IGMS - Issue 22

by IGMS

  "You're the one who doesn't understand," Mother said. Her voice was taut with fear -- as if she'd stretch in one fluid, easy kick, and run to the door before anyone could stop her. "If she doesn't belong, they'll just send her away. They'll send us all away, back to the sea and what's waiting for us there. Do you want to go back, Hervé?"

  He was silent, then. "No," he said; but it didn't sound like a "no."

  The first time I was in the water, it was a revelation.

  I'd never liked sports: racing or basketball seemed needlessly tiring, with my lungs contracting to take in searing, dry air that didn't sustain me. Always out of breath, I was always last -- the last runner on the track, the last one to be picked up for the teams.

  But swimming was different.

  The school took us to sports at the local swimming pool. We lined up, twenty awkward girls in swimsuits and bathing caps, feeling as flat as flounders. I felt encased in stretched cloth, hardly able to draw in breath; and the others were looking at me oddly. They had never seen so much of me -- without the turtleneck sweater I used to hide my gills, and the long sleeves I wore in every season, covering the patches of shimmering, iridescent skin above my wrists.

  "Come on, sleepyhead," Jamila said. She leapt into the water with her legs drawn under her, making a splash big enough to drench every lane.

  I leapt after her, eager to dispel the others' gazes. The water rose up to meet me, shimmering in the winter sunlight; and then it swallowed me. It kissed my skin and blessed it, and the dry itch I always felt receded. The water pressed against me, warm and comforting, an embrace I had always longed for. I breathed in -- in and out, and my gills distended, taking in the grace being offered -- my legs stretched in an expansive kick that felt instinctive, and I dived deeper. The pressure grew greater; it took me and shaped me and made me whole as I swooped and swam, turning lithely above the blue tiles at the bottom of the pool. There was a faint aftertaste of chlorine, not salt; but I didn't care. I felt . . . at peace, at home, finally back where I belonged.

  When I emerged, everyone was staring at me -- including Jamila, though her gaze wasn't hostile.

  "What the matter?" I hissed, swimming closer to her.

  "Do you know how long you were in there?" She maintained herself afloat with awkward kicks of her legs.

  "No." I said. It had barely been a moment; and already I craved diving again.

  She rolled her eyes upwards. "I didn't count, but it's got to be minutes, Em. Minutes."

  I tried to shrug, but it was harder in the water. "I am what I am."

  "Sure." Jamila nodded, but I could tell I'd somehow breached the boundaries of what she considered normal.

  When Mother came to pick me up later, and asked me how my day had been, I almost told her. But she stood there waiting for me, her grey skin shimmering in the sunlight: prim and correct, with a green cashmere cardigan and a pair of silk trousers around her surgically reconstructed legs -- the epitome of French chic, from her Lancel handbag to the discreet gold pendant around her neck. And, somehow, I couldn't find the heart to share any of this.

  Aunt Albane wouldn't speak much about the sea, either; but she did tell me a few things whenever I went to her house.

  Unlike my parents, Uncle Hervé and Aunt Albane had never settled in a city; but had instead chosen some god-forsaken place in the middle of the countryside, in a commune of other merpeople. Small houses, so far away from each other that you could barely guess at their presence. They were spread out in a circle around a field, with trampled grass and a few bits of coloured cloth tied to the trunks of trees: it might have been a shrine, it might have been a meeting place. I didn't know enough to tell.

  I could see Mother relax every time we drove there, when the wide expanse under the sky replaced the narrow, high streets of the cities -- when everything became wide and limitless, as it had been before.

  Their house wasn't exactly French: they'd used their resettlement money to knock down all the walls they could in order to make a single, wide room with barely any furniture -- not even a TV or a computer. Everything had the same smell as Uncle Hervé's packages; but here it was strong enough to permeate everything. My gills breathed in brine and algae; and the pores of my skin opened wide, trying to store enough water before we went back to the dry, polluted streets of the city. This was the true thing, or as true as it could be -- not like the spray I kept in a drawer of my bedside table for those days when I couldn't sneak off to the swimming pool.

