Page 45 of The Sirens

44

MARY

The night before they were due to make landfall at New South Wales, Mary woke to a strange sound. A violent tearing, like the rending of time itself. Then, as if clasped by great hands, she was wrenched from her berth, her skull cracking against the wall opposite.

She tried to grab hold of something, to scramble upright, but the ship tilted forward and there was another great ripping sound. Mary realised that it was the splintering of wood, the bursting of casks and barrels. The sea was lapping its way inside the ship.

All around, the women were screaming, crying, praying. A terrified chorus. ‘God help us!’

‘I cannot see, I cannot see!’ ‘Pray for your souls!’

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners …’ ‘The floor! The floor!’

Mary looked down and saw that the wooden walkway between the berths was gone – in its place rose black, jagged rocks, the sea swirling around them, vicious white.

She cried out in pain as the gouged flesh of her neck began to widen. She pressed a shaking hand to her skin. It felt warm and slick, like the inside of her mouth.

She heard Eliza’s voice, calling to her in the dark. Around her, women retched and screamed in fear.

The ship pitched again and she took her chance and leapt back to her berth, the sea licking at her feet. She felt Eliza’s hands reaching out to her, pulling her to safety.

‘We need to go,’ Eliza said. ‘Now.’

‘Where?’ Mary asked, though she knew the answer. Her lungs already burned for it.

‘You must believe, Mary,’ Eliza said, her voice urgent and trembling. ‘You must believe and you must remember. Remember how the sea felt back in Ard na Caithne, how it felt cold and good and sweet. Remember Mam, swimming ahead of us, leading us to the deep.’

Mary trembled. She gulped at the air, and yet could not slake her thirst for it.

Eliza squeezed Mary’s hand, placed it on her own throat so that she could feel the desperate beating wings there.

‘Remember, Mary. Please. The water makes us strong.’

The hole in the deck was widening, the planks disappearing into the water. She thought of the ship as they had first seen her: the proud swell of her sails, the mermaid figurehead with her painted eyes. She had never been a match for the waves, for the ocean’s fury.

Mary could hear Annie screaming, Sarah trying to comfort her with ragged words. ‘Do you remember what Mammy told you about heaven? The place you’d go if you were a very good girl? You’ve been such a good girl, a linbh . Such a very good girl.’

Bridie’s laugh rang out, brittle and brave. ‘Cruel, isn’t it? For us to be almost there and it to come to this!’

A boom, and the ship sagged further into the waves. Mary looked up: for the briefest of moments, there was a great hole where the roof had been, and she could see the night, spangled with stars.

The mast.

The impact was so loud that Mary felt it, juddering in her bones and teeth. The rigging, torn and knotted, fell over them like a net.

‘Now,’ Eliza hissed, her breath hot and ragged on Mary’s skin. ‘Now, or we’ll be trapped.’

The sea rose around them.

Mary thought of the stream back in Ireland, the way the water had felt like gentle hands on her skin. The hands had returned. It was time at last to give in to them.

The sea wrapped itself around her, cold and sweet, as Eliza had promised. The gills on her neck opened like flowers, the water singing on her skin.

She was no longer freakish, no longer stunted. Blooming into herself, at last. She felt her spine burst through her dress in spiked fins. Her hands, when she held them to her face, were strangers: her pulse beat in the webbing between her fingers.

She remembered now.

Mam, taking her gently by the hand and leading her to the shore. Her face – not crusted and grey but glittering pale. Laughing at the tickle of the water over her toes, and then the hardening of her skin all over, the strange pressure in her throat. Gills blooming beneath Mam’s jaw, velvet red as roses. The three of them diving down deep, their bodies weightless. How would you like to stay in the sea , she had said that night, the night before she left. For the three of us to be together forever, with the dolphins and the seals?

She remembered how she had cried, how she had dug her toes into the wet sand, calling out for Da. Mam had knelt, silhouetted against the moon and the white spray, and held her close. Then she had lifted them – one child on each hip – and taken them back to the stone cottage, her tears running into Mary’s hair as she told them the story. The story of the merrow who longed for the sea. Who loved her girls but could not part them from each other. Who hoped that, one day, they might choose her world for themselves.

And now Mary was here, a thousand leagues from the coast of Kerry, in a different ocean. But that forgotten taste from childhood had returned: salt and weeds and the minerals that make up the seabed, floating towards her in a glorious dust. And it felt then that perhaps Mam was not so far away, that perhaps the same water that had combed Mam’s hair from her face now gently brushed Mary’s cheek.

At last, rightness in her body. At last, the knowledge that Mam lived, that she had not wanted to leave them behind. That she had loved them.

Her small surge of peace was soon swallowed by horror.

The ship fell to pieces around them, a broken cage. There were bodies, too: men, wreathed in crystal bubbles, their eyes bulging as their lungs filled. Mary looked for the captain, hoping to see the fear in his eyes as he drowned. But she saw no officers, only sailors, their shirts billowing like shrouds.

