Deeper

by Jane Thomson

  “Stories. Not true. But I don’t seem to be able to write anything these days. I sit here and nothing comes, it’s no good – but what’s the point of telling you that, you don’t understand a word I say, do you.”

  But I did understand – not all that you said, but some of it. I was learning. I wanted to know what those marks meant, that made you so moody, and that you spent so much time poring over. I was beginning to understand that they were some kind of symbol, a mark meaning a thing, as a sound means a thing. But now you sat staring at pictures on your laptop, and smoking, and frowning. Your spirits weren’t speaking to you. That I understood.

  One day, when Caz had come and you were down on the beach bringing up supplies, she went to your lap top, and sat down to look at your Book. She knew you wouldn’t like it – I could see by the way she looked behind, to see if you were coming up the path from the sea, and might catch her at it. Your Book was a secret. Humans are good at keeping secrets. They have so many that they have to be.

  Caz didn’t like your Book, but she found it interesting. The black marks held her like a snare. As she read she got angry. I could tell by the way her lips pressed together, and her fists tightened, in the way that humans do when they’re annoyed or embarrassed. I was getting to be quite an expert on humans.

  You banged the door as you came in, and Caz jumped, and then sat again, challenging. Seal, the black creature called dog, that belonged to Caz, jumped up too and put his paws on you. He was an old, tired creature, and didn’t like to go down to the beach. You pushed him off, swearing.

  I looked from Caz to you, waiting. Maybe you’d hit her. Father would have, any of the males, because you’d said once, don’t touch my laptop, and so I never had. But it wasn’t you who was ready to strike, it was Caz. She pointed at the laptop, and at me, and spoke in a voice that shook and broke. Against the light I could see the spray of her spit, and her finger pointed like a spear. She spoke to you, mer-hiss.

  “You bastard.”

  You turned your back, washing your hands in the sink, and your neck was stiff and warning, even from behind. When you finished washing, you dried your hands slowly, without looking at Caz, and then you crossed to the laptop and turned it off, and it went dark. Closing your box of secrets.

  Caz stood as tall as she could make herself, close to your body, face to your face, and I think she couldn’t make up her mind what she wanted more, to bite you or to mate with you. Humans don’t bite much, though, or claw. They use words instead.

  “It’s just a story,” you said. “It’s not real.”

  What is real? I didn’t dare to ask. I put my hands over my face, hoped you wouldn’t notice me there.

  “You promised you wouldn’t. You said.”

  You loomed above Caz with your beak-nose, pushing her back with your two hands.

  “You had no right to read it.”

  “You had no right to write it. About me. Her.”

  Her fingers, gold-clawed, stabbed towards me.

  “You don’t own me,” you said, and you tossed your head as Azura used to when she stole the meat.

  Caz threw a glass at you. It missed and broke on the stone floor. You stood cross-armed as she grabbed her bag, hissing, and walked loud to the door. As she passed me, she bent and pulled my hands away from my face, and stared into my eyes, blue into green. I bared my teeth, defensive.

  “Look at her, she’s not human.”

  If she had touched me again, perhaps I would’ve bitten her, though I’d liked her quite well. And then again, it was your world, and she was right.

  You went after her, raising your hand to slap.

  “Leave her alone,” you said, low thunder. “Mind your own business.”

  I lifted my head. You’d protect me from Caz? I shot her a look, victorious.

  I watched the boat spring away from the sand, the white froth trailing out behind like blood in the water.

  Chapter 22

  We didn’t see Caz after that. You went to the Dry to get your own food, and I waited for you, and fished with your rod and hook, and painted. When you came back you taught me new ways of mating, like this and like that, using my tongue and my mouth and my breasts on all the parts of your body. You were happy afterwards but never content, like someone who finds rainwater but not enough to stop their thirst.

  I hardly thought about home at all, it seemed irrelevant to my life with you. There it was, if I wanted to go there, stretching blue-grey-green below the Trapped Moon. I didn’t. I knew for certain that none of my sisters or brothers or even Che, could possibly understand how there was nothing more in life for me than to be loved by you.

  You told me a friend of yours would put my paintings in a gallery. I didn’t know what you meant by ‘gallery’, and you said it was too hard to explain, but you said you’d take them and try to bring money – the paper you kept in your clothes – and with money you could get fish and bread and coffee and cigarettes. And more colours, and more canvases, and brushes, to replace the ones that Seal used to chew, or which frayed with use.

  “I can catch us fish without money,” I said. I hadn’t hunted properly since I’d been mer, but maybe I still could. Hunting is a skill that takes knowledge and patience as well as speed. We could live on fresh fish and sea plants, and do without those cans and packets that you seemed to like so much, mush without bones or blood or bite.

  You laughed and shook your head.

  “But not fags and beer,” you said, “Everything costs money. Even living here costs money. I’m not made of it.”

  I could see that without you telling me.

  But I was beginning to understand the human way of doing things.

  “So to get….all this, you need money.” I swept my arm around, taking in your cave, stuffed with things and more things.

  You nodded.

  “I’m running out of cash. I’m stony broke.”

  “But what about the Book?”

  You drained your beer, lit a cigarette.

