Page 28 of The Sirens

27

MARY

Days – or perhaps weeks – passed before they were taken on deck again.

As the women struggled to their feet in a chorus of groans and clanking chains, Mary wondered if there had been another death. Despite her constant hunger, her stomach churned at the thought of the dead man they’d buried at sea all those weeks ago, the pale blue of his foot.

But once on deck it was clear that they had not been summoned for a funeral: instead, the mood was one of celebration. Mary closed her eyes at the touch of fresh air on her face, savouring its briny tang. It was dusk, and when she opened her eyes she saw the first glimmer of stars appear in the pink sky. The sea stretched around them, dark as a bruise.

An iron smell reminded her of the times she’d helped Da slaughter chickens, and as her eyes adjusted to the thin light, she saw that rivulets of blood seeped across the deck. Through the throng of sailors, she could not see where it was coming from.

Panic gripped her: had they killed someone?

Around her, the men drank and danced and sang, their feet stamping in time to the words, and through their shifting bodies she saw that a carcass hung from the mast.

Aoife was in front of her, patches of scalp shining through her hair. She stiffened, so that Mary bumped into her. The older woman’s whole body was trembling, and her rasping words struck fear into Mary’s heart.

‘What have they done?’ she was saying. ‘Dear God, they have killed us all!’

Mary squinted to make out the gruesome sight. Her fogged brain had assumed that they had slaughtered some pig or sheep, but of course none had been brought on board; not at Cork and not in Rio. That was why their rations were so paltry.

‘Please, Aoife …’ she said, her lips numb with fear. ‘In God’s name, please tell me that isn’t a person?’

But Aoife only trembled harder. Beside her, Eliza made little noises of frustration, her fingers clinging desperately to Mary’s own. Mary knew how much Eliza hated these moments – moments when the keenness of her other senses could not fill the gap left by blindness – and her heart ached with guilt. Eliza counted on her to make sense of what she couldn’t see. But there was nothing she could do, no reassurance she could give, when her own eyes could not comprehend the sight before them.

It was Bridie who answered.

‘It’s a shark, you eejits,’ she said, turning to face them, then sighing when she saw their blank looks. ‘A giant fish with great big teeth, that’s all. They’ve caught it and hauled it up on deck.’

Mary’s pulse slowed, but it was a shock to see Bridie’s face after so long in darkness. Her cheekbones were sharp, her eyes shadowed; her red mane of hair was matted and alive with fleas. Mary shuddered to think how she herself must look – she could hardly bear to look properly at her twin – but it was somehow worse to see Bridie brought so low. Even Wright’s payment couldn’t keep the flesh on her bones.

In front of her, Aoife was still trembling and sobbing. ‘Hush, now,’ Mary said. ‘Did you not hear Bridie? It’s a shark – a fish – not a person.’

But Aoife only sobbed harder, cursing the captain and his men for bringing bad luck down upon them all.

‘I think she knows what it is,’ Eliza said, her voice low. ‘She is from the Blasket Islands, remember? She must know each fish in the sea. But will you describe it for me, Mary? The shark?’

Eliza’s voice was heavy with concern for Aoife, but still Mary caught the relish with which she sounded out that new word – shark . It was so like Eliza to take pleasure in the learning of something new, even amid all this terror. Her hunger for the world and all its workings was never sated. Not for the first time, Mary wondered if God had made some sort of mistake when he took her sister’s sight. He ought to have taken Mary’s instead. She’d always been so dreamy – Da used to say her head was so far up in the clouds that she never saw what was right in front of her. It was Eliza who brought Mary back to the world, to how it really was.

She strained forward, eyes narrowed as she inspected the strange creature. She saw bright teeth, sharp rows of them, like a weaver’s loom. Fins that made her think of wings, a shimmer of scales. The dead glint of an eye.

She imagined the creature gliding through the deep. Perhaps, beneath the waves, the shark took human form; became the ruler of the tír fo thuinn. She thought she understood why Aoife railed against what the men had done.

How to tell Eliza all of this?

‘It is the loveliest – and the most frightening – thing I ever saw,’ she said. ‘They should not have killed it.’

* * *

When the shark had been butchered, they were taken back below. The smell of cooking meat filtered from the galley all the way down to the prison deck, turning Mary’s stomach. When the sailors unlocked the bulkhead, bearing buckets of charred, bloodied flesh, Aoife began to sob again. Some of the women gagged, but most ate the pungent meat.

When a sailor flung a scrap into Mary’s hands, she shuddered at the feel of it. The flesh was veined with blood, and she could not help thinking how only hours before, it had throbbed and pulsed with life, propelling the shark through the sea.

How many times had she swallowed mutton stew, or gnawed on the bone of a chicken? Had she not eaten the fish that Da had caught, when she was a small girl back in Ard na Caithne?

But this felt different. Even as she tried so hard to push it from her mind, she could not stop thinking about Eliza’s story, about the merrow woman with her shining silver scales. The story she said Mam had told them, the story Mary could not bring herself to remember. When she closed her eyes, she could still see the shark’s carcass before they had carved it away; the elegant sweep of its tail, the silver gleam of its flesh. Bile rose in her throat.

But she needed to survive. She pushed the cold, jellied meat into her mouth and swallowed.

Mary could not sleep.

The prison deck seemed tighter around her body after their brief glimpse of the stars. Her stomach contracted around the shark meat. The other women stank: the tang of roast meat added to the sourness of urine and sweat, of body parts too long slicked together.

