Goonoo Goonoo Road

chapter one – a serpent in the dust

This is a memory. I may tell you about it as if you were my close and familiar companion, cognisant of all the guilts and rivulets of my inmost thoughts. Forgive me if I berate you, as I berate myself. We are on the shore, the cusp. Take off your shoes, the sand is a hundred million years of piscean regurgitation, but, for that brute alchemy, quite pure; walk with me awhile.

When this town was new, fat off good rivers, wool and wheat, they built a brick factory and made red bricks of the ochre-red clay of the southern fields to build mansions, town halls, courthouses, prisons. Later, when the brick factory was nothing but a redder stain and two crippled towers canted precariously on the horizon, they built less grand buildings, of clapboard and asbestos sheets, grey and pastel blue and pink, fading into the sunset, for we lesser, sunset people, in the lee of the slaughter yards, in the shadow of those chimneys, curtailed by the mazed angularity of new bitumen and concrete culverts.

How they built the towers, the brick factory, of seemingly the same red bricks that it disgorged from beehive kilns, I wondered, but never understood. A monstrous town, under an obdurate sun; it ate earth and people, and vomited out itself.

One of those dust devil days, you know the ones, where they rise spontaneously up out of the brick and scree littered vacant lots, whip grit like sunlight into your mouth and eyes, blinking and sputtering, as quickly gone.

“Hey, look,” I said, to the craning ghost gums, to no one in particular. It was the colour of watered down honey, interleaved with the fading, dismayed black of dawn, scything determinedly in that sideways way along the bright, mercenary vee of the new-cast gutter.

Serpenting along, I thought. As if the road were its mother.

It was a matter of a few lengthened steps to overtake, for my shadow to bestride it. I scrabbled a red plastic lunch box from my side-slung canvas satchel, peeled off the translucent yellow lid. Flung away a gleaming red apple, the lank slather of of a mortadella sandwich, into the slaughterman’s field, a prize for sleek crows or broken horses, and with one sure but careful encirclement of the snake’s nape, scooped it.

“There is no one left in the world,” it said, looking at me in wise chagrin, tongue flickering over river-pebbled lips, peering from below the half closed lid.

“That’s a nonsense,” I replied, bringing the box closer, to better see the needling, night-lit eyes. “I can see traffic, ahead, I can see the shapes of people.”

“Shapes only, you have stepped sideways. Let me go, and step back. It smells like death and mustard in here. Lettuce and mayonnaise. Pah. Let me go. My mother will be mad.”

“You cost me an apple. And a sandwich that my mother made. I am taking you for show and tell. I shone my shoes. Though they hurt. I shone them.”

“Let me go. My mother made the world. I will give you a pepper tree. I will tell the sun my father to calm his fury.”

“Shhhhhh. I don’t like pepper.” I closed the lid, and held the box close to my chest, and late, ran for school, the still low morning sun still blazing across the watery hide of the Goonoo Goonoo road, the cattle trucks gnashing chrome bright masks, I flinging myself sideways from mouth-wide wheels, almost invisible, into the grit and talc of disgorged brick dust that snaked the verge. I thought; as if that hard, fixed river had on each side twinned rivers moving with that slow remora determination.

Where I fled, none saw; the snake in the box striking ineffectually with upraised perfect fangs against the slick, impenetrable surface, at each enfilading scatter of my heart.

“What sort of child are you?” Mrs Smith asked. I could see in the ghost against the distant dun and blue beyond the window glass, tears had turned the dust on my face into a warning. A claw scraped tiger’s mask.

She was the shape of an old and I’ll-manicured rose. Leaves long curled to husks. Obsidian chips for eyes. Her mouth a long healed wound. Gnarled, grained, bereft, for fast fingers, a cat’s knotted whip cords. I heard her thinking, “How does one beat such a child?”

“ Sorry, Miss. Fell over.” Safely at school, amongst the fast eroding bricks, the colour of broken bottles and dried blood, embedded in the alien surface, like hard watchful eyes, glassy, concave inclusions, people, buildings, the town, could, almost, see me again.

“The Vikings used ice for windows,” she was saying, with the stridency of fraught but determined certitude. “There are runic marks on the rocks in Sydney Cove, so it is thought they came here long before Captain Cook.”

