‘Selkie’ by Tom Vowler
The water’s cold was like some ancient thing, like it had always been part of her, part of everything, and she felt this connection to everyone who’d known it. A childhood memory gathered, of observing the sea for the first time not in a book or a painting, and the awe of it, its unknowableness. She’d read about the sea gods of other cultures, the lore of her own landlocked country rarely in need of any. And real-life giants that dwelt in its depths, clandestine and noble. She tried to imagine the first person to cross terrain to meet this non-land, to witness its restive spectacle, its ebb and flow, and in that moment their desire to traverse it, to connect with other people. To locate the rim of the world and watch the sea fall from it.
The ferocity when she’d entered the water had for a moment overwritten her mortal impulse, the body’s instinct to survive beyond her will. She knew the English phrase come to your senses and supposed it meant this, an obeying of the corporeal despite your intent. Like putting your hand in a flame, you couldn’t urge it to stay there. And yet each wave she negotiated, the more accepting her body became, the sea’s icy clench a conspirator, a force to work with, not against. Initially, the current tried in bursts delivering her back to shore – a maternal gesture, warning against itself.
Yet she surged onward, the level rising imperceptibly around her, its gentle wrestling of her a reminder of its vastness, and there being solace in this, the interconnectedness of all water.
*
She could recall none of their faces, the men who arrived to take brief ownership of her: their features had morphed into an apparition, a medley of mouths and noses and eyes that her mind rendered nebulous. Something to be grateful for perhaps, that her final images would not be of those who lay on her, excavated her.
She would always smell the men, though, the foulness of their cologne and sweat, the alcohol and tobacco on their breath, remaining at a deeper level in the memory, easily retrieved despite the strata of scents laid over them. Even now, with the nautical air upon her, it was never far away, their stench.
The woman in charge at the parlour had told her there were rules, things the men were not allowed to do, unless she wanted the extra money. It was up to her, and the autonomy surprised her. The man who drove her from the farm made no reference to this, only that she should do as she was told, that it was a temporary thing, the best way to pay off what she owed. Take yourself somewhere else, he’d said, and she’d been confused until she realized he meant in her mind.
I don’t know how to give massage, she said to him on that first day before they arrived.
Just do like the other girls do, the man replied, his eyes losing some of their harshness and she’d understood then: massage did not mean massage.
That first day, before they went into the parlour, he’d handed her a small plastic bottle, shaking the contents. These will help, he said, just one or you’ll fall asleep, and she remembered the groggy feeling the pills had given her on the journey over. Those febrile hours in the floor of the van, lying like canned sardines next to the other women, drifting back and forth, perpetually nauseous, sweating then shivering, certain she would die.
It will be uncomfortable, they had told her with all their charm; just focus on how good life will be after.
*
For the first time her feet could no longer touch the seabed, her body now given over fully to the ocean’s desires. Her clothes now a second skin, tugging her downwards until the bottom was reached and she had to hold her breath. She half-swam, half-pogoed further out until she was treading water.
She tried to gauge the rhythm of the waves in the gloaming, sense their frequency so she could close her mouth before they were upon her. It was just as easy to hear as to see them, a soft churring, barely anything. Up wave and down wave she was taken, and there was a strange pleasure in this, despite it all; the more she gave herself to the sea, the more accepting of her it became. She tried reaching down, to remove the ballast that was her shoes, but the coiling of her body took her under each time.
A gull cried out from the gloom, hardly any distance away, mocking and spectral, its own realm adjacent to hers yet sovereign, intangible.
She felt the sea as a living thing now, a conscious entity, and she was happy to give herself over to it. It was everything land was not, an untameable netherworld, and she thought of the first water to exist, wondered if these were the same molecules, whether it worked like that.
*
Inside the parlour that first day, the woman in charge had shown her the room she would work in, the bathroom they all shared to get clean in between men. There was a waiting area, in which you were allowed to talk to the others, though few of them spoke her language; the ones that did were content to make small talk but little else in those first days. Later, when she had been accepted as one of them, they furnished her with the wisdom of survival, how to treat the soreness, prevent infection. How to cover up bruises, which men never liked to see. To sense when a man was getting angry. In return she taught them the English she knew.
