by Cluley, Ray
“But if you ever want a proper fuck again, just let me know.”
Do you love her, Josh?
I looked away. At least I did that. But what I saw was the notepad on the bedside table and that ridiculous cartoon version of me, the fake me, all smiles and charm and a bouquet of fish flowers.
...have sex with her and stop all this mermaid nonsense...
When I put my hands on her waist it was to stop her, it really was, but they didn’t stay there when she began walking me backwards the same way I’d done to her. By the time we reached the bed I was helping her with my jeans. She sat me down and straddled me.
“Kate–”
But fuck knows what I was going to say. She was already lowering herself onto my lap by then anyway, guiding me inside with one hand. The satisfied groan was both of ours.
“See?” she said. “How good is that?”
“Kate...”
She rose up, and then she lowered. “Yeah?”
But I still didn’t know what I was going to say.
“Yeah?”
Pretty soon we were both saying it, only it wasn’t a question any more.
THERE’S NOT MUCH more to tell. Genna caught us, of course. Kate was laying across my chest afterwards and I was stroking her new hair. Even when she said, “Genna,” I only said “yeah” because that’s who I was thinking about. So she nudged me.
“What?”
Genna was standing in the doorway. She had her backpack in one hand and my key in the other. “I needed to see you,” she said.
I couldn’t think of a single word to say. It would’ve only made things worse anyway, though how things could’ve been worse I have absolutely no fucking idea, not with Kate clearly naked draped all over me. I pushed her away but all that did was emphasise her nakedness by putting her tits on show. She made no move to cover herself.
“They want to send me away again,” Genna said. “To get better.” Then, as if realising something important, “You gave me your key.” She held it up like a prize.
“Genna–”
“Seriously?” Kate said. “Your key?”
That was when Genna ran. She dropped her bag and the key and ran away from what she’d seen. Ran away from me.
“Genna!”
“Just leave her,” Kate said.
I pulled on my clothes, fucking it all up as I went.
“You don’t need her now,” Kate said. With Kate’s smile you never know if she’s kidding or not and I hesitated. After everything, I still fucking hesitated.
Kate pulled the sheets to her chest as if suddenly modest, despite all we’d just done, and said, “Fuck it,” then made a show of looking around the room, “Where are your cigarettes?”
The key lay on one of the damp towels in the doorway. The towel was stained with hair dye but it looked like blood.
“Nice,” Kate said, showing me the cartoon version of myself, grinning like a fucking retard, a fist full of fish bones. “Did you do this?”
I ran after Genna.
IN THE LITTLE Mermaid the girl wants to be human, but who’d want that? Her tail splits, every step she takes on her new legs feels like walking on shards of glass, and she loses her tongue too, I think, so basically it hurts being human. She changes a lot to try to win this guy and it’s really painful for her and then he goes and fucks it all up. So she runs into the sea, only she can’t fucking swim now, can she, not with legs, and she drowns. Something like that. I don’t remember and I don’t feel like checking. Feels right, though. Feels fucked up enough to be right. Don’t change who you are just to be with someone or something.
I don’t know. It’s just a fucking fairy tale. I’m not trying to say it’s anything to do with Genna and me. But I do wonder about it a lot. That, and the one she told me about the mermaid with precious gifts. The one where the dickhead gives them to someone else. She takes him away to her cave in the deep dark depths of the sea and keeps him prisoner forever. That one feels pretty fucking spot on.
Genna didn’t go to the ferry or the hovercraft. I went to both, and I waited around, but after a while I walked the beach instead, which is what I should have done in the first place. I found her clothes at the South Parade Pier. A neat folded pile on the stones. I half expected to find her skin too, like some fleshy onesie, but the skin thing is selkies, not mermaids. I’ve held on to her clothes, though. Just in case.
