Deeper

by Jane Thomson

  DEEPER

  Written by Jane Thomson

  Illustrated by

  Melissa Cryder

  © 2013 Jane Thomson (author) and Melissa Cryder (illustrator)

  Chapter 1

  When I look back now, home seems like a story for pups playing in tide pools. And yet, there are kinds and kinds of stories. There’s the kind that you read to me once from a book your mother gave you when you were small, that begins ‘once upon a time’ and ends ‘and they lived..’. Well, you know. It’s the same kind that my mother used to murmur to us before bed time – fresh rain in the morning and fat silver fish with pearls for eyes, and sea-witches with the power to grant your heart’s desire, and mates handsome as – well, as you were, to me.

  And the other kind. Sunlit in the shallows, but dark below, the kind to keep young mer awake at night dreaming of the ugly sharp-toothed things that live far down in Deep Sea, or of the long nets of humans, and their sails of scraped mer skin, drying in the wind. Stories that begin well, with young mer girls combing out their bright hair on the rocks, and end in death and the crunching of old bones into sand on the sea shore.

  But if any of those things were ever real, any of them, they’re lost now and exist only in my mind. Like home.

  My five sisters, sunbathing on the warm surface waters of the sea, glowing dark pink as the sun sets. Motherly Dayang with her two little pups and another on the way, dark-haired Suria, Dawii and Cik in the middle, and vain, spiteful Azura next in age to me.

  Father, leading a pod of mermen in the evening hunt, the adolescent males showing off their strength and speed as the females watch. Their translucent tails throw up sprays of silver towards the sky and come down with a thwack to stun a school of redstripes or drive them streaming into our nets of seagrass. Outside the ring of rushing, circling shapes, the bigger pups practice their quickness on the outliers, plucking them from the green as they dart away, wriggling and full of panicked life.

  Damp heat on the rocks at midday, the merwomen sorting sea plants: some for eating soon, some for drying and storing in bags of fish gut and hidden under piles of stones. Tall growing kelp, algae red, green and blue, limu like fat stretching hands, purple dulse, gut weed and bitter sea lettuce, rockweed and wrack. We have our own names for those things - these I read in one of your books. But mostly, to you, it’s just sea weed.

  Casih, my father’s mate, diving for clams and sea cucumber, her newest pup clamped to her nipple.

  We lived – our pod and about ten others – in an archipelago of sand banks and tiny atolls, mostly a few mer lengths above the sea at high tide. On some there were flat rocks, salt-leaved bushes and maybe a palm or two, but most were just sand or sharp pink coral grains. All around us the ocean, that we call Deep Sea, but on one side, a lagoon, clearer and shallower and calmer than the open ocean, rimmed with reef. On the other side, breakers, where the tiger shark pups grew and played.

  Between the sand banks and small islands ran fast, shallow streams of water, which we called the channels. Twice a day they were pulled by the tide out into the lagoon and the surf, running first one way then another. Fish were often sucked into the streams by the current, and we’d set up nets across our channels and catch them as they hurried along at dawn or dusk. The path of the channels was always changing – even most of the islands sank and rose and changed shape, depending on the pull of the moon.

  Our pod’s territory was on the eastern edge of the lagoon, though, and we mostly stayed there. Other males patrolled other territories and pulled the show off boys into line. Father ruled ours, and Grandmother the females. She wasn’t our Grandmother, just Grandmother. She spoke to the spirits on our behalf, and brought down the warm rain for us to drink, and guided in the big shoals. So the elders said.

  Away from the lagoon and the sea, you could always find wide shallow pools, warm as urine, left behind by the tide and good for pups to flip about in and learn how to use their tails, and play safe from predators. Out in Deep Sea, only the adults went, and usually not too far. Their stories usually made up for where they didn’t dare to go.

  And then, sometimes, there were caves. Sea-caves, mostly, all beneath the water and good for hiding in for a short time – say if you were in trouble from an adult, which I always was - or hunting squid, reef sharks, turtles, and other creatures who wander in and get lost among the pillars and clumps of dead coral.

