Deeper

by Jane Thomson

  Money, again. Humans are always talking about money. I’m glad we have none.

  You dragged on your cigarette and frowned at me.

  “This place is full of your stuff. There’s not enough room here.”

  I think you meant, my house is full of you, Melur. Too full.

  “I can keep them outside.”

  I didn’t care about the pictures. I’d throw them all out if you wanted me to, if there was more room for us, if you’d stop frowning at me and fretting.

  I slid over to you and pulled your hands onto my breasts. You squeezed me, staring down at me, your hands covering me completely, in a way that I’d always loved. Now it hurt.

  “I can’t write with all this shit around.”

  I went to the nearest picture and began dragging it towards the door.

  “Don’t.”

  You got up and pulled me away, held me, tight, tense. You were hiding something.

  “Just don’t be such a drama queen.”

  Drama queen?

  “You might as well know, I’m going back to the mainland tomorrow. I can’t write here, the way I thought I’d be able to. Nothing’s working out for me here. I need people for inspiration.”

  I reached out to stroke your hair. You pulled your head away and drank your urine drink.

  “I still don’t know a thing about you, do I. You’re a secretive little bitch.”

  I thought of the long nights spent lying together, your hands stroking my back, your penis inside me, your lips open on mine. And still you can say, you don’t know anything about me?

  “I can take you to the mainland, but I’m sorry, it’s not my job to look after you. I haven’t made any promises, have I.”

  Promises, no. Under your softness, you were sharp as oyster shells.

  I had words now, though. I could use them to keep you.

  “But you owe me.”

  I’d heard it said before. Caz had said it.

  “I don’t ‘owe you’.” You snorted. “What do I owe you? It’s you who owe me.”

  Your words were hurried, as if you didn’t want to linger too long over them.

  “I saved your life. Don’t you remember? When you fell from your boat, I swam with you to the sand and kept you warm till dawn. Isn’t that worth something?”

  You stared at me, head on one side. It used to mean that you were curious and interested, but now it just meant that you thought I was mad.

  “You what?”

  “I saved you. You cut your head, and you would have drowned, but I held you up.”

  “No, you didn’t, Melur. Nobody was with me. I had my life jacket on and got washed up on the beach. Caz found me. How could you, anyway – you can’t even walk, much less swim for miles with me in tow.”

  You took my hand, patiently, as if I was a boasting child.

  “I was with you then. I swam with my tail. I’m mer. Mermaid. From the sea.”

  “Yeah right. So where is this tail?”

  “I asked the spirits to give me legs.”

  Your brows rose into your matted hair. You hadn’t been combing it recently, or cutting your beard either. You were beginning to look more like my father, fierce and overgrown, even to the belly that rolled over the top of your jeans.

  “Uh huh.”

  “I wanted to be human. I wanted to be with you, so I asked the spirits to take my tail and give me legs.”

  You shook your head.

  “You’re completely off your head. You’re not a mermaid. You’re…I don’t know what you are, but you’re not a mermaid. They’re made up. Like my book. You’re real.”

  Made up?

  You squeezed my breast.

  “Real. See?”

  It hurt. You meant it to.

  “Real and mer. Mermaid.” I said stubbornly, clasping your knee as if my body could convince yours, flesh to flesh.

  “Don’t tell lies. You’re not stupid so don’t act stupid. You need professional help.”

  I pulled up my skirt.

  “See these lines?” I drew my finger over the thin red lines that ran like arteries up the inside of my legs. The spirits had left them there out of spite, to remind me. If they’d wanted, of course they could have given me legs like you, or like Caz. They gave me these things for a joke.

  I took the knife that you used for gutting fish, drew it up from between my knees to the place where my thighs parted. Where human thighs parted, but mer tails began.

  You grabbed the knife from me, almost cutting my hand in your alarm.

  “Ok, so you had some kind of operation. I’m telling you, you need help. Caz can find you, I don’t know, a hospital. You know what a hospital is? You look as if you’ve been in one before.”

