by Jane Thomson
“Stay close to me,” I said, not bothering to move. “I’ll deal with her for you,” not understanding that I’d made it even worse. Che turned his head away, reddening.
I thrust after Azura and caught her by the hair from behind. I twisted and pulled till her face turned pink with temper and she clawed back, but missed.
“Leave him alone, shit for brains, understand? He’s my friend.”
I snapped my teeth in her face a few times, to show her I meant it, and she bared hers, and scratched me. I still have the scar, on my left shoulder. Maybe she still has the mark, too, where I tore her ear and made it bleed. We’re not clawed like lobster, but our nails grow long and sharp and hardened by the salt. Our wounds fill with seawater and heal fast, luckily.
On my menstruation, it was time for me to be carved with the totem I’d have for life, the spirit who’d look after me in the hunt and giving birth, and who’d receive me when I sank into darkness. I had no other decoration yet, because I didn’t have the patience to sit around waiting for the tiny grains of pearl and gold to bind to the skin of my arms and shoulders, or to inlay shining shells over my hips until they grew into my flesh and became part of me. I’d always rather play and think. Besides, I never liked the pain, which Casih said was part of being a woman.
I swam to Grandmother’s cave, quaking. To come there, you had to dive to the floor of the lagoon and swim through a dark, narrow passage, close enough that you had to keep your arms by your sides and push yourself along with a flick of your tail. Then you’d come up in half-darkness, into a pool with a little sandy beach, littered with the bones of creatures who’d died or been brought there long ago and eaten. The coral sand sloped up steeply until it met the dark rock, and there Grandmother sat, out of reach of the tide. Above her, light filtered down from wherever the cave met the sky, but you couldn’t see the bright air, or even smell it. The air in the cave was thick with rotten fish and old mer smell, musty like seaweed left to dry. We all held our breath.
Grandmother must have been fifty at least, an old, old woman, with eyes white and blind as a deep sea slit-mouth. Her skin hung in folds from her neck to her belly, encrusted over with small shell creatures which would grow on anything which stopped still long enough.
I pushed the skin of silvertail that I’d brought towards her, and she sat sucking on it with her broken, yellow teeth, and staring evilly in my direction.
“What do you want? It’s not your Day.”
I knew it wasn’t my Day and so did she. Once every two weeks or so, I had to stay with Grandmother, feed her, listen to her stories of killings and maimings and the punishments of spirits upset by some small piece of disrespect. Sometimes I thought her spirits must be different from the ones that we all knew - spirits of the cave, dank and vengeful. I’d have to clean her toe-claws, pick her teeth, and clear up the cave so that the next grand child could at least find their way in there over the mess of half-eaten food.
“I’ve had my first bleed, Grandmother.”
She sat chewing and sucking, ignoring me. If I was that old, I thought, I’d swim out far into the deep ocean and dive till I drowned. Better to be eaten by sharks than be that ugly.
“You think you’re different from the rest of us, don’t you, little fish?”
Grandmother’s voice whispered low sometimes, like a stick scraped over rock. You had to lean in to hear her, even though you didn’t want to come near. But if you didn’t answer, she’d swipe about with her long clawed fingers, hoping to catch you with them and score your tender hide.
I shook my head, and then, remembering she couldn’t see me, muttered “No”.
She laughed, a thin, mucous sound like someone choking on a shellfish gone down the wrong way, and pointed a finger at me.
“Yes you do. I know all about you, you needn’t think just because I can’t see you that I don’t know.”
I trawled through my mind for all the things that Grandmother might know. Maybe that I’d gone to Deep Sea, without the pod. That I’d bitten Azura till a chunk came out (I didn’t swallow it though). That I’d been out all day exploring yesterday with Che and then stolen a bag of dried fish Casih had put aside for Father and eaten them all. That Casih had gone to Father and said she ate them herself, and come back nursing a bruise as big as an abalone. There were so many things, that was the trouble!
