by Sarah Winman
I don’t think I’ve ever met a mermaid before, said Drake.
How would you know? They don’t advertise, said Marvellous.
What else do they do? he said.
Who?
Mermaids.
What do you mean what do they do? They swim.
Don’t they sing and comb their hair?
I think you’ll find they’re rather more accomplished than that.
That’s what the books say, isn’t it?
Rumour.
Luring sailors to their deaths?
Rumour, said Marvellous a little more emphatically, and she filled two mugs with warm rum and ale and shuffled back to the bed.
Here, she said.
Drake took the mug and drank gratefully. Where do you live? he asked.
In the caravan. Out there.
Drake craned his neck towards the window. It was a tarry tarry night.
You won’t see it, said Marvellous. It’s too dark for your eyes. You’ve still got city eyes.
Drake fell back against the pillows. He took a drag of his cigarette and flicked ash into a scallop shell the old woman had left for that use. Did your mother come from round here? he asked.
No, no, no. She lived off the coast of Lady Island in South Carolina. America, she said with emphasis. My father went to a house one night for a ball, and she was standing in a nearby street surrounded by men. He said it was as if she punctured his skin and entered his veins and swam directly to his heart. I don’t think he got out much.
Marvellous lifted her mug and steam rose and misted her glasses.
Did they stay there? asked Drake.
No. My father brought her back to London where he thought differences could be hidden. They took a house by the river and lived in a world that straddled the two, half dry half damp. Over time, though, my mother became unhappy because the Thames was dirty and people said she was dirty too. She became sad and lonely and took to midnight swims amongst the tugs. Her eyes became infected. I think she probably cried too much.
Marvellous finished her ale. Are you all right? she said.
Drake nodded. Smoked the last of his cigarette and stubbed it out.
You look very pale, said Marvellous. Seem tired all of a sudden.
Maybe, said Drake, and he shifted down the bed. Marvellous leant across and adjusted his pillows. She pulled the blanket up to his neck and made sure his feet were tucked in at the bottom. She had a vague memory of someone doing that for her when she was small. She began to button up her jacket.
Where are you going? he asked.
Back to my caravan.
Don’t go. Stay, he said.
Three words, beautiful. The old woman sat back down. So? she said into the silence.
Drake placed his hand across his forehead. Just keep talking, will you?
What about?
Anything, said Drake.
What sort of anything?
Your parents. There you go.
What about them? she said.
Did they stay in London?
Oh no. My father gave my mother a hand-drawn map of the Cornish Peninsula and said I’ll meet you here. Well, my mother arrived before him, of course, because she was half fish, and when she came across this sheltered creek and saw ramsons and bluebells sprouting from the mud, she knew instinctively that it would be her home.
Days later when my father arrived at the confluence, my mother leapt out of the water with her hands across her rounded belly and said, She’s coming soon! – Me, obviously. She knew I was a she by the way I swam inside her. Boys swim in circles.
Drake nodded wearily.
My father had money and bought everything he could see – land, river, chapel, too – and he built this boathouse, and they collected food from the shore and every high water night or day, that sacred time when the river stills, they swam; because that’s what mermaids do. And then sometime in – and Marvellous thought hard for a moment – in 1858, I believe, I slipped out like an eel and surfaced in a ripple of light, where my first breath was scented with the sweetness of wild honeysuckle. I had feet not fins, my father’s brow and my mother’s eyes. But, more importantly, I had my mother’s heart. I never met her, though. She was shot just after my birth. I think someone mistook her for a seal.
Jesus, said Drake.
Marvellous shrugged. You should sleep, she said.
No, wait a minute, he said. Tell me. What did your father do when your mother died?
What did he do? He stopped breathing, said Marvellous.
He died?
No, he stopped breathing.
Died?
Are you doing this on purpose?
Doing what?
I said he stopped breathing. There’s a difference, you know. It was as if a blade had shucked his heart like an oyster and stolen the beauty within. He said his heart never started beating again, it just started working and I never understood the difference, not until I was much older anyway, when I learnt that coming back from the dead is not quite the same as coming back to life. Know what I mean?
And she stuffed her thinking pipe with black twist and held a match above the bowl, and said nothing more. She waited for night to take him and it took him swiftly and deeply. His head tilted back and snores became soft growls. She rested her hand across his brow and whispered good night. She didn’t leave straight away, sat and watched the rise and fall of his sleep.
18
Drake slept soundly throughout the following day and only awoke at the handover of sun to moon when the old woman staggered through the door and placed the pot of steamed mussels and cockles on to the crane above the fire. The smell was divine and his hunger was ragged. He was feeling stronger he could tell, but the old woman looked weaker.
They ate the river stew with stale bread that became less stale in the salty broth. When the shells had been sucked clean, and the bowls wiped clean, old Marvellous took out a small bottle of sloe gin and filled her glass and downed it in one. Her cheeks began to glow. She slipped off her glasses and rubbed her eyes and they squeaked because they were so dry.