“That’s a nonsense, Miss.” it was the favourite thing I had learned in school; that one person’s harboured absolutes were another’s nonsense. That repeating the phrase, so often repeated to me, was a way of cutting through the obstinate veneer. On the desk, the snake in the lunch box said, “Bravissimo.”

“Shhhhh!” I said, putting my hand on the lid, the shadowed Ouroboros shape circling within.

“If you are eating in class, I expect you have enough for everyone.”

“No, Miss.”

“Let’s see what you do have, then.” She came striding forward, like a cavalry charge. Cannonade heels, eyes like Medusa, hair flailing, grabbed the box, held it down against the desk, perhaps, in case it escaped. With that invasive, indrawn vacuum sound, of necessity’s abhorrent breath, tore up the lid.

She yelped. Quite empty. Marks like crimson eyes on the soft fore edge of her wrist.

“You stabbed me with a pencil.” Outrage, incredulous. Her mouth moving with a marionette’s jolting, imprecise stutter.

“I’ll die of lead poisoning!”

“That’s a nonsense, Miss.”

The slap came with that God-like fury. Tears, laughter, silence sting. Suddenly sideways through the world. I closed up the box and ran.

By the ordure grimed trap of the slaughter yard’s mazy railed marshalling corral, my chest caught me up in a demand of roaring. Somewhere I had thrown away my shoes. The road was following me. I could see it in the distance, raising up, writhing. The snake in the box against my chest said, “Time to go home, our mother’s calling.”

“I killed her. Mrs Smith. I can never go home.”

“You didn’t kill her. She has just about as much life as she always had. You stepped sideways, little brother. Think of it as a dance. You cannot unstep. Here, I’m hungry. Give me your wrist.”

It suckled for a while.

After, a sate purchase on its lips, it sidled into the yard’s litter of bones and Paterson’s Curse. An apple core’s mangled hourglass. Against my forehead’s irrationed heat, through dry weeds, a breeze still singing.

Before vanishing in sand and scree, the serpent looked back, over broad imagined shoulders, and whispered – something I did not quite hear – something like a winter wind caught in a chimney’s hollow breast.

I plunged my head into the algal stain of a half-barrel concrete trough, mica flickering on the surface, and underneath, thinking; here is where the condemned drink. Shoulders, collar wet. It was cooling, nevertheless.

Heading home. A moth abroad, confused by my moon brightness, deflected from my chest. Fell with bent wings to rust borne earth. Stunned or dead. Misadventure, I thought; am I then an act of god? The penultimate act.

In the near distance are the hunched shapes of clapboard and asbestos houses. Somewhere beyond, the desperate, leaning shards of red brick.

I think; the world is stretched thin. There are monsters. I am at the precipice. About to fall.

The world here is desperately empty.

chapter 2 – mother

Chapter Two (Mother)

It was almost ten years later I was beaten to death and my body thrown off a cliff into a debris littered gully, to lie in the moonless dark awhile hidden amongst the scree and scrub, the carapaces of decaying cars and the blistered cocoons of mouldering floral-patterned mattresses, before I was dragged back up through glaring streetlights and brutally resurrected. Afterwards, I was neither here nor there, quasi modo for a while. Quite monstrous. Then, emerging from all outward signs of my destruction, nevertheless, a different shape.

How that later blasphemy connects with this, I cannot tell you exactly. Only that it does, in the way wing beats propel the bird, and horses balk at barbed fences, or a storm demands the unravelling of a tethered kite, and sunshine evaporates puddles after, revealing gravel, and broken glass, and in the worn, degraded screed of tyre tracks, unremarked departures.

You doubt. This is not a novel that through glib voicelessness asks you to subsume consciousness, to suspend disbelief. Nor is it a biograph, dressed in sheep’s clothes, inveigling at the door of veracity. Because this child is a cur, not a pig, I have come to blow your house down. Here each moment makes its own demands. Think instead; these are the rifled reflections of my life passing before my inner eye at the moments of my deaths, those moments, that passage, deranged like an overturned display of photographs and tourist postcards, lurid corals now in fragmentary montage with  stark monochrome and melancholic sepia. It is not for you to know which parts of my story are true; that some are, must suffice. As to the rest, if they are embellished, heightened, confabulated, extemporised, recast, concocted, nevertheless; there is a kernel, and here, I give you the bask and threat and spill of the living tree.

