Herring Girl Read online

  While they’ve been talking, Laura must have nodded off, because now her mouth’s hanging open a bit and she’s started snoring. Ben catches the doc’s eye and they share a grin. ‘Is that why you smoke now?’ he asks. ‘Because you liked it so much before?’

  ‘Perhaps. But nicotine addiction would also have something to do with it. As Freud said once when quizzed on his fondness for Havana cigars, “The cigar is indeed a phallic symbol, my friend – but it is also a cigar.” But I’d also be tempted to blame a certain Jane Hill, who smuggled ten packs of Number Six into my boarding school when I was fourteen – “numbies” we used to call them. One cough and I was hooked for life.’ When she inhales her lips go all puckered. She’s still sucking in and blowing out like she can’t get the smoke down fast enough. ‘However, your question has touched on an important principle. Have I mentioned the concept of “scarring”?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Ben settles back on his elbows, stretching his legs out in the sun and pointing his toes.

  ‘About forty years ago a psychologist called Ian Stevenson decided to make a scientific study of reincarnation. He travelled to the Indian subcontinent, where such cases abound. Hindus believe that a soul may occupy many bodies during its journey – Buddhists do too, though in a slightly different way. Of course that doesn’t mean reincarnation is limited to Hindu and Buddhist societies, but it does mean that it was relatively easy for Dr Stevenson to find cases to investigate. To cut a long story short, he did indeed find a number of children—’

  ‘Children?’ Ben sits up.

  ‘Where a person does have some conscious awareness of a past life – and that is rather rare – it tends to surface as the child learns to speak, then fades away by the age of eight or nine. Thereafter the fine details of that person’s past-life memories can only be accessed via the unconscious, in dream states and hypnosis for instance.’

  ‘Like me.’

  ‘Precisely.’ She smiles at him. ‘Which is one reason I’m so glad you decided to visit me. Anyway, what Professor Stevenson subsequently discovered, which is germane to our discussion, was that if a person had died violently in a previous incarnation, this was sometimes reflected in the form of unusual birthmarks or disabilities – “scars” I call them – in the subsequent reincarnation. In one case, a boy had a series of birthmarks on his chest and back exactly where a volley of bullets had passed through the torso of his previous incarnation.’

  Ben whistles: how weird is that? Then he thinks about it a bit more: ‘But he could have seen the pattern the scars made and just made up the story of the bullets,’ he says.

  ‘Well spotted. Which was why Stevenson only reported cases where he was able to find objective evidence to verify the child’s story. In this particular case, the child remembered the name of the village where the shooting had taken place and Stevenson was able to access an autopsy report detailing the dead man’s injuries.’

  ‘And they matched.’

  ‘Like a glove, as they say. As did the birthmarks or disabilities of hundreds of other children he investigated. The phenomenon is so pervasive that one community has developed a custom of marking a dead body with charcoal so that they can look out for a birthmark in the same place on babies born afterwards and identify where the dead person’s soul has migrated for its next incarnation.’

  ‘So what’s that got to do with you smoking?’

  ‘Well it seems that it’s not only physical injuries that can leave a mark, so to speak, on a subsequent incarnation. Intense fears and passions may also be passed on in this way – though of course there’s no scientific explanation at present for exactly how any of this might occur.’

  ‘I’ve got a weird mark here,’ Ben says, showing her a pinkish line at the base of his neck. ‘It’s faded now, but Dad says it was bright red when I was born. He thought it might be because they had to use forceps to get me out.’

  ‘That’s a possible explanation, of course. But it could also be a clue to what happened to Annie.’

  ‘So why don’t you do the same as that professor?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look up old police reports and that from that time. Nana says you can find out all sorts. Dad got her this book with a DVD about tracing your ancestors and she got really into it for about two weeks, which is ages for her.’

  Laura snuffles a bit and rolls onto her side.

  ‘I did travel some way down that road with Peggy’s life,’ says the doc, ‘though this was before the advent of the Internet, so my investigations were somewhat limited. But I have always considered the facts surrounding my clients’ previous incarnations to be outside my remit. My role, as I see it, is to help the client access unconscious material for therapeutic purposes. If they wish to investigate further, that’s up to them.’

