Water For Drowning

by Cluley, Ray

  “Sing me something,” she said.

  “Later.”

  I pulled at her underwear. The hand job was good, really fucking good, but I needed to be inside her.

  “Sing me ‘Coastline’ or I’ll stop.”

  So I did, and she didn’t, and it was all so fucking weird and amazing that as the song finished I came in her hands.

  “And that,” she said afterwards, “Is how you make a mermaid.” She smiled. “Think of all those fish you just impregnated.”

  It was a fucking crazy thing to say, but I laughed anyway. Sort of.

  “I get so thirsty whenever I come here,” she said, and sighed. Then she dipped down so the sea came up over her chin, opened her mouth, and drank a shit-load of seawater. I definitely saw her swallow.

  “Genna, Jesus.”

  “What?” She’d cupped some water into her hands and offered it to me.

  “No thanks.”

  “Why not?”

  Because it’s fucking seawater, I wanted to say. And because it’s got my come in it, for fuck’s sake.

  She drank it happily enough, though. Which was when I thought, fuck, she really is mental.

  Of course, I didn’t tell the guys in the pub any of that.

  I’VE RESEARCHED SEAWATER a bit since then. About how drinking it makes you crazy. It doesn’t, apparently. That’s just a myth. You know, like mermaids.

  It does fuck your blood pressure, which can put too much pressure on your heart. The heart rate goes right up and breathing quickens. And it can impair judgement. But then I didn’t drink any of that shit and I had some of those symptoms too by the end.

  Mostly people thought it made you crazy, sailors and that, because it did nothing to sort your thirst out which made you drink more of it, and then more, and more. I guess that kind of desperation looked a bit crazy if you’re stuck in a lifeboat with someone who can’t stop. Can’t help themselves. But Genna didn’t drink it all the time. And it’s just a myth anyway, like I said. I just want to mention it so you know what happened wasn’t Genna’s fault. She didn’t make herself crazy.

  “GOT YOURSELF A stalker,” Tommy said at the next gig. We were coming in with the gear and there she was, leaning against the bar, chasing ice cubes around and around with a straw. She was wearing a short dress that was all laces and buckles and promises.

  “What can I say? They always want more.”

  The gig was on the Isle of Wight again, which was a right fucking hassle with the crossing but some pub was paying us well to bring the summer in. It was a late afternoon, early evening thing, still quite light, the bar only half full. Or half empty. Whatever.

  “You gonna poke that again?” Vince asked.

  “Maybe.” I should have said no, but the way she looked tonight...

  “Well shove her my way if you don’t, I’ll give her a go. I’d love to get a bit of that slit.”

  See? Such a way with words.

  Genna was looking into her glass, stirring her whirlpool. Fuck it, I thought, and went over. “Not thirsty?”

  I get so thirsty whenever I come here...

  I tried not to think about the seawater. And fuck knows what she was thinking because for a moment it was like she didn’t even recognise me. Her eyes were far away and I wondered if she was on something, and then I wondered if she was just playing it cooler than me, and then I wasn’t wondering anything because she was back and smiling her pearly whites. “Hi!”

  “Yeah, hi.”

  “You taking requests?” she asked.

  “Let me guess...”

  “‘Coastline’.”

  Which was going to be a problem because this was another covers gig. But I said yes anyway because I’m a fucking idiot sometimes, in case you haven’t noticed.

  “Maybe we can meet up again after,” is what she should have said then, but instead it was me saying it.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Fuck.

  The gig was not one of our best. Mainly because my heart just wasn’t in it. I just wanted it finished so I could get back to Genna. We went through the usual playlist but really I was just going through the motions.

  ...the motion of the ocean...

  “Okay, this next one is one of ours,” I said. “It’s called ‘Coastline’.”

  I could feel the others giving me and each other ‘what the fuck?’ looks but I ignored them and started in with the song so they’d have to go with it. They didn’t fucking like it though, and neither did the audience – they wanted something they could sing to, music they could predict. They didn’t hate it, they didn’t fuck off and leave us, but some of the energy went away and the bar got a bit busier.

  I get so thirsty...

  Genna loved it. I could even hear her voice at one point, yelling my lyrics back at me when I sang about mermaids riding the waves and the voices that wake us to drown. She whooped and clapped as Hench bashed out a conclusion that was all storm and rocks, cymbals crashing and fading into a shimmering sound of receding waves. Before I could say or do anything else, Tommy took us into ‘Going Under’ which made a pretty smooth transition actually, the clever prick, and we got our audience back because they weren’t really our fans anyway they were Evanescence fans or whatever and what the fuck did I care?

  “The hell?” Tommy said when we finished.

  “What?”

  “Remember that chat we had? About girls not fucking up the group? You know, after Sally?”

  Sally was a gorgeous band aid until she got pregnant and ruined it all. She lives up north now. Not sure if she kept the kid.

  “I remember.”

  “Good, because you said most of it.”

  I nearly told the self-righteous prick about Kate then. That I’d fucked her once and how there’s been tension between us ever since. Instead I went with, “She’s hardly fucking up the group. I gave her one song.”