An hour passed before that first occasion, a period of time that seemed to swell and contract as she occupied it, and it was peculiar, that all the paths of her life had led here, and she thought of all the escape routes she must have missed. Men came and went in that hour, sometimes not even looking their way, instead heading straight out the back, whereupon one of the girls would finish her cigarette and follow. Thirty minutes later it was usually over – an hour if they paid more.
When the man was shown from the reception to where the girls waited, she knew he would choose her. A sense that if not his first time, then it was early on in such behaviour, that they had this in common. Around forty-something, overweight, he tried at first not to make eye contact, issuing a hand gesture to suggest any of them would suffice. The woman again encouraged him away from such reticence, told him to take his time selecting. His gaze swept across them more discerningly this time, his confidence rising a little, and with each sweep he settled on her a little longer. She tried to look undesiring, hunched her body a little, pursed her lips to make them thinner until she felt the glare of the woman in charge. Either smile or look seductive, they had been told, though she found both difficult on command. Look at all these beautiful women, she urged him silently, you cannot want me. There was fear when finally he did point to her, but also resignation: the moment could not be postponed indefinitely, and the man was perhaps not as grotesque as the previous ones. It may as well be you, she thought.
She repeated the driver’s words in her head: just get the first one over with. Willed the tablet to kick in more. She took the man’s hand, as they were taught to do, and led him to the room.
*
She’d almost entered the water last night, a stubborn vestige of will instead returning her to the village, to the garden shed she’d found open that first evening. There were berries in the hedgerows nearby, and a man had given her some change as she sat on a bench near a row of shops. She filled a large plastic bottle she’d found in a waste bin with water from the public toilets. It amazed her how much food people threw away, a circuit of the village offering up sustenance to rival that which they were given at the farm, though none of it warm. You could live like this for a while, she told herself.
In the daytime she wandered around the lanes, trying not to draw attention, all the while hoping someone took pity. But she realized she was a ghost to the people here; they saw her from the corners of eyes, but chose not to look, and she wondered how they knew what she had become, as if she exuded an aura of squalor. She thought of her own country, the custom of welcoming visitors, taking them into your home, sharing whatever you had with them. It was shameful to do anything less.
Whatever she had thought escape from the farm looked like, the reality of her new situation dawned on those cold nights in the shed. She had no documents, no right to be here. What she did at the parlour was surely illegal; the authorities would put her in prison, or worse – return her to the farm that wasn’t really a farm, where no animals grazed, no crops were produced.
*
The current swept her up a little, dropped her back down. He came to her mind now, the man she’d met back home, who’d blazed into her world from nowhere, blown her heart wide open. He’d given her a cigarette after the dance, offered to walk her back, something she’d normally decline. But there had been more arguing with her parents earlier that evening, the lure of prolonging her return enticing, and so she’d accompanied the charismatic man, content to listen to him talk in the moonlight.
He hoped to attend the next dance, but asked if she would see him again before then, and so they’d met the following week and shared some țuică he’d brought along, her head made incautious and dreamy by the sweet alcohol. The air was spiced and heady, a symphony of crickets everywhere, nowhere. They walked for miles, along a woodcutter’s path and up into the hills, every now and then pausing and she was certain he would kiss her, though he never did that day. She remembered thinking there was an age gap, that her parents would be angry at this, but reminded herself she was almost seventeen, that these decisions were becoming more and more her own. She didn’t want the life they’d had, the back-breaking toil, the everydayness. The world was about to open itself up, a host of possibilities. And the man with the big brown eyes and the way with words, despite being from the countryside too, knew about the city, how it had transformed since the revolution. He spoke of the opportunities there, of fashion and art and ambition. She was, she supposed, mesmerized.
They had been seeing each other for a few weeks when he mentioned the UK. How much work there was, what you could earn. Enough to send some back to her family, to buy things they never had.
Your English is good, he said. They want people with two languages.
She could work in a big hotel, meet famous people. They could rent a big house, she could go to university, become whatever she wanted. It all happened so quickly. She would go there first, he said, a friend already had work for her. He needed to sort out his passport, and would join her soon.
She hadn’t said goodbye to her parents. They wouldn’t allow her to move to Bucharest with a gypsy, let alone abroad. Frivolous people, her father would say, who made no provision for winter, who came begging when their own supplies had gone. No, it was better not to face her parents and have a scene. She would explain it all in a letter; they would see it was a good thing once money arrived.
