Page 35 of The Sirens

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MARY

In the dark of the prison deck, there was little to distract her from the pain. From the whoosh of blood in her ears, the ache of thirst in her throat.

Sometimes, Mary wondered if there was a world beyond the ship at all.

It had been some other girl, some other Mary, who had seen the stars blink through the clouds at night; who had watched starlings write their messages in the sky. Even the girl who had shivered in the cart from Kilmainham to the port, passing through the green countryside still scabbed with war; even that girl was a stranger to her now.

Mary’s world had shrunk to contain only her own body. Her hunger, her thirst. And the new, strange pain: the feeling that something was pushing through the soft skin on her neck, that her fingers and toes were knitting themselves together.

They had been told that they had only four weeks left, now. As hungry as Mary was, and as much as the smell of the slop buckets and the gnawing of the rats made her want to retch, fear wormed in her chest. When they had the energy to talk, the women began to wonder what awaited them in New South Wales.

A woman called Lizzie with a Northern accent spoke of a girl from her village who had been transported several years before. The girl had found someone in Sydney Town to write a letter home to her mother and Lizzie had read it aloud for her. ‘She wrote that she’d been taken to a place called the female factory ,’ Lizzie told them, whispering the final words for effect. ‘Where settlers would come and pick out the girls they wanted for servants or wives. Her mammy was beside herself, thinking her precious girl might have to marry a Protestant, or bed someone out of wedlock. The poor woman couldn’t decide what would be worse.’

Mary had imagined a man plucking her from a line as if she were a cow, taking her away from Eliza. She had felt for her sister’s hand and squeezed it tight. Perhaps it would not be so bad, she told herself. A man might be kind, like Da. But he might be like the sailors, or like Byrne.

That was the problem. There seemed to be no way of telling the difference.

One morning, after the rations had been delivered, Mary lifted her hand to her neck, wanting to soothe the stinging pain she felt there. She gasped as her fingers touched the flesh; the wet smoothness of it, like a membrane.

‘Eliza,’ she whispered now. ‘Move your hair aside.’

‘What? What’s wrong?’ Eliza’s fingers fluttered to her chest, brushing at her smock. ‘Is it a rat?’

‘Hush,’ Mary hissed. ‘I don’t want the others to see. Just – I need you to show me your neck. Move a bit closer to me.’ Eliza shuffled forward, to the space where light snaked from the upper decks, and held back her hair. Mary covered her mouth with her hand so that her sister would not hear her gasp.

Two slits had appeared on Eliza’s neck, at the exact spot where her pulse flickered.

She watched them move in time with her sister’s breathing. At first, her mind was too blank with horror to comprehend them. But then she remembered the herring Da had caught back in Ard na Caithne, the nightmare she’d had of Mam. The beat of those fleshy wings.

‘Come, now,’ Eliza said, catching Mary’s shaking fingers in her own. ‘There’s no need to be frightened.’

‘But these wounds,’ Mary breathed. ‘This sickness—’

‘It is not a sickness,’ Eliza said. ‘But you know that, you remember. That night, the things Mam told us …’

Mary rolled away from her sister, pressed her body against the curved wall of the berth, with its stink of sweat and tar.

She closed her eyes, but instead of blackness, she saw a face. Mam’s face, that terrible face from her dream, with its scaled skin; the raw pink of its empty eyes. Eliza stroked her back, murmuring softly, but Mary pulled away, burrowing tighter into herself.

She would not listen to Eliza’s whisperings, her imaginings borne of grief.

And she would not remember. She could not bear to.