  “Yeah, and it fucking threw us. Vince came in late and–”

  “Hey,” said Vince, “It wasn’t my fault, I–”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Tommy, “it was this dick’s fault.”

  “Hey, Tommy?”

  “What?”

  “Fuck off.”

  And, surprise surprise, he did. He flicked both hands at me dramatically, the diva, but he went.

  “Wow,” I said, “If I’d known it’d be that easy...”

  Vince only shook his head. “Mate, you were a bit of a cunt.”

  “Whatever.”

  Genna joined me at the bar. I tried to remember how she looked in the water with her underwear all see-through and wanking me off but all I kept seeing was her drinking seawater with my come in it and I wasn’t thirsty anymore.

  She must have picked up on that, or maybe she could just tell that I was pissed about something, because she came straight out with, “Back to mine then?”

  I looked over to where Hench and Vince were packing up. Tommy wasn’t around. He was probably outside, calling Kate on the mainland, bitching about me. She hadn’t come tonight – too much hassle – and I was wishing I’d stayed behind as well.

  “I live here,” Genna said, “Just up the road.”

  “Okay, cool. Let’s go.”

  Up the road was right. Her place was at the top of a steep hill with a view over the sea to Portsmouth. We barely spoke, and when we did it was just small talk stuff, the kind you have when there’s something else unsaid underneath it all. Mostly it was sexual tension, but for me there was a riptide underneath of band shit and concern for Genna’s mental stability and all that. But fuck it, any hole’s a goal, right?

  “Mum? You still up?”

  I couldn’t fucking believe it.

  “You live with your mum?”

  “In here, honey.”

  And so I was led into the front room were a skinny woman in a tatty dressing gown sat watching TV. She looked at me, looked longer at the guitar case in my hands, then looked at Genna.

  “This is Josh.”

 
; “Hi,” I said. Then, after an awkward pause, “Look, Genna–”

  “You play guitar, Josh?”

  “Er, yeah.”

  “Any good?”

  I looked at Genna to end this but she just smiled at me. “He’s great, Mum.”

  Her mother nodded, “Of course he is,” and muted the television.

  Here we go...

  “What else do you do, Josh?”

  “He’s in a band, Mum. Breaking Wave. They’re really good.”

  Genna’s mother nodded. “I’m sure, honey.”

  “Josh writes the songs. His lyrics are amazing.”

  If I had to pick a moment that marked the start of it all, for me, I think it might have been right then. She’d called the band Breaking Wave and never mind what the fuck everybody else called it. And she liked my songs.

  “We’re going up to my room, okay?”

  I could see in the way Genna’s mum smiled and said, “Okay,” that this was a woman eager to keep her daughter happy. Later I’d realise it was more a case of not wanting her upset, which is a slightly different thing. “I’ll bring you both a cup of tea.”

  “That’s okay Mrs–”

  “Miss. Do you take sugar, Josh?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “He’s sweet enough, Mum.”

  Genna was already dragging me up the stairs after her and as much as I wanted to leave I was still grateful. I tried not to knock the framed photos with my guitar on the way up. They were all Genna, all pre-goth smiles and all at the seaside. Every single picture. In one of them she wore seaweed like a wig, buried to the waist in sand shaped like a fish tail.

  “This is me.”

  She opened her door and, holy fuck... there were mermaids everywhere.

  “This one’s Waterhouse,” Genna said, dancing in and pointing to one of the many posters. Women with fishtails rising from the water in graceful arcs or sitting on rocks to comb their hair, play a tiny harp. “And this one is Leighton. It’s called ‘The Fisherman and the Syren’.” She shrugged. “Slightly different but they get mixed up all the time and anyway, I like it.”

  There was a picture beside her mirror I recognised.

  “That’s from the film Splash,” she said. “You know, with Tom Hanks?”

  “Doesn’t look like Tom Hanks,” I said, and Genna laughed but I stopped looking just in case. Girls get jealous easy, even of pictures. I looked around her room some more.

  There were ornaments and statuettes everywhere, even a mermaid lamp. A scattering of shells decorated every surface too, open mussels and clams and even the large spike-edged bulge of one of those that lets you hear the sea, a conch or whatever. She saw me looking and said, “My telephone to the ocean,” and picked it up. She put it to my ear. “Listen. What do you hear?” She waited with what I thought was obvious expectation but now I think it was hope.

  What I heard was the blood in my ear hushed back at me, but I said, “The sea.” She seemed disappointed, maybe at my lack of enthusiasm, and put it back on the table next to a fishbowl where a yellow fish swam circles around a sparkly mermaid spewing bubbles. Above it was a poster that matched her bedspread.

  “That one’s Disney,” she said.

  The Little fucking Mermaid.

  “How old are you, Genna?”

  She laughed but I was serious, and seriously worried.

  “Nineteen.”

  Thank fuck.

  “I know, too old.”

  Better than too young.

  I leant my guitar against the wardrobe.

  “Look,” she said, showing me a video case of the same film. A fucking video case; who watched those anymore? “See the difference?”

  I looked. All I saw was the same cartoon redhead with clamshells on her tits. And the same yellow fish like the one in her bedside bowl.

  “Look at the castle,” Genna said. “At the towers. Look.”

