“In the Shetlands, women are the best men.” Negley Farson, Buffalo Evening News, March 1928.

In the water, everything finds a second self. The sea fills bodies with secrets of its own: seaweed fingers to taunt with, a slick fin of kelp, a gannet caped in silver bubbles. On land, things keep to themselves.

She finds a boy, a body curled against the rocks like a negative of a tidepool in the sand. She knows a seal when she sees one: he's slippery. Dark-eyed and inquisitive. The slash of pink on his side gives her a good reason to take him, but she might have tried anyway. This is the kind of girl she has always been, her tentacle heart reaching, sucking, clinging, binding.

Now she has someone to give her bed up for. Someone to watch her, in the paraffin light, in the sleeping tide of his breath, with her dark hair straggling into her eyes and her mother’s pearls shining around her throat. While he still sleeps, she must wind the key of this clock as quickly as she can, for nothing lies ahead but waiting for it to wind down and down and down until it stops. She’s read these stories, and they’re always about going away.

“Why are you here?” she asks.

“I want to be a boy.”

“You are a boy.”

He grins like a dog.

She read her grandmother's encyclopedia as he slept. Between May and August, while the daylight yawns forever, orcas drive the seals through the underwater forests that fence her little island off from the Atlantic. His sleeping pulse leapt between her fingers as he ranged the darkness of sleep, slipping past hunters of memory. She blew out her lamp and listened to the wind cross the sea.

Even after a double helping of bread and salty herring she’s hungry for his difference, for his life she cannot live. All night she dragged her teeth across the edges of the empty space until she could feel its fins.

“Tell me what it’s like.” She withholds the bread. “In the sea.”

He watches. Not the bread, not the split pink back of the mackerel, but her fingers. She squeals when he jumps forward - first over a boy lunging at her, and then only ticklish from his hot breath on her knuckles. He thinks his fingers are still beside his nose. She clasps his other hand, brings it towards herself, and settles his fingers over hers. His lips dampen her palm as she feeds him the mackerel. Their fingers close each others’ negative space. His fingers are white as driftwood. Hers are flushed with blood.

*

Lent gives them a fine moon. He follows her out past the glow of the whitewashed cottages, where the whispering sea humps its back in greeting. A low howl rings over the water. What could a sea-thing be longing for? If you ask the men, they’ll tell you it’s a pack of drowned sailors crying for home; the women say sirens, calling a man’s soul to keep. Giggling, she shakes off her dress and her grandmother’s braids—everything but the pearls whose outlines are tanned onto her skin—and darts to the black sea tonguing between the dark rocks. He follows without taking off his shoes. In the dark, she can, should, go no deeper than her thighs. But she makes believe she’s a seal-girl, and she’s just waiting for him, just a boy, dragged down by his oilskin trousers.

Then there is no boy. Only a dark, round head, and a boy’s skin bobbing on the surf. Its emptiness transfixes her, face-down, not a whisper of the life just like her own which haunted it a moment ago. Trapped in his silence, he herds it to her and circles until she lifts it from the water. She folds it over her shoulder like a coat and the seawater runs from his impermeable skin to hers, between her shoulder blades and into the sea again.

The image of the moon forms on the water over his head. Dark, still, hissing water stretches out to the horizon, swallowing even his shadow.

His hair trails in the water at her waist. The skin offers no company against the North Sea, which she has seen cut open a thousand times by lobster creels and boats heeling home with their decks painted herring-silver, but is still a stranger.

She closes her eyes.

He’s in another country. He’s in the sea’s dream, while its body sleeps quietly around her.

Cold stiffens her thighs and forces her back to shore. The water is thicker on the way out than in and smacks its lips around her, and her breaths come pinched—the sea likes to keep people—until the familiar band of gravel pricks her bare feet. Her longing reverses again with her return to safety. Leaving the water always feels like giving up on something unfinished.

She sits on a rock with his warm skin over her legs and the moonlight silver through the pane of her eyelids, and turns her face out to sea.

A hand on her shoulder stirs her to skin hard with cold, her teeth chattering, the lengths of her hair crusted with salt. He’s warm and dry. She meant to help him into his skin, but here he is, walking as well as her, and he swims even better.

The tidepools swelled while they were away, so they hop from fist to fist of barnacled rock to stay dry. His hand flitters at her elbow; a foolish girl could easily overstep in the dark. Only when they reach the tidepoint, marked by pricklegrass, does he recede.