  But some caves stretched up beyond the tide line into the flat rocks, and in one of these lived Grandmother, a mer so old that nobody remembered when she was born and so none of us could work out when she was supposed to die. We all wished she’d hurry up and do it, preferably just before it was our turn to go keep an eye on her. Into her cave, there was one entrance, and that by sea, from underneath. She must have swum in that way, once, but nobody could remember the last time she’d come out again into the air and seen the sky, and that was just as well – it would have made even the clouds puke to look at her.

  If it had been up to me, I would’ve left her there to catch her own fish or see if she could get the spirits of rain and air to catch them for her – seeing as she got on so well with them. Casih said that if Grandmother’s dinner wasn’t on time, or one of us was insolent, she could have a word with the spirits and send the fish elsewhere for a week. Or a year, depending. She could make the rainwater dry up in the rock hollows where it gathered, and we’d die of thirst. She could turn us into dolphins, too stupid to speak in proper words. Mer despise dolphins, though you humans seem to like them. Sometimes now I think it’s because they’re too like us, with their tails and their cleverness and their whistling talk.

  Of course, back then, I was angry with nearly everybody and everything, on and off. They restricted me, they bored me, they made stupid rules for me to follow and hurt me when I didn’t. I have to laugh when I think back on it. Che asks me what I’m laughing at. I say, myself, and he looks away and pretends to be preoccupied, because he doesn’t understand what there is to laugh at. But when you live every day with pain, in a world that isn’t yours, you forget what it was like to slide through the water without even thinking about it, the cool green slipping easily over your breasts and hips and the full length of your long tail fanning out behind you. Normal is pain, pain is part of you, pain lives deep inside you and darkens everything with its shadow.

  But at fifteen, I didn’t know this. There are so many differences between human and mer – I could make a great long list of them, longer than this book of mine - but as teenagers we’re just the same – moody, dissatisfied, never knowing how good we’ve got it. I was worse than most.

  Chapter 2

  “Melur, come on over here, let me fix your hair.”

  That was Dayang, my eldest sister. Of the six of us, she was first and I was last, younger by a long way. She had two pups of her own then but that didn’t stop her busying herself after me, fussing about my hair, my ear-pieces, the shell inserts I’d started growing on my arms to seem more like the adults – and then pulling off because they hurt. She was always trying to change me, to make me more like a mer female should be. Bearing pups, mating, foraging, eating, that was Dayang’s world. She meant well though.

  “My hair’s fine. Just leave it alone.”

  With a flick and a scowl I was off the rock shelf that edged our part of the lagoon, and into the water, skimming along the sandy bottom in search of something to annoy. Dawii followed me, pulling at my tail. She’s my third eldest sister, not so much older than me and just promised for a mate. She’s a rainbow of colour, so stuck with shells and bits of coral and bright things that even a blind groper could see her. In your world, you’d call it makeup.

  Fat blubber seal, I muttered to myself, blowing contemptuous bubbles through my nose. I wriggled away from h
er – I was faster than most, in those days - and slid down into the water-forest, thickest just under the drop off. I lay there feeling the sway and tickle of the grass against my belly. I’ll just stay down here for a while, I thought, day dreaming, while they sit overhead, braiding their stupid long hair and talking about where to find the most perfect shell grit and about how to make eyelid colours that don’t come off in the water, and which females Dayang’s male mates with when he goes visiting to the other pods.

  You know, if you stare really hard down at the roots of the forest, you can see points of light in the sand, specks of silver and gold and mother of pearl all ground up among the white. They’re pretty – for a while. But after a while it’s boring being alone. So I let myself fly up again, and poked my head up high above the wavelets, and made fish faces at my sisters, sitting side by side with their tails hanging in the water like shark bait. Suria, the second eldest, wasn’t there, she was looking after Grandmother, it was her turn that day. Nobody wanted to take their turn to look after Grandmother, but Father would’ve punished any of us who didn’t go. The rest of them were chewing on green kelp, and chattering, and taking no notice of me at all.