“You think you should have been born among the humans, don’t you, in the Big Dry, with legs? Let me tell you, little fish, you’re lucky you weren’t.”
“Yes Grandmother. I mean no.”
Legs? I’d never said I wanted to have legs. Although I’d always wondered what it would be like. Of course I wouldn’t want to have those feeble legs in place of my beautiful strong tail - who would! I wondered how she knew those things, anyway. Dayang, Azura, Suria, any of them could have told her, I guess, chattering away to keep their minds off the smell. I should have kept my stupid mouth shut. I’d tell them so when I got out of here.
She searched around beside her with blind, wrinkled hands and found her long, sharp fishbone knife, with the point cut fine as a spine, that she always kept by her. Maybe in case something nastier than her found its way in.
“Sit by me, little fish, and we’ll make a start.”
I sat with my back to her, holding my fists one in the other, tight as I could. I squeezed my eyes tight and waited, mouth trembling.
I wasn’t prepared for the first cut, though I thought I would be. As she dug the knife over my shoulder blade, I nearly jumped. I gasped and shook with the pain of it and almost unclasped my fists to strike, but it was shameful to struggle or move, and after all every female mer had to do the same, when her blood came.
The second cut was worse, and I would’ve shot away, but one bony hand grabbed my arm and held me still. I could’ve moved, even so, but the pain of the pinch was as bad as the pain in my back, and somehow the one made the other feel a little better. If she were to cut me in two places at once, I thought, maybe I wouldn’t feel either of them, my brain wouldn’t know which place to pick.
“You’re feeling a little pain now, a little suffering? It’s nothing to the suffering the humans feel. That’s what their world is, suffering. Take my word for it, you wouldn’t want to live in the Dry.”
She scored my back again, hard and deep, as if to emphasise the point. Suria said she’d tried to work out the shape of her totem, while Grandmother was cutting her, line by line, and she’d done it too, so she said – an octopus, eight legged and goggle-eyed. Anyone could have worked that out, I said. Now I didn’t know, it seemed to me that it hurt too much to think about the whole picture, only each line as it burned into my shrinking skin.
Halfway through I started to wail out loud, thinking that voicing the pain might drown it out. Grandmother put down the knife and yanked my hair, once, hard. I’d never thought she had so much strength in her.
“You’re shaking. Stop that noise at once. Do you want your totem to be a mess? Something nobody even recognises? What’ll you do then? Who’ll mate with you when they don’t even know who you are, or what your pups will be?”
I thought of my sisters, with their beautiful scarred backs – ray, octopus, marlin, shark – all the creatures we lived with, whose spirits inhabited us and ruled our lives. Who would I be, without a totem? Just a nameless fish?
I bit my lip. I wondered if the others had cried too. I bet they did, too.
“Bend over. And have this, it’ll shut your mewling up.”
I bent, so that Grandmother could better reach my lower back, and felt the cuts on my shoulder blades spring apart. I took the lump she gave me and bit into it. It tasted unpleasant, but only for a moment, then my jaws began to numb and my lips to thicken.
Cold trickled through me and brought paralysis with it. I found myself forgetting the knife, and the place, and thinking of other things entirely. It was over.
“Go, wash the blood off. Not too long, I haven’t got all day.”
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nbsp; I slid down the beach, my body a sack of wet sand. The water stung and cooled and burned, all at the same time, but I was glad I could feel it. The blood swirled around me in soft pink spirals. I stayed a little while, till the cold stopped the bleeding, then dragged myself slowly back up for the finishing.
“Colours, now.”
I fumbled clumsy-fingered through the pouches that Grandmother kept her things in. The cave was littered. I don’t know how she ever found anything, blind as she was. No other mer collected such things – we spent our days in the sea and our nights on the sand - where would we have put them?
