Saltskin

by Louise Moulin

  The light darted on the bullseye of the mermaid, targeted her, and the charge of what it meant, caused her to surge out of the water. She flipped in mid-air, pausing in her arc, and saw the source of light on the foreshore. Diving with a gleeful splash, she swam towards him.

  The colours of the corals and sponges blurred with her speed. A yellow-bellied sea snake accompanied her part of the way; a pod of octopi made a merry tunnel for her; stingrays moved out of her way; whales serenaded her with their love song as they continued their migration; seahorses the size of men rocked in teams on either side of her; a sea turtle rode her back, leaving her only as she slowed where the sea shelf became shallow. Her skin grazed the sand and pebbles of the bottom. Gentle waves broke over her body, pushing her forward; the foam frothed around her, swirling her hair.

  It began to hail, with knucklebone-sized stones pelting the sea, pitting the sand in a burst of irrational violence. Then just as suddenly it stopped, and seven rainbows appeared over the sea.

  The mermaid reached Angelo and said, ‘I know you,’ her voice an exotic blend of sounds.

  Angelo smiled mistily, tears running down his face. He waded up to his thighs and pulled her wet body into his arms, pressed his lips to her face, over and over. She tasted salty. A river yellow with emotions streamed through his body. He lifted her, staggering under the massive burden of her tail, managed two or three steps then dropped her with a thud. He tried again, the scales cutting his hands like tiny razors, and he dragged her inelegantly into the cave where they wouldn’t be seen.

  Her beauty was astonishing; her tail in the enclosed space was enormous and frightening, and yet a dazzle. Her lips appeared too big for her face.

  He kissed her. Their teeth and tongues crashed and grazed in a gauche manner, the kiss of amateurs, saliva strung between their mouths, until Angelo pulled back, embarrassed, and looked into her purple eyes. He watched a smile spread across her face and his own deepened with it.

  Eve threw her arms about him, offsetting his balance, her rubbery tail the weight of ten men upon him. She smelt oily. Eager and impatient, he gripped her face between his palms and squeezed so that her face was squashed, then rolled her on her back. Her tail thumped and twitched.

  ‘What must I do? How do we?’ he growled. The desire to have her was overwhelming. He dug his nails into her tail where her V ought to have been, ploughing and scraping at her scales, his hands cut and bleeding.

  Eve pulled his touch to her breasts, which fitted snugly in his palms, and the wonder of their cool perfection stunned him. His eyes met hers and in them he saw white sparks of light flinting. The intensity of their emotions bonded them, and then she said in the sweetest voice, ‘By giving me your heart.’

  Angelo would gladly have ripped open his ribs and given her his actual heart if it meant he could lie between her legs, and he said, as their mouths moved closer, ‘By loving you.’ The salty chill of her mouth was a shock compared with the heat of his groin, and their kiss a melting of flesh; their tongues and lips hit a note of harmony — no kiss could ever have been as succulent and delicious.

  Angelo lay over her, cupping her skull in his palms, and gently moved his hips over her cold body. Her arms pulled him to her until their embrace was fierce. Their eyes never closed. Angelo felt his chest was fusing with hers and he was elated and sure of his love and of hers for him. She gave a gasp and arched her back and Angelo pressed harder into her pelvis, moaning words of devotion into her mouth and she swallowed them and and still they made love with their hearts, their spirits lifted on the wings of a great bird into euphoria, and layer after layer of her mermaid’s tail dissolved and still they kissed and nothing could have stopped them, not an earthquake or a fire, and Eve’s mermaid tail split underneath them until a creamy film covered her legs, streaked with red veins of membrane.

  Angelo gazed with adoration at her face and without looking at her legs moved the tail husks aside, linked an arm under her knee and opened her. His first thrust into the damp clam of her insides was a blade to Eve, but she wound her legs about him and surrendered. Like a twoheaded beast they writhed together with urgency and abandon. His hands clutched at the folds of her flesh, leaving welts on her buttocks and back, and Eve clung to him, for her heart was his.

  Yet she feared what might happen if he ever withdrew his devotion, for all was unknown, and with the desperation to become one with him, Eve asked her Angelo if they would be together forever. He nodded vigorously in time with his thrusts, and she demanded he repeat it to her over and over and he said, ‘Yes, yes, I promise to love you forever.’

