by Jane Thomson
You moved your fingers over me, warm shallow currents pulling me out to deeper water.
You stroked me between my teats and over them, in small circles, on down to my belly.
Mermaid, you said.
You kissed me, slid your face down between my legs, reached the warmth inside and nibbled me, a hundred small fishes. They streamed into me and through me, their fins setting my body fluttering and shivering. For the first time, to be human was pleasure as well as pain. You leaned over to kiss me again and I felt for your penis. You were hot and strange and strong, but not like a mer, because there was no sheath you could hide yourself in. I stroked your seed-sac, the soft balls that hang in front of human males for anything to bite, now tight and strained. But you looked the same as any young mer ready to fuck, straight, and pink, and reaching up for me.
You wanted to mate then, and I wanted it too, but when it came to it I was frightened. You leant over me, still kissing my neck with tiny cruel bites, and you were very heavy for something so thin. Your bones pressed into me. It was hard for me to breathe. I struggled to get out from under you. I felt your penis pressing at me, breaking through. I wasn’t made for fucking with a human. I tried to cover myself with my hands. You felt it, raised your head and kissed my eyelids as I’d kissed yours.
It’s ok. I’d heard you say that before. It meant, don’t be scared. It meant, let me in, or I’ll come in without asking.
Are you alright? That upwards inflection in your voice, and breathlessness, as if there wasn’t enough air now in the room for both of us. While you asked, you pushed and parted.
It’s ok.
I wanted you. I choked down my fear and took my hands away and put them around your neck, and rolled towards you. You lifted my legs over your hips, and I felt a sharp pain. You entered me, slowly, watching my face. If we’d been in the sea, this moment would have been side by side in the sand, or the current, twisting around one another, weightless, till the seed came from you and we drifted apart. So I’d seen Casih and Father, and my sisters with their mer-mates.
Here, now, everything was heavy and awkward. You thrust into me, your eyes shut and your face screwed up as if you were eating something you didn’t like. I wondered if I’d die, mating with a human male, against nature.
You slowed, opened your eyes, brought your face to mine. I felt your body trembling, holding back. You nibbled my lower lip, bit gently into my neck. I had the feeling it wasn’t me you saw.
The feeling took me by surprise. It grew in seconds, from a ripple to a rush, and I kissed you, and pulled you hard into me. You thrust, and cried out, and then twisted away with a shout, and I didn’t know at first why, until I saw the blood running from your shoulder onto my body.
I had done something very wrong, this time.
I leaned up and kissed you gently and said sorry in mer, and in human. Your blood dropped onto my face and I licked at it.
“No,” you said. “I don’t like that.”
I shook my head. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Mer have sharp teeth and we use them. All mer have bite marks, from fights and lovemaking and play.
You wiped yourself, and said,
“Never do that again.”
I understood the look in your eyes. Ok, I said in mer, I won’t. I rubbed at the small bruises you’d made with your blunt human teeth.
We lay, my fish legs over your hairy, brown, perfect human ones, and you put your arm around me and drew me in against the warmth of your body, and smiled down at me, triumphant. You were pleased with me and loving, and pleased with yourself too. At that moment, I was glad I’d lost my tail, since I’d gained you.
Chapter 18
In the next weeks, I learned more of your words, but we learned to talk without speaking, too. That was how I came to know you were sometimes unhappy, like me - even though you were a healthy human male, with strong working legs.
There were times when you were content, and I hoped at first that was because of me. Soon I realised I didn’t have anything to do with it. You either woke happy, or you woke in the midst of a dark cloud, and whether or not we’d mated made no difference. I think it was more to do with your laptop, and with what you called your Book. When you weren’t wading, or fishing from the rocks, or smoking your cigarettes, you sat staring at the laptop, and making marks in it with your fingers, and then frowning at them as if they’d made themselves without asking you and you were angry and disappointed. Perhaps, I thought, you were trying to communicate with your spirits, and they weren’t talking to you. The way you peered and frowned at your laptop reminded me of Grandmother and her trances, when she’d grumble at the spirits for troubling an old woman and keeping her awake at night.