  My parents always seemed drawn into arguments with Uncle Hervé, so I took refuge in the kitchen, helping Aunt Albane cook. She walked in slow, tottering steps -- she'd had the surgery for her lungs, not for her legs, and those were weak and stunted within her walker. I helped her fetch garlic and fish-sauce, and spread it into a cooking pan -- she only cooked for our benefit, since the pan always looked brand-new, and I could see the jars of salted fish above the stove. I didn't think they ate any cooked food; just fish, as we had done under the sea. Their friends, I guessed, did likewise.

  "It used to be different," Aunt Albane told me. "We followed the currents and the shoals, and took our sustenance where we could."

  "You never had cities?"

  Aunt Albane snorted. "Buildings, sometimes, for one ceremony or another. But not so many as here. Buildings are a human thing." She didn't sound as though she approved. "We don't need roofs over our heads, or walls to protect us from the cold."

  "Predators," I said, leaving the question half-asked.

  "Sharks and barracudas, sometimes. The weak died; the strong survived. That's how it had always been."

  "But it changed," I said, cautiously. She was quick to share her stories of the time before; but she almost never told me about the exodus that had sent hundreds of them staggering onto the shores of France.

  Aunt Albane's eyes flicked to the stove. "Salmon, please."

  I took two chunks of salmon from the freezer, and handed them to her to put into the pan. Oil sizzled and sang where the flesh touched the hot metal.

  Aunt Albane nodded, not moving from her place at the stove. "It wasn't much, at first. We ignored the signs. Babies born with deformed limbs -- without eyes, without gills --"

  "The Twisted Ones," I said. The Dark King's servants, the ones that had chased Mother and Father all the way to the shore.

  "Yes," Aunt Albane looked stubbornly at the salmon, turning pink in the pan.

  "And the King," I said.

  "Yes." Aunt Albane's gaze was distant. "If not for your father and his companions, we wouldn't be alive today."

  "Companions?" I asked. In my mind's eye, Father was always alone -- battling monsters with his sword, dragging Mother and Aunt Albane out of the sea. "Like the Knights of the Round Table?"

  Aunt Albane shook her head. "They were cleverer than your knights. Not strong or tough, but smart. Has he never shown you his papers? He and his colleagues saw the end coming long before we did, and planned for it."

  "Papers? What was in them?" It didn't sound like something Father would do. Then again, swimming underwater with a sword didn't sound like him either.

  "Mathematical formulas and charts -- their plans to rescue us, laid out so meticulously." Her lips twisted. "Scientists. And it all worked."

  "Why shouldn't it have worked?" I asked, slowly. I couldn't understand. I'd always thought Father had been a knight; a lone hero. Companions were one thing; but scientists in a research laboratory, with flasks and white coats, and the smell of ammonium and bleach?

  "Take all the mermen out of the sea, bring them all onto the shore?" Aunt Albane shook the pan as if it had offended her. "It's not an easy thing, or a simple one."

  "Then . . ." Then it was all right; and Father was just another kind of hero. Not a knight; not a scientist who paved the way to the stars; but our saviour all the same.

  Aunt Albane made a dismissive gesture. "You worry too much, Emilie."

  How could I worry too much, when I understood nothing? I wanted
to tell her that, but in that moment Mother came over, a frown on her face. "Albane," she said. "Do you know where the forks are?" She saw me crouching by the stove and threw Aunt Albane a look that said they'd talk about this later. "Émilie, come on, help me lay the table."

  I rose and left, bursting with a thousand unanswered questions.

  We went to Brittany once, when I was ten -- because that was what the French did -- left for two weeks in July and drove hours through traffic jams to some sleepy little town smelling of brine and pine needles. I walked among the market stalls, my mouth watering every time I passed the fishmongers' displays with the fresh, raw fish lined up on ice, their open eyes glistening in the sunlight. The lobsters and crabs were still alive, their shells a healthy, tantalising brown -- a food fit for the nobles of the sea. I could imagine how they'd taste -- how it would feel to have their legs kicking feebly against my palate in that brief moment before my teeth closed down on them. But then I remembered that we didn't eat raw flesh, not in the Republic.

