The Brighton Mermaid

by Koomson, Dorothy

  I didn’t move. I watched the policeman’s face become a red, inkblot-like Rorschach pattern that would scream ‘hatred’ to whoever looked at it. I had never seen a look like that on anyone’s face. It was clear he wanted to hurt my dad because my dad was doing what I had been doing – not giving in. Just like I wasn’t going to cry, my dad wasn’t going to be intimidated.

  ‘Enelle. Get. Up. We. Are. Leaving.’

  The policeman didn’t say anything this time and I jumped up, suddenly remembering how much trouble I was in with my father.

  ‘Judana,’ Dad said in a slightly softer tone – because she was crying and because she wasn’t the daughter who he was going to punish until the end of time – ‘we are leaving. Come on, we are taking you home.’

  ‘We do need to talk to the girls,’ said the policewoman beside Mr Dalton. ‘They’re witnesses to a very serious crime.’

  ‘Well, as they are witnesses, you can come to our homes to interview them, with an adult present, when they have had time to sleep and start to deal with what they have experienced tonight.’ Dad didn’t take his eyes off the policeman as he spoke.

  The room was charged; electric, terrifying. Jude’s dad looked worried: his eyes moved quickly between my dad and the policeman, clearly wondering what would happen next.

  Jude scraped the chair as she stood up, the sharp sound breaking the atmosphere and allowing the policeman to look at the table and Dad to focus on me. He put his arm around my shoulders, this one gesture saying: ‘I’m here. You’re safe .’ The look on his face adding that I was in so much trouble I wouldn’t be leaving the house to do anything but go to school for the next fifty years.

  Jude and I left the building with our dads’ arms around us, but I knew it wasn’t over with the policeman. I knew that it was a long, long way from being over with him.

  Now

  Nell

  Saturday, 24 March

  ‘Are you going to call me?’ Zach asks. He’s sitting up in bed, watching me finish getting dressed after a long, indulgent shower. From the angle he sits at, I can see the top half of his body and it, like the rest of him, has not a single hair anywhere on it. His skin, without hair, was as soft as it was smooth. And I’d delighted in exploring his body without coming up against any ‘roadblocks’ of hair or stubble.

  A couple more hours of sleep transformed how we were together: the kisses turned into caresses turned into the type of sex you pull out for exes who you want to spend years regretting letting you go.

  ‘I gave you my number early on in the evening,’ he states when I say nothing to answer his question. ‘Are you going to use it?’

  The men I’ve slept with, especially ones I’ve met in bars, are not usually this direct afterwards. We’ve both got what we wanted – sex – from the encounter and they can generally leave it there. After all, a woman who goes home with them isn’t exactly marriage material in their minds. If they do want to hook up again they’ll ask in roundabout ways, often checking their phone or switching on the television, while mentioning giving me a call sometime. The number of men I have met in a bar who later ask me if I’m going to call has, so far, amounted to one: the man in front of me.

  He continues to stare at me as I push the rest of my bangles over my hand and up onto my wrist.

  Zach has a tattoo. I remember the first tattoo I saw on dark brown skin was on the Brighton Mermaid. Zach’s tattoo is very different to hers, of course. His isn’t one single tattoo, but a collection of small symbols, curls and lines that stretch from the centre of his chest, over his left pec, capping his left shoulder and spreading down over his left bicep. He must have spent hours sitting still, having the needles inject all that ink into him. Earlier I traced over every millimetre of it with my finger, as fascinated by it as I had been with the Brighton Mermaid’s one.

  ‘This silence is starting to drag into awkward,’ Zach says. ‘Are you going to call me or not?’

  I shrug on my jacket. ‘I wouldn’t wish me on anyone,’ I state.

  ‘Well, it’s a good thing I’m not you, isn’t it?’ he replies.

  He is gorgeous, there’s no escaping it. He is quick-witted and funny. Decent enough to not have sex with me when I was drunk and hadn’t explicitly consented. And when we did get to have sex, it was out of this world.

