Skins by Sarah Hay Page A

what?’
    â€˜We walk. It ain’t that far.’
    â€˜Thistle Cove took three days sailing.’
    â€˜Be quicker, us walking.’ He poked his stick towards the coast. ‘Look there, we just follow the coast. Easy, can’t get lost.’
    Jem followed Manning’s gaze.
    â€˜Yeah.’ He ran his fingers over his mouth, sighed and then said: ‘We’ll need a gun.’
    â€˜Of course and we’ll get it, even if we have to steal it.’
    Manning stood up and rubbed his hands together to get rid of the little loose stones that stuck to his palms.
    â€˜When?’
    â€˜Come on, we’ll go see Anderson.’
    Jem frowned. ‘Now?’
    But Manning was already clambering down the rock.

January 1886
    I see their faces at night. They open their mouths like beached fish but I can’t hear what they’re saying. When Mother died she looked like a blowfish. The doctor peeled her fingers from the bottle and took the snuffbox out of her lap. They lifted her onto the bed but it was too late for they couldn’t straighten her legs.
    Our little brother William, whose face is framed by curls like a dirt-streaked angel, has eyes bright with fever and knowing. I want him to stay but he passes too quickly. There is Charlie who was twenty when they speared him while he looked after someone else’s sheep. They all died not long after you left. Father wouldn’t let me go to their funerals because of what had happened. Then he died too.
    Much later Jem took a black woman and they had a child. It was many years before Jem forgot. And then one day he came to my house. He never said much and there was the sweet smell of liquor that followed him. Sometimes he didn’t have any money. Then he began to work for my husband who had land and sheep at Tackalarup. But George has sold them now and Jem is buried on the side of the hill that faces away from the sea.
    Middle Island 1835, Dorothea Newell
    Dorothea closed her eyes and turned her head away from the smoke. When her gaze returned to the fire, the smoke had lifted and in the embers she saw a house with walls of grey stone and windows that glowed and inside it was painfully blue with heat. She had been watching Anderson threaten Manning and her brother. Something about stolen money: she couldn’t quite hear what was being said. It didn’t surprise her. They would often find Jem where there was trouble. It was the other reason her father had sent him away to Hampshire when he was eight years of age. She did worry for him but it was a feeling she could easily reason herself out of. Particularly now that he was always with that James Manning. Manning made her uneasy for it was as though there was something that seethed beneath his skin, waiting to burst out.

    Jansen was on the other side of the fire and the flames looked as though they were lapping his chin. He ripped chunks of meat from a bone with his teeth. When he turned to talk to the man beside him, his mouth glistened with fat. She decided that they ate better on the island than they had ever done at home.
    The noise of the black women broke into her thoughts. Their voices rising and falling as they moved about in front of their fire. She never looked directly at their nakedness but under the cover of darkness her eyes were drawn to them. Their skin shone in the flickering light and their empty breasts swung unfettered. Strands of shells were wrapped in layers around their necks. Hanging from Dinah’s necklace was a bone like a small jawbone which glowed against her skin.
    She realised it was only Dinah and Sal who were singing. Mooney sat quietly to one side. The other two were different. They shaved their hair and their features were finer. Mooney’s face was broader, her nose and lips more pronounced, and instead of shells she wore an amulet of skin and hair. Their scars were different too. Mooney’s were symmetrical lines connecting her breasts. The