The Mermaid's Child (8 page)

“Can I come with you?”

He looked down at me looking up. The lines on his face mapped out, I thought, a whole world of experience.

A long moment passed.

“What do they call you?” he asked.

My mouth was dry. The word felt strange on my lips:

“Malin,” I said. “Malin Reed.”

“Malin.”

He seemed to consider this a moment, to weigh it up. Then he said:

“It's not what you think it is, you know. It's never what it seems to be.”

I nodded, alert only for a yes or no, happy to accept this, happy to accept anything. I told myself it would all make sense, when we knew each other, when we were travelling
together, when I'd been to all the places he had been. I looked up at him, witless and tenterhooked.

“All right then, young Malin,” he said, and I felt a smile begin to broaden across my cheeks, “if that's the way it is, you can come along.”

For a while I was so dizzy with excitement that just following him required me to be conscious of each step as it was made, to concentrate on the flexing of each knee, the lifting of each foot, the necessary swing of each hip in turn. His easy lope, half a pace ahead, made me all the more aware of my ungainly eagerness. I couldn't see his face. Above us, the stars were bright. A breeze, the first one that summer it seemed, caught at my hair. Clouds scudded, gathered above, tumbling across the stars. The breeze stiffened and grew sharp. The night darkened, the clouds thickening and curtaining the moon. At the road's bend I turned to take a last look at the sleeping village, and thought of my grandmother. She'd said I was too much for her. She'd said Uncle George would straighten me out. Well he hadn't.

And as I stood there, looking back, something passed swiftly before my face, hit the road in front of me with a thwack. I glanced round at the stranger: he too had stopped and turned to look. Something fell again, just over to my left. Then something else, further off, towards the village. I squinted into the dark, at the outlines of the public, the schoolhouse, the shambling cottages. Suddenly, a precise but painless blow to my collarbone, and an instantaneous cold, which rolled over the round of my shoulder, ran down my chest, lingered in the linen of my shirt.

“It's raining,” I said, unbelievingly.

A low growl of thunder, another whipcord lash of wind, and the heavens opened.

I don't know who laughed first. I remember seeing him push back his hat, his mouth open with a great shout of laughter, his eyes closed to let the rain run over his face, and I found myself thinking of his nakedness, his honey-coloured skin. I remember him turning to me, laughing, and me laughing too and being surprised that I was laughing so naturally, so comfortably, with him, and him putting an arm around my waist, and the cold wet linen of my father's shirt pressed against my skin. And him lifting me off my feet and spinning me round and the water falling all around us and the darkness blurring, and the breath squeezed out of me and still the laughter. That was the first time I had ever been kissed, and it is typical of me that I should spend that moment in which his body was first pressed against my own, just thin wet fabric between his limbs and mine, his hand on the small of my back and his lips wet with rain on my lips, thinking how badly I must have stank.

SIX
 

I loped through the downpour at his heel, not hunched and collar-turned against the wet, but loose-jointed, shoulders low. After that kiss, the rain fell on me like a blessing. As I walked, I licked the water off my lips, tasted the bitterness and salt of unwashed skin. I blinked away the rain-smear from my eyes, pushed the hair back from my forehead, and lifted my face to the heavens. I felt cocksure, expansive, light-of-heart. I was glad to be alive.

Beneath the falling rain, the villagers slept on, unaware of the puttering of water onto slates, of the quiet gathering of puddles outside their back doors. In the morning, they would wake to find the world transformed; muddied, damp, and unfamiliar. They would step outside, lift their faces to the cool sky, tears gathering in the crooks of their eyes and rain running down their skin. And in their rapture, they would not
forget to bless this extraordinary man, whose doing it must have, somehow, been.

And Uncle George, who would wake to a house empty of all but vermin, who would thump downstairs headachy, parched and farting, to find the bar room untidied, the floor unswept, and a barricade of dirty glasses on the kitchen table. He would call for me, thinking me just out-of-sight, and be answered only by the scratch of mice behind the wainscot. Then he would shout, lifting his voice to the low ceiling, his anger growing as, in his drink-muddied mind, an image began to form of me still upstairs in bed among tangled sweaty sheets. But he would hear nothing back; not even the surprised clatter of distant feet coming to his call. So he would curse, snatch up a glass from the table, and throw it at the wall. And only as he turned away from the shards and sparks that skittered out across the floor, considering what he would do with me when he finally found me, would he notice that the back door was standing open, and feel the cool breath of weatherchange on his thick old skin, and see that it was raining.