“What was it like?”

He kneels to help her back into her shoes. “You were there.”

“I want to know what it’s like for you.” She can guess about the bubbles twinkling round his head and the thick fat repudiating the cold; but she wants to know if seals know one another, if you can feel your lonely sea-voice ringing in your spotted chest, and does anyone miss him? She has often dreamed about breathing underwater (how natural it seems then) and is certain she’s seen everything he’s seen: the scallops and crabs and whiting and even the sand-coloured rays—but either in flashes, or dying.

“There you go, then.” Hands in his damp pockets, shoulders a straight line as he stands. “Like that.”

But watching him know is better than knowing.

Different. His mouth shrinks like an anemone at low tide. The more he shrinks, the more she reaches. So beautiful, wrong and unsteady from the ocean. His real home is there, out where her feet don’t touch the seafloor.

Why should he care about being a boy, which anyone can do? Does he think she cares about being a seal, which any seal can do? But a boy who can tell her about being a seal, about being so otherwise: a boy who can remember the sea. She would like to know. She must know. She can't.

*

Men with little tufts of fur on their tight lips sometimes waddle from the mainland to browse seagrass baskets and wooden bowls grooved from the lathe and lace knit so fine you can feel the heat of your skin through it, if your skin is as hot as hers. They coo at her knitted hap, but she would rather show everyone her seal. He didn't exist—not here, not to them—and now he does. So in a way, she made him too.

Dressing for school in the late morning, he's too much of a boy now not to be shooed behind the screen. She fingers where her long sides have begun to curve and imagines herself glossy black, a blaze of pink-yellow lifting to white. But she doesn’t want to close her teeth on him. It would be over so fast. She feels more scientist than cetacean, at least the breathless kind of scientist who edited her prized natural encyclopaedia. She balances it on her lap and swoops the pages open and closed, flashing the seals imprisoned within, swimming alongside their dissection in prose.

She lets Peter teach him to kick a ball while she sits in the schoolyard with Edith and Molly, trying to peel one unbroken core of foam from a strand of marsh grass. Edith, who never warmed to her, is pleased now there's three girls and three boys. Although Peter's hand stays steady on her seal’s back, gaze on the side of his face, but who'd look anywhere else?

Edith grins expectantly. Her eyes catch at their faces. Attending passively to her daisy chain, Molly shrugs.

The girl watches her seal. He’s strong-legged but has never kicked before, and his whole face rounds with surprise when the ball clears the schoolroom roof. He shies from the harsh sunlight. Peter shields his eyes with his hand and goes to retrieve the ball. Her seal, behind Peter’s back, brings his hand to his eyes too. His lips twitch up beneath the shadow of his palm.

Over the Easter term, the fork-tailed tirricks squabble over the beaches and the oysterplant turns from pink to blue. Seaweed darkens the shoreline, and she is no longer the only girl he knows. The next full moon, she goes alone. He said it was too cold, too late, which he means it’s too strange.

It is cold. She winces at the sting between her toes, and keeps her dress on. Before she returns, she dips the ends of her braids into the sea, because he thinks it's the sea she loves.

*

After Pentecost, they all run alongside the voe to catch a glimpse of dorsal fins taller than a man. Three of them, the bull’s fin tall enough to wobble when he dives, with big square heads and white patches like pupilless eyes. Sea wolves. She laughed at the grainy sketch in her encyclopaedia, but with the water veiling most of their bodies, they’re awful. She fingers her pearls for comfort. They’re too far to hear anything, but watching their glossy footprints in the water and the mist they snort into the air, she can almost feel the slap of water on their backs.

She glances to her seal, and finds his arm around Molly’s trembling shoulders. He doesn't look away from the water. After the orcas turn safely out to sea, a flock of gannets splatter into the water to pick over the remains.

In July, the children avoid the beaches, clogged with jellyfish by a late storm. Their edges pucker as they dry, their fluffy purple innards bubbled in seawater until the gulls pick them open.

The encyclopaedia says they don’t feel it.

It says seals eat jellyfish. She takes his hand and trots down the sandy slope from the cottage, where halfway down gravity overtakes you, so if you don’t run into it, you’ll fall anyway. He watches impassively as the tendrils flutter in the tide, rotting in the sun while seals brave the open sea for their dinner. She would have liked to laugh with him, or at him. She would have liked watching him brave his appetite in silence. He just looks.