Next to her, Eliza slept, strands of her hair tickling Mary’s nose. Mary breathed in, searching for the smell of her sister, the smell of nights spent safe and loved in their father’s cottage; the must of old blankets and the sweet rise and fall of breath. But there was only the lingering smell of cooked flesh, black and tarry in her nostrils, like the bonfires from Samhain.

It was harder, then, to keep the memories away.

She could not say when she’d first become aware of Byrne. For as long as she could remember – ever since they’d moved to the north and into the little cottage with its plot of flax, its spinning wheel and loom – he had come to collect the rent and tithe.

He spoke, as all the villagers did, differently to them; the vowels were somehow smaller, sharper, in his mouth. His hair and eyes were the black of turf, his clothes fine with the wages he earned from the Big House.

It was Eliza who first learned to predict his visits. Da would draw into himself, would become sullen and quiet, fingers reaching more often for the poitín bottle than for the fiddle. ‘The tithe,’ she would whisper to Mary in the warmth of their blankets. ‘He’ll come for it tomorrow. That’s why there are no stories. No songs.’

And sure enough, morning would come, bringing with it the rap of knuckles on the cottage door. Byrne, smiling with all his teeth, blessing their health as he took Da’s earnings from his hands.

At first, his eyes had glazed over Mary – Eliza had always hung back, a sheep scenting a wolf – but as her body changed, so did the tone of these meetings. He would look not at Da but at Mary, at the new swells of flesh beneath her dress. She began to drape her shawl over her shoulders when the knock came at the door, even in summer when the cottage grew thick with heat. Before, she had always smiled hello when she saw him around the village, or at the market, frightened that any rudeness might hold some consequence for Da. But she began to keep her eyes to the ground when she caught sight of him cutting through the crowd.

Still, she’d put him out of her mind for the most part, busying herself with her daily tasks. The give of the vegetables under her knife when she prepared the evening meal, the dough for the farls sticky on her palms. The dreams that sustained her: of growing up and falling in love, of bearing children and keeping them close. When Da fell asleep, she’d walk with Eliza to the stream, her sister’s hand firm in hers as if to tug her away from those dreams and back to earth, to the grass beneath their feet and the brush of insects on their skin.

‘I wonder where you go, sometimes,’ Eliza had said to her, softly in the warm dark of their bed one night. It was summer, and Mary’s skin itched with straw, and with the too-close heat of her sister’s body. Each time she rolled away, pressing herself against the coolness of the wall, her sister moved with her.

‘What do you mean?’ she said, though the question pricked like a splinter on her finger, an intrusion.

‘When you’re quiet like this, but your breathing is shallow. I know you’re not asleep, but you’re not here, either.’

‘Nowhere,’ Mary lied, pressing her cheek against the wall. She could not tell Eliza of these longings: longings for love and children. Of a family, complete rather than fractured, the way theirs was.

She loved her sister – though love was not a strong enough word for the sensation that Eliza’s heart thrummed in time with hers, that if one of them ceased to draw breath, the other would, too. But she did not know how to fit her sister into these dreams.

Perhaps Byrne had smelled it on her, the longing for something else.

Perhaps that was why it was her that he singled out. Why it was Mary that he chose, instead of Eliza.

Samhain. The burn of the water on her skin, the rush of the stream around her. The new tightness in Eliza’s face.

Hush. Someone is there.

He came upon them so quickly that Mary had felt unable to move, fear weighting her down like stones. Eliza had thrown herself from the rock, but Mary had lain frightened and twitching, a gutted fish. He swore as he waded through the icy water, his hands reaching for her, calling her his love, his beauty. His breath touched her before his fingers did, reeking of drink, of something sweetly rotten.

Then, his shadow on her, a bat blotting out the moon. Around her, the night sounds swelled, as if this – a man pushing a girl against the jagged face of a rock – was but some ordinary occurrence of nature.

Still she could not move. One hand clawed at her breast, the other reached for her skirts, his breath a ragged wheeze in her ear and then—

The soft, wet thwack of rock on bone; his body slumping over her; lips slack and drooling in her hair. She could see the moon again, and in its yellow light Eliza, reddened stone trembling in her hand.

Blood sweetened the air, and Mary saw them hang – their bodies swaying on the rope, Da stooped in mourning clothes – before Byrne groaned against her ear. Eliza helped her struggle out from under his weight. Mary gasped as the air forced its way into her lungs.

‘It was my fault,’ Mary said later, under their den of blankets in the cottage, hiding like foolish children. The men’s shouts were getting closer and though she did not yet know the words assault and exile , she knew they would be punished for what they had done. ‘I was clumsy, I led him there, and then I did not …’ the words clogged her mouth, ‘I could not fight. I am weak. Not like you.’

‘No, Mary,’ Eliza said. ‘No. You must not think that. It was the water that protected me. It’s the water that makes us strong.’

The wind grew loud and furious, blowing high and fierce as a woman’s voice. Mary began to wonder if Aoife was right, if the sea sought vengeance for what they had taken from it. The tide lifted them with great grey hands and the sailors’ shouts of work turned to screams of terror. Down below, the women held hands and closed their eyes.

When the lightning came through the cracks between the boards, her own body looked strange and otherworldly; her toes greenish and webbed. Her skin seemed to shimmer, as if covered with tiny scales, like the shark’s had been. But then, in the next burst of light, the illusion was gone.