The Mermaid's Child (15 page)

“Sir,” I said.

“My desk drawer, left hand side, there's a lump of beeswax. Fetch it and take it round the men.”

I found that I was examining the folds of cloth, the buttoning of his fly. An uneasy feeling. I'd brought it with me: my own cargo of shadows. I looked up at his face.

“Are you listening, Reed?”

“Sir.”

“Make sure you get everyone, mind. Below decks, too.”

The song was growing thicker, more palpable. The sounds hung in the air, soft and entangling like spiders' webs, like the travelling-lines that sweep across your face in autumn, invisible till sun-caught. A memory resurfaced: an intimation of nettle-stings, the smell of vomit and of piss, and the reeling heady joy of recognition. On deck, in the hot sun, the hairs stood up on my arms, on the back of my neck. So close. They were so close.

“And the cargo, sir?” I found myself saying. “What's left of them, I mean?”

He had been turning to go, had lifted a foot to the next rung. He turned back round to look at me.

“They're hardly in a position to desert, are they?” he said.

He didn't follow me to his room, though the back of my neck prickled with apprehension all the way down the corridor. The book still lay open on his desk: a different page. The soldier wasn't there, and in his absence the young woman was consoling herself with the intimate attentions of her maid and a small tabby cat. I dragged open a drawer, found the beeswax. A lump the size and shape of an otter's head. I lifted it out, began warming it in my hands.

I brought the last of the wax to John Doyle. A ball the size of a cob nut. She took it, began rolling it into plugs. She blinked, and her eyelids showed white against her weather-tanned face. She didn't speak. Maybe she thought I'd already taken my share. Or maybe she'd noticed McMichaels nearby, watching.

We went about our tasks in silence, in dumb show. At first, I mugged and gestured along with the rest of them. Someone dropped a deadeye: it landed with a noisy clatter on the deck. I flinched, but no one seemed to notice. I worked briskly, moving through the ritual patterns of my tasks, my eyes turning at every chance towards the water, straining to catch a glimpse of something. Then all at once a tailfin broke the surface of the ocean, and across the ship a sudden cry went up. And the only one who heard it was me.

I heard, but was no longer listening, and no longer had to pretend my ears were stopped. The mermaids' song had
wrapped itself around me, thickening, taking form. The ship's noises began to fade. I watched everything through a veil. The music was a paleness and a softness in the air, and I could swim through it, wrap myself up in it, be held and lifted and carried along and never have to think or work or worry again. My mother. I would be with my mother.

They were slipping through the water, diving, breaking the surface. Moving through the ocean like currents, streams. Their tails were translucent; some green, some grey-blue; here and there was a touch of luminosity, a glimpse of gracefully articulated spine. Eyes dark as seals' eyes, they were turning to me, calling; one raised a pale arm in a flash before rolling, slipping down through the bright water and away. Then another curl of foam, a splash of tail fin, a curve of diving back. Dozens of them. Scores. I clambered up onto the railing, raised my arm towards them, called:

“I'm coming! Wait for me!”

But was slammed down onto the boards, the breath knocked out of me. There was weight on my back, legs, arms. My nose was pushed askew, my eyes watering, my cheek pressed hard against wood. I heard shouting. And still above it and beyond and all around me, stronger, thicker, was the mermaids' song. As I writhed and twisted under the sailors' weight, I thought I could hear the battering of delicate cold hands against the keel. They were calling for me, coming for me, demanding that I join them.

“Let me go!” I shouted. “Let me go!”

I was hauled up and held, thrashing like a fish. Suddenly I found myself face to face with McMichaels, standing between me and what I'd crossed half the world to find. I didn't think twice about it. I heaved myself forward and slammed my forehead into his nose.

He staggered back, blinking, brought his hand up to his face. There was blood on his lip.

He hit me. A crack to the jaw as if the bone had burst open. My head flew back; I staggered and was held. I blinked, slid my tongue round my teeth, tasted blood. I looked up at him. His eyes were thin. It was inevitable now, I remember thinking. I'd given him his excuse.

I almost welcomed it. It would simplify things.

Then his fist landed on the side of my head, and everything collapsed into darkness.