  And he brushed the hair off her forehead and buried his face in her neck, where the skin was as smooth and ice-like as the marble against his shins. Briefly he imagined that he had made a pact with the devil; but his hand found the perfect bud of her nipple and the glory of her was too much and with a cry that sounded like agony his muscles spasmed and he sent his semen high into her womb, and then again until she overflowed. Their mouths still together they drowsed, waking often in the blurry-eyed wet way of new lovers, to touch and whisper and sleep.

  And when they finally came to, after their ardour had softened, Angelo etched with a shell into the marble ceiling of the cave a heart, and inside the words:

  Angelo loves Eve forever.

  And his hair turned a rosy gold.

  Angelo held her steady while she delicately took her first step. And then another. She gasped, because sharpness shot through her with each, but she smiled bravely.

  Angelo could not stand it, and, lifting her, he carried his new woman out of the cave into the lagoon. He set her in a rockpool, green with algae, and washed her white legs, smooth as if carved from soft stone — legs that in that moment he vowed he would always protect.

  And because she had no clothes he dressed her in his shirt. It reached below her knees.

  25.

  Relics

  It snowed all week, layer upon fresh layer covering people’s treads, hiding where they had been. Gilda’s headache felt like lack of oxygen; she felt like a diver down too long. It made her giddy. The throbbing at the top of her spine increased, and with it the imminence of a blackout. She just hoped that when it hit, she would be alone. She always carried painkillers with her but she didn’t take any. She had come to think of the event as more like a light that would lead her somewhere.

  She did a few shifts at the Qualm’s Arms and chatted with Val over the bar, listening to his plans for settling in Riverton and starting a fishing charter business.

  If Joel wasn’t at work with Gilda she was listless, yet if he was there she avoided him. He in turn carried on as though they had never had the conversation on the step, but he watched as she waved a final goodbye to Ben Johnston.

  Ben’s eyes were milky with unsaid things but Gilda was gay and brisk, as if she were ushering a child out into the sunshine. She was breezy as he rode out of town in his white minivan, smiling forlornly out the back window.

  ‘Y’know, if a woman sleeps with a man once she forms an attachment to him,’ Sophia had breathed down her neck. ‘And if she doesn’t, he forms an attachment to her.’

  Gilda thought: She doesn’t know; she wasn’t there.

  She set up a darkroom in the old wash-house. Painted the windows black, rigged up a red light, hauled in tables and set up dishes of solution. She was energised by the chemical smell with its sense of purpose; her ambition was back.

  She strung up a line and pinched wooden pegs onto it. There was a photographic competition coming up and she intended to enter. First prize was a National Geographic cover. Gilda went on a binge of photo-taking.

  She passed Tom in the street and he smiled at the sight of her with her camera. It was like a woman with a guitar: brainy and beautiful.

  ‘Stand still, Tom.’ Through her viewfinder she zoomed in on his eyes, surrounded by the velvet crinkles of age, and captured the tenderness she found there, the light crisp and silver.

  ‘
Gilda, why don’t you come in and have a cuppa with Blanche and me?’

  ‘Not today, Tom.’ Still with the camera on him, she snapped his disappointment. ‘But soon,’ she said, experimentally changing angle and shooting the shift in his face: the hopefulness, and behind that a thought he seemed to be about to share, until he changed his mind. She caught it all.

  Dear Tom. She felt sorry for him — had always felt sorry for him — but didn’t know why, something connected to a happier time, now lost.

  Tom turned to walk away.

  ‘Okay, I will pop in,’ she yelled.

  Tom hesitated in his step, waved, and said he would be there soon, to head on over. When he moved on again he seemed taller. She watched him walk towards the Qualm’s; saw Sophia come out to meet him. They both turned in her direction.

  Gilda zoomed in on their faces and clicked, once, closer, twice. They looked furtive, the look of strangers in the underground back in London. Guilty of something.

  She walked down a dead-end street, where the houses became sparse and then petered out. Her breath blew clouds. The streetlights were on and the snow was almost violet. Her socks bunched at the toes of her gumboots. She had the urge to take off all her clothes but instead took off her cardigan, wrapping it around her waist.