  You put the beer down, and your head in your hands. Through your hair you eyed me.

  “I should’ve known. Stuck on an island with a madwoman who cuts herself!”

  “No. I didn’t cut myself. My grandmother cut me. Spirits cut me.”

  You leaned forward, tweaking my nose, but not in a friendly way.

  “Spirits, huh. I might have known.” You rolled your weary turtle eyes. “You’re only human. I guarantee it.”

  How could I show you?

  “Why don’t you just stop telling stories and tell the truth for once! Real life’s not about stories.”

  “What’s your Book then?” I pointed to your laptop. “If stories are bad why do you spend so much time making them up?”

  You made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a snort, put your head down between your hands. I wriggled between your knees.

  “Do you love me?”

  You said nothing for a while, then you looked into my eyes with your long light lashes.

  “I don’t think I believe in love.”

  I looked back at you with despair in my heart. If you don’t believe in love, then what thing have we been sharing, all this time? This thing that I’ve built, and shaped, and breathed all my spirits into, this creature of wind and fine sand. What is this thing I feel for you then? Alone?

  “I like you sometimes, Melur, I really do, and we’ve had some good times. Even though I think you’re completely round the bend. Maybe you’re right, you’re not really human. I’ve always thought there was something weird about you.”

  Weird. Not human. Those are insults, as ‘human’ and ‘dolphin’ is among the mer. I laughed, because suddenly I thought of Father saying, “You don’t want to become like a human!” as if I’d asked to become a groper or something. How we despised your kind then!

  You took my arm and pulled me to the bed, and took me, as always, covering me with your body. You reminded me of Guntur, an old male staking his claim, proving his virility.

  “You know what, don’t you ever get tired of missionary?” you said, leaning on your hands above me.

  “Missionary?”

  “Like this.”

  “But how else?”

  You laughed.

  “Who would’ve thought I’d be making out with a mad foreign girl who can’t walk and thinks she’s a mermaid!”

  Chapter 24

  The next day, the day of your leaving, you began to walk around your house in a hurry, picking things up and putting them down, and smoking all the while, and talking to me or maybe yourself. You didn’t look at me.

  “I’m going to move down south this time and live in the city for a change. Melbourne, I reckon. There’s a lot of other writers in Melbourne.”

  City? I’d seen pictures. Many, many humans, a gigantic meet of humans and their growling boxes. Cars.

  I knew you weren’t intending to take me. You couldn’t put me in a box.

  “I want to come with you.”

  “You can’t. You have to go to your own place, wherever that is.”

  “I don’t have my own place.”

  “Oh that’s right, you’re a mermaid and you live in the sea. Don’t you understand, Melur, it’s not my problem. You have to find your own way!”
<
br />   “Why?”

  “Because I need my own space. Writers need freedom, that’s what we have to have, to write.”

  They sounded like they were someone else’s words.

  Freedom. What do I have to do with your freedom? I don’t tell you what you can do, where you can go.

  “I could live with Caz.”

  You sat down opposite my chair. You were ashamed, frustrated.

  “Caz will be living with me. In the city.”

  “But Caz –“

  “We made it up. We’ve known each other a long time, Caz and me. How long have we known each other, Melur? A few months? Three? Four?”

  Something about you reminded me of Grandmother.

  “But you said you wanted space..”

  “Space away from you.”

  There was a silence. I couldn’t believe it. Caz, and you.

  “We’ll take you down south with us, if you like. Only I’m not going to be responsible for you. It’s not the right time in my life for me to be responsible for anyone. Hell, I haven’t even got kids, let alone some strange girl from nowhere who can’t speak English.”

  I saw that you didn’t love me at all. You probably didn’t love Caz either. I watched you put some of your things into boxes. Most of the things you left where they were, because you said you couldn’t afford a truck –

  “What is a truck?”

