The Mermaid's Child (26 page)

Their dust cloud slipped over me, veiled the sun. A ghostly bag-of-bones horse, his head hanging, his feet barely lifted, was shambling along the dune corridor. His harness shivered and clinked with brasses. Cracked and dusty tack looped back towards the caravan, where glimpses of gold paint caught the light through a film of grime.
Aldobrandi's Circus of Delights
. In the dark mouth of the canopy a hunched figure was grasping the reins and squinting straight ahead though the dust. He wouldn't see me. He would pass right in front of me, not two yards distant.

I lifted my head. Sand fell away from my cheek, poured from my hair. I opened my mouth to call to them, but all that came out was a faint whistling sound, like the wind stirring dry grasses. The first caravan passed by, grew vague in the dust of its passing.

Another followed behind, the horse ghost-pale with dust,
her head hanging even lower, eyes half-closed, nostrils caked. Wading through the sand, dragging the caravan behind her, its wheels deep and slow, its old red paint glowing faintly through the caking grey. The reins looped back to another figure sitting hunched in its shadowed canopy.

And all that would come from my mouth was a sound like an old man's breath, like the stirring of leaves in a dried-up pool, and no one stilled the horses, no one slid from their seat and came running stumbling through the sand towards me.

The second caravan had passed. Before my face, my breath stirred the dust-fogged air into whorls and eddies. The acrobats, the dancing girls, the mermaid I'd called mother, slipping through my fingers like the colours of a dream, like sand.

The third caravan was passing now.

I heaved my head up from the ground. I stretched out an arm, yellow-grey in the dim light, ingrained with dust. I cried out to them.

And could not even hear myself. No one stopped, and no one turned my way, and the final caravan was already moving past me. Hunched in their dark canopies, squinting out ahead, the drivers sat contained, oblivious. My hand fell, I slumped forward and lay still, my mouth open, breathing dust.

I would die here. I'd crossed half the world to die here. If I'd had the strength left, I would have laughed.

What a place for a mermaid's child to die.

And then I felt something tickling my cheek. I wasn't even dead yet and the first bluebottle had already come to lay her eggs on me. I tried to brush it away, but found I could no longer lift the weight of my hand. That there should be flies out there. Crossing arid leagues to find each new oasis of flesh. I would have shuddered at the notion of them, of their maggots nosing blindly through my body, if there had been any
strength left in me to shudder. I would have heaved, if there had been anything left inside me but the sand.

But then something hot and rough and faintly damp was run across my skin. A puff of air flushed across my cheek, blowing away dust, smelling warm and sweet and slightly rank. I opened my eyes again, looked up.

Something blinked back at me: long lashes swept over eyes as brown and soft as peatwater. Something moved in closer, breathed again, gathering up my scent. The sand was blown away in gusts. Whiskers brushed against my cheek, tickling me again. Not a blowfly, then: a camel.

And then I heard it. A shout from up ahead. Faint, husky, muffled by the dust cloud and the buzzing in my head, but nonetheless a shout.

“Delilah!” it sounded like. Then, after a moment, “That bloody animal.” My heart contracted. Someone had seen the camel stop, and now they would have to stop too: they would come back for her. And when they did, they would see me. The acrobats, the dancing girls: they would come streaming from the caravans, cluster round me, lift me up and carry me away. I'd slipped inside the circle. I'd come home.

“What is it?” a second voice was calling.

“It's Delilah. Somethin's spooked her.”

Wordless croons and calls, the jingling harnesses falling silent. Once stilled, the horses didn't have the strength left to stamp and blow, to shake their heads.

Someone was speaking, his voice growing clearer, closer: he was moving back along the train of caravans, coming for the camel, coming towards me. I heard the sigh of his footsteps through the sand.

“I told you to tie her to the tailgate.”

A woman's voice this time: “She don't like it.”

“Can't you keep her alongside then, and keep a friggin' eye on her? This is the last thing we need—”

I sensed the camel lift her head to watch him as he grew close. I heard everything as though through a blanket. I felt my heart begin to flutter faster, higher, as if it were a blackbird caught inside my ribcage. I could not catch a breath.

“She ain't been herself since Sarah died,” this was the woman's voice again, calling out after him.

