The Mermaid's Child (3 page)

I saw the wheeled crate standing in the moonlight. Its side panel had been taken down and left leaning against the wheels. Light caught on the gilding, and I was aware, in the corner of my eye, of the words:

make you laugh … make you cry
we'll change your life …
… no refunds …

But I wasn't looking at them.

It must have been moonlight that caught the curve of her arm, silvered her tail and stroked the fall of her hair, because oil-light makes everything warm and dirty, and she looked as clean and cold as frost. She was reclining on cushions in the opened crate. Someone had painted waterweeds, fishes and bubbles on the inside to make her feel at home. She was singing. And as she sang she dipped a tiny brush into a tiny pot beside her, studied her nails, then applied paint to each of them in turn. I crawled out from underneath the caravan and scrambled to my feet. Mouth open, eyes wide and bright with fever, I was vividly aware of my dirty knees and palms, my sick-stained clothes, the dried urine on one foot. My head was pounding, but I watched transfixed as she dropped the brush back into the pot, then screwed it neatly shut. She shifted her position, blowing on her fingernails. And as she moved, the
scales on her tail rippled, catching the moonlight. Her tailfin was lacy, like frozen spiderswebs. I may have stumbled, staggered slightly with the centrifugal force of my dizziness, or made some noise, some whimper, I don't know, but certainly something drew her attention to me. She glanced up, looked over in my direction, squinted.

“Who's there?” she asked.

Speechless, I found myself stumbling forward into the moonlight, wiping my hands down my shorts.

“Who is it? What do you want?”

I stared up at her. She was beautiful and fresh and clean and indisputably there. I tried to blink it away, but darkness was already gathering round my vision. I reached out to steady myself, but there was nothing to my touch. The mermaid shimmered in my fevered sight, seemed to slip away, grow distant, tiny. The darkness blinked. It swallowed her.

“Mother—” I said, and then I fainted.

TWO
 

If you're wondering how I remember all this, word for word, smell for smell, taste for taste, I wouldn't blame you. After all, I did say that my recollection isn't perfect. The truth is that time is seared into my memory with a clarity I myself sometimes find astonishing. Something to do with the virgin quality of my senses then, I suppose—I had seen so little, smelt so little, felt so little back then that an event such as this could record itself precisely and in minute detail on my mind. Like pissing on new snow, it was bound to make an impression.

A lot has happened since.

There's another reason for the clarity of my memories: after these events there came a break in my consciousness as neat and round as a full stop. After that comes the scratchiness of a blanket and the stickiness of hot skin and a burning sensation in my eyes every time I blinked, then the scrape of a spoon on teeth and the taste of liquorice and metal and alcohol. Some
kind of fever. Caught while sleeping under that damp hedge, or contracted perhaps from the scarlet of the tent.

I don't know how long I was ill, but by the time I was able to elude my grandmother for long enough to shuffle up to the village green, the circus had gone, the sawdust had been swept away, and all that was left was a ghost of a circle, like a fairy-ring, where the grass caught the light at a different angle.

THREE
 

The following year saw the worst weather I've ever known. Not bad in the sense of extreme, not ice and snow and hail the size of apples: not weather you'd write home about. The danger in this weather was that it was so dull that it could bore you to tears, or to death. It began with a wind, so light at first that you'd hardly feel it, though the women began to notice it was good drying weather and fired up the coppers for a titanic wash. Then, gradually, over the course of several days, the wind became infested with water, droplets so minute that at first you could barely tell that it was raining, until the women began to notice that the sheets and shirts and underskirts they'd boiled and scraped and pounded and pegged out on the line were not even beginning to dry. And over the space of days and weeks, the wind grew ever stronger and its water content ever greater, so that the sheets, which had at first gently stirred in the breeze, now snapped, soaking wet, on the line, like sailcloth.

There was no autumn that year. Leaves, debilitated by the wind and wet, turned muddy brown without bothering with the intermediate shades of red and gold, then lost their grip and fell. They gathered in wet drifts in the lee of drystone walls and hedges, and would not, despite my efforts, rustle. Depressed, the days retreated in upon themselves, so that come October it was dark by four o'clock. Dark, but you could never see the stars: dirty clouds tumbled almost incessantly across the sky. I remember one afternoon standing in the haymeadow, the cut grass rotting in neatly combed rows, and squinting up at the sky through the stinging rain. Briefly, the clouds had broken and a weak golden light had penetrated, catching me there, making the droplets on my eyelashes and on the tip of my nose glitter, glossing the silken threads of the dying grass. And I thought, come and take me now. Come flying down through that gap in the grey, come pick me up and take me away to warmth and sunshine and the blue.

I was not a holy child, and this was not a spiritual experience. I'd developed a rather pragmatic notion of religion, constructed out of bits and scraps I'd picked up in the Reverend Carr's Sunday School, when I couldn't otherwise distract myself from lessons. What with the biting incident, and getting myself expelled from Miss Woodend's school, I was lucky, I was told, that he'd let me join the class at all. Christian forgiveness, he had told my grandmother, palming the coin she offered him. He would turn the other cheek.

“But remember, Malin, I only have one more cheek to turn.”

I resisted the temptation. I nodded solemnly.

