The Seal Wife *10

Autopilot

Trappey thought all kinds of things during his long night, sitting alone at the scarred table with only a bottle and the genie curl of cigarette smoke to keep him company. He saw his brother, in the house across the way, ushering another inebriated girl over his threshold after the pub had shut. He was a slick character all right. No sense of right and wrong. What to do.

There was that job on tomorrow. Staying up all night and drinking probably wasn’t the best preparation for it. He switched off the lights and put a rag under the leaking kitchen tap, so the noise would not keep him awake and thinking any longer. It seemed no amount of quiet faucets or alcohol could stop him thinking these days but he made sure he tried his damndest.

Their father had left the houses to his two boys, perched on the mountain above town, more than twenty years ago when he’d bought out his neighbours and dreamed of establishing a Trappe and Sons fiefdom overlooking everyone else. It didn’t quite work that way of course. The old man, now enjoying what is gently termed aged care, would have been mortified had his marbles been intact, to see the concrete tilt up, Tuscan-style monsters that blocked the harbour views and shut away the sun. The two Trappe abodes perched between the monoliths, sporting rusted gutters and the resulting rotten weatherboards, trying to blend in like quaint little garden sheds amongst all that grandeur and fake wrought iron.

He lay in the bed that smelt only of him and no one else and stared at the Baltic pine ceiling, smoking one last cigarette. Finally he butted out in the orange carnival glass bowl and tried to think of nothing. How do you think of nothing? He tried to think of nothing and then not to think at all.

At the airport in the morning he met the two suits who stood waiting for him in the car park. One man toked on a tailor made and looked at the wispy clouds through squinty, reckoning eyes. The other looked younger but closer inspection showed him to be a healthy fifty year old sprouting a rooster ruff of grey blonde hair that would back chat any brush.

“Peter Cowie – Immigration,” said the toker.

“Rowan Stuart – Fisheries,” said the rooster.

“Gordon Trappe – Trappey,” he shook hands with them both.

“And how are we today?” asked Cowie.

Trappey grinned and shook his head. “Ask me later mate. Right now I think a good fuck and a green apple would kill me.”

Stuart laughed. “Well, that’s ... encouraging.”

“Don’t worry mate. I know this coast better than anyone.” It was no idle boast but it felt like it this morning and he left them awkwardly to prepare his charts and chat to the guys inside.

On the tarmac, the first person he saw when he’d run out the Cessna was a woman. She walked towards the plane is slow, thoughtless steps, her head and her thumb bent over a mobile phone. Tawny hair fell over the square shoulders of her jacket, her legs were cased in tight black jeans and she wore high heels. Shit, he loved heels on tarmac.

She lifted the phone up to her ear and at the same time the two government suits emerged from the building with – his bloody brother. The woman and his brother saw each other, both with phones pressed to their ears, and started laughing. Trappey couldn’t hear anything over the engine but he could see what was going on.

The Seal Wife *9

 Transmutation

Four women stood on the orange sand of the shore, staring in his direction. One woman wearing a red cotton dress pointed to where he lay and talked to the others. He didn’t move for what felt like hours. The other women were naked and stood in the water, working their feet around in the sand. Occasionally they picked up something with their toes, putting them in their bags. Cockles?

He slept eventually, in the sun. When he woke, they were gone and the inlet was still and quiet. The only movement was the bull seal who had returned to the rocks in front of his camp. He strained his eyes to see what the old sea dog was up to. The animal had something in its jaws and was shaking it to and fro as a dingo shakes a chicken. The twang of a broken string floated across the flat water and then the crunch of teeth into thin, varnished wood.

He watched, appalled, as the seal broke his violin into pieces on the rocks. The rage came up again, through his belly and straight up into his head. He ran back along the rocks to his camp, where he found his home unmolested by the women and everything in its rightful place. The axe lay in his bed, beneath the oilskin and seaweed and her seashell scent. He took the axe, leaping over the rocks to the bull seal, swinging the weapon at his side.

The seal watched him approach and growled over its find, pulling away the wreckage of the fiddle and glaring at him from reddened eyes. Every time it moved, a pathetic strum or crunch would answer from the instrument that was now so shattered that only the strings held together the neck and the body. The seal tried to manoeuvre itself off the rocks and keep the smashed fiddle but it wasn’t quick enough.

Julian raised the axe high above his head and clouted the seal between its eyes, cleaving open its skull. It was a clean kill. He felt his power return from the days and weeks of clubbing, shooting, axing one after another, ten, twenty in an afternoon, until some days the beaches they returned to were gone of all life except carrion feeders and flies buzzing around the clean picked skeletons.

He rolled the body into the water and went to push it out, thinking the next tide would take it away like it did his boat. He eyed the skin and changed his mind. He took out his knife and robbed the creature of its hide.

He gorged himself on great slabs of red, half cooked meat and scrubbed with sharp stones at the skin, stripping away the fat until the skin was supple and thin. It would make a fine blanket and cloak, something to warm him now that winter was coming on. The meat could be salted or perhaps given to the men who would surely return after today’s encounter.

He worked and ate and tried not to think too much. Thoughts could be nocturnal ambushes and today was bright and his belly was full. What he tried to think about was the warmth of that skin and where to find salt and how to break the back of the hide once it had dried and hardened like old bull kelp.