  Slowly, I walk to his side of the bed and sit down on the edge. ‘Listen—’

  ‘What job is it that you’re going to do?’ he cuts in.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You said last night that you’ve been saving for years and finally you’re in a position to leave your job as assistant manager of a supermarket to do another job you’ve been doing on the side for years.’

  ‘I told you all that last night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’ It’s unlike me to be so open with anyone, let alone a complete stranger.

  ‘So, what is it?’

  ‘I find people.’ I know how it sounds when I say it out loud. How ridiculous and fanciful, but that is what I do.

  ‘You find people?’

  ‘Yes, I find people.’

  ‘What, you’re like a private detective?’

  ‘Not quite. I use genealogy methods to help people find out if they have family out there. I do it by creating a family tree, looking through old records, searching online databases.’ And DNA. I also use DNA to help create a fuller picture of a family’s history and composition, but that can freak people out. (I learnt that the hard way: one guy I’d been seeing for a few weeks thought I’d had sex with him purely to collect the DNA in his semen. Even when I explained it would have been easier to get a skin scraping or to pluck a couple of hairs than to keep a condom, he insisted on checking my bag to make sure I hadn’t secreted away the condom – that he’d flushed down the toilet – with his precious seed in it. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t see him again – despite him calling me many, many more times.)

  Zach nods slowly. ‘Right, sounds interesting. Why do you do it?’

  I shrug. ‘I like doing it.’

  ‘How many people have you found?’

  ‘Over the years? Quite a few. But I’ve helped find more. What I do most of is help people to link things together so they get to the missing parts and strands of their family. I don’t regularly go looking for a specific person, like a detective would. I just try to find the unseen leaves on the different branches of a family tree, if you see what I mean?’

  ‘I do see what you mean.’

  Being so close to him, I can’t help eyeing up his tattoo again. The whorls and curls, shaped and expanded by his firm body, are spectacular and I want to feel connected to them again. I reach out to touch a thick black line that sits on the brow of his shoulder and he catches hold of my wrist to stop me making contact.

  ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ he reminds me. ‘Are you going to call me?’ His eyes, without eyelashes, are an intense brown. He’s making it clear I’m not to touch him if I don’t want anything else to do with him.

  I lower my hand. ‘Maybe,’ I reply.

  ‘Not a “yes”, not an outright “no”, but clearly a “no” without actually saying the word. Fair enough.’ With that, he raises his hands and knits them together behind his head, clearly waiting for me to leave.

  Oh.

  I should feel better about this, shouldn’t I? He didn’t try to convince me to ring him; he didn’t seem that hurt I wasn’t going to call; he accepted what I said with good grace. I should feel good that I didn’t actually have to say no and there were no complications, no angst or passive aggressiveness from him. So why don’t I feel happy, relieved? Why do I, instead, feel monumentally stupid?

  ‘See you then,’ Zach says with a hint of a smile on his face when I don’t move.

  ‘Yes, see you,’ I reply. Why didn’t I say yes? What is there about him not to like? We had a laugh from what I remember of last night; we had brilliant kisses, amazing sex. It isn’t like he’s proposed marriage and he hasn’t
treated me like I’m a slag because we had sex without dating. What exactly would stop me from calling? Why exactly would I say ‘maybe’ when it should be an emphatic yes?

  I collect my bag and slip on my shoes, feeling more stupid with every passing second.

  I drag my feet when I leave the main room, and head down the short corridor past the bathroom and the wardrobe towards the door. ‘I’ll pay for the room service downstairs,’ I call to him when I’m at the door.

  ‘Cool,’ he calls back.

  I unhook the chain and place my hand on the handle. Last chance, Nell , I tell myself. Last chance to say you will call .

  ‘It’s a shame you’re not going to call,’ he says loudly. ‘I think we could have had a lot of fun together.’

  Thank you, Zach! I think as I smile to myself. He’s giving me an out, a way to say I will ring him.

  ‘I said I’d maybe call,’ I respond.

  ‘All right, I’ll wait for your maybe call, Mermaid Lady,’ he says.

