The Mermaid's Child (4 page)

It was rare that we got to stay like that for very long. Gran would stagger in with a bucketful of something-or-other and spot me; she'd bundle me back into my jacket and hat and push me out of the door. Or the ferry bell would sound far off on the distant bank, or nearby, fierce and sudden, making us both jump, sending him running out of the house, heaving his oilskin onto his broad shoulders.

It's hardly surprising, then, that before spring could even bring a break in the weather, he had caught a cold and died, though at the time it did surprise me. I found him lying cold on the kitchen table, where, it only occurred to me years later, Gran had laid him out. I concluded, as one tends to conclude something even when faced with irreconcilable impressions, that tiredness had overtaken him there and he was resting. I sat on the flags, my back against the dresser, and waited for him to wake. I ate a jar of Gran's raspberry preserve with a spoon. Still he didn't stir, so I went to fetch a blanket and covered him up, and tucked it in around his cold white toes. His feet were strong and broad: he could almost, I thought, have walked on water. When Gran came back into the room, and saw what I had done, she sank down onto a chair, put her face
in her hands and began to cry. I thought at first it was because of the raspberries.

At my father's funeral, the Reverend Carr spoke of Heaven and God's goodness. He spoke of my father's willingness to shoulder a burden, and the honesty and dignity of hard work, and what a cross he had to bear, and what a worry I must have been to him.

My grandmother rowed his coffin across the river and, sweating and speechless, dragged it onto the jetty, then came back for the mourners. The men carried him across the floodplain, the pools and backwaters reflecting a silvery sky, and I followed, last, and no one spoke to me.

They buried him in the sodden earth of Melling graveyard, because ours isn't a proper church. It's only a chapel of ease.

As I stood at my father's graveside, I looked up at the tumbling clouds and felt the cool clear air on my skin, and heard the faint trickle of retreating waters, and I thought that's it, never again. He's dead, and now I won't hear the stories he might have told me, or know the things I should have known, and all because he was good, and I was trying to be good. Well, I thought, it won't happen twice. I won't get caught out like that again.

I wonder now, though I didn't think about it then, as my head was full of the ache in my throat, what happened to my father after death. I've read somewhere that you get what you believe in, but I've no idea what my father believed. I can imagine him, though, on the bank of the Styx, greeting Charon with professional courtesy, glancing appraisingly at his punt and pole while handing over the coin he has ready in his palm. He wouldn't want to keep anyone waiting, my father, wouldn't want to be any bother. On board, his strong hands folded as he sits quietly on his bench, he would gaze
round politely at the plains and mountains of the underworld, but all the while be more intensely aware of the tug of the current against the hull, the dip and splash of the puntpole, the strain of the ferryman's back and shoulder muscles. He would know it, he would feel it all instinctively, he wouldn't have forgotten yet. And he would be itching to give a hand.

Following his death, things were, of course, immediately different. The weather changed, as if it enjoyed a joke. Spring came all in a rush and flushed the trees with leaves and blossoms, and the earth began to dry. My Gran, having developed a taste for it, took to the ferry trade like a duck to water. She spent all day, and often long into the night, down at the ferrysteps; caulking the hull, greasing the rowlocks, splicing rope, endlessly smoking a thin clay pipe which she filled with her son's old tobacco. I'd watch her, sometimes, from a favourite perch halfway up a sycamore tree, leaning back against the trunk, stretching my legs out along a branch.

The cottage grew dark and cold as the sky's blue deepened into summer, and there was never anything cooking on the range, and there was never anything to eat, not even gluey blackberry jelly or slimy mushrooms, and I never spoke to my grandmother from one day's end to the next. When by accident we did bump into one another her eyes would drift past me, then she would just turn away: I'd catch the scent of his tobacco-smoke on the air, and for a moment my heart would quicken, expecting him.

I grew thin and ravenous that summer, fending for myself. I stole eggs from underneath the neighbours' hens and hen-food from their feeders. I grazed the currants off the currant
bushes, stripped pea-plants of their pods. I chewed carrots with the earth still clinging to them and got grit between my teeth. I was chased from outhouses and vegetable plots all over the village. From my perch up in the sycamore tree, I would watch the villagers gather at the ferrysteps to complain to my grandmother. Sometimes they would have to form a queue.

Then one evening when I brushed past her in the doorway, she held out a strong brown hand to stop me. I looked up from the stained creases of her palm. She stood there looking over my shoulder, the broken veins like elderberry stems patterning her cheeks, the white of her eyes almost blue against her skin. She told me, without once meeting my eye, that I was to be off up the road to work for Uncle George at the Public, and I found that I was not surprised at all.

“You're too much for me. He'll keep you in line, if anyone can. Bit of hard work for once, that'll straighten you out.”

Still she didn't look at me. I don't need straightening out, I wanted to say.

“I expect there's food there,” I said.

“I expect so.”

“When do I start?” I said.

“Tomorrow.”

I ducked under her hand and was off, down towards the riverbank.

I sat on the ferrysteps, the slate cool through worn cloth, my legs grown too long for me to swing my heels. Above, the sky was deep blue, the night full of riversounds. The water caught the moon's reflection and teased it into ripples. I put a hand on the bulwark of the boat.

A grey hollowness filled my chest, my throat. My nose
began to prickle; on the river, slivers of moonlight bleared and swam. There was no one, nothing left for me now. Not even this.

So I was to work at the Anchor. The public house. Forbidden to children, disapproved of by women, possessed of an irresistible attraction for the village men. It was unknown territory. A new, mysterious world. God only knew what went on in there. The Metcalfes and the Clay twins would be so jealous.