There were bags of dried fish, for when Grandmother got peckish. Lots of kinds of bones, for knife making, and sharp teeth, too, from whale and shark and dolphin. A particular kind of weed she used to make rope, and another kind, finer, for nets. Poisons to put you to sleep and poisons to kill you, or so my sisters said. Jelly for healing wounds. Trance-weed, to give you waking dreams and make you forget the days and nights. Spell-weed, so that you could hear the spirits of the air and the water and the wind and understand what they said – usually, to bring more lobster and stay within sight of the channels. These were the spirits who chose your totem, and then Grandmother would cut it into you so everyone would always know who you were and what you belonged to.
I found the inks for her, that she’d drop into the wounds to turn the scars purple and blue and green. It was delicate work. I wondered how she managed. She couldn’t tell any colour from any other, or see where her dirty fingers scored and painted. Still, she never seemed to hesitate, and the totems were clear enough and beautiful, on my sisters’ backs. How did she know which one to give who? Why was gentle Casih a shark, and spiteful Azura a harmless rainbow fish? Why…
Still thinking, I turned my head towards her.
“Why do we do this?”
Grandmother hit me hard, a glancing blow just above the ear, that dizzied me and knocked the warm water out of one ear. She must have been feeling soft hearted.
“Do what?”
“Cut totems into our skin.”
I looked at Grandmother’s long knife. She hit out at me again, but this time I bent in time and her hand passed over the top. I thought she’d be angry and try again, but she just laughed. If anything, that was worse.
“Questions, questions!”
She leaned back, grinning, her fingers stained with purple ink from the colouring stick.
“Because we’ve always done it. Would you like to be the first one? The only one without a totem picture? How would we recognise you, without your totem?”
“But you knew me before. Am I different now?”
I was scaring myself with my own insolence. Maybe it was the stuff she gave me to still the pain, which made me reckless.
“Humans don’t have totems on their backs,” I said. “I’ve seen one and they don’t.”
“I’ll tell you a story,” said Grandmother, picking up the inking stick again. It still burned where she touched, but it was not so bad now. I sat still.
“Once, when my great grandmother was a girl – yes, she was even uglier than me – there was a mer woman who wasn’t satisfied. Oh no, she wanted to see if things could be different. So she went to Deep Sea, all on her own, and swam for days without stopping, and thought she was very clever. She’d come up to the surface,” (oh so she’s heard that story, I thought), “and stick her head up like a fool, and one day she even went to the sands near the Big Dry, watching for the humans to come out in their little boats. Usually, when they saw her, they screamed and ran away. But one day, a boat came out with some humans who didn’t run away. The mer came to the top of the waves, and found she couldn’t look away from the human’s black eyes and his long thick legs. She sang to him, asking him to come swim in the sea with her for a while. She would have put him safely back in his boat, she didn’t mean any harm. But the fisherman just stared, and then he threw a net out and caught the mer in it and dragged her into the boat, and took her away, all the way to the Dry.
Nobody ever saw her again after that – not alive - but my great grandmother’s uncle said he saw her bones lying in the sand, and her skin drying on the rocks, like kelp.”
Grandmother settled back, her story done. Her red eyes challenged me to answer back.
“But how did your great grandmother’s uncle know? I mean, he would have had to go to the Big Dry himself, and see? Maybe she made friends with the human and he gave her fish to eat and she sang to him?”
Grandmother’s claws flexed.
“You think my great grandmother was lying, little fish? Is that what you think?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head and watching out for her claws when they came searching for me, to pinch and tear, “But what if she – what if she got it wrong. What if the mer and the human lived together, happily ever after?”
My grandmother laughed until she was nearly sick, and then hawked a great gob of something grey and sticky onto the floor of her cave.
“Where exactly? Tell me where it is, where the mer can walk and the humans can swim?”
She had a point. I relaxed, watching the yellow trail that ran from the corners of her eyes down the channels of her cheeks, and met the grey saliva there on its way out to her chins. I was full of pride and fright. Nobody had ever dared to ask so many questions before and been answered.
“There’s no stopping the young from believing what they want to believe, is there,” she said mildly. She stretched out an arm, the flesh hanging from it like a curtain of seagrass, and pulled another bag from behind her.
