I stand and let the pebbles and shale fall from my skirt.
‘Where are you going?’
I don’t answer him. Behind us, the morning pierces the skin of the eastern sky. The dark face over the ocean recedes, leaving an ambivalent grey in its wake. Soon there will be the aquamarine sea, the gleaming silver horizon, the white horses galloping over the crest of the waves. But not yet.
I walk down the thin crescent of sand, leaving the ragged boulders behind me. I hear him shift and sigh – a sibilant sound of dying frustration. The sweetness of the night has bled through. The shells press against my feet, pricking my soles.
The skin of the sea splits. Something surfaces, then dips again. Slick forms shine black against the mirrored surface, rising and falling like piano keys singing a sonata.
‘Seals.’ His voice cuts the air behind me.
I watch their ebony heads; their circling fins rippling in the tide.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We should go back to the ship.’
I don’t reply.
I have seen them before, floating in the shallows, foraging with their vibrissae as they stalk redbait and molluscs. I have seen them dive deep into the darkness of the Southern Ocean, spinning against the cold. And I have seen them, row after row, skinned and dismembered, their pelts staked out over the white sand to dry.
I turn back. The dawn is blank and curious, a face waiting in expectation. But the shore looks west, and all I can see is this liminal blend of light and dark.
‘Come with me.’
He raises his eyebrows. ‘Where?’
There are hollows along his cheeks. The skin on his lips has cracked from the sea. The air smells like saltwater and acacia blossoms.
‘To Calcutta. Or Penang. Or Singapore, even. Away from here.’ I hold my hand out as though in one arm I might capture a continent. The coastline winds its infinity around me. Great Southern Land.
He laughs. ‘I can’t leave.’
‘Why not?’
In the half-light his coat gleams red, like the colour of fighting Napoleon. I think of all he’s done and been, the scent of old cordite, the Union Jack over Spain, a light brown boy hustled onto a ship in George Town, bound for Suffolk, somewhere. Dark skin, English face. And now he is here, with his compass and surveying chain, a map and allotment plan, the men in the North awaiting their profits.
‘Why not?’ I speak again.
He shakes his head. ‘I have responsibilities here. And besides, can’t you see the opportunity? Europe, Asia. There’s no space for people like us there. This is a new world.’
People like us.
I was born to the scent of frangipanis, night blooming lotuses closing with the thickening dawn. As a child I traced my face in the looking glass. Not pure English and not wholly foreign either. Strange eyes, a European nose. Skin the colour of damp sand. A hairline part drawn so stiff it might snap me in two.
I look around us. The dawn is threaded with the warble of the lone willy wagtail. I can hear the rustle of the dancing eucalyptus leaves, the breeze in the salt brushed bushes. There are no clouds in the sky, and the morning holds the promise of an adamantine noon.
‘This is not a new world.’
He looks up at the sound of my voice, frowning.
‘There are people here, already.’ I have seen the black-haired women working on the beach, raising their clubs against the seal skulls and peeling back the sleek brown fur. Somewhere, these women had parents, husbands, children, before the sealers came with their gunpowder and their red raw skin.
‘I know that. This will be better for them.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘Think of everything we have to offer. We are building a new society here, this land, the best of English civilisation – ’
‘You have seen the women on the beaches.’
‘All that was unregulated. It will change.’
‘And what of your mother? My mother? What did this civilisation do for them?’
He doesn’t answer. The shadows move over his face, his brows furrow and shift. He would like to counter me, to parry, but the truth is there is no defence. We were both born in the heat and cast out, like driftwood, onto cold waves.
As the daylight lengthens, the seals disperse, trained to avoid this coast at certain times, to sniff out the scent of tar and burning blubber. In the north, seal pups are born white. Their pelts thicken with darkness over time. The whiteness of their fur serves to protect them; they lie very still to escape predators, against the snow. Not moving, against this blanket, this blankness, this absence of colour. And still some of them are taken.
He stands next to me, watching the seals leave. His coat has dulled to burgundy. Silver threads shine against the blackness of his hair. He will never wear a uniform again. ‘Remember that story you told me? About the selkies?’
I nod. ‘Yes.’