“None of us have.” He said this in an undertone, hissing. His voice changed in pitch as he grew closer, as he spoke first to himself, then to the animal.

“C'mon old girl,” he crooned, “c'mon now.”

Soon he would glance down and see me, splayed out like tanning leather on the ground. Soon I would be scooped up into his arms and carried, streaming sand, back towards the caravans.

“C'mon old darling, let's be having you,” he was saying, his shadow falling across me as he reached out to take her bridle. “What is it, honeybee, what is it?”

And then a pause. I felt the shadow slip over me, felt the movement above as he leaned in closer to look down. I would have smiled, a halved, profile smile, if I hadn't been choking on feathers, suffocated by the beating wings inside my chest.

He called out, “There's a
body
—”

And then it hit me. He was right. I couldn't speak, I couldn't move. I was a body, just a body, waiting for the flies. I wondered when it was that I'd died. It seemed strange not to have noticed it happening.

“What do you mean, a body?” the woman called.

“That's what's spooking her.” I felt the shadow move across me again as he leaned over to catch hold of the camel's bridle.
“Must've given her a fright, that's all. Don't you worry old girl. C'mon, let's go.”

I felt my eyelid flicker.

“Ach
shite
.”

“What is it Bill?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” He was dragging on the camel's halter, slipping, kicking up dust. I could feel her feet shifting and stumbling on the sand near me: he was turning her too abruptly, forcing her round. She was complaining, yawling and growling in the back of her throat.

“What do you mean, nothing?” The woman's voice was getting closer now.

“It's a body, just a body, that's all,” he said, speaking too quickly. “It's all covered in sand, you can't see it till you're up close, she must've nearly trod on it and given herself a fright. You come across them sometimes out here, dried out like kippers. It's prob'ly a hundred years old.”

There was a slight movement in the sand as the woman approached.

“Don't look, Marguerite, you'll only upset yourself.”

He was right. I was dead a hundred years, I was parched to leather. The dark open mouths crowded round me, the wailing filled my head like pain or darkness, and I was dizzy now, perched up high and vertiginous: at any moment I would fall, slip between their lips and down into the black, and there would be no river-crossing, no ferryboat, no father there to meet me, just falling, darkness, then black sand drifting, and the sound of high voices wailing, each alone.

There was movement and a shadow passed over my face: someone was crouching down by my side, paired fingertips were pressed into my throat. A moment passed. The fluttering
in my ribcage subsided and I watched, vaguely amazed, as a breath stirred the sand before my face. The fingers were instantly lifted from my throat, and as if from the back of a cave, I heard the woman—Marguerite—call out:

“Andre, c'mon over here, give us a hand.”

No other word was said. The dull thud of feet, then a hand gripping my shoulder. I was rolled over to lie on my back. Above, the dust was like dirty muslin across the sun. I blinked once, slow and sore. A dark figure was leaning over me, another standing a little way off, a third just crouching down beside me. A hand was stretched out to wipe the sand from off my cheek.

“Jesus, would you look—” Marguerite said.

A moment's pause.

“Is there any space in yours?”

Hands were slid under the crooks of my knees and under my shoulders. I was lifted up and carried. There were no clustering dancing girls, no acrobats, just three dusty figures with kerchiefs tied across their faces. I felt the warm softness of the woman's body as she carried me; I could feel the regular beat of her heart against me, could smell her sweat. She climbed some steps, turned to move through a narrow gap, and then there was darkness; gentle, domestic darkness; and I was laid down on something soft. I caught the smell of wool, felt its fibres against my cheek.

I could see nothing. The dark swam with chromatic flares, with amoebic plaques of blue and green. I was dimly aware of voices, of shifts in tone and distance. Then there was a rolling sway of movement, and I heard the first faint jingle of shaken tack.

Someone was talking to me, dripping water into my mouth, and my whole body was caught up in that, in the
drip-drip-drip of water between my lips, the moisture spreading out across my tongue, the softening of lip and tongue and gum, the sense of wet. And in the relief at being borne along, at being moved, at no longer having to drag myself through every step.

And then, a little later, something was dropped stinging into my eyes, and I was blinking, and streams of tears I had not cried were running over my cheeks, and a cloth was passed across my skin, wiping them away. The stinging subsided, and my eyes felt cool and moist.

