The Brighton Mermaid

by Koomson, Dorothy

  Usually I don’t rebel against her anxiety. Usually I answer the phone when she calls, I talk to her, then get to her house as soon as possible to take my place in her family’s life. I’ve ignored her this morning, so if I go and see her now, she will fall apart with relief, then she will snap at me in indignation, then she will slide away from me. She will hold herself in a semi-normal state, only speaking when spoken to, only engaging when it is to get something she needs. Other than that, she will stare at me, hurt at me, and Macy’s hurt is something I cannot take.

  Macy or him?

  Him or Macy?

  It has to be one of them.

  Because if I choose the third option of ‘Nell’, which is really just choosing neither of them, I know I’ll pay for it double next time.

  Macy or him?

  Him or Macy?

  I’ve just spent £140 on room service booze from last night. ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY POUNDS. I’ve budgeted very carefully to get the year off work, and in one night I have blown nearly a fortnight’s worth of food shopping. I’m a mess sometimes. An absolutely bloody mess. No wonder Macy regularly side-eyes me. Even though she’s four years younger than me, there’s no way she’d do something like this.

  Macy or him?

  Him or Macy?

  Macy. Of course Macy. I was never going to choose anything else.

  Macy

  Saturday, 24 March

  From the top of the hill at Tilgate Park, I stand and watch Willow, Aubrey and Clara tear down the steepest part. Their limbs are flying every which way, their clothes flapping behind them as they race to the bottom. Tilgate is a huge place, rolling hills and greenery, designated outdoor adventure centre, outdoor gym, nature reserve, ponds and lakes.

  We’ve just arrived here and whilst there’s glorious sun, there’s a nip to the air – spring is almost here but winter seems to be clinging on, sending out its chills to make sure we don’t forget it too soon. The clocks will be springing forward tonight, the already lighter evenings will be officially acknowledged. There’s change coming – not just a hint of it, a very definite line seems to have been drawn between the recent past, the present and the future.

  I don’t know what the future will bring. I feel sick sometimes at the thought of it. At the change I feel in the air, at the shift I can sense in my life.

  I watch the children run and feel like that is what my life is going to be like from now on. Now Nell has potentially broken the run of good luck we’ve had by turning off her phone, things will become uncontrolled. That could mean wild, fun and free, and it could also mean unpredictable and terrifying.

  There was a series of articles online recently. The person obviously wanted to write a novel, the way they punned and used flowery descriptions, but the net result was this: people looking at me oddly at work because Okorie is not that common a surname; me suddenly being ‘friended’ on social media by numerous people who knew how to get around my various ways of locking down my accounts (I only ever accept requests from people I’ve met more than once in real life); and me having that constant sickly feeling of having to tell Nell what I saw twenty-five years ago.

  At the bottom of the hill is a wide path and then the lake. I watch the children run, not a care in the world as they race each other to the bottom, and I have to bite my tongue. I want to yell to watch out for other people, to slow down so they won’t be catapulted into the water, to watch out for dog poo, to just be so damn careful nothing bad will ever happen to them. Biting my tongue, curling my fingers inwards then digging my nails into my palms – causing myself actual, physical pain – is the only way to stop myself pushing my fears onto them.

  Shane doesn’t understand – he gets mad with me and tells me to stop putting adult limits on children’s natures. It’s more a case of adult insight into children’s natural ability to seek out trouble, I’d say.

  ‘Aren’t you glad we didn’t just hang around the house waiting for Nell to grace us with her presence?’ Shane asks. He’s been to get himself a coffee from the nearest café and checking the sports scores on his phone, no doubt. If I didn’t know how much he adores sport and how it’s on round the clock in his office at home, I’d be suspicious of him always being on his phone.

  ‘We don’t wait for Nell to grace us with her presence,’ I reply, because I won’t have him rewriting history. I can get annoyed with her but, for many, many reasons that he knows, he can’t.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he says.

  ‘If I know it, then say it.’

