Selkie

I lean against a post as a sudden wave of nausea and weakness tells me I'm pregnant. Again. For the seventh time. At least I'm not barefoot, well, not in winter anyway.

Old wives will tell you that feeding your own child is a sure guarantee against further pregnancy for as long as you keep it up. It seems to work for every other woman on this Godforsaken Scottish island, but not me. (I assume it's a Scottish island, it could just as well be Irish. All I know is everyone speaks Gaelic, which took me forever to learn. My husband had to teach me so the first phrases I learned to understand loosely translate as 'Come here, gorgeous' and 'Go and make breakfast').

Of course, I'm different in other ways. All my children are still alive. I never get sick. I don't look a day older or a pound heavier than when I first came to the island. That was approximately seven years ago but my kind don't age like mortals do. Exactly what year it is I have no idea. No one on the island is literate apart from the priest and no one would understand our modern idea of a calendar. The year follows the festivals and harvests. My husband tells me Jamie is King, which if I remember my history right means that could be any one of seven kings spread over at least three hundred years.

It doesn't matter to me. Whoever is King my lot is the same, spinning, weaving, cooking, cleaning, washing clothes in the burn (which is freezing) raising six children, gathering kelp and shellfish, gossiping with the other wives and every night, in the darkness, being passionately ravished.

My husband Kenneth devotes fierce, lengthy efforts to this. There is no such thing as a quickie here or an unsatisfied woman. Sex is the greatest pleasure any poor crofters can find in this time and place and they dedicate a lot of care and effort to it, but even so I think Kenneth is extreme. It's almost frightening to be the object of such desire and more so that he can play me like a violin. Kenneth has to put his hand over my mouth a lot of the time to stop me waking the children – turns out I'm a screamer. Afterwards of course I worry about just how many more children I can cope with before my head explodes!

It would be no use talking to Kenneth about it. It's not that he would be unsympathetic but he literally wouldn't understand. Children are not only a joy in themselves, in a time where there are few others to be had, they are also the only prop or guarantee of old age.

Explaining to anyone, male or female in these times, why you might not want more children would be like, oh, I don't know, explaining to 21st century people why you think the innocent should be executed or why you should burn your house down every time it rains. It would be as illogical to my fellow islanders as that!

I did try once. Everyone was very patient and gentle with my nonsense. They expect the faery folk to be strange and no one holds it against me. I'm pretty sure that was the night I got knocked up for the fourth time though, which shows how much Kenneth failed to take it on board.

Oh,yes, the faery folk. You see, I am, I suppose, a selkie, also called silkie or roane. In Scottish, Irish and Scandinavian legends of the sort I used to study back when I was a comfortable academic living in 21st century America, selkies are seals who come ashore to shed their skins whereupon they become beautiful maidens, fair beyond the lot of mortals, who dance on the strand for a night before returning to the water.

Eight years ago - or centuries in the future- when I was Professor Ronald Lockley, Chair of Comparative Anthropology at the University of -----. I was on a research trip to the Hebrides – what's that? Yes, I was a man, though sometimes I find it hard to believe. Try being a wife and then bearing and raising six children in a society rigidly divided by gender roles and see how masculine you feel at the end of it.

The trip was to gather oral traditions, to chart the change and development of old folk beliefs in modern society. It was purely by chance that I went for a walk on the deserted beaches of that tiny island one evening and saw the seal maidens dance. It was then that I took a selkie's skin from where it was hidden, behind rocks, far from the firelight and slipped it on.

Then I knew the magic of the sea. As a seal I explored reefs and coves and the hidden grottoes of the ocean. As a faery seal I saw things no words can describe. The electric feel of the brine around me was pure ecstasy. I don't know how many months or years I roamed the seas before a curious urge drew me to go ashore to dance, on an island which I later found wasn't even in my own time. It turns out the realm of faerie touches the human world at different points in time as well as space. None of the legends warned me of that!

When I shed my skin, the human form I returned to was not the one I had left. I was female, beautiful – and so distracted I didn't even notice a poor fisherman slipping through the darkness to take my skin.

I really should have thought of this. In all the legends I'd studied, if a human could take a selkie's skin she was his, for as long as it was kept from her – my own curiosity had led me to take a different route on that night I was in the fisherman's position but my husband to be had other ideas.

I looked round when I felt his hand take me by the wrist.

'Tá tú níos áille ná réaltaí nó gealach. Bí mianach, cailín séala. Bí bhean mo theach. An bposfaidh tú mé!'

'Um, what?'

I later found out that means 'You are more beautiful than the moon and stars. Be mine, seal girl. Be lady of my home. Marry me.' He started out romantic and he still is.

At the time I didn't know that, of course. I couldn't understand the words but the look in his eyes gave me a fairly good idea of what he was thinking even though I'd never seen a look like that directed at me before. I was overwhelmed. I hadn't had the chance to even begin to come to terms with being female and, apparently, a good forty years younger than before and this tall, dark young man, no older than one of my students, was gazing at me like he'd just seen the sun for the first time and I was it.

'Please,there's been a mistake. I'm not – wait, where are you taking me? No, put me down. Hey, seriously, stop. I'm a man! I'm too old for you! Can't you speak English? I – wait, pogue mahone? Doesn't that mean kiss mflll!? Mmmm! Oh, oh well, if you must...Oh! Don't ...stop...don't stop....ohhhhhh!”

