‘Are you hurt?’ one of the men shouted.
The woman was trying to manoeuvre herself out of the tipped cabin, but she seemed to have lost her strength.
‘I’m Monty, this is my brother Tom. What’s your name?’ the same man shouted, and Magnús took a second to register that the two men looked near identical.
Still the woman didn’t answer, only grunting and heaving, trying to right herself.
‘She doesn’t understand,’ Tom told his brother, his day’s fishing now completely forgotten, impossible in this squall anyway.
Magnús found his voice, if not his sense, and stepped right up to the cabin, his hand stretched out to the woman. ‘Talar þú íslensku?’ he heard himself shout over the winds.
The woman blinked into his face.
‘What?’ She continued with her struggle, only now her hand was in his. He steadied her.
‘I thought you might be Icelandic,’ he shouted back, feeling stupid and not sure why. She was so fair and so tall and somehow familiar. He’d simply assumed.
‘Pull me up,’ she said, her voice salty and dry and followed by a coughing fit that made the Bickleigh brothers exchange worried looks.
‘She’s sick,’ they both said.
Someone was now behind Magnús holding out blankets.
‘Call for Morrison,’ Monty shouted with all his lungs to Finan who stood on the wall outside his pub with hands cupped over his ears. The landlord caught the words and dashed inside.
With one heaving movement Magnús helped the woman out of the boat.
The fall was not at all dignified, but very much in keeping with the morning’s messy scramble.
‘Uft!’ As the woman fell down on him, all the air was forced from Magnús’s lungs. The back of his skull knocked against the pebbles but he’d tensed his body to catch her safely and he was surprised to find it only hurt a little.
She’d screamed as she fell, and the sound had penetrated his core, making his empty stomach somehow throb. The weight of her upon him set his heart beating again after his bloodless race over the shore thinking someone was drowned. They both breathed heavily as the woman pulled herself off his body, blinking wildly.
Mermaid, he thought, somewhere dimly at the back of his head.She’s a mermaid. Then the notion disappeared as Mrs Crocombe came into focus, throwing a blanket around the woman’s shoulders.
‘Stop!’ Magnús called, as the woman shakily clutched at the blankets. ‘Take that off first,’ he pointed to her great coat. ‘Get out of the wet things, right away.’
The sodden woman nodded, her whole body now trembling, and her face even paler than before, all the pink from the fall now washed from her cheeks.
‘Let me?’ he said in a quieter voice, now up on his feet and leaning closer to her, instinctively knowing she didn’t want any more shouting and yelling.
Passively, she nodded, looking like she might shrink away entirely. Her eyes darted around the beach at all the faces and then up at the crowd on the sea wall. She seemed afraid.
When she looked right at him as he pushed the great coat off her shoulders, Magnús felt himself weaken as though absorbing all of her exhaustion into his own body.
Her eyes were heavy-lidded and irises icy blue, truly like an Icelander. She was having difficulty keeping them open.
Why had she been at sea in these high winds? It was miraculous she’d managed to put in at the harbour at all. Perhaps she’d been washed ashore while she slept? Magnús watched as the woman pulled her dripping jumper up over her head and let it fall on the shore.
Mrs Crocombe – who was tiny in comparison to this woman – immediately wrapped her tightly in blankets and grabbed the wet clothes. She was shivering like a person in hypothermic shock and urgently needed to get warm.
‘A hot bath will help her,’ Magnús instructed nobody in particular, and the woman’s eyes snapped to his once more, her expression dazed and unreadable. Was it a look of curiosity? He didn’t have time to learn more; she was suddenly whisked off up the shore by the Bickleigh brothers who, without warning, had picked her up off her feet and were carrying her away like a great haul caught in their nets, making it look effortless and as though they netted mermaids every day of the week.
Magnús followed in their wake, unsure what to do now and feeling like he was no longer required. He was, after all, a failed bookseller, not a doctor.
Jowan and his little beige dog were waiting for the brothers on the old lifeboat ramp, long since decommissioned, and they placed the woman onto Jowan’s wooden sled where she sat stiff and motionless before they hauled her up the cobbled street and out of view.
Mrs Crocombe placed a hand on Magnús’s arm. ‘She’ll be all right now,’ she told him with all the certainty of a soothsayer.