  “Is that...”

  “Yeah, a huge golden penis!”

  “Shit, it really is.”

  “Subversive, huh? Some joker at Disney having a laugh. It’s only on the video cover though.” She threw it onto the bed and followed it. Looking at the face printed beside her on the quilt, her reflection in a pool of bedding, she said, “The original Little Mermaid dies, you know.”

  “What?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, she dies. The prince doesn’t love her as much as she loves him and she dies. Turns into sea foam.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well I can see why they’d change that for the cartoon.” I didn’t like this conversation at all. There seemed to be a threat in it somewhere. “What is it with you and mermaids?”

  Genna shrugged. “I’m just mental.”

  “No you’re not.”

  I tried to tell myself lots of people obsessed about something. Shit, Hench’s room was entirely football players, but then he was gay. Probably.

  “Some people think mermaids are real,” she said. “I mean, there’s so much ocean out there we haven’t explored properly, so maybe...”

  I only gave her “Mm.”

  “Some people think we evolved from mermaids,” she said. She made little speech marks with her fingers and added, “Aquatic ape theory.”

  “Aquatic ape theory,” I said. “Okay.”

  “It’s why we don’t have much body hair compared to other animals. And more fat.”

  I remembered what she looked like nearly naked and said, “Now you are being mental. There’s no fat on you at all.”

  It was meant to be a compliment but she ignored it. Might’ve even looked a bit hurt, which was weird.

  “Plus our noses stick out,” she said, recovering, “nostrils pointing down so we can bob underwater without air getting in.” She demonstrated with a ducking motion.

  I get so thirsty whenever I come here...

  Then she turned profile. “Streamlined for swimming, see? It’s why our fingers wrinkle in the bath, too. Improves our grip on rocks and for catching fish, from when we lived more in the water.” Then she laughed and said, “And people think I’m crazy.”

  “Even Darwin thought a fish climbed out of the water one day,” I said, going to where she sat on the bed. Standing, I was in the perfect position for a blowjob.

  “Exactly!” She reached up, but only to take my hands, guiding me down beside her. “In the old days, mermaids used to be in the sea life encyclopaedias, right there with whales and dolphins. You know, real creatures.”

  “I love these tattoos,” I said. I was trying to change the subject, and it was a good excuse to raise the skirt of her dress. I stroked the lines of seaweed on her thighs. She made a noise that was either acknowledgment or encouragement so I carried on.

  So did she.

  “There was this mermaid who fell in love with a man,” she said softly, letting me continue what I was doing. I could tell she was liking it from her breathing. “She gave him precious gifts.”

  “What precious gifts?”

  But I thought, yes. Sex. Obviously. This was just her way of leading up to it.

  “Trinkets,” she said. “Jewels. Pearls, probably. When mermaids cry, they cry pearls.”

  I looked at how the corset part of her dress squashed her tits up and thought, pearl necklace, yeah. Definitely.

  “She kept him in her cave.”

  Definitely sex.

  I could feel her knickers now and was reassured at how damp they were. “Sounds terrible.” I said, and moved closer.

  I rubbed between her thighs and she told me all about mermaids and selkies and sirens, or tried to; eventually she just groaned and sighed instead and things were looking good for a fuck, really fucking good. At last.

  So of course that was when her mum came in with the tea.

  KATE CAME INTO the hall having heard me slam the door.

  “Not like you to go back for seconds,” she said. “She must be a great shag.”

  I didn’t have a fucking
clue, but I said, “Best ever.”

  “Well I hope you’re fucking her in every hole because you’ve pissed off pretty much everyone.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They went back to Vince’s. You know, without you. Because you didn’t show up at the ferry.”

  Vince was the only one in the band who didn’t live with us. Kate didn’t live with us either but it fucking felt like it. She was always there, even when Tommy wasn’t.

  “What’s so special about this one?”

  I ignored her, stomping up the stairs like some frustrated blue-balled teenager. She called up after me. “Got a soft spot for nutjobs?”

  “Nothing soft about it.”

  Kate followed me.

  “She doesn’t seem your type.”

  “How’s that?”

  She smiled. “Well, she’s not inflatable for starters.”

  “Funny.” I put my guitar down and cleared my bed of clothes.

  “She must fake a good orgasm.”

  “I’ve heard plenty of those from Tommy’s room.”

  “I don’t fake all of them.” She smiled again, trying to be mischievous or some shit.

  “Not you,” I said. “Tommy.”

  Her smile slipped a little at that. I think because she couldn’t tell if I was joking.

  “I don’t fake any orgasms, actually,” she said. “Not with anyone.”

  “No, you fake entire relationships.”

  “Twat.”

  Finally she left me alone. I shut the door behind her and flopped down next to my guitar. Checked my phone again but still had nothing. Thought about calling. Thought about texting. Didn’t do either. I just lay there, thinking of Genna, not even wanking. It was weird.

  I was still laying there thinking when the others came home. I heard some laughter and soon people were coming up to bed themselves.

  “G’night Josh,” Kate called through the door. Tommy tried to shush her, but he was drunk and laughing. She added, “We’ll try to keep the noise down.”