The Mermaid's Child (24 page)

He was leaning forward, going for my britches. I swung
my feet up to his chest and shoved him away. He landed on his arse in the sand.

“No you bloody won't,” I said.

Their mouths fell open. Cunningham turned to look at the older man. A moment, then he started getting to his feet, brushing off the sand. He came back towards me, lifted up the lantern, peered at me. I glared back at him.

“Damn,” he said. He turned back to Cunningham. “Damn damn damn.”

“Where are you from?” Cunningham said. His voice was unsteady. I opened my mouth to speak.

“Shut up,” the older man told me. “It doesn't matter where it's from.”

He took Cunningham's arm and steered him away.

“She,” Cunningham said. “She.”

They reached their stools. The older man sat down, gestured for Cunningham to sit.

“Sir, this changes everything.”

“I know, just don't start making small-talk with it. It doesn't matter where it's from. What matters is how we're going to deal with it now it's here.”

Cunningham took his seat. He looked shaken.

“You'll keep mum, of course.”

“Of course.”

When the older man spoke next, there was a shift in his tone. I heard it distinctly. A step away, a disengagement.

“What are you making these days, Cunningham?” he said.

“Sir?”

“What are you making?” He picked up the basket, undid the fastening and lifted the lid.

“Not enough to marry on, at a guess. Not the way the Company pays.”

The young man swallowed. The older one held out the basket towards him, shook it. Cunningham took it from him, looked absently down inside it.

“We can't take it with us, Cunningham. There'd be no keeping it quiet, who knows what kind of gossip would start to fly around. If we took it back, that'd be two days' journey wasted, there and back again. And I doubt I'd get my money back.”

A moment. The basket hanging limply from Cunningham's hand, forgotten.

“So what are we going to do?” he asked.

“We can't take it with us,” the older man said again.

“I hope you're not suggesting—I couldn't kill her, sir.”

Another silence.

“No.” A pause, a breath. “No. I don't think I could either.”

“Go on, give it a try. You might surprise yourself.”

Their heads slewed back round to look at me. Almost as if they'd already forgotten I could speak, that I could understand what they were saying.

“You shut up,” the older man said.

“You'd be doing me a favour,” I said.

“Keep out of this. I'm trying to think.”

“Something quick and clean would be nice,” I called out. “I'm not so keen on the idea of dying of thirst, and I've had it up to here with flogging—”

“Shut
up
!”

“All right.” I shifted a little on the sand. “Got any baccy?”

They conferred in whispers for what seemed like hours, hunched over the lamp, glancing round my way from time to time. The light grew dim and smoky. Eventually, the desert's
fierce night-time chill wormed into their bones. They lit another lamp and went shivering and, it seemed, still undecided, to their respective tents.

And then, a shadow-puppet show as they undressed for bed, their bent goblin figures projected by the lanterns onto the walls of their tents. Jackets were shrugged off shoulders, holsters unbuckled and laid over the backs of camp chairs. Shirts were unbuttoned, britches stepped out of, nightshirts dropped down over heads. I watched as, in turn, each of them extracted his gun from its harness and slid it under his pillow. I hunched into myself against the cold, my one blanket tugged tightly round me, and watched as bedclothes were drawn back, and the silhouettes folded themselves away flat into their low beds. A few rippling waves of shadow followed as they rearranged their blankets, then one and then the other light blinked off. I waited. The shadows heaved and shifted as one of them turned upon his side. After a little while I heard the first snore.

I heaved myself up onto my feet, dragging my blanket awkwardly over a shoulder. I shuffled up towards the camels, stroked a neck, scratched a tufty forehead with my trussed-up hands. Intransigent, foul-smelling beasts that they were, I'd rather risk their temper and stink than sit shivering the whole night alone. Anyway, I was pretty sure that I stank too. It'd been a long time since I'd last dropped down from the deck of the
Spendlove
and through the water's skin, a long journey from the milk-white water of the mermaids' sea. From Jebb's body in my arms and the smell of his blood on my shirt. The stain was still there, brown as tea, but the smell had faded away. By now the
Spendlove
would be scattered cinders on the ocean floor.