  Mother retreated into the backyard of the house where she cooked shellfish and haddocks and salmons with a vengeance: the rooms filled with the smell of oil and the curiously bland odor of cooked fish-flesh.

  I went to the seaside.

  They'd forbidden me, of course, but I slipped away early one morning while they were all sleeping. I crept along the fir-scented paths, past the bunched-up houses with their white paints and grey slate roofs stained with greenish moss. The sky overhead was unbearably blue, the light sharp and unforgiving; not the gentle, shimmering veils I'd seen underwater.

  The beach was deserted: I climbed down the stairs from the road, and took off my shoes and socks to stand in warm sand. I stood for a while, where the sea met the shore -- breathing in the wetness of the air, my pores expanding to take it all in. There were algae and fragments of broken seashells by my feet, crunching when I stepped over them, and the sand was wet and clinging to my skin. I don't know what I'd expected -- the Dark King, looming out of the deserted surf to snatch me, laughing manically all the while; some squad of twisted, leering merpeople with harpoons, unfolding from Aunt Albane's nightmarish accounts.

  Or perhaps the sea itself, the blessed Abyss gaping out between the waves, its shimmering depths reminding me of my purpose in life, of the past that must not be forgotten, that would be restored someday.

  But the sea remained silent. A few families had spread their bags and towels on the sand, and their children were busy digging holes in the dry sand, daring each other to breach their fortresses and castles. No one swam: the water had ceased to be a friendly place, with the rise of the Dark King -- what the French had called the Black Catastrophe, spouting excuses about global warming and greedy corporations, as if they knew anything about what had really happened under the sea.

  I wanted, more than anything, to immerse myself in the water, to be cleansed by salt and iodine; but there was no telling what might happen.

  I walked back home feeling as though a piece of me were missing.

  Uncle Hervé knocked at the door of our flat late one night. He stood framed in the doorway with a plain white parcel bearing the logo of the local bakery, his skin glowing a faint blue under the corridor's lights. He held his mask in one hand, and his mouth was full of small, sharp teeth: he looked both terribly familiar and terribly alien.

  He didn't bother with greetings. "Em, are your parents home?"

  I was about to show him into the kitchen, but he looked so . . . changed, so feral, that the words were out of my mouth before I could think. "Is this -- about the sea?"

  He looked at me for a while, his eyes shining with the grey-green of storms. He smelled of brine, and of wet sand; and of a thousand things that didn't belong in small, cramped flats locked within Parisian suburbs. At length he shook his head. "I always told your parents they sheltered you too much." He snorted, water gurgling up through his gills. "Your father was always so good at making decisions for other people."

  "I don't understand," I said slowly -- with the feeling that I was dancing on the edge of the blessed Abyss, that the right words, the rights gestures would finally cause the Abyss to open and show me the treasures in its depths. "Did Father do something wrong?" Father was a hero, a knight in armour; Mother's rescuer, no matter how or with whom he had done it. Surely . . .

  Uncle Hervé's face had gone flat -- with the particular edge of a merman's anger. "Your father is a fool."

  "He rescued the mermen . . ." I started, but Uncle Hervé cut me with a dismissive gesture.

  "Do you think we came willingly, Em? Ask yourself what he did."

  He walked past me, into the kitchen; I trailed after him, hoping for more. It was more than the glow; he seemed transfigured altogether, his gestures more fluid and more expansive than I'd ever seen, as if some great energy moved beneath the surface.

  They sent me to my room; but I listened in, just the same.

  "It's late for a courtesy visit," Mother said.

  Uncle Hervé didn't jest or protest, as he might have. "The way is open again."

  Silence spread outward from those few words, as if we had all moved underwater where sound took more time to travel. "It can't be true . . ." Mother started.

  Uncle Hervé inhaled noisily through the mask -- letting the moment stretch, I guessed. "They say they've cleansed the waters. That the pollutants are gone."

  "That's not possible. Scientifically speaking --" Father sounded . . . thoughtful, angry? I couldn't tell; couldn't understand half of what they were talking about.

