Mara and the Dolphins
“Pádraig! Come help me bring your sister upstairs, the fresh air will do her some good.”
“Yes, Ma,” Paddy made his way across the tiny cabin to where his sister, Mara, lay sleeping on the bunk his four sisters shared in the crowded room. Under the guidance of their mother and with a fare of only £10, the O’Malley family had set off from Portsmouth to reunite with their father who had gone ahead and found work on a farm in Western Australia. Their high spirits had quickly turned to confusion when little Mara, still a slip of a girl though now fourteen, collapsed in a fit while the family took a walk on deck and had not woken since.
Paddy stooped over her sister, trying not to hit his head on the bunk above and steadying himself with the gentle roll of the ship. He grabbed her under the armpits, carefully lifting her out as his mother took her legs, together manoeuvring the somnolent girl out of the cabin. Through the narrow, crowded passageways of third-class they carried Mara who never once stirred from her slumber – not when Paddy slipped and knocked her head against a door way, prompting an virulent outburst from his mother, nor as they hoisted her slowly up the countless flights of stairs, Ma O’Malley panting and cursing the whole way.
Up on deck the weather was fine and sunny, a cool breeze from the south taking the edge off the heat. Water stretched out around them to the horizon, unhindered by land or cloud and tiny swells lapped at the ship’s side; they found a stool and propped Mara up against the ship, the sleeping girl as pliant as a doll.
“Look, Ma! Dolphins!” cried Paddy as his mother settled her daughter to face the blue calm expanse.
“I’ve had enough of your fecking dolphins, so I have!” his mother snapped, still trying to get her breath back. “You come help me here, she keeps slipping over.”
“But Ma, have you not noticed they only come out when we bring Mara up? I’ve not seen them when I’m up here by myself.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean, eh?”
Paddy looked over at his mother, her once ruddy round cheeks now as grey and sunken as his sister’s, the tension marking deep around her mouth and her eyes. He decided to change tact. “They say we’re only six day’s away from Fremantle. We can take little Mara to a doctor there,” he offered.
“If she lasts that long,” his mother scoffed.
“Oh, Ma! Of course she will!”
“Will she? She’s not had a bite to eat since we were a week out of Portsmouth and if it weren’t for the water I be dripping between her fecking lips she’d’ve died of thirst by now! I tell you, if her chest didn’t keep rising and her eyelids fluttering like that I’d say we’ve been living with a corpse!”
Paddy returned his gaze to the dolphins playing joyfully in the ship’s currents, politely ignoring his mother as she tried to hide her tears. He looked down on his sister’s face, as peaceful as a baby’s, and he imagined he saw her smiling as she watched the dolphins leap by the bow.
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But little Mara O’Malley wasn’t aware of her mother’s tears or her brother’s hand on her shoulder. She wasn’t even aware of the fact her body had been moved from the stuffy confines of the cabin up to the fresh air of the deck.
Mara was lost, leagues-deep in the ocean of her mind in a place nobody could reach her. There she swam, free in the vast seas with no need for food or water or air. She swam with schools of fish, thrilling as she twisted and turned with them in perfect unity, their scales like jewels all around her. She drifted along with giant jellyfish, as elegant and graceful as silk in the breeze. At night, she floated on her back, feeling the gentle rock of the ocean breathing like a giant animal below her as she watched the moon and the stars turn on their ancient paths overhead.
While her mother fretted, she was slowly being subsumed by the sea, her soul gradually forgetting its human casing as she joyfully merged with the ebb and flow of life around her. She no longer remembered the companionship of her sisters, or the playful jokes of her big brother. She forgot the feeling of her mother’s heavy arms hugging her like a bear in the mornings or the excitement she had felt on the prospect of seeing her father again, all the way on the other side of the world. She forgot the chores, forgot all the hard, aching work helping her mother cook and clean, forgot all the hours spent fearing the indiscriminate and arbitrary rod in the classroom under the hawkish Mrs. Feldsmeadow.
No, Mara was free, ecstatically submerged and swallowed into the infinite expanse of the sea in her mind. Only her eyelids flickered and fluttered as she swam, leaping and spinning, with the dolphins as they played in the ship’s wake.
© Molly Cule, December 2008
