Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  She laughed very softly, deep in her throat. “Sweetest boy,” she said. She kissed the top of my head and then laid her other hand there. And so we stood, she in her cloak blanket and me wearing her like a cloak, turning the ring on her finger while outside the steps glowed and the cat dozed and the sea sat flat behind it all, nothing of anything changing.

  My mam had never had daughters—only me, and a couple of those seal-things that did not live more than a few minutes outside of her. So after that first unpleasantness—which was all about did she know, and why had she not said, and how could they do this to the men who loved them so—our peaceful life went on. But Lonna Trumbell, across the lane, she had drowned six—“Daughters-in-law for all of ye,” Marcus Trumbell had boasted up at Wholeman’s. Trumbell woke us up every night now, rolling down the hill when Wholeman turned him out, bellowing foulness. He would force into his house, and sometimes in his rage and hurry to hit her he would forget closing the door, and the whole dire scene would pour straight into our woken ears. Sometimes it was surprising when morning came up and the house there looked quite the same as always, after the smashings and roarings that had come from it in the night.

  I would get up and go to my dad in the front room, at the moonsilver lace at the window, his face and front patterned with its flowers. We would stand and flinch there together awhile—we had had the conversation about how Dad could do nothing, having lost no daughters himself. I have lost as many wives for my boy as has anyone, he had said to them, but still he had not the same rights to misery. He would stand there, his great hand on my shoulder and arm, his thumb at my hair and ear, and I would hold to his leg as to a big warm tree, while Trumbell’s shouts, and the wife’s, and sometimes Jakes’ and Kerry’s as well, made a kind of awful weather over there, that might yet blow across the lane, and break something of ours.

  When Dad patted and sent me off I would go in to Mam, curled tight as a hedgehog in their bed, sometimes sea-blanketed and sometimes wool. There! If you want to be held tight, clamber up next to your sea-mam when she is alarmed; she will pull you into the knot of herself where nothing can get at you. Her breath will change from uneven and muttering to slow, steady, sea-like as your presence consoles her, and behind the rushing of it and the beat-beat of her pulses calming, Trumbell’s rage is nothing, Trumbell’s blows, Jakes’s pleas; it is all happening in another house, another world, as separate from us as a birds’ duel among the clouds, as fish-monsters’ battling away down in the sea.

  They spoiled their wives’ faces, some of them. Some men made the women stay home and not show anyone, until they were not so swollen; others took them out on their arms, and very gentlemanly escorted them about the streets and in the lanes around. If you came upon the men they would greet you gruesome heartily, and say how they and their lady-wife were out for a stroll and weren’t it lovely weather?

  And you would not be able to not glance just a little at the wife. You needed to know—although what good did it do, to know a tooth was gone, to marvel how tight and shiny and bright purple eye-skin could swell up?

  And then you were caught; somehow you felt again as if you were abandoning the woman to her bully man by walking on. But my, the most thing you wanted to do was run from this awful game, from the two faces, one so wrong-colored and -shaped, the other a skin of mawkish friendliness over a red-biling rage.

  They used all to go down together, the mams, and wash their blankets in the sea. They would sit about on the rocks at the start of the south mole, with their feet hooked in the seaweed, and the water would rush up, and fizz and shush in the blankets, and rush away again. It seemed to soothe them, and we liked to be with them then, clambering about at our own play among them while they joked to one another. “I’ve a mind to let it go,” Grinny’s mam might say, “the way he’s been treating me. I’ve a mind to lift my feet and let it float away, free as a summer cloud.” Or my own mam: “Not many sea-hearts down the washing-beach this year, anyone find? Usually there is a good lot coming up by now.” They sat so solid there, and watched the crowding sea so attentive, you could imagine them not getting up from there ever, sitting like sea-rocks all night even, searching the black waves as the water and knitted weed bobbed and sucked around them.

