The Mermaid's Child (11 page)

His coat was lying in folds, slung over the back of the chair. He'd gone without it. His hat was there too, sitting black and pristine on the chair's fraying straw seat. He'd catch his death.

I'd have to be quick if I was going to catch him. His spare shirt and britches were lying on the same seat so I pulled them on: it was quicker than buttoning myself into that dress. I gathered up his coat and hat and made for the door. If he was
already too far ahead, if he was going too fast, if I had to just follow awhile and see where he went and who he met, well, that wouldn't be my fault. It wouldn't be spying. I was just bringing him his hat and coat.

I slipped out through the front door and hurried down to the end of our street. At the corner I caught sight of him going uphill, his head down, hand to mouth. I followed.

After climbing about half a mile, he turned abruptly and stepped into Bashful Alley. I ran up to the corner and peered round. He was just reaching the far end, was just turning to the right. I ducked down the passageway, trying to run softly on the flagstones, and stopped at the end to peer after him. The lane was steep and cobbled. He was climbing slowly: he looked tired. And I was getting breathless too. Clutched to my chest, his coat was bulky, cumbersome, and his hat was getting crushed. I slipped his jacket on over my own, tapped the hat down onto my head. It sank down low over my eyes. If he glanced round, he'd hardly recognize me. He wouldn't stop and send me back. I slid round the corner, followed him.

Each turn he took was dragging us further uphill, each narrowing street bringing us further round in a shallow curve from our lodgings towards that dark and threatening quarter, that rat's nest of dives and dens and brothels up behind the quays. He'd been there all last night, and he was already going back. Despite the extra layers of clothing, despite the exertion of the chase, I felt cold.

We were coming to the brow of the hill and a crossroads. Ahead of us, Hope Street sloped down towards the waterfront. The cobbles were thick with filth, the street overhung with dripping, carious tenements. The darkest, most notorious of slums. I felt anxiety rise inside me, like sickness. He turned down a sidestreet and I followed.

Thirty yards or so ahead of me, on the far side of the street, he'd stopped. I slid my back up against a wall and watched. A trick of the town: at the end of the street was a view out across the rooftops to the world beyond. A slice of saltmarsh, fading evening sky, and river. Sailortown's speciality, these sudden perspectives, glimpsed at the turn of a mildewed street, at the brow of a hill, or through a cavity left by collapsed tenements. Cut against this backdrop, his silhouette looked crooked, his head slumped forward from his shoulders like an old man's. Anxiety rose again inside me, but I swallowed it back.

He'd made it rain, I told myself. He had made it rain.

We both stood there a moment longer, me pressing myself breathlessly back against the wall, and him standing, not moving, just staring at someone's shut-tight door. Its paint was peeling, blue.

Slowly, he stepped up towards the door. He lifted a fist, then hesitated, his hand suspended a moment in front of the boards. Then he knocked and immediately stepped back. I couldn't see his face: his quarter-profile was dark against the brightness beyond. He waited just a moment, not really long enough for anyone to answer, then stepped forward and knocked again. Impatient, I realized, wanting to get it over with. Whatever it was.

I heard bolts being drawn back, watched as the door was scraped open on darkness. Inside, a figure; substantial, paler than the shadows. Joe moved forward, lifting his right hand, extending it to be shaken. The figure didn't move. A moment's awkwardness. Joe's hand fell back to his side.

“All I'm asking,” I heard him say, “is that you give me one more chance. Just one. That's all I'm asking.”

“It doesn't work like that.” The voice was dark; it brought with it a sense of bulk, of heavy strength. “You played the
game, and you lost, so now you hand over the goods. That's the way it works.”

“I'll pay you double what you'd get on the open market.”

A low-pitched growl, indecipherable.

“I can get the money. No problem. That's what I'm telling you. It's no problem.”

“You made the stake. You honour it.”

“I'm offering you a better deal.”

“I'm not interested.”

“I can understand that,” Joe's voice sparked with animation. “I understand what you're saying. You're right to be suspicious, you've every reason to be. Because what I'm offering you is pretty much unbelievable. What I'm offering you is the best deal you'll ever—”

For some reason, my mouth had gone dry. He was still speaking, but all the energy seemed to be slipping away from him as he spoke. His voice began to take on a failed, husky quality.

“I mean,” he said, “when it comes down to it, what's the kid worth, really, anyway?”

The press of cold stone against my palms and shoulderblades.

“You saw last night's takings,” he added. “A pittance, it was. Just pennies. And to be honest with you, that was one of the better nights—”

There was acid rising in my throat.

“I'm a fool to myself, but that's why I'm saying—the only way you stand to make any money out of this—”

The other man's voice was low: “There's always a market for young flesh,” he said.

I found myself sliding back along the wall, slipping into the darkness of a narrow ginnel. I still remember the smell of
the place: decay and emptiness. I stretched out a hand to the wall. The stone was sweating. I leaned over, and, quietly as possible, vomited.

For a while I was conscious of little more than that: the heave of my guts, the choking feeling in my throat, the sick in my mouth. When the sickness passed and I was able to wipe my lips, and spit, and then peer out of the ginnel's shadows, he had gone and the street was deserted. I came back out and leaned against a wall, breathing.