  My blood thickens in my veins all at once and my heart skips several beats. Mermaid Lady? Mermaid Lady?

  Swallowing the bitter taste that has pooled at the back of my throat, I turn and move stiffly back to the main area of the bedroom. He is still sitting in the same position as before, that same smile on his face. I look around the room, try to see if there’s anything that will give me a clue as to who this man is. I know nothing about him, but he seems to know something significant about me.

  There’s nothing on display in the room – he has put his clothes away in the wardrobe – only a suit jacket hangs over the back of the chair by the desk. The curtains are partially drawn, but even if they were wide open there would be nothing else to see – everything is out of sight. He’s either a very neat person – or a man with something to hide.

  ‘What did you say you did again?’ I ask him.

  ‘I told you last night.’

  ‘I don’t remember much from last night. What was it you do?’

  He frowns. ‘I’m a teacher. I’m about to start a job up at Surry Hills High, the private school on the way out of Brighton. Near the Marina thing.’

  ‘Yes, I know it,’ I say. We all knew the kids from Surry Hills High growing up. They were ultra-posh, even posher than the other children who went to fee-paying schools. ‘Bit of an odd time to start a teaching job? It’s March, and it’ll be Easter in a week or so.’

  ‘One of the teachers left suddenly, didn’t work their notice. They called me because I’d previously applied for a job there … What’s this all about, Nell?’ he asks. ‘Why all the questions?’

  ‘Why did you call me Mermaid Lady?’ I ask in return. I stare directly at Zach as I wait for his answer.

  It’s been nearly twenty-five years since Jude and I found her on the beach. At the time it was a big thing. Then after what happened to Jude, it became an even bigger thing. Then for two more years it kept getting dredged up as talk of a serial killer haunted all of us who lived down on the south coast.

  It died away eventually, submerged under the surface of the constant churn of everyday news. But it’s resurfacing, I can feel it. The twenty-five-year anniversary is piquing people’s interest. There was a series of articles online about it a few weeks ago, a mention in the paper last week. Talk of a possible reconstruction, see if it would jog anyone’s memory from all that time ago to identify her or find out who might have killed her. If that threw up anything, there could be grounds for an exhumation and re-examining of the forensic evidence. All the articles had mentioned me, had talked about what happened to Jude, had stirred up the stuff about my dad’s arrest … I’d seen each of these articles and had felt sick, actually on the verge of throwing up, because it was all coming back to haunt me again.

  Yes, I quit my job so I can concentrate on the mystery of the Brighton Mermaid, but I want no part in someone else’s investigation. I don’t want to be newspaper fodder again. And I certainly don’t want to find out I’ve slept with a journalist who’s writing a story on the Brighton Mermaid, or a ghoul who might know who I am and is trying to sell a story on it.

  Zach had been watching me when I spoke to him in the bar, had just been standing there on his own, and now we’re in a hotel room rather than his own place. He could be anyone. Right now, I observe him intently, wanting to see every reaction for even the slightest hint of a lie or subterfuge.

  ‘I called you Mermaid Lady because it’s pretty much all you talked about last night,’ he says. ‘Even in your sleep you were mumbling stuff about mermaids.’ His frown deepens. ‘Was I not meant to call you that?’

  I should laugh it off. Dismiss it as nothing; say he can call me what he likes and I won’t mind. But I can’t. I do mind.

  ‘No, you shouldn’t call me that. Ever. Ever .’

  Zach removes his hands from their link behind his head and instead raises them in front of him in surrender. ‘I will never call you that again, ever.’

  I’m shaking. It must be the alcohol, the after-effects of going so completely over the top last night. It’s nothing to do with the visceral pain – the awful, twisted agony that comes from having to talk about this. In my head, on my computer screens, it’s OK. When it starts to cross boundaries into real life, it hurts. Quite simply, it hurts.

