by Miles Gibson
Dancing with Mermaids
MILES GIBSON
For Susan
Suppose you cut a tall bamboo in two;
make the bottom piece a woman,
the head piece a man;
rub them together
till they kindle:
tell me now,
the fire that’s born,
is it male or female,
O Ramanatha?
Lyric no. 144
Speaking of Siva
Preface to the 2013 Edition
John Barth once observed: ‘If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is reinvent the world. God wasn’t too bad a novelist, except that he was a Realist.’
I knew that Realists were not to be trusted. Mirrors distort by their own reflection and history edits the facts. There is no true story to be written. Every story is a true story. In the early 1980s I discovered the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, author of The Street of Crocodiles, the man Updike had described as ‘one of the great transmogrifiers of the world’, and I was bewitched by the strangeness of his vision, the brilliance of his prose. Dancing with Mermaids was my fumbling first attempt to reinvent the world, to create a more marvellous reality, an hallucinatory landscape in which mischief rules and miracles may happen. Rams Horn, that remote village built on the estuary mud at the mouth of the River Sheep on the Dorset coast and populated by delinquents and dreamers, became my own fiefdom, a magic kingdom.
I needed only to glance over my shoulder for inspiration. I had spent my childhood in a tiny seaside town on the edge of the New Forest. During the summer, visitors invaded the town, crowding the beaches and cafes, choking the footpaths and country lanes. But when winter came and the last of the visitors had gone, the town was transformed, the shops were shuttered, the streets were deserted and fog rolled in from the sea, shrouding the trees and cottages. The town felt isolated, steeped in silence, populated by phantoms, haunted by some strange melancholy that I hoped to rekindle in Rams Horn.
At the time of publication there were one or two reviewers anxious to categorise the work by placing it within an English dystopian tradition. ‘A nightmare parody of Lyme Regis – magnificently effective in touching the springs of our native ghoulishness,’ concluded the Observer. But that had never been my intention. I wasn’t concerned with satire, I was happy chasing will-o’-the-wisps, seeking a different poetic vision. And the critics and readers were kind to me.
‘A lovely book,’ said the New Yorker, ‘a wild, funny, poetic exhalation that sparkles and hoots and flies.’
I’m intrigued, reading the novel again after so many years, that I’d interrupted the narrative with fragments from the pages of a local history, recipes and folk songs, suggesting a different work of fiction might have emerged, given time and opportunity.
If I were writing Dancing with Mermaids today I think I’d be tempted to invent a complete guidebook and chronicle of the town, offering a more comprehensive history of its prominent founding fathers – the various achievements of Wilton Hunt the button millionaire, in particular, deserve closer examination – illustrated with archaeological and architectural notes, with the chapters on local flora and fauna employing the excellent watercolour work of the Victorian parson Hercules Shanks. The reworked novel might so endeavour to become a substantial reference work, allowing Rams Horn to speak for itself without interruption from its raucous inhabitants.
But here they still run wild in the streets – the doctor and the herbalist, the stargazer and the clairvoyant, the butcher and the publican, the landlady and the stranded sailor; not forgetting the schoolboys, Vernie, Sickly and Smudger – creating endless mischief with their plots and conspiracies, seductions and séances.
Miles Gibson
January 2013
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface to the 2013 Edition
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Copyright
Chapter One
The River Sheep bubbles from a hole in Dorset and flows ten miles to the sea. In the beginning the river is a path of weeping stones but when it gathers strength it cuts a channel through the ancient chalk and the water is cold and deep. It pushes between hills, soft as the breasts of sleeping women, and floods the road at Drizzle. Beyond the village it rattles through a dark trench concealed by trees, roars into a field of nettles and spits at the cattle who come to drink. It is bright and wild and dangerous. And then, approaching the sea through a cleft in the cliffs, the river staggers, its courage fails and the ground opens up to swallow it again, leaving nothing but a swamp of poisonous mud. Two miles west of the Sheeps Mouth lies the town called Rams Horn. When the summer is hot, and a dry wind blows, the smell of the dead river invades the town and lingers on its narrow streets. The Sheep’s ghost becomes a stink, an ooze, a yellow shadow, a broth of unspeakable secrets. It ferments in the blood of those who stand around on street corners and clouds the dreams of those who sleep with their heads beneath the sheets.
Rams Horn is a memory, a lost cause, a carnival of ghosts, an ark of half-forgotten dreams. Sometimes in summer, when the air sparkles with salt and gulls are dancing on the wind, the town seems to lean against the cliffs like a rusting ocean liner, thrown to shore by a storm. The decks are dark with faces, funnels belch sparks and the sound of engines can be heard as far as the mudflats. But when fog rolls in from the sea and smothers the streets, Rams Horn shrinks, phantoms walk the esplanade and the skeleton of Whelk Pier rattles its chains in the silence.