I could not get comfortable. The sand was hard beneath
me. I found myself wondering whether I had been right about Cunningham, whether there had been an interest, a tenderness in him, or if it had just been my imagination. If I'd just wanted it to be that way.

But the camel-smell had a softness to it, a stable-familiarity. Leaning up against her was comforting: her warmth, her heartbeat, the rumble and squelch of her belly.

Something was hanging there in front of me, a ghostly shape in the darkness. I swung my fists out, without thinking. My knuckles hit flesh, a ridge of bone beneath. I heard a muffled yell and someone was stumbling, falling back across the sand. I had been sleeping, I realized. I couldn't remember when it was that I'd last slept. My knuckles smarted.

“Who's there?”

A pale figure unfolded itself from the sand. It moved towards me.

“It's me.”

Cunningham. He'd come, after all. I peered up at him. His face was just a whitish blur in the deep blue night: he was, I realized by the paleness of his form, still dressed in his nightshirt.

“I was asleep,” I said. “You woke me up.”

He hunkered down in front of me, a hand raised to rub his stinging cheek.

“Sorry,” he said. He was speaking in an undertone. “What's your name?”

I'd been right. I almost smiled.

“Malin.” I extended my tied hands as if to be shaken. “Malin Reed, at, it seems, your service.”

He came closer, settled down onto the sand next to me.
He leaned back beside me, against the camel's warm musky flank. She sighed.

“That's an unusual name—” he began. “It's not one I think I've heard before—is that Miss,” he said, “or Mrs., or—”

And then I couldn't help but smile. He wouldn't see, of course, in the darkness; and so he wouldn't, I hoped, realize that I was already three steps ahead of him, and knew precisely where he was going. If anything, that smile, which was not altogether mocking, might warm the words for him when I spoke, might make them sweeter.

“Why do you ask?” I said.

A pause. He said nothing for a moment. Then he sighed.

“I'm so lonely.” A sniff. Deep and wet and, after all that whispering, rather noisy. “I just get so lonely.”

I watched as his head bent down towards the pale angle of his knees and rested there. Another sniff. I raised my eyebrows, shifted a little on the sand. My blanket slipped away, and awkwardly, with knotted fists, I dragged it back, tugged it tighter round me. The movement pressed my shoulder for a moment against his. He was shaking.

“I just get so lonely,”
he said again.

“There there,” I said.

A flurry in the darkness as he raised then shook his head. After a moment I reached out towards him and patted his knee. This wasn't what I'd expected. I'd foreseen the eager untying of my hands and feet, and stumbling across the sand into his tent. Once there, I'd do whatever was necessary. I'd seen where he'd left his pistol: he wasn't to know that I didn't have a clue how to use it. But instead of untying me he was shuffling closer on his backside, leaning up against my shoulder, pushing his face into my neck, making it warm and wet
with tears. I opened my mouth, but was dumbfounded. I could not find a single suitable word to say.

“I don't know,” he was whispering, stumbling over the words, breaking them apart with sobs, gulping in air, “I don't know if I can take it anymore. I can't bear
him
a moment longer. He's a
savage
. And I can't go back. My mother—they're all, they're all expecting me to make something of myself. And even if I did go back, there's still Rose. I don't even
know
her, not really. I've met her perhaps a dozen times, it was madness to propose—but now there's no way out—I have to—I can't bear it—”

By now the edge of my blanket was getting damp. Whilst he was speaking I'd been considering saying something, something like, “Pull yourself together, you think you've got problems,” but as his words broke apart and stumbled off, as they collapsed in the dark, something in me shifted and I found myself softening towards him. He seemed so young. He seemed younger than I'd ever been.

Sitting there, with this boy's wet face pressed into my neck, his convulsions shaking me, I found myself flicking back through all the books I'd read on the
Spendlove
; philosophy, history, theology; hoping to catch upon some useful theory or exemplum to console him with. But any concept I could summon was just a grander, more systematized version of the “pull yourself together” notion which I'd already dismissed: for the time being, he was way beyond pulling himself together.

