Saltskin

by Louise Moulin

  Letting off steam at Joel had lightened Gilda’s mood. Poor guy, she thought, but she knew he could handle it — handle it rather well, really. Her hair flew behind her and, as usual, men, women and children all turned to watch her pass. Gilda just could not see what others saw in her. The way she created waves wherever she went.

  She congratulated herself for leaving Ben’s hotel room. Already it seemed like ages ago, irrelevant, distant. She didn’t care. From now on life was going to be good, damn it. No more heartache. The expression ‘It is better to have loved and lost …’ crossed her mind, but she walked the words out, and as her body moved, she wondered why she felt different, buoyant. She looked out to the sea. It was a beautiful late winter day, the blue of sky and sea merging on the horizon. Gilda remembered a photo she’d seen of the earth taken from the moon. It was the same blue, with white swirling gaseous clouds like the soft wisps in the sky today.

  She tilted her head back and closed her eyes to the sun. Ideals, she thought, are fine, but one has to be realistic. When she opened her eyes she felt a sharp pain running from her temple down her spine, as though she had bitten into ice-cream. She staggered, her fingers to her temples, focusing on her feet until the pain subsided. Once again she felt the heaviness she carried with her, the notion that she had forgotten something — it flew up inside her like a stack of documents hurled around a room, and she worried she would never get all the information straight. What were these memories? What were her dreams? And who else was sharing her mind?

  At the homestead Gilda hesitated. For a reason she did not care to name she was reluctant to see anyone. She mourned the anonymity of London, but even as she thought it she knew herself to be in the right place. Riverton. She could hear the diamond saw Maggie used on her sculptures, clouds of white dust, fine as talcum powder, puffing the air.

  A fire escape stretched from the ground up to the tower. Reluctant to encounter Maggie or Martha, Gilda hauled herself up, scaling the side of the building and climbing in her window. Her face was flushed. Joel’s words kept coming back to her; she needed to think.

  She took off her musky clothes and walked into her bathroom. Tying her hair up out of the way, she turned on the shower and stood under the pressure before it was hot.

  She got out and splashed rosewater on her body. Hardly drying herself, she impulsively snatched the emerald gown from the floor and put it on, lacing it up as best she could. She looked at the shell box on her unslept-in bed and a quiver went through her. What if what was inside was bad? She didn’t want to know. Not just yet. She ran her palm over the lid but did not lift it. Later, she promised herself, and wondered when later would be. Tomorrow never comes. She cursed herself for her cowardice.

  As she stood in her room in the tower, unsure, undecided, Gilda tried to check in with her intuition, that little voice that was so hard to hear clearly; tried to listen to whether she should, right now, open the shell box.

  God, I have to get out of this place, she thought, and grabbed her camera, swinging it around her neck. She climbed back down the fire escape, her hair falling in loose tresses around her like Rapunzel’s. Near the bottom she gathered up her skirt and sprinted down the path and out through the gate. She gave a whoop as she leapt onto the fawn sand dunes, which bore the marks of the wind, resembling the Sahara.

  The sand shifted under her bare feet and she ran as fast as she could to the rocks — fleeing her past or, perhaps, hurling herself toward the future. A strange bursting feeling was with her the whole way.

  The sea licked at the rocks. Seagulls hung like airborne newspaper. A grin spread across Gilda’s face, deepening until the warmth spread to her tummy, and she opened her arms wide and ran as if she were flying until she reached the boulders, wet and slimy against the soles of her feet. The folds of the dress bunched in her hand, she danced recklessly over their shiny surfaces, moving too fast in light steps to a place she had not been since she was a child: the cave where she had once sought refuge.

  The village was far behind her now. The mountain with its waterfall was so magnificent it startled her. The strange fear that lived inside her like white noise faded completely, as though she were being pacified by an embrace, and as the pink marble of the cliff face loomed vertical, close enough to stroke, she lifted her camera and took a photo of its rosy folds. Then she walked into the cave.

