Page 32 of The Sirens

31

MARY

Mam’s lips were warm against Mary’s ear.

‘Come, a linbh ,’ she said. ‘Follow me.’

Mary opened her eyes to darkness. There was the long-buried smell of home – not the smell of the cottage in Armagh, with the hearth that she had yet to sweep and the stain of poitín in the air. Instead there was the briny tang of the sea, the sweet rot of fish guts. Her mother’s scent, sun-baked sand and the gritty inside of shells.

Mam lifted her from the bed, and Mary buried her face in the damp tendrils of her hair. They passed Da’s sleeping form, her mother stepping lightly over the coils of rope at the threshold and into the pearled morning.

Eliza was waiting on the shore, her eyes on the foaming waves as if she could see them. She turned at the soft fall of their footsteps in the sand and smiled.

See , her face seemed to say. Didn’t I tell you?

Mam took their hands in hers, and together the three of them walked towards the water. Spindrift raked back Mary’s hair with gentle fingers. She was afraid to look at Mam, afraid that if she did, the tall, elegant figure – pale and thin as if she’d been whittled from scrimshaw – would disappear. They passed bloated bodies of jellyfish, red ropes of dulse, and then the water frothed and bubbled over Mary’s toes. Already it began to sting, and the fear started up in her. She hung back, pulling at Mam’s fingers, but Mam and Eliza strode on, white water rising to their chests.

Mary looked back to the shore, to the little stone cottage squatting on the shingle. Somehow, she knew that if she kept going – if she followed Mam and Eliza – she would never see it again. She would never see Da again.

‘Come, a linbh ,’ Mam said again, and for the first time Mary allowed herself to look upon her mother’s face.

Fleshy wings, like the gills on the herring Da caught in his net, beat beneath her jaw. Her cheeks were crusted grey with barnacles, and there were raw pink holes where her eyes should have been.

‘Come, a linbh ,’ she said once more, as if those were the only words she knew. Mary knew then that this was not Mam but some copy of her, that Mam was dead, a corpse eaten by the sea.

Her own scream woke her to the groan and pitch of the ship. Her breath came fast in her chest, and she raised fingers to her neck, checking that the skin there was smooth. It was tender to the touch, so tender that she ripped her hand away, not wanting to feel it, not wanting to know.

Already, the water was soaking into her, pulling her into its maw. She imagined it reaching inside the ship and dragging her to the seabed, the way it had done with Mam, the flesh lifting from her greening bones—

‘Mary?’ Next to her Eliza stirred. ‘What is it?’

She could not answer, her mouth was too dry and swollen with thirst. How cruel that water raged around them, that it seeped into her very dreams, and yet there was still not enough to drink. She wanted to cry but the tears would not come.

Instead, she folded herself small as she could in the berth, gagging on the stink of rotting blankets and her own unwashed flesh. She wished there was some way she could stop her ears, some way she could drown out the sound of terrified sobbing around her, the awful boom as the ship rose and fell.

At first, she thought she was imagining Eliza’s voice, that it was part of the dream that lingered still. But then the sweet notes grew louder, and she knew that her sister sought to soothe and comfort her. She felt Eliza’s hand grasp hers.

Join me , she seemed to say. It will help .

It was a strange song that Eliza had chosen, with its eerie echo of Mary’s dream. She wondered if her sister had seen inside her mind, had seen the spectre of Mam that had haunted her, so different from Eliza’s beloved merrow with shining scales. Perhaps she wanted to vanquish Mary’s nightmare, to paint in her mind the image of Mam as she, Eliza, remembered her.

But Eliza was right about one thing, Mary realised. Singing would calm her, and so she tilted back her head and pushed the song out through her lungs. It was one that Da had taught them, when they were small enough to sit at his knee before the jumping flames of the hearth. It was about a maiden who waits on the shore, luring a sea-captain with her voice, before robbing him of his coins and his sword. Da had sung it with such passion – Mary remembered feeling the notes quivering from his chest – that she had believed he’d composed it himself.

But that could not have been so, for the other women began to join in until their voices grew so strong that it seemed they might lift the ship above the waves, away from the savage sea to safety.

You should have known me before

I sang you to sleep, and I robbed you of wealth

And again I’m a maid on the shore

Mary wondered if the captain could hear it. The beauty they made of his prison.