An excerpt from Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman

The following excerpt is from the opening pages of The Seal Woman by Beverley Farmer. First published in 1992, it was released in a new edition in 2025.

White worms with lips are grazing in midair, nuzzling their way over the mounds, the boulders. The tide is out. Their white fins drift, veils and webs, gossamer, as if in water. They feed on the corruption. Shore sand, bull kelp, boulders of grey flesh, and nowhere a crab, a fly or a wasp, only the filmy-finned floaters. Over the whole shore, layer on layer of white veiling lifts and bells, flattens and hangs drifting. The boulders are great animals, diminishing slowly, torpid, already porous on the grey sand where soon not even bones will be left.

A flow across the dunes, their skin creeping in wrinkles. Tides of the sand.

Hot and swollen I wake out of an aftersleep into the late morning with a hand on his pubic hair, damp and warm like seaweed, black, stuck to the white flesh in a springy, delicate fuzz. I wake to the sound of footsteps. No one is here, I know it is only the children in the house next door running on the wooden floors before school. This is a strange house, whose? I must try to remember but I am numb all over and blind, as if stung in my sleep and the sound thumps muted beside me, a swan leaving the water, a pelican, slow beats of a paddle.

The surf beach this morning had a fleshy smell in its salt, a faint overripeness of warm fish or, sweeter still, of sweated scallops. At midday it was low tide, the sea flat calm. The rock shelf stood high out of the water, heavy with the brown grape chains of the seaweed: light filled the sandy pits and kelp forests in the pools. Umbrellas flapped at a tilt to the hot sandy wind. Naked children with shiny skins were playing in the shallows. This beach, like a child’s drawing of The Beach, always has a ship or two high on the sea line, a dark hull and smoky funnels, a yacht, a motor boat or windsurfer.

I paddled groping with the mask over the weed forest, my breaths loud, stirring the lazy light into frantic tight white loops. A shoal of silvery fish paused just beyond reach, hanging apart and turning this way and that with a flick, each eye of water gold-ringed, watchful of me. Faint shadows of them moved on the sand in a net of the noon light.

My bow wave washed over channels of rock and weed. Alone in the pools, Oooh-oh, I hooted through the snorkel, oooh-oh, on the note of the lighthouse foghorn until the sea boomed aloud and the rocks echoed. Oooh-oh, and I bobbed up through the rocking sheen and sunspatter into the air under a man who squatted suddenly by my clothes on the rock ledge, Martin, and grinned down. Tugboat Annie, he called. I waved and floated weightless, a sea grape, through the chain of deep pools into the last one before open water, rimmed with a black wall where even then the first waves of the returning tide swilled and spread out in wrinkles.

When I swam back the water was halfway up to my clothes. No one was there.

A thunderstorm last night, and hard rain and yet the heat continues to rise in wafts on this north wind, a breath from a bread oven, sweet, spiced.

One afternoon the smaller of two blond boys in wetsuits dropped on to the sand beside me: ‘You ever had a plate?’ he said.

‘A what?’

‘Plate.’ He opened his palm to show a butterfly, a spider shell, petals of pink plastic and a tooth sticking out.
‘No.’
‘I have to.’
The other boy came over and stood with his legs wide apart.
‘I seen you here,’ he said. ‘The other day.’
‘That’s my brother,’ the little one said. ‘His name’s Wayne.’
‘Mine is Dagmar.’ I squinted up. ‘I come here a lot.’
‘Us too. Do you surf?’
‘Nej.’
The older boy hoisted his surfboard. ‘You live here?’
‘Swanhaven. But mostly Norway.’
‘Norway!’ the little one hooted, and looked up for the other’s approval.
‘What you mean,’ he scoffed, ‘no where? You got to live some where.’
‘Nor-way,’ I said. ‘And Denmark.’
‘Uh?’
‘Countries, Tim. Next to Sweden. Is that right?’
‘Sweden, ja, Scotland, over the North Sea.’
‘So what’s it like? Nor-way?’
‘A bit like here. A bit different.’
‘You got McDonald’s?’
‘Ja. Everywhere. And Wendy’s. 7-11 –’
‘Bonus. You got any kids?’ Tim broke in, and I shook my head. ‘Norway’s got all snow and ice. I seen it on the TV.’
‘Ja, in winter. But now they have summer and for weeks the sun will never set.’
‘I wished it snowed in Swanhaven! I wished the sea freezed!’ ‘Dummy! The sea can’t freeze.’
‘It can,’ I said, watching Tim press the plate into his mouth and poke it with his tongue. ‘The waves freeze, and ships are trapped and icebreakers come, and the whales and dolphins and seals have to have breathing holes.’
‘Why do they stay in?’
‘Shit you’re dumb. They have to.’
‘They do not. Seals don’t.’
‘They are water animals,’ I said, ‘that live on fish. And the sea is still the warmest place.’
‘Is it?’
‘Jeeze. Poor seals.’
Wayne ran his hand through his white tufts. ‘What do they do if the hole gets freezed over?’
‘They chew the edges. Until they lose their teeth, and then they drown.’
Tim’s mouth fell open and he went red.
‘They do not.’ Wayne scowled. A silence fell, one of rebuke, while Tim stared from one to another of us. ‘They do not,’ muttered Wayne, ‘they share,’ and he loped away up the beach, Tim at his back.

Low tide at midmorning, and I move along behind my shadow on the printed sand and on to the fretwork of low rocks studded with limpets – sea ponds and rivers under glass, grey and green glass, fern-fronded tawny forests that sway under reflections of cloud and rock – their dark overhangs, bearded snouts. Children in goggles come and lie sprawled on the surface in the channel beside a hump of rock. One calls to the others that he has found an air cavity in the hump of rock, and soon he dares to dive down and swim into it, coming up gasping. Snorkelling over the weed forest I pass the humped rock and see, diving down, parting the beaded curtain with my hands, sunlight flickering in the weeds at its heart, the bubble of air in its cavern, but I will not swim in. A parrot fish stares. A torn blue and purple tatter on the seabed is a crayfish. I come up close to where the rock shelves into the water, the convergence of the planes of glass above me and below, as if a mirror had opened away from its backing, converging lines of light. I break through, I sit on the dry rough skin of the rock and take off the mask. Hearing, and smell, and taste, all muted underwater, have come alive.

Flippers in the water, a woman sits on the rocks opposite like a mirror image, her wet hair gathered up in a red ribbon, threads of light unravelling her. The tide is heaving up sandy hawsers of the kelp and rolling them under.