  ‘Look, I’d better go, leave you alone,’ I say to Zach. ‘I honestly will think about calling you. But this morning was great. Good. Fun.’ All the pleasant words are being wheeled out to smooth things over. He doesn’t know anything. I’m just being paranoid. This anniversary stuff is getting to me. I shouldn’t take it out on Zach.

  He nods. He’s clearly not going to risk speaking.

  ‘And I really will think about calling you,’ I repeat.

  Another nod. Although now he looks like he’d rather I didn’t call thank you very much.

  ‘I’ll see you,’ I say.

  A third nod.

  Now I feel completely ridiculous.

  ‘Yep. I’m going. This is me leaving.’

  He raises his hand in goodbye and I practically run to the door, throw it open and leave. How many more times is my connection to the Brighton Mermaid going to have this effect on my life?

  Macy

  Saturday, 24 March

  ‘Let’s do something,’ Shane says as he comes into the kitchen.

  I look up at him from my phone, which I’ve been sitting and staring at for hours now. I’ve done other things, of course, the children have had breakfast and are dressed and settled with books and games and TV, but all the while I’ve been looking at my phone, willing it to ring. Actually, I’ve been willing time to go backwards so it can be 5:17 a.m. again and I can call and she will answer her damn phone.

  ‘Do what?’ I ask.

  ‘Something. Anything. Let’s just get in the van and do something.

  It looks like it’s going to be lovely out today. Let’s get out there.’

  I glare at my phone again. It’s when she does things like this that I want to tell her. I want to tell her what I know so that she can be the one with this burden for once. She can be carrying this secret and all the worry and fear and sheer blinding terror that goes with it. It’s when she pisses me off like this that I want to see how she would deal with what I saw twenty-five years ago. No, I didn’t see a dead body like Nell did, but what I did see was horrific. How would Nell handle that type of horror? How would she cope with a nightmare much closer to home?

  ‘All right. Let’s do something,’ I concede.

  ‘Oh, come on! You could sound at least a little more excited about it. We’re spending time together as a family. That’s what weekends are for, aren’t they?’ Shane is like the super-keen ambassador of fun at a holiday camp sometimes – he seems to have boundless energy to get everyone up and at it when we need it.

  ‘OK, OK. Let’s go do something,’ I say as I get up, pocketing my phone. Anything’s got to be better than sitting here thinking of ways to understand my sister.

  Nell<
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  Saturday, 24 March

  He needs to see you.

  There are five of those messages when I turn on my phone again.

  Nothing from Macy.

  I read each one, knowing they say the same thing, knowing they are not only summoning me as though dropping everything to go and see him is what I am supposed to live for, they’re reminding me that the clock is ticking. I do not have all the time in the world and if I can’t get it right, get this done in the time given, my life is going to fall apart again. Scratch that: everyone’s life is going to fall apart again.

  I stand outside the hotel – one of the ones on the seafront. Zach’s room didn’t have a sea view, but once I leave the hotel I’m on the main road, with a view that is endless sea, forever sky. The hotel is a bit further into Brighton than where we found her . That’s probably why I started talking to Zach about mermaids. When alcohol loosens my tongue, anything that reminds me of her makes me talk about her.

  So what do I do now? Who do I choose to go and spend the afternoon with?

  Macy or him?

  Him or Macy?

  I look left, towards the Pier. I would love to go there right now, to blend in among the crowd that has already flocked there, many of them having got the early train down to make the most of their day by the sea. On the Pier I would be anonymous, possibly another tourist who’s come to experience one of Brighton’s world-famous landmarks.

  Beyond the Pier, beyond Surry Hills High school, beyond the rolling greens is him . Sitting in his wheelchair, waiting. Nothing about him dulled by the passage of time, nothing tamed or relaxed.

  I look right. To King’s Lawns, the multicoloured beach huts, the 1930s block of flats that starts the run of seafront buildings into Hove. Beyond that art deco seafront building is her. Macy. She’s most likely bordering on hysterical by now because I haven’t answered my phone. Not only that, I turned it off. If she’s called again and hasn’t been able to get hold of me, in Macy’s mind, this will mean something terrible must have happened to me.