by Cluley, Ray
She didn’t. And I managed to have a wank after all.
THE NEXT DAY I got a text from Genna telling me her mum was out and I should come over. There was even a little kiss as well. It was a bit of a mission, getting back over to the Isle of Wight on a Sunday, but the kiss was promising so I text back to say I was on my way.
It wasn’t true, though. Her text. Quite the opposite, in fact. Just a trick to get me over.
“It was me who text you,” Genna’s mum said as soon as she opened the door. I’ve often wondered how different things would have been if I’d just gone home. But she said there were things I needed to know so I stayed.
She put the kettle on and though neither of us mentioned it I knew we were both thinking about the cup of tea last night. I’d been a knickers slide-aside away from getting laid, so there’s another moment to think about, another ‘what if?’. What if she’d taken a bit longer with the tea? I could have fucked Genna and ‘all this mermaid nonsense’ would have been sorted.
But I’m telling it out of order. Hang on.
“Sugar?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but she said, “Oh, no, you’re sweet enough, isn’t that right?”
Yeah, she had my number.
“Mrs–”
“Miss. McVeagh.”
“Right. Miss McVeagh, I dunno what you–”
“Why don’t you let me go first, Josh. See what you want to say when I’m done.”
I took my tea from her and put it down quickly before I could burn my fingers too much on the thin china. “Okay.”
“Genna’s adopted, did she tell you that?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“She went through a few foster parents first, and then me and my husband adopted her.”
“Your husband?”
“Gone. Not important.”
She thought about that for a moment then said, “Well, maybe it is important. Her real daddy left when she was little. Then her mum tried to kill herself and Genna too.”
What the fuck?
“Yeah.”
I hadn’t said it aloud, but it must have showed.
“She walked into the sea carrying baby Genna in her arms. God knows how such a wee thing survived, but she did.”
I didn’t know what to say, or even if I was supposed to say anything, so I tried my tea. It was still ridiculously hot but I forced myself.
“One of her early foster parents made up some stuff about mermaids and it stuck.” She smiled but it wasn’t a nice one. If she hadn’t already said, I’d have known then that Genna was adopted. “Mermaids took Genna’s parents, apparently. And now Genna wants to be one.”
“A mermaid.”
Miss McVeagh had no trouble with her tea. She took a scalding swallow. “They probably thought they were helping, making up a story, telling Genna she was too young at the time to change. Become a mermaid.”
“That had to be tough.”
She looked at me over the top of her tea, through the steam, then put the cup down again.
“Sometimes she says she hears her mother, her real mother, singing from the taps,” she said. “And from the sink. The drains. Sometimes she speaks to her on the sea-phone.”
“The–”
“Sea-phone. The shell in her room, the big one. So you see, Josh, she’s a troubled girl. And she’s heard all these other mermaid stories and they’re all about love and they’ve become mixed in with each other so now she thinks to find love she needs to be a mermaid. Or if she finds love she’ll become a mermaid. Something like that. You can’t understand what it’s like, Josh.”
I thought I did, actually. Wanting something you couldn’t have.
“She loves you, you know.”
“Who?”
“She’s been going to your gigs, up and down the coast. Plus I found this in her room.” She put Genna’s hip flask on the table. “She’s done this before.”
“She doesn’t have a drinking problem, Miss McVeagh. She just sneaks that into the pubs. Because it’s cheaper.”
“Open it.”
I did.
“Taste it.”
I only had to smell it.
“Seawater. She thinks if she drinks enough of it...” she shrugged. “I don’t know. She started doing it, off and on, after her first period.”
Fucking hell.
“Miss–”
“Just wait, Josh. I’m nearly done. I know you men are squeamish about these things but that was when she... got worse. She thought her period meant it was too late, that the bleeding meant she was permanently split down there–”
“I better–”
“She thought it meant her legs were permanent. She was a confused girl. She still is.”
“I’ll stop seeing her. If that’s what you want.”
It was what I wanted. I didn’t need all this shit.
“Well, that’s up to you. She’s gone to yours though.”
“What?”
“We had an argument, just before I text you.”
I could guess what about.
Miss McVeagh followed me to the door.
“Look after her, Josh. Just for tonight. Let her stay over. She likes you, you could have sex with her and stop all this mermaid nonsense, mermaids are virgins you see. Or you could break her heart. Christ, you could even do both if it sorts her out.”
I wasn’t sure Genna got all her crazy from her birth mother.
I didn’t say goodbye.
I didn’t exactly hurry home, either.
“ABOUT FUCKING TIME,” was how Hench greeted me as I let myself in.
“Genna here?”
“Yeah, Genna’s here.” He pointed at the downstairs bathroom. “She’s been here a couple of hours. Where have you been?”
“She have bags with her?”
“Carrier bags, yeah. Some shopping. And a backpack. Why?”
I knocked on the bathroom door. “Genna? You in there?”
“Why’d you ask about bags, man? Is she moving in or something?”
“Genna?”
I could hear she was in there. She was crying, but trying to do it quietly. And I could hear the quiet swishes and splashes of her movement in the bathwater.
