Page 23 of The Sirens

22

MARY

Mary’s skin was burning.

She opened her eyes, gasping at the pain. Her feet stung where the water had licked at them for so many long weeks, the flesh rough and thickened. She tried to wriggle her toes and winced.

Oh, how she longed for light, to escape the dark heat of the prison deck, the other bodies pressed in around her. She closed her eyes and saw Da’s face at the courtroom. What was he doing now? She imagined him alone in the cottage, his head in his hands, shoulders shaking as the goat knickered, unfed, in the corner. Smelling of stale sweat and unwashed clothes and too much drink.

A stirring next to her: she had woken Eliza.

‘Mary?’ Her sister’s voice, soft and low in her ear. ‘Are you hungry? You must stay strong – they will feed us soon.’

It was worse, somehow, that Eliza could remain so calm. That she was at home in this blackness. But Mary could not mark it. Was it not a greater torture for Eliza, who Da joked could hear a man whistle all the way from Dublin, who could tell you whether some mammy had burnt her farls in the next county? How could she bear it, the heat that pressed against their bodies like sticky hands? The bilge water, teeming with rotting food and human waste and the soft corpses of rats? The sounds of four score women crying and muttering and praying to God above for their deliverance?

‘It is not hunger,’ she whispered, for it was true that her stomach had shrivelled, that it had learned to accept little. ‘It is the pain,’ she murmured, forcing the words through dry lips. ‘In my feet, my hands.’

‘I feel it too,’ Eliza whispered back. And then she took Mary’s hand in hers, unfurling her fingers and tracing them over the winged flesh between her own. Mary gasped at the feel of her sister’s skin, sharp and crusted as if with scales.

‘Yours is the same,’ Eliza said. The two sisters were quiet a moment, hands clasped together tight.

Mary thought of Da, the hunched curve of his back as he keened to the waves, the twist of Mam’s cloak in his hands.

She thought of Mam, who had given herself to the mercy of the sea, and what it had done to her.

She wanted to ask Eliza what was happening to them, but she could not find the words. Her fear was so great that it had stolen her voice.

The days seeped together like mud. The air was still, too, and without the howl of wind and waves they could hear seabirds for the first time. They did not sound like the birds from home; the jays and the robins and the finches with their pretty songs. Instead, their calls were harsh and eerie.

The women were quiet, the stifling heat sucking their energy. Above deck, it seemed a different story: the timbers shook with frenzied steps, shouts and laughter slipping through the cracks. More than once they heard screaming, the scuffling of a fight. When the men came to deliver their rations, they carried with them the sweet stink of rum.

‘The doldrums, they call it,’ Bridie said. ‘When the sea is flat and the wind dies, so the sails cannot fill. Wright told me it sends men mad.’

Aoife clucked her tongue. She often ignored Bridie for days at a time, after Wright’s visits.

‘He’s not so bad,’ Bridie would say. ‘He wants to be here as little as we do. Press gang got him when he was a lad, took him off to fight the Yankees. He went back home last year to find his mam but she’d long since died. He doesn’t know how to do anything else, he says. After he finishes, he likes me to stroke his hair. Once he wanted me to sing him a lullaby.’

‘Ugh,’ Aoife would spit. ‘I don’t care how much he misses his fucking mammy. He’s still English, a jackeen .’

‘Doldrums,’ Eliza said now, rolling the word around her mouth. ‘A perfect name for such a thing. Like the tolling of a bell.’

‘What kind of bell?’ Sarah asked, her voice thin. ‘A church bell, like a funeral?’

‘Not mine,’ said Bridie, loud and somehow jaunty, as if they were not in a ship’s hold but some crowded Dublin tavern. ‘They won’t be burying my body at sea. I’ll die an old matron, with hundreds of acres and gold rings on fingers so fat that no one will be able to get them off. All that gold, lost to the worms.’

Little Annie giggled. ‘Can I’ve a gold ring, Mammy?’

Sarah shushed her. ‘Greed is a sin,’ she said to her daughter, though Mary knew the words were meant for Bridie.

‘Tell that to the judge who sentenced you,’ Bridie said. ‘Half a yard of linen, was it? You’re lucky you didn’t swing from a rope.’

‘Hush now,’ said Aoife. ‘I won’t have this talk of death and funerals. It’s bad luck, so.’