Sometimes when I dream of looking for Genna, I do find a pile of stripped off skin with her clothes. There’s sand stuck to the inside where it’s red and wet, and it smells of salt and blood, but it’s not her skin, it’s mine. She didn’t want it anymore, and who can blame her? Why the fuck did she even want it in the first place? The music, says the sea. Every breaking wave of the ocean says to me, the music, the music. That’s what lured her in. Me, I was just the rock she dashed herself against.
I like to think she lives in some sand-strewn cavern beneath the sea now, and sleeps inside a giant oyster shell in a city where the pavements are made of pearl or something. Somewhere beyond the sea, waiting for me, like in the song. Whereas me, I’m stuck in that cold water she told me about. It surrounds me, now. And what is love if not water for drowning?
You know, once the drowning process starts it doesn’t let up, it just gets quicker. Gets worse. Unless you have one of those weird switches that stops it.
Anyway, I stand there, in the dream, hearing my siren songs washing ashore, all of it water for drowning, and it stings my skin because I don’t have any. All I am now is raw and sore with brine. And in my mouth, the taste of seawater, as if I’m chasing her madness to follow after. But they’re only tears and they don’t do anything. If she’d been a selkie they might have called her back but she’s not.
I think everybody has one that got away but Genna didn’t get away, not really. There’s no sand-strewn cave or giant oyster shell for her, no palace of coral. But people will believe anything if it makes them happy. Even if they know it isn’t real. When the paper said a girl had been washed up I didn’t read it, but I did wonder if the poor girl, whoever she was, made the water colder.
I have a dream sometimes where they keep on washing up, a whole beach full of drowned girls, and Genna steps out from the sea to walk amongst them, wincing with pain. She splits the skin of her chest open with her nails like I saw with the fish in the bath, and she peels back her skin, and I think, thank fuck, she is a selkie, but she only opens herself enough to reach inside. She wrenches something free and offers it to me dripping but it’s not her heart. It’s the twin sacks of her lungs, bloated full with the sea, and she offers them to me smiling.
I grope around in the dark for her webbed hand but it’s never there.
WE’LL BEGIN RIGHT away with the title.
“Shark! Shark!”
We’re on a beach in the summer. I could tell you about how beautiful and clean the stretch of sand is, and how the sea is calm and bright and blue beneath a sky that’s just the same, but you won’t care about that now, not when someone’s calling, “Shark!” The cry comes from a blonde woman in a bikini, her hands cupped around her mouth, looking around the crowd. “Shark!”
But it’s not what you think. She’s a director, one of two directors actually, calling for the shark man. The shark man is just some guy, no one for you to worry about. Here he comes, with a big ol’ fin on a board, making his way through the crowd of extras. He’ll be swimming with that above him in a minute and not only is that the only part he’ll play in the film but it’s the only part he plays in this story.
That’s a lot of onlys, I know. Forget them. Look at the directors instead. They’re a husband and wife team. The wife looks Scandinavian but isn’t. You’ve seen her already. She’s the blonde in the bikini, of course, making it look good even in her late thirties, body streamlined and supple. Not your typical director attire, perhaps, but this is California (although, for the sake of the film it’s Palm Beach, Florida). Anyway, bikini or not, her baseball cap has �
��director’ printed on it, only without the inverted commas. The husband’s the big man with the curled greying hair and the scraggly beard. Nothing neat and Spielbergy for him, oh no. This guy could be a lumberjack. But he’s not, he’s British, in his forties, and he’s a director. His cap says so, just like hers, but he never wears it, just lets it rest on the canvas seat that also has ‘director’ printed on it (without the inverted commas).
“I want you to swim out to the raft and just circle it a coupla times, ’k?”
The shark man nods at her while looking at her breasts, thinking that because she wears sunglasses she can’t see him looking when actually that only works when it’s the other way around. He’s stupid. He won’t go far, not even in movies.
“Jesus,” she says as shark man heads for the sea.
Her husband says, “Will I do?”
