The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) (7 page)

He felt all his sadness and loneliness fall away from him like an old wrinkled skin.

Quickly, soundlessly, he pulled his boat right up to the rocks and, trying not to splash in the shallows, he dropped to his hands and knees and crept ashore. There he saw another strange sight.

At the edge of the water was a heap of empty sealskins and he guessed that these belonged to the dancing women.

So it was true, the man thought to himself. All the tales that his grandfathers had told him were true, after all. These women must be the selkies, the seal people, part human, part seal-spirit. His hand trembled over the pile of skins, his palm hot as if it were burning.

Without really knowing what he was doing, he quickly selected the most beautiful of the skins, the one that glinted at him with its fine red hairs, and rolled it up and stuffed it under his sweater where it felt soft and warm against his skin.

Then he waited.

And he waited.

And as the moon began to set, the women stopped dancing and climbed down over the rocks, one by one. Two of them slipped easily back into their sealskins and slithered and splashed into the sea.

But of course, the youngest woman, the woman with red hair to her waist and the voice like music, couldn’t find her skin anywhere. As she searched, she began to cry out.

‘Where is my skin, my sealskin?’

It was nowhere to be found.

It was then that the man stepped out from his hiding place.

‘’Beautiful lady,’ he said, ‘I want you to be my wife. Until this moment, I’ve been the saddest and loneliest man in the world but you’ve sung away all my troubles.’

He saw the look of horror pass over the selkie’s face. She flushed with shame and clasped her arms around herself to shield herself from his gaze.

“No,’ she cried, ‘Of course I can’t be your wife. I’m not of your kind. I’m of the Others, the sacred ones, the ones who live and sing beneath the waves.’

But the man was insistent. He clasped the skin to him. Now that he’d at last  found his happiness, he had no intention of ever letting it slip away.

‘Be my wife,’ he said. ‘Live with me and be my wife and I give you my word that in seven summers, I’ll return your sealskin to you, and then you can choose to stay or go, exactly as you wish.’

A long rippling sigh escaped from the young selkie’s lips.

She let her arms fall to her sides. She studied the man’s face for a long time. He could see that she was thinking – and perhaps, he thought, she was a little curious about what life woud be like among humankind.

Slowly, gradually, a smile appeared at the corners of her mouth as she looked him up and down.

“Very well, Fisherman,” she said, “I will live with you for seven summers. But after that,” she told him, “I must return to my true home and be with my sisters.”

The fisherman lifted the young seal woman into his boat and rowed her back to the village. Although his nets were empty, his heart beat proudly in his chest for he knew that he’d landed himself the biggest catch of all.

Months passed in the village. The corn on the hillside grew tall under the hot sun, the oranges began to ripen and the man and the seal woman had a baby together, a little boy. His mother told him stories, just as I’m telling you this one now,
tesora
, stories of a secret world under the sea where the people lived on sunlight and starlight and wove songs out of the ocean waves.

And the seal woman tried to be happy. She really did try. She mended her husband’s nets, whispering powerful charms into the knots, and his catch was always the best of the village and so they never went hungry.

But as the years passed, the young selkie’s skin began to wither, her hair began to come out in handfuls, the roundness of her hips and breasts began to wither away and she could no longer see very well to cook or clean or mend.

‘You’ve kept my sealskin for seven long years and now it’s time for you to honour your promise and return it to me,’ she said to her husband, ‘The eighth autumn is arriving.’

‘Woman, you must think I’m stupid!’ Her husband laughed. ‘If I ever give it back to you, you’ll leave me alone without a wife.’ He strode off into the night, slamming the door behind him.

The little boy loved his mother and was very afraid of losing her to the world beneath the waves but, at the same time, he couldn’t watch silently as she suffered in this way. That night, as he was sleeping, he heard the wind and the water whispering to him.

He jumped out of bed and ran out into the night, scrambling over the rockpools. As he looked down into the waves, he saw a big bundle, clumsily tied with string, rolling out of a cleft in a large rock. He picked it up and held it to his chest, and gasped as he felt the strong scent of his mother unfolding itself all through him like the sea itself.