* * *

The winds returned, and with them a lightness to the men’s step when they came to deliver the rations.

‘We’ll be stopping soon,’ Bridie murmured, returning from one of her visits with Wright. ‘The men are giddy with waiting for it.’

‘Stopping?’ Mary asked, failing to understand. ‘You mean, we’ve reached New South Wales?’

Bridie laughed.

‘Not New South Wales, you eejit. We’ve got months more to go still, Wright said. No – he told me the name of the place. Rio , he called it.’

‘Rio? I’ve never heard of it,’ Sarah said grandly from the opposite berth.

‘Well, it must be purely a sailor’s fancy,’ Bridie scoffed. ‘I shall tell Wright to advise the captain not to sail to Rio; Sarah Hagarty thinks it does not exist.’

The days stretched on, the ship cutting through the waves, and Mary forgot about what Bridie had said. There was too much else to crowd her mind: the flesh between her fingers was beginning to thicken, and there was an odd ache under her jaw, as if something were budding there.

But then Eliza woke her, tugging frantically at her hand. ‘The air,’ said her sister, as Mary opened her eyes to darkness. ‘The air is different.’

Around them, other women were stirring and talking, voices hissing and rumbling. Mary tasted the air, as Eliza had taught her. There was something else, mingled with the familiar brine of the sea. A green, animal smell.

Land.

Rio de Janeiro. Another name that was strange on Mary’s tongue.

The women were briefly brought on deck, allowed to watch the throng of colourful little boats dance in the harbour. The sky seemed to have grown in the time since Mary had last seen it: her mind could not fathom so much blue. Beyond the dock, she could make out buildings lining the jungle’s mouth like pretty teeth. Mountains rose in the distance, green and lush. One of the sailors gave them oranges: they peeled back the bitter skin and sucked the sweet juice from the tender flesh. It was the best thing Mary had ever tasted.

Later, the men removed the casks and barrels that were stored with them in the prison deck, straining and sweating in the heat.

‘Rum,’ said Bridie as one of them passed, grunting and wincing under the weight of a barrel. There was a wistful note in her voice.

‘What will they do with it?’ Sarah asked.

‘The captain will be wanting to sell it,’ said Bridie. ‘The king doesn’t pay him much for transporting the likes of us. Wright says it’s a racket, that His Majesty’s government would arrest the captain if they knew. But none will risk their skin to tell.’

Mary was glad that the captain was selling the casks and barrels, for surely their absence would mean more room in the prison deck. There’d also be less rum for the men to drink, or to offer Bridie and the other women who’d followed in her footsteps. There was a new, glassy look to Bridie’s eyes that she didn’t like, and sometimes she heard her teeth chatter, though it was never cold in the prison deck, in that warm fug of breath and bodies.

But after only a few days, the sounds of men cursing and grunting filtered down to them. As their lights approached, Mary sat up, her hand groping for Eliza’s. When the bulkhead gate opened, she saw that it was the sailors bringing back the casks and barrels of rum.

‘Wright says the captain couldn’t sell them,’ Bridie told them later. ‘He’ll be wanting to make his coin some other way.’

After they left Rio, the sea grew rough and cold, the rations fewer. Mary had thought that there might be fresh food now, remembering the sweetness of the orange on her tongue. Surely, the purpose of such a stop would be to purchase more supplies? But if there was anything fresh to be had, they never saw a morsel: the sailors brought them gruel and the dried husks of biscuits, fleshy-tasting with maggots. Sometimes, they were given only water, blood-warm and paltry.

Bridie said that the captain must have kept the King’s coin for himself rather than spend it on more rations.

‘Didn’t I tell you,’ she said, ‘that he’d need some other way to make his funds?’

The hungrier and thirstier they were, the harder it was to brave the storms. Thunder and lightning tore the air, and the ship groaned as she climbed the waves. Icy water rushed into the prison deck, and one of the casks burst, flooding the bilges with rum. Mary’s ears rang with screams of terror, and her own heart galloped in her chest, keeping time with the bucking waves.

She thought of Mam, and for the first time in years let herself wonder what her final moments had been like, in the grey fury of the sea. Did it hurt, to drown? Or had it been like the strange memory Mary had, of silver bubbles and darkly drifting hair?