When you got up in the late morning, smelling of sweat and salt, your hair matted from sleep, you sometimes brought me breakfast, sitting beside me on the rock outside while we both watched the sea to see what kind of day it would be. It was usually warm, but it often rained, a light rain like water-in-sun, and sometimes a cool wind blew in from far ocean. To me the air on my skin was welcome, but you, with your skin over bones and no fat, shivered easily and covered yourself up. You thought it was strange when I took the rasping clothes you’d given me off and sat bare in the sea spray, but you got used to it. Clothes scraped and tickled.
You always seemed to be able to find something new and strange for this first food of the day. Sometimes, you’d bring bread you’d burnt on your fire, with yellow oil and sweet brown liquid like sap, much too sweet for me. Sometimes, meat from some land animal I’d never seen. When I asked, you showed me a picture or made one with your drawing stick – pen – cows, chickens, pigs.
I drew you a picture of a fish, and made you understand that I’d much rather eat that, if I could. You brought a flathead one morning that you’d caught with a line and hook from the rocks. It still flapped in a bucket, drawing in the poison air. I was about to pop the head into my mouth – watering after all this time eating your long dead human food – but you grimaced, and grabbed it from me, swearing. The first time I’d had something fresh and alive for weeks – my fury overcame my fear and love of you, and I bared my teeth, and almost bit you instead.
“No.” You raised your hand.
I knew that word – you used it when I wanted to touch the thing you burnt your food on, and I touched it anyway, and was burnt.
I dearly wanted to eat that fish.
“No.”
You slapped the fish, still twitching, on the rock to kill it. You took it to the sink and began to scrape the silver scales off, and then you ran a knife down the spine, and all the good red blood ran out and down into the hole, and the stomach and innards too.
I wondered if maybe you meant to chew it for me, as the mothers do for their babies – but I wasn’t a baby, and I didn’t much like that idea. Still, because it was you, I’d have to eat it, or your feelings would be hurt.
You gathered the insides of the fish up and put them in the bad-smelling black bag where you put the things you didn’t want. Finally, when there was hardly anything left, you burnt the meat on your hot thing – stove – until it changed from succulent pink to dry, bone white. I ground my teeth and wept.
When you brought the fish to me to eat I turned my face away, and hissed at you, and pushed it away, so it fell on the floor.
“You might as well have thrown it in there!” I shouted, tears in my eyes, pointing at the black bag. You jumped back, swearing. The burnt fish lay on the floor.
Your dark eyes grew narrow. I could see the dirty white around the brown of your pupils, red-veined and clotted with sleep. You stepped towards me. How huge you were! I remembered Father, in one of his tempers, pregnant with rage. I cowered from you, and wished I’d eaten the horrible, burnt, bloodless fish you’d made for me. I reached for it.
You picked up the pieces from the floor and gave them to me, disgusted. I chewed on them, huddling low and meek - but after you’d gone out of sight, I went to the black throw-aw
ay place and dug in it for the red bits you’d put in there, shoving them into my mouth and swallowing them fast so you wouldn’t notice.
My mouth and hands were covered with fish scales and blood when you came back, too soon. What could I do? I knew you wouldn’t like it, and you didn’t. I waited for you to beat me, since there wasn’t anywhere I could swim.
Your nose wrinkled. You looked in despair at the black bag, and at me, and said “shit”. You put your head in your hands and groaned.
“Sorry.”
You made me wash, holding my wrists tightly so that it hurt, and turning your face away. You gave me my sticks and pushed me outside. I sat down there and whimpered, because I thought that now you’d throw me back.
But in a while, you came out to the rock where I lay, curled up, and you crouched and spoke softly to me, stroking my hair. I said, “I won’t do it again,” and you nodded, not understanding the mer, but maybe the meaning.