“My mother was a mermaid,” I said, by way of introduction.

“Oh really.”

“She left us. She went back to her own people.”

The rummaging of branches overhead, the creak of limb on limb in wind. We walked into a deeper dark where the rain fell in fewer, fatter drops, leaf-gathered. Above, the canopy was cacophonous with birds.

“They always do.”

“Mermaids?” I stopped dead. He kept on walking. I ran to catch up with him. “You know about them? You'd know where to find her?”

The road was rising: I felt running water tug my feet. A stitch pinched at my side. I knew, though I couldn't see anything but him, and he was just a grainy flicker of movement to my left and a lightness where his collar curled above his jacket, that I was in a place that I had never seen: from the village, the track disappeared beneath these trees. The thought made the hairs stand on the nape of my neck. The air sang in my chest.

“I know a few places you could try,” he said.

I stopped again. The stranger walked on without a break in his stride, without turning his head. I stared after him a moment, or rather at the darkness where he'd been. I could hear him walking on though the murk, water sluicing round his legs, stones clattering out from underneath his feet. My mouth was opening on some still unformulated question, and I was just breaking into a run to catch up with him again when my foot snagged on something and I went flying.

He caught me. An arm across my chest, winding me.

“All right?” he asked, setting me back on my feet.

I nodded, hadn't got the breath to answer him.

“Not far now,” he said, “Not far to the watershed.”

And he set off again into the dark. I followed him unevenly, gasping, looking forward to the watershed. We'd rest in there awhile, I thought. Perhaps we'd stay the night.

We had come out from underneath the trees: it was a little lighter, and the rain fell more gently. Underfoot, the angle of the climb grew shallow, the water's tug less fierce. Soon, we were walking on flat ground.

And I realized that the rain had stopped.

I wiped my face. A fullish moon had risen out of nowhere. Its pale light picked out the road in front of us, twisting away into the distance, serpentine, declining, dry. To left and right,
the darkness of moorland heaved up towards a cloudless, starry sky. Blonde grasses rustled gently in the breeze. My clothes were sticking to my skin, dripping: my skin bristled with goosepimples. A droplet rolled down my nose, hung, then fell into the open throat of my shirt.

But the rain had stopped.

He had stopped too. His face, shadowed by the hatbrim, was unreadable. I glanced round over my shoulder, back the way we'd come. I could still hear the rain thwacking down onto foliage, splashing into standing water, trickling away in rivulets downhill. I stretched a hand back into the dark behind me, and three drops landed there in quick succession, soft and heavy. I took a step back, and the rain was falling thick and fast and cold, drenching through the skin-warmed wetness of my shirt. I lifted my face up to the sky, spiralled slowly round, open-mouthed. I turned back to him, and stood there a moment, just looking at him.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

He pushed up his hatbrim and stood looking at me for a long moment, but even so I still couldn't quite read his expression. A slight shake of the head perhaps. Perhaps half a smile.

“C'mon,” he said, and turned to go. “You'll catch your death.”

I stepped out of the rain, into the dry.

I stayed at his heel, always half a pace behind. As we walked I was vividly conscious of the sigh of his breath, the creak of his bootleather, the crunch of his footfalls. The moors reared up above us. The air was cool with mist. From high up and to the left came a distant reedy birdcall, a kind I'd never heard before, and I caught the sweet wild smell of honey.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Nowhere,” he said.

“It's lovely.”

