Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~~~

Sonali shrugged. "It should be vile; I'd two pound back on a fiver for the six." She opened her own beer, the straw-yellow fluid fizzing, flexing the clear plastic bottle, and let the rancid taste of spoiled water flow around in her mouth. "Aye, you're right; this is well awful." She gulped and made a face, and Colleen laughed at it; honestly laughed.

"If you knew it was going to be awful, why on earth did you bring it out here? Why even?"

Sonali smiled and looked off into the distance, out to the sun still rising low from the sea. "Cause when we can agree that this is awful, well, maybe we're no so different after all. Maybe it's not so hard, for someone like me to understand, maybe, a little, of what you are and where you're from and why you're here."

"Not about the kids?"

Sonali shook her head. "No, not to start. I figure, well, we'll get to them in their own time." She turned to look at Colleen, trying to give her the kind of look Jordyn gave her when she was trying to be earnest about her crush, trying to show her emotional interest. "If you don't mind, could you tell me why you've come up on the land? You read in the books, and selkies come ashore when, like, they're captured by a man or something, but you're famous at school for not being connected to no boy nor girl nor anybody, so that seems like you've got something else, some other reason."

Colleen shook her head and half-laughed again. "I'm here because I've got to be – how do you think it is, out in the water? There's all this gunk from the oil wells, the fish are fewer and fewer and they keep moving, like the currents are changing and everything's getting warmer; most of our folk have moved on, up to Shetland, on to Norway, and there's too few of us – too few for long lives and not too many kids in a family and worrying about propeller strikes. In our little patch, there's not enough of us to keep up a family; some want to move, but my da is dead-set on staying, even if that means I've to work on the land and save the fish for them as didn't go to school."

Sonali blinked, dumbstruck. "Haud on," she said, finally. "That's it? You're a migrant? That bloody 'breaking point' queue goes out to sea?"

Colleen smiled again. "Maybe, maybe not? I think we're inside the twelve-mile zone, so I guess I'm Scots, even if it's no quite the same as everyone else. But if it makes you feel closer –"

"No, that's dead right," Sonali said, taking a swig of her beer and immediately regretting it. "I was born here too, even if sometimes folk don't have that idea. Like, they're expecting you to have half a hand somewhere else and they're confused when you're just the same as them. So, what's the plan for you? Are you going to finish your highers, go to uni here, and then just find a job where you don't have to work nights, and go home by the harbor?"

Colleen rested her chin in her hand and looked out into the water. "I don't know. I don't know yet. I don't want to – there are humans I like, places where I enjoy having so many people around, but for me, it's not really where I belong. If I can, if I can change the way things are going, I'd much rather live in the sea – with my own folk, the way I was meant to, the way I was raised and the way I thought for the longest time when I was small that I'd always be able to live. Don't you ever get like that? Like you're out high and dry and everything's baking you to a crisp, nothing but thin air on your sides to hold you up, and you want to just dive back down home, where the water's around you and everyone sees the world through the same eyes you do?"

Sonali drew her knees up, thinking. "I don't know; I'm not sure that I have. Everyone's got their own circumstances, aye? You even said: sometimes the water's full of gunk from the rigs, and the fish are flowing away. If it was me in your place, with my baba putting me on the land, I'd drop my skin and my feet'd never touch the ground till I got to Edinburgh. I've a brother, the one who gave me this –" Sonali pulled the amulet out through the zip neck of her trackie, and Colleen turned with obvious interest "– and when he gave it to me, we were in a chippy off King Street, because he had such a blowout with baba when he wasn't about to let him go work on the rigs that he's still not allowed back to the house. He's gone up your land, and he's took the high road near clear to Russia the now. But aye, both ways; didn't that Liam go back to you? So there must be something out in the water that's worth coming back to, even if you've not been there long."