About the Author

ELEMENTAL

Amanda Curtin is a writer, book editor, and adjunct lecturer at Edith Cowan University. Her first novel, The Sinkings, was published in 2008 and a short story collection, Inherited, in 2011, both to critical acclaim. She has been granted writing residencies in Australia, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States, and the rest of the time resides in Perth, Western Australia.

Title Page

Dedication

For

Edna Jean

and all grandmothers

Epigraph

If nothing ever changed,

there would be no butterflies

Author unknown

NOTEBOOK 1

Notebook 1

1891–1905

WATER

Brukie’s Sandy

That boy, Brukie’s Sandy, he was a one for plucking the world from the sea. Driftwood, rope, slimy knots of net and weed, bonxie feathers, odd leather slippers, bits of wool, salt sacks, mittens, wax paper, eggshells, Dutchmen’s caps, syrup tins, skeleton fish, the beaks and broken wings of gulls. Once, he scooped from the swell a hank of long yellow hair with the skin still upon it. Gave them gooseflesh, it did, those hard, tough fishermen, but the boy stashed it away in his bundle like it was worth something.

And once, Jeemsie had to stop him from pulling aboard a half firkin of sodden grain wriggling with rats. ‘Ye gaakie lad!’ the old man cried. ‘What have I told ye about the long-tailed fellers on the Lily Maud!’ The kick of Jeemsie’s seaboot busted up the rotting staves and flung the lot into the foam. And that boy, that Brukie’s Sandy, he hung his sorry head, for he knew as well as any there were things a fisherman should never even say, let alone bring aboard a boat. But still he kept his eyes on the sea, for what it would toss up next.

So there was none surprised at how it happened. Aye, none at all.

April 1972

April 1972

Do you remember when you were a wee thing, lambsie, and you begged for a story, a story true? Funny bairn you were, never wanting ‘Cinderella’ or ‘The Three Bears’, oh no, not you. You always wanted your grunnie to tell you about Fish Meggie, the Gutting Girl from the Top of the World, and at the end I would have to cross my heart and say, And it happened so, true as the puffin flies or the sealie sings or my name’s not Margaret Duthie Tulloch. Years it was, lambsie, before you guessed that Fish Meggie was me.

I promised, didn’t I, that I would write the stories down for you one day. You were right to be impatient, lambsie, you were right to roll your pretty eyes. One day is what mothers tell daughters, and daughters tell their daughters, and it just never gets to be one day.

But I have been to town, lambsie—given your mother the slip—and I’ve bought myself this case of pens, blue and red and green, these books of lined paper, fresh and white. I have things to tell you before they take me off to one of those places where people put their bloomers on their heads and you have to eat blancmange whether you like it or not.

It won’t be what you’re expecting, not the fairytales of Fish Meggie you used to love. Even if I could remember exactly how I used to tell them, they wouldn’t sound the same, now you are no longer a wee thing and no longer begging for stories. And I canna remember them exactly, no. I used to make things up, hither and thither, or turn the details upside down, just to keep the smile on your face. I know there is much I left out. We don’t tell children how sad the world can be.

Aye, and there are things I’ve never told anyone. Some things are not spoken of even when they are happening, and as the years go by it’s like the words that might explain them have been taken by the tide.

I am past eighty now, and I have done a fine job of forgetting a good many things in my life. But when I look at you, lambsie, nearly twenty-one and thinking there’s nothing of value you don’t already know, I am ashamed of myself. You don’t know who you are until you know where you’ve come from. Even when … Ah, well. Even when.

So I will write my story, if I can find the words. I will pull the pictures from my memory and try.

I am seeing with the eye of a bird. There’s a coastline, there are canvas sails, wee boats painted blue. Coming in closer, the boatie shore, the long stony sweep of it, and the soles of my feet are tingling. Everywhere, skinny children, barefoot on the shingle. I am blown from the shore, up the slope to a grid of four streets. Tiller Street—my street—crosses through them, rows of stone houses with their backs to the North Sea. The wind is a howl the likes of which I have never heard since. And in the air, a sea tang, fresh and sharp and rotten all at once, spiced up with old bait, fish guts, plumes from chimneys where the fish are hung to dry and smoke. I can see the stiff striped aprons of the women, the wifies. My mother’s face.