The charismatic man had taken her to a part of the country she hardly knew, introduced her to men who would take her on the journey, quiet men whose eyes alone took something from you, but by then it felt too late, the thing with its own momentum now. A small apartment and more girls arriving, though not from Romania, the men passing cigarettes, eyeing them without shame. This is just a temporary thing, she said.
There were five of them in the truck, for hours, offering each other half-smiles. When they finally did stop, she thought they had arrived, congratulated herself. But it was only to transfer into another vehicle, this one smaller and she couldn’t work out how they would all fit, the man showing them this hole in the floor. They were given a sip of something strong, a pill to take, told to lie down together. And a bottle of water each to cling to in the darkness, told to make it last.
I will join you very soon, the man had said to her, and she had repeated the words until she passed out.
*
The sea was part of her now, as if trying to connect with the fluid inside her. She was exhausted, the effort – to expel the salty water each time a wave broke, or when her weight dunked her below the surface – almost beyond her. Swimming was no longer an option, so she lay on her back, wishing that the moonlight of the previous nights was upon her. She pictured the other girls at the farm, their varied routes across Europe, a dozen stories all different yet the same. How in the cold months of last winter they had huddled up at night, the act unspoken, a primal response to survive, like animals. Like the cattle back home. The strangeness of curling into a woman, she thought. There seemed no judgement, though, either from those who could not bring themselves to, or from the men who roused them at dawn to go to the fields or the parlour, as if they’d seen it before, and she supposed they had. When she first arrived one of the women had shown her a conch shell in the far corner of the barn, how you could place it to your ear and hear the sea. How you could escape in it.
*
The man that first time had been nervous, and she had to reassure him.
What would you like, she said, and he said he didn’t know.
The pill she’d taken had given soft edges to everything, like the țuică but warmer, like she was being held, and she was grateful for it.
They sat on the bed like this for a while, like embarrassed teenagers, until he pointed at her bra, so she removed it. Her pants too. And all his shyness went.
*
This time she didn’t resist the water as it took her down, the breath holding itself on instinct. That would be the start of the end, she supposed – a breath. For now she could still swim up if she chose to – go further out, even change her mind – yet no such desire to leave this realm came. She opened her eyes to the pregnant blackness, sensed the granular texture of salt on them, a few blinks to accustom them to it. She let the current twist and snag her. Further down and there was a ringing in her ears now, something building, like a pressure. Finally, her body breathed for her, in spite of her, the urge to choke intense but brief as water flooded her lungs, the panic like a fire sweeping through her, chest burning despite the cold sea now inside. Air a few feet away and its possibility became everything, the only thing, and she made some strokes with arms and legs, hoping up was up.
A mistake, then, in thinking she could do this, and in that moment there being no past or future, air now everything, even time. There was this terror in not being able to try to breathe, the body in stasis, arms grasping hungrily for non-water, and a few seconds later their movement easier, the sea’s resistance gone, her head lurching through the surface and choking like she was something turned inside out. Somehow lying on her back, head to the side, lungs exhuming themselves, water forced out to where it belonged. Her ears clearing one at a time, sound entering her like life starting up, and she heaved and wretched, felt the first of the air reach inside her, the sea breeze on her face the most beautiful thing ever. If she had the strength to laugh, she would do so, at this birthing, at the realization she wanted to live after all.
Then a wave arced on to her, bigger than any before, and she fought to stay afloat, realized she was an enfeebled being now, the choice something she had given up, the fight gone from her. More kicking and flailing, like a fit, and for a moment she thought this could be turned around, that the sea would deliver her back to shore, where she’d limp to the village and life would somehow start again. But air again became water, there being no effort left to summon, sound skewing and gurgling in her ears, and she held the breath in, tried to make a prisoner of it as she sank. An outbreath bringing a moment’s relief but with it the immediate compulsion to inhale, as irresistible as water itself, and hoping the end would be quick, consciousness lost in a heartbeat rather than dwelling, coming and going.
*
She wasn’t chosen often in those first weeks – something the men sensed in her perhaps, her timidity, her inexperience. But as the terror in her receded, replaced by resignation, she became as popular as the others, perhaps more so being the youngest.