It must have been hours, miles, that we walked that night. We crossed becks, running fast and shallow across the track, cutting down through the turf, and when we crouched to cup water to our mouths it tasted like the smell of currant bushes. I drank, squatting there on the gravel beside him, conscious of his crouching presence, his lips open to his cupped hand. Once, straightening, I found my legs had stiffened, become weak and heavy, and as we walked on my feet seemed just to swing out ahead of me volitionless, like plumblines. Blisters began to burn my feet. And then came the cold; slyly incremental, relentless. No matter how often I reminded myself to keep my shoulders down, to keep my back straight, to step out, no matter how persuasive were my recollections of hot sun freckling my face, warm slate step on the back of my legs, or winter fires crackling on the sandstone hearth, there was no getting round it. I was frozen. I wrapped my arms around myself to hold back the shivers, but this pressed my wet shirt against my skin. I let go, but then the night air slipped in around my body. Jaw clamped tight, stumbling along, flapping my arms around me like some giant waterbird, I became absorbed in the kernel of warmth inside, focused on the slight ripples of comfort that followed each shiver.

I didn't notice the sun rise, or hear the dawn chorus. I wasn't going to complain, wasn't going to show any weakness. I wasn't going to make him regret, even for a moment, that he had brought me with him. So I just stumbled on, still half a pace behind the stranger, wondering if he would never stop, if we would keep on walking until I crumpled in on myself like a struck tent and lay where I fell, shivering, unnoticed, while he strode on ahead, believing, if indeed he gave it any thought
at all, that I was still there, still half a pace behind him, following at his heels. I glanced up and caught him looking round at me. I tried to smile. He laughed.

“You look fit to drop,” he said.

He glanced up beyond me, up the empty moorside.

“Best get you sorted out.”

And he set off uphill through the heather. As far as I could see, there was nothing up there but a sheer rise, a patch of broken-stemmed bracken and a stand of gorse bushes, and after that the sky. But I sucked in a breath, gritted my teeth and set off after him, following like a balloon tugged along on a string.

It was a difficult climb, that hundred yards or so up the hillside, footsnared and stumbling in the heath. As I passed the gorse I was engulfed by its sudden thick cloud of scent. When, some years afterwards, I first encountered a coconut, I found myself transported by the perfume of its unexpected milk, its blue-white flesh, back to that shivering stumble through the moors. Coconuts, to me, will always smell of gorse.

Behind the gorse stand there was a dip in the moorland, where the hill gathered itself a moment before taking another leap towards the sky. And here he'd stopped and slid his knapsack from his shoulder, and I almost stumbled into him.

“This'll do,” he said.

I saw nothing but a dip in the ground, an overcrop of rock. I didn't like to ask about the watershed.

“Sit yourself down,” he said. “Soon get you warm.”

I made to sit, but found that I couldn't. Everything seemed to have locked solid. I stood swaying, looking down the length of my uncooperative legs, past the black scuffed leather of my clogs, to gaze at the soft mossy turf. It looked so
comfortable I could have cried. Then I felt his hands pressing against my ribcage, under my arms.

“Here,” he said. “I'll help you.”

I glanced up at him, thinking he was laughing at me, but his face was all sympathy and seriousness. He took my weight and lowered me, stiff-legged, down onto the ground. I whimpered: I couldn't help myself. He straightened up and turned away. I just sat there, my legs stretched bolt out in front of me, looking down at my feet, and it was wonderful just to be still. Each specific pain, each throb and cramp and chafe, sang out through the fog of overall discomfort. I was conscious of his presence as he moved around, but only vaguely. I was preoccupied by the deep structural ache within my feet, by the burning tackiness where the skin had been worn away. It would be wonderful if I could just lean forward, reach down and untie the laces, ease off my clogs. But it wasn't worth the fight against the tightness of my muscles, it wasn't worth giving up being still just to do that. And it would be even more wonderful if I could be warm. If the shivers would just melt and the goosepimples smooth themselves away. And then something dense dropped round my shoulders: his jacket, dry inside, and still warm from his body. I reached up a hand and held it closed around my throat, and dipping my nose down into the collar, smelt leather. I shivered, felt the shiver warm my flesh, the jacket catch the warmth and hold it to me. I heard the hiss of grass, of heather rustling as it grazed against his boots and trouserlegs, I heard the clean snap of dry wood, the tear of greensticks, the click of stone on stone. A pause, a breath held, the scrape and silence as he struck a light and held it to the kindling. And then the first cough of smoke. I looked up. A flame begin to curl itself around a parched gorse twig, to lick at the tip of a thorn. Crouched, intent and precise,
his face half cold in the morning light, half aglow from the fire, he fed uprooted heather stems into the flame.