  Sleeping bats lined the ceiling, and the only light came through the cave mouth. The waterfall sounded louder, yet muffled, as if she had her head underwater. Water dripdripped from stalactites. Her hands felt their way along the crystalline wall until she reached the inner recesses and a small shelf like a mezzanine. Up she climbed, skinning her knees. Matchboxes, old food cans with candles in them, used condoms and cigarette packets littered the floor. It was not only Gilda who had used the cave over the years — it was a favourite place to make out. The lovers’ cave. She lit some candles and the wispy flames grew brighter.

  She dusted a space and lay down with her eyes closed. Breathed deeply, the perfume soil and salt and a note of never ending. She undid the lens cap and held the camera in both hands as her heartbeat settled. She sighed, and the sound touched a spot in her stomach, then rose up to choke her. She made the first sounds of a sob, on an indrawn shudder of a breath. If only a man would give her his heart with no reserve. Anything less wasn’t worth it. Anything else was fake.

  She knew why she had come to the cave. Had known as she had raced there, and yet the idea had just come to her, like a subliminal force drawing her there.

  Gilda willed herself to quieten, the way the minister does at Mass, where life’s pettiness and domestic demands are set aside for one focus. Instinctively she ran her hand along the marble cave wall until her fingers felt the indent she had first sought a long time ago — for she had lain in that same spot under the starlight as a child. Her fingertips remembered for her and she traced the engraving, absorbed the heart and the names within, the way a blind person gleans the meaning of Braille. She paused, absorbing the import of it, and then focused her camera. As she clicked she opened her eyes; the camera flashed and her body thrilled to the promise it illuminated, there, carved deeply into the marble: a heart with two names.

  16.

  Lost Man

  The morning revealed a hoar frost. A giant hand had sprinkled fine sugar over the settlement. Seagulls called. A day dark and moody, as if created by a dejected boy.

  Angelo sat in a rowboat hidden by sea mist. Dense fog lay over the sea and beach, partly concealing the activity of the whalers on land, a shroud over a cadaver. Angelo was deeply cold, his tatty spencer coat scant protection. The wind sneaked in through the fabric’s weave, chilling his blood. His teeth chattered incessantly. Sea salt lay over his exposed skin and stung his wounds.

  Three others were assigned with Angelo — Jake’s henchmen from the night of the fight: the mould of men who needed a leader to give them purpose. They chugged on bottles of spirits while giving Angelo the evil eye, their drunkenness hampering their eyeball control. Percy had patchy, oddly pigmented skin like mutton fat on soup. Dick was frail and rat-featured, and Fred had hands as large as lobsters, scaly and red, and yet, like the other two, his demeanour was that of the runts of the litter: the weak sadness of those who never heard an endearment worth holding in their hearts, and if they did they might not believe it.

  Angelo longed to stretch his cramped legs. He shifted a numb foot among the tangled ropes and limbs. He blew on his hands to warm them, and tucked them in his armpits, but the chill was relentless. His trousers had become stiffened with frost, frozen to his thighs. The thin plank he sat on was not wide enough for his bottom. He shivered.

  They were waiting for one of the Unicorn’s slaughterboats to hand over a fresh kill, to be towed tail first into shore, an ordeal that could take twelve hours. Far away, sounds of whalers and ships drifted, partly lost and irrelevant. Rowers were chosen for their burly strength, which made the Angelo an odd choice, for his strengt
h came mostly from an exaggeration of emotion, not the power of muscle.

  There was no guarantee of an early catch and it was feasible to expect to endure hours before being given a whale to tow. They sat hunched as if nursing a horrid insult. Percy, Dick and Fred drank their liquor, which lent the illusion of warmth but masked the true danger of the nasty temperature. Their breath crystallised before them like puffs of smoke, and frost powdered their whiskers and made lips blue, as though swabbed with ink.

  Percy withdrew one of the new fashionable pocket-watches from the grimy recesses of his clothing. But the mechanics of the thing had frozen and its glass face had cracked and frosted over, like everything else exposed to the air. He flung it belligerently overboard and all watched its flight into the fog until it disappeared, and then a plop was heard.

