The Selkie

Dawn splits crêpe sky, moist mist of air. There is despair here, and also life. We tumble out of the back of a cube van. Bodies, buckets, dented thermoses of chai, rotis wrapped in aluminum foil, stale biscuits for afternoon tea break. We survey the field, pair off, are assigned rows, handed crisp cards with our names in block letters to keep track of our labour: put to work.

Mother washes our hair with olive soap. She gives each child a fig; we are going on a journey. We roll out onto the landscape like waterways – by the second roll of the dice, we have already split into forked plans the first son to the right, the second to the left, and so on and so forth, because there are too many seas. I follow chickadees, chickpeas, go kiss the Kush – unafraid of pomegranate deflagrations, so many roofs.

Before it fell out of vogue with the vermin-people, this had been a sculpture park, or so we heard. Their ideologies and utopias, now abandoned, became interwoven with the ivy and rosebay willowherb. When we arrived here, to the sound of the pipes and the beat of our own drum, we felt a oneness with the vermin-people past, and our own Murinae ancestors who had been free to live off the land. For seven sunrises and seven sunsets, we danced, we foraged fruits and planted memories, we grew strong and made music with our souls. Our freedom came at no great cost, our greatest fears unfounded in the face of the rhythm of the righteous. On our eighth sunrise, the vermin-children arrived, and their innocence and optimism brought new light and life to our sculpture park Shangri-La. The vermin-children see life where life sees them, and, unshackled by their culture – their cult – they too found comfort and community.

Every summer, the community of Port Tawe contracts against outsiders; and yet, this summer, they want to know everything about him. In her constant to and fro between the bakery and café, Riona hears them whisper. The young man. The artist. The stranger. People speak as if she is not there. They amuse themselves with their hushed talk. She has never spoken to him, although she knows the texture of his voice. The shape of the words that fall from his lips, that hang about his head and trail after him when he opens the door to leave. Her own questions come at night. Questions about the birds he watches from the balcony with its view of the harbour: the dinner-jacketed guillemots sailing on the wind, the herring gulls fighting over scraps. About the colours he chooses to capture the sound of the waves as they crash against the rocks.