At sun down, you brought me another fish, and this time, you gave it to me outside and turned your back, and went inside where you couldn’t see me eat it. I hesitated, thinking maybe it was a test, and if I bit into the cool wet body you’d come rushing out full of rage and disgust– but I was hungry, and homesick, and after a moment I tore into it, the blood running down on to my chest. After so much time it tasted almost as good as your fucking – but then, as I sat in the hot sun, licking my arms clean, I began to feel sticky and smelly. In the sea, the water washes us all clean but here, in the Dry, your food and your sweat and your seed and saliva grow like a stinking salt-crust on your skin.
So that’s why humans rub at themselves with water, I thought, and eat their food with silver sticks, and only when it’s well dead and burned. They don’t like the sweet sticky blood on their faces and running down into their laps. It accounted for the dry, musty smell of you, the faint sweet rottenness, before you lay in your pool with the strong smelling green and pink liquids you added to take the stink away.
I slid into the place where you washed, and made the water run – I knew the use of some of your human things now – and swam, and bathed the mess from my face and chest with cool running water. I planned then that I’d eat fish whole and unburnt, when you gave it to me, but only on the sand, far from you, where you wouldn’t be disgusted. Then I could dive into the surf and be clean, and you’d never even know.
When I came out smelling of washing, and well fed, you smiled at me. You were always smiling but then you had so many different kinds of smiles. You could smile and be angry. You could smile in discomfort, because you had nothing to say. You could smile and feel disgust. There were so many things behind your smile that I had to understand if I was going to be your mate. I studied you all the time, all the different kinds of smiles and the way you pulled your seagull brows together and the way your eyes sparkled at me like the sun over a cloud or drew half-closed in annoyance, the movements of your red mouth, the way your fingers clenched together or rested palm out on your thighs. I must become an expert in you.
Chapter 19
One day, you said you wanted to go to the Dry.
You showed me a picture of lots of humans holding drinks and laughing, on your laptop. This thing, this laptop, could show images of anything you could imagine, even Deep Sea and islands like ours in the midst of it. Mer spirits appear, if they come at all, in trances and drifting shapes, but human spirits you can see clearly on a screen, speaking to you as if they were right there.
A party, you said.
“A meet?”
I was shy, and still frightened. I thought I knew, now that Grandmother’s stories of skinning and drying and eating were all nasty lies – but what if the others weren’t like you?
Caz had come once since the first time. She brought you more cigarettes and the yellow drink you call beer, which makes you sleepy. She didn’t think I should be with you, in your cave. I could feel it as she ran about fetching things and talking to me in words I couldn’t understand. I understood, though, when she asked you questions about me.
To all of her questions, you just shrugged or shook your head, and that upset her. She sighed so we could both hear, and put her container – cup – down with a noise on the floor, and spilled things.
It was a special day. The black thing that buzzed like a fly, which you carried in your pocket or left on one of the tables and then couldn’t find when it called to you – that thing made a noise in the early morning and you stumbled out to get it, looking sleepy but eager.
You talked to someone who wasn’t there – I could hear the voice coming out of the black buzzing thing, as if from far away. Your spirits, maybe, and happy for once? You looked as if they’d cheered you up, anyway.
“It’s my birthday,” you said. I looked at you blankly.
You showed me a picture of someone fat. Not fat, pregnant. A pregnant human – the same shape as Casih before she pupped.
“Mother.”
Then a human baby – big head and tiny curled legs and arms, not so different from a mer baby except for the legs.
“Baby.”
You and your mother. Yes? No? I wished I had more words.
You showed me a picture of a man and a woman, holding a small human. The woman looked like you. She had your hooded eyes and thin red lips. She held you as if she didn’t like you much.
Me, you said, pointing at the baby. “Daniel. On this day, I was born. Birthday.”
“Birthday?”
“Melur? Birthday?”