For a thousand years the town was a clutch of cottages, cut from earth and stone. The people were small and as ugly as gnomes. Brothers married sisters because the bible had not reached them: pilgrims on the road from Drizzle always drowned in the mud of the Sheep. The Rams Horn men smoked seaweed, cured in a mixture of rum and honey, while the women made shawls from the scales of fish. In fair weather they would take to the sea in shallow boats hunting for lobsters and dogfish. In foul weather they would hide in their hovels, watching the sea spray through the shutters while mussels cracked sweetly in driftwood fires.
In the summer of 1348 a French fishing boat full of corpses drifted into Melcombe Regis and the Black Death infested Dorset. Thousands perished, churches burned and towns fell empty. But Rams Horn was spared, since even the rats would not cross the river. Two hundred and forty years later, when Drake engaged the Spanish fleet, the people of Rams Hor
n stood on the top of the limestone cliffs and watched the smoke from the English cannon. But they could not guess who had won the day and received no news of the battle. They were a wild, forgotten tribe of men.
And then, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a physician called Wilton Hunt, on a grand tour of England, suggested that mud from the Sheeps Mouth might cure fever, fainting and fits. Among the crumbling cottages he constructed a bath-house, shaped like a pyramid, and filled the tank with mud. When the news was carried to London the rich and foolish, forbidden to venture abroad by Napoleon, flocked to Rams Horn to wallow and gossip. They built a terrace overlooking the sea and paved the road from Drizzle. But five years later, when the mud began to poison them, they abandoned the town in a week and fled to wash themselves in the waters at Bath. The little Regency mansions with their marble floors and dainty iron balconies were deserted. The Sheep flooded the road again and when the fishermen came down from the hills Wilton Hunt killed himself. They buried him beneath the pyramid sitting astride his favourite horse.
The town remained in disgrace until a Victorian parson called Hercules Shanks passed through Rams Horn while painting pages for A Dictionary of Small Wild Flowers. On the cliffs to the west of the town he stumbled upon some fossil bones. He collected a fragment of skull and several teeth and carried them back to London. For a time he used them as paperweights and then, grown tired of the novelty, gave the remains to a friend and forgot them. But Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species and the parson’s bones were soon exhibited as evidence of modern man rising from the ancient ape. The fossil fragments became a sensation. The size of the teeth suggested that early Rams Horn Man was a flesh-eating giant. A naked, pagan brute. The beast inspired a penny song sheet and correspondence in the Tatler.
The parson, who knew in his heart that God had created the world both perfect and complete on 23 October 4004BC, at nine o’clock in the morning, argued that the bones were those of a fossil horse. But London laughed at the very idea of Shanks’s pony and the parson felt ridiculous. His sermons were ignored and his family was attacked in the street. He left England in 1865 and sailed for South Africa where he wrote The Empire Dictionary of Tufted Grasses. The book was never published and he died, mysteriously, in the Zulu War.
Rams Horn Man was nothing more than a prehistoric pig, but until the museum confessed its mistake, the town was guardian to one of the most important fossil beds in Britain. The Victorians opened Rams Horn to the world. They built a school, a factory and an ugly church. At the end of the century there was a post office and a motor-wagon that delivered dogfish to Drizzle.
A button millionaire built a small hotel overlooking the town and Hunt’s pyramid stood in the garden, screened by an ornamental hedge. The hotel rooms were draped with silk and doubtful oils of sprawling nudes. In season there was dancing in the marble hall and laughter on candlelit lawns. But whenever mutton was served in the dining room Wilton Hunt would be seen, stiff as a corpse, riding down the central stairs on his hideous phantom horse.
After the Great War the town enjoyed a golden age. Men from factories in the North were sent to the sea for the sake of their health. The railways brought them in hundreds, along with their women, their dogs and children. Rams Horn learned to love these strangers with worn-out faces who sat all day and scratched in the sand. There were tea rooms and guest-houses, whelks, lobsters, oysters and Guinness. There were pleasure boats and telescopes, postcard views and sugar shrimps.
When it was hot there were deckchairs strung like flags in the shadow of the esplanade where old men collected to sleep and young girls ventured to peel off their stockings before they ran out to prance in the sea. Families trampled the beach from dawn until dusk and the great iron pier was ablaze with lanterns.
When it rained fat women with dimpled thighs drank Ovaltine in ice-cream parlours while children shrieked and squabbled like starlings. Young men nursed bottles of India pale as they swore at the rain through saloon bar windows and dashed, with their heads wrapped in newspaper, to the picture palace where, in the catcalling, flea-bitten darkness, local girls with sunburnt noses watched Tarzan strangle rubber snakes. Later they would walk the girls along the beach and into the little amusement arcade which was dark as a cowshed and warmed by an ancient paraffin stove. They flirted and shouted and played the machines for trinkets, trifles or packets of Woodbines. There was a clockwork gypsy in a glass box who raised her hand and dispensed your fortune printed on a card for sixpence; an electric shock machine, a laughing policeman, and a brass kinetoscope with warnings to small boys that the views were forbidden, which never failed to make boys waste a penny for a glimpse of the huge and faded buttocks of the Sultan’s Daughter as she flickered past their straining eyes. Then the rain lifted, the lanterns were lit on the dripping pier and Rams Horn steamed in the darkness.
