The town of Buckie presses itself back against the rocks as it nervously looks out across the mouth of the Moray firth right into the heart of the North Sea, its salt-stained and cracking buildings a stark reminder of the sheer force of nature this close to the edge. It was once a busy fishing port, its safe harbour walls enfolding countless small boats while music overflowed from lively pubs to compete with the laughter of crews returning from the sea. But that time has passed.
The life of a fisherman has become harsher, the fish stocks have been diminished, and the town now smells more of rust and diesel than of herring and salt. When the wages dried up, most of the shops soon followed, leaving behind a co-op corner store, a bookie and a scruffy string of charity shops. Out at the edge of town, near an uninteresting trading estate where weeds grow from the cracks in the concrete parking lots and ‘for sale or rent’ signs pepper the entrance, lives a man named Ewan McLeod.
Ewan in forty-something though he looks a lot older. His skin is cracked and eroded by twenty years of biting wind and rain; his eyes are bloodshot from the same number of sleepless nights and whisky chasers. He’s one of a dwindling number of old men still clinging to a living on the water. Not in the way his father and grandfather did, returning day after day with a livewell filled to the brim, but by laying lines of lobster pots along the jagged rocky shoreline where the bigger boats can’t go, or by running supplies to oilrigs out in the big swell, where a boat the size of Ewan’s could be swallowed whole by a rogue wave.
His house looks much like the rest of the tired Victorian terrace of fishermen’s cottages, but unlike the other, regular homes, behind the façade the rocky cliff face, against which it leans, juts into the middle of the one living room, to reinforce the essence of a cave, not a house. Masking tape keeps the wind and rain out where timber window frames pounded by salt spray and sunlight have shrunk away from small glass panels, and when cold wind whips in from the north-east and the waves crash high into the air against the sea wall, the Saltwater flays the front of the house like a wet towel snapped again and again across the front door.
His neighbours talk about Ewan in low tones. Some think him lucky, always coming back with something for his trouble when others return with only empty bait pots. Others think him strangely attuned to the moods of the sea, as if her speaks to the waves or they to him and give him clues about when go out and when to tie everything down and stay in harbour.
One morning, when the sea was not in the mood to allow Ewan’s little boat safe passage to collect his pots, he picked his way along the shore, out past Strathlene where the golf course rose up above the rocks, and he would be able to see that his buoys and pots had not been driven into the shore during the night, when something below caught his eye.
Scrambling down to the waterline he cautiously approached the object. He had found many useful or interesting things washed up on the rocks over the years, and he even used to fill bags with litter and leave them for the council refuse collectors until he had been told that he would have to pay for the collections, but this definitely wasn’t litter. He picked it up. It was a heavy pelt, slick with brine and shining faintly in the low, early morning light. Seal he thought at first, but he knew seal skins well and this was too big, and the texture seemed to shift in his hands like it was trying to escape. The second his hands touched it a warmth flared up his arms and into his chest, penetrating his whole body and banishing the cold, winter morning.
“Please.”
The voice was nervous and breathless.
He turned to see a woman standing on a flat, wet rock at the edge of the water, half in shadow, her hair dripping with seawater and her skin pale as frost. She had no clothes that Ewan could see, and a tangle of kelp draped across her shoulder, suggesting that she had just crawled up out of the swell. Her eyes were deep, dark and terrified as she spoke in stilted bursts.
“My skin,” she said, pointing to the pelt in his hands. “Please, give it back.”
Ewan stayed quiet, rooted to the spot. He thought she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen and for a while he simply stared. Loneliness and grief since his brother drowned balled up in his chest as the silence stretched to breaking.
“No!” he blurted, his tongue twisting awkwardly as the sound squeezed out, “not yet”. He was making it up as he went, like an out-of-control firehose he saw on TikTok once. His brain clawed at pieces of incomplete ideas as it searched for anything to cling on to, and the girl’s face morphed from scared to horrified. “You can come with me.”
The girl shrank away, made herself smaller, flatter against the rock. He held out his hand “Just for tonight, let the storm pass, . . . I’ll keep you safe”.
She didn’t speak, but after a moment she slowly rose to her feet and Ewan hastily removed his coat and placed it around her shoulders before tucking the heavy fleece under his arm before starting back for his cottage.
He walked slow, staying out of the lights where his neighbours’ houses came close to the shore. Once or twice, he looked back and found her following a few steps behind.
When he reached the door he opened it and stood to the side to allow her to enter at her own pace, and like a lobster pot he thought, the way out would not be so clear.
Ewan fed her and gave her a comfortable place to sleep but in the morning when the storm had passed, he pulled up a huge floorboard which spanned the whole room and placed her fleece between the joists before lowering the board back into place.
“Stay a little longer” he said, “I’ll look after you”.
For the first few days, when he would return from his boat, he would find her crying with bloody fingers, raw from scratching and scaping at the floor. He would remove the splinters and bathe the wounds and she would sulk and retreat to the corner.