I shrugged. This was something you really wanted to know, but I didn’t understand this, birthday. We don’t celebrate the day you’re born, among mer. What’s special about that? Babies are born all the time, and die all the time too.
I pointed to my back, to the salamander.
“Totem. Birthday.”
After the cutting, we have a party so that you forget the pain, and to celebrate that you’ve become a grown mer, with a guide spirit to look after you. Your sisters and female cousins and mothers – your own mother and any other mothers your father might have given you – gather around and we eat sweet kelp and dried fish and gull.
“Where were you born?” you said, gazing away, so I’d think the answer didn’t matter to you, and I’d tell you without thinking. I caught the cunning in your smile.
I pointed to the sea.
“There.”
The sea is wide, and over the sea is land and more land. You told me that. I waved, vaguely.
“Where is Daniel born?”
You took me to the window, and pointed. Far away, I saw a line of green. I’d seen it before. The Great Dry. Caz came from there, when she came, with containers – cans and packets – and beer, and more cigarettes.
For you, the day was special, and you were all alone, with me. You were especially lonely on this day, as you hadn’t been before. I bumped down to the shore with the sticks – crutches - on my own, and picked out a cuttle fish bone. It wasn’t as sharp as the one my grandmother had used, but I could sharpen it.
Back at your cave, I found the picture book with sea creatures. I showed you a picture as you lay in the sun, burning your skin to pink and brown.
“You. Totem. Spirit.”
You looked from me to the picture, and tipped beer down your throat from a brown bottle, sleepy-eyed.
“You think I look like a turtle?”
It was your rounded, pinkish lids that reminded me of a turtle, and your knobbled spine, and the way your neck sometimes poked forward from your shoulders. Too much of looking at the laptop, too much of looking at your Book. That and the way you drew in to yourself, when I pushed at you too hard.
I nodded, drawing my fingers over your heavy turtle eyelids. You laughed shortly and yanked my hair as it brushed your face. I didn’t understand why - turtles are beautiful, graceful creatures, strong and long-lived.
“Really?”
I think you would have rather I’d said you were like a shark, or a whale – something strong a
nd fast. You can’t pick your own totem, though, it is what you are. So the elders used to say.
I showed you the knife I’d made, drew it lightly across your bare chest, making sure not to cut the skin, yet.
You pushed me away, pretending to be afraid of me and my knife. I’d never have cut you if you didn’t want it, but you needed a spirit to guide you, anyone could see that.
“For your birthday.”
You shook your head, no thanks, oh no. You rolled your body away. I could tell you were pulling yourself into your hard shell, like the turtle you were.
I took your arm, turned it wrist upwards, lying on my lap. The underside of your arm was pale like the belly of some fish, delicate. As I held it in my hand, I could feel the tiny beat of your pulse. I kissed it where it fluttered.
I stroked your neck as you lay on your belly, and pulled the hair away from the nape. You had a nape like a pup, soft and white and freckled with brown and pink spots. I kissed that too. You watched me, tense, trying not to show fear.
I traced the lines of the turtle on your back with my finger. You looked up at me, laughing and doubtful. I laid the knife on your skin, between the bones of your shoulders. You shut your eyes and turned your face to the stone, but you let me do it. I drew a line, so lightly you could hardly see it, no blood, just white, a scratch. You reached for a cigarette, drew hard, and blew a cloud of choking smoke, and said nothing.
I stroked your shoulder with one hand while I drew my lines with the other. I drew them delicately, not deep. Tiny droplets of blood stood up on your skin and I sucked them away as they beaded. You wanted to shrink away but you lay still, eyes closed. I sang a spell song to you so that you wouldn’t notice the cuts.
It was a very simple drawing. It couldn’t have too many lines - you wouldn’t lie still for that, no matter how brave you wanted to seem. I’d already guessed you were afraid of lots of things. Don’t worry, it made me love you more. So I cut quickly and lightly, licking off the blood as I went so it wouldn’t run down the sides of your body and make a sticky mess. You wouldn’t like that.