Changeling's Island: Chapter Eleven

    “Well, that’s a good-sized rock flathead!” exclaimed his grandmother, touching it. “You were lucky!”

    “I caught another one. A bit bigger.”

    “But it got away,” said his grandmother, raising an eyebrow.

    “No, I got it out. But I gave it to Molly.”

    His grandmother turned her head askance, her face setting in lines of anger. “I thought I told you not to talk to strange women!”

    “She’s not! She’s a girl from school! She’s on the bus with me every day. She’s not a stranger or anything. I went to the show with her and her parents. You even spoke to her dad,” protested Tim.

    His grandmother had opened her mouth to start shouting…and stopped. “Oh. What was she doing on the beach?” It was still suspicious.

    “Walking her dog. They live a bit further toward West End. She helped me find the bait, because I didn’t know where to look. And helped gut the fish. I…I thought it was only fair and…and polite to give her one for her family. Good manners. They took me to the show, and I thought I ought to give her something to say thanks.”

    The last part was plainly the right thing to say. “Yer right. It was a good thing to do. Well done.”

    But Tim’s curiosity, as well as some anger, was up now. “Why are you so worried about this woman? Who is she?”

    His grandmother rubbed her forehead, pushing back a stray lock of dark hair. “I don’t know the whole truth of it. But she’s been botherin’ yer grandfather’s side of the family forever. I didn’t believe it all, but yer grandfather reckoned his great-grandfather nearly got drowned by her. He didn’t go near the water alone, and said you always kept iron next to your skin if you did. My family, we used to sail a lot, always been fishermen. But they farmed. Didn’t even go mutton-birding.

    She took a deep breath. “I didn’t think much of it, but your father…he took to diving. He could swim like a fish by the time he was eight. He used to go and get us crayfish and abalone. I didn’t think much about it, my brothers all did it; me, I collected muttonfish when I was littler than him. He used to go down most days…I was busy on the farm, I always said it was all right as long as there was two of yer. He would meet yer Uncle Dicky, and the two of them would go down to the beach and fish and dive and fool about. And then one day, when he was about thirteen, he went off to meet your uncle to dive. Dicky didn’t show up, but he went anyway, even though he wasn’t ‘lowed to. And he had a run-in with a woman down there. He wouldn’t ever tell me no more about it. Just that she nearly killed him. I tried to get him to talk to the cops, I tried to get his teacher and even that priest to talk to him. He wasn’t talking to no one. But he never went back diving.” She shook herself. “And yer to stay out the water. No diving. No strange women. No going down on yer own again. That seal-woman is around, and she’s bad luck — trouble, too.”

    Tim was seething with this. It was crazy and so unfair. Just because of something his father did. He was about to say something and then he remembered that well, actually, he had met a strange woman down there. One that looked a bit like Lorde. Maybe he should just let it blow over a bit. Otherwise maybe next she’d stop him going to sea with Jon, too. He had a bit of money in his pouch, but not enough to see the back of her and this place forever…and he liked being out on the boat. So he just kept quiet.

    Maybe his quiet got to his grandmother, because after their fish tea she said: “Yer could open that present. It’s Christmas Eve. Some people open them then. Yer could see if it got broken by that damned copper.”

    Tim didn’t need any urging. He was feeling flat and depressed. He opened the box. On the top was a pack of what Tim assumed were fishing lures. Plastic fish with hooks, silver oblongs with hooks.

    “What is it?” his grandmother asked.

    “Fishing stuff, I think.” He held it out to her.

    She took it, and peered at it in her odd sideways fashion. “Wobblers. Good for Aussie salmon and yellowtail. He knows his fishing.”

    Tim pulled the plastic packet out from the lower section of the box. It was red. He shook it out, and a lifejacket — the kind with sleeves and an inflation cartridge, which doubled as a windbreaker and waterproof, the kind Jon and his deckie wore, fell out. Tim had to put it on immediately. It was so cool. Jon had even gotten the size about right! It fitted him much better than the boat-spare he’d been using.

    He was surprised by a little whimper from his grandmother. She’d sat down on the hard kitchen chair, and was staring at him. Not her usual sideways stare, but straight at him. Her suntanned face was as white as a sheet.

