Runcie - Salt on your tongue: women and the sea

First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West
and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

Copyright Charlotte Runcie, 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. For permission credits, please see p. 365

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78689 119 8
eISBN 978 1 78689 120 4

For B.

Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.

Psalm 77:19

CONTENTS

I

ALKYONE

Alkyone throws herself into the sea and drowns. She is the daughter of Aeolus, god of the winds. Alkyone and her husband, Ceyx, have angered the gods with their love, and so Zeus casts a great storm to drown Ceyx. After a distraught Alkyone has killed herself, Zeus regrets what hes done, so he transforms Alkyone and Ceyx into kingfishers. For two weeks every January, Aeolus calms the winds and seas so that Alkyone can make her nest on the smooth water. These are called halcyon days.

THE NORTHERN STAR

T HE SEA BEGINS WITH THE stars. I put my bare feet in a rockpool near Elgol beach on the Isle of Skye to look more closely at a starfish. The jagged black triangles of the Cuillin mountains rise in the distance, together with a horseshoe of islands making a natural amphitheatre of the stormy bay. We are on holiday here, the furthest north Ive ever been, after visiting my mothers family in Fife. The sea is exotic to me, a girl usually to be found growing up in the hills of landlocked Hertfordshire, far from the shore. Its new.

The water is cold and my toes white. The ground is broken shells, drawing beads of blood from the soles of my feet. My parents are a little way away. All around limpets are stuck fast to the rocks and birds are circling. The breeze is hard, the clouds low. The sea around stretches into infinite mist. I feel completely alone.

While Ive been looking to see where my parents have gone, the starfish has inched its way into a clump of shadows and out of sight. I remember reading in my Collins book of the seashore that starfish can have babies in different ways: either by mating with other starfish, or by having one of their arms removed. A disembodied starfish arm can sprout its own new arms, and then grow into a whole new star. The original starfish will then grow its lost arm back, too, so there would be two new and whole creatures grown from something mutilated and broken. Does this starfish have any babies other versions of itself crawling across another rockpool floor?

Nearby there is a piece of driftwood shining under the surface, dark and slick with seawater, alive-seeming, like a little beached monster. When its time for us to go, I drag the chunk of wood back to the cottage with me. (The water that comes from the taps in the cottage is brown with peat. Why cant we bathe and cook in the sparkling clear salt water from the bay below? I am a sulky child, and refuse to help with the washing up.)

On the way back up the steep road to the house, the blackened water from the piece of wood soaks into my clothes, into my favourite T-shirt, the one that Id wear every day if I could, green and black striped like how I imagine a pirates shirt to be, and full of holes from too much wear and clambering. I am a tall and loud child with a temper. I bite my nails and never brush my hair. I devour books, especially books about horses and seaside boarding schools, though I have experience of neither. I never feel, really, like a little girl, or know what that is meant to feel like.

My grandmother has tried to remedy the situation by giving me a series of flouncy ruffled dresses and telling me to brush my hair which is naturally curly and full of tangles with one hundred strokes of the brush every night to make it soft. This practice hurts so much it makes my eyes water, and tests my patience to its limit, so I avoid it. It didnt seem to improve my hair much when I did it, anyway, only succeeding in turning it into a static-buoyed bundle of reddish-brown hay. The dresses are itchy and too tight and so I take any opportunity to opt out. Always I want to get my feet good and cold and salty in the sea as much as possible.

On the windowsill in my grandmothers bathroom, with its avocado suite and cupboard full of painkillers and cancer medication for my grandfather, there has been, for as long as I can remember, a display of shells. These are shells my grandmother has collected from cruise holidays and trips around the world, some of them picked up from beaches, but most of them from gift shops, large and exotic and shining. There is an enormous conch that I have picked up and held to my ear in the bath so many times that it has a thin slick layer of old soap over the delicate curve of its pink opening, near to where the white ridges of the furled operculum twist round and up to the back of the shell. A particularly big scallop shell is perched on the edge of the bath, and used to keep soap in.

That afternoon I make a project of the dried-out driftwood. Somehow it has lost its slick magic back in the safety of the cottage, cracking and fading in the warmth. Using my art set and a thick brush, I paint it all over with the brightest red poster paint I have. I think I am trying to recapture its wet wildness, and the beguiling horror of when I first found it in the rockpool, shimmering and fat and soaked with brine. But no paint can make it again as bright and fierce as it was when I found it, when it glowed like moonlight among the starfish, as bright and fierce as I felt with my feet in the sea.

For years after that holiday, I collect glittering shells and sea glass from trips to beaches and take them home. I watch the magic fade from them as the water evaporates and their shining surfaces dry to nothing, and wonder what it would take to be able to keep a real piece of the sea with me, to keep its mystery alive.

Whenever its late autumn and Im by the sea, and the night is cold and the stars are stretching up into the dark, I go to stand on the edge of the shore, with the darkness so deep, and the sea so loud, that I can imagine Im standing on the prow of a ship. If Im far enough away from a city, the sky will be overwhelmed by stars, so many that the darkness seems to dip from their weight. Galaxies, planets and nebulae reveal themselves.

People have always projected poetry on to the light-shot night. Alnilam, we call the belt of the constellation of Orion. The string of pearls. Capella, little she-goat. Piscis Austrini, the mouth of the southern fish. Carinae, the prow of a ship. Eridani, the end of the river.