The Merman (16 page)

The school was buzzing with rumours for the rest of the day. Someone claimed to have seen the gang on their scooters up by the newsagent's kiosk, and when a police car approached they zoomed off into the woods on the path with the street lamps. Somebody else said they'd already been questioned at the police station and Gerard was being charged with grievous bodily harm.

Nicke Wester, dressed today in a ripped Ebba Grön T-shirt with a bandana knotted round his head, claimed to know why Gerard had been excluded: he'd threatened several of the teachers. Patrik Lagerberg, who had a different source, said the gang had brought back some hashish from Christiania at the end of the summer and sold it on to some older guys in town. But when someone asked why Gerard was the only one who'd been excluded, he had no reply.

Anyway, the caretaker seemed to have survived. When the ambulance came for him he was conscious, and one of the paramedics who was trying to calm down an upset teacher said that it looked a lot worse than it was, and there's always a lot of blood when someone is bleeding from a head wound.

I felt like I was going to be sick, the more I thought about it. If the caretaker, a fully grown man, easily weighing forty kilos more than Gerard and nearly two heads taller, didn't have a chance, what would happen to me or my brother if we happened to stand in his way?

During the last recess of the day I went over to the Year Seven wing to spend some time with Robert.

‘Gerard isn't going to get away with this, is he?' he asked hopefully as he perched on the banister dangling his legs, on his own as usual. ‘People must get sent to borstal at least, if they go after a caretaker?'

‘Maybe,' I said. ‘But you've got to be careful. If you see him, get out of there.'

‘Are Ola and Peder still at school?'

‘No. They cleared off with their boss this morning. Nobody knows where they're keeping themselves.'

‘Maybe the police took them in? What's happening with the caretaker, anyway? Is he badly injured?'

‘I hope not. But you've got to promise me: if you catch sight of Gerard, you have to get away as fast as you can.'

‘Okay.'

My brother had removed the plaster from the lens of his glasses. His squint had returned.

‘Fortunately, Dad was in a good mood,' he said when he noticed me looking at him, ‘and gave me my glasses back. At first I thought he was going to keep them. And maybe buy me a new pair, cooler ones. But he didn't. At least I can see now.'

It was incredible that he was capable of refashioning reality in such a short time, like sweeping all the unpleasant stuff under the rug.

‘Shall we walk home together after school, Nella?'

‘Sure, if you want to.'

‘Do you think Leif's going to stay over Christmas?'

‘I really don't know.'

And that was the truth: I didn't know I did still hope I'd be able to keep my room, because that was only the first night Leif had slept at ours. The following day he'd looked up an old girlfriend and asked if he could live there for a while. Dad was saying he should stay at ours. They had joint business, as he put it, loads of stuff that needed sorting out asap and it was better if they were living under the same roof. The previous night they'd disappeared with the car again without saying where they were going. I hoped they were involved in something illegal. And that they'd get caught before Christmas.

T
he house was empty when Robert and I got home. There was a note from Mum on the table in the hall. The Professor was looking for me. I phoned him while my brother went into the kitchen to see if there was anything to eat. He picked up straight away as if he'd been waiting for the phone to ring.

‘I was in Gothenburg yesterday,' he said, ‘at the public library, checking into what you asked me about. I had a hospital appointment. My heart took a licking after my operations, as you know, and the doctors want to change my medication because the one I was on before had loads of side effects. But it went so well I could spend the rest of the day at the library afterwards. I've borrowed a few books that seem interesting. It would be good if you could pop by.'

I could hear my brother slamming cupboard doors and cursing under his breath.

‘When should I come?'

‘Now, if you've got time.'

‘I'll be there as soon as I can.'

Out in the kitchen, my brother stood staring vacantly into the fridge.

‘Nothing today, either,' he said. ‘Not even a piece of crispbread.'

He went over to the sink and filled a glass with lukewarm water – the old trick to fool your stomach. I noticed I was hungry myself. After what had happened to the caretaker, I didn't manage to get anything down at lunch. And given the situation we were in, it could mean we'd have to go without food for an entire day, until the school canteen was open again.

‘I'm sorry there's nothing here at home,' I said. ‘I should've thought of that. Do you think you can manage on your own for a couple of hours? I've got to head over to the Professor's for a bit. I might be able to bring something back from there.'

With his back turned towards me, my brother nodded.

‘I'll come back as soon as I can, I promise. By the way, you need a haircut. Your fringe is hanging down over your glasses, and there are tangled knots on the back of your neck. If you can find the scissors, I'll sort it out when I get back.'

The Professor was sitting in his reading room when I arrived. He was holding a teacup in his hand and had his glasses on.

‘How nice you could come,' he said, pointing to one of the squashed-out armchairs. ‘Have a seat and I'll show you what I've found.'

I could tell he'd done a thorough job. There was a stack of library books on the coffee table, with a notebook filled with jottings lying next to them.

‘It'll be terrific to read your essay when it's finished. If I don't muddy things up for you with too many historical facts.'

With that, he picked up his notebook, looked inside and began to explain.

The first time mermaids appeared in the sources was during classical antiquity. They were called Naiads then, or Nereids, and they were a sort of freshwater nymph that ruled over lakes and river channels. According to the descriptions, they had fish-like scales on their abdomen, but the upper body of a woman. They were related to the tritons and other gods of the sea in Greek mythology, but they didn't do a whole lot in comparison to those other figures... It would take another few hundred years, up until about AD 500 before the classic mermaid took shape. In a text called a “bestiarium” by one Physiologus, mermaids are described as a “fantastically shaped woman from the navel upwards, and like a fish from the navel downwards”. The creatures, he writes,
are happy during storms but sad during periods of calm, and they exert a strange attraction on seafarers: they lure sailors to sleep with them, and then they kill them... '

The Professor took a sip of tea and looked at me.