    “Are you all right, Gran?” he asked, hastily stepping over to her.

    She grabbed his arm with that iron-hard grip of hers. Squeezed. Nodded at him. He noticed a tiny tear leaking from her eye.

    She sniffed. Rubbed her eye and said gruffly, “Yer promise me yer will always wear that jacket when yer at sea. Always. Yer hear me?”

    “Yes, Gran.” It wasn’t exactly a hard promise to make. It was just…brilliant! All he needed was a chance to go to sea with it now. It was kind of like designer label jeans, only better. You had one of those jackets…you had arrived. You were the real thing. You were an ab diver, or at least a proper deckie. He couldn’t help smiling and standing up a bit straighter. Jon must have thought he did okay.

    “Yer look like yer grandfather sometimes,” said his grandmother, shaking her head. “Now off to bed with yer. We’ll go down and try for some salmon tomorrow with them shiny new jigs of yours, after we have our dinner.”

    “How on earth did you get that? That’s the biggest flattie I ever saw,” exclaimed her father, when Molly walked in with it.

    “We caught it,” said Molly proudly.

    “Of all the luck! I’ve never caught anything near that size.” He paused. “Who’s ‘we’? One of the guests?”

    “Tim from school. He was down on the beach. He caught two. Both whoppers, in, like, fifteen minutes, and most of that was bringing them in.”

    “Hey! Does he give lessons?”

    Molly, thinking of Tim and the fact he didn’t even know what a pipi was, packed up laughing. “This was his first time.”

    “Whoa Nellie! Talk about beginner’s luck.”

    “Yeah, he, like, has this old rod, and can’t cast, but he can catch. You should show him how to cast, Daddy. He’s a nice kid. He…was saying he wished he had a dad to show him.”

    “Divorce can sometimes be really hard on kids,” said her father, nodding. “But it happens, Molly.”

    “Yeah, and on top of it all, his grandmother is, like, really weird. I mean, no TV, no Internet. Never goes anywhere. She told him not to talk to strange women.”

    “Sounds like good advice to me,” he said with a grin. “But you’re not that strange, are you?”

    “That’s what I said to him. I said I’d lend him some books.”

    For Tim, Christmas day might have been a different day from any other day. But to the cow it was still a day on which she needed milking. By ten o’clock, when his mother called, he’d been up for more than four hours, and had done all sorts of tasks, had breakfast, and had just come in for morning tea. As a sign that it was not just any other day, there were little gingery star-shaped biscuits. Nan believed in lots of ginger. Tim had read that it was good for keeping off zombies, and it must work because there had been no sign of even one so far on the farm. Until his mother phoned he would have said they hadn’t even got to Melbourne, but obviously they’d eaten the part of her brain that was arranging his trip home. She prattled on about her holidays, like his being here was normal.

    Eventually he just had to ask.

    There was a brief silence. “Oh, Tim. Your father is being awkward about it. I asked him to organize it. He hasn’t even gotten back to me.”

    Tim knew she wasn’t telling the truth. Or not entirely. In the messy bit of his life where he’d realized that Dad just wasn’t coming back, he’d learned to spot his mother’s not quite revealing everything. Well, that was how she might put it. Lying was how he put it. “You didn’t tell him, did you?” he said, crossly.

    “I did, Tim. I did. You e-mail him. He sometimes listens to you.”

    Like “not unless he thought it would make you mad,” thought Tim, glumly. He hadn’t spoken to his father for months, even before he came to the island. But what he said was, “I haven’t got the Internet here. That’s just one of the other things you did to me. It’s not fair.”

    “You did it to yourself, Tim Ryan.”

    The call didn’t get any better. It didn’t quite get to shouting and screaming, but when it got down to “you’re ungrateful and didn’t even say thank you for your Christmas present” Tim was actually quite able to say “well, I haven’t got one.” He hadn’t got her anything either…actually, hadn’t even thought of it.

    That did stop the rise in temperature. “I posted it.”

    “We only get the post about every two or three weeks.”

    There was another silence. “Then it’s waiting for you.”

    “Well, thank you, anyway,” still resentful. At least she hadn’t forgotten.

    “Yes, um, I am sorry it didn’t get there. And contact your father. Now, love, I really must go, I’m going out to lunch with…with Mark. Goodbye, be good and take care.”