So I shrugged his head off my shoulder and twisted round to face him. He straightened up, wiped his eyes. His face, his movements, were just vague palenesses in the dark. But I could tell that he was looking at me, I could hear him gulping, stunned by the force of his own misery.

So I kissed him. Not because I thought that he wanted me to, not because I thought that it would make him let me go. I kissed him to console him. I kissed him to quieten him. I kissed him because he was, after all, just a boy.

But the kiss was nice. Soft and warm and slightly fumbly. I found myself leaning into him, my body warming towards him. His hands reached out, touched my waist. I'd thought, I'd been told, I'd believed that no one would ever want to touch me like that again.

“Oh,” he said, when the kiss was over.

“I'm cold,” I said. “Shall we go into your tent?”

And he reached down and began to untie my hands. I watched the movement of his fingers. The knots came free: he shifted to untie my ankles. I stood up and took his hand. And now things were, at last, going to plan.

Though just a boy, he was twice my size: a big strong well-fed child. No need for him to feel anxious about me. He could have snapped me like a corn-dolly, like a piece of biscuit, if he'd wanted to. If he found that he needed to. In the closeness of his tent, his hands were at once hesitant and over-eager: he wanted to kiss, more than anything else, but he also wanted to touch me so much it was as if he'd never touched another person's flesh before. When his fingers found the scarring on my back, a moment's pause was all the question that he asked, and even though I didn't explain, the fact that he hadn't said a word made me feel tenderly towards him. I'd told myself I would do whatever was necessary. In fact I did a good bit more.

He came quickly, lying back among the tumbled blankets of his camp bed, mouth a wide dark hole, startled by the heat and wet and convulsive pleasure of it all.

“I'm sorry—” he said.

And I held back anything that might have sounded like teasing, like a joke: I stroked the hair back off his forehead and kissed him, because he seemed sweet. I lay down at his side on the narrow canvas bed. He kept on taking little gulping breaths, as if about to speak, then failing to find the words, or thinking better of it. Part of me just wanted to stay there stroking his hair, comforting him. To fall asleep beside him. To forget about everything else. But I knew I couldn't think like that. I didn't have much choice. I turned on my side, slipped my fingertips beneath the pillow. I spoke softly, into his ear, to cover any sound my hand might make.

“What do you really want, Cunningham?” I asked him.

For a moment he didn't reply. He turned to look at me.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“If you don't want all that, all that you said, that girl, getting married and everything, what do you want?”

Another moment's pause. His head rolled round again to look up at the night-blued canvas above. I slid my hand further beneath the pillow, searching.

“I don't know—I've never really—” he said.

“Because you really should figure out what you want. It's no good just knowing what you
don't
want—” my fingers found the cool touch of gunmetal. I kept on talking, shifting in the bed, rustling the blankets to cover the noise and movement of my hand. My fingers curled around the smooth warm wood of the pistol butt. “It's none of my business, of course, but it might be worth just sitting down for a while and thinking it through.”

“I suppose—”

“Because it's not fair to marry her you know,” I went on, drawing the pistol down towards me, inch by inch, breath
by breath, “just out of embarrassment. It's not fair on either of you.” I lifted myself up onto an elbow, as if just to look him in the face, and in the same movement drew the gun out from under the pillow to lie beside my chest. “Because, when it comes down to it, life is brief,” I said, lifting the pistol and pressing its barrel to his forehead. “Life is cruelly brief.”

He lay there for just a moment, his young soft body pale in the night, the gun pressing against his forehead, the dark blotches of his eyes fixed upon my face. He lay there looking up at me, and then he began again to cry. Which, again, was not what I had bargained for at all.

Not noisily at first, but insistently, and with an increasing intensity and volume, he cried until his whole body began to shake again, and he was shuddering and sniffing and sobbing phlegmily, and I was sure the other one would waken, hear, and come running in to help him.