  So I turned upside to the hot blue sky, and started to daydream, again. What was I dreaming of? Humans.

  We’d seen some two seasons ago, when we chased a school of blue fin out to Deep Sea, outside the channels. They led us further than I’d ever been, further than I knew you could go, half a day’s swim from the lagoon and as much back. The mer women followed the males to help bring back the kill. We were too small to tackle such big prey on our own.

  In the distance, we saw four of these strange creatures, standing on a bobbing white island with a tree in the middle of it and wide white flapping things catching the breeze. They were shouting to one another with hoarse deep voices, like seals groaning at one another in mating season. They stood up high on two legs, wingless pelicans. I’d heard of these things.

  My heart turned over with fear, but I was mesmerised at once. I wanted to go closer and look at these odd pink birds with their long skinny bodies wrapped in bright coverings, and their dark narrow faces like mer but not like, and their black eyes squinting into the sun.

  “Humans!” hissed Casih, and dived straight down. My sisters followed, a chain of glittering tail fins and bubbles chasing each other to the surface.

  But I stayed staring, and stood up on my own tail, as high as I could above the water.

  “Aren’t they weird? Look! Look at their legs! What are they floating on?”

  But as I thrust myself up, round-eyed, Suria grabbed at my arm and pulled me under. I stared at her angrily through the broken sunlight, chest to chest. She was much bigger than me, then, but I was fiercer. I was always fierce.

  “It’s not safe to look. Don’t you hear what Grandmother tells us?”

  Oh sure, I heard. A lot more than I ever wanted to. Humans are wicked creatures that live on the Great Dry, she used to tell us little ones. A place where it’s so hot and parched that your skin burns and peels and sloughs off like sand, so the humans have to dip themselves in water every day to keep it pink and fresh. Sometimes you might come across them in Deep Sea, in the floating islands that they’ve made - big ones sometimes, so big they look like islands piled on top of one another, reaching up to the clouds. They float around and search for mer, which they catch and eat the same way we eat the little coloured fish that hide in the reef - heads first, then crunching on down to the tail. They particularly like the fresh young pups – they collect them in nets and knock them out flat on the rocks and then dry their little bodies in the sun, to eat for afternoon snacks. And so on.

  Pink juice would run down Grandmother’s three slack-falling chins, as she laughed at us cowering, covering our little faces with our hands, and she would chew into whatever delicacy the females had brought that day, dropping the unwanted bits all around. The others had nightmares, but even then I thought, she only wants to see us shrink down and squeak with fright. She wasn’t scared herself, so why should we be?

  “I just want to look. I’ll be really quick! We’ll never see them again!”

  Eel-like I wriggled out of Suria’s grasp, and darted towards the floater, and poked my head up as high above the water as I could, trembling with curiosity and my own disobedience. On their island, the humans fought with their flapping tree and struggled and shouted in the wind. The island bucked and tipped. They didn’t look all-powerful to me.

  I could see my sisters reaching for me again from below, so I pushed myself right out of the water, arching backwards, and got a really good look - then slapped back down on my belly with a smack.

  I thought the humans would look my way for sure, then. But they didn’t give any sign of it. Maybe they had poor eyesight, like some of the pale fish that come up from the darkness below, deeper than mer can dive. Maybe those black eyes were sightless and that’s why they seemed so helpless out here, out on the great green Deep. Maybe I could swim closer and call out to them to see if they called back. I wondered what they’d do. Scream, perhaps, and try to swim away? Grandmother said that long ago humans used to be afraid of mer. They knew that if they fell in the Deep, then it’d be the mer who’d catch them and take them back for dinner.

  Humans, said Grandmother, can’t swim. They have no tails. They have other things, though. Nets that stretch for thousands of mer lengths and sweep in everything that swims in the sea. Spears that can kill the biggest whale and floaters that can pull it in and carve it up and throw out the scraps before night comes. Growling spirits that drive their floaters across the water faster than a mer can swim. Stronger than our spirits, Grandmother, I asked?