I wasn't conscious of the passing time. I became gradually aware of changes, of different shapes and bulks beside me in the darkness, of the different weights and deftnesses of the hands that wiped my face, that dripped the water between my lips. Usually, it was the woman, Marguerite, her shape soft and vague in the unlit caravan, her voice rich and soothing, like toffee. Sometimes I'd be aware of the jingle of tack and the clop of hoofs; sometimes I'd surface on silence, hold my breath until I caught the sound of another breath beside me in the dark. Sometimes I heard a violin. Once I thought I heard the creak of ships' timbers, the slap of waves, but I might have been dreaming. I was dreaming all the time, or remembering, or imagining: a warm slate ferrystep against the back of my thigh, swimming with my mother in the fellside pool, rhubarb bubbling on the stove and the view up my grandmother's sooty nostrils.

And with that, I found myself speaking out loud into the darkness, the words coming thick and ugly.

“Where's the mermaid?” I asked.

“What's that, love?” The woman's voice, dulled with sleep. Marguerite.

“The mermaid, can I see her?”

“We don't have a mermaid, love.”

“No—you have—I remember.”

“We haven't had one for years,” she said. “The last one went a long time ago.”

I couldn't think what to say.

“They never last long,” she added.

“She died?”

“They always die.”

And it was then that I first noticed I was shivering.

There followed a time when I was conscious of no more than the sweatsoaked blankets tangling round me and the bone-shaking shiver that knocked my teeth together, made me huddle up small and clutch the bedclothes close. And then I'd be hot, a desperate flush of heat, and I'd be kicking the covers away, fighting off the hands that tried to pull them straight back over me. And every bone, every joint, every muscle ached and burned. And then after that, there was just feebleness, and acquiescence, and dumb, heart-eating grief.

I'd seen her, painting her nails in the moonlight. I'd heard her sing. And the moment that I'd clambered out from underneath the caravan into a pool of moonlight and the sight of her and the sound of her song, that was the moment when my father's stories had rung true, when my mother, the mermaid, had seemed for the first time possible, and I no longer had to believe in that sugared smutty word my grandmother had used. I'd stood in the gloom of Hope Street, looking out over Sailortown, and seen the
Sally Ann
round the bend in the river, and my world had blossomed into possibility again, and that was because of her. And I was clambering up the ship's rail, calling out to the shoal of mermaids, demanding to be taken with them, and Jebb's lips were pressed against my forehead, and milk-white waves lapped against the hull.

To start again from scratch.

I sat, blanket-wrapped, in the shadow of the canopy, beside Marguerite. I found myself holding, between the pad of my thumb and my forefinger, the lucky charm that John Doyle had carved for me. I could feel the curve of her tail, the snaking waves of hair, the tiny stipple of her scales. It seemed almost impossible that it should still be there, still hanging round my neck from the filament of John's hair, still solid and definite and real, when everything else seemed to have been undermined, emptied, made meaningless.

I sat beside Marguerite and kept my eyes on the horse's bony rump, on the flick of her tail and the shift of muscle beneath her skin. I found myself wondering at her determination, at her continuing willingness to drag herself, us, and the laden caravan along, when she could choose just to give up, to climb down into the nearest ditch and die. Because what was the point of struggling, of dragging yourself on for another day, another mile, when all that you were stumbling on towards all the time was death.

I sat beside Marguerite and thought myself unable to do anything more than sit there, shaken by the jolting roll of the caravan, vaguely aware of her hands holding the reins, the way the flesh hung loose on her fingers, the way the leather strap wove between them, pressing into the soft skin. Sometimes Marguerite's skinny dog would run alongside us, following a scent; sometimes he would hop up and lie behind Marguerite's feet. He would sleep in the shadow of her skirts, twitch and twitter with his dreams. Every so often, Marguerite would talk, her mouth turned upwards in a half-smile, but I never really heard what she was saying, was only half aware of the regular patter of her voice, the rise and fall of intonation. I felt the scratch of the woollen blanket on my throat, the brush
of her elbow against me when the caravan's pitch pushed us together. My throat always felt thick and swollen. From time to time I would raise a hand to my face, wipe away with a knuckle the fluid that dripped from my nose and eyes, as if, after all that dryness, I was now somehow overflowing.