“She’s been in there pretty much the whole time,” Hench said.
“You the only one in?”
Hench nodded.
“Genna, I’m going to come in if you don’t answer me.”
“She’s been in there for nearly two hours,” Hench said.
“Yeah, okay, you’ve said. Fuck off.”
“Hey, I’m just saying–”
“And I’m just saying she won’t let me in if you’re stood out here with me. Go for a walk or something.”
Hench held up his hands like I was overreacting but he did as he was told. I’d been an asshole, I knew that, but I could fix that later. Or not.
“Genna?”
Still nothing but quiet sniffling and splashing.
We’ve got a shitty lock on our bathroom door, one of those you can open from the outside with a screwdriver or piece of cutlery. I’ve got guitarist’s fingernails though, which were enough.
There was towel on the floor and it caught under the door so that it wouldn’t open all the way at first, but even open just a little bit I was hit by the smell.
“Christ!”
It was fish. A really fucking strong stink of fish. I remember thinking, shit, she really does need a bath and then I had the door all the way open and I saw what was going on.
“Fuck, Genna, what the fuck?”
I shut the door behind me immediately and locked it again in case anyone else came home, even though it trapped me in with the smell.
Genna was sitting in the bath, her makeup running down her face. She looked like she was crying oil. She was naked, her glorious tits right there for me to see, but I barely noticed right then because I was looking in the bath. It was full of fish. Dead ones, floating, some of them spilling their guts in the
water. She had one in her hands. I know fuck all about fish so I can only tell you they were pretty big and a silvery dark colour. A shit load of their scales glittered on the surface of the water.
“What’s going on, sweetheart?”
Sweetheart?
She still hadn’t said anything or reacted in any way to suggest she knew I was there. She just stuck her fingers into the fish’s belly and opened it up with her nails. Then she rubbed the split fish up and down her legs.
“It’s not working,” she said. She swapped legs and rubbed the fish up her body again as if it was soap. “It’s not fucking working.” Her voice hitched for breath between words. Christ knows how long she’d been crying, but she sounded exhausted by it.
She dropped one fish and swilled around the scales and bodies for another one, a fresh one. There must have been two, three dozen of the fuckers in there with her, floating around. Squashed up against the bathtub beneath her foot, one of them had folded around her toes like some novelty slipper. Another seemed to nuzzle between her thighs and somehow I managed to notice she was shaved bare down there. That nuzzling fish was the one she took hold of next, dragging her nails under it, splitting it open, shining her legs with its flattened body and everything that glistened and emptied from inside.
“Genna, no. Stop it, Genna.”
I went to my knees at the side of the tub and took the fish from her hands. She let me do it. I threw it back in the water and then took her arms to pull her hands away from her face. She was proper sobbing now and covering her face as if she didn’t want me to see. Like I hadn’t seen enough already.
“Genna, come on.” I pulled at her wrists and she let me do that too. She’d probably let me do anything, state she was in.
...have sex with her and stop all this mermaid nonsense...
“Genna, sweetheart, look at me.”
Her eyes were black circles with lines running down her face, and her cheeks sparkled with fish scales where she’d put her hands, iridescent fantails of silver rising up from her cheekbones and spread around her eyes like that glitter shit some girls wear.
“It’s okay,” I said, even though it definitely fucking wasn’t okay. The girl was proper damaged. But still.
“It’s not working,” she said again, quietly this time, imploring me like I could somehow fix it. “It’s supposed to make me... make me...” But her sobs were so violent she couldn’t get the words out.
“I know, I know,” I said, partly so she could stop trying. Partly because I really didn’t want to hear it. That would be like admitting how fucked up she was, though it was already obvious.
“You know what I read the other day?” I said, trying to calm her down. “About mermaids? I read about them and apparently, if you drink the seawater from a drowned man’s lungs then you can breathe underwater like they do.”
I didn’t know what the fuck I was saying. I was just trying to stop her from crying, get her out of the bath so that I could tidy the whole mess up before the others came home.
“I mean, it’s not quite a mermaid, but it’s a start, yeah?”
And okay, part of me was just trying to make her happy. Fucking sue me. I wanted to give her something to cling to.
She wiped her eyes but only managed to spread more makeup and scales across her face. “Where did you read that?”
“I dunno. Maybe I didn’t read it, maybe it was on TV. Maybe it was on that channel with the documentaries, yeah? Anyway, it said in the old days people drank the water from a drowned man’s lung so they could live with the mermaids. You know, because they were in love with them? They drank it and they could breathe underwater. I think for a year?”
I was making this shit up as I went. And it got worse.
“I know a guy who works in the hospital,” I told her. “Next time they get a drowned person in, I’ll get him to keep the water if you want.”
She sniffed, and she must have got a right fucking chestful of that fish stink but she didn’t seem to care. She wiped her nose.
“Does it have to be a man?” she asked.
“What?”
“You said a drowned man. Does it have to be a man?”
“I don’t think it matters.”
She tilted her head and looked at me like I was the one being crazy and said, “It’s magic, everything matters. Every detail.”