She swats at his butt, what he would call his arse, because they still have that kind of relationship. Even on set they are very firmly husband and wife.
“Seriously, what is it?” He’s looking at her breasts, but that’s okay because he’s her husband and anyway, they’re good breasts.
“Shark guy was doing what you’re doing right now.”
“Well, they’re good breasts.”
“Thanks.”
“Real, too. And so much in this business isn’t.”
“You’re so deep.”
“Deep as the ocean, baby.” He flashes her a smile that’s bright in his beard and it’s the same smile he caught her with all those years ago, although the beard is different now. More grey. She smiles back and he sees this as encouragement, as men trying to be funny often do, and so he continues. “The people in this country of yours aren’t used to seeing anything real. Except Coca Cola, of course. That’s the real thing. You gotta cut him some slack.”
“Can I just cut him?”
“Sorry.”
The two of them look out to sea where extras hold their position in the shallows.
“You think if we use that Coke line in the movie it will count as product placement?”
“Can you see him yet?”
The wife has one hand up to shield her eyes from the sun, even though she’s wearing sunglasses. The light on the water dazzle-flashes her as it moves with breeze and tide.
“There he is.”
“Swimming?”
“Yep. Unless it’s a real shark.”
The wife, who deserves a name really so let’s call her Sheila (although she’s not Australian, just like she’s not Scandinavian), cups her hands around her mouth and shouts, “Action!”
Bobby, that’s her husband, says the same thing into a handheld radio and they are filming, baby. Making movies.
THE FILM BEGAN as a conversation in a bar about Jaws. (The film they’re making doesn’t actually begin that way. It begins with a water-skier discovering a body. She hits it, in fact, and there’s a tumbling splash and then she surfaces and it’s floating right at her in the wake of the boat and that scene alone will probably get them an R rating but we don’t care about that.) The film doesn’t begin with a conversation in a bar about Jaws, but the making of the film begins that way. The idea, which turned into a script, which eventually became casting and all the rest of it, that began in a bar with a conversation about Jaws.
Glad that’s clear.
“Seriously, has there ever been a decent shark movie since?”
“Can there be? I mean, it’s kinda difficult to top. Even the man himself couldn’t do it, no matter how many times he tried.”
“Be fair, he didn’t do the sequels.”
Her husband supports that statement as a good point by raising his glass and toasting it. He’s drinking something that’s red and orange and yellow, a sunset in a glass, and it has some fruit stuck on the rim. Little details like that are important. Not to the story so much, but the general sense of atmosphere. Exotic, sunny, fun. You’re meant to like this guy, this couple, and if you’ve ever been on holiday with a lover and had drinks at a bar near a beach then you’ll know the feeling I’m going for here.
“I want to make something scary that isn’t all dark and stormy with vampires in it. Something scary in the sunshine.”
“Good title.”
“Thanks.”
Bobby uses both hands in a gesture that’s meant to represent words appearing on a screen or the bottom of a promotional poster. ‘Sunny Florida – it’s a scary place.’ He smiles his smile at her and drinks again. See? He smiles a lot. He’s likeable. “Actually, this whole country scares the shit out of me.”
“Yeah, well, it’s warmer.”
“True, and I do like a warmer climate. But I still feel like a fish out of water here. Get it? Fish out of–”
“I’m serious. That movie scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.”
“Yeah, when you were a kid. Now it’s a rubber shark and a head rolling out of a wrecked boat.”
“It’s got good shots, good story.”
“Good music.”
“Good quotable lines.”
“Good monologue.” Bobby rolls his sleeve and points to a tattoo scar that isn’t there and slurs, “‘That’s the USS Indianapolis’.”
“Exactly. And it’s scary.”
“Which is what you want.”
This time she toasts his point because it’s accurate. She’s drinking something in a classic martini glass to suggest she’s cooler, not as frivolous, but still a drinker and therefore fun, like you and me maybe.
“So, scary summer film. With a shark.”
