Page 19 of The Sirens

18

MARY

Mary had been asleep – or in the strange place between sleep and wakefulness – when a new sound woke her, joining the groan of timber, the cries and murmurs of the women. The heavy tread of a sailor, cursing as he encountered the stench of the prison deck, the yeast and blood and sweat. A female smell. Mary liked to imagine it as a sort of force, a power in and of itself. A protective circle.

But now she heard clinking and rustling as women cringed away from the sailor’s path. The oily glare from his lamp lit up wan faces and furious eyes.

Only Bridie seemed to welcome their visitor. She leaned over her berth to him, her pale body unfurling in the dark. The sailor put out his hand and helped her down, her curls glinting like flames.

When the bulkhead gate shut behind them, the silence that had fallen lifted.

‘Whore,’ said Sarah, the word sharp as a blade. ‘Fool, more like,’ Aoife murmured.

Mary said nothing. She could hear Eliza chewing her hair, and she wished suddenly for the return of the sailor’s lamp, so that she could see her sister’s face. So that she would no longer be alone with her memories, a child left in a forest.

Samhain. The night their lives changed forever. Bonfires burned in the darkness, heralding the coming of winter, warding off the spirits that watched from the Otherworld. The air was thick with poitín and smoke; men cradled fiddles as if they were babes, plucking cries from their throats.

Da had told them to stay inside the cottage. They were to eat the stew that hung in the pot over the hearth, to block their ears to the sounds of merriment. He gave Eliza his rosary for safekeeping, the corners of her mouth lifting as she clicked the beads through her fingers. Together they made a den of their blankets, like animals in a burrow; eating the stew straight from the pot.

‘Leave it,’ Eliza had said, when Mary brought her candlestick under the blankets, frowning at the lick of heat on her face. ‘You don’t need that.’

And so Mary had joined her sister in the darkness. Eliza asked if Mary wanted a story, and Mary squeezed her hand to say yes.

‘In Kerry, where the sea creeps up the shore, there once lived a merrow,’ Eliza began. ‘She had a tail the silver of fish scales, and hair the ruby red of dulse weed. Her voice was the sweetest thing anyone ever heard. One morning, she saw a fisherman – a handsome fisherman, with his own sweet voice – and the two fell in love. He made her his wife and—’

‘Stop,’ Mary said.

‘But don’t you remember it? The story Mam told us, before Da took us away.’

‘She never told any story,’ Mary said. ‘You have heard it somewhere else, you have invented it.’

She hated it, the way that Eliza clung to the memory of Mam. What good did it do Eliza to long for her so? She was never coming back.

The older she got, the angrier she was at Mam, for leaving them so carelessly. What had been in her mind, the day she went down to the shore and took off her cloak, throwing herself on the sea’s mercy? Had she not thought of Mary and Eliza, and how much they needed her?

Da had told her it was a blessing that Mam hadn’t taken Mary and Eliza with her that day, for then all three of them might be lost. Da had also told them that they must try not to think of the shore at Ard na Caithne, of the white waves on the sand, the sea that tingled on their skin. They must try not to remember the way their mother had endangered them.

And so Mam had become only an absence, a scar on her heart. Mam was not warm arms holding her close, or the sweetness of a lullaby. She was the cold space by the hearth, the ache of watching the village women hug their children tight. She was Da, hunched on the shore, turning the cloak over and over in his hands.

But Eliza kept going with her story.

‘The merrow and the fisherman loved each other so much that they made two children, twin girls—’

Mary could not bear it. Anger burned fierce in her belly, as bright as the bonfire flames outside.

‘Why do you do this – talk about her as if she were some magic thing? She didn’t care about us, Eliza. She let the sea take her away.’

Eliza fell silent. She turned her head, as though in anticipation of a blow.

‘She might have come back,’ she said softly. ‘If we had waited. Da should not have brought us to Armagh. We don’t belong here, so far inland.’

‘Come back? Eliza, she is dead,’ Mary said, standing so suddenly that the den of blankets collapsed around them.

‘What if she is not?’ Eliza pressed. ‘What if we were wrong? Perhaps she did not drown, perhaps she went to the tír fo thuinn …’

Mary coiled her hands into fists, the nails cutting into her palms.

‘Just because you cannot see what is in front of you,’ Mary said, ‘does not mean that you see things others cannot. It does not make you special. Only broken.’

The words fell heavy between them, and at once, Mary wished she could take them back.

‘Eliza …’

There was the rustling of blankets. Eliza stood, and before Mary could react, darted towards the door and out into the night.

