The Monster's Wife(7)
“Tainted! I told you. And my whole catch wrong. Not a single living fish in the stinking lot.” Cormick lurched through the Smokehouse door, so deep in his cups he barely looked human any more. He was a small man, dogged as a terrier. Over the years, he’d been salted, pickled and smoked until he looked like the cured cod that hung from a rope over the fire. His deep-set eyes had a dreamy look, but when the whisky hit the back of his throat those eyes dared you to pick a fight.
The meaty fist of Big Dod, May’s chunk of a Da, followed him out and gave him a shove. “Drunk as a wheelbarrow. Be off with you!” Dod ran a tight ship at the Smokehouse and stood for no nonsense. The door slammed shut.
Cormick turned to Oona, his flat eyes the colour of whey. He jabbed a finger at her. “The way they spied at you, those horrors, bodies higgledy-pig, poor creeturs.”
He was close now and she caught a whiff of his layers of stink, the fishy rankness of his netted vest, the barley-broo on his breath.
“Fish with legs? Frogs with fins?” Stuart roared. “Old rusty gut’s lost what little wit he had!”
Andrew chortled, a pale ginger echo of his friend. He always laughed at Stuart’s japing. Oona wrapped her arms around herself. She was fearful cold though the sun was warm and everyone else was sweltering.
“Mistress Scollay doesn’t like hearing about it.” Cormick’s face looked chewed, drawn in like the mouth of a bag. “Pishing French I tell you, damnable Frogs in their pannikins, eating their infernal foreign victuals and throwing them in our sea—“
Oona thought about the night before, the crates and their rank contents. She looked at Andrew, anything to keep her tell-tale eyes from meeting Cormick’s.
Andrew smiled sweetly at her, as if she’d bestowed a favour on him. “If they’d been eating them,” he scratched his gingery beard and held his finger high in the manner of a mildly drunken philosopher, “they’d be gone wouldn’t they? Not whole like you say?”
“Whole? Whole? Those freaks, half fish, half frog, half bloody bird, not one thing or t’other! Way you talk,” Cormick swilled the spit round his mouth and spat in the muck, “you probably want to swim out and join the blasted Frogs, eat at their table wi’em, suck down their -”
Andrew raised his fist. “Fighting words.”
He caught Oona’s eye and his brave gesture withered halfway through, fist drooping to his side. She watched the colour rise in his throat and fill his face like wine glugging into a glass. His eyes slipped over her face and away. He’d taken a liking to her when they were children and for her part, she’d formed the opinion that he was a pea-wit. Stuart looked back and forth between them, a smug smile broadening on his face. He whispered something in Andrew’s ear that made his colour deepen. Then he ruffled his ginger hair and laughed.
“Don’t be a pigeon.” Andrew angrily patted his pockets. “You’ve stolen my pipe, you wretch. Give me my pipe.”
Stuart put his hand over his friend’s face, pushing him down on the stone. Andrew got him by the neck and they half-wrestled, half-hugged in that way boys do. Except there was something in their manner of doing it that was so soft, Oona felt she had to look away. She watched Cormick’s slow progress down the hill from the Smokehouse, heard his prating about the strange haul, the dead things that poured in his nets. No living pollock or cod fighting the net and flapping on the deck, fighting for freedom. Just pale, rotting sea creatures, blanched and bloodless, flopping out belly up and tainting the boat. Disgusting things coming up in waves as if the sea were retching to rid itself of them.
6
Oona let Cormick get a little way ahead before she began to follow him. She flicked a look over her shoulder, but Stuart and Andrew were still prostrate with mirth and did not see her go.
She scrabbled downhill in Cormick’s wake. Whatever mischief May was caught up in at the big house, she wasn’t skidding down sharp grass on her bare heels, kicking pebbles of sheep shit like hailstones. She was probably setting out the crystal decanter for the doctor’s afternoon sherry, blithesomely ignorant of all this. Oona cursed herself for being so eager to help last night, when May scratched a dry twig on the door. She’d been a fool to become embroiled, save that May had been so feverish and her errand so unlike every other humdrum thing that happened here.
She crossed the burn downstream from the copse where the irises thrust their yellow points through the rushes and the birches whispered last night’s secrets. Cormick was beyond her, flitting in and out of sight between trees - if such a foul, drunk thing could be said to flit. She scratched her back, surprised at the damp feel of the skin of her back, tallow-greasy and cold against the pads of her fingers.
Cormick stopped to lean on a tree. She feared he would pish again, but he grunted and shuffled onwards. At the far side of the burn, the leaves were a young green against the birches’ silver. If she plucked one and rubbed it between her fingers, the scent would be tangy and bitter and new. In the meadow, the poppies burned red in the tall grass that the cows had not yet cropped and the sky was the colour they painted fishing boats. The firth beyond curved around the island, holding it tight, white-burnished spots of it gleaming so she had to shade her eyes. This was Eden as Father Yule told of it in kirk. Every tree and river pleasant to her sight, the sea compassing the land of Hav’ilah, where there is gold and the naked go unashamed.