If I spoke these words to you now, lambsie, they would sound shivery-strange, all shirred up on invisible threads, clipped of the Aussie vowels my voice began to grow when I came down here to this place from the top of the world. My ink is turning to water, briny and blue. I look at her, that girl I was, at all those people with her, and I see how easily it breaks, my will to walk away from them lean and free. Because when it comes to family, you can walk from the top of the world to the bottom and still not be free.

I will write them down, lambsie, the things I remember, and the things I have tried to forget. I will take my time, my own roundabout way, but I will do my best for you. It’s your story, too, whether you like it or not.

And it happened so, true as the puffin flies or the sealie sings or my name’s not Margaret Duthie Tulloch—no, I canna promise you that this time, lambsie. I’ve learned some things, see, and one of them is this: there’s no-one can tell a story true.

1

I was born in a village as far north-east as you can go on the Scottish mainland, closer to Norway than London. Roanhaven was only two miles from the town of Gadlehead, and I’m told they’re all the one place now. But back then, oh, we were a folk apart, we thought Gadlehead as much a stranger-place as Fraserburgh to the north, Collieston to the south, and all those inland villages where Ma would sell fish from the creel on her back.

Our house was a but-and-ben—a wee two-room cottage, that is—like the others in Tiller Street, squat and polished smooth by the wind. That wind! Ach, a force, it was, a furious spinning of salt and grit and sleet sucked up from icefloes, ashpits, the spume of the ocean. It could scour the hairs off your arms, freeze the mud on your boots. Every year it took a little more of the houses in Tiller Street, wearing them away grain by grain. Not the frames, no, for the pink granite of Gadlehead will survive more generations than ever I’ll know, but the soft matter between that yields to the elements.

I was the youngest at number 8 Tiller Street. The others—well, there was Da and Ma, Granda Jeemsie, my brothers, Archie, Jamie and Will, and my sister, Kitta. If you had asked Granda, Da or Ma which of them was head of the household, each would have owned the name and looked at you as though it was the feeblest of questions, too plain to need an answer. Although my mother would not have been telling you this in words. No, Ma had Looks for that.

In the smallest but-and-ben in Tiller Street were Da’s sister Unty Jinna, and her daughter, Liza. And next to us, Sailor Wattie, who had his own boat and a share in ours, the Lily Maud, Ma’s sister Unty Leebie, and their children, Andrew and Elspet. Liza, Elspet and I were about the same age, so it was like having two more sisters. They could never come close to Kitta in my heart, though. No-one could.

We were sea people. We lived by its moods and rhythms as much as the fish and birds that were part of the order of things. From the time we could stumble along the boatie shore on our own feet, we’d be working—collecting whelks and limpets for bait, pitching stones at gulls pecking at the fish on our mothers’ drying racks. Later, boys were expected to go to sea on the family boat or a neighbour’s, while girls were put to service in the large estates thereabouts, or married young to another fisher family and made useful that way. A fisher canna be in want of a wife—that was the common wisdom and no-one quarrelled with it back then. When we children stood with our bare toes in the icy sand, gazing out to sea, I fancied there was freedom in what Archie, Jamie and Will saw, a ticket to the wide world, beyond the life I would know. To catch a glimpse of my future, I’d to turn in the other direction, to the land. There I would see the labour of the mending sheds, the worn tracks between the peat country and our fireplaces. Tubs of grey, soapy water where woollens were scrubbed on wooden boards. Roadways leading to the farms and estates where my mother and aunties walked to sell fish. For me and Kitta, for Elspet and Liza, the pattern of the years ahead would be plain and safe and all the dreary same.