It is only from the relative safety of distance that childhood is lustrous, the deep thrall of ruby glass. We see now with envy, forgetting, the same fracture that makes rubies red, makes emeralds green. Which is to simply say; each image has its own truth.

There was a locust on the screen door. That dun bright plague verdure almost hidden against the dulled mesh and curlicues of blighted aluminium silver. I chew the word like an incantation. Like they say on TV. A-loomi-num – a-loo-mini-yum. A spell to ease the hinges, to silence the world. At the creak and shudder, the locust whirrs, nips at my wrist, my fingers curl tighter on the lever, in a blur of lace wings and bent-back, serrated limbs, fled, on the currents of its own precarious hunger.

The house, in vacant summer’s middling morning heat has the heady, intoxicating smell of almost burnt meat and fresh lead paint. It seems quite new, at what I imagine is a secret women’s, hour. Our invasive racket reduced to temple quiet steps. A scent of recently turned earth rising from beneath. Mother is all these things. She is honeysuckle and green, the ozone smell of Fabulon, and the rivery murk of silk-slick polyester. I come, at this hour, a stranger, an alien, an interloper. Smelling of tears and death, and that dusty, serpentine stench. With the bang of the screen behind me, all peace gone.

But – she knows already. She is cradling the phone, chin and shoulder, sotto voce chirping, hands wringing and smoothing a cloth, the red gone to pink, as if she could not help but in turns kill and revive a fear paralysed animal. Involuntarily knuckling for the warning of its heartbeat. The start and scrabble of its flailing claws. A voice echoed louder against pristine walls. Full of the static of hard, accusatory words. Calmed again, with that deflating hiss. Put it to rest.

Mother is brown and creased and bent and patient as a willow. I suppose sometimes I am the bird in her hair, at others the creek in skirl and babble below her feet. Sometimes she lashes, sometimes she scoops me up in tendril branches. Now she is somewhere between a cigarette and a sigh. I am a chore. There is nothing to say. I can only slowly cry. She folds me up like linen. Carefully, with a whetted thumb, smooths and creases the edges. Puts me in the cupboard with the sheets and towels. I imagine a tomb for pharaoh. Forty four thread count, a smell in the semi-dark almost like dried flowers. I will be found with the moths, a desiccated husk, heart still barely thrumming, in a thousand aching years.

The telephone again. The distant, watery voice. “They say he’s killed his teacher. I don’t know. With a pencil or with a snake. I know. I’ve put him in the hall cupboard. Yes. The police are coming.”

Sleep is an anvil, just above my head. You think a cartoon, but this is a serious weight. I will be crushed, my skull caved in, my chest collapsed until I look like the half-constructed Opera House, exhaling like arias the unsung deaths of a thousand cockatoo roadkills.

I imagine the bird, a skeletal machine, pushing itself up, shedding earth and sea, the halo bright feathers underneath, rending trains and ferries in iron talons, toppling buildings with the beat of its wings, a glance of that piercing eye, then gone into the sun. After, by whatever unconscious process the crisis is resolved, I wake again. 

There is something incredibly freeing in the the betrayal by a parent, of their child, to authority, to the state. However unintentional. Regardless of whatever sense of duty, of obligation to the rule of civil society, some bonds must be held inviolate. When they are not, like a kite that has unspooled and escaped, spun through suddenly welt fingers, you are made an orphan, beyond tempor, freed from all but the most tenuous bonds to both.

Mother’s snare drum pacing. The police cars have that sly sound, that Judas hush of a loose piece of rope, the grit of it, not yet done with flailing, an encroaching sea over the corrugations of a too resilient sand, the drag and drown of it. The screech of doors with that half-full barrel sound of small animals drowning. I unbury myself, push the closet doors, peek out the guillotining crack of light, the magnetic catch unclicks. There she is again, only now the size of legend, the bands of liquorice black and acid drop yellow, the polished sandstone grain, softly glowing, coming down the hall with the cool, irrevocable purpose of water.