After several days like this she gave her name as Mairi and they began to converse, about the cottage at first, then the village and the beach and the sea, but her eyes would regularly dart to the pack of floor that hid the key to her invisible cell.
Month blurred into month, season into season and Mairi gradually took on the roles of a wife, although Ewan knew that he could never marry her because a church would ask from which Parrish she had come, and so he lied to his neighbours and told them that he had travelled to her home in Nairn for a ceremony.
The following spring, Mairi was pregnant, and during the first storm that winter a baby boy was born as the wind howled through the fireplace sending sparks flying and the tiles rattled on the roof.
From the moment he was born Mairi sang to him in strange, melodic tones and words that Ewan couldn’t understand. She named the boy Finn and bathed him every day in fresh sea water, even in the depths on winter when the waves froze between the beach pebbles.
The boy was lean and pale skinned with eyes of pale blue, shot with silver, and when Ewan took him to the village school he was teased mercilessly and called fish boy or guppy in the playground. The adults weren’t much better, old women gossiped in the isles at Co-op and old men grew cold and silent in the pub or crossed themselves when passing in the street.
Finn grew up in silence, tossing stones into the sea or swimming back and forth across the bay, which he was surprisingly good at doing.
The years piled in on Ewan and his body became weak and crooked, but the guilt that burned in his heart tore away at his sanity day after day, until the whisky did nothing to ease his suffering. Mairi’s eyes dulled but her face and body remained young and supple. She bore his touch each night without flinching, but without any warmth for the man who stole her life.
One day, when Finn had reached the age of fourteen and his chin was level with the top of his father’s head, Mairi asked him to help her pull up the long floorboard, and together they managed to gradually lift it and insert pieces of furniture under it until the space between the joists where Mairi’s pelt had been hidden was exposed.
Mairi reached in and gathered the bundle to her chest with tears flowing down her face.
When she had sat for some time she suddenly rose and came to her son, kissing him on the forehead.
“You are born of both worlds my child. Don’t forget!”
By the time Ewan returned home she was long gone.
That night and every night thereafter Ewan could be found screaming incomprehensibly into the waves or simply sitting on the foreshore staring at the horizon.
The Neighbours talked, of course they did, most were of the opinion that she had run off with someone more attractive, younger, richer, but none would have guessed the truth.
Years passed and Finn studied hard to be a marine biologist, it was an easy choice. He took a job on a survey vessel, skirting the glacial ice around Svalbard for six months, but he came back gaunt and shaken.
“I saw her,” he told his father, his voice cracked with salt and exhaustion. “In the deep. She called my name.”
Ewan’s hands trembled as a tear swelled in the corner of his bloodshot eye, “Then she still watches.”
Finn nodded. “She said that the sea is changing, and I’ll have to choose where I belong.”
Now people say that the fishing villages scattered up and down the coast of Moray are dying. Not with a woosh and a bang, but slow and quiet, like the sand on the beach that moves sideways a little with every high tide until it runs out of land. The harbours silt up faster each year, and there are less and less boats to dredge them for, many have simply given up.
Unnaturally furious storms blow up form the Atlantic or down from the North Sea now with alarming regularity, and the intrepid captains who remain, scratch out a hard and unforgiving living for themselves.
Old oil rigs and forgotten pipelines seep toxins into the open ocean where no one’s looking, and the water is getting warmer, the thermostat inching, imperceptibly higher and higher.
Old folk whose memories allow, speak of times when the waves didn’t crash over the top of the sea wall, smashing windows, soaking carpets and washing people off their feet. They whisper if a time when storms didn’t rip the tiles from the roof or smash their boats together with force enough to damage their hulls.
And in between these reminiscences they talk of Ewan and of his wife who came from the sea. They say her son doesn’t drink or joke with the other local men, and when they congregate in the pubs, he walks the shore, always followed by several seals, their dark eyes always following him as he speaks to them. Not in English, or even the local tongue Doric, but sings a melodic tune that none can understand.
He isn’t the only one waiting for something to happen. The sea itself seems to hold its breath. The rigs that once thrummed and roared with industry now sit abandoned, replaced by thousands of humming turbines, quietly clogging up the horizon in every direction. Kelp forests are smashed against the rocks and deposited on beaches like rotting carcasses. Dolphins keep their distance now, replaced by sharks, circling boats as if to ward them off and nipping holes in their nets.
Mairi’s voice is still carried by the wind. On nights when gales scream down from the North and people shut themselves inside to huddle round a fire, people swear that hear a woman’s cry, high and wild, not sad but fierce, urgent. They say she isn’t just calling her son, but all the people of Buckie, all the people who live along the coast and think themselves safe from the hunger of the sea.
For the choice is not only for Finn. It’s for all of us. To blindly continue stabbing at the heart of the ocean until it can no longer sustain life. Or listen, listen to the warnings carried by the waves, by the rising sea levels and the turbulent storms. Learn to live in harmony with the sea or die when it can no longer support us.
Finn McLeod walks the line every day, silver-eyed and silent, the weight of two worlds in his blood. But the tide is rising, and the choice is coming, and it will not wait.