  ‘But the answer could be right there, just waiting to be found out.’ Ben kneels up, thinking how cool it would be to do some proper detecting, to find clues and follow them.

  ‘Theoretically, yes,’ says the doc cautiously. ‘But discovering something in a police report is unlikely to have the same therapeutic benefit as remembering it as it happened in a previous life.’

  ‘But what if you’re like me and you can’t remember what happened? There might be an old newspaper story or something that would jog my memory.’

  ‘Sounds like a great idea to me,’ says Laura, opening her eyes and heaving up on one elbow.

  The doc scowls. ‘Thank you, Laura,’ she says through gritted teeth.

  ‘Oh, come on. It’s not as if you’re overwhelmed with work at the moment. Half your clients are off on their hols and after all that hoo-ha with Hester thingummy I can’t see you writing any more papers for a while.’

  ‘If it’s any of your business, which it isn’t, I have to produce a chapter for a psychosynthesis textbook before the end of September, and I need to update my religion and therapy book for the new edition—’

  ‘Think how much fun we could have fossicking around the local history section in the library.’

  ‘And a two-thousand-word review for the TLS of three books I haven’t even opened yet.’

  ‘I’ll help.’

  ‘That’s supposed to persuade me, is it?’

  While they bicker away, Ben lies down and closes his eyes, as though he’s ducking underwater away from it. But it’s not like when Mam and Dad used to fight, in quiet low voices, with the door shut so he couldn’t hear them, but he could really. When Laura and the doc argue, Ben just wants to giggle. Laura’s going to win this one, he reckons, because the doc’s stopped chain-smoking, which means she must be interested.

  The blanket’s prickling the backs of his legs and the sun’s glowing through his eyelids. It feels like he’s floating in a warm red sea.

  ‌Chapter Twelve

  1898

  It’s early morning and I’m waiting for Flo. She was wanting to go to the nettie on her own, so I’m guessing it’s maybe her time – though she’d never say – because I’ve just come on and we’re usually on our rags together.

  It’s just after six, a bonny morning, with a soft wispy fret crawling upriver and the water smooth as a mirror. There’s an elbow bend in the stairs a nip up from our house, with a bit wall where I like to sit, that catches the rising sun through a gap in the roofs this time of day. So I’m closing my eyes, and feeling the warmth on my face, and just listening to the day waking up.

  I can hear the lumpers yelling for landing lines down on the quayside and the capstans chugging away to winch the crans ashore – and the gulls of course, always the gulls, bickering over fish innards.

  Now here comes Flo, frowning and blushing a bit, but she doesn’t look at me so I can’t tell if she’s come on or not. So off we set down the bank, and I swear this town’s filling up more every day. There’s nets all over, like brown spiders’ webs: hanging from the walls, draped over every bush and washing line; or spread out for the ransackers on the grass in the distance like a bro
wn mist. And standing at every window in every loft, caught like flies, you can see the beatsters at work mending them.

  Flo’s dragging her feet so I’m worried we’ll be late. She’s still not letting on, but she’s looking pained, so I think maybes her belly’s nipping her. But when we get there the work’s never even started, because the lasses are all crowded round fat Sally, and I can see straight away that she’s not right.

  She looks pale – and Sal’s normally ruddy as an apple – and there’s fresh blood seeping through her bindings where she cut herself a few days back. She’s making out she’s fine to gip, but Mrs Gibson’s taking her knife away, and folding it, and pulling up the sleeve to see if there’s poison in the wound. And I can tell by Mrs Gibson’s face that it’s not good. See, when a wound goes bad, and the poison starts to spread, there’s a red line appears under the skin, going from the wound up the arm, taking the badness into the body. They say if that line reaches your heart, it’ll kill you stone dead, so Mrs Gibson’s giving Sal a sixpence and sending her off to the doctor.