“Better follow me,” the snake says, passing with the slightest camber to the lionesque weight of her head, an insouciant flick of her tongue, the shape of a lipless smile, passing. I imagine one day she shall show me her fangs, but not today. Today I follow.

Quickly down the honey coloured floorboards. Somehow, in her path, the hard soles of my shoes silent. The bleach and lemon powder scent of the laundry, the serpentine entanglement of green and red tiles, through the oil slick foam on the surface of the overfilling sink, then those garbled, demanding voices, cannonade footsteps, I am jackknifing through the window, hear the oofed cries, the tackle-crash of pursuing men falling on the confined and slippy tiles in the room behind me.

A whir of dragonflies around the moss and fylfot shadows of the drain. Terracotta, cement and pvc. Alien white gravel, in slender spindles, the weeds pushing through. The fresh cut smell of grass, an orchestral crescendo, has an air of torture, an air of hobbled freedom. The universal constant, the throat and monoxide stench of an unseen lawnmower. She is slipping through a V gap in the weathered to silver crenellations of the post and paling fence at the back of the yard, under the lower beam, shrinking as she does.

“Make yourself smaller,” she says. And I do.

Lionel is there. On the other side. A knot of a boy. That cockatoo smile. He has pushed the Victa in a spiral, outward from the central eye of the sea blue and silver above ground pool in the middle of the yard. The pulsing, exhalations it makes. Vinyl and chlorine. 

“Hey,” he says.

She is gone. I see the hint of her down the driveway at the side of his house. Narrow, horizontal, mustard coloured boards. Clinker built, as if a house were sometimes a ship. In familiar conspiracy, I raise a finger to my lips. The last, chugging whirl of the mower blades as Lionel throttles the thing down catches a stray white pebble, flings it with a mosquito whir, with the surgical precision of a snakebite sting it cuts through shirt, to rib, deflects to the suckling pale softness of my inner arm. Blood wells like a paint stroke. 

Lionel raises a cupped hand to his mouth. In the sudden, consuming silence, I again gesture, two fingers to closed lips, and run for the side of the yard, the carport, past the decrepit hulk of Lionel’s father’s station-wagon. We have spent long afternoons in the tobacco ash and oil stink of it driving to invisible places. A glance back and with two gestures he is making the secret signs for “tower – later”.

I nod acknowledgement.

From there the street opens into the tumult no man’s land of partially constructed houses. Trenches and piles of sand and the yellow pine jigsaw of naked framework. Some, skeletal and carcass still. Others with crews clambering over, as if, rather than building, they were ants or carrion birds, stripping away swathes of sky from behemoths to reveal the underlying bone, in a kind of irreversible decay, listening to the gravel shouts and magpie trills of their tinpot radios as they work. The red towers of the brickworks above this jagged horizon in the far distance beyond. Which seemed, in this moment, nursing wounds and strangely free, as good a place as any to disappear.

Fish-mother

There once was a fishwife of a worn to silver seaside town, who, though her hands were stung by years of scales and salt, was nevertheless admired, her hair the ink and spindrift of the sea at night, her smile changeable as tides.

Each day her husband, a brown and knotted driftwood man, would return in his coracle with two baskets of fish. Those with melancholy eyes she salted, those with iridescent skin she cut and quartered for the traders who carried such bounty to places far and strange. Some she smoked and put aside for their own larder, and some she prepared with herbs and roots for their evening meal.

The sea was generous, offering fish and sometimes curious storm washed things, and though their days were unchanging, for the most part they were content. Except – except, though they coupled most nights, they way the sea and shore did, still, they had no child. Sometimes she felt as bare as the tideline on those moonless, silent winter mornings, when the sea had scoured, and receded.

One evening when she could hear the quiet susurr of mothers in nearby houses singing to their children, she remembered what her grandmother had told her when she was young, in a time of famine. “Carve a bone so it will float, a stone so it will sink, and a knuckle entwined between. Cast it in the deep at sunset, and sit vigil through the night on the empty shore. Light no fire, sing no songs. Sometime before the dawn, the octopus headed god will come ashore. Ask of that stranger your boon.” She remembered two hungry seasons, and how they ended in sudden wealth from the sea, and that her grandmother after each had shortened fingers on her sinister hand.