She stayed away during the day light hours. A light misty rain began to fall in the evening, flattening out the water. He stood in the doorway and looked at the pink clouds against the black mountain, scratched his belly and then went inside to his fire and resigned himself to the night.

He woke in the dark when the ashes creaked with the last of the heat to hear a peculiar keening. The only sound he could liken it to was the sound in his head when he’d shot his brother. She appeared in the doorway. His heart gladdened. She did not come in. She held out her hand. He followed her down to the water.

She took his hand as the sea lapped and swelled around his feet. She took him into the sea. They swam to the wreck of the Erica and she dragged him down into the depth of the inlet that breathed like the breath of the world.

“You are killing us,” she spread the words out in his mind. “There are too many of you. You are killing us all.”

Panic seized him as tightly as her grip. The stolen black woman, from another inlet just like this one, floated up before him. Her face, last time without any feeling, now gazed upon him with a terrible sadness, maybe even compassion. He could not tell. The thumping in his chest began to spread throughout his limbs. Pressure from the deep squeezed his whole body. His ears ached dreadfully.

She had a strong grasp of his ankle and pulled him down into the stone and kelpy castles. Julian stared at her, pleading, terrified and her black eyes said to him, “Don’t be afraid. Come down with me. Believe in me.”

This is the last episode of the 'Transmutation' section of The Seal Wife. The next section is called 'Autopilot'. What happens to poor old Julian McGregor Stuart is revealed ... later. x

The Seal Wife *8

 Transmutation

He woke when the sun was already shining on the mountain and the birds had settled into more pressing deeds than announcing their position. He felt himself, as he worked out of unconsciousness, to discover that his chest hurt like his lungs had been strained. But he was dry and, real as his dreaming felt, he should have been wearing damp clothes if he’d dived to the bottom of the inlet in the night. He smiled to himself and rubbed his chest.

Outside his doorway lay three herring on a flat slab of stone, lined neatly head to tail.

He understood. He took his violin from its case and restrung the instrument. For a little while he tuned it, loosening and tightening the pegs and turning the brass screws at the bridge until he could bow a passable octave. Then he played Rights of Man over and over by the shore until she appeared, snorting with delight. He fiddled and she rolled about in the water, soaking the morning warmth into her glossy pelt.

The bull seal swept over the water in a series of angry, focussed leaps until it reached her and rounded on her, trying to force her away from the rocks. It happened so fast that the man was taken unaware until there were two brawling seals in front of him. They fought like big dogs, quick and violent, huge canines bared, barking and growling, their bodies twined and then separating to clash together again. Her teeth flashed and she went for the bull’s neck. Then she gave a pitched yelp and withdrew, scurfing away on her back from the male, watching him with rolling black eyes. He stalked around her, growling, wiry hackles raised along the back of his thick neck. Finally she disappeared beneath the water and when he next saw her, she was twenty or thirty yards away and heading for the channel.

The bull seal looked at him and he wondered if there was even a challenge lurking in its eyes. He walked away, shaking his head. A seal fight. How lonely and crazed with desire was he that he considered a seal to be a rival in an affair of the heart!

He set about rekindling the fire in his hut. When the thin plume of smoke curled up from the leaves he remembered – the smell of her hair. It was more than some horny dream about sirens and shipwrecks, he knew.

He went back outside to the flat stone where she’d left the fish and there was only a wet mark. He looked out to the water and saw the bull seal jawing one of his fish, glaring indolently at him.

A red spot in his head began to burn. He felt the same anger as when his father hit him across the head when he was a kid. He stalked in a small circle with clenched fists, cursing this new arrival, this bane of his happiness, this filthy, glaring scum sucking bottom dweller, a lowly belligerent beast who thought himself better than a man. He assuaged his rage by throwing stones at the seal until he hit it. The seal slid into the water but he did not see it leave the area. He walked around the rocks, his stomach growling, until he found some sea celery and a few periwinkles. He ate them all raw, trying to mash the celery weed into the little coils of periwinkle flesh with his teeth.

That night he was unsure whether he was awake or asleep when she came to him. It was a brighter night; the clouds pulled away from the moon but in the gloom of his little hut all he could see was her lithe figure in the doorway, a naked silhouette with the silver water behind her. She stood there for a moment framed by the sea-worn edges of the stone and then she crept into his bed. He felt the breath seep out of his body.

“He doesn’t belong to my people,” she silently explained.

He smiled in the dark. Later he took out his fiddle and played her a sad, quiet song about a territorial war that raged over a grassy knoll between two faerie clans.

In the morning he didn’t see the bull seal but fires burned around the horizon. The day seemed ready for a happening. He got the fire going and cooked the cuttlefish and herring that she’d left him. It was a good feed, the cuttlefish spongy and wholesome. He felt good. He took the fiddle down to the rocks and played an eastern gypsy lament that began sedately, gaining speed. She didn’t appear.

He heard voices. He turned to look behind him and the women slid out of the trees. Both parties stared at each other in surprise and shock. Then he dropped his fiddle into a deep crevice and ran along the rocks. He kept going, not looking back, sure they would go shrieking to their men. When he’d worked his way to the other side of the inlet, he found a small grove of trees and slid down a bank where he could watch and not be seen.

Alms for Sarah Toa x