  Messkeletha would walk along the mole above; the mams always ignored her. She would climb down now and again muttering, and wade out to one woman’s blanket and another’s. From her belt-string she took a length of weed for mending, and worked there scowling a while. Then she knotted and bit off the shining weed, and waded back, climbed back, and paced and stared again above.

  When the washing was done and the mending, she would loose one of her two-finger whistles up to Wholeman’s Inn—which would set us boys to practicing our own whistles, none of us achieving anything like the witch’s piercingness except sometimes by luck. Dads would file out of Wholeman’s—not all the dads, maybe six or seven—and gather along the rail there and watch while the mams dragged their blankets up, and spread them on the mole-top, some of them, or carried the great wet bundles in their arms or on their heads, up to their own clotheslines to dry.

  “Bye, Sal, then.”

  “Bye, Peachy. Don’t you take no nonsense now.”

  That was how it was done, before Titch Cawdron let slip. Now Messkeletha came to your door and took out your mam individual—which was terrifying, that she knew where you lived and might come back of a night and snatch you out through your dreams. It was horrible; everyone seemed blamed.

  Some mams went tall and proud ahead of her pretending their weed was not such a burden; others, particularly ones whose dads had beaten them, walked as if smacked low, or expecting to be, bobbed along gathering up corners and turning their faces from all the windows as they went.

  “My dad watches them go by,” I heard Grinny say to Asham. “Every one, and he’s not a good word to say of any of them. My mam will be scrubbing and scrubbing over the sound of him, but he’ll just talk louder—the sly look of that one, the three girls that one stole away, how Martyr walloped the smile off that one’s face. It’s shocking, and he will not let me go, not out into the yard, even. He makes me stay and listen.”

  We were none of us let out at that time, even the sons of the mam called to washing. We were a distraction, the town said, and it would grow from there: a lad would have his friend, and then his friend’s friend would tag along, and before you knew it the lot of them would all be down there, arrayed on rocks and scheming again.

  We lived high enough in the town that not many women were brought by. But when they were, Mam or Dad would hurry to close the door, and open the lace so as to show no one was looking from behind it, and find works to do in yard and scullery, and ways for me to help them. When the knock came for my mam, Dad would always have some job ready. “Here, take the other end of this, Dan’l; save your old man’s back.” Or, “Is that ash-bin still out the back lane, I’m wondering?” So that I should never see her go, never see Messkeletha take her. Or maybe that he shouldn’t see. Perhaps he was as frightened of the oul witch as I was.

  They used—and it seemed so foolish to me now, but it wasn’t then, in those accepting days when we all ran about among our mams’ skirts—they used to be allowed to gather, in this house and that, the mams and children, by themselves without men or Messkeletha. At first there would be talk and tea and sitting upright and eyes everywhere. They would talk of their men and their men’s tempers; they would talk of us, and how we were coming on, how we ate and grew.

  Then one of them would sigh and cross from table to armchair, or settee or fireside stool. All their movements would suddenly change, slowing and swaying, and their voices would lower from so bright and brittle, and someone might laugh low, too. As we ran in and out we would see more of them gather at the seated one, leaning to her or pulling her to lean on them. Hairs would be unpinned and fall, and combs brought out and combing begin, and there is nothing happier than the sight of a mam’s face when her hair is being c
ombed. When we were littler we would run in from our play and lie among them, patted and tutted over and our own hairs combed and compared, the differences in wave and redness. Sometimes we were allowed the combing, but our arms were never long enough to do it as well as they did for each other, long slow silky sweeps from scalp to tips, the combed mam dreamy, the comber thoughtful above.

  But of course that came to an end once the daughter-matter were out. Mam combed her own hair now, and if Dad or I saw her at it we would take it on too, and it was always a pleasant time, but it was not the same, though I didn’t like to say, as a room full of warm mams murmurous by the fire, and several hairs to plait and play with as you would, and any number of bosoms to lay your head upon, and doze away an afternoon.