Thus, in the dark of a midsummer eve, when her husband followed the season’s night shoals with the other men, she carved a blue-green stone the shape of an eye, and a knob of bone into a hollow like a cup, and she cut the smallest finger from her hand, pressing the blade in at the first phalanx the way she sometimes separated the leg bones of a fowl. Her tears were more of determination than of pain.

She tied the pieces together, clumsy fingers bloodying the string, so that the nub of flesh, already no longer part of her, but just the bait necessary for a very particular fish, sat equally between the cup and weight. She bandaged her hand in salve and ribbon, and went to the shore, uncertain, of the ache in her hand, or belly, or heart, which was worse.

She swung the lure above her head, the hole in the stone whistling, and let it fly, and it flew far out beyond the night-limned lazy breakers, to where the sea was calm and black and shot through with luminescence. The bone cup floated on the surface, the way palace flowers floated in an ornamental pond in a painting she had seen. The morsel floating somewhere in the layer of brightness could not be told. The stone hung below, in the dark.

She sat on the sand, and pulled her shawl tighter, forgetting her injury for a moment, til it stung. She thought of a child, challenging and retreating from the waves. Of a golden haired boy, trimming a triangular sail. Of a driftwood man, like but unlike her husband, holding his own child in his arms.

The bone flower bobbed, and vanished below the black waters. Green swirled where it had been. Then with a sound like leather, something, someone, emerged from the sea. He had the aspect a of silver skinned youth in a coral crown, and at once, a gnarled and barnacled deepdweller, slow of eye, sudden of sting.

“Woman, do you hunger?” Said the creature with, a sound like waves spilling from lipless mouth, hair writhing.

“Oh I hunger.”

“I have tasted, and know your hunger.’

A great salamander, glistening, blotched and pale, crawled out of the waters behind the sea god. At the sight of it her mouth turned hard, and her breasts warmed and ached.

“Take this child of the sea, do not speak of it, but care for it as you would your own, and in seven years come back to me, and you will, of your flesh and blood, have a child of your own.”

Tears wet her face as she scooped the thing up in her shawl and held it against her breast. It made a mewling sound and she felt small soft fingers on her skin, grasping her nipple.

“Mama,” it said, and fed as she fled home.

“Wife, I am the fisherman, yet you bring me a fish,” laughed her husband, home from his labours, as she walked into the kitchen. “Shall I be the fishwife then? Put it on the bench and I will gut it for you. Though I must say, this beast makes a rank oil, and an ill meat, though I warrant its sharp teeth make a vicious scourge.”

“With that beard and those clumsy hands you make a poor fishwife, my dear. Perhaps a fish-husband? I have heard tell these creatures turn from fish to firedrake under a red moon, with flames for plumage, that I would have for my new midsummer’s festival dress, so I will keep it awhile.”

“We shall be the talk of the town, the wife who keeps a fish wrapped in a shawl like a swaddling! Well, keep your ugly fish. When he has grown shall we make a feast or send him to the minster to learn his letters?”

“If he wants, to learn his letters, he will” she said.

The creature in her arms burbled with a sound like the sea against the sides of hollow boats, a peculiarly contented laughter.

The household soon settled into a routine. Thorgold, who was a kindly man, and believed there were still greater mysteries in the sea than fish that walked and wives that pined, brought into the house an old oak bath. He caulked it well with pith and gum, filled it with sand and rocks and seawater, so it made its own little shore, where the creature could bask on the sand or partially submerged in the brine, as was his wont.

Anwen, (for that was the fish-mother’s name) set to knitting a cardigan of coloured wool in a thick rope pattern, which would hold moisture well. Young Oompla made mewling complaint if he slept too close to the fire and his skin dried. The sea damp cardigan kept his skin iridescent and gleaming, and he would burble, “Oompla” quite contentedly. By a kind of natural, unspoken agreement, all three quickly recognised this sound, like small waves against a wooden hull, as the creature’s name.

“Oommpla, my dear, come to the table for your supper,” Anwen would sing in the evening, and Oompla would burble “Oompla”, and come from his tub on skinny, dexterous legs, to sit at the table and eat his favourite, steamed white bait and sea greens. After he would smile with a wide, toothsome grin.