  “Maybe one day. One day I’ll make lots of money. But I need it now. I can’t even make the rent.”

  “What is rent?”

  You laughed, and looked at the ceiling, sighing. Maybe I didn’t understand how the human system worked, after all.

  “This place doesn’t belong to me.”

  Belong?

  “I have to pay money for it. It’s called rent. Welcome to the real world.”

  So, nothing without money, not even the place where you slept.

  “We could sleep on the sand. I’d keep you warm. Maybe I could find us a cave..”

  “Thanks,” you said. “But if I slept on the sand, I’d get bitten by mosquitoes, and I couldn’t live without fags and beer. And how about my laptop? What about my writing? “

  And you laughed again, but bitterly.

  “I wish I didn’t need all those things”, you said, “but I do, and so do you.”

  You looked out the door, to the sea, and out to the horizon, as if you dreamed of great birds flying towards you over the ocean with money in their claws. You were looking towards the future, and I had a feeling that I was becoming the past.

  But nothing much changed. You wrote your Book, and smoked, and drank, and sucked up strange smelling steam from a long pipe. It blunted your discontent. While you sat looking over the ocean, I stared at the writing in the books you had, to try to understand these human signs. When you came back, if you were in a better mood, you helped me, patting me like you used to pat Seal when he sat at command. You’d made me humble, but at least I was learning.

  You made the sounds, and showed me the signs for them. You showed me words – fish, sky, sea. You wrote your name – Daniel – and mine – Melur. This, you said, means you. So I had my totem, and my sign, made in black ink on paper – both of them meaning me, Melur. While you slept and stared out towards the Dry, I practised.

  I began to see, once more, how much cleverer than mer you humans were, about some things. You didn�
��t know one sea plant from another, and you couldn’t see the fish as they swam all around you, or tell when the ocean was brewing up a storm, or hear a heartbeat – but you had this thing, this writing – so that everything you knew and saw could be made into little black marks, and any other human could look at those marks, and know what it was you saw, even if you weren’t there to tell them. Although I wondered too, if you were so clever, why did you live on the Dry, when the sea was obviously so much richer and easier. Why walk on those clumsy, sunburnt legs, when you could have swum easily with tails in the weightless ocean? It made no sense. And why invent this useless, greedy symbol, money, when everything you needed was all around you?

  “Tell me what you’re writing.”

  What was it that made Caz so angry? I needed to know this, didn’t dare to ask.

  You were awake and bright-eyed, for once. You’d been talking to your friends, on the buzzing thing you called a mobile. I’d given up trying to understand how it worked: it was enough that sometimes it made you kind to me. Sometimes, you liked to be asked about your Book. You were proud of it, like a mother with a naughty pup who bullies the others but always comes back with a fish and a smile.

  “It’s about a man who lives by the sea.”

  “What man?”

  “A man like me.”

  “About you?”

  You let me comb the knots out of your hair, grimacing a little when one caught in the comb.

  “Not exactly. About someone like me. And, you know, people”

  “What people? Your friends?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  So you were writing about all of us. What did you write? Bad things, things that you couldn’t say to us eye to eye?

  I peered over your shoulder at the marks on your laptop, trying to see the words for Melur or Caz. I made sure not to touch. There were too many words for me, now, but if I had to stare day and night, I’d learn to read them. One day I would read your writing, because if I understood your Book, I’d understand you. The third spell that would unlock the secret of you and make you mine, if it wasn’t too late.

  “Is it about the sea?” I said, fishing for clues.

  “Not really. It’s about life. About a man who doesn’t know what to do with his life.”

  What does anyone do with their life? Live it? But then I remembered how I’d felt, in the channels, sitting on the sand with my sisters wishing I was somewhere else. Did you wish you were somewhere else? Perhaps you’d leave, then, like I did, to find what you were looking for.

  “Do you want to be here? On Trapped – on the lighthouse?”

  “Yeah, of course, for now.”

  I think you meant to say no. Your eyes flicked to the window, out towards the far Dry, and back to me. Still I loved you, so I kissed your neck – I could still see the indent of my first bite mark there. I’d never bitten you again after that. You humans are complicated.

  “Who are you writing to?”

  Writing, Caz said, was for telling other people things you wanted them to know. Like messages.

  “For, not to. Everybody.”

  You laughed, and looked wistful, like someone who’d like two fish for dinner but only had one.

  “Everybody? All humans?”

  “Everybody, you space cadet! I want to be famous.”

  “Famous?”

  “When everyone knows you. Knows your name. You know what I mean?”

  Not really. I spread my hands.

  “You want everyone to know that you’re unhappy? Why?”

  “You just don’t get it, do you.”

  You pulled at my hair, hard like Azura used to, a little vicious.

  “Why’s your hair so thick? I’ve never seen hair like yours. It’s like rope! Oily rope. You don’t wash it enough.”

  You pulled at a strand of your own sun-bleached hair and laid it side by side with mine. Compared with yours, mine was more like Seal’s hair. The dog, that is. Mer hair is strong but not soft, no matter how much you wash it. At least, so it seemed.