“This is all that’s left of her, that mer woman. My great grandmother’s uncle went and collected her, at night, when the humans were sleeping. She was his mate. He took her away to show us what happens when the mer leave their mates to keep company with humans. Why don’t you open it and have a look.”
I opened the bag. White bones, a skull dry as cuttle fish. Some rags of something that might once have been mer-skin, black and shrivelled with age – or might have just been some old dolphin skin. I closed the bag quickly.
Grandmother pushed her knives towards me, the long thin one for the big cuts, the smaller one for the fine lines in between.
“Dip those in the water, will you, my dear?”
She sometimes spoke to us with affection. It was a warning sign. I took the knives, my back a mess of hardened blood and ink, and dipped them in the cold seawater.
“So what am I, Grandmother?”
There are no mirrors in the sea, unless you want to try to see yourself among the crabs in a rock pool.
“Ask your sisters.”
I had an uneasy feeling. What if Grandmother had given me something stupid – a prawn for example, a mollusc, or even one of the humans we talked so much about. I liked to imagine being a human, sometimes – I didn’t want one on my back.
Flipping back into the water, the salt stung my wounds again and I could barely swim. But it would do them good. I had to move, to stay in the water till they became scars, rainbow coloured and beautiful.
When I wriggled out into the lagoon, my sisters crowded around me, their tails turning the water into froth.
“Let’s see what you’ve got?” Azura turned me around towards her for a better look. “Ewww, it’s got legs.”
Oh no. She’s given me a human! I could’ve gone back in there and killed the evil old woman. I could still see her grinning as I left.
“It’s got four legs,” Dawii added, poking me. She hadn’t forgotten the incident in the cave.
Four? No human has four legs. What has four legs. Nothing has four legs.
“And a body like a sea horse, only not curled up,” said Cik, my fourth sister, puzzling.
“Or maybe an eel – no, it isn’t that,” added Casih, turning me round again, so that I felt like a strange piece of flotsam, being examined from all angles.
I arched my neck but there was no way I could see what Grandmother had etched into my skin. Besid
es, it hurt too much to try.
My sisters had brought fresh meat, and sweet kelp, and a coconut Casih had found on the sand. The females of Che’s pod came to share and to celebrate. We ate, and they talked and sang, and I was morose.
At dusk the pod females went to fish, but I lay staring into the place where the sea meets the sky.
“It stings like crazy, doesn’t it,” said Dayang, taking my hand. She’d always been like a mother to me, since ours pulled herself up on the beach to give birth for the last time. “Come and sit by me for a while.”
She sat beside me, stroking my head and singing, of silly things like the sardine that thought it was a whale, and a song about the old mother of the sea which I remembered from when I was very little.
“Dayang, how does Grandmother know where to cut, when she can’t even see where her food is? “
“I don’t know. The spirits guide her, I suppose.” Dayang gazed out over the lagoon, sky-reflecting. “There, you can see a picture in the clouds. A sky-mer looking down on us.”
I looked up. In the blue, the sky mer stretched out her tail, her fins wisps of white.
“Her head’s coming off,” I said, as the wind blew the sky-mer across to Deep Sea. Dayang said nothing.
“How old is Grandmother?”
Dayang laughed.
“Nobody knows. Maybe she’s been here since the first mer was born in the sea.”
“She’s just a dirty old seal!” I sneezed at something in the sand, and then wished I hadn’t, as my back muscles drew tight.
Dayang put her hands over her ears, a sign for when you don’t want others to hear what’s been said.
“You shouldn’t speak like that. She can hear you, wherever you are. She’s stronger than you think, Melur. She can call up a storm and make the whales drive themselves onto the sand and die there, she can make you drown, or me – if she wants. “
I looked away, ashamed of having frightened her, and she pulled my hair gently to take the sting out.
“Or she could turn you into a bottom-feeder or, let’s see, a porpoise maybe?”
That was Dayang’s idea of a joke.