  Shane stops himself sighing, resists rolling his eyes, and instead slings his arm around my shoulders. He buries his face in the nape of my neck and nuzzles a kiss on my slightly chilled skin. ‘I love you,’ he says. ‘Truly. And I love our family being out like this, doing something different, using up the hours on a Saturday for more than competitions and matches and the games your sister plays with the kids.’ He pulls away, his bright blue eyes staring into my brown ones. ‘That’s what I mean to say. Sorry. Now I’ve said that properly, I understand how what I originally said sounded.’ He presses a kiss onto my cheek and I can smell the bitter warmth of espresso on his breath. ‘I didn’t mean to diss your sister. You know how I feel about her.’

  I draw back, out of his hold, and raise unimpressed eyebrows at him.

  This time he does groan and he does close his eyes. ‘You know what I mean,’ he says.

  ‘Kids!’ I shout and start to stride down the hill towards where my children are starting to get too close to the water’s edge. They managed to stop themselves before they went running into it, but that’s no guarantee they’ll stay dry. It’s nice being out, but Shane convinced me a while back that I don’t need to carry a change of clothes for all of them now they’re older, so if they get wet now, they stay wet till we drive back home. And I couldn’t stand the whole day of them in damp clothes while waiting for the colds that would no doubt arrive once we’re home and drying off. ‘Willow! Aubrey! Clara! Come away from the edge.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ Shane calls after me. He doesn’t care if the people nearby hear him, he just wants me to understand.

  ‘I know what you meant,’ I reply over my shoulder. I do, as well, I know exactly what he meant.

  1993

  Nell

  Thursday, 1 July

  Apart from school, Jude was allowed to come to my house and that was it. Me, I wasn’t allowed out except for school. Mum and Dad hadn’t even bothered saying it – I simply knew it.

  After the shock had worn off, after the police had come to take our witness statements at home, it was business as usual for my parents. And that business was punishing me for sneaking out from Jude’s house. Secretly, I was pleased. I wasn’t like Jude, I didn’t mind staying in. I didn’t need to be constantly out. The world felt very different. I’d been near a dead body. I’d stood and waited with a dead body. People all over the city knew that I’d seen a dead body. Kids at school whispered about us, giving us a wide berth. It bothered me, a lot more than it seemed to bother Jude.

  Although, today, Jude had been over for a while and there was something odd about her.

  She kept walking around my room with her hand clenched in a fist. Then she would sigh and sit down. Then stand up as if she was going to do something important. Then pace around the room again.

  Jude had started to dress like the woman the police and everyone else called the Brighton Mermaid. The young woman was around nineteen, they said, and had been strangled before being left on the beach. And in the time since we found her, Jude seemed to want to inhabit her persona. She’d stopped wearing make-up, she wore vests and denim skirts, and went barefoot whenever possible. She had stopped plaiting her hair in two neat cornrows like I did, and instead wore it in a cute Afro style with a headband. And the bangles. She had managed – in the time of being grounded – to get herself an armful of bracelets that sat from wrist to elbow on her left arm, so she now jingled when she walked.

&nbs
p; The Brighton Mermaid’s face and body and tattoo were painted onto the inside of my head, they fit like filters over my eyes, so sometimes when I turned too quickly or from the corner of my eye would catch a glimpse of Jude, my heart would stop. I’d think, just for a second, that the Brighton Mermaid had come for me. It truly gave me the heebie-jeebies, Jude dressing like a dead woman. The only things Jude hadn’t copied were the tattoo on her right arm and the charm bracelet that had been the only jewellery on that same arm.

  ‘What did you do, Jude?’ I asked her.

  It was obvious she’d done something and I was sick of her not settling, of her walking around with a clenched fist, of me seeing her from the corner of my eye and having a shock.

  ‘I had to do something,’ she said. ‘I had to find a way to keep her with me.’