  “And your skin…”

  You stroked the skin of my arm, more with curiosity than affection. Yours is brown, mine, a kind of bluish white. Except my two human legs, which burn and peel in the sun. The veins in your hand stood out strongly, running along the bones. You were a fine skeleton, covered with stretched silk.

  “You have strange eyes,” you said. “No whites. Like a fish. Were you born like that?”

  I’d never thought of my own eyes, only yours, a circle of brown in a pool of egg white.

  “What are you, Melur. An alien?”

  “A human”, I said. “Like you.”

  If you didn’t understand mer, I might as well be human. But it was the wrong thing to say. Humans don’t tell each other they’re humans, any more than a mer would call herself mer. You’d say, I’m from this pod, or that pod, or cousin of so and so, or daughter of such and such.

  “Or are you really a mermaid?”

  Who are you? When humans ask it, can mean anything. It can mean how do you get money? Who do you know? What are you called? Are you female or male? What is your territory? Who do you want to mate with?

  “You’re beautiful, in your own way. Did you know that?”

  You looked at me slyly, flattering.

  “I’m Melur.” Me. I remembered Grandmother’s knife. How will we recognise you without a totem?

  “Melur. But who’s this Melur? Do you come from another planet? Come on then, are you really an alien?”

  “Alien? Planet?”

  These words weren’t familiar to me.

  “China? You don’t look Chinese. Even Caz says you’re not Chinese. Eastern Europe then? These cheekbones –“ you touched my face, prodding, “they’re gypsy cheekbones. Under the puppy fat.”

  You laughed again, meanly, like Azura does when she finds a sore spot to tickle.

  “But you don’t have an accent. What country are you from? What language do you speak? I know it’s not English. Unless you’ve been pretending not to understand, that is. Have you?”

  Country, I understood. You’d explained that this was the way territory on the Dry was divided. Your pod owned a country called Australia, you said.

  “The sea is my country. I speak mer.”

  “Not from the sea. From OVER the sea. So you’re a refugee? From where? What are you running away from? Where do you belong?”

  “Yes.” I was running away, that fitted.

  “Not yes.” There was impatience in your voice, you were irritated with me, by me. All these questions, one on another, couldn’t mean any good. “Yes doesn’t mean anything. You need to be honest with me now. Where do you come from? I know you understand, don’t pretend you don’t!”

  I looked out at the sea helplessly. You were a human from the Dry, and I am a mer from the Sea. Why couldn’t you understand that?

  “What do you think’s going to happen? Are you expecting to stay here with me forever?”

  Of course. What else would I do. You were my mate.

  “You can’t, you know.”

  I turned your face towards mine with my hands, but you didn’t want to look at me. You avoided my eyes as if I was a small child asking for more than my share of meat. But you still wanted to fuck me. I saw it in the way your look dropped to my teats, and you reached out to touch my thigh.

  “Why not?”

  I wanted to stay. You loved me.

  “I don’t want to be here in the wet. I don’t like being cooped up here, anyway, I’m starting to feel trapped.”

  “By me?”

  “Oh, not by you. Just by – I can’t live in a place like this for ever. I have to earn my living, get back among people. I miss, I don’t know..”

  You looked towards the Dry.

  “I could come.”

  “What would you do there?”

  “I’d paint.”

  You looked around at my paintings, on the canvases that you’d brought me.

>   “You think they’re any good?”

  “We can sell them to get –“

  “I’ve tried. My friends buy them to be nice, but... I mean, look at them. They’re all – there’s no sky, no land, just underwater scenes like some aquarium but with not so many fish in it. What is it with you and water? If you keep painting the same thing all the time, people will get sick of it. You’re not really a mermaid, let’s stop this pretending, shall we? Where are you really from?”

  I searched my mind for somewhere that you’d find more acceptable than ‘the sea’. Russia, maybe, I’d heard of that. Vietnam? Wollongong, where Caz was from? Or just, ‘over there’.

  “I’m going for a walk.”

  I reached for my sticks.

  “No, you’re not coming.”

  You went outside, closing the door with a snap. I lapsed onto the floor, hurt.

  I thought, there are still some places that I can go. I can go where I can drag myself, or walk using sticks that you gave me. But you can go anywhere. You can go away from me. What if you want to go far away from me? I can’t follow. I have no legs, or might as well not. I should have kept my tail.

  When you came back, I’d cried myself almost to sleep, but I woke when you opened the door. You squatted beside me, as you had on that first day, and put your hand on the back of my neck, circling.

  “We need to talk about what you’re going to do, Melur. You can’t stay with me.”

  “But I want to.”

  Where else could I go? If you didn’t love me, what else was left?

  Chapter 23

  It seemed to me in those last weeks that you spent even more time drinking beer and smoking than usual. You didn’t bother to write your Book, or even to sit at your laptop staring at the place where it should be. I think you’d given up.

  I began painting a picture of home. I used the yellow for a sand island, light blue for the channels streaming around it.

  You looked across at me sourly.

  “What’re you painting? Let me guess – water.“

  “Home.”

  You snorted.

  “It’s not like these things..” you waved at the paints, the brushes, canvases, “cost nothing.”

  “Money?”