What was it he'd said, that first night on the valley road, when he'd agreed to take me with him?
It's not what you think it is, you know. It's never what it seems to be
. Everything, everything that had ever happened since I met him seemed to have become loose and shifting. Memories slipped and tumbled like coins, like dice. I wanted to go after him, to confront him, to make him explain, to make him tell me what it was that I had so far failed to understand, but my legs felt weak beneath me, and I didn't know where he'd gone, or how I could possibly string half a dozen words into a question if I caught up with him. I found myself gazing out across that view of river, land and sky. I knew that from here my feet would take me down into the dark streets, towards the gantries and the mud, back to men's gaping flies and unwashed dicks and the scuttle of rats and the stink of shit. I felt my stomach churn again, put a hand to a wall, head reeling. If I could sail straight out there above the rooftops, over the smoking chimneys and rain-greased slates, gliding out towards the clean clipped saltmarshes and the sea; alone—something went solid in my chest, choking me. My eyes squeezed themselves shut, my face contracting. He had lost me. He had lost me in a game of dice. No skill, no foresight, no pattern of play: nothing but pure dumb luck with dice. He had run out of money,
the money that I'd brought him, and so had placed my life on a single cast.

He lived by chance. I could see that now. Everything was luck. I found myself thinking of the phials of pills, the stories he had told, the way his hands had darted like spiders as he dealt cards across a table. And the first drops of rain thwacking onto the dusty road that night, and the downfall's sudden stop on the cusp of the hill. And me turning round, stretching out my hands, and turning to him, alive for the first time with the wonder of it all.
It's not what you think it is
, he'd said.
It's never what it seems to be
. He'd told me there would be mermaids here, but there were only whores.

Something was forcing its way out of me, something uncountenanceable, something that hadn't happened in what felt like a lifetime. I buckled in on myself, I choked. I began to cry.

I don't know how much later it was that I blinked away the tears, rubbed the back of a hand across my face. I'd already given myself a headache and my eyes felt raw, but for some reason I'd become suddenly self-conscious. I sniffed, glanced round, half-expecting trouble. I blinked and wiped my eyes again. I stared. Because, rounding the bend in the river, against the evening blue of the water and the green of the saltmarsh, its colours snapping silently, sails bellying, rigging and deck alive with tiny figures, steering a precise path between sandbanks and shilloe beds, came, at last, the unexpected splendour of a ship. Which changed everything.

I'd been wasting my time, I realized. I would go and find my mother.

NINE
 

The agent glanced up from his ledger, looked at me, then narrowed his eyes and said, “Do I know you?”

I'd already begun to shake my head before I realized that in fact we had met before, in rather more intimate circumstances. Which was why I hadn't immediately recognized his face. His prick, on the other hand: that might well have been a different matter, but he didn't happen to have it currently on display. I'd been in the dress then, and now I was wearing Joe's clothes. It made things easier for me, being a boy; but it obviously made things uncomfortable for my former customer. To put it frankly, he was no longer quite sure who he'd paid to suck his cock. A slow blush rose up his neck, flushed his cheeks.

“Perhaps you've met my sister?” I suggested.

He tugged at his collar.

“No, no, I don't think so. I must have been mistaken.”
Flustered, he picked up his pen, put it down to straighten his ledger, lifted it again.

“Name?” he said.

He signed me there and then, scratching my name onto the page with a sputtering pen. As he reeled off the questions I answered him as well as I could.

Name: Malin Reed.

Age: Unknown.

Father's occupation: Ferryman.

And then, without asking me, he scratched out the words:

Engagement: to the slaver
Sally Ann
, five years.

Position: Boy.

He dipped the pen again, held it out to me, and spun the ledger slowly round. An inky finger tapped at an empty column.

“Sign here,” he said.

I took the pen and wrote out my name. I looked at it a moment, inscribed there in black and white by my own hand. It didn't look like me.

He pushed a coin across the desktop. “Most of that,” he said, “will go on your kit. Next door; the chandler's office. They'll sort you out.”

And then later that same day, the ritual humiliation of getting on board. I struggled up the gangway with my kitbag dragging heavy on my shoulder and the planks swaying and buckling underneath me as, at the bottom of the gangway, two sailors jumped up and down on the boards, laughing. Then I crossed the deck. The agent had told me I was to report to Mr. McMichaels, the captain, but I had no idea where to find him, and when I came to the middle of the deck, I realized
I didn't have a clue where to go next. If I kept on going the way I was going, before long I'd be all the way across the ship and off the far side and into the river: overboard before I'd even made it out to sea. I slowed. Clustered here and there on deck, men were standing in their shirtsleeves, chewing on tobacco. A bad impression made now would stick like pitch, and I was, I realized, already making one: despite the fact that we were docked, and on the river, the deck seemed to be lurching beneath me, and I found myself teetering from side to side like a drunk. Someone laughed. I turned towards the noise. I squared my shoulders.

“I'm looking for the captain,” I said.

Behind me, someone said something which I didn't quite catch, and then everybody laughed. I flushed with anger. I'd wanted to leave complications and entanglements behind. I'd wanted to start afresh, to be someone quite new, and already it was going wrong. I opened my mouth and was about to speak, was about to call into question the virtue of their mothers, their sisters, of all their female relations young and old, and suggest that they themselves had picked up something unpleasant, itchy and ultimately fatal in some foreign port. I was lucky I didn't get the chance.

“That's enough,” someone said.

I hadn't noticed the higher deck, the flight of steps behind me. A man was coming down them, an account book tucked beneath an arm. He came to the bottom of the flight, stopped. He flopped open the book in his hands, looked down at it.

“Reed,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Come with me.”

He turned and disappeared through a doorway beneath the stairs, and I followed. Behind me, someone spoke again,
and though I missed the words, the inflection was unmistakably jeering. A general, breathy snickering followed me down the dark passageway.