I'd been dreaming, swimming, weightlessly twisting through the green water. My mother was swimming there beside me, translucent, just out-of-sight, and when I turned my head just gone. Then light crashed onto me like breaking glass. I peered up, squinting. A dark shadow against the sun.

“John?”

She crouched down beside me, began helping me to my feet. There were shackles round my wrists and ankles. Plenty of them to be had on board the
Sally Ann
. They were cold and heavy and cut into the skin.

“I'm sorry—” she said.

“It's all right, I'm fine.” This came as something of a surprise. My jaw ached, I was very thirsty, and there was a sting and tightness at my temple where the blood had dried, but I was, all things considered, fine.

She led me into the sunshine. The wind was buffeting the ship a little, like a bully. Taking us away. A sharp sun overhead. Sharp as a needle.

“I'm sorry,” she said again.

I shambled forward, chains clattering.

“S'all right,” I said. “It's all right.” I was thinking, I'll find them again. Now that I've seen them, and they've called out to me, it's only a matter of time before I find them again.

We moved slowly, awkwardly, John's arm under mine, supporting me. There was a cluster of men, a crowd on deck. I looked at them, vaguely puzzled. A few faces turned to look at us. We came up towards them. I turned to John, asked:

“What's going on? What are they waiting for?”

“I'm sorry.”

McMichaels was there. And the whole crew. Even the other watches, those who should have been below, who should have been sleeping. Everyone. Every last man jack of them.

I stopped dead. I straightened up, looked round at John. She held my gaze a moment, then looked away. She swallowed. Tell-tale, of course, the smoothness of her throat; no roll of Adam's apple, no grey stipple of growth on her tanned flesh. I wanted, suddenly, to kiss her there, where her skin dipped over her collarbone and caught the light.

“I'm sorry,” she murmured.

I looked away from her, looked round. McMichaels' eyes were as thin as the wind. From his hand, twitching like the tail of an excited cat, hung the lash.

“Tie him, Doyle.”

“Sir—”

“Have you got a problem with that, Doyle?”

A pause.

“No, sir.”

“Then tie him.”

John Doyle released my shackles, brought my hands around the mast. With my cheek pressed up against the wood, I couldn't see her, but I sensed the movement of her hands, the deliberate precision of her fingers. I felt the rope loop and
twist and tug itself tight. A Carrick bend. Workmanlike. Unshiftable. A final twist, a tug, and the knot was finished. A breath. She came round the mast. I looked up at her, the skin tingling down my back, jaw clenched tight.

“John?” I managed.

Nothing.

“John?”

She looked at me, her head bent, her face in shadow.

“I loved you,” I hissed at her, and realized that it was true.

She reached out, took hold of my shirt and tugged at it, as if straightening me against the mast. Her face near me, turned away from the assembled crew, I felt the words on my skin as she breathed them.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

Then she turned away.

“Take the lash,” I heard McMichaels say.

“It's not my job,” John said.

“Nevertheless,” McMichaels said, “take the lash.”

The flogging was worse than the one Uncle George had given me. It wiped away those scars as if they'd never been.

Occasionally, even now, I get a twinge from a spot between my shoulderblades where the nerves were flayed and will never, it seems, quite recover. As John Doyle lifted the lash and whipped it across my back, peeling away linen and skin, it seemed that I was being born again, this time through my own pain. I bit at my lips and tongue to stop myself from screaming, as if by this slight self-inflicted discomfort I could control the agony of the scourge. I passed out before she'd finished, my mouth full of blood, my mind dissolving into black, but I knew in that moment of dissolution, with
a miraculous clarity like nothing else but the certainty that sometimes comes to me in dreams, that the person that I had been was gone forever, had now been peeled entirely away. If I was to live, I would need to grow a new skin, a thicker one.

Night. The steady pitch and roll of the ship, the creak of timbers. A pallet beneath me: the prickle of horsehair on my cheek. The smell of smoke and men. I lifted my head; my back screamed with pain, a lesser ache throbbed through jaw and temple. I lowered my cheek down again onto the mattress, exhaled. A slow burn down my whole back, from nape to coccyx. Someone hunkered down at my side.