  There was no way to know the hour. No sun or stars. The sky gave the impression of being a black hole into nothingness. Occasionally the tiny dinghy would rise up on a swell from the turbulence veiled by fog, like a burp hours after supper. But the sounds grew fainter and the men lapsed into their thoughts. A drizzle so light as to go unnoticed coated them in a fine mist like venom spray.

  They had failed to drop anchor and, without realising it, were drifting out to sea. The mist gave motion the impression of stillness. Unbeknown to them, the Unicorn, which had been in front of them, was now to starboard, and still they drifted. Their boat rose and fell on the increasing lilt of the waves meeting the greater belly of the sea, and they drifted further and further without alarm, out to the never-ending ocean.

  While the others slumbered, Angelo went over and over the sound he had heard the night before. It had not been the love song of a whale, of this he was sure. He closed his eyes and let the memory lull him. In part it was boy soprano, like the ones he had heard through the walls of St Bride’s Church, with an irresistible underlay like the sigh of a woman. He longed to go towards it, to follow it wherever it led, to let it wrap him like a cashmere shawl on naked skin. He gave himself to the notion of being swallowed by the sound, and so used was Angelo to his make-believe world and its convincing landscape, he was able to slip, meditatively, into his delusion, as if no stitch or button separated it from reality. Unaware of the danger he was in, he did not panic but felt sleepy, imagining he was being swung in a cradle hung from a great tree.

  The mermaid, after singing the night before and aware of her own yearning for an end to loneliness, had dived deep into the emerald layers of the sea to the ocean’s floor.

  She liked pretty things and collected them like a magpie. She stored them in a treasure chest salvaged from a shipwreck almost 200 years ago: a shipwreck she still recalled as if it were yesterday, for the horror and waste of all the swollen dead sailors trapped under beams, unable to float to the surface for the dense weight of a thousand fathoms pressed down on them.

  She had swum from one corpse to another, her hungry hands flitting over their white Adam’s apples the way the blind seek meaning in touch. She planted kisses on the lump of a throat here, a mouth there. She ran through her repertoire of kisses; the chance to practise on real lips, albeit dead ones, was a real treat, like an audience to an ageing beauty. Some of the kisses were quick, snatched in a hurry; some passionate, complete with tongue and twisting head; some tender; some theatrical; some mournful.

  The mermaid had found a partially undressed woman and had peeled the clothes off her to get a better look at her body. She had almost wept at the sight of the dead girl’s coveted legs — two perfect sticks with a clove in the middle that she could split apart. Oh, how she wished she could have legs, and die some day. She felt the choke of tears in her chest and throat but knew it was pointless, for a mermaid cannot cry. She had never cried, so all sadness stayed stoppered within.

  She inspected the dead she-sailor thoroughly, as if planning to take her apart and put her back together. Then she looked hatefully down at her great whopping tail, heavy and thick-trunked, the way a human woman might bemoan her thick ankles.

  In truth, her tail was magnificent. It measured the length of her torso doubled, and the colours were a dazzling mix of coral reefs and rainbows, of the pink and turquoise of snapper and crimson purples of twilight — a chameleon of a tail — but she wanted nothing more than to have legs. Legs, legs, legs. The only way she could was if a mortal loved her. But how was she ever to meet a live one?

  With the dead girl lying like a lover in her arms, the mermaid pulled the remaining whips of cloth from her body and ran her hands over the curve of the waist, down the length of a thigh and back up the inside leg. She prised apart the girl’s thighs and peered in: a mass of hair and curls of flesh that made the mermaid frown. Was she only ever to find mysteries and not answers? She had dragged the body around with her for a while before she had tired of the game, swishing her tail in and out of the rooms of the sunken ship searching for loot.

  The mermaid marvelled at all the little things humans used. She took for herself a teaspoon, a candlestick in a holder (because its purpose puzzled her), a gorgeous jewel-encrusted mirror that had since been stolen from her, a box inlaid with gorgeous shells, a book with lovely pictures in it and words and words and words. Over the centuries she became fluent in every language under the sun and a lot smarter than almost anyone alive or dead, but oh, so silly.

