The Gift of Stones

10

‘ALL WE HAD to eat that night was slott. The woman ground the fish eggs into creamy paste and added green flour. She rolled the mixture into dumplings and heated them in sea water on the dampened fire which she had lit too dangerously close to the reedwork of her hut.

“Watch the pot,” she said. “Don’t let it crack. And call me when they’re done.”

“When are they done?”

“They’ll rise and float,” she said. She took a cup of water and stooped to leave the hut. In the dull light that lingered in the distance I watched her step into the grasses with her dog and walk a little way from the hut. She wore a belted smock. She took it by the hem, lifted it up to her breasts and squatted on the ground. Beneath the smock, she was thin and naked. Her buttocks and her thighs were creased and empty like punctured water bags. The hair between her legs was long and black. The dog stood before her, its tail erect, sniffing at the ground. She took its muzzle in her hands and pushed the dog away towards the hut. Her eyes were good. She saw me watching her as she added earth to earth, and cleaned herself with the water and some leaves. “Watch that pot,” she called, and pulled a screen of grass to block my view.

The dumplings were still boulders at the bottom of the sea. I turned my head away from the woman in the grass and looked about her home. Her child was sleeping on its mat. I could hear the snort and whistle of its blocked nostrils, the insect in its chest. The woman’s woven house had once been strong, but water, winter, sun, wind and frost had soaked and dried and split and snapped the reeds. Its coating of caked mud had cracked and fallen. Its roof required new timber. Its floor, fresh mats. The bracken fronds that she had used in bunches on the ground to keep out draughts and rats wheezed and fidgeted with bugs and roaches. Now I saw the sense in lighting fires so close. What smoke remained blew low into the hut, into my eyes, into the baby’s chest, into the bracken and kept the flies away.

“Are they done?” she said. She was standing at the fireside, her smock in place, the dog sniffing at her hands.

“Not yet.”

“You’re not much use.” She shook the clay pot with a stick and the slott came up like bubbles in a pool. She tipped the pot and let the water run away until there were only dumplings and a little juice. She reached for some dry wood which was stacked inside the hut and for a while we had a golden flame without much smoke by which to eat our meal. She looked much older in that light. Sockets large and rimmed from sleeplessness, lips cracked and ulcerated, hair coarse and bunched in stooks behind her ears, white sores in clusters on her nose. I’d seen her skin before. It had the points and peaks of urchin shells. I’ve said her eyes were good. Quite clear and grey and unabashed. She handed me hot dumplings.

“They’re good,” she said, but she did not eat with appetite. She ate as if it were a duty. She had good cause. The taste was high and tedious.

“We had much better food,” she said, “when my husband was around. We had our pick. Crab, we had. And laver soup. And samphire, too. That tastes so good. He picked it at low tide in summer from the marshes over there.” She hardly moved her head. “You have to let the roots hang for a while before you cook. And then you strip it with your teeth. You eat the flesh and throw the stem into the fire. It whines and bubbles there like spit. We had all sorts of fish. He caught them in those baskets.” Again she hardly moved her head to indicate the fish traps, holed and ageing, hanging from the roof. Her voice woke up the baby. It was a girl. She crawled onto her mother’s lap but would not take the salty pellets of slott which her mother offered on a finger. She lived in the hope of milk and nuzzled at the smock until her mother pushed it from her shoulders to her waist and let her suck. Her breasts were scarcely more than nipples. ‘There is no milk,’ she said, and shrugged. She must have known that I was watching her, a youth who’d never seen a woman naked and so close.

I see you smile and brighten up as if you think I’ll tell some tale of how I dropped my head, perhaps, and took the woman’s other nipple in my mouth. Or, throwing down my dumpling, put my one good hand upon her knee. Hard luck. You have ignored the state that she was in, the ulcers and the dirt, her thinness and her poverty. What I said about her eyes — quite clear, and grey, and unabashed — has made you think of sex. Me, too. She was a beauty in decay. And I was cold and wet and far from home and frightened of the night.

She was obsessed with food. She went on talking with the baby tugging drily at her breast: “When my husband was still here we’d eat so well. Lobsters, coalfish, ebb meat. We never ate the same thing twice. Baked eel. Baked guillemot. Seakale. Goose eggs. Have you had those? Have you had mussels roasted in hot stones?” She told how her husband and her two boys would scour the sea shore for its fruits, how they would search the cliffs for nests, and harvest reeds, and club the seals to death. Once they found a whale, a rorqual, on the beach. There was meat and hide enough to feed and clothe a hundred men. And fat for light, and bones for fuel, and ribs for making huts. They took the surplus — the whale, the eggs, the kale, the tasty saltland rabbits — to the markets at the villages around, and they came back with meat and milk and cheese and beans and beer.

“On market days we had a feast,” she said. And then, one day when they had gone to trade at the village where the stoneys lived, they did not return. The dog came back. But not her husband or the boys. She waited. She was waiting still. Who knows what happened to them? She went herself to the village. “I’ve never seen such things,” she said. “Such wealth. Such homes. But the people there…” She mimed some spit. “They had no time for me. I came back here. I had this child, poor thing. I do the best I can. I have the dog. I do a little trade. But I never caught a fish. No one taught me how. I never clubbed a seal. I couldn’t climb a cliff for eggs. So I make do. I found a dead fish on the shore today, its eggs were swollen in its pouch. This slott has been a treat. And then? Perhaps my family will come back and we’ll eat well again before we die.”

I asked her, had she seen a ship. She shook her head. She hadn’t seen a ship. All she’d seen that day was me, emerging through the heathgrass with a look of terror on my face. I’d looked so frightened of her dog and so burdened with the rain that she had no choice but to offer help.

“And that?” she asked. She nodded at my severed arm. “What happened to the rest?”

What happened to your husband and your sons? I thought. The same, no doubt. If I could lose an arm for a dozen scallops, then they could lose their lives for whale meat, rabbits, kale.

“My arm?” I said. “I lost it at my birth. You know what mothers are. Mine couldn’t wait and pulled me out, and snap. It came away. You don’t like that? Then, let it be an animal that tore it free. Half dog, half gull. No one knows its name. One bite.”

Why tell the truth when lies are more amusing, when lies can make the listener shake her head and laugh — and cough — and roll her eyes? People are like stones. You strike them right, they open up like shells.’