“Malin?”

Hands were cupped round my head; it was lifted, turned. The movement made my flesh sing out at me again. I sucked in a breath. There was something cold and hard against my lips. I flinched.

“It's all right.”

Again, the cold hard rim against my lips, and something wet in my mouth, burning broken lips and swollen tongue: automatically I swallowed. The bottle was tilted again and I drank, the fierce liquid making my eyes water, my nose prickle. My head was gently lowered back down upon the mattress. I closed my eyes. Everything had gone slightly fuzzy, slightly soft. The burning of my flayed skin seemed just a little further away.

She said it softly, quickly, so that I couldn't even make the words register before the pain came. “
Be brave
,” she said.

She poured something onto me, over the whole open wound of my back. Cold at first, and then stinging, and then
burning worse than before. I gasped, in too much pain even to protest.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry. It'll help you heal.”

And then the drink took over, and the pain, and blackness covered me again.

When I was able to move about again, I was assigned to light duties, shuffling round the deck on my knees with a bucket and brush, or hunching over bits of old rope, splicing them or unsplicing them according to instructions. It was all I was fit for. The scabbing was still so tight across my shoulders that it made climbing an impossible agony: it made any movement at all an act of will, of sheer bloodymindedness. But I was determined. I had been beaten, but I would not, I told myself, be crushed. And I was healing, day by day. I would live. John's ministrations had seen to that.

She had poured salt water over the raw wounds, and when they began to heal, gently stroked on sharp-smelling ointment to give the skin some suppleness, to try to ensure my future mobility. She had made me drink rum and water, and helped me swallow crumbs of biscuit, and suck on limes, and had kept death from me, but every moment was an agony to add to the pain of my wounds. To be touched by those hands again, so tenderly. To feel their strength and skill again. I could not speak a word. I could not find a single word to say. And beyond the slight instructions of her nursing, neither could she. The one time I had met her eyes, as she helped me raise myself to my feet for the first time since my thrashing, there had been tears brimming there, ready to spill, and I had looked away, had watched instead my toes spread on the
boards as my feet took my weight. A drop, warm and wet, had landed on the knuckle of my second toe, and I still could not find a word to say. The clumsiness of a swollen tongue, of lips bitten to ribbons. My misery was overwhelming, incommunicable. It left me mute.

At night I would lie awake, face down on a pallet, the hammocks swinging row after row above. Parched with exhaustion, I would rise and climb the steps to the deck, breathe cool night air, sense its moisture on my skin. I would watch the moonlight on the waves. Sometimes sleep would descend on me unexpectedly, and I would wake, cold and shivering, hunched against the cathead or the rails. The other watches must have got used to me trespassing on their time, but no one spoke to me, no one came near. A superstitious inkling, perhaps, that my bad luck might be catching.

Stooping over my work day after day in total silence, my eyes heavy with fatigue, the only pleasure I took was in the smudged and fevered memory of the mermaids. The elegant community of their shoal swam past my vision, its movement instinctively synchronous as starlings' flight. I could almost hear the keening of their voices, the faint clamour of their fine cool hands beating at the keel. I had been recognized. I was wanted. I belonged with them.

The voyage could have gone on forever. I was ignorant of the distance to be travelled, of the speed we were making, and of signs that we were nearing land. Time itself had unravelled, the days and nights shredded by fatigue and sudden sleep into a perpetual moment, a patch of hours. Wrapped up in my misery, I noticed nothing. My tasks were completed mechanically, unthinkingly. I did not, could not allow myself to think.

Then, one morning when the air was still cool and I had already settled myself down to some repair, there was a cry
from above. I glanced up, instinctively looking for someone in difficulties aloft, and the movement sent a ripple of pain down my back. There was no one up there, but nearby a white gull was gliding along on the same wind as us, wings spread, steady as a kite on a string. The bird gave another cry, pushed twice against the air current and came to rest upon the rigging. I watched it settle itself, watched its shit fall and hit the deck, watched a man walking towards me from the bows. One of the topmen. Davies, his name was. Slowing as he approached me. Coming to a halt. He crouched down to speak to me.