  ‘What did you do, Jude?’ I repeated, a little quieter because now I was scared. She was going to get us into trouble. Huge trouble. I knew her parents were all cool and laid-back, but mine weren’t. They still looked at me with disappointment and anger about the fact I’d been out that night. And fear. As well as being let down and annoyed with me, the whole thing had terrified them. Not only because it could have been me instead of that girl without a name who’d ended up on the beach – they were horrified and shaken that I was capable of lies and subterfuge. They’d thought I was different, but I was like all those other teenagers out there who did things behind their parents’ backs.

  The fact that Jude was allowed out meant that her parents weren’t still checking the windows in her bedroom were locked every night, and her mother wasn’t still considering giving up her job as a night nurse so she could be in every night. Dad had grocery stores along the coast, and when he had to open up at one of them, he would usually stay there the night before so he could start early. In the last week he’d had to leave the second Mum walked in from work. Yesterday, a staff member had called in sick over in Eastbourne and he’d had to leave the shop shut. Their lives were now about being at home, making sure I didn’t try to do anything like I had done again.

  Our lives had been upended, but that didn’t seem to be enough for Jude. She wanted more awfulness to find us because she had done this thing. I knew all of a sudden what she had done and it was terrible.

  ‘Please tell me you didn’t,’ I said to her. ‘Please.’

  Slowly her fingers uncurled and there it lay on top of the network of dark brown lines that laced across her palm like branches from a tree. There it lay, the silver charm bracelet, adorned with several different, intricate mermaids, some loops hanging empty as though they had lost their mermaid but were patiently waiting for her to swim back.

  I put my hands first on my face, then they covered my mouth. I wanted to scream at her to throw it away, to take that thing out of my bedroom, out of my house because it was most likely cursed.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I said from behind my hands. ‘Why?’

  I was hot, that feverish type of heat I got when I had chickenpox and I couldn’t keep myself upright for very long. I felt sick, that seesaw type of nausea I’d had constantly the last time I had a stomach bug.

  ‘I had to have something of hers. We had to have something of hers,’ Jude quickly corrected herself. She needed to bring me in on her crime so what she had done wasn’t too bad. ‘We need something so we’ll never forget, never give up trying to find out who she is.’

  ‘They’ll probably lock us up when they find out what you’ve done,’ I said. She had done it, but I would get into trouble right along with her. ‘How did you do it?’

  She looked unsure of herself then. She glanced at the door that she’d closed behind her, pausing as though someone might have their ear pressed against it, eavesdropping. To be fair, Macy probably was out there doing that.

  Jude came closer and then sat on the edge of my bed, near where I had pulled up my legs to my chest, trying to comfort myself. ‘When I came back from the phone call, you turned your back and I took it then.’

  ‘Oh my God, Jude!’ I screeched.

  ‘Shhhh,’ she hushed desperately. ‘Shhhh.’

  ‘You touched a dead body to steal from it!’ I was shaking. Uncontrollably quivering. I started to bite the large knuckle of my thumb. The pain of my teeth pushing on my skin almost hard enough to draw blood was comforting in a perverse way – it kept me focused on my pain rather than the craziness of my best friend.

  I hated Jude sometimes. She was my best friend and I loved her, but she was constantly doing things like this. She was always acting first and then I was paying the price later. I hated her. So much.

  ‘You’ve robbed from the dead, Jude,’ I said to her. ‘That’s the lowest of the low.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ she snapped. ‘What’s lowest of the low is that no one cares any more.’

  ‘Who doesn’t care?’

  ‘Them lot out there,’ she said, and waved her hand at the windows. ‘It’s not even on the news any more. They’ve stopped caring that she doesn’t have a name and that we don’t know who she is or if anyone cared about her and is searching for her.

  ‘She looks like us, Nell. That could be me or you strangled – and probably raped – on the beach and no one would care after a couple of weeks. It’s not right.’

  ‘But you can’t change that by stealing from her.’

