I did not really know what to do, and it was in this strange ignorance that I found true liberation, my own version of spontaneity. I strode towards her, hoping that some other force would take over, then I stumbled with a motion that was somehow both deliberate and accidental, stumbled as if I had twisted my ankle, and felt the water hit my chest as I fell to my knees and continued to walk. I felt wonderful. My stiffness and self-consciousness had become receptiveness and sensitivity. Gwendoline slipped through the rolling water towards me like a tiger. She had been quite right about me being able to feel the friction better like this. The water had become alive, electrified with currents of communication between us. She began to swim around me, and I joined her. It would be near useless for me to describe what we did, for, as she had suggested, the greater part of the playing was in the tantalising contact of two minds. I was naked, as I have said, and I felt that with her, who had no human lower portions, my nakedness took on an entirely different meaning than it would have with another human being.
Her radiance bathed me, enveloped me: this was when I really began to understand her, her humour, her subtlety, her depth. Sometimes, when I saw her great glittering tail around me, and the flash of its beautiful fin, I felt an icy fear as if I were in the water with a shark, and then I remembered that the tail was attached to a woman’s body and the fear was translated into a curious wondering thrill and affection.
After my clowning woodenness and my blissful smiling shyness had been met by her expansive girlishness and her mystery, after the pouring out of myself, the accent and manners of all I was, the gentle bowing of my spirit blessed by her foreign amusement and wrapped in the blanket of feeling that shone from her pink flesh, she came closer, now, with giggling familiarity. She laid her hands on me and we stopped moving. She was trying out her English.
‘Please close your eyelips.’
‘I think you mean eyelids.’
‘No, surely they are more like lips, lips of the mouths that devour what you see, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t believe so. Anyway, you really only have to say “close your eyes”.’
‘Close your eyes, then.’
I did so and felt the gratuitous gift of female affection, that most undeserved and luxurious of all things, as Gwendoline pressed her lips to my cheek. I was gorgeously startled and immediately opened my eyes again. Gwendoline’s eyes were rolled up into their corners, showing their whites, as dazzling as sunshine, as delicious as ice-cream. Her mouth was still on my face, like a baby blowing mischievously against the flesh of a parent, pretending to eat them. It was a moment of brightness. If she had been more human I would have said Gwendoline was a star, and this was such a moment of stardom as when Marilyn Monroe stood above the grill with her dress blowing around her. It is a moment that I still remember with a lacerating jolt, like lightning, because I suddenly realised I had been out of my depth in love for quite some time.
But Gwendoline was not human, and the concept of romance is too tame and artificial really to apply to her. I must be wary not to delude myself on this score. This whole experience has taught me that the human looking portion of Gwendoline, which spoke to me in the Sunken Tongue and in English, was the merest tip of an iceberg.
This state of affairs persisted for some time. I would join Gwendoline in the pool I had made for her, and we would play together. All this time I would be overwhelmed by the whelk-like smoothness and perfection of her beauty, her flesh riding the water like sea foam. ‘Playing’ is a peculiarly appropriate word, for it soon occurred to me that I had found the ideal love that had been missing from my childhood. This non-existent childhood love had come to attain a sort of ghostly shadow existence in my mind, its unreality adding to its elusive beauty, so that I actually looked back on its phantom with a wistful nostalgia. Now, in later life, this story-book love had come back to me more fully than I could have imagined. The essential components of this love were that it had no object to it other than itself—we were not thinking of our future together, making plans—there was no actual consummation involved. It was in a way sexless, as sexless as two children holding hands and kissing and stringing daisies together. Just as children have no sense of impending future and see no need of having any point or any movement in a love affair, neither did we.