  Nobody expected Aggie Bannister, after all her time hid away from us, so no one stopped her. They were too astounded seeing this white creature in midst of the clouds and gray, among coats and wool hats and clumpy boots this naked thing, all that bared skin in the cold air, the wobbling nipple-eyes mad below her determined face, and then the wobbling bottom behind, the feet that we remembered from summer, toenails and bunions and cracked heels freed of the shoes that so pained them, the slap of cobbles against foot-soles. Wrong, so wrong, for this season, for this place.

  Down she ran, Aran’s mam, through the dark gray town like a running flare, through the streets like an animal gone wild, like someone’s stock got out and not knowing about towns and hard surfaces and cold. Or about real people, and their eyes and their laughter and their cruel words. Oh, gracious who was that! Aggie Bannister! It’s Aggie! Her name, which was not her name at all but Bannister’s chosen name for her, his own name with a girl’s name that he liked tied on before like the front end of a horse costume—her name got passed all down the streets and back over shoulders into the houses, and from being on so many lips, it became soiled so badly that the woman might never be able to lift her head in Potshead streets again, nor Bannister pass by without laughter breaking out behind him, nor Aran nor Timmy nor Cornelius neither.

  It was clear where she was headed, and while she was not thinking straight, we were. Or at least, she was after a different aim: to reach the sea, whereas we only needed the view of it, so we all headed down Totting Lane and Fishhead Lane straight down, while she ran the full ramp length of the main street and across to the mole and then she clambered, all white bottom and—you could see every fold of her if your eyes were good as mine, while the young men whooped and whistled and the women and the married men turned their faces away behind their hands, and glanced again and groaned and laughed. She clambered, slipped, clambered down and then turned and with one bloodied knee ran limping, ran clumsy as if she were transforming back right there, down the pebbly gray sand towards the water.

  And then she was in it, a naked back and bottom in the middle of a white fan of water. And then the green-white froth passed over her and her hair wasn’t wild any more but pasted flat to her head. Thank goodness! I thought. The seals will come and fetch her and she never will have to flounder ashore and face our kindness and our ridicule. And she was embracing the waves, and swimming there so strongly, you could tell they were her home; she was not clumsy there.

  “She want to stay within the lee of the mole,” said Prentice Meehan above me. “It’s dirty farther out.’

  A howl of the wind turned to the howl of a man, the howl of Bannister running out the house ends. “Aggie!”

  “Look at him! He has her coat!” Which made him look somewhat octopus-ish, all its arms and flaps a-flapping.

  “Don’t you expect me to do that for you,” muttered Arthur Sack to his missus. He was standing his hand locked around hers, glaring at her, while she gazed now towards lumbering woeful Bannister, now out to the water, where Aggie was a dot of black, a momentary shining white haunch, a white foot splashing, and now hidden behind the green glass upshelving of a wave.

  Along the mole ran Bannister. All our men is taciturn, when not angry; I cannot describe to you the uncomfortableness of seeing him so come out of himself, his mouth wide in his face like a bawling bab’s, his arms reaching. His bellows were torn up by the wind and waves and thrown at us in shreds, some strange animal’s cry, not a man’s, not a grown man’s.

  Right out to the end he got, and still he yearned farther. He made to clamber down the end point.

  “Don’t be daft, man!” said some man.

  “He will be swept away!” a woman said dreamily.

  But the sea jumped up and smacked the mole-end, a great fanfare of spray, and Bannister staggered back in it, soaked with it. And there he stood a moment, clutching her coat and staring out to where she came and went, came and went, bobbing and struggling now among the wilder, dirtier waves.

  A spot of sun came then, poked a hole in the clouds and cut a bar through the spume and lighted on them both as he flung the coat, as it flew—not far, it was so heavy—as it lumped out into the air and splatted on the water and was gone there, then was there again, struggling, just as she was, to stay above water.

  And the laugh-and-chattering here against the rail stopped, because coat and Aggie were so far apart, and neither of them were swimming towards the other. We saw the coat edge at the surface, the shadow of the coat within a big sunlit wave; we saw her face, her mouth, her arm and breast, and a different wave crash down, folding her down into the sea. Bannister knew not to dive in; even mad with grief he knew. He stood instead a little way down from the mole-top, stood with legs bent and red hands claws upon his knees, bellowing out to Aggie not to die.