He ran back to the house and fell through the door where his mother was waiting for him. She snatched him up and snatched up the skin.

‘Mother,’ he cried, ‘Don’t leave me!’

But something older than herself, something older then the rocks and older even than the sea, was calling to her.

With the little boy tucked under her arm, she staggered to the rocks, stepped into her sealskin and drew it up all around her. Already she could feel her strength returning. Now she dove down deep under the water, still clasping the boy tightly to her body, and the boy discovered that he too could breathe easily under the water and swim with all the grace and slipperiness of the seals.

Seven days and nights passed and the boy lived among his mother’s selkie-people. They danced and sang in their world under the waves and feasted on starlight and sunlight from plates of shell and drank the moon’s reflections from goblets of pearl.

The seal woman’s skin turned lustrous again and shone more brightly than ever before. The little boy laughed to see how plump and soft she was becoming. He could no longer circle her wrist with his hand.

But on the seventh night, he noticed tears in his mother’s eyes and knew that it was time for him to return to the upper world.

‘Little one, my precious one, one day, many years from now, it’ll be your time to come and join us,’ his mother told him, guiding him up to the shore and sitting him gently on the rocks. ‘But until that time you’ll live here in the world of people, of human beings,’ she told him, ’and I’ll never leave you.’

And, sure enough, as the years passed, the boy became a man and well-known in the village as a poet and a singer and a teller of wonderful stories. And every evening, his nets were filled with fish.

People said that this was because as a very small boy he’d survived being dragged to the bottom of the sea in a terrible storm and he’d learned how to talk to the selkie-spirits.

Even today, you can see him,
tesora
, on moonlit nights, sitting on the rocks, talking softly to a certain female seal with a pelt of shining silver who often comes near the shore.’ 

Then Mamma would let out a long sigh and rearrange herself against the cushions.

‘And you know, of course, that although many have tried to hunt that seal, none have ever succeeded,’ she’d say, stretching her long legs out in front of her and yawning. ‘And now, my Ella-
issima
, it’s time for bed.’

And Ella would throw her arms around Mamma’s neck and breath in her scent which was of Mamma’s favourite French perfume – irises, lilies, sandalwood – and the Marseille soap that she sold in the shop and something else, her own rich scent, that was impossible to define.

And for a long time after Mamma had left her for her book or her sewing or her letter-writing, Ella would lie and imagine that she was drifting out to sea in a boat with stilled oars, feeling the slow lap of the waves, watching the stars.

7.

A girl’s grey school skirt, standard issue, taken up at the hem and in at the seam. Briggs School Uniform Suppliers. 2010.

They’d been in York for a couple of months. Ella was just getting used to the short cold days, when the mist crept up from the river and rubbed itself through the narrow streets like a giant cat with damp, grey fur.

And then suddenly, a March wind blew into the city, whipping the river into brown froth, sending people scurrying through the streets, their shopping bags filled like sails, and the pigeons flapping frantically under the eaves. In Museum Gardens, gusts of rain chased away the squirrels and the early tourists and battered the first beds of tulips. Even the gargoyles on the Minster seemed to huddle down closer on their carved plinths and the stone angels tucked in their crumbling wings.

Mamma didn’t like the wind. ‘It makes me restless,’ she grumbled, fingering the flimsy sleeves of her favourite dresses. ‘When will spring arrive?’ 

‘Ne’er cast a clout till May is out,’ said Gracie, tapping the side of her nose with a mittened finger.

‘May?’ gasped Mamma. ‘
Dio mio
. We’ll all be frozen half to death by then.’

But Ella loved the wind. She loved how it slapped her cheek and tangled in her hair, how it smelled of things rising and quickening. She loved to stand on the riverbank and stretch her arms out wide so that she could almost imagine she could fly.

‘Have you been wearing your scarf?’ said Mamma, when she came home from school with one of her sore throats. ‘You haven’t, have you? Your ears are like lumps of ice.’