When we were sated with the exhausting and unspeaking joy of our play we would talk, and our talk was more relaxed than previously. I learnt much from Gwendoline about the habitations of merfolk. Just as with humans, those habitations varied, but Gwendoline herself had come from a great city or kingdom beneath the seabed. It was a city whose walls, ramps, bridges were all made of sparkling striated stone such as chalcedony and lapis lazuli. Its highest level was a complex of canals. Only here did some of the buildings such as the magnificent palace, emerge from the water. Most of the city was a hive of interconnected chambers below these canals. The city had an ingenious and vastly intricate system of aqueducts which maintained the freshness of the brine and which supplied the amazing fountains and water gardens of the palace, floating in the centre of the city like a great water-lily. The aqueducts had often sucked in creatures from the outer ocean, so that the chambers and thoroughfares of the city supported a variety of life. Indeed, so ancient was the city that some of the species that lived there could be found nowhere else. More intricate even than the aqueducts was the city’s bureaucracy, whose function was to observe the ponderous age-old ceremonial that formed the city’s solemn equivalent of law, order and religion.
The thought of a whole city down there, crowded with merfolk, wriggling, swarming, shoaling, bathing, playing, spawning, filled me with emotions hard to name. Awe, wonder and admiration were mixed with something like fascinated disgust. Out of those thousands, millions, one magical being had distinguished herself by becoming a part of my life. I found it hard to imagine certain aspects of the life of the city as described to me by Gwendoline. For instance, I could not understand how the scribes she sometimes referred to could keep records, since any paper was obviously useless underwater. This, however, was easily explained. Records of all kinds were kept. Those of greatest historical and religious significance were carved in stones of one variety or another. Then there were other records that were scratched on the treated hides of octopi with special styluses to make huge books or scrolls. There were even books made of a bright, shining, unrusting alloy which could be beaten leaf-thin and maintain great strength. Another matter that puzzled me was how merfolk, lacking legs, managed to get about in a city. Those portions of it that were submerged I could understand, but what about the surface layer with its bridges and towers? When I asked about this, Gwendoline explained that, where human cities might have stairs or walkways, the merfolk’s city might utilise its system of aqueducts to create an aqueous thoroughfare, or otherwise a hydraulic lift might be implemented. I began to imagine all sorts of weird constructions making water do impossible things, like some print by M.C. Escher—waterfall escalators and splashing helixes. And then Gwendoline hinted to me too that the variety of form amongst merfolk would probably surprise me. It seemed to me, from Gwendoline’s descriptions, that any human visiting the city would probably go mad with wonder at its teeming brilliance.
As afternoon was turning into evening, one day, we were sitting by the edge of the cliffs, looking out on the ocean, its waves like battered metal curving almost convex to the vagueness of the horizon. Gwendoline looked different in sunlight, her flesh seeming to glow from within like the tottering heads of buttercups in a field. She was actually dangling her long tail over the edge, where it occasionally flapped against the dry rocks whose grooves and irregularities looked like the bitten core of an apple. Her scales had taken on tones that were almost purple, like the local heather, brought out like shadows by the slowly sinking sun. The Sunken Tongue had paled in the bright day, yet everything had become silvered by it, made vivid and strangely warped. Our blanched, echoless words took their place in the slow warming afternoon like old
legends, while lizards basked on stones.
Gwendoline seemed to be searching the waves for something. She pointed.
‘Over there, by that spar of rock, there is a deep shaft that sinks straight down. There are many sharp rocks sticking out from its sides. When you get to the bottom, if you didn’t know it was there, you probably wouldn’t find the tunnel. It would probably just look like a gouge in the rocks. But if you go under the lip that hangs down you can see that it goes on and on, and there are bright tame fish there and sea anemones. Many, many centuries ago it was the exit to one of our mines. Our ancestors deliberately cultivated luminous weeds and creatures to populate it, to make it lighter, although we have very good vision in darkness. You can follow the tunnel to caverns where there were great excavations, although the tunnel is very neglected now, with lots of dips and twists and piles of rocks. Sometimes it is very narrow. More tunnels lead from the caverns to the city, which is further out in the sea, deep down. We hardly ever use it now, but when I was very young, hundreds of years ago now, I ran away from home through the mines. It was so strange, all those tunnels and huge caverns so empty, even though I could sense a sort of presence there, like warmth in the water. You could say the mines are haunted. They have been tamed by the merfolk, and you can tell it is one of our places I suppose, the same must be true in the human world. You can tell when humans have been in a wild place. But perhaps to a human our places in the sea wouldn’t seem tame at all, only different. Anyway, I remember the feeling. It fascinated me. It was scary and comforting at the same time, a place haunted and tame—haunted because it was tame. When I went back home—you see, I hadn’t been serious about running away, it was a sort of game I’d got carried away with—I was so excited about my discovery that I never forgot it, and every so often I would return. It is strange to think the place is so near. It seems so far away now.’