Is the vocabulary I'm using too complicated?' he asked. ‘Let me know if it is.'

‘No, I'm getting the drift.'

‘Okay. I'll carry on. In the fifteenth century the first more realistic reports of contacts between people and mermaids started to come in. In 1423 a Dutch monk by the name of John Gerbrandus wrote of a “wild sea-maid” that was washed ashore through a hole in a dyke in the Netherlands. The creature was found by some milkmaids and taken to a nearby farm. After they washed her and gave her some food and clothing, she remained on the farm where she learned to spin wool and perform simple kitchen tasks. After a while she was taken to a nunnery in Haarlem, where she lived until her death, without ever learning to speak.'

‘So you think that actually happened?'

The Professor chuckled.

‘No, I doubt it. Gerbrandus was not an eyewitness. He just wrote down a story he'd heard. That's how it was in those days: monks collected stories about strange occurrences. And when you think about all the wonders described in the Bible, it didn't seem unreasonable that the sea would be full of mermaids and other mystical creatures. God was the creator of everything, and nothing was impossible for God.'

He turned the page.

‘Reported sightings of mermaids continued to turn up at regular intervals from voyages of exploration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This one's interesting... '

He paused at a bookmark in his notebook.

‘In the summer of 1658 the explorer Henry Hudson led a convoy of ships along the Arctic coast of Russia. Near Novaya Zemlya on the 15th of June he recorded this entry in the ship's log:
“This morning one of our sailors on the lookout for icebergs sighted a mermaid off the port side. When he summoned me, another mermaid came to the surface. The first one was quite near the bow and looked up sternly towards the men who had gathered at the ship's rail. A great breaker took her, lifting her up and down. Her neck and back were those of a woman, her body of a size similar to ours, her skin very white. Her long hair, black in colour, hung down over her face. When she dived, we saw her tail, which resembled the fin of a large fish.'”

‘Is that made up as well?' I asked.

The Professor looked at me, touched.

‘We'll never know. Even today, the Arctic Ocean is still fairly unexplored. And of course there are deep sea trenches with their strange marine fauna. Or else, which seems most likely, Hudson just saw what he wanted to see. Sea voyages could last for many months in the 1600s. They must have been incredibly boring. But he did actually make some sketches... '

He opened to a page in one of the books. In an old print there was a vague figure, half-seal, half-woman.

‘Curiously, a famous English zoologist, P.H. Gosse, read about this and dismissed the theory that they might have been elephant seals, sea cows, walruses or anything like that.'

‘What did he think they were instead?'

‘An as-yet-undiscovered species of mammal. Hudson's experienced crew, he thought, would have been too familiar with large marine animals to err so greatly.'

That might be one possibility, I thought as I let my eyes wander round the Professor's cluttered reading room, to the bookshelves, newspapers and clippings that lay in piles on the floor. Maybe they existed at one time but then died out? Or else I was going up a dead end.

‘Another episode that made headlines in European newspapers around that time involved some Dutch sailors who caught a “mermaid” off the coast of Borneo and kept her captive in a
barrel of water. That was the famed Mermaid of Amboina, “five foot long, which from time to time let out small cries not unlike a cat's”. Her body was examined after her death, and Dutch scientists of the era maintained with absolute certainty that it was a mermaid. Peter the Great, the Russian Tsar at that time, actually travelled to Amsterdam to obtain more information about the event. Afterwards, he was convinced that mermaids existed and sent an expedition to the Far East to try to capture one alive. Which of course didn't work out.'

The Professor made a dramatic pause before continuing.

‘The scientific advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should have put an end to all the speculations about fantastical creatures. But that didn't happen. On the contrary, interest grew, and there were loads of reported sightings of mermaids. During the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, a great many mermaid skeletons were exhibited around Europe and the United States. The most famous one was part of P.T. Barnum's Cabinet of Curiosities. It's thought that the skeleton came from Japan, where fishermen produced them to order. Barnum's skeleton was examined by experts from the Royal Society and was judged to be a fake. Apparently it was made from the bones of an ape, skilfully joined to those of a dolphin.'

‘So they never really existed?' I asked. ‘Other than in people's imaginations?'

‘Unless they just disappeared. In the twentieth century at any rate, all reports of mermaid sightings stopped.'

The Professor opened up the book from the bottom of the pile on the table. In a black-and-white photo was a little girl whose legs were joined together.

‘Some researchers think the mermaid legend might have its origin in Sirenomelia, also known as Mermaid Syndrome. This is a rare genetic disorder. Affected people are born with their legs fused together and undeveloped genitals, and they usually die shortly after birth. Some of the preserved mermaid bodies that
were exhibited to the public during the nineteenth century might have been children who died as a result of Sirenomelia.'

I had to take my eyes away from the photo. It looked so awful, that deformed little girl.

‘And what about the males? There must have been some of them in the tales as well.'

The Professor looked at his pill case on the table, now with different-coloured tablets in it. He grimaced, and I understood he was in pain.

‘The only thing I could find was a report in an English reference book. “Mermen” is what the males are called. And they seem to exist only as a logical consequence of the fact that there are descriptions of mermaids, so they would have someone to mate with.'

Are there any pictures of them? Drawings or something?'

‘None that I've found.'

I nodded. None of this helped me. I didn't even know what I'd been hoping for. That some of the stories might have been more plausible than others, that there might have been some extinct animal that resembled what I'd seen. But there was nothing.

The Professor got up and fumbled for his crutches, which were leaning against the table. I could smell food from downstairs in the kitchen. I'd smelled it the whole time, but sort of ignored it so the hunger pangs wouldn't get worse. I hated being hungry. Finally I couldn't think of anything other that nagging pain in my belly.