“Seals eat jellyfish.”

He looks at her like Edith looks at her: smiling, but not really. “Super.”

He leaves her facing the sea as grass hisses up the sandbank. The wind whips her hair into her cheek, into her eye.

Eventually he wanders back with a spear of pale driftwood, which he stabs into the slub, squinting in the sun. Her fists clench with each thrust through the weightless body into the sand. Scrunch scrunch scrunch scrunch she feels it even if the jellyfish doesn’t. Why, when she would have loved him on his hands and knees?

Peter has spotted her seal and run down the dune. He gawps and grins and holds out his hand for the stick. They bicker like gannets over it. Wood is hard to come by on such a small island, but they're Christian boys. They take turns. Down the shore, purposeful and disaffected as crofters marking sheep. Everyone does the same thing over and over on the island. Women have to be quick and precise with their lace needles, while men just have to be quick.

Coming back up the beach, there’s too much sun on the port sides of their faces, on all their acne and stubble and crooked teeth. No memory of low puffed cheeks haunts his long mouth. His eyes in the sun are hard and bright as jewels.

*

Migratory birds prelude the fairy lights soon to glitter the sky. The cliffs smoulder. His legs are longer, stride smoother, and a low burr intrudes into his voice, making him seem almost gentle, almost beyond the ugly stage between fluffy chick and gold-faced cock. The land is finishing, and so must she, while she still can.

Autumn will come up again next year—but it will be a different autumn—but it will come.

By September, she doesn’t ask at all. She goes alone and stares into the sea alone, far from the water, knowing she should try to remember this. The tide comes in, in the dark, as if sucking the meat from a bone. Wet sand mouths at her knees and her pearls gleam from a rock, her mother’s pearls, sixty white eyes glued to the moon. She digs a shallow pit and buries them within, her grandmother’s pearls. A film of water rises in the dip, marking the place she’ll retrieve them afterwards.

She only ever gets tears when she doesn't want them, which must be because she’s a girl. She’ll ask her father when he gets back from sea, him being less a man than a vessel for superstitions about women and the ocean. But it’s no trouble to rub salt water into her eyes until they sting. To clamber up the slope and burst in with sand on her dress and shake him awake.

She was swimming…and then….they were her great-grandmother’s! They’re gone!

He’s up from the bed as soon as he sees the sea on her cheeks. With his newly soft voice and his smile, he wants to soothe her in his arms first, and then to leave her here while he finds them. But the sea doesn’t wait. And they were her great-great-grandmother’s.

Roosting birds clatter from the cliffs as they pass. Her birds, birds she knows the seasons by. She can name them all. Her pulse seethes in her ears, but she’s only afraid he’ll find an impression in the sand and know her well enough to dig, and that if he finds them he’ll laugh. And his laugh will sound just like Peter’s, like Michael’s, like any other boy. So when they find the inky water has already swallowed another yard of beach and claimed payment for the tears it lent her, she feels cool and strong. Her neck, without the pearls she has worn almost all her life, feels a little new.

The wheat-gold autumn moon reflects a path straight out into the ocean, smearing each wavetip with light. She draws her gaze back into herself and breathes in the sizzling night and his eyes black and round with hesitation, still looking out to the sea and the moon. If she could stain this moment on film… the light on his nose and the roll in her belly and the chill that never quite leaves the island.

He’s beautiful, now. Her lovely boy, her seal, sweet fairy thing. He turns to wipe the tear from her eye with his thumb—he’s smiling—and leaves a flat boy-skin on the sand.

When he’s already in the water she remembers that, though she loved him as a seal, she has only touched him as a boy, and she splashes after with a scream, salt running from real and borrowed tears to the ocean where it makes no difference, and throws her arms around the wide, slippery neck they were never made to fit around, where they find no purchase. He dives away. But for one moment there was strong, supple, wet skin against her chest and whiskers scratching her cheek.

*

One nature in the water, another on shore; only a few things ever learn both. She hopes the sea will uncover her pearls and teach them.

Her cot is dry and still, and so is the boy skin stretched over her. The flickering oil lamp tries and fails to animate it the way water does. If there is some trick to slipping inside, she doesn’t know it. She’s no seal.

Somewhere, a mile down the cliff, a seal humps ashore in the dark, perhaps with a string of pearls in its teeth, but likely not. Its bright black eyes roll to the sky, up the cliff to the whitewashed cottage, but cannot cry.