  Once she’s gone and we’ve set to gipping, we none of us feels much like talking, because it can get you just like that, the blood poisoning. One minute you’re laughing and full of blether, next your hand’s swelled up and leaking pus and there’s a rash starting, and the doctor’s there with his bone saw. And if you’re lucky, you’ll lose a hand, and if not – well, that’s you poisoned to death.

  When we get in, the Scots lasses have arrived and are crowded into the kitchen with their kists open on the floor, unloading things they’ve brought for Mam – tin cups and raisins, bags of tea and sugar, a big roll of leaf lard for their late suppers. And if words were smoke, you’d not be able to see across the room, there’s that much blether going on.

  We’ve the same crew as always lodging with us: two gippers and a packer – Ellie, Mags and Sue. We’ve known them since we were wee, when they’d bring a string of broken herring home for tea and show us how to gip them. It always seemed a grand way of life, following the herring round the coast, from Shetland to Peterhead to Shields, and on up to Yarmouth and Grimsby. Then, come winter, boarding the train to Plymouth for the mackerel, then on across to Ireland to gip in the snow.

  I asked Ellie once, don’t your hands freeze? For we’ve the lums at the smokehouse to take the chill off. But she just laughed, no, it’s your feet that suffer, even when you’ve four layers of socks and newspaper in your boots. Mam says it’s the same in the net loft. Your legs can be numb as wood and your neb dripping with cold, but the busyness of your needles keeps your hands pink.

  So now Mam’s poured the tea and Ellie and them are telling how they’d got in a right barny down Eyemouth, and would’ve been driven out except the herring shoals had shifted anyway, so it was time for them to leave. They’d got up a protest for a better rate for their night barrels, because it’s harder to keep up your speed under the lamps.

  For us smokehouse gippers it’s different. Once the lums are loaded and the rousing floors heaped high, there’s no point gipping more fish. But the Scots lasses are gipping for the coopers’ barrels, and so long as there’s herring to gip, they have to keep going – right into the night if needs be. See, once a herring’s out of the water it won’t wait. If you don’t get the innards out and the salt on, or the pickle, or get it on the baulks in the lum, it’ll go rotten in the blink of an eye, specially in the warm weather.

  So anyway, that’s Ellie for you: always on about how the gippers get tret. And now she’s asking about our pay in the smokehouse, if it’s by the hour or the cran, and have we got a union organizer yet. Which is another of her bugbears, how the lasses hereabouts just take what they’re given and never think to complain.

  Then here comes Da’s voice from upstairs, roaring for his water, which puts Mam in a canny dither, for she’s forgotten to heat him a kettle, hasn’t she? And Ellie and them are laughing at him roaring and her scurrying and I’m trying to shush them, even though they’re guests, for it seems disrespectful to laugh at a man in his own house.

  After tea, as it’s a Friday, Flo and me set off up the bank to the High Town to look at the shops – though looking is all we can do, as our pay goes straight to our mams and what’s left is barely enough for a hair ribbon. By, but it’s grand to be linked in and strolling along in the late sunshine, with our oilies off and our hands washed, and our feet light in clogs for a change, instead of slurruping along in heavy lads’ boots.

  Some of the Scots lasses are out strolling too, blethering and knitting away at socks and ganseys to keep their lads warm under their oilies. Never mind your diamond rings, among fishing folk there’s no surer sign a lass is promised than when she’s knitted her lad’s initials into the hem of a gansey. That’s how I know Flo’s really hooked on Tom, for she’s brought a skein of new wool to our place so she can work a gansey without her mam mythering on about it. Flo’s mam and da are canny tidy folk, see, so a rough lad like Tom’s not exactly what they’re wanting for a son-in-law.

  So now we’re back home and up in the loft with the candle lit, and Flo’s sorting through her shiftenings and hanging up her good clothes. I’ve rinsed out my day rags and hung them to dry, and set a fresh pail ready for my night ones – not saying anything to Flo, mind, but not hiding what I’m doing neither. For I want her to feel at ease and not need to ask what to do with hers. But she’s never lifted her pettie nor unpinned any rags, so it seems I’m wrong about her coming on.