For twenty years the town prospered. But after the Second World War the summers turned cold, the Sheep stank and Rams Horn fell from fashion. Now the picture palace is a haunted shell. The laughing policeman burst into flames and reduced the amusement arcade to cinders. The ice-cream parlours were carried off one night in the teeth of a storm. The railway is closed. The legs of the pier are hairy with seaweed.
In the early morning the town stands invisible and remote. There is nothing in the world but the ghost of the moon and the sound of the sea grinding pebbles. Slowly, as the first few threads of light touch the hills, the houses take shape and the streets run black between them. The sun flies up from Sheeps Mouth and for a few moments the town is enchanted. The streets are luminous canals, the walls of houses glow like pearl, windowpanes flash, roof slates glitter and then, it is gone.
Cats stretch and sneeze in doorways. Milk crates clatter in the dairy yard. The butcher scatters sawdust and dreams of walrus meat as he prods the pork with sprigs of parsley. Mrs Reynolds appears in the high street, running on some secret errand, high heels clicking on the wet cobbles. Later Doctor Douglas leaves his surgery and walks the beach, stands to stare at Regent Terrace and dreams of finding Mrs Clancy sitting naked in his waiting room. Far out on the rocks boys throw stones at gulls and watch, in horrified delight, for Tom Crow to limp down from his lair in the cliffs, hair tangled and eyes full of stars.
Sometimes at night the inhabitants dream of the town, inventing all the narrow streets that lead down to the rolling, varicose sea. And sometimes, at dawn, the town remains as a dream, a whispering movement of water and shadows.
Chapter Two
One morning, while the sun still rolled among the chimney pots and the cobbles were steaming, three small boys appeared on the corner of Empire Road. Cruel as giants, cunning as goblins, they swaggered down the high street with their hands in their pockets and milk on their breath. They swore at Oswald Murdoch, the butcher, chased Tanner Atkins’ cat down a drain, spat, with venom, on the baker’s windows and fled up the street, past the post office, to the safety of the woods.
‘We could keep her in the shed,’ shouted Smudger as they ran among the dark and dangerous trees. He was eleven years old and full of bright ideas. He looked at his companions, his blue eyes sparkling with excitement.
They ran towards the sunlight, jumped ditches, scrambled through brambles, skipped, somersaulted, wriggled and crawled until they reached the shelter of an old brick wall, perched high on a hill above the town.
‘We’d have to bring her food sometimes,’ gasped Sickly, breathlessly. He stared down the hill towards the sea. From this height Rams Horn was no more than a puzzle of rooftops forced between the limestone cliffs.
‘We could look at her whenever we wanted,’ said Vernie. He was twelve years old and already sprouting from his clothes. His feet had grown so big that his plimsolls had burst. When he walked he moved like a large, unhealthy stork. He poked a finger into his ear, looked at Smudger and grinned.
They clambered over the wall and fell together in a bed of tangled grass. The shed stood in the garden of an empty cottage
. The cottage was derelict, the ceiling collapsed and the walls bulging, but the shed had survived. It was a tiny wooden bungalow built against the garden wall, half-hidden by bushes. They had discovered it many weeks ago, broken the padlock on the door and taken possession. They arranged themselves now on a pile of potato sacks and discussed the great plan.
‘We could keep her in here and nobody would ever find out,’ said Vernie.
‘Yes, but how are we going to catch her?’ demanded Smudger impatiently.
‘Well, we could say that Sickly had fallen down and broken his neck and then we’d bring her out and lock her up,’ suggested Vernie.
Sickly scratched and looked doubtful. He had a small face, pale and tender as a mushroom through living in the shadow of his nose, which was long and varnished with freckles. His ears were so flat that they might have been stitched down against the sides of his skull. His hair was ginger bristle. Smudger and Vernie didn’t really like the look of him but he had been tolerated ever since they had met his mother.
Smudger’s mother was fat as a porker and had a moustache. Vernie’s mother wore curlers and kept her legs in bandages. But Sickly’s mother was tall and beautiful and had slow, flirtatious eyes. She was the most exciting woman they had ever encountered and she had devastated their small, closed world of tame hedgehogs, gulls’ nests and rollerskates. Vernie’s fishing tackle was gathering cobwebs in a corner of his wardrobe. The model tramp steamer that Smudger had been building since Christmas, had been abandoned. She had overturned the natural order of things, invaded their dreams and fermented their blood. She had become the focus for all the sizzling fantasies that could be conjured up by their unripe lust. And the knowledge that Sickly didn’t have a father made his mother seem especially vulnerable to their schemes of kidnap and assault.
Once she had invited them to tea and while she stood at the table to serve them Smudger had dropped his spoon on the floor and climbed down from the chair to retrieve it. He’d slipped beneath the table and there, breathless, on his hands and knees, in the twilight under the tablecloth, he had peered up her skirt. He had surfaced, bandy with excitement, and trembled so much that he’d almost fainted.