The Monster's Wife(8)

She’d lost sight of Cormick. He must have slipped off towards his shack. She came to the beach light-blind, wondering whether the whole business was some odd joke between the menfolk, some Bean King prank to scare the women. Or perhaps they’d been in their cups and sun-struck and imagined things, like mariners becalmed too long, tongues swelling from thirst, minds dizzy from the salt caked on their lips and the mad-making seaweed they scraped from the hull to stave off starvation. Men saw the Devil out at sea, Christ too. Their dead bairns and their long-lost fathers spoke to them and they came back touched. Cormick was just such a case.

Hot stone burned the soles of her feet. A strand of dry seaweed was wrapped round her big toe. It was dry and sharp. She bent to pluck it off and straightened. The sea was a too-dazzling mirror. She pressed her hand tight to her forehead and still couldn’t see. The stink hit her then, worse than a sheep’s carcass. The salt-putrid stench caught in her throat and choked her, the force of it catching her so hard and so suddenly that she doubled up and vomited on the rocks, dribbles of milky spittle beading her lips. She wiped her mouth and straightened, eyes blurred. Someone stood in front of the sun, black against the light. The person bent low, peered at the ground.

“Cormick?”

The figure turned. She still couldn’t see the face, only the bulk of his chest and arms. Too big to be Cormick.

“Stuart?”

The man said nothing.

Tears stung her eyes. She scrubbed them and blinked at the light. The man was gone. His going shredded her nerves even more than his silent presence. What had he been staring at, down at the shore’s edge? Pinching her nose, she pressed on.

All along the cusp of shore and sea bore whitish scurf. As the sea came, so did the flotsam. She scratched her chest, suddenly itchy beyond bearing. A step further and her bare feet pushed into something softer than wet sand. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the light, wiping tears away. With her hand clamped over her mouth and nose, she looked down. The shoreline was strewn with the bodies of frogs, dead eyes milked over, pale bellies bloated, pushed upwards. This was the plague Cormick had caught in his nets - nothing but frogs!

And strange as it might be if these were what she and May had thrown out in the crates, it wasn’t a sin or a crime as far as she knew. Anyway, Cormick seemed to think the French navy was at fault. She let out the breath she’d been holding in, rued it at once and clamped her hand over her mouth.

Things shifted and seethed in the flotsam - dark and gleaming things. She stepped closer. It seemed that young eels hardly bigger than slugs fed on one of the frogs. A crab joined in, its fat, purple hand feeding its little square mouth from which bubbles sprang and popped. The claw reached down and filched another chunk, red and fibrous and nothing like frog guts. She grabbed one of the elvers away. The rest scattered.

The crab stood its ground, waving a claw still clamped around flesh, its little legs keeping precarious grip on a pale hand that bobbed in the Biblical tide.





7


All the way home, she thought about Dead Men’s Fingers and how as children, she and May had plucked the yellow fronds of weed and chased each other along the beach, screaming. She clutched the lump in her shirt, begging it not to bloom poppies of blood that would give her away. The fingers were cold against her breastbone - slim fingers, tapered at the ends, the bluish nails ending raggedly. As if the fingers had clawed for all they were worth. Hairless. Dead Girl’s Fingers. Nothing seemed real.

At the wicket gate, Toby greeted her, stumpy tail wagging. He stretched in front of the gate and whined, licking his chops.

“Be gone with you.” She pushed the gate slowly to stop the hinges from telling on her.

Toby cocked his head to one side, as if he couldn’t quite believe she was scolding him. She closed the gate behind her, looking around the croft in confusion. The cottage and the byre and the chicken coop were like buildings sunk beneath the waters of the Firth. Out there where frogs floated and fingers grew. Her stomach roiled. She gulped down a mouthful of stinging bile. Sweat was in her eyes, but she couldn’t wipe them, not when her hands held that other hand close. Why had she taken it? The crabs and eels would have eaten it and all this could have been forgotten.

She headed across the yard, too slow for her staccato heart, like swimming through bog water, nightmare slow, her calves pushing through the soft, smelly huddle of chickens pecking for grain and worms. Toby followed close at her heels. He must smell something.

“Go chase a rat,” she hissed. She wanted him gone before she took the hand out of her shirt and really gave him something to bark about.

Outside the chicken coop, the cockerel flicked his gold eye up at Oona with something akin to suspicion. She was usually the one whose lap he sought out, whose bed he settled on when it was time to tuck his head under his wing. He puffed his ginger neck feathers and coughed out a salvo of clucks.

“Put your hackles up, will you, Orpheus?” She shoved him out of the way with her foot. “Fair-weather friend.”

She pulled out the wooden hatch and grabbed up an egg. “Toby!”

He sat on his hind legs, let out a whine-growl of anticipation. She mock-threw the egg to the far side of the croft. The daft bugger ran for it. In the time it took him to see her trick and circle back, she’d taken the hand from her shirt, wrapped it in her kerchief and stuffed the bundle into the roof of the coop where the hens couldn’t get to it, or Granny or Toby either. The little dog ran back just as she was sliding the hatch back in place.