  So anyway, we’re laying out the bedding and settling down all cosy, with Mam’s nets hanging up like curtains all around, for she was beating today, while we were gipping – Da doesn’t trust the big beating lofts and keeps his lint-work in the family, so it’s hard on Mam and Nana this time of year.

  Now Flo’s asking have I ever been kissed, though she knows the answer well enough, and it’s just her way of talking about Tom. For he has kissed her, of course, and once you’re used to it, she says, you can even get to like it. Though his tongue coming in was a bit of a shock, what with the taste of the bakkie on it. Which is a shock to me too, for I’d never thought there might be a tongue involved, so we’re giggling, pulling our blankets up to hide our faces.

  And when she catches her breath, Flo says that she daresn’t relax into liking the kissing part anyway, for that would distract from where his hands are going – which sets us off again. So now I’m asking where are they going, but she won’t tell, so I’m guessing at some places, at cami-buttons and boobies, and she’s never saying no, which is another shock, though I never let on. So now I’m wondering about other places a lad’s hands could go, which makes me shiver at the thought, and I can’t even find the words to ask, but try anyway, so we’re giggling into the small hours.

  Now it’s Sunday, and we’ve had our dinner and done the pots and Da’s sat outside on the bench with his pipe and bakkie tin, and the Scots lasses are off in the yard rinsing out their shiftenings for tomorrow, so there’s enough chairs for a change. Flo’s helped wash my hair, so it’s smelling of sea wind and sunshine, instead of oak-smoke and herring; and we’ve kicked off our clogs so we’re barefoot as bairns, and leaning back with a brew and a sweet biscuit.

  And I can hear Da’s speaking to someone outside, and calling for a chair, so I carry mine out and his visitor steps forward to take it off me. But in that daft way that happens sometimes, I can’t let it go neatly into his hands, so we’re stood there for a long blushing moment, tussling politely over this chair.

  He’s younger than I guessed from his voice, with pale eyes and pale skin and a tangle of black curls – Celt colouring, Mam would say. And when he looks at me with my hair loose, I’m all of a fluster suddenly, though it’s only my feet that’s bare.

  So anyway, I let go the chair at last, and he gives a little bow before setting it down, and there’s the shadow of a smile in his eyes that says he’s seen me, and maybes likes what he’s seen, before he straightens his shoulders and turns back to Da and the business he
was minded to do.

  So what do I do then? Well, I go back through to the front room, where Mam and Flo have taken out their knitting, but I can’t settle. So I wander about a bit with a cloth, wiping the mantle, for there’s always a need for that, even in summer. And I think of that soft noticing look that lad’s given me, and hold on to it like a curl in a locket. For I know fine well that once he’s seen Flo, that’s the last time he’ll pay me any mind.

  ‌Chapter Thirteen

  1898

  If you’re a lass in Shields, you’re forever watching the horizon and waiting for news of your lads. Even in summer, when the winds are kind, a squall can blow up from nowt. Or you’ll get a calm, with a thick white fret, that has the herring drifters rocking blind on a flat sea, till some massive collier heaves up out of the fog and bears down on them blaring its horn. Two colliers collided in a fret just last week and six men drowned before the lifeboat could get to them.

  Of course when you’re gipping, or beating, you can’t keep a look out, but the bairns know all our boats by the patches on their sails, and scoot off to the Priory to see who’s coming in, and earn a ha’penny for their pains. So there’s a deal of running off and reporting back this morning, for all the crews who set out in that high wind last night.

  See, you can’t go for the herring in the daytime, for fear of netting up a batch of gurnards, which spoil the herring with their spines. That’s why you’ll see the drifters setting out with the setting sun on their backs, and plying home with the sun rising behind them.

  I often think of Da and Jimmy out there on the night sea, bucking though a ghostie world of black waves and stars and bobbing lights. That dark world is nearly all our lads know, for their time ashore is spent mostly asleep, or sleep-walking as it seems to me, stotting home after a night’s hauling followed by a morning’s cranning and sluicing out. You can be five hours hauling a big catch, Da says, and that’s heavy going, even with the capstan to help.