“Well just to be safe we’ll only use one that comes from a man, okay?”
She sniffed again, and nodded, and I didn’t care how fucking doolally that made her as long as she was calming down.
“Do you have to drink it from the lung?”
“What? No.”
“You said they drink water from a drowned man’s lung. Do you mean the water comes from the lung or it has to actually be drunk from the lung?”
“No, just the water.”
The best smile she ever gave me was right then. It was so grateful it almost hurt to see, and I’ve wondered about a billion times since if she knew I was full of shit but just smiled anyway.
She reached for the towel. I handed it to her. She wiped her face and saw the makeup stains and scale-shimmer on the towel. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
She stood up and the water rinsed off of her, leaving the skin of her lower body silver-shiny with scales. If it wasn’t for all the dead fish bobbing in the water, and the fucking awful smell, it would have been pretty sexy, in a weird kinda way. Exotic or erotic or something. And she did have the most amazing body. I stood up with her, aware of where my head would be if I didn’t, but she quickly wrapped the towel around her waist anyway. The bottom of the towel fell into the water but what the hell did that matter at this point? I offered her my hand to help her step out of the bath.
“Thank you,” she said.
“That’s okay.”
I kept saying it, like I could make it true.
“I had an argument with my mum.”
“I know. That’s okay.”
That’s okay, that’s okay, that’s okay.
“I’ll get dressed.”
“No rush.”
I meant it as in take your time, no hurry, stay calm, all of that, but she raised her eyebrow at me and said, “Oh, really?” She glanced down at her half naked body and back at me. “Do you like what you see?”
That was a pretty fucking complicated question, but I looked. She was practically begging me to. She stepped closer and, yeah, her tits felt as good as they looked. She started undoing my jeans.
“Genna...”
“To say thank you.”
I swallowed whatever I was going to say next because she knelt and then I was in her mouth. I meant to stop her but then I didn’t want to and even though the room stank and she was fucking crazy I sat down on the toilet seat to get more comfortable and she curled up at my feet, playing her mouth over me. Thinking about it now, she was probably fantasising about being a mermaid, but that was okay because with the glittering scales on her skin and the way the wet towel was wrapped around her legs, fanned out at the bottom to hide her feet like a tail... Well, I was thinking about mermaids too. Until all I could think about was whether to come in her mouth or on her tits and then I didn’t care about mermaids anymore.
GENNA SHOWERED IN the upstairs bathroom while I cleaned the one downstairs. By the time I was done she was tucked up in my bed, all fresh and clean, her hair still wet. She’d wrapped the quilt around herself and was looking at a notepad I keep on the bedside table.
“Are these new songs?”
Normally I’m sensitive as fuck about that kind of thing. “Eventually,” I said. She leafed back through the pad as I tidied the room a bit, though she’d already seen what a shithole it was.
“I like this one.”
She quoted some lines about dark quiet seas. Of course she liked that one. She turned the pages back, back, time travelling into my past through my lyrics.
“‘Coastline’,” she said.
“Yeah.”
&n
bsp; “I love ‘Coastline’.”
“I know.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “It’s not all mine. I nicked some from a poem.” I’d never admitted that before.
“You read poetry?”
Only on my phone, so nobody sees. I didn’t say that, though. I just shrugged, no big deal, and recited lines about mermaids combing their hair, sea-girls wreathed in seaweed, human voices. Drowning.
“What poem?”
“T.S. Eliot. A poem about a guy too scared to live his life properly.”
“I like this bit best,” she said, and read from the notepad. And it was my bit. Lines about beaches and cliffs and the to and fro of tides not belonging. She preferred my lines.
I don’t know what she saw in my face, but she smiled and flipped the notepad to its most recent page before handing it back. She’d drawn a cartoon, a caricature with elements of Disney, but he had the same hair, the same too-big smile I used when trying to be charming, and a guitar. The guitar was strung with seaweed.
“Ha! I love it!”
In the other hand I held what I’d assumed was a bouquet of flowers at first but turned out to be a bunch of spiky fish bones, all spines and lines and wilting half-circle heads with crosses for eyes.
Genna moved over in the bed. “Come on,” she said.
I turned the covers back and saw she was wearing pyjamas, proper trouser ones with long sleeves too, and found I didn’t mind. In fact, there was something pretty intimate about seeing her that way that I liked. I took off my jeans and climbed in beside her in my shorts and t-shirt.
It was the best night of my life. We didn’t even do anything. We just talked. Can you believe that? True even if you don’t. She told me some of what her mother, her foster mother or whatever, had told me but quickly shifted the focus to my songs instead of going into detail. It was easy to do because of that dark quiet seas bit, “The whispered hush of a dark quiet tide.” She snuggled into my shoulder and draped one of her legs over mine, her arm over my chest; exactly the sort of position I usually hated. But I didn’t shrug her away. “I’m looking for someone to share the darkness with too,” she said.
We talked all night, it felt like. A lot of it was about my songs. Genna understood them. She fucking understood what I was talking about. Understood me.