  You didn’t answer. And you didn’t need them anyway. A writer doesn’t need things, you said – surrounded by more things than I’d ever seen in my life as a mer – and anyway they’d be useful for the next person.

  “What next person?”

  “The next person who comes to live here”, you said.

  “So another human will come to live here?”

  “You could stay and keep them company,” you suggested, and put your arm round my waist and squeezed my bottom, showing your white teeth.

  You put your boxes into the boat. I looked out at the sea. It was blue, sunny and empty as you. I couldn’t even see dolphins.

  “Last swim?” I said, taking your arm, quietly, smiling a secret smile, like yours.

  You were relieved that I wasn’t going to make a scene or ask you to stay or even to take me with you. You felt guilty, but not guilty enough to matter. You rubbed my shoulder quickly, not lingering in case I took it as a sign of more, or weakness.

  You’d already put your shorts, which you used for swimming, in a box. You shook your head. No swimming.

  “No clothes? Just..”

  I took my dress off, the smothering stuff that Caz had given me. I had nothing on underneath. It’s funny, I’d worn clothes for so many weeks now that I felt strange and bare without them, like a real human would.

  “Alright. I’ll skinny dip with you. But we have to be quick, I want to start for the mainland before the wind comes up.”

  We went down to the beach, me walking with my sticks. I left them on the sand. I wouldn’t need them any more.

  You waded out into the water, stopped and gasped when the cold hit your balls. That always made me giggle, but not today.

  I felt weightless back in the water – almost, as if my tail never had been cut. I let myself float, rocking in the low surf.

  We stood waist deep and I pulled at you, stretching out towards the sea. The waves were gentle and hardly broke against the beach, nothing to be afraid of.

  “No, I’d rather not.”

  You were still nervous.

  I pulled myself up against your body, put my lips to yours and felt your arousal, even though you didn’t want to be distracted by that. Little by little I drew you out, kissing, stroking, until the laplets sipped at your bare chest.

  “Not missionary.” I said.

  We made love standing up. For you, I think it was a way of saying sorry - but also because you wanted to have me for the last time, your strange mad fish-girl from who knows where. I felt you speed inside of me.

  After, we stayed locked together in silence as the waves moved around us. You tried to walk towards the shore, but I coiled my legs around yours and put my strong arms around your neck. Mer are stronger than humans, even the females. All day we pull against the currents, using our long arms to take the darting fish from the thick panicked school.

  “I want to go in now,” you said, reaching down to untangle my legs from yours. “I’m getting cold.”

  I felt anger, at last. It began as pins and needles, a trembling in my belly and a cold unease that spread like iced water from my thighs to the back of my neck.

  You sensed it.

  “I didn’t ask you to love me,” you said, reaching out to touch my arms in the bright, surging water. Silver droplets trailed along the hairs of your forearm, trickling back into the foam.

  I tried to put my anger into words, human words.

  ‘I’ve given everything for you, my whole life, it’s nothing now, and you..’

  I stopped. I couldn’t put the enormity of my feelings, my hatred and pain, into mere words. Or perhaps I could have, into mer words, but not yours, not this human language that I still grappled with as if it were a pair of unfamiliar crutches, awkward and inadequate.

  You stood there, chest deep, silent. I breathed in the spirits of the sea air, felt myself grow with each intake, my body expanding with rage, with hopelessness, my fingers laced into the wide blue sea, my heart a whirlpool, my mouth a cave big enough to swallow you and all the humans on the Deep. Grandmother, I never left you behind, I thought, you’re in me, and your dark spirits, too.

  Your eyes widened, the pupils flared. I drew my lips back from my teeth, the sharp unforgiving jaws of a mako, fast, powerful, deadly.

  I reached out and put my two hands softly on your strong, once-dear throat. How delicate it was. I could feel your pulse, a lone human signal in the vastness of the ocean. Now I was warm, hot. Heat raced to the end of my fingertips, to the long fingernails which rested lightly around your carotid artery. In my mind the nails became claws, rock-hard, stone-cruel, coral-sharp. Grandmother’s claws.