Eliza swam ahead, and Mary followed her past sinking barrels and lengths of chain, past sails that rose like ghosts. The sounds – the screams and the cries and the great shuddering as the ship broke apart – were muffled by water. Mary heard only the rush of the sea, as right and rhythmic as the thrumming of her heart.

Her eyes filmed with tears, tiny drops that floated away from her.

She remembered Bridie’s farewell, Sarah’s whispers of comfort to her terrified child. She turned back for one last look.

Don’t.

She felt, rather than heard, Eliza’s voice, the way she’d once felt her breath on her skin.

She turned back. Eliza swam next to her, eyes wide and pale as moons.

You can see me?

No. Feel you. Your movements. It’s too late. We cannot help. Please, Mary – I can’t lose you. Please.

Mary remembered Aoife. How they had all stood and watched on the deck, as the whip sliced through the air towards her fragile fresh. How she had done nothing. How she had been weak, just as she had been when Byrne had reached his foul fingers towards her.

But she was different now. Changed.

Half-merrow, half-fisherman.

The tír fo thuinn , the land beneath the waves, belonged to her, just as it had belonged to Mam.

Was it any wonder men had feared it so?

She reached out and grasped Eliza’s outstretched hand one final time.

Mary, please.

But Mary turned away from Eliza, back towards the sinking ship.

The Naiad listed on its side, a drowning animal. The hull gaped where the reef had torn its flesh. Curious fish darted in and out, glinting in shafts of moonlight.

Mary swam towards the mermaid figurehead, placed a hand over its painted eyes. She looked at the pert wooden breasts, the fish’s tail with its chipped paint, then down at her own body. Her smock rose around her, a pale membrane. There was no tail, only her legs, the pinkish webs of skin between her toes.

She scanned the dark shifting water, saw only the graceful turn of sinking bodies. Time seemed different, under the sea, slow and sinuous. And perhaps it was now, for her, and for Eliza. But not for the others.

She swam towards the jagged hole on the side of the hull and paused. There was a prickling sensation along her spine, in her fingers and toes. Her gills fluttered. She slipped inside.

The ship closed around her, coffin-dark. Mary pushed herself along the passageways, passing the quarterdeck and the storedecks, the officers’ sleeping quarters. Something sharp tore at the skin of her arm and she screamed, the sound swallowed by water.

Her lungs squeezed. Fear burned through her veins, her gills beating so hard they made tiny currents around her.

She groped forward, searching for the prison deck, her palms brushing jagged wood, the coarse hair of a rope; once, something cold and soft that she didn’t like to think about. Moonlight poured in through the hole that had been left by the mast and she jerked backwards when something flickered ahead. Then she saw that it was the suspended body of a rat, tiny hands clawed and snout tilted upwards, tail moving with the current as if it were alive.

She thought of Bridie, her red hair drifting with the tide, her lungs still and swollen with the sea.

What a coward she had been, leaving them behind.

But she was almost there. All she had to do was swim down the hatchway and through the bulkhead, and then she would be at the prison deck.

The bulkhead gate was slightly open, thrown off its hinges when the ship had broken apart. Mary swam through sideways, the splintered bars nipping at her like teeth.

Her vision was beginning to adjust, the shapes in the prison deck forming with awful clarity. She tried hard not to look at the berths. At the clouds of hair, the ragged blankets that drifted upwards to reveal vulnerable feet, ridden with sores. Here and there, a pale hand lifted from a berth, grasping at nothing.

Here, locked in the ship’s bowels, they had never had a chance.

Mary swallowed a sob. She should be here, lying bloated and silent with the others.

But instead, by some divine trick she did not understand, she had been spared.

She willed her body to swim on, to find the corner of the prison deck that had been theirs. To retrieve the bodies of her friends and bear them up to the moonlight, where the night sky could touch their faces one last time.

Bridie, with her rich bawdy laugh. Sarah, holding Annie close and humming in her ear. And Annie herself, pushing her doll – her one treasure – into Aoife’s berth.

All of them, gone.

But then. Some dappled movement, which might have been nothing more than moonlight through the hatches, caught her eye.

She closed her eyes, feeling the sea move around her. Waiting. Then there it was: something fluttering through the water, like a kick.

Mary swam towards the sound, her arms outstretched as if she might feel her way towards it. In sinking, the ship had turned on its side, so that one corner of the prison deck – their corner – pointed towards the surface. It was there that Mary saw the glimmer of treading feet.

Hope surged in her lungs, a glorious bubble of it, lifting her upwards.

Someone was alive!

She blinked, again and again, for surely it was not possible, surely it was just that her eyes could not yet make sense of this new underwater world.

But it was real. She could even see the dull red of Bridie’s hair.

Two women, one child. Their legs working furiously, sipping from an air pocket that clung to the arch where the ship’s joists met the hull. Sarah pressed Annie to her chest, and even as Mary looked up at them from below, wreathed in shadows, she could see the exhaustion trembling in their muscles.

She did not know how she would get them to safety. She would have to take them one by one – perhaps she could take Annie first, have the child cling to her back. But there wasn’t time for them all – there wasn’t air.

Whoever she left would drown.

Eliza , she thought, focusing on the word with all her might. I need you.