The Merman (12 page)

For several seconds, I thought it was going to open its eyes and look at me. But instead it sank back into hibernation, became almost motionless, except for its ribcage, which steadily rose and fell. There was an open flesh wound on one of its cheeks. You could see right inside the creature's mouth there. You could see its tongue that was big and pink like a cow's tongue, see its teeth – fish teeth, loads of them, relatively small, but razor-sharp. A little further up by its temple was a large bruise. There was blood clotted around it. Small bone chips were sticking out of its flesh.

‘They used the boat hook,' Tommy said in a quiet voice. ‘Its whole cheek was torn open. They didn't have a choice, it could have killed them.'

‘But how... I don't get it.'

‘With its tail. It's aggressive, I've seen it myself... and really strong. He must weigh two, three hundred kilos.'

He took a cigarette out of the packet his brother had left behind, and lit it. I had never seen him smoke before; it looked almost indecent. Like photos you might see of street children in impoverished countries. He took a deep drag without coughing. Then he bent over, fumbled over the creature's body down there and turned over a flap of skin on its tail fin.

‘See for yourself,' he said. ‘It's a male.'

Even though I didn't want to, I couldn't help looking. Its penis was the most human-like part of the whole creature. It looked like it could be on any grown man at all. It felt shameful to look at it, sort of like spying on someone in the shower or peeping through a keyhole at somebody doing something dirty.

‘Leave it be,' I said. ‘Don't do that.'

‘It doesn't notice anything. You can touch it. The body, I mean. It's totally pumped up on this stuff.' Tommy picked up a syringe that lay in the bottom of the crate, and a brown bottle that had a little liquid sloshing around in it., ‘Anaesthetic... the stuff they use at the zoo to put animals to sleep. He's had the same size dose a polar bear would get. He won't wake up for hours.'

It was only now that I realised the creature was tied down. A heavy rope was wound around its tail fin. Its arms, or what you might call its reverse-jointed limbs, were fastened to the bottom of the crate with steel cables. I felt confused in a way I'd never been before. My whole head was swimming with questions, a mishmash of questions, an entire landslide: what it was, where it came from, why it was still alive, and how long it would survive like this.

Tommy took my hand and placed it on the creature's body. It was cold and slimy. I felt how my hand sort of stuck to its hide. The whole thing just felt wrong: that it was here in the first place, that it had a gender, that it was bound and drugged up, and that Tommy wanted me to touch it.

‘Let me go!' I said.

‘Calm down. There's no danger. It can't hurt you.'

‘It's not that... it just doesn't feel right. Tell me what happened instead.'

It was the Tuesday before when Tommy's brothers had gone out on their boat. It was perfect fishing weather. As I understood it, that had to do with the winds: they affected the surface temperature and made the cod shoals head towards the fishing banks. That was why they took an extra deckhand out on the boat: they might have needed another pair of strong arms if they got a big catch.

First they had gone to their usual reefs, the places where they knew the fish would normally be. But the echo sounder had shown only small shoals not worth trawling for. They had lain still just north of Marsten and discussed what to do: head back to the marina or head out further to the north-west. Finally they decided to go in the opposite direction, towards Anholt. In fact, those were Danish waters and, according to the rule book, they weren't allowed to fish there. But Anholt was special. Not that long ago people in Glommen had relations on the island, married into each other's families, fished together; the border only existed on the nautical charts.

It was around midday when everything happened. They were by a bank a few nautical miles inside Danish waters when the echo sounder showed a large shoal of fish. It was moving strangely, Tommy said, not at all like it should, sort of splitting up and then joining together again, suddenly diving and then immediately coming back up towards the surface. Nobody said anything, but they suspected it might be porpoises or whales that were hunting in the shoal. It was unusual for whales to come so far into the Kattegat, but it happened sometimes. Pilot whales, for example, had made it as far south as Öresund. After talking it over for a while, they decided to put the trawl net out. There were no Coast Guard boats in sight, and if any fishermen from the island turned up, they would turn a blind
eye to their presence. With the eldest brother as the helmsman, they followed the shoal at a leisurely pace. Tommy's next older brother Olof and the lad, who was called Jens, were standing on the shelter deck, each with a pair of binoculars. They were hoping to catch a glimpse of a whale, or at worst a Danish Coast Guard vessel that they would have to get away from as fast as possible, hopefully without needing to let go of their net.

All that was significant in leading up to what happened next. The fact that they were there against the rules, that they were breaking certain laws. People from Glommen were known for their suspicion of authorities: customs, the police, the Board of Fisheries. And maybe there were other things on board the boat that made them unwilling to involve outsiders.

They had had the trawl net out for less than half an hour when they decided to bring it back in. Tommy seemed unsure exactly in what order events had occurred, but then he hadn't been there. Maybe it was the idea that there were whales in their path, that they might destroy their equipment; maybe they had seen something on the echo sounder or identified some strange movement in the hawsers. At any rate, they started to bring in the trawl net again.

They discovered it when they made the lift. It was tangled up in the net, struggling for its life. As I understood Tommy, they tried to let it out through the side panel, but the creature was too big. Finally there was no other option but to bring it in. It was incredibly aggressive, striking out with its tail, throwing itself this way and that all over the place, and it managed to make some large tears in the net. They had never seen anything like it. At first they thought it was moving like a small whale, Tommy said, and that in itself was a problem because you have to report a catch like that. Then they realised what it was, or in any case what it resembled.

