linen trade.

Those first months in the new place were hard: Da struggled to make the flax yield, and more nights than not his eyes glowed and his words slurred from too much poitín. These were the only times he spoke of Mam: sometimes with tears and sometimes with rage, and Mary realised that he was angry with his wife for drowning, for putting herself in harm’s way. ‘I begged her not to go near the water,’ he said, again and again. ‘I begged her to stay ashore, where she was safe.’

Over the years, Da’s anger became Mary’s own. She locked her memories of her mother deep inside her heart. It was easier, she learned, to be angry than to be sad.