Selkies in the Fading Sun

Old stories of the sea

The low light before the sun dies is thick with promise. The day is clear and I drop my plans and I drive to the coast, quickly, racing the fading day. By the time I am there, the flaring bright blue sky has dimmed; it is softer now, a memory. But out on the horizon the sky is striped, blue fading to yellow fading through peach to pink. I walk over the shingle, right to the edge. The tide is high but I do not swim; I haven’t wanted to this Christmas, even though I always do, even though it is beautiful. I am tired and I still want to hibernate and I am learning to listen to that.

The waves push in, pull back with a crackle of shingle, the water rearranged into white lace, shifting, sliding, always rising. The light feels thick, hazy. It is almost something you could touch. The particles of it are heavy, intangible as they change, slipping slowly, inevitably towards darkness. There is magic in the water today.

There are many stories of magic in the water. I am in the very early, very messy phase of a new novel and stories of the sea are everything. I thought I would start to share them with you here; I am sure you know them, or versions of them, already - but that’s no reason not to return.

As I stand on the edge watching the light tip deeper, darker, I am thinking of Selkies. It is one of the best known stories.

A man - sometimes a fisherman, sometimes not - goes to the sea. Sometimes it is midnight, sometimes the moon is full. He sees three women dancing, playing on the shore. They are naked; he watches. He is entranced by their beauty. They are otherworldly, they have no human concerns. But he startles them; they run out, across the sand, towards the slick rocks. They slip into skins that lie glistening by the rock pools. Seals now, they dive into the water and are gone.

But he goes back. He watches again, he intrudes. He steals one of the skins. This time when the women run back to the sea, one of them is held helpless on the land. He has her skin. She begs with him; he does not relent. She must stay with him on the land, learn to live a life that is unnatural to her, a life she did not choose.

The stories, mostly, stress that she did learn to love him. That he trapped her only out of love, the love that was born when he first set eyes on her beauty. A strange, uncomplex, fairy story love. Love, a convenience to explain away any blame.

They have children. Three, I think, mostly. Three is a good fairytale number. She loves her children, she loves her husband, but she never stops yearning for the sea. She never stops going to the shore, staring out, looking for her sisters in the waves. She never stops looking for her skin.

And then, one day, her youngest child mentions that he saw the skin; that he saw his father hide it. Sometimes she goes right to it, sometimes she waits till dead of night. Either way she goes and pulls it down, from the rafters where it hides, or from the chest where it languishes. She slips it on; it still fits. Of course it does. She slides back into the sea, and is gone.

In some stories she is never seen again. In some she comes back to watch her children, always staying in her seal form - she knows the risk of leaving it now. In some she returns for a child, taking them with her in seal form. The man who stole her skin is heartbroken. But she is out there, in the wild, in the water, the way she was always meant to be.