But why didn't they just chuck it overboard, I wondered. They couldn't, he explained. They couldn't even get near it: as soon as they got too close, it tried to attack, and they couldn't stay out at sea all night. Finally they panicked and started hitting it with
the boat hooks. I could see it in my mind's eye, how they kept hitting and hitting and how the creature tried to defend itself, how it threw itself upon them, biting with its jaws and lashing with its tail fin. I could hear how they struck it on the head, the low, blunt noise from the boat hooks when the gristle and hide split open, the blood that ran, all the chaos on that slippery deck, how the creature's cheek was sliced open when they tried to hook it, the men's screams, the terror in the creature as it fought for its life, and how at last, as the boat heaved, it slid through the hatch to the lower deck, struck its head and passed out.

They returned to Glommen with the creature in the cargo hold. They didn't know what they should do. The best thing, they said, would be to kill it, but that was easier said than done. To do that they needed a gun, but none of them had one. They discussed whether they should contact someone they knew: there were several people in the village who had a hunting licence, but the fewer people who got wind of what they had brought in, the better. Anyway, they would need a larger calibre weapon than an average shotgun.

The brothers had not told anyone what they had brought up that day. Presumably they were afraid of questions about what they were doing in Danish fishing waters, about the duty of notification, about fishing quotas that might already have been exceeded, and maybe because there were other things in the cargo hold that Tommy didn't mention. When they returned, the creature was still unconscious. Assisted by the dock crane, they lifted it up onto a trailer, rolled it into the hut and tied it down in an old machinery crate while they tried to figure out what to do.

Tommy had been dragged into the story against his will. He had noticed that something was not right. He had heard his brothers coming in and leaving the house at odd hours, heard them arguing downstairs in the games room. From the window in his room he had seen them in the hut, the tarpaulin they used to cover the windows, the strange sneaking around, and he wondered what was actually going on. On Thursday, even though he had a
temperature, he went down there. His brothers had gone into town to sort something out; he opened the door with a spare key, went in and discovered the creature. That same evening he demanded an explanation from them. And because the story began to follow its own rules, he was suddenly involved in it.

‘What are you going to do now?' I asked when he had finished telling his story.

‘I have no idea.'

‘Can't you phone the police or something? It has to go back where it came from. Or be handed in somewhere... I don't know.'

From the look he gave me, I understood that that was the very last thing that they wanted to do.

‘I have no idea what they want to do,' he said. ‘Leave it to die, maybe. But it's tough. It looks like it can survive a long time on land. A bloody amphibian... uses its gills to breathe underwater... and its windpipe and lungs on land.'

I looked over at the crate of fish guts that was over by the door.

‘So why are they feeding it, if they want it to die?'

‘Don't ask me. I'm not the one who's making the decisions here.'

Something didn't add up. Tommy's sentences that stumbled, skipped over certain words, went back to pick them up again, sentences that haltingly advanced over invisible obstacles, fell over them and got up again. And why didn't they throw it back into the sea now, when it was completely helpless?

I detected the smell of the creature again. The mermaid... although it was a man. The merman, merbull, mermonkey... the smell of sea, fish and blood. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I noticed more wounds, flesh wounds and bruises between its scales, deep wounds where they stabbed it with the boat hooks the way bullfighters thrust and stab at bulls.

‘Do your mum and dad know about this?' I asked.

‘No. Since Dad retired from fishing they never come down here. Just me, Jens and my brothers... and now you.'

A
man
, a
male
, I thought as I looked down into the crate again; the
words bore less and less relation to reality. It really was breathing through its mouth, and releasing the air from its gills; I saw the moisture there, the slime and the small air bubbles that formed. And then that horrible wheezing noise when the air was forced out. Tommy touched it, with exaggerated roughness I thought. And then the movement started again, that powerful trembling through the bound beast or fish or whatever it was. Smooth and clumsy at the same time.

‘It's starting to wake up,' said Tommy. ‘It can't tolerate the light. It probably lives down at the bottom of the sea and only comes up to the surface at night.'

And then I saw another thing I had never experienced before. The creature opened its eyelids, or rather the scales or flaps in front of its eyes. It looked straight at me. Its eyes were large, pitch-black and watery, as if it were suffering from an eye infection. But its gaze was completely human, and I noticed it was observing me and wondering who I was. It tried to lift one arm; its fingers scratched awkwardly in the air before its hand sank down again, restrained by a steel cable fastened to the bottom of the crate.

‘It's suffering,' I told Tommy. ‘Don't you understand that?'

But he was already heading for the door.

T
he Professor was sitting on a stool in his yard, busily doing something as I approached on my bike. On the ground next to his crutches there was a pile of boards and some rolls of chicken wire. He was holding a hammer in his hand.

‘Hello there, Nella,' he said. ‘What luck you're here. Can you give me a hand with this?' He pointed to the pile of boards with the handle of his hammer. ‘Rabbit hutches. I got them from my neighbour. They need to be repaired before they can be used... for the summer, I was thinking. How come you're not in school, by the way?'

He looked at me, concerned.

‘Has something happened? Come on, let's go inside.'

It felt safe sitting in the Professor's kitchen; it really did, among the usual jumble of things he'd found at flea markets or the rubbish tip, among broken radio sets and telephones he'd planned to fix, but had given up hope before he finished, among old books and stacks of articles he'd cut out of newspapers, about everything from UFO sightings to unsolved murders.

As we drank tea, I told him about Gerard and what had happened at school, that Dad was coming home and my room was going to be let out to a jailbird. And even though I told everything as accurately as I could, it felt like I was keeping certain key facts from him, such as the rules of the game underlying everything.

At one point, when he was hobbling over towards the stove to get his medicines, I was on the verge of telling him about what I'd just seen in the hut, only twenty minutes ago. What my brain was sort of refusing to grasp, the creature lying in the wooden crate, tied up
and drugged, which made everything else seem unimportant. But at the same instant the words began to take shape in my mouth, I could see Tommy in my mind's eye, and even though he hadn't said so explicitly, I knew that I mustn't tell anyone. Not a single person. Not even the Professor.