I wiped my eyes. The smear of moonlight resolved back into ripples. Somewhere in the night a sheep called, baritone; and another, younger one answered her.

I wasn't going to leave empty-handed. I took advantage of my grandmother's absence the next day and had a thorough hoke around. Da must have kept something, some keepsake or souvenir. If I could just find something that was important to him, it would give me a glimpse of the man he had been, of the stories I had lost when I lost him.

In his room, the light shafted in through the deep-set window, fell on the enamelled bedhead, the crocheted counterpane. She still hadn't stripped the bed. For a moment I considered pulling back the pillow to see if his nightshirt was still there, but I couldn't bear to look.

His old seachest stood at the foot of the bed. It had always been there; plain, slate-blue, and with his initials stencilled on it in black; but I couldn't remember him ever mentioning it, and had never seen it open.

I knelt down, ran my hands over its dusty surface. A keyhole but no key. Experimentally, I tugged at the lid. It flew up, unlocked and unexpectedly lightweight. There were dustmotes
in the sunlight. I looked inside. I sank my hands into folds of soft pale stuff.

There was nothing there, not really. Just a lavender-bag made from the same fabric as the front room curtains, and a couple of old shirts, one white, one white with blue stripes, which must have fitted my father as a boy. These, and a pair of boys' clogs, black, nailed and laced, the wooden soles splintery with wear. But apart from that, nothing. I ran my hands over the grey inner surface of the trunk, not quite able to accept its emptiness. No letter, no note, not even a smudged address label: nothing. And for a moment I felt almost angry. How could they have left me with nothing, without even a clue? I turned back to the shirts, lifted one, examined it unsuccessfully for pockets. The fabric was soft, smelt of mustiness and lavender. I peeled off my scratchy jumper, by now so outgrown that a clear three inches of sunbrowned belly was visible beneath it anyway, and lifted the white shirt over my head. It fell around me in cool folds. I tucked it into my shorts, then bent to unhook my sandals. The clogs were too big, but I took a pair of my grandmother's yellow ribknit socks from the press. I tucked the striped shirt into one of her old woolgathering bags. I slung it on my shoulder. I would, at least, be bringing something of him with me.

Bag on back, my feet somehow, despite the ache for change and proper food that was gnawing at my belly, would not take me straight to the Anchor. Instead, I found myself scuffing along the riverbank. I followed without thinking the bend in the river round to where Thrush Gill falls into the water, and turned to walk the shallows upstream.

Half a mile up over loose rocks, then pushing through hanging branches and slithering over water-filmed slabs of sandstone. Easier going in my new clogs; no knocks to vulnerable
ankle bones, no stubbed toes. Half a mile under dripping mossy overhangs, dark loamy banks, then up over a rocky shelf and out into open evening sky: the buzz of a waterfall, and the pool, a single perfect cup of sandstone, worn by the constant stirring of a single skull-sized boulder in its bottom. Above, one twisted hawthorn tree and the brackened sweep of moorland up to the sky. A hawk sailed by, carrying something small and soft and dead. I stripped naked. I felt the deep moss beneath my feet, the air around my skin.

It was my place. It always had been. I shared it with a blackbird: she bathed in the shallows sometimes. No one else ever came there.

I swam in the cold hillside water, turning and diving like a fish, legs together, as my mother would have done. I washed off domestic dust and darkness, let the waterfall pound the breath out of me.

And clean, breathless and damp-skinned, I pulled on my clothes. It felt oddly like putting the skin back on a rabbit. As I clattered back down the stream, my feet, still unused to the warmth and support of the clogs, glowed comfortable and secure. The air tasted sweet. A new life, I thought, was opening out in front of me. I had prospects.

FOUR
 

“Right,” Uncle George said, “let me make myself clear.”

He held my shirt bunched up at the neck, his fist pressing into my throat. I'd barely got in there: he was pushing me up against the doorjamb, he'd almost lifted me off my feet.

“I'm not your grandmother and don't you ever forget it. You can't get round me the way you did with her. I know what you're like, and I know how to deal with kids like you. There will be no nonsense. You won't get away with anything. Do you understand me?”

“I never got round—”

He lifted me still higher, growled.

“And I won't take any lip from you either. You're here to work. The moment you step out of line I will beat you straight back into it. If I have to, I will break you. It won't bother me one bit. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Uncle George wasn't really my uncle. He wasn't anybody's uncle. He was the principal tallyman and moneylender of the area. Maybe Gran gave me to him to service a bad debt: certainly what with the funeral and the weather it had been a difficult year for her, and I don't recall ever being paid. But like I said, my memory isn't what it ought to be. Maybe I got that wrong.

Uncle George assumed that I was ignorant of everything: mostly he was right to do so. He stood in the kitchen, armsfolded, and told me the best way to pluck a hen, to clean enamel, to prevent a loaf from spoiling. He pushed the larder door open and gestured me in. The cool slate shelves were laden with jars of pickled eggs, vegetables and nuts, a grey and cloudy canister of mushrooms looking unpleasantly familiar. These preserves, he told me, were to be served with his meals. He had, he said, a taste for vinegar.

Behind the bar, he showed me the appropriate angle at which to hold a pint mug while filling it with beer, how to wipe the lip-prints off its rim after use. He opened a cupboard door to reveal a broom, a scrubbing brush and pail, and explained the sweeping, and, following that, the scrubbing of the flagged floor. He tossed me a donkeystone, informed me of its use in rubbing down front steps, and that this activity was to be performed once a week, on Thursdays. He mimed the action of rubbing. The enquiry as to how his last slave might have died was on the tip of my tongue, but I managed to swallow it back down. Such good behaviour on my part could not go on indefinitely, but for the time being my throat was still sore from where he'd held me.