After that first time she expected it to always be rough, the grabbing, the pounding, the pinning down, so it surprised her when men weren’t. Often they were gentle, considerate even, a different kind of dread rising in her at this. Sometimes they couldn’t finish and bowed their heads in embarrassment, and she would comfort them, tell them it was okay, that it was still amazing, the best ever, and sometimes they believed her. Other times they’d blame her for the absence of a climax, salvage some pride this way, as if a breach of contract had occurred. Some fell in love with her and were offered one of the other girls, or on occasion were excluded from the parlour when they asked to meet her elsewhere. Some wanted to kiss her, which seemed more intrusive, more intimate, until it happened and then it wasn’t intimate at all.
Some of the men were cruel and she learned how to sense this beforehand, wondered how much this was reserved for her, or whether their wives and girlfriends were also subject to it. Perhaps this was her worth, to soak it up so the other women in their lives didn’t have to.
Men’s preferences were varied and unpredictable. Some liked to lead, others to be led, and she was an actress auditioning for a part. Some insisted on obscure positions, odd angles that put great strain on her back and joints and took strength she didn’t know she had. She was coerced into various roles, from submissive to aggressor, entire scripts to stick to, phrases to repeat, crescendoing to their vocal climax.
Some requested the absence of a condom, a thing you never agreed to. Another girl had shown her how to put one on a man, a courgette serving this particular purpose, a brief moment of hilarity touching the day.
Even the non-violent ones tended towards a furious rhythm near the end, anger in their movements, hatred of themselves for attendance, or at her as the instrument of their deviancy, she wasn’t sure. It was like they were trying to leave all their hate, their sins, inside her, like a bee leaving its stinger, and she wondered how much of this could fit in one person.
Some liked to pull her hair, arcing her up from the bed, and she thought her back would break. She recalled a doll from childhood, how you could make its limbs achieve such implausible geometry, legs that folded up almost to the ears.
One man wanted her to piss on him and so she had, standing astride him and soaking his grinning face, and there being the illusion of power in this, although recalling it later she had vomited. Another insisted he place two fingers down her throat as he entered her from behind, getting off on her retching while he came.
She asked the man for more pills after that time.
In the early days she often cried, which some of them liked, were aroused by. After finishing, if there was time left, some men liked to talk, as if she’d shifted from whore to confidante, the session both hedonistic and confessional, and she imagined herself a priest, sponging all the guilt from them, as if their acts had been committed on someone else. They spoke to her like friends might, as if what had passed before was the most reasonable of transactions.
One day in that first week she refused, assuming they’d take her back to the fields, but another man came for her, returned her to the farm and a beating, a cigarette on her arm. Later she was sent to other locations, brothels masquerading as saunas, some barely hiding the fact. The realization that it could be forever, or a version of forever. That her debt would never be paid. There would be thousands more men, one after the other, fucking and beating her, until the relief of an age older than this one rendered her undesirable.
*
I am the sea, she thought, her being in a kind of motionlessness, unbreathing, unthinking, unmoving except the gentle descent, like a leaf in air. I am becoming. Everything falls: bird and fish and mammal. The blackness of before now absolute, and there being no part of her not cleansed of those men. There was a semblance of consciousness remaining. A flicker deep in the mind, the self barely aware, yet something nonetheless, the thing that distinguished you from another. Hardly even thought, more a dream, a passing from one state to another. A powering down. A system quieted, starved of its fuel, yet not quite ready to go.
The final trace of the old her, of a life. Sea all around and in her now. Glimmers of childhood and all its psychedelic colour. Light in the darkness, the promise of it. Entry and exit via the womb. The water not even felt as water now, no distinction made between her and it. Body and water as one, only this final spark of her lingering, an energy not yet extinguished. Time suspended, like being snagged on something, yet any moment now ready to catch the current and unspool again, and there being no spark then, the water taking her home.
From issue #9.5: spring/summer 2020
About the Author
Tom Vowler is an award-winning novelist and short story writer living in south west England. His books include The Method, What Lies Within and That Dark Remembered Day. He is an associate lecturer in creative writing at Plymouth University, where he gained his PhD. Tom’s second collection of stories is titled Dazzling the Gods and his new novel, Every Seventh Wave, is forthcoming in late 2020. More at www.tomvowler.co.uk.