As a child, on the boat out from India, I heard of these women, stepping onto the Scottish shores out of another world, removing their salt scented furs. Skin-changers, shapeshifters. To steal a selkie’s sealskin was to bind her to the land, and this was what the fishermen did. They took the selkies’ pelts and turned them into fishermen’s wives until the day – and there was always a day – when the women discovered their hidden seal fur, put on their skins, and swam their long journey home.
‘I’d heard the stories might have been based on truth. That women from the north used to sail their canoes wrapped in sealskins to Scotland. If a man caught one, and hid her canoe, she had no way of going home. So he could take her as a wife, have children with her, until the day –’
‘Until the day she found her canoe.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because she always left. No matter how many years had passed, or how many children she’d had. She always left, and she left the children behind. In Scotland, in Europe. That was where they remained.’
I shake my head. ‘Our mothers didn’t leave us. We left them.’
‘But they moved on, into their own worlds. And we, we were left behind to make sense of this one. And that’s what I’m doing here.’
To make sense of this world.
‘It’s not going to work.’
He makes a sound and turns from me. His boots crunch and thud upon the rock. I look out towards the ripening sea. I feel his hands on my back, my hair, my waist. His head against my shoulder.
‘Come back to the boat with me,’ he says, as I draw away.
In the dark she kisses him with lips as red and swollen as seaberries and just as bitter. Her dress is samphire in his hands; her nails caress his back like kangaroo thorn. As he rocks into her he thinks of shipwrecks and castaways, of men condemned to eternal thirst.
He knows then that he cannot hold her, though he will try. But still he is unprepared for the striations of dawn, for her burning desire to leave.
He tries to stop her as she goes. He calls but his voice is just a whisper in a squall. He grasps her arm and she slips through his fingers, saline, marine, with a flick of her tail.
His voice echoes down the coast as I walk. My wrist burns with his invisible prints, sending licking flames through my arteries. The sun rises higher. I thirst. I shed my layers like an old skin – my shawl, the netted muslin at my throat, my underskirt – until all that remains is the shell of my dress, as sea green as the gown of Loro Kidu.
I walk. I bleed water. Sweat pools along my belly. My capillaries constrict. I can’t breathe.
In the haze of the light dancing off the sand I see them. The rows of seal pelts darkening the shore with fur and purple blood. The black-haired women work rhythmically on the skins, scraping and drying. The youngest brings fresh pelts to the others as the dried furs are collected and packed away.
I pause by the sand bank, waiting. The women ignore me, all but the youngest, who watches me out of the corner of her eye. As I sit on the sand, the sunlight lengthens over the expanse of sea. Light pricks behind my eyes. My lips are brittle and bleeding. I can think only of water, its sound, its taste. The feeling of silver fish between my teeth.
The women begin to leave. I would call to them but my body is limp. I am thinning, deflating, absorbed into the sand. Above me, gulls circle, like birds over the Hooghly lined with marigolds and frangipani. The Durga Puja, the Maidan, Kalighat. From my house I can hear the temple bells.
Fingers touch my arm, cool and wet. By the time I open my eyes, the girl has already stepped away, watchful. I move to follow her and then I see it. Fresh, moist, lined with blackening blood like treacle. The fur smells of seal pups and the open ocean. It smells like the way home.
I unlace my dress. The fabric floats free – the Queen of the Southern Seas calls back her colours. The girl is gone, the beach is empty. The wind rips the silk from my fingers. I lie on the sand and wrap the pelt about me. The blood and blubber is cool, the skin is softly fibrous. I shudder as I feel it, skin upon my skin, the fur overcoming my nakedness, the pelt seeping into my muscle and bone. The world curves around me; the sea sings. I roll into the waves, into sound and silence.
As the sun dips red into the horizon, the girl approaches the dune. She fingers the dress, studies its oceanic green, its fine-spun silk. She sees a crown of silver stars, a rush of aquamarine. There are murmurs in the water.
She tosses the dress into the sea.
Lyn Dickens is a a writer currently completing a doctorate in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Sydney and has been an Asialink Arts Resident and a visiting academic at the University of Cambridge. Her fiction writing has been longlisted for the Richell Prize and the Lucy Cavendish Cambridge Prize, shortlisted for the Deborah Cass Prize and highly commended for the AAWP Chapter One Prize. She has published short fiction and academic articles in the UK and Australia.
