False Mermaid

“The 1911 census had no record of her, in Buncrana or anywhere in Donegal. She might have married or emigrated by that time—she would have been about the right age. I haven’t had a chance to follow up on all that. Come and have a look inside. I’ve been here a couple of times, but haven’t touched anything. You’ll see why people still call it ‘the selkie cottage.’”

Cormac followed Roz through the open entrance, and the first thing his eye fell upon was the half-door, torn from its hinges and lying in the middle of the kitchen. He let his gaze wander across the room. The once-whitewashed walls were peeling and had gone black and green from seeping damp. The pine dresser against the wall still held a few cracked pieces of blue-and-white delft. A traditional box bed was built into the far corner of the room, an iron-framed cot stood in the other. Under a window on the far wall, a cupboard held a washbasin, and empty tins and sacks spilled out from the shelves beneath. There was plentiful evidence that animals had lived here, taking advantage of abandoned food stores. Layers of dust covered everything: the rude table, the child-sized rush-seated chairs, the iron kettle that still hung from a hook over the hearth. Cormac could see a half-finished piece of knitting someone had set aside, the contours of a clay pipe under the dust in the hob beside the fireplace. Everything spoke of lives suddenly and rudely interrupted.

“What do you see?” Roz asked.

“Hard work. Long winter nights.” He could actually imagine a family moving about this room, the woman tending the fire, the man mending nets in the flickering light, the children’s muted breathing from the cot. He tried to conjure Mary and P. J. Heaney before him. What exactly had passed between them? How little was left here to illuminate how, and in what spirit, those two human beings had occupied this space. Nothing to capture the fleeting evidence of a glance, a touch, a word. There was nothing to encapsulate the longing or the revulsion—or perhaps both, in endless close succession—that had flowed through them every day. Did she mind his touch, or had she invited it? Was she a willing participant, a kidnap victim, an amnesiac? To say that she stayed with him for years was no measure. People stayed for all sorts of reasons: inertia, the hope that things would change, fear of the unknown, poverty, a dread that things could actually get much worse. Physical objects might offer some glimpses into a life, but how could they get down to the real texture of everyday existence? How infinitely subtle were the traces of happiness and despair?

Nora had become so much a part of him that he could not imagine living without her, and yet anyone digging through his possessions would find no physical evidence of her at all. Not a single trace. They had exchanged nothing but a look, a touch, a few words—and not even written words, only fleeting conversations and marks on a screen that evaporated into the ether. The one concrete thing he’d given her—the hazel knot—felt like a meager, temporary token.

Roz’s voice startled him out of his thoughts. “I was hoping to get some pictures, to start documenting what’s here.”

As Roz went around the room snapping photos, Cormac sketched a quick floor plan of the house. He found marks on the floor, where a heavy object had been dragged through the dust. Someone had stacked up dozens of conical limpet shells to form narrow, teetering towers on the shelves where delft once stood.

He said to Roz: “I thought you told me no one would come near this place—”

She looked up at the piles of shells. “That’s what people said. But it does seem as if someone’s been here, doesn’t it?”

Cormac noted the shells on his drawing, and left them undisturbed. Crossing to the iron-frame cot, he lifted the rotting straw mattress and heard something fall to the floor. Pulling the bed away from the wall, he found a threadbare muslin doll. The shape was not recognizably human, more like an animal—a seal. Someone had sewn on black metal buttons for eyes, but one had come loose. A mute witness to whatever had taken place here. Beneath the bed he found a short piece of a plank with holes in it, and two tiny sandbags that fit in the palm of his hand. The board was cracked and stained, but he brushed the dust away from its face, and saw that the plank had been brightly painted at one time. The only faint glimmer of happiness that this room had so far possessed. “Roz, look at this.”

She came closer and snapped several photos. “Some sort of game?”