Sunday Selkie
NIAMH MCGONNELL-HALL
The car slid into the wet parking spot by the sea. It was grey, like every weekend this autumn. The doctor's words on Friday had not affected eight-year-old Billy McGinish, who had been staring at the poster MPPsych on the wall.
It's been a big year for him with the separation… a child's imagination can do wonders with a little inattention.
The doctor had smiled at him, told his mother not to worry, given him a lollipop and made him promise to stop telling people that he could see monsters.
Bundling out of the car, Billy, wrapped in his woollen hat, surged towards the pebbled beach. He had a collection at home, and the granite shapes dusted his narrow windowsill.
His short legs jolted as he clambered towards the waiting water, head bent. The once ashy white stones, now darkened by the salt spray, grated against each other as Billy tumbled along. They made a path to the lapping tide. Round, oval, a completely smooth sphere. His mother trailed behind, snagged by her scarf whipping in the wind.
The waves were icy. They washed about Billy's ankles; the current pulling him by his calves down onto the wet stones. Another wave bounded over his head, dragging its hands through his hair.
His mother's yells faded as Billy was washed away from the shoreline. He could see her shedding her boots and socks as his feet lost their footing on the seabed.
Another wave and his coat grew heavy with salt. The grey of the sky became the grey of the sea, the wobbly surface drawing a distinct line between free oxygen and the one unlocked by gills.
Something firmer than the current grasped his waist and held his soaked head above the water.
Through his plastered curls, he saw a woman bobbing up and down with him on the sea. Her cold fingers were steady on his ribs, a firm grip like his mother's. Her feet didn’t brush his under the waves; instead, Billy’s toes, reaching for purchase, rested on silky fur. A watermarbled mirage of a seal dangled underneath them.
His mother reached him then, floundering with her drowned scarf. The selkie let go, just before his mother's hands replaced hers, and she dragged Billy back to shore.
‘There was a lady swimming, ma.’ Billy’s voice was muffled as his mother wrapped him in a stale towel in the front seat.
‘That was me!’ Her hands shook as she punched the heater to high. ‘I almost didn’t reach you, Billy! I will not give your father the satisfaction of having you drown on my weekend!’
‘No, out there in the water,’ his little hand pointed out of the foggy windshield at the still slate of the sea.
His excitement bubbled. ‘She had flippers, like a seal!’
‘Oh, pet,’ his mother's voice lost its edge.
It’s just his childhood imagination, but try not to encourage it, the doctor had whispered to her. Then, with a gleaming smile, had turned to Billy. They just won't understand your creativity. Grown-ups live in the real world, you see.
‘I’m not lying, ma.’ Billy rose to his knees to search the disappearing waves as his mother silently reversed out of the car park.
HAGSTONE HILL
The yew tree forest was a thick, unmoving blanket against the gusty winter morning. Bill and his Ulster University peers huddled together on the worn picnic rug. The slouching branches of the biggest yew they could find barricaded them against the wind, whilst the rain-laden moss attempted to dampen the sandwiches they were hungrily eating for their very late breakfast.
A buzzing started in Bill’s back pocket.
Locking his sandwich away in its foil, he left the rug for the quieter shelter of Hagstone Hill.
The low dewy mound wasn’t really a hill. But Hagstone Hump didn’t quite have the same ring to it, not with its famous hagstones that wiggled their way out of the rock.
‘How are you, Billy?’ His mother's voice bounded down the line.
‘Fine ma, busy that’s all. Exams and stuff.’ It was easy to sound busy as he picked at the small ferns by his shoulder.
‘Will you be coming home next month?’
Bill sighed, ‘I don’t know, ma.’ The fabled mound dug into the back of his head, his legs sinking slightly in the damp earth.
‘Ok, sweetie.’ There was a breathy pause. ‘How about summer then? We could go to the bay? Go swimming?’
Something grazed his neck, catapulted off his shoulders and landed by his feet.
‘Sure, ma… yeah, maybe,’ he dribbled his response as he palmed the smooth hagstone that had landed on his laces.
‘I bought a new swimming costume and… ’ His mother's voice dissolved into the soggy trees as Bill held the hagstone higher into the light. A wobbled shape, not perfectly round, but it was slippery smooth under his fingers.
The hole in its centre awaited to be pressed against Bill’s eye socket. The cold bite of granite ached into his browbone, his eyes searching the hills through the stony monocle.
The picnic rug, back under the tree, held another figure. A hooded thing with a pale face. Its limbs were gnarled like the branches of the yew behind it, its face as grey as the rain-threatening sky.