Are you all right? asked Drake.
Marvellous nodded and refilled her glass. Tonight I’m old, she said. Most of my life I’ve felt like spring but now I’m winter.
May I? said Drake and he reached over and smelt her glass. Sloe gin, he said.
Make it myself, and she raised the glass to her lips. It usually helps.
To feel young?
She smiled. No, to remember, she said.
Drake drank his ale. I was wondering, he said. Your mother. Was she buried over there? and he pointed to the church and cluster of gravestones.
Oh no, said Marvellous. You don’t bury mermaids. They go back to the sea. My father carried her into the river when the waters were high and on the turn. He said a rogue wave came towards him crested by gold, and the wave enveloped them and the waters unpeeled my mother from his grip and carried her back to the warmer seas of her people and her birth.
And what happened to you afterwards?
To me?
Yes, he said.
Oh. I was sent to London to be brought up by my father’s sister and her husband. It was quite clear by then that my father could barely look after himself, let alone a baby.
Where did you go?
I don’t remember. But we lived in a big house and there was little light but a lot of God, and so many things. And they gave me everything a child could want including a new name that I didn’t want: Ethel.
You’re not an Ethel, I think.
No, I’m not, am I? Anyway, I didn’t see my father again until I was ten years old. It was like meeting a stranger, albeit one who had the same smile.
What kind of l
ife had he had? asked Drake.
I suppose I’d have to base a lot on speculation.
I won’t hold you to anything.
That would be a good thing, said the old woman, and she nodded her thanks. She said, From what I gathered – and this is the speculation part – my father went through quite a transformation after my mother’s death. He was a man who, up until then, had not even been known for rudeness. But overnight he became a man full of hate, and most of all, his hatred was for God. Which in truth, I believe, was really a hatred for his father, who was a strict man, very religious, who later became a doctor. No doubt thinking that with feet firmly planted in both camps, salvation could be secured.
Marvellous sipped her gin and smoked her pipe. Where was I? she asked.
God . . . ? Medicine . . . ? Your fath—
Ah yes. Well, either of those two pathways my father was expected to take.
So which one did he choose?
Neither. Choice didn’t really come into it. On one hand he was scared of God and on the other he was scared of blood. He took his inheritance and fled to sea. Made a fortune. Indigo.
So when he woke up one morning and had as his first sight a House of God, you can imagine, it near destroyed him. Kindness made him angry. The sight of the first bluebells made him seethe. And every day at the close of day when the world stilled, the utter emptiness of life alone filled him with dread. So he prayed for a sign from my mother, prayed night and day for permission to end his life.
Did it come? asked Drake.
No, said Marvellous. What came instead was permission to live. One morning, he was awoken by a fearful sound coming from the coast. He headed towards the shore thinking a large steamer had run aground, but what he found when he got to the sea was the sight of a large grampus whale wedged between the rocks, tearing off its own skin in the instinctive fight to free itself. That was the sign my father needed, and the following morning he locked up the boathouse and what little remained of his heart, and he took to the road.
Three hours into the journey the rain hammered down. A mile later a double rainbow appeared over the sea. He felt no hatred, no bitterness, he noticed. Just awe. And the first pangs of what he would eventually describe as freedom.
Miles of road became inscribed on his soles, dirt grass moor and sand, a whole history of the Peninsula laid down one on top of the other, like fossils, like prayers. He walked across to Michael’s Mount, around its periphery and walked back undisturbed by an encroaching tide. He walked to the Land’s End, across the jagged cliffs. He often slept standing up, lodged against a wall, his legs twitching, dreaming their own walking dreams. Daybreak he kept on walking, never stopped to have a conversation, a raise of the hat maybe, a quick hello, but those legs never stopped moving.
He covered two thousand miles and had walked the periphery of that county six times. It had taken him nine years. He had seen eclipses and pilot whales. He had seen ships turn into wrecks, raging waves swallow men whole. He learnt from the old wise women who traded in ancient secrets and ways, and from them he tasted herbs and learnt what made him better, what made him ill. He learnt to find fresh water when the landscape told him there was none, and he learnt to deliver the dying. And only then, after those years of seeing so much, did his legs finally stop. He took breath at an ancient stone at the edge of the land and watched the sun fall to earth, and knew it was the end of something, and I think he would have said that something was grief.
And as the sky turned gold he felt the most glorious contentment wash over him. And he thought, Somewhere between God and Medicine there is a place for me. And he put that thought in the small shell box around his neck – this shell box, she said, lifting the one around her own neck. And that’s when he slept, she said. When his legs slept. You see, he had finally caught up with his calling. He had refound his purpose. And that meant he could live.
That’s when he brought me back from London. He had bought the gypsy caravan by then and an old dray horse and we travelled the length and breadth of the Peninsula together. In the villages and hamlets he was called upon night or day to sit with the dying. I went too and learnt from him.
