Creative non-fiction competition - Runner Up

It has been said that there are mermaids in our ancestors. I do have an uncle with webbed feet, a nana who swells up when she goes too far from shore and a grandad who ‘drank like a fish’? I think perhaps it is more likely we are descended from selkies … chubby, noisy seal people who love a swim … the water version of Labradors.
I tried to live away from the sea. Not intentionally, accidently mostly, through following misguided opportunity and ambition. Every time I did, a gradual claustrophobia would gather over me, only lifted by the crossing over the Ord, where the long and winding road veers onto the soaring clifftops and infinite skies of, as we modestly know it, God’s own country. A strange flat triangle of a county, thumbed onto the north eastern point of Scotland, bound by sea on two sides and mountains on the other. We are as close to an island as the mainland can be – one road in and one road out and more often than not, these are closed by snow, lorries tripped by the hairpin bend or the glorious salt-scented, ghost-haunted sea ha’ar.
As a teenager I dreamed of escape. I cursed the ha’ar, rolled my eyes at our white sand beaches and flailed against the wide empty spaces. How could a place be so boring, so quiet, so suffocating? Then, I left and found that I could only breathe when I came home. I lived by hot seas and felt dirty. I cried in a cinema in Israel for the weary fishing boats of A Perfect Storm. I fell in love with Boston not knowing that I loved it for its brightly coloured version of home. I lived by the river Thames and scoffed at its pretty greens and puddled floods. I swelled and choked and felt ever more tightly bound.
And then, my belly swelled with something else, a new generation of seal people and determined that my selkie pup would be born within sight of the sea, I wrapped myself in voluminous layers and flew home, long past the time a pregnant woman should. I had barely glimpsed the shore, before my tiny secret rushed to be born and my heart was washed clean again with the salt rush of joyful tears. I named her Rhea for the mother of the Gods and Iona for the Holy Island.
One of the first people to meet her was my mermaid nana, so proud of her fourth-generation wise woman. A new sea witch, ‘born of a long line of witches’, as my dad would love to mock. I would think of my nana often on my travels home. I would feel myself gradually deflate, as I imagined she did, like a puffer fish when danger has passed. Her house was my favourite place when I was small. My grandad had drunk himself, like a fish, into an early grave by the time I was two and I thought my nana lived the most wonderful life. We would eat oxtail or royal game soup from a tin with buttered French stick and spend hours wandering the shore looking into rock pools and collecting treasures. Limpets and crabs and tiny stickle back fish. We would sit on the rocks by the stilt walking lifeboat shed and throw stones at the waves. She would tell me stories about why fishermen never learn to swim, ‘so they drown faster if they fall in the sea’, and how the tinkers would live in caves and make limpet stew in their kettles.  She knew all the secret paths and would find steps cut in the cliff that seemed invisible until you were climbing them. We would swim in the sea fed pool where they kept a baby whale who had been separated from her mother. I would swim tightly, gathering as much of my body to the surface as I could, just in case the baby was still there, amongst the seaweed, full grown now and hungry. She shared secret wells and whirlpools and passed to me the magic of the shore. She never lived by anyone else’s rules once my grandad was gone and at eighty-seven, she will still head for the shore the minute your back is turned. I think one day, she will simply be gone, leaving an empty seal skin on her favourite rock.
I feel responsible for passing on the salt magic to my daughter, starting with her naming, a suitable name for a carrier of watery secrets. We have our own strip of shore, on the other side of the triangle. A small strip of sand pinned to the sea with chunks of black rock. My stories for her are of singing seals and selkies with graves that never dry up. Of drowned Viking princesses and buried Pictish villages. There is a door that appears in the sand on our beach, the lintel and the very top of its supporting stones. Sometimes, we would dig a little, revealing more of the door and the layers behind it, and the next time it would be gone again. We would talk of the buried village of Skara Brae, a short sail across the tortured waters of The Pentland Firth, and we would know that through that door slept our own buried village. Stone beds and shelves and fireplaces. Once, we found a stone, carved with runes, a faery stone, because that is what they were, the Picts, the faery people, the little people who lived in the hills.
We would search the beach for hours, for the suede soft seaglass gems, the tiny curled cowrie shells of Groatie Buckies, and mermaids’ purses, the puffed purse egg cases of tiny sharks. A walrus came once, dragging its car sized bulk up the shore with its teeth. Shivering and sunburned. We stared open mouthed until it rolled back to the sea and continued its journey. Whales pass by, orcas and pilots. Porpoises and dolphins chase each other through the waves. Once, we saw an otter, sound asleep, anchored to a kelp frond by its foot, a limpet clutched to its chest.
Bad days and good days, visitors and celebrations, losses and heartbreaks were marked by a beach hunt. New members were accepted into the family by their induction onto our beach. The buried village is just for us though, no-one yet has met that grade.
You can swim here, the water ice cold and crystal clear. Seals slide in and out of the sea and bob close, whiskered faces baffled by the clumsy, shrieking invaders. Scarfies balance like black question marks on the edge of the rock and dive past our ears with an almost silent, fish and oil scented, ploop. The occasional black cow grazes on the machar. I can breathe here. I can breathe so deeply that I sometimes feel my inhale will swallow the whole bowl of the sky.
Our scraggy, magical beach is separated from the ‘fancy’ beach by a rock foreshore, booby-trapped by kelp and the ominous bulk of Ackergill Tower. Home of many dastardly deeds, clan battles and celebrity weddings. This beach is where the tourists go. It is also where the locals go. It is the beach of my father’s people. They are not mermaid or selkie descended. They are people of picnics and sandcastles, wind breakers and arm bands, their beach is three miles of white sand, collapsing sand-dunes and golfers.
The moment I grew up took place there. A summer party filled with Tennants lager, white lightning cider, my first love naked in the dunes with my best friend and a bonfire built from the groundkeeper’s shed. My father also grew up here, I think, but no one will talk of it. His cousin was drowned at this beach, dragged out to sea by a rip tide, while his children played. Was it my dad who pulled him from the sea, tried to pump life into his chest, or did he stand back, helpless? People tell me he was light-hearted before, playful even, but now he looks everywhere for danger and lives a life curtailed by fear. The generation after the drowned cousin would never really be free. We would run down the dunes and into the water with everyone smiling and waving but watching, twitching, waiting for the sea to claim another of their own. I don’t know why we would go there. White sand and a bitter taste. There is no mermaid magic there, only tourists and sadness.
So here I am, whether selkie or mermaid, sea witch and guardian of two magical shores, sharer of salt-scented stories, set free by the relentless thrashing of storm stirred waves, held aloft by soaring cliffs, eternally grateful for the wide open skies and the enveloping ha’ar. As the fisherfolk say, I do indeed have salt water in my veins. I dream of the slide of the sea above my head and the sparkle of the surface from beneath. I promise that when it is my time to go, I will leave my own seal skin on my favourite rock.