Mary followed her to the stream, her voice hoarse from calling her sister’s name. Twigs snapped loudly beneath her boots, her breath misting in the autumn air. In the distance, a bonfire glowed, split into two watching eyes by Mary’s tears. As she ran deeper into the woods, the sounds of Samhain – the fiddles and the shouts and the song – faded, until there was only her own breath coming loud and ragged in her ears, her own desperate voice calling for Eliza.

She should never have said those things to her sister. She should never have driven her away, into the threat of the Samhain night.

By the time she reached the stream, Mary saw that Eliza had broken her promise not to touch the water: she had waded in so deep that it rose to her waist. Mary’s breath caught. It was so cold – cold even for autumn – and the reeds that curled from the banks were sugared with frost.

Mary struggled out of her boots, lifted her shawl over her head. She did not think of the night air and how it needled her skin, nor the stinging bite of the stream. She thought only of Eliza.

She waded into the centre of the stream, her frenzied movements sending white plumes into the air. The water pulled at her with hands that were icy but gentle, and something sparked inside her, something still and buried curled suddenly into life. Her arms, silver with bubbles, sliced through the water. A figure swam ahead, dark hair moving as if in a breeze. And in that moment, Mary felt herself slipping, felt the temptation to give herself over to feeling, to memory. To Mam.

Somewhere, an owl hooted, bringing her back to herself.

‘Eliza!’ she called. ‘Eliza!’

But it was as if her sister could not hear her, as if she had passed to some other plane, some other world. As if she had been lured to the water by some spirit or ghost, or perhaps even by an each-uisce , the shapeshifter from Da’s stories.

She caught Eliza around the waist, her sister struggling in her grasp. One pale fist struck Mary in the cheek.

But Mary was the stronger sister – had always been the stronger sister. She dragged Eliza to the rock in the middle of the stream and pushed the wet tangles of hair from her face.

‘What were you doing?’ she hissed, fear turning to anger in her veins. The skin between her toes and fingers burned. She needed to get Eliza home, to get her away from the water and into the dry of the cottage. Her heart pounded at the thought of Da, if he learned what they had done.

‘I was looking for it,’ Eliza said. ‘For the tír fo thuinn. The land beneath the waves.’

As if she might find Mam there, like the merrow from her childish story.

Pain bloomed in Mary’s heart, and she traced the glittering drops of water that clung to her sister’s cheek. So many times, Mary had thought Eliza the wiser sister: the one who could read anger in silence, sorrow in a sigh. But in that moment, she seemed so innocent, na?ve to death and its meaning.

The girl who sings but does not see.

It reminded Mary of her duty, as the first-born twin. To protect her sister, to guide her.

‘I’m sorry for what I said,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t mean it.’

‘I know,’ Eliza said. ‘I know you didn’t. And I know it isn’t true.’

But then, her features tightened, like the string of a fiddle.

‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Someone is there.’

Byrne, moving through the reeds towards them.

When the bulkhead gate scraped open again and the sailor Wright brought Bridie back inside, the women fell silent. Once the footsteps had sounded away and the light from the oil lamps had faded, the murmurs swelled.

Next to her, Eliza cringed in disgust.

‘It’s all right,’ Mary whispered. ‘He’s gone.’

‘But he isn’t,’ said Eliza. ‘I can smell him on her.’

Mary caught it too, a new note among the female musk. Something sour-sweet, like old milk. A male smell.

She heard the berth above creak as Aoife angled her body away from Bridie’s. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she spat. ‘I won’t share a bed with a Sasanach whore.’

‘What did you call me?’ Bridie said, her voice low and dangerous.

‘She called you whore,’ Sarah said from the berth across. ‘And she’s right with it. Haven’t we given the English enough? Our land, our men. They would even take our God from us. And now you’d give your virtue, too?’

There was a rustling then, the impatient sound of Bridie clucking her tongue.

‘It’s not my virtue I’m concerned with,’ she said. ‘But my belly. Would you not take it yourself, if it was offered? Extra meat for your leanbh ?’

Sarah said nothing.

‘I can smell food, Mammy,’ her child murmured. ‘I’m so hungry.’

‘Take it,’ Bridie said now. ‘For your girl.’

There was the smell of biscuit then: the meaty brine of salt pork. The berth creaked as Bridie reached out to Sarah.

‘I—’

‘I won’t be offering twice.’

‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘Just see that your girl gets there alive.’

Mary curled up tight, trying to banish the sound of little Annie’s jaws moving. Her own stomach writhed with hunger.

And there was something else: something that struck fear deep in her belly, Da’s warnings echoing inside her. A new pain in her toes, on the soles of the feet, where the bilge water had lapped at her, as if the skin was lifting and peeling away. She remembered the time as a child she had plunged her hand into water and watched it turn white, the way the stream had burned on her skin.

Da had tried so hard to protect them from the water, from the sea that had taken Mam away.

And now they were at its mercy.