Later in the evening, Thorgold would show Oompla the tying of knots and other sea crafts, and with his small nimble fingers, Oompla was proficient after only a few tries, while Anwen read poems and stories from The Book Of The Sea, to which husband and child would both respond with exclamations of “Oooom!”, at the exciting feats and monstrous discoveries, and “Plaaaaaaaa,” at the terrible tempests and tragic drownings.

There were many busy words spoken behind idle hands when Anwen would take Oompla, wearing his cardigan and wrapped in a net sling against her chest to market. To such empty-lipped looks and scandalised questions she would just say that she was bringing up a fish for his midsummer plumage, no more, no less, and that was the end of the matter.

Well, the end, until, after several weeks, a delegation of the town’s concerned folk knocked at their door.

Anwen was stitching knotted appliqué anchors to a sea blue velvet coat she had made for Oompla, while the fish-child, with a few deft twists was tying more of the decorations. She stood, gathering Oompla in his net sling, behind her.

The village master, perhaps part walrus, stood in their small parlour, kindly frowning, and the priest, at least as much lammergeier as lordling, bent below the low figured ceiling, where tools and lamps and gourds and drying fish and herbs and bobs of coloured glass hung from scraps of net, spoke.

“The folk are concerned, Anwen, if this is a fish, or a child. It is said even the Lord and the high folk in his great hall laugh at the idiot village where the women have fish rather than bairns.” Those gathered outside the open door, nodded and grumbled in assent, the sky behind them darkening in the bruised colours of a fast approaching summer squall.

“Fools will always frown or laugh,” Anwen replied, “but I’m sure his lordship has bigger fish to fry.” Oompla, from her back, peered cautiously over.

“As The Book Of The Sea says, ‘Keep of the sea what the sea freely gives, return to the sea what belongs to the sea’.” Fiercely quoth the priest.

“I hear tell the Emperor of Malagasy has a golden fish with curling moustaches, that his seven concubines feed sweetmeats everyday, and that he augurs from its fast flickering movements his plans for conquest, but this is no such fish as that, this is a plain fish, out of water I grant you, but still quite spry and plump. Of course it is said such fish grant long-life and renewed vigour when reduced to a broth, but if that is your aim I tell you, sirs, when the sea gives you such a fish, you may have it, but this fish is my fish.”

“And yet, Anwen, you carry the creature, and burble to it, and dress it in fine raiment,” said the priest, the apple in his throat bobbing in a manner both reviling and voracious.

“I hear the Lord, when a child, had a bear that wore a vest and doublet, knew its own name and could count to three. Did the Lord’s folk make demands of his mother that the bear be turned loose in the woods for sport, or drained of its bile to invigorate their lax appendages? I think not.”

“Ah, exactly then, Anwen. If this fish that you carry as a child can speak his name, and count his numbers, he must be both baptised and attend school for his letters, if not, the village will decide if it shall be consumed by all in a healthful broth, or returned to the sea.”

About then the rising squall struck. Those outside wetting their lips fled at the downpour, clutching at escaping hats and the lapels of their flax coats. The priest stood glowering.

Oompla said, “Oompla,” and squirted the crowing man with three quick squirts of water from his full gullet pouches, counting gleefully in his chirrupy voice, “One, two, three!” after each briny squirt.

“It has been decided, then,” the village master said, beaming. “Young Oompla shall be baptised and learn his trades and letters with the other village children.”

The priest dabbed gloweringly at his face with a linen kerchief, while Anwen laughed and held Oompla close, and thought to the bargain she made on the beach, and what that sea god would think of its fosterling learning hey-ho-a-day and three plus three, and joinery, and to sew a shark skin jerkin and cast a weighted net, and all the other lore of those who live above the sea in its graces, not below it.

Oompla was baptised in rainwater and in salt, as was the custom, from a driftwood bowl, by the whalebone temple on the shore, the villages singing songs of praise from  The Book to the new child. What they thought, who knew, but some remembered the squall of the day it was decided, and the blue calm of the morning of the ceremony, and took it as a portent.