  She did not obey him. She lay slumped in the water when next we saw her, only her back, and then the sun went away and the sea brought her in behind the mole again. Through the gray rain-beginning, through the green-gray waters, the rows and curling rows of them, up and down it brought her slow—mams ushered some of the littler boys away. It deposited her not three yards from where it had thrown up the empty coat, a welter of black flesh and stirred pebbles, onto Potshead beach.

  “It is all our faults,” shivered little Thomas Davven, left behind with me on the rail while the men ran, while the woman pushed children away, while here came Messkeletha with one of her blankets for a shroud. “If we had not faddle-arsed around in that coat room . . . ”

  “It is all their faults,” I said and savagely. The witch cast me a look in passing, and I waited till she had gone, one blanket-corner dragging as she went. “Stealing our mams out of the sea in the first place,” I hissed to Thomas.

  “Oh, you cannot blame them that.” He clutched himself and bowed and bent in the cold wind, without the shelter of the crowd any more. “You had the choice between women like that raddle-witch and our beautiful mams, which would you choose?”

  He had me. That was no fair choice, that was. “Still,” I said through my teeth, clamping them tight against their chattering. “Still, they never ought to done it. They dint belong here. They belonged under the waves.”

  Down there, we could see it all well; we were like birds stopped above them in the wind. Only Aggie Bannister was normal length, white and awash until they pulled her by wrists and ankles up out of the shadows; the rest of them were all cap-tops and coat-shoulders, with boot toes popping out, popping away again. And Messkeletha hurried up, a snarl of red-streaked white hair above a trailing clump of knitted seaweed, and her feet were bare and blue, the toenails long as the teeth of some old neglected dog.

  I went home to Mam. I did not care if she talked or wept of slept or hid from me under her seaweed; I wanted only to be in the room with her, to see the mound of her and know she was not drowned and naked before the Potshead populace.

  I sat by the window and the sun now and again broke through and lit the sea silver, and lit the ceiling with silver reflections, and the wind outside was one breath and the sea, rushing, pausing, falling, was another, and Mam’s was another—though mostly I could only see it in her rise and fall, not hear it among all the others. And then there was my ow
n breathing, which at first when I sat was all raggy and half into speech, and after a while was soothed, by Mam’s ongoingness, by the wind’s being outside and by the distance of the dirty sea and of the people round Aggie Bannister, to something that fit, that fell into peaceful pace, with all the other beings’. The furniture sat plain and hard in its place; the rug that I remembered her making—her twisting fingers with her singing face above—lay finished and in place by the bed, and her hair was a black salty tangle on the pillow, beyond the table where lay her shells, and her stones that meant something, and her sea-glass, red and blue and powdery white, smoothed to harmlessness, beaten to something beautiful by the sea, taken from the sea before it were quite beaten away into nothing but more sand.

  I was not waiting for anything. I had forgot I was there; I had forgot, indeed, who I was. Being with Mam often made me this way—how much did it matter, after all, that I was crossed of land-man and sea-woman? Time could pass unwatched; it need not lead away from good times so that I yearned back, or push me towards a future that I dreaded. I could just lounge, and breathe like this, and the silver lights of water and winter could move above me.

  There is labor in getting a boat through the sea. Either you pull it with oars, digging and hauling the water back, or you dance and scrabble with sails and sheets, begging the wind to cooperate with your work. Or some men engage with grease and metal, propellers, stinking fuel, and carve up the sea behind them with an engine.

  Looking from that labor to the seals, you can tell they are magical. All they have is those slender hands, those fine feet like a limp plant hanging off their back end, like a tail. I have watched men struggle with the washed-up body of one of those, reduced to cutting it to pieces and moving it with hooks. They are such a stubborn, slippery weight. And yet they fly under water, and spin and sport and somersault, all the while we chug and beat and swear above.