He was mad with desire for me and only waited until he had taken me to his two room hut to demonstrate it. So what was I doing during this um, demonstration, you ask?

Whatever he wanted. The possession of my skin doesn't just stop me going back to the water. It makes him the centre of my Universe. I think it has the same effect on him in reverse. So is what we have true love? Magic? Obsession? A bit of all three I think. Next morning a hasty baptism (I'm now Kirsty, if you were wondering, or Bean Cionnadh, Kenneth's woman, in the third person) followed by a hasty wedding bound us together for life.

The next day one of the neighbours kindly brought in a distaff and spindle and I began to find out exactly what I was in for. Clothes can't be bought here. Thread can't be bought here. Cloth can't be bought here. So what do women do? Well, we start with a fleece, wash it, comb it, card it, spin it into thread, weave it into cloth and sew it into clothes and blankets. No help, no shortcuts, no escape. Kenneth's mother brought me a dress and a shift to go under it. Everything else I've worn since then I had to make myself.

Married life is not like it is in the 21st century. Apart from all my domestic responsibilities, which I can't complain about because Kenneth spends all his waking hours either working his little patch of land or risking his life on the freezing seas just to feed us, it turns out I'm a community resource. No, not like that. What I mean is that if any woman gets sick I can literally be lent to the household to do the woman's work of making sure everyone is warm, clothed and fed.

Community is everything here. Refusing would be the equivalent of accidentally running someone over in your car and then reversing over them a few times to make sure they're too dead to report you. Any of our neighbours would do the same for us, so the principle of it is fair enough, the problem is that this occasionally means looking after the household of a Mac an Diabhal like Feargus MacCodrum.

To understand what's wrong with that dirty omadan you need to know more about how things work on the island. You may have gathered that gender roles are traditional here, but they aren't as uneven as they look on the surface. Everyone knows the man is the head of the household and any woman who challenges that publicly is either a shrew or a flibbertigibbet too young to know better. Everyone also knows that any man who doesn't talk to his wife and make damn sure she agrees with every word before he starts giving orders is either an idiot or a tyrant. Feargus is both.

I'm pretty sure the reason his poor wife is sick was because he'd been beating her. You don't get a black eye like that walking into the flimsy pile of rubbish that he thinks will do for a door, the lazy sacshrathair that he is, so I don't grudge helping her out or seeing that her children get as good a breakfast as possible out of what that fireside-sitter provides, even though it takes time I could be using to gather shellfish (limpets are tricky; you have to sneak up on them) or weave more good cloth. No, it's feeding Feargus himself that grates on me.

Long after he should be out and working he sits by the fire, watching my every move just a little too closely, not even drawing back to a decent distance when I bend over the pot to ladle out porridge. So I did something my friend Bean Seamus (transl: Seamus's Missus) taught me. I prepared him a bowl of porridge all of his own and over salted it to the point of being truly awful. The minute he tasted it I knew he wanted to hit me and couldn't. Kenneth would drag him out in front of the whole village and beat him bloody if he so much as dared to lay a finger on me. Complaining would do him no good. I was doing him a favour. Community or not, no one would ever help him again if he was that ungrateful. All he could do was eat the horrid mess or go hungry. I quietly spread the word to any other woman he might borrow and now every time he puts his wife out of action the same thing happens. Who knows, he may actually learn one day.

Revenge isn't sweet, it's salty.

Life isn't all work though. Every so often we have a ceilidh. In the 21st cntury that means a dance. We have those too, but here a ceilidh is for stories, songs, poems and tall tales, the last being called 'a lee', with prizes for best in category. If I was still a professor I'd have gathered enough information for at least two theses, just by sitting still and listening carefully, which is what I prefer. From time to time I do get roped into things though. The first time I was forced to sing I gave them an improvised Gaelic version of 'Bat Out of Hell'. Suffice to say everyone gave me very funny looks and it didn't catch on.

The second time I couldn't think of a thing so I told them all the tale of how I came here, how I'm a male professor from the future and what the future is like. It turns out my neighbours may believe in trows, fair folk and selkies but not in Professors of Comparative Anthropology. You guessed it – I won the prize for best lee at the ceilidh!

Of course I have one possible get-out. All the legends I've studied end the same way. The selkie bride finds her skin, no matter how well concealed and returns to the sea, leaving her bereft husband and children to carry on as best they can.

I sometimes see the neighbours look at us, in worry and pity, as they await the inevitable and try to work out if years of bliss are worth a lifetime of sorrow.

They can look all they want. What no one knows is that I found the skin years ago. I found it and I sat for an hour and I looked at it.

I looked at my chance to go back to the seas, maybe to be a man again, my chance to go back to the 21st century. To be warm at the flick of a switch instead of gathering peats all the time and huddling over a smoky fire through a northern winter. To have food that isn't porridge, fish, milk, cheese or oatcakes, food that I don't have to make from scratch and cook over an open fire. To wear clothes I haven't had to make myself. To have television and books, the internet, electric lights, real beds. To not have to work from can see to can't see. To not be pregnant all the time. To be a free citizen of a modern democracy, not a rightless, helpless strand wife dancing attendance on her husband and children.

But I wouldn't be loved. I wouldn't be loved. So I cut the skin up and turned it into mittens for my children. I'm going nowhere!