    Tim was left holding the sound of long-distance silence before he could ask just how he was supposed to contact his dad. He couldn’t phone on Nan’s phone. And who was Mark? It looked like Nan was right about the boyfriend. No wonder she didn’t want him home.

    His grandmother put a hand on his shoulder. “Just so yer know, I asked Dicky to check the post for us yesterday. He said there was nothing, but yer can’t always rely on him.” She took a deep breath. “I got nothing for yer, really. Just some chocolate. There’s not a lot of spare money. But I’m hoping we’re going to do better with those steers at the next sale. Prices have been bad.”

    That was puzzling. “People at school were saying the price was up. They talk about it. And Gran…I got my present early from you. You let me use the fishing stuff, and…and I enjoyed that so much.” He knew he was being a little devious, but he wanted the freedom. “If I got hold of Molly, and she and her dog met me at the beach paddock…could I go fishing again? She’s older than me. I wouldn’t go down alone.” He felt like a baby saying that.

    “Hmph. I’ll see.” With his mother, that meant she was giving in. With Nan it seemed to mean “no.” “Now I got to finish our dinner. You check the sheep near the road for me. My little helper is worried about the water.”

    Tim was glad to go out to walk through the bush and tussocky paddocks, to be alone with his head for a bit. Just walking along, barefoot, because he was too hot to put boots on, did seem to make things seem well, less unbeatable. If neither his mother or father were going to lift a finger to get him out of here, he’d just have to get out himself. He just needed somewhere to go. He was thinking about that when a big copperhead slithered across his path. By now, he knew better than to jump or run. He stood quietly and watched it slide away.

    The dancing and feasting continued here beneath the hollow hills, with the Aos Sí lords and ladies on a wide and a level place, where the sun never shone but somehow the grass grew green and long nights followed long warm days. There was a tenuous connection with the world above, and the things that moved and changed there, but this place did not change with them. The great lords of the Fae seldom walked or rode the lands of mortal men anymore. The tracery of steel spread across the land with the railways had set bounds on them, and they did not like to be reminded of the loss of their dominions.

    Humans came to Faerie — but far fewer now — and were bound to Faerie lands, with the eating or drinking of the produce of Faerie. The Fae knew how food and drink were a part of the land and place, and that by consuming them, those who ate and drank became part of the place.

    Most humans seemed willing to be thus entrapped, and loved the life of Faerie.

    But they did not flourish there.

    The selkie, Maeve, did not know or care how well they did. But she herself was entrapped and needed to free herself from the ancient obligation, the geas laid on her. The king under the hollow hill at Cnoc Meadha needed to be repaid before she could be free.

    The young man had proved stronger than the last one she’d hunted. The bloodline had always been hard to catch, with the magic of the Aos Sí helping them and the spirits of the land binding them. Her last prey, this one’s father, had escaped her by chance and luck, a piece of scrap iron from an old mooring that his desperate hand found as she’d held him down. It had been a bad mischance. She’d planned to frighten him witless and get him to agree, and instead he’d never come near enough to the water to be caught again.

    The first changeling and his lesser spirit had fled Ireland long before she had been summoned to the court of King Finvarra. It had taken her some years to track him down, across the wide and wasteful oceans…to find him dead. Killed in a fight over an Aboriginal woman, his half-Aos Sí blood soaked into the sand, leaching down into the water, to the sea, to her.

    The key remained, somewhere, hidden on the island where he had died. Not easily found, either, to one who had no claim to it.

    There was, however, an heir to the changeling’s birthright. A child carried by the woman. Maeve had planned to search for the key, or at least steal the heir-child…until she slid out onto the beach.

    And found that this land had its own hold on the child.

    If she was going to catch one of those who had a claim to the key, she needed them in the salt sea.

    She’d tried, when the changeling’s heir moved to the bigger island. There, the child had had defenders, besides the land. She still carried the scar.

    But she was nothing if not patient. Long generations passed, and still she hunted the changeling-heirs.

    This one…she hadn’t gotten him into the water, but her spell-hooks would at least draw him back. She’d felt the lust in him. Humans were like that, and her kind were good at using it against them.