  She was all alone and longed to find someone to converse with. In that moment, sitting on the ocean floor, she felt she had been forgotten before anyone had even known she existed. She sighed, curled her tail under her and began sorting her treasure into piles of colours.

  She already had enormous numbers of pearls, jewels, necklaces, silverware, bracelets, hat-pins, earrings, cufflinks, golden goblets, pewter jugs, bone-handled knives encrusted with diamonds, tiaras of pink sapphire and crowns so large her head could fit all the way through them. She had no concept of the value of her items; all she knew was she wanted more — what she had was not enough.

  Her current favourite was a man’s boot she had found afloat on the sea’s surface. So lonesome it looked without its mate that she had stolen it as a talisman, to remind her of the loneliness of a one-shoed man somewhere wandering the great expanse of earth without his boot’s twin sole. She sighed wistfully with it clutched to her breast.

  The fog lifted and showed the first star in the sky. Angelo awoke and cast his gaze around. Dick and Percy stared ahead with unseeing eyes as if their personalities had been replaced with emptiness.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be on shore by now?’ Angelo asked, his voice raspy, disturbing.

  Dick and Percy did not respond.

  The whales … Angelo vaguely thought. His mouth was horribly dry. He peeled it open and moved his thick tongue. Then he raked a hand through his scalp and tiny icicles fell in his lap. Anxiety elbowed his mind but he resisted it. Instead he heard Magdalene saying, ‘Nothing is without meaning,’ and he nodded and closed his eyes again.

  The night fell heavy. Fred was now slumped partly overboard, and with each breath he took, water lapped into the boat and pooled on the bottom. One of his red hands had turned a bruised blue, the other dangled in the sea. If anyone had their wits about them they would have been frantically baling out the water. But no one had their wits about them and the sea had turned rough. Waves headbutted the boat from unexpected angles.

  Angelo’s salt-crusted eyes stung. He blinked and saw the face of Fred at the other end of the boat, with the waxy, pale look of death about him. Angelo knew it by the dread in his gut. He stood unsteadily; the boat rocked and gallons of water sloshed in. Angelo stumbled to the other end of the dinghy and slapped Fred’s face. He had to save him …

  He awoke some time later on Fred’s chest. He searched the blackness around him and knew in an instant that they were lost at sea. Angelo screamed, then took a broad, ragged breath, filling his lungs, and bawled again. The unsteady boat lurched. Angelo screamed until Fred wrestled him down, knocking the oars in their oarlocks as he lurched from his end to Angelo’
s.

  Angelo was filled with gratitude that Fred was alive. Alive! Alive! He embraced the man, raining kisses all over his face in a sluggish, exhausted way, as Fred pawed him off. One oar loosened and slipped into the ocean. They watched it glide away, and yet it seemed to have nothing to do with them, and the two men soon wafted off to a place beneath awake but more sinister than sleep, the boat tipping too heavily at one end.

  When Angelo next opened his eyes he realised he was still screaming, even though it seemed that hours had passed. His own screams comforted him, the way a child hums for company.

  The dinghy was floating directly above the mermaid, who felt the vibrations of Angelo’s shrieks and swam up towards the surface. As she approached the barnacled underside of the dinghy her face was an imprint of expectation. She broke the surface and lunged at the side of the boat, where she clung with her arms. The lurch she created rolled the men into one another and they mewed and pawed the air like blind kittens.

  Percy saw the flash of movement but was too delirious to make much of it, and he didn’t care. The men settled again, curled in together, severely unbalancing their boat, not noticing that water spilled into their laps. Fred snored a horrid rattle as if he had liquid in the lungs. So under the fever of their long exposure to the elements were they that their bodies had shut down, gratefully conserving strength, all immaterial compared with the sweetness of oblivion. Death patiently waited.

  Only Angelo saw — briefly, like an apparition in the darkness — the pearl of the mermaid’s face and a corner flick of her tail. He silently gave thanks before he, too, succumbed to the overwhelming desire to sleep …