She frowns and nods and says after a moment’s thought, “Yeah, I’m thinking so.”
“Okay.”
“I like sharks.”
“I know you do, baby.” He smiles, and drinks.
“But we’re not just throwing a load of pretty teenagers into the water to kill them off one by one.”
“Heavens, no.” He signals for a couple more drinks with one of those friendly gestures that says they come here often, theirs is a good marriage, and to prove it he takes her hand in his other one without even thinking about it.
“Although we’ll have to have a significant number of deaths.”
“Of course.”
“And none of that false alarm scream crap either. None of that oh-my-God-it’s-a-shark-but-no-it’s-not-it’s-my-boyfriend-messing-about-underwater crap. In fact, I want the boyfriend screaming, fuck the girlfriend.”
“Fuck the girlfriend?”
She gives him the look that couples have for each other when one of them is being silly at the wrong time.
“Because that’s a different film entirely,” he says anyway.
“It needs to be something different.”
“Unless you mean he’s screaming ‘fuck the girlfriend’. Is that what you mean?”
The look has evolved into a look with raised eyebrows.
“A mutation maybe?” he says to compensate. “Genetic experiment?”
She wrinkles her nose at that.
“A feeding group brought close to the beach thanks to climate change.”
“Too many, keep it simple.”
“One big giant shark then.”
“No, something different.”
He raises his hands to the heavens in mock exasperation and then suggests “Vampire shark?”
“Keeping it real, remember.”
“When so much in this business isn’t.”
“Exactly.”
“Open Water tried to keep it real. And that sucked.”
They both toast to that point, tipping their drinks back together.
RIGHT, BACK TO the movie business.
The good looking man slouched on a towel, reading from a sheet of paper clutched in one hand while a finger on his other hand follows the words, is an up-and-coming movie star. He moves his mouth when he reads, but to be fair to him he might be practising pronunciation or delivery or something else actors do. His name is immediately forgettable for now until you
’ve seen it lots of times on posters and movie credits, something like Tom, Brad or Colin (but if you’re thinking of another Tom, Brad or Colin currently working in the movie business then stop because he’s younger and more surfer-dude type, and I only used those names in a Tom, Dick or Harry kind of way). Phil. That’s his name. Probably Philip if he wants to be taken seriously, and he desperately does want to be taken seriously, although he never will be.
“Who’s that?”
She only means to glance over to see who Bobby means but she lingers a little because although their marriage is good, the man on the towel reading his lines is a damn fine looking specimen of a man. “That’s Phil.”
“I mean, who is he in the film? I don’t remember any surfer-types that actually have lines.”
“He’s our Dreyfus.”
“Hardly.”
“He’s our shark expert. You know, our way of telling the audience things they need to know about sharks so they can be properly scared.”
“Who isn’t scared of sharks?”
She shrugs.
“Stop staring at him.”
“But he’s a damn fine looking specimen of a man.”
“Bit too good looking for a shark expert, isn’t he?”
“What, they’re all ugly?”
He shrugs. “Anyway, sharks are on Discovery Channel all the time. People know it all already. And they’ve seen that movie. You know, that other one about a shark.” He clicks his fingers, feigning memory loss.
“I think I’ll change into my bikini.”
“Don’t you dare, or I’ll change into one too.”
“Gross.”
“Gross is cutting open a shark and seeing everything spill out, like a fish head and a licence plate. Is the beautiful Phil going to do that, too?”
Sheila frowns at Bobby.
“You know, the autopsy scene? He pulls all that crap out of–”
“We’re not just ripping off Jaws.”
Bobby knows he’s gone too far because they really aren’t just ripping off Jaws and she’s sensitive about that.
“Phil is actually Bodie,” Sheila explains. (I know Bodie is a bit like Bobby but I’m trusting you won’t get confused. It’s also a bit like body, which might give your some idea of his role in this movie, and this story for that matter.)