MUSSELS

MUSSELS

Miran worked the pocket knife like a lever, sliding it up and under the mussels until they came free of their moorings. She held each clump briefly, as though they might contain some small pulse. The shells were scarred and dark as oil, with streaks of blue-green where the light found them.

She dropped the cluster in the pail and moved on.

Morning came slow and cold.

The mussels were abundant here. She remained surprised that life could still take such a simple form. Even the artificial ones had some flavour, despite a more rubbery texture.

The shore was moon-like in its desolation. Plateaux of mud-stone. Outcrops of purple Carageen and Oarweed. Slick and dark as bottle glass where the wet held.

She watched the breakers. The tide would turn without warning. Then the water would run like a thief.

The wind played amongst the grass. The sound came without pause, older than speech. No mercy in it. Only work.

She listened. The stones ticked.

Further along, vast tile mosaics had been laid upon the fore-shore. Rows of wires sang from poles. Amongst them, several spinners, mounted to catch and reflect the light.

The vagrants were still finding a way through.

 
At the cottage, she noticed Emma’s car parked just along the lane. Found her daughter waiting by the water condenser.

Emma gave the plastic cistern a gentle kick.

'You’re out.’ she said.

‘Plenty in the storage butt. Next storm will cover it.’

In the kitchen, Miran emptied the bucket of mussels into the sink and ran the sprayer over them.

Thin sunlight came through the kitchen window, illuminated dead plants and racks of empty jars. Made the dust resemble protozoa.

Emma sat at the table and watched.

‘You’re still eating those?’ she said.

For a moment Miran didn’t speak.

Outside, the tide was coming in across the flats. She could hear it working the stones.

Headstrong, people had once said. Miran had preferred to call her daughter stubborn. She had felt both its weight and gift.

Now she saw Emma as a harder thing. A daughter who knew the shape of her own wanting and would not turn from it.

There had been a widening by degrees. Their differences drawing them apart as surely as opposite poles.

In Miran’s mind, their relationship had tightened into a knot. When she tried to inspect it, she saw only a child’s scribble. Lines crossing and doubling back. There was no beginning to find. No loose ends to grasp.

It frightened her. Not because Emma was wrong, but because Miran knew the world had never been kind to women who stood where they had decided to stand.

‘Is that why you’re here?’ she said, ‘to fuss about my diet?’

‘You know it’s not, but it is linked.’

‘Oh?’

‘Mum!’

‘I don’t see the problem. They’re fine.’

She picked out a single mussel, held it between thumb and forefinger as though it might speak.

‘You can’t possibly know that.’ Emma said.

‘This same conversation every time.’

‘You’re still so closed to it.’

‘I’ve been foraging on this beach for over thirty years.’

‘Most of those aren’t even real.’

Emma jabbed an accusatory finger at the sink, not quite touching what lay there. Never allowing herself to do that.

‘They don’t do me any harm.’

‘You don’t know that. Would you even realise if they were - I don’t know - changing you?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I’m not Mum. They’ve found things in Dolphin stomachs. Things they can’t identify.’

Miran glanced towards the window. What was left by the waves shone in the grey light. Seemed to shift slightly.

‘I know what I’m eating.’

‘You don’t.’

‘I know a mussel.’

‘You know what a mussel used to be.’

Miran placed the mussels into a colander, a handful at a time. She wanted to say that food was not the point. That she liked the strangeness of them, their small, obstinate refusal to belong entirely to the sea.

She wanted to say that each year there were fewer things she could choose for herself without her daughter finding fault with them.

‘Your father used to say the sea would provide for us all,’ she said.

‘He didn’t see it like this though, did he? He never saw it get this bad.’

Miran looked down at the sink again.

‘They’re finding new variations every day.’ Emma continued, ‘Things that imitate. They’ve found fibres in gulls. Teeth in the soil. Things with eyes that aren’t eyes.’

Miran remained silent for a long time.

‘I can’t live on charity hand-outs,’ she spat.

Emma came up from the table and leant against the sideboard, next to her.

‘There’s room with me.’

‘I know.’

‘You can see the garden from the bedroom window.’

‘You’ve said it before. I don’t want your garden. I want mine with all its wildness.’

‘You could have your chair. Your books.’

‘I have the sea.’

For a while neither spoke.

Eventually, Miran shook her head.

‘This is home.’

She watched the water. The mottle of it. The reeds bending in the breeze. The gorse. The mud. Each a self contained thing of its own.

Place possesses us, she thought. It colonises us until we are neither separate nor belonging. That’s the dirt simple truth of the soil.

The water line was studded with jellyfish. Thousands of them, quivering and befouled. A menagerie of blancmanges. 

Something moved there. Small things that lifted themselves from the foam and against all odds, stood upright. They were thin and glistened.

She knew the gulls would have them.

 

By early afternoon, the air had grown cooler. The reeds in the marsh bent in unison. For a moment they held there, torsional and whispering.