  She slipped and crunched on the iced gravel until she came to the barbed-wire fence of Tom’s collection, his own personal museum: the state house with sewed-on garage and rusty caravans grafted on over time, all standing in a junkyard of piled-up old tyres and scrap metal, with an incongruously lush vegetable patch in the centre.

  She pulled on the heavy padlock and when it didn’t budge she walked around the corner and knocked on the corrugated-iron garage door, yelling out for Blanche.

  The door shimmied, jerked and rolled up. The spraypainted words RELICS folded up too.

  ‘Hi.’ Tom’s daughter welcomed Gilda with a flash of her big front teeth.

  ‘Hello, Miss Blanche. Tell me, did you get back at that boy in the end?’ Gilda walked inside the museum, where few visitors ever went. It smelt of oil, soil, dust and, oddly, freshly baked bread.

  ‘I rose above it and wiped him from my life.’

  ‘You are a class act,’ Gilda said with honest admiration. ‘I don’t know if I have ever been in here,’ she went on, wandering among the exhibits. ‘I’ve always tried to avoid the past.’ Above each was a handwritten card in blue biro, pinned to the wall. She stopped to read a document nailed at eye level: a letter signed by Captain Cook in curly lettering.

  ‘Shouldn’t this be in a glass cabinet?’ She looked at Blanche, who shrugged. ‘And what’s this?’

  ‘Shackleton’s sled.’

  Gilda stared, marvelling that there was no protective rope around it, as if it were no more valuable than a broken lawnmower. A garden chair stood beside it, with an upturned beer crate positioned as a footstool. Beside that sat a full ashtray and some empty beer stubbies. A sign above it all read: DESTINY BECOMES YOU.

  Blanche could tell that Gilda thought it all a bit of a joke. ‘We’re amateurs and amateurs do it for love,’ she said proudly, defensively. ‘By summer we’ll have it all cleaned up. Dad’s been working hard at the new place on the hill to make money so we can get some storage cabinets made and do a roaring trade come summer, and he can rest his gout.’

  ‘Sorry — you’re doing a great job.’ She raised her camera.

  ‘I’ll bring us afternoon tea,’ said Blanche, and Gilda recognised the voice of a child playing grown-up.

  Gilda made her way down the end of the garage, where the wall had been knocked out, exposing wires, pink building paper and the candyfloss of insulation. She stepped up into a grafted caravan, in a chain strung like carriages on a train. She sat down on a rocking chair and absently toyed with a black ribbon tied to the arm. Looking closely, she saw that it was made of silk.

  Blanche returned, carrying a silver tray with a pot of tea and thick fresh bread slathered in butter and jam.

  ‘Yum,’ said Gilda.

  ‘I made the jam and the bread.’

  Gilda raised her eyebrows in admiration.

  ‘Tom says you’re afraid to swim.’ Blanche leant against the wall in an awkward pose that seemed too practised. Gilda coughed, taken aback. ‘I am not.’

  ‘Tom says you used to swim like a fish, that you could swim before you walked but you stopped when your mum drowned and now you’re afraid of the sea.’

  Gilda leant back in the chair and rocked a little, chewing. ‘Well, we don’t know if Mum drowned. She might be alive in Acapulco for all we know. No corpse.’ But she realised it was true: she hadn’t been swimming since. She also realised the silliness of imagining that her mother might still be alive.

  ‘Tom said your mum could swim as if she didn’t need to breathe. That she swam across the bay and could swim upriver. Is that true?’

  ‘If Tom says so, then it must be so. Do you want me to help you for a bit?’

  Blanche clapped her hands, delighted, and flicked on a one-bar heater. She made a line in the air, indicating the beginning of the next caravan. ‘I’ve got up to here with sorting.’ She was excited and chattered almost non-stop as she went off into the recesses and returned dragging cardboard boxes, pens, cards and string.

  Tom came back and clearly felt a little overwhelmed with the intensity of females working. He went out the back and brought a fresh box for each of them, then took a box himself back to his garden chair in the garage. He turned on the radio and the sped-up voice of the horse races was his background music.