His instruction was made up of much blather about duty, obedience, and meekness. He was particularly keen on meekness, and sometimes I'd glance up when he was delivering one
of his disquisitions on this virtue, and notice he was looking right at me. I couldn't see myself hanging around indefinitely in the hopes that I'd inherit the earth, but in the meantime, the advantages of being good were not entirely lost on me either. If you were good, as I understood it, and asked very nicely, God might just do you a favour. So I had resolved to be very good and see what came of it, which was why I was there, standing in the haymeadow in the rain, when the clouds parted and a beam of sunlight illuminated, briefly, the grey wet world and me, and I thought for just a moment that all my efforts had paid off.

It was all part of my grandmother's scheme to combine convalescence with punishment. In practice, this meant my consumption of as much fresh air as possible, and my undertaking of endless, thankless tasks. Anything that kept me busy and out of her way. Every morning she sent me out with a receptacle (bucket, basket or bag, depending on the nature of the errand) and instructions to collect something. One day I would be easing apart bramble bushes to tease blackberries off their hulls and staining my fingers blue with juice, another I would be following the sheep-paths along hedgerows and across the fields and moors, to collect the scraps of fleece that had been tugged off by a thorn or nail. She had me pacing out the cowfields for mushrooms long past the mushroom season, when the only ones left were sodden and worm-raddled. Put roses in your cheeks, she said. Put hairs on your chest. I wasn't sure that I wanted either.

She made jelly with the blackberries, dyed the wool with onion skin, bottled the mushrooms in brine, and never once said thank you. The jelly tasted of rot, the wool took on a nasty shade of yellow, and the mushrooms, even the early, pearly white ones, grew mucousy and grey in their cloudy
bottles. Perhaps it was this early experience of preservation that made of me the squanderer that I am today. The phrase waste-not-want-not, though commonly repeated, has always seemed wrong to me. To boil up perfect blackberries into nastiness, just so that the resultant jelly can be consumed at a later date, seems much less sensible to me than gorging on the fruit in season. Waste, want. That's the idea I have come to hold to. At least then, in times of dearth, you have the memory of pleasures to sustain you.

And even when all the summer's last fruits were exhausted, my Gran still had me out there gathering driftwood for kindling. And I, trying to be good and curry favour up above, still went uncomplainingly, and did not mitch or shirk or skive.

There was a great deal of driftwood that year, deposited in skeins across the watermeadows. With each flooding came a new tideline thatch of broken branches, fenceposts, upwashed roots and reeds, like the nests of giant waterbirds. I trod these high water marks, gathered the driftwood into damp bundles, and carried them home to stack in the shippon.

Thinking back, Gran's main motive in enforcing this regime might well have been to keep me out of my da's way. It was an anxious and a busy time for him. There's something about persistent bad weather which seems to make people all the more determined to travel. He must have had twice the usual volume of traffic that year. Shrouded in oilcloth and hessian, the village women would be clanging the ferry bell at all hours, demanding to be taken across the river to visit a sister or an aunt or a sick cow stranded on the opposite bank. The Reverend Carr and the rector of Melling had come upon an intricate and dusty difference-of-opinion on a point of theology, so our curate was forever shuttling back and forth to and from Melling rectory with heavy books bundled in canvas and
his hatbrim dripping. And of course the doctor was called out more than usual, to sick children and the elderly who found the constant wet debilitating, and as his practice was based across the river, that meant my father was also called out for every illness and for every death in the village. Warming his hard red hands at the kitchen fire, his head would twitch up at the first clang of the bell on the far bank, and he would be halfway out of the house before he'd even pulled his oilskin on. He didn't like to keep people waiting in the rain, and hated to think, as he pulled out across the water, of the dark figure of the doctor standing underneath the dripping bell, and of the sweating feverish child, or the old woman burning with rheumatics, all of them waiting for him as he battled with the current. He was a good man, my father. He was kind.

It was an uneasy time for me too, though my discomfort was almost entirely selfishly motivated, if you consider the desire for forgiveness to be a selfish motivation (and I do). If I ever managed to be home at the same time as my father, and escape my Gran's notice, I would huddle at his feet, pull my yellow itchy jumper down over my knees, sit in sympathetic silence and hope for stories. I didn't ever ask, I didn't feel that I could ask, not after doubting his word so unjustly. My experiences at the circus had revealed to me that I could take his word as gospel truth, and my experiences at Sunday School had revealed to me that as he was my father I should have taken his word as gospel truth anyway, and not required corroborating evidence. It seemed I had a good deal of ground to make up with Him Upstairs.

Looking at the situation in daylight and good health, I wasn't really convinced that the mermaid at the circus had been my mother (that would have been too much of a coincidence, I reasoned) but she was nonetheless living speaking
proof that not only did these creatures exist, but they were prepared, despite the obvious discomforts of the journey, to travel to this village at the arse-end of nowhere. It should have made no difference, but I couldn't help but find that this cast my father in an entirely different light. He had lived. He'd seen the world. He had attracted, however temporarily, the affections of an extraordinary being. He was more than good: he was great. So I sat and waited patiently for stories. And then I sat and waited impatiently, as, in exhausted silence, he passed down cigarette after cigarette for me to light for him at the fire.