  ‘I’m not stealing from her. I’m borrowing it. Once we find out who she is and where she comes from, I’ll give it back. Until then, we have to keep it to remind ourselves to never forget.’

  I couldn’t forget, and I had tried. I had tried so hard. But her face was the one I saw every time I closed my eyes; her tattoo was what I saw when I put lotion on myself after my bath; her hair was the style I suspected my hair would be in if I didn’t plait it every week. I couldn’t forget her, and even if we did find out who she was, what her name was, where she had come from, I knew that wouldn’t change. I knew I would keep on seeing the Brighton Mermaid for ever.

  ‘I promise,’ Jude said to me in my little bedroom, ‘I will give it back as soon as we find out who she is.’

  Now

  Nell

  Saturday, 24 March

  They were out.

  After bracing myself for Macy’s hurt, I’d arrived at their little corner of Hove to find Shane’s people carrier gone, and the door went unanswered. They’d managed to organise a perfectly good Saturday without me, apparently, and it was only the lingering remains of my hangover and the fact that I’d had to go past my flat to get to their house that caused me to have a kick of irritation about it. In the main, it is good that I don’t have to spend the afternoon apologising to Macy and avoiding Shane.

  I shut my blue front door behind me and lean against it for a second or two, just drinking in the space, the only area of this whole planet that is mine, all mine.

  That’s part of the reason why I usually go home an hour or so after I’ve been with someone. I love walking through my front door and knowing that whoever I have been ‘out there’ – worker, friend, lover – is not who I have to be in here. Whichever mask I am wearing comes off at the door and I can shed the persona I put on for the outside world and just be me.

  I want a shower. I had a long one earlier in Zach’s hotel room, but I want another in my own home, with my own soap and body lotion. Then I want to put on my fluffiest pyjamas, top them with my furriest dressing gown, and then pick at leftovers from the fridge. I know I should get right at it, go straight to my desk and start this renewed search, but I can’t face it. Yes, I’ve been thinking about the Brighton Mermaid and I’ve been thinking about Jude, but the will to work at it is absent.

  I shed my jacket and shoes, and this simple act causes a wave of exhaustion to crash over me. It’s not just being up late, or drinking too much, or even the physical stuff with Zach earlier. It’s the other thing. The thing that clings to every thing that I can’t shake off.

  1993

  Nell

  Thursday, 15 July

>   ‘Enelle, wake up,’ Dad’s voice said.

  I could tell by the way he said it that he’d been calling me for a long time. I’d hardly slept in the weeks since we found her . Every time I closed my eyes I kept seeing her face. Sometimes it was all right, her eyes were open and she was laughing. Her face was warm, her smile was wide and her happiness danced in her brown eyes. Other times – most times – she was cold and still; there was no smile on her face and her brown eyes were unstaring and frozen. I couldn’t take those dreams. When I clawed myself away from them, forced myself into wakefulness, I would lie still in the dark and pant away my fear. Then I would bury my face into my pillow to cry. I hadn’t told anyone that I battled sleep to avoid the dreams; I hadn’t confessed that I cried and cried into my pillow to stop myself running out into the dark to try to find out who she was and where she came from because that would be the only way to stop her haunting me.

  I couldn’t tell anyone what was going on because Jude seemed fine with it. She didn’t seem upset and bothered, and I wondered, more than once, if that was because she had the mermaid charm bracelet and it kept the bad dreams away.

  The last two or three nights, though, I’d slept. I’d gone to bed at normal time and woken up when it was light outside. Each time I’d felt almost ashamed at that: as Jude had been so mad about a couple of weeks ago – a poor young woman had been murdered and I was starting to put it behind me.

  ‘Enelle,’ Dad repeated, ‘are you awake?’

  ‘Yes, Daddy?’ I replied, and struggled to sit up.

  He put his finger over his lips, to tell me hush and, I guessed, not wake Macy, whose room was next to mine. ‘Get your dressing gown and come downstairs,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t ask questions,’ he said. ‘Just get your dressing gown and come downstairs.’