In the upturned hull that served as kirkroom and school, Oompla soon learned that he could calculate on his sixteen lithe toes and fingers more rapidly than the other children on their ten. Although the sea-sough and basso waves of his voice were not readily given to debate, or history, or argument, or the other flimsy arts, he could sing two countered parts from The Book Of The Sea in contrasting harmonies to great effect, earning in equal measure suspicion and respect from Father Urgolain. While the children played games of Cast The Net, and Rover, Red Rover, on the sand when the priest attended some other duty, Oompla showed them how he could call waves, a little faster and higher, with his sea voice, and once, when one small group of boys got it in their stern jaws and stony knuckles to punish him for his soft and glimmering appearance, and held him down and roughed his appliquéd jacket, he called a roil of green crabs from the coral reefs, that swarmed up and pinched the boys, vicious with hard, serrated pincers, until they howling fled. Oompla called calming waves to ease the crabs’ way back to their domain, this song calmed the children too, and from then he would sing it quietly if the children grew hard and sharp and brittle, as they seemed to do when gathered in vying crowds.

Despite the scowls of the priest, his glaring fish-hawk aspect, Anwen walked Oompla to the school’s shell blazoned door each day, and meet him there again in the early afternoon.

“Were the other children cruel today?” She would ask, “Was Father Urgolain?”

“No, Mother, I sang him the song of the Red Tern, from The Book, and he was pleased, and I showed the children how the narwhals joust like knights, and they were pleased. Jesma said she liked my coat, I showed her your way of tying string in fish and fronds and anchors for its decoration.”

Oompla both learned his lessons and grew faster than the other children, and in the span of a few bountiful seasons sat at the back of the class, with the older children, given less to play and more to the tasks demanded of passing time. His mother had made him a fine new sea-silk coat, and Jesma had made him a necklet of knotted glass and anchors. She had eyes like the summer sea, and the summer’s furious laughter. He had grown into a handsome walking fish, upright as a voyager, with coloured patterns on his skin like the words of God. To see them walking through the market, or calling waves like stallions on the shore, was to imagine the young gods had come again amongst them.

But one morning when he went to meet her by the arced bones of the sea temple, she was not there. At the polished ebon door of her father’s house, a servant through the latch simply said, “She is no longer here.” When Oompla insisted, in his sea voice, her father came, bearing a harpoon, a drunken, squalling aspect, and said, “Begone, creature.”

The sea rose and the day darkened. At home his mother said, “She has gone to serve on one of the great Lord’s ships, using the sea songs you taught her to call kind winds and easing waves. Your friendship has brought her much honour, and she would be here if she could.”

“In the great deep of the sea, hours slow to days, days to years. The great leviathan’s heart strikes only once in a handful of moments, but with as much love as any mother for her sea-lost child. I think I will return to the sea, mother, for time, here, now, has become so much more burdensome than that weight, my heart has stopped.”

“Soon my love,” Anwen said. The nub of her small finger had been aching again of late. The seventh midsummer was fast approaching.

It was a moonless night, the polished sea softly singing, the other folk had turned home, from their celebrations. Around some dimming fires, others slept away the gleam and raucous laughter of their intoxicated dreams.

Anwen, holding Oompla’s small cool hand, walked to the quiet, stony beach around the heads, beyond the sea-temple, where the receding tide exposed a scape of frown and molten rock, black and coally hissing.

From the steam and roil of one eye-dark pool, the sea-god rose, water pouring off his green and mottle skin like blue flame from burning copper.

“You have fattened this creature for seven years, kept it in health,” the deep one said, in that now familiar voice of wave and cliff, “preserved its life from threat, nurtured it through its changes. Revealed nought of this bargain. Now it is grown. You may cast it in these burning stones, and consume each morsel of its flesh, then, in months hence, you will be with child, or, for the offering of another morsel from your hand, you may take the creature, and for another seven years, return home.”

The sea god held forth a knife, jewelled and barnacled, the crescent blade honed and bill-hook bright.

Anwen thought of that child, of that young driftwood man, nut brown, sea-polished, with his own sand-coloured child in his arms, and of this wide-mouthed, lantern-eyed creature, with its fleshy moustaches, and silvery, ink blemished skin, its laments, sea songs and laughter.

Oompla looked at her, an oil-thick tear silking from the corner of his eye. 

She thought; this was the first time she had seen him cry.

“Oh, Mama,” Oompla said.

Taking the knife from the sea-god’s hand, she did.