It didn’t stop me from yearning, mind. Even my earliest memory …

I was a wee bairn when I tottered into the winter sea. Straight in, clothes and all. Folk said later I was blessed to be alive, that my heart didn’t stop, nor my blood turn white. Jockel Buchan, an old fisherman, strode through the shallows to reach me. Waded in, he did, almost to the knees of his great seaboots. I remember this, aye, but I don’t remember feeling frightened, or cold, though how could I not have been? Nor the sound of Kitta and Liza squealing like piglets all the while he was hauling me ashore. Nor Unty Jinna shaking my shoulders and calling me a raickless bairn. These things they told me later. What I remember—aye, even now, I remember—is struggling to be free of the arms holding me safe, twisting round to the water again, searching the sea for another glimpse of the huge white wings that had lifted from the waveslick and flown far away into the sky. The most beautiful thing, lambsie! Ma used to say my pretty birdie was a kittiwake or a solan goose that had strayed too close to the shore, and what a foolish bairnikie who would droon herself for that! But I knew it was something miraculous, and I cried to fly away with it.

Granda Jeemsie took on a rage about my little rush into the sea. He muttered for weeks and shook his head. He spat on the ground and marked a cross on the sand with the blade of his gullie knife. He gave a sixpence to the widow of Jockel Buchan when the old man and his yawl were taken by a storm that same winter. Jeemsie Neish giving away a sixpence! Now, that was a thing to remark on.

~

My people would have recognised you, lambsie, you and your mother both. You have the look of Ma’s side of the family—the Neishes—on your brow and in your eyes. Aye, and in the set of your frame, too. Wifie’s bones, Ma used to say, her proud claim to generous hips and a strength in the spine fit for fetching and carrying. I canna expect you’ll think on it as any sort of blessing, but you’d have been given the nod back then, lambsie, the nod and the closed-lipped smile of those parts that was grim and smug both.

Me, now, I always had the Neish build, too, but there was not a soul who would smile upon on a reid-heidit throwback from some ancient Pictish kin. The Neishes would lay no claim to red hair, and nor would Da’s side, the Duthies. Be thankful this curse passed you by, lambsie. Aye, I know you’re smirking, thinking your grunnie fanciful with talk of curses, but it was not a thing to smile about then, no.

Imagine this:

In the distance, a little quinie—a wee fisher girl—is running up near the braes, her hands flailing about like stars, long hair whipped from her scalp in knots and skeins. It’s dusk. No-one pays her any mind. Too much to do. Loaded murlins to carry to the boats, the boats to be readied for sea, no time for else but the business of setting sail this night.

Granda Jeemsie and Da are striding in front with coils of lines slung about their shoulders. Ma and Unty Leebie are behind, bent under the weight of floats and ropes and hooks. Then come the boys, laden too, but still green enough to be full of the thrill of Going to Sea.

Suddenly Ma freezes. No. The word catches a moment in her throat. No, NO!

Leather floats tumble from her murlin, skitter across the sand. She swings around. Archie! Jamie! But they have seen for themselves and are already running, though too late to stop it, too late, too late.

The little quinie has danced her way down to the boatie shore, flitting along, chasing after gulls, her fists pounding the air as they escape her. She turns away from the sea.

Ma pants, florid. It could not be worse. The quinie is right in front of the fishers now. She is all Granda Jeemsie’s scandalised face can see.

He stops. And so does Da. And Sailor Wattie. And Buckey’s John and his boys. All of them stopped cold by this reid-heidit child who has put herself between them and the sea.

And then Granda Jeemsie rips the lines from his shoulders. Get from my sight! is what he says, but the words are mangled up in rage. He stomps back to Tiller Street, pushing Ma aside with the meat of his hand, leaving the coils for her to gather and rewind. The rest of them follow, turning the dusk thick with spittle and mutter.

The fleet would not be setting sail that night.

I knew I’d done a terrible thing, and never would I do it again, but just what it was I’d done was a bewilderment that day. I made myself small on the sand, hugging my knees. Kitta will come, I told myself, Kitta will come find me. By the time I heard her calling my name, I was a wretched, whimpering, shivering thing. She dragged me to my feet and hugged me, and I wept into her plaited hair.