  "Impossible?" Uncle Hervé growled. "You destroyed our homeland, Erwan. And when that was finished, when nothing was left to salvage, you lured us out of it. You called it saving us, but the fact remains: you took us out of the sea. You sang to us and called us, and you marooned us on dry land. You gave us money, later on. You helped us resettle. But you can't change what you did, and you can't lecture me."

  "Hervé --" Father said, pleading; and the world twisted and died a little, for Father never begged.

  "I've heard it from reliable sources. I'm going back to the sea."

  "For all you know --"

  "Oh, please. For the Abyss' sake, spare me your childish fears." He sounded enraged, as if he'd been holding everything back for too long. "What wouldn't you give to go back home?" He made a sound in the back of his throat; it was only later I realised he was speaking Mother's name -- not the French one she'd taken, but her true one, the one from the sea.

  "There's no going back," Mother said, and it seemed to be the end of the conversation.

  When Uncle Hervé was gone my parents looked at each other.

  "Do you think --" Father asked, but Mother shook her head.

  "I've seen it, Erwan. The sea that became black and stuck to our bodies, the buildings crumbling under the weight of tar. You know it can't be reversed." Her voice was taut again, with the same fear I'd heard in Aunt Albane when she spoke of the dark times.

  "I guess it can't be," Father said. But afterwards I heard him pace in the bedroom; and I crept and stood hidden in the carpeted corridor. He pulled something from under their bed: a long, weather-beaten chest that might have belonged to any sailor. When he opened it, the smell of the sea wafted so strong I had to stifle a moan of pleasure. I stood on tiptoe as he lifted the lid higher, but saw nothing but pieces of yellowed papers, and cross-hatched maps. Father meticulously set those aside until at last he lifted something that had rested at the bottom of the box, like an unfathomable treasure.

  The sword, I thought, as he laid it across his knees -- but it wasn't shaped like one. It was short and oblong at one end, with a single piece of string stretching over all its length. I had seen something like this -- not a sword, but something else . . .

  A guitar, with a narrower resonance box.

  It didn't look beautiful or sleek: rather, it looked like someone had tried to copy a design from under the sea, perhaps one of the age-old instruments Aunt Albane had once described t
o me; and that they'd got all the proportions wrong. It was green -- not like live lobsters, but like military fatigues -- and at the end of the handle was a white square of paper with a barcode and serial number.

  Father ran his fingers over it; it made no sound, but there was a smell like a salt-charged breeze; and for a split, endless moment I heard in my mind the song of mermen, the desperate calls of lone men under the sea, the rich, inviting chant of women in the mating season.

  Do you think we came willingly, Em? Ask yourself what he did.

  I saw men in grey-green armour, swimming at the bottom of the sea -- dozens of them, wielding the swords in front of them, and the mermen hearing the song, following it out of their tainted hunting grounds -- until the sea ran out, and they took their first stumbling steps on dry land, in air so devoid of humidity it burnt in the gills and crinkled the skins, like fire.

  I thought of knights; and how easily they could become raiders, and invaders, and cattle-drivers; and how the world seemed to have altered, and I no longer knew where I stood -- the Abyss yawning under me, revealing nothing but utter darkness -- and I with nowhere to go, no seawater to uphold and sustain me, or show me any path I could take.

  Mother had always said the sea wasn't a safe place; and it wasn't something that would ever be cleaned. The Dark King had destroyed everything, until all that remained to us was this shabby exile. Clearly not a good thing, but was there ever really a better course?

  We would have died if they hadn't come -- if it hadn't been planned, that rescue. Mother wouldn't be here; Uncle Hervé wouldn't be here . . . I wouldn't be here.

  I didn't know what to think, not any more.

  At length, Father put the instrument back into the box and piled the papers on top of it. He looked old and grey and fragile; infinitely more tired than I'd ever seen him. He stared inside the box as if it held the answers to everything he'd ever longed for, and there was such pain in his face that I wanted to run to him, to kiss him and tell him everything was going to be all right.