The cottage stood upon a spur of rock that jutted into the marshes. From the garden you could look down upon the creaks and dunes where the water lay black in the evenings.

Emma smoked beneath the porch.

Miran joined her. 

There were swifts over the far fields. She traced their low sickle arcs, watching them skimming the furrows.

The ground was dry and hard and smelled of dust and lavender.

‘I keep expecting him to walk back in,’ she said. ‘It’s been five years.’

‘I know.’

‘Sometimes I think he’s not gone. That he’s somewhere else. Made of brightness and edge. I can almost see him. Then I turn and its only sunlight.’

Silence.

‘How could something take so much and leave so little?’

Clouds moved upon the hills. The light shifted.

The grass had gone high around the stones, and the beans had climbed their poles and gone to seed.

Along the wall there was a fine grey growth. It came back after even after Miran had pulled it up.

The previous spring it had made little clear, tube-like stems that collected and held the rain.

Emma crouched beside it.

‘What is this stuff’

‘No idea,’ Miran shrugged. ‘It doesn’t cause me any bother.’

Emma put her hand close to it without touching. The stems seemed to sense her there and trembled.

Further along, something had pushed through the grass. It resembled a flattened mushroom, but the cap was translucent. Beneath were fine threads that moved slowly against one another. They seemed to be growing.

‘It’s everywhere,’ Emma said.

‘Those?’

‘And the things in the hedges.’

‘I haven't seen those.’

‘You don't look.’

‘I do.’

‘You only see what you expect.’

For a moment neither spoke.

‘I found his coat yesterday,’ Miran said.

‘Where?’

‘In the shed.’

‘You still had it?’

‘I suppose I did.’

‘What did you do with it?’

‘Nothing. He’d left a receipt in the pocket. For a packet of nails. And there was one of those little stones.’

‘What sort?’

‘One of the brown ones with a yellow stripe running through it. He used to collect them and give them to people.’

‘I remember. Tiger’s Eyes.’

‘Probably. He would bring all sorts home. Bits of wood. Feathers. Fossils. For luck. That’s what he said. God knows, I used to throw out so much.’

Emma smiled, but only slightly. ‘He said everything was for luck.’

‘Yes.’

Beyond the garden, something small moved amongst the grass. It was too quick to be an insect. Too smooth in its motion to be a bird.

Emma followed the movement.

‘Do you remember the other things Dad used to bring back?’

Miran looked at her.

‘What things?’

‘From the fields. The more unusual things. Some with wings. Extra sets of legs.’

Miran was quiet.

‘He liked finding things,’ she said. ‘He liked nature.’

‘Did he ever tell you what they were?’

‘He made a go of explaining it to me once but I never really understood.’

‘Did he ever tell you what he did with them?’

‘No. I’d never have them in the house. Some of them were barely formed. He never told me what he did with them after.’

‘He used to burn them,’ Emma laughed.

‘What? No. He would have buried them.’

‘That’s what he told you. He’d wrap them in newspaper. He had that burn pit behind the shed. You remember? You used to put rubbish in there.’

Miran could remember her husband coming home with the smell of smoke in his clothes. She had thought he had been burning the gorse that choked the drainage ditches. She could remember how he would wash his hands before touching her.

Married thirty-two years and she had never thought to ask why.

'He wouldn’t have burned them, she said. ‘He hated the smell of burning.’

‘He hated the smell of burning animals.’ Emma said it gently, as if gentleness might alter the fact. ‘I used to watch him from my bedroom.’

‘You were never asleep?’

‘No. There’s no getting used to that smell. I used to rake through the ashes the next morning. Count the little bones. At one point I even had a jar of them under my bed.’

‘I found that. I assumed it was something of his. Something he’d given you?’

‘What sort of father gives their daughter a jar of burned bones?’

The garden was suddenly very still.

The grass had grown over the place where the pit had been. There was no trace of it now.

‘Five years,’ Miran whispered.

Emma remained silent.

‘The strange thing is, I don’t think of him as dead.’

‘What do you think of him as?’

‘Just gone.’

‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

‘You know it’s not. He is somewhere nearby. Not far in meters or miles. Just elsewhere. The other side of the mirror perhaps.’

That was her own father talking. The idea that there were other worlds folded against their own like pages pressed tight.

She tried to envisage him there. A man less hollowed out by illness.

If such a world existed, it ran close. As close as breath upon glass.

She did not know if that was a comfort or an undoing.

She noticed Emma watching her.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Tell me.’

‘You miss him.’

Miran stared at the distance.

’Yes,’ she said. ‘I miss the man I knew before he died. That man is gone longer still.’

The clouds had darkened. She hadn’t really noticed exactly when it had happened but there was a steady breeze now. It ruffled the undergrowth and drew a low sound from the trees.

As she watched, a small black shape crossed the soil near the shed. It had six legs, although two of those seemed to be growing even as it moved. It stopped beside a stone and seemed to disappear.

When she looked again, there was only a narrow opening in the earth where it had been.