Kitta wiped away the snotty strings from my face with a scrunch of her skirt. Ye’re to be quiet now, Meggie mine, she said firmly. Home an’ straight to bed, Ma says. And when I nodded, she put a finger to her lips, took something from her skirt pocket and handed it to me. Turning the folded lump of bread over, I spied a pink sugar scraping inside. A jeely piece! I gasped, looked up. My sister was grinning.

Ma knelt by our closet bed later, and her voice was a gruff whisper. The fishers say it’s unlucky, she told me, her fingers opening and closing as if trying to pluck something from the air. And maybe they be right, quinie, maybe no, but isn’t for us to say when they be the ones the sea plays with, a witch who can give or take at leastest whim.

I listened, aye, and I learned, and from then on I stayed far from the boatie shore on the nights the men left so never again would they be cursed by the redhead crossing their path.

Mind, when it came to the things a Buchan fisherman thought cursed, the list was long. Pigs, rats, cats, hares, rabbits, salmon … Even now it feels reckless to write that list of words, as any child of fisherfolk had it slapped into them, from the time they could point, that pigs were to be called four-fitted beasts or grunters, rats were long-tailed fellers, salmon, the reid fish. Pastors, now, they couldn’t be named, nor seen near the boats, and we called the kirk the bell hoose. Strange, you think, that the work of the Lord should be held in such fear? Well, fishermen didn’t like to take chances when it came to offending gods, the pagan and the Christian both. To show reverence to the Lord, well, that might upset the Witch.

I don’t know, lambsie, just what it was about red hair that threatened the fishermen’s pact with the sea. But I remember a day when our Archie was sending me dark looks as he dumped by the door a ruined twine of lines shredded by dogfish. Like the fault was mine. Ma took my chin in her hands and knelt down to whisper. Don’t ye fret, quinie, for if we end our days with hair at all, it all be the same colour. But look, lambsie, see how wrong she was. Dulled with age it might be, but my hair has never gone the usual white or grey.

She could be soft at times, Ma could, when it came to me and Kitta, glancing around first to check there was none watching to mistake soft for weak. But she was a tough woman, aye, like all the fishwives of those parts, because tough they had to be.

Times were different then. You’re rolling your eyes again, aren’t you, lambsie. That’s what old folk always say. But it’s true. Time matters. You will know this when you look it in the face. Isn’t a child alive today who could have survived back then. I don’t mean the hardships of those days—the meanness of the food, the idea that children should work for their keep. Those are things that can be endured, and if a child now were to be cast back through the years and flung into a but-and-ben in Roanhaven, the wee thing would learn. Learn and survive. People do when they have to.

No, the thing I venture would befuddle a child of today is this: in the scheme of the universe—your family, your village—you were one notch north of a hindrance and two south of a help. Loved you were, aye, in the way of those days, a careless kind of love that took all manner of things for granted. But if you had a thought in your head there was none who would stoop to hear it and none to say you mattered the peeriest thing. And if you were a girl, you’d to get used to that, aye. You would forever be the last, the very very last, in a world where the words of men and the ways of shoalfish and the direction of the wind were what mattered.

I canna imagine a child of today taking it into their head that they were not the centre of all else. That the world was not waiting for the next thing they might say.

May 1972

May 1972

Ach, all the nieces and nephews of mine there might be in the world somewhere, all the family I don’t know. Could be, lambsie, could be you are the first of the Neishes and Duthies to have your own special name, one that doesn’t belong to a long line of those who have gone before you. Laura—that was your mother’s choosing. Always a mind of her own, that one.

Maybe it seems I was going along with the past when I blessed your mother with a family name, but there’s a thought to make me smile. It wasn’t for tradition that I called your mother Kathryn, it was for someone I loved with all the beats of my heart. And because in the midst of so much forgetting, this I wanted to remember.

2

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