Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan

Author:Margo Lanagan [Margo Lanagan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781742694054
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2012-01-22T13:00:00+00:00

Next day I rose, and dressed what felt like an entirely new body, an entirely new man, in the ordinary clothing of the old. I kissed sleeping Neme, and took up her skin that had lain folded all night on the blanket-chest, and tucked it into my coat. I went out into the world, which greeted me wet and windily, full of a cruel and exhilarating light.

Up the town I climbed to Wholeman’s inn, and peered in at the window. Wholeman was at work in there, wiping down tables. I knocked on the window, then met him at the door.

He squinted up at me. ‘I know you, I’m sure,’ he said, ‘though it’s very early for a welcome-home drink.’

‘That’s not what I’m after. May I speak with you a moment?’

‘Why, certainly! You’re Mallett’s boy, aren’t you, that his mam took off to Cordlin years ago?’ He stood back for me and I stepped in. The empty room smelt of men and pipe-smoke and ale; it had no ornament beyond mounted fishes and a stag’s head on the walls.

‘That’s me: Dominic Mallett,’ I said, with the smile of a man who has had his name whispered in his ear all night. We shook hands. ‘And I have come into a fortune.’

‘You have? Well, you’re very welcome to spend it here,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Oh,’ he then said as I pulled Neme’s skin-parcel free of my coat. ‘It must have been quite a fortune, to persuade Misskaella out so late in the season.’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I found my lady on the beach last night, just this side of Forward Head, singing on the rocks there.’ This was the story Misskaella had advised me to tell. I owe you money, I had said foolishly, not even looking at her, because that would mean tearing my gaze from Neme’s. But, Let me give you a gift, the witch had cooed, just to see what that feels like.

‘Found her?’ Wholeman took the skin from me, and looked up wide-eyed. ‘Singing on the rocks? For the taking?’

‘She is at my house now. She has agreed to stay awhile.’

Wholeman shook his head slowly. ‘I have heard of such luck, women coming up by themselves,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never known a man to have it, not in my time.’

‘Well, now you have, Wholeman,’ I said. ‘But my fix is still the same as every man’s, to keep the skin where she cannot find it, for she says she does not trust herself to resist the lure of the sea, if she knows of the skin’s whereabouts, or finds it accidentally. Do I remember, you used to have a locked room out the back here?’

‘I did and I do. Shall I hang this there with the others?’

‘Would you? And what do I owe you for it?’

‘Owe me? Why, a little custom now and then, that’s all.’

‘No fee, for the keeping? Are you sure?’

‘There’s enough debt in this town without my taking men’s pennies for a bit of hanging-space I’d not use otherwise.

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