I looked at Gwendoline’s face as she said this. She seemed to have grown wistful. I was suddenly jealous of her past, her memories and secrets, all the eerie sea-haunts that to her were familiar, that, however novel I might prove, had an older and more secure footing in her heart than I, and for that reason would outlast me. I would never be a part of that world. Never. I stared at the strangeness of her beauty, that attracted and excluded, that kept her forever heartbreakingly unknown, and lowered my head in shame as I felt a hook of pain in my chest and a tear crept furtively from the corner of my eye.
Of course, I could not avoid questioning whether Gwendoline wanted to leave, to return to her freedom and her heart’s home. But I questioned myself only, questioned silently. If I had truly loved her, surely I should have let her go! Isn’t that the lightness and courage of true love? And by letting her go, I would never have really lost her? I thought these things even then, but instead of light there was darkness, instead of courage, fear. I gave into these things and did not dare ask Gwendoline how she felt, did not dare offer to carry her back to the waves, for fear she would have accepted my offer. Surely, though I tried to deny it, even then I must have known what I was doing, must have known I was choosing darkness as that tear squeezed out of my eye.
As Gwendoline sat, her arms to either side, leaning on her palms, I almost expected her to launch herself from her seat and dive, tail undulating, into the waves below. I thought that nothing could be more beautiful than such a sight. I almost wished for it to happen, then prayed that it would not. It was that excruciating, laughing beauty, which even in imagination touched my heart like fingers of light, that the darkness would descend on and cover forever.
After that, I realised time was an issue. Gwendoline had mentioned centuries in reference to her own life, so perhaps she could be patient. Yet somehow, there seemed to be a restlessness inherent in our very situation, in what, for me, at least, had become passion. The status quo could not continue indefinitely.
I carried Gwendoline back into the cottage, quite as if I were the one in control of everything, whilst quietly I was awed and amazed that she was still with me and had not leapt to freedom. And only after I had placed her once more in her pool, only then, after I had considered mermaids and my own erotic tastes separately for so long, I realised that the mermaid was the ultimate symbol of my own desire. And it was, above all else, because of her tail! Hadn’t I always been attracted by a certain smoothness that suggested there was nothing there? I thought about my fetish for underwear, and realised this tail was the ultimate underwear, a shimmering, concealing sheath that could not be removed. I thought of the girl in the untitled print, her vacant smoothness, and knew that the mermaid’s tail was smoother still, tapering to more exquisite nothingness. That tail was the elusiveness that inflamed desire, precluding all consummation, all possession, leaving only the strange, unpeaking ecstasy of longing. Previously, I had seen Gwendoline’s tail almost as a symbol of the chastity of our relationship. Without knowing it I had regarded it almost with repulsion, which sobering influence had allowed our relationship to be sexless and ideal. Now her tail had become something absolutely opposite in my eyes. Repulsion had turned into lust and chastity into a tease, a tantalisation.