  Gilda was fascinated with the odd things people kept. She took photos of cups with special lips to protect moustaches, carved wooden rosary beads, old thimbles, redundant spectacles.

  Blanche had made a pile of stuff she deemed not worth keeping, and that pile grew large. After a while she brought out refreshments in the form of tomato sauce and cheese mousetraps. Gilda licked her fingers and wiped them on her jeans before picking up a tattered old journal. Leatherbound. She put her hand to her neck and randomly opened the book. It fell open to a watermarked page yellowed with age and singed.

  What I most feared has come to pass. Tragedy of tragedies. He has betrayed her, and now she is lost to us and the curse has been set, as sure as ink on paper. Seven years, as is the lore: if he loved her fully in that time, prized her above all else, then and only then would she be mortal, with a mortal soul. If not, then a terrible fate would befall.

  I feared he would not cope well under the threat. How I wish I had impressed its importance on him with more urgency. The curse decrees love lost for seven generations. Her legs too weak for her to live well alone, she cannot even run. The men are vultures at her door and I fear she will be pawed. Again she goes, again and again to the ocean, and swims away. I worry that one day she will return to the sea forever. A creature trapped between two realms.

  Gilda frowned and took a moment to query the sense of foreboding that half arrested her. The page in the journal was ripped. She was turning back the pages to see who the journal had belonged to when Blanche walked over and placed a bundle of gold velvet on the open book in Gilda’s lap. The black ribbon that tied it matched the one tied around her chair. Blanche motioned to Gilda to open it.

  Gilda loosened the knot and folded back the fabric and even before she saw what lay inside, time took on a different rhythm. Her eyes widened and her skin drained of all colour when she found, like twin eggs in a nest, a pair of exquisite slippers. She was shocked to realise she recognised them and, without blinking, she fondled the snaky skin. The colours were dazzling and the sheen almost wet.

  She felt very odd. She became aware of a clicking in the background — a clock, the creaking of the corrugated iron roof, a scuttling possum. Her faculty for smell was suddenly acute, powerful: the leftover food, her own feet, the musty boxes, old paint and oil and soil and salt and sweat and fish. Blood gushed in her ears. She bit her lip to redirect the pain digging into her neck, and noted t
hat her mouth tasted salty, like seawater.

  ‘Let’s put them on you.’ Blanche, on her knees, tugged off Gilda’s gumboots, pulled off the socks. She drew in her breath. She’d heard, of course, about Gilda’s feet but to see them was incredible: the translucent pink webbing like the skin under a bird’s wing, fine and backlit with red veins; enhanced as if a torch shone behind them. Blanche spread the webbing wide like a fan. And then, feeling weird, as though enacting a piece she had rehearsed, she put the slippers on Gilda’s feet.

  They sucked onto Gilda’s flesh with a wet sound, moulding, engulfing. Gilda observed Blanche reach out to her slowly, as if underwater, and had to shake her head to clear the time drag of her vision. A bolt shocked her heart. She was aware of Tom near her: she smelt the tobacco of him. His hand on her shoulder was age-spotted and knotted, and he was speaking, but she heard nothing but a rushing, like waves at night, and she smelt the sea, and her vision became a billion stars of glitter. Pain washed her spine like boiling water poured down her back and she feared she was close to blacking out.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said, tripping among the jumble through the caravan and the garage and out into the snowy night.

  Blanche went to follow but Tom stopped her.

  Outside Gilda glided as though her feet and the ground were magnets of opposite poles, as if she hovered; each step sent stitch-like sensations up her legs. The snow-covered beach looked like the craters on the moon, disorienting her. She felt a pressure on her chest, as if a fat man lay on top of her, smothering her in the folds of his flesh. Pain pressed behind her eyes and at the same time she made a feverish attempt to control her body, but her muscles were rebel to her will. She was held by some enchantment.

  She let out a cry: an exquisite song, high like a eunuch choir and then deep like an owl call. The force of it arched her back; her arms became rigid as if for balance. The stars were plentiful and gave the impression of flaring in the sky in colours like fireworks. They dazed her, and then she saw the man — that man — tall and lanky, with the sea frothing around his legs, his head down, peering into the water. She turned her song on him, beamed it to him. And she knew he was searching for someone — had been for a long time — and she was struck by the fact.