  You’re drawing blood.

  Did you say that or did I? My mind and body were full with blood, bursting with it. Even the sea seemed tinged with red, though it would be hours till the sun set. I put a hand to my mouth, tasted the salt thickness of it. I saw you as you would be, soon, ripped end to end, entrails slipping out into the current, swirling, dark blood warm against my body. I would wrap myself in them, lashing them around and around, till you were hollow and I was clothed triumphantly in your torn, wet organs. I would suck out those mud-brown eyes, round and soft like oysters, feel your screams slide down my throat and swallow them with eager, fierce gladness. I would take you by the hair and hold your face against my teats, struggling and choking, till the water ended you. I would..

  I held you close. Your body rose to the surface, there was air in you still, but no life. I cried out, a thin, whistling sound no human could make, threw my arms around you and let the under-current carry us both together towards Deep Sea.

  Chapter 25

  I would have held you until we both sank to the green darkness for good, but Che came, and prised you out of my arms, and pulled me up to the surface and held me there, For once I was very cold – maybe I’d turned into more of a human than I ever asked for – so he swam with me back to the beach and lay there with his arms around me, where I’d first lain with you, on the sand. Where you were now, I didn’t know.

  At first I wanted to swim out into the Deep Sea until I got tired, and then let the water and the fish take me. But whenever I tried to slide away, Che held on to me with strong merman arms. He’d come into his full size in the months that I’d been with you, and lost his teenage awkwardness. He still swam oddly, though – that’d be with him for life. As you would be with me, I thought.

  We didn’t eat much, either of us, what with Che watching me, and me with my face to the sand. After the fourth day, we were both very hungry. Che hunted off the rocks and caught a fat whisker-f
ace. He ate it in front of me and didn’t offer me any, and that made me angry. Just feeling something other than despair helped. The next fish he caught, I grabbed off him and bit into. We ate it together.

  On the fifth day, Caz came in her boat. She’d been expecting you, on the mainland, and you hadn’t come, or answered her messages. Che and I hid in the water off the rocks, on the far side from the boat. She climbed up onto the cliff and stood staring around, shading her eyes, but she couldn’t see us lying just underneath the grey waves.

  Humans with more boats came, and a flying thing, scanning for signs of you. I thought perhaps by this time they might find you, cast up on the rocks, your beautiful turtle eyes eaten out by sea creatures. I felt an urge to wave my hands in the air and cry out and bring the flying thing down on us. If humans had been kind before, they wouldn’t be this time. Maybe they really would skin me and hang me out for the seabirds to peck at. I deserved it, this time.

  But Che, again, pulled me under the water where the light was dim, and wouldn’t let me go till they’d passed out of sight.

  “Where were you? Were you here, all this time?”

  “There’s nowhere else.”

  “But the channels..?”

  “The channels are gone now”, said Che, “and the pods with them. The water rose and covered us in the last storm, and now only a few islands are above the sea. Our fresh water turned salty. So the pods had to swim away.”

  He pointed east. I remembered that storm. I’d watched it with you, out of the glass of the Trapped Moon, and felt not a drop of rain, though the wind shook the windows.

  “What about Grandmother? “

  “Drowned, I suppose. Nobody knows. The cave was flooded out before anyone thought the water would come so high.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Che agreed.

  “So then?”

  “So then I came here, to see what’d happened to you. I hid on the cliff side of the Light. I saw you on the beach sometimes.”

  “Did you see me when..”

  Che shook his head – something about the way I looked at him, I guess. I’d become dangerous.

  “But suppose..”

  I was going to say, suppose I’d mated with Daniel, and we’d had mer-human pups, and lived together on the Trapped Moon till we were old. It could have been. If you were different, and not so.. Anyway, if it had happened like that, would you have waited forever, Che?