These curious notions had already taken a firm hold of me as I left Gwendoline alone in the attic. My features became set, I turned my back on the shadowy space and descended the wooden stairs, closing the trap door behind me. Instead of Gwendoline’s company I was grimly seeking solitude for the sake of a lonely act. In seeking to possess Gwendoline more intimately I had left her a virtual prisoner in the attic and headed for a separate room of my own. Furtive as a spy, and not without a trace of irony playing around my lips, I walked past the rows of bizarre pictures that line the walls of my cottage and shut myself in the bathroom.
For the first time I fantasised about Gwendoline, firing myself up by committing deliberate sacrilege upon the idealised image I had of her. Not her human half, but her monstrous tail became the focus of my imagination, that tail swollen with the monster energy of lust. Perhaps if I had only thought about mermaids in the abstract it would not have had the same powerful effect, but I was thinking about one in particular, with whom I was personally acquainted. So the fish’s tail took on an erotic significance for me because of who it was attached to. My body shuddered and I gasped.
It occurred to me that, having lived without the company of my fellow humans for so long, I could indulge in the most outlandish and frankly embarrassing behaviour without a twinge of self-consciousness. If the fact that I masturbated fantasising about a mermaid, who was guest and captive in my own attic, was known and believed, how would it appear to others? I could not even imagine. I had lost my always shaky sense of what was considered normal in human society. I felt as if I had been living so long dressed as an old woman or a baby that I had forgotten how disturbing such a lifestyle might be to the outside world.
Chapter Three: The End of the Tail
I was floating, a tiny green particle in deep ocean, borne and lost upon rhythmical currents—an eerie, restful, inhuman sensation. Milk, I had been thinking of milk, as if it were some comforting poison, some potion of forgetfulness. I had pictured the inside of the breast, the cross section of glands, themselves curved like drops of liquid. But the milk was not white. It was green. Everything around me was green and salty. This was not a womb. It was vast and open and cold. I was not inside. I was outside, exposed. But I was down, deep down, stirring mindlessly amongst weeds and bubbles and other floating debris. Among the drifting micro-world of inanimate particles, there was animate matter, tiny crumbs of ocean life. There were copepods and euphausiids, dancing in jerky spirals, while I saw without watching, vacantly hypnotised, merely being. I was related to no living thing. I had come from nowhere. I did not even know if I was alive myself. In this cold and weedy locality of undivided vastness, all things seemed embryonic and motherless. Things living and unliving, gestating together forever, unborn, preyed on one another in ancient embryo consciousness.
Then it was as if I were floating to the surfa
ce and my mind began slowly to focus, remembering, first of all without identity, then that too returned. I had been playing with the sea-maid, Gwendoline, hadn’t I? We had become closer and, without thinking, encountering no resistance, I had put my mouth to her breast and suckled like a child. In memory I regarded the act with horror. Of all the acts of sex, this had always been the one which I found most disturbing. It is perhaps obvious why. Amongst the various things that take place between adults, this alone is an act they share with children. To be at once an adult and a child always made me feel unbearably vulnerable and self-conscious. I could not be more naked. I had sucked on the sea monster’s breast, drawn to it as if mesmerised by a snake, and was shocked to find myself drinking milk. Milk—the most disgusting and grotesque of all substances. I took my mouth away to breathe, and as a cloud of milk spread in the water from Gwendoline’s breast, I saw that it was green. For some reason I could not help myself, and, despite my repugnance, I continued to drink. It had a strange taste, at once sweet and salty. It was then I began to forget and to sink, stunned, to the depths of the ocean and to strange emptiness.
Now I was back. Gwendoline gave me a serene half-smile that was weirdly impersonal. I had somehow won my way to sharing some deep biological secret, quite as if Gwendoline’s will had not been involved in the matter. Now we had reached a new level of intimacy that, paradoxically, made us more separate and independent than before. It was like a trust based on knowledge between two mercenaries who each knew exactly when the other would betray them, that knowledge fostering a strange mutual respect. It was a frightening intimacy. Then this fleeting and inflaming harshness was dispelled as Gwendoline broke into a slinky, unnamed stroke and I swam towards her, laying my head upon her shoulder.
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