This time not even Maadar-Bozorg’s famous gargle of sea salt, lavender and honey could soothe it. By evening, the fever had taken hold of her. It raged all over her body. It floated her up to the ceiling and shook her eyes in their sockets. Now she was even too weak to resist Mamma’s plaster of sage and rosemary.

Ella’s voice came in squeaks and croaks. Mamma ignored her, basting her chest with a determined expression.

Ella submitted, exhausted, as Mamma produced an egg from her pocket and rubbed it all over her body. This was Mamma’s favourite technique. Ella knew that Mamma would place this egg in the freezer compartment of the fridge, up against the ice-cube trays and the frozen bottle of vodka. 

‘To take your heat away,’ she always said.

Finally, her hand resting light and cool on Ella’s forehead, she announced, ‘We need a doctor. I’m going to go next door and ask Gracie who to call.’

Ella nodded, feeling the heat rise up from her stomach and sweep over her in a red wave.

When Dr Carter arrived, he was not at all how she thought a doctor should be. To begin with, he seemed very young. When Mamma pulled back the curtain, he crouched on his haunches at the side of her bed in a not-very-doctor-ish way and his face up close was smooth and clean-shaven, with a firm chin and eyes as twinkly as Billy’s.

‘Now then, young lady,’ he said. ‘What’ve you been up to?’

‘May I,
senorita
?’ he asked, before placing his stethoscope inside her nightdress, as if he were asking her for a waltz around the bedroom. Not very doctor-like at all.

‘Tonsillitis,’ he pronounced. ‘Antibiotics. Necessary for this type of infection, I’m afraid.’

Through a haze of pain, Ella saw Mamma smoothing her dress over her hips, heard her offering the doctor a cup of coffee. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, the luminous hands of her Betty Boop alarm clock, one of Mamma’s more irritating eBay finds, pointed to half past midnight. She heard footsteps on the stairs and Mamma humming that little tune of hers under her breath. She closed her eyes again and felt the press of the cool flannel on her forehead.

A little while after that, she heard the clink of glasses in the kitchen sink, then bare feet padding across the hallway and the swish and rustle as Mamma undressed in the dark, sliding herself into her own bed on the other side of the curtain.

‘Mamma…’ she tried to whisper but her mouth made no sound and she floated on a flotsam of feathers.

*

Funny, Ella thought, how your body could be doing one thing – buttering a slice of toast or listening to Mrs Cossington explain that the earth’s core is made of molten magma – when your mind was somewhere else entirely.

And it was at times like this that The Signals would arrive, flying into her head like a flock of angry birds, all red beaks and green wings, like nothing she’d ever seen before - not with her ordinary eyes, anyway.

What did she mean by that, with her
ordinary
eyes? She didn’t know, exactly. It was just that she had no idea where these images came from or how they got there, inside her mind. It was as if she were pressing up against the outside of her body and she could feel the air against her skin beginning to change its colour and texture.

She noticed that it always happened before something went wrong or when someone was angry or upset or just when she was sitting in a big group of people, like in assemblies.

She’d asked Mamma about it again just the other day, the strange swirling colours, the feelings.

‘That’s right,’ Mamma had said, in a matter-of-fact way, ‘The Signals. Nothing to be afraid of, Ellissima. They can come in very handy.’

But there were so many other questions Ella wanted to ask. Would they start coming more and more often? And how was it that she seemed to be able to tune in to other people’s thoughts sometimes? Was she supposed to do that?

But Mamma was always so busy these days, with one of her customers or Dr Carter.

She’d noticed that The Signals happened in particular around her new friend, Katrina Cushworth. Because flippin’ Norah, here was the Big News. Ella finally had a new friend and the friend was even female.

Katrina Cushworth had blonde hair, one blue eye and one brown. And flippin’ Norah was something she would say. She’d been telling everyone that she and Ella were Inseparable. That was the word she used to her mother, who was Mrs Jean Cushworth, a Very Important Person in this city.

Snooty old cow, said Billy, and her stuck-up daughter too.

When Billy had come up to them in the playground today, Katrina had sighed loudly and said, ‘That Billy thinks he owns you, like a bag of bloomin’ marbles or a library book. Look at him, all soppy on you, the big daft thing.’