I watched him whisper words – usually words that came to him there in the moment, or sometimes words from the Bible if the family requested it. And I watched him administer herbs, and he took their pain, and they thanked him by passing on unencumbered. In those early days, little money changed hands; he was offered food, drink instead. When there was no work we ate what nature provided, and it provides much. The gossips revered him.
What were the gossips? asked Drake.
Village women, said Marvellous. They were the ones who often delivered babies or mourned for the dead, they were the attendees anyway, and they called him to prepare the laying-out, whilst I went with them and learnt about the lying-in, the giving birth.
You delivered babies? asked Drake.
No, no, not at first. Years later I did, but then I just helped to boil water, and to lay out the sheets, and sometimes to tie the cord. But I watched and listened and learnt. Many died, that’s what I learnt. It wasn’t clean then, Drake, you see. Cuffs weren’t clean and sleeves weren’t rolled up. Noses weren’t clean and in the depth of winter they dripped. They didn’t understand how important it was to keep things clean.
Sometimes the dying begged for more time and that was the hardest, and my father would send me out under the cloak of night to release lobsters from their pots, to release lambs and pigs and rabbits from imminent slaughter. Buying life for life, he called it, bargaining with an unseen fate that played his cards too close to his chest. In many ways it was idyllic. Threatened, but idyllic.
Why threatened? asked Drake.
Because it was only a matter of time before the pain he swallowed whole bedded down and nestled somewhere warm until it grew like yeast. He kept little from me except the swelling in his legs. I kept little from him except the fear of our parting.
We need to turn back now, my love, was what he said the day he knew our adventure was over. And at the age of fourteen, I turned the dray round and made my way back to my father’s past.
He was asleep when we arrived back into St Ophere. It was day but he was asleep. I secured the wagon and allowed the horse to wander amongst the trees. I had never been inside the boathouse, and the bolt was easy to pry away, the wood being so rotten. But ten years of damp had rusted the hinges and swollen the door and a violent kick was the only way to gain access to my parents’ private world.
It was so tidy, with little within. The bed was made, as if it had never been slept in. And there were candelabras by the bed. And by the hearth. Red rugs carried a hue of green where mould had settled in the woollen pattern. But what I remember most was that it was a world of two: two chairs, two glasses, two bowls. I felt like a trespasser and not the natural product of their love.
Drake pointed to the soot-smudged outline above the fireplace. What used to be there? he said.
I don’t know, said Marvellous. Something my father couldn’t live with?
A painting?
Yes, I suppose it was. I never asked and he never said and in the end everything was quick.
The old woman reached for her glass. Three days, that was all it took, Drake. On the third and final night, a bright light shone from my father’s body. And in the sublime peace of his face, I saw my mother waiting for him.
I had never seen my mother’s face, and had longed beyond all longing to one day see it. I still do, in fact – that is a desire that age hasn’t softened – because that night her face was hidden, covered by the thick tress of her dark hair. But I knew it was her because she used words like mine and daughter and her breath was of the sea.
My father said to her: Hello my love. You’ve come back to me.
My mother said: I never left.
And in those
three words was a lifetime.
He said: Shall we go then?
And they both turned to me and they said: Can you let us go, do you think?
And I could say nothing. I raised my hand, a feeble attempt at a wave, I think. But I could say nothing. Because I was fourteen years old and all I wanted to say was, Please. Don’t go.
19
The next night, Drake waited for her. He waited for the old woman but she didn’t come. The birds quietened, the river emptied, the night passed, and she didn’t come.
He fed the hearth a solid pile of sappy logs and they seemed to eat all oxygen from the room and he felt suffocated; couldn’t even eat the salty broth left over from the night before. He lifted the water jug and filled the basin, splashed his neck and face, but still his mind wouldn’t clear. He stood on the balcony; the candle flickered in the church opposite. Maybe he should go out and look for her in case something had happened? He went to the front door and opened it. The cold air pounced on him, fed off him as if he were prey. The trees swayed and the clouds raced north and the need for light was the rarest ache. There was nothing out there but loneliness. He closed the door swiftly. Nothing out there but the sad pull of Missy Hall.
After it had happened, after she’d gone, he’d run. Hadn’t even waited for the police, couldn’t face their questions nor their contempt: What do you mean you couldn’t reach her? How hard did you try, eh? How hard did you really try?
He didn’t even go back to her lodging house, heels took off on the wings of guilt and fear. Right along the Embankment all the way to Westminster he ran, kidding himself he was still searching for her, scouring the shingled banks and incoming tide for a body, at least. But he just wanted to get away from it, as far from the horror as he could.
And then as night had fallen, he had wandered aimlessly through the dark with sodden trousers and his pathetic suitcase of possessions, retracing every minutiae of their day looking for a clue, an open door she may have stepped through instead of the one leading to her grave.