  Grandmother frowned and spat. In the old days we could have sunk them, floaters and all, she said sourly – in the old days the spirits had strong spells to drive creatures like that back to the Dry - but now young mer (looking at me, green eyes red-rimmed with age and malice) – now young mer are insolent and ask too many questions, and the spirits get irritated, and bring winds and high waves – and why are there no oysters this week?

  Suria grabbed hold of me again, annoyed.

  “Why can’t you ever do as you’re told! You’re a pain in the arse!”

  Azura smirked righteously.

  Later, as the males came back dragging their catch for us to net and pull home, Casih swam alongside, serious and motherly.

  “You don’t understand how dangerous they are,” she explained, “You mustn’t ever get close to those things.”

  “But why not? I can swim faster than any human” and I showed them all just how fast I could swim, circling the females in a bright flash with my small net dragging behind me. “Anyway, I jumped right out in front of them and they didn’t even look!”

  “That’s because they can’t see you properly, moron,” Azura sneered, making a face on my other side.

  “Why not? Are they blind?”

  I knew it. Those things on their faces didn’t even look like eyes.

  Azura laughed and stuck a long-nailed finger under my ribcage, where it hurt.

  “They’re not blind, stupid. What do you think they are, bottom feeders? They see right through you. You look like part of the sea to them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I looked down at my body, a pale sheen of blueish white skin, plump and smooth. Of course they could see me, as well as I could see the turtles that wove like flying stones through our channels.

  “The water hides us. I thought everybody knew that! Grandmother says humans can only see mer if we’re out on the Dry. But you know what? If a human ever does see you, they’ll grab you and skin you and chop you into bite sized pieces and chew you up like a silver tail. Mmmm!”

  Azura stuck her snub-nosed face into mine, and ground her molars like someone mashing up a piece of old gristly shark meat.

  I spat at her, and snapped my own teeth, sharp as hers.

  “She just says that to scare you, cause she kn
ows you’re a scuttle-face. Anyway, how come you sleep out on the sand then with the rest of us? Aren’t you afraid a human’ll come along and skin you?”

  “Don’t be stupid! It’s alright because there aren’t any humans there to see us, jelly-brain!”

  It’s true. Humans are never seen in the channels. They run too shallow and fast for their floaters, and there are so many islands and sand banks they’d become lost. And why should they come there? At least, that’s what Casih told me, when I asked her why we never saw humans around the pods. Father said that if they did ever come there, he would slice their bodies from leg to throat and pull out their guts to eat for supper, and make their dry skins into bags for fish.

  A shoal of yellowtails passed like a wriggling cloud. Quick as a moray, Azura’s pale arm shot out and grabbed one from the centre. The shoal shivered, re-formed, swam on unconcerned. THEY didn’t care if their family got eaten. She shoved it between her white pointed teeth, and blew out faint pink bubbles.

  “If the humans catch you, that’s what’ll happen to you, little sister. So you’d better cut the back flips, huh.”

  I turned my back on her and tried to squirm away. Dawii, older than Azura, closed in on me and pinched my arm tight in long fingers. She and Azura exchanged glances.

  “Don’t be stupid. Father says curiosity isn’t good for females. Father says –“

  “Don’t give a fish’s arse what Father says!”

  I pulled one arm away from Dawii and puffed out my cheeks with water, my fingers wiggling off my cheeks like seal whiskers. Then I spat it out, right into Azura face, with a loud farting noise.

  “Father’s full of shit anyway…”

  That was going too far. Casih held her hand over my mouth and hissed at me to be quiet, looking ahead to where the males dived and leapt. Father frightened us all, with his huge dark bulk and pale octopus eyes. The thought of his great clawed fingers and yellowed teeth made my belly turn over. And still, I pushed to see how far I could go.