‘I got rid of those filthy towels, too! We have a matching set now, all blue and white… ’
Sandwiches abandoned, his classmates stared as Bill and his phone-bound mother returned to the rug.
‘Billy? Are you there?’ His mother’s voice mumbled from Bill’s side, phone forgotten.
‘There’s something behind you, Stephen,’ Bill jammed the hagstone back against his face.
‘I thought this had stopped Billy,’ his mother was sullen. He could hear her head drop on the other end of the line.
‘It’s an abhartach,’ Bill stared into the red eyes that hovered amongst the yew arils.
‘Yes, alright, the abhanatch of Garvagh and Dungiven. But this is a yew tree we’re under, not a hawthorn, so I think I’m fine,’ Stephen laughed, the abhartach behind him grinned.
‘Anyone see a grave upturned?! Quick! Somebody get a yew sword!’ Stephen was howling on the rug.
The cold stone had numbed Bill’s fingers, and the granite jumped from his grip. With the ring of stone no longer crowding his vision, the air behind Stephen was empty.
‘I’m not lying,’ Bill mumbled into the bare branches, the abhartach no longer hovering against the grey.
‘Sure, next thing you know, you’ll be out here with a stake,’ Stephen scoffed.
Bill left the hagstone in the mud where it had fallen.
PIXIE DUST HALOPERIDOL
The sunlight dusted the curtains from the outside, and Mr McGinish was still in bed at noon. He was then bathed with a pair of hands that were not his own, dressed, medicated and parked out in the early afternoon air.
Maeve, his nurse, came crunching over the pebbles with tea and a cupcake, a half-melted candle poked into the sponge. Eighty-nine of them wouldn’t have fit in the pale yellow icing.
A faster movement caught William’s eye. Across the lawn, there were pixies in the hedge. Their wings flashed as they zipped around, some blue, some green. They shone, like the old baubles and stale tinsel that were tacked up around the place in late November.
William wobbled as the wheels of his walker corrected on the grass.
‘What have you spotted, hun?’ Maeve’s hand was instantly on his elbow.
‘I saw pixies,’ he leafed through the hedge. ‘Right here, dancing about.’
‘And what colour were they?’ Maeve’s head was tilted, soft eyes pretending to search the grass.
Behind her encouraging stare, the nursing home doctor’s words played out in her head.
William had a pattern of this in his childhood. He seems to be regressing into it… just let him play it out.
‘Blue. They were blue. And green. Not like the leaves, but darker,’ William rubbed the furry vegetation, trying to catch another glimpse.
Maeve kept sneaking glances at him in between her feigned searching. But William spotted her assessing stare, her eyes blurring into his mother's.
‘I’m not lying.’ He closed his dressing gown against his mother’s ghostly sigh.
‘I don’t doubt it, hun! I myself saw them just last week, I was hoping they’d turn up again.’ Maeve’s hand was still firmly on William’s elbow.
Maeve whipped her head back to the hedge as another rustle sounded. Her eyes searched properly this time, but it was just the resident Dunnock, a bright green beetle in its mouth.
‘But the sun’s about to set, and it will get cold,’ she gave William’s arm a gentle tug. ‘Let's get you inside.’
‘You could see them too?’ William quizzed her as they stepped into the heated corridor.
‘Yes, hun, the green ones are my favourite, I think.’
‘I knew I wasn’t crazy, William sighed as Maeve gave him his nightly medication. ‘You could see them too… how wonderful.’
The door brushed closed as Maeve stepped into the corridor to hand over to the night shift. ‘One extra Haloperidol in the morning, he still thinks there are pixies in the hedge.’
The night nurse scribbled a three over the two in his chart, laughter barely contained behind his closed lips. ‘I’ll add that to the banshee by the shed and the dullahan that was terrorising the neighbours' sheep last week.’
‘I read his file,’ Maeve glanced towards the closed door, Mr McGinish deep in a drug-filled sleep behind it. ‘He started seeing things when he was eight. No diagnosis, though.’
Her colleague shrugged. ‘Some people come to us crazy. Some people go crazy whilst they're here. Either way, they all end up the same. Crazy.’
‘That could be you one day, you know,’ Maeve teased, the closed door eyeing her back.
The other nurse laughed. ‘If I start seeing leprechauns hiding in the breakfast cereal, I’ll let you know.’
Niamh is a writer and editor from Sydney. She has a collection of Celtic magical realism short stories, amongst other non-fiction pieces, that can be found in Grapeshot Magazine, where she works as the Repeat Offenders Section Editor. She is currently working on her debut fantasy novel, whilst juggling too many books and cups of tea.
