Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  Sea View curved right around the bottom of The Rise. Behind its railing, the cliff lurched forward into the night and tumbled on the sea. Number 19 was the farthest house down, the last in the terrace. An odd curly little alley ran off to the side of it, leading along the downslope of the cliff and out of sight, probably to the beach. The sound of the tide, coupled with the rain, was savage, close, and immensely wet.

  I pushed through the gate and walked up the short path. A dim illumination came from the glass panels of the door. There was no bell, just a knocker. I knocked, and waited like the traveler in the poem. Like him, it didn’t seem I was going to get an answer. An even more wretched end to my escapade than I had foreseen. I hadn’t considered the possibility of absence. Somehow I’d got the notion Mrs. Besmouth—Mrs. Antacid—seldom went out. It must be difficult, with him the way he was, whichever way that happened to be. So, why did I want to get caught up in it?

  A minute more, and I turned with a feeling of letdown and relief. I was halfway along the path when the front door opened.

  “Hi, you,” she said.

  At this uninviting salute, I looked back. I didn’t recognize her, because I hadn’t properly been able to see her on the previous occasion. A frizz of fawn hair, outlined by the inner light, stood round her head like a martyr’s crown. She was clad in a fiery apron.

  “Mrs. Besmouth.” I went towards her, extending the carrier bag like meat offered to a wild dog.

  “Besmouth, that’s right. What is it?” She didn’t know me at all.

  I said the name of the store, a password, but she only blinked.

  “You came in about your dressing gown, but it hadn’t arrived. It came today. I’ve got it here.”

  She looked at the bag.

  “All right,” she said. “What’s the delivery charge?”

  “No charge. I just thought I’d drop it in to you.”

  She went on looking at the bag. The rain went on falling.

  “You live round here?” she demanded.

  “No. The other end of the bay, actually.”

  “Long way for you to come,” she said accusingly.

  “Well . . . I had to come up to The Rise tonight. And it seemed a shame, the way you came in and just missed the delivery. Here, do take it, or the rain may get in the bag.”

  She extended her hand and took the carrier.

  “It was kind of you,” she said. Her voice was full of dislike because I’d forced her into a show of gratitude. “People don’t usually bother nowadays.”

  “No, I know. But you said you hadn’t got time to keep coming back, and I could see that, with—with your son—”

  “Son,” she interrupted. “So you know he’s my son, do you?”

  I felt hot with embarrassed fear.

  “Well, whoever—”

  “Haven’t you got an umbrella?” she said.

  “Er—no—”

  “You’re soaked,” she said. I smiled foolishly, and her dislike reached its climax. “You’d better come in a minute.”

  “Oh no, really that isn’t—”

  She stood aside in the doorway, and I slunk past her into the hall. The door banged to.

  I experienced instant claustrophobia and a yearning to run; but it was too late now. The glow was murky, there was a faintly musty smell, not stale exactly, more like the odor of a long-closed box.

  “This way.”

  We went by the stairs and a shut door, into a small back room, which in turn opened on a kitchen. There was a smokeless coal fire burning in an old brown fireplace. The curtains were drawn, even at the kitchen windows, which I could see through the doorway. A clock ticked, setting the scene as inexorably as in a radio play. It reminded me of my grandmother’s house years before, except that in my grandmother’s house you couldn’t hear the sea. And then it came to me that I couldn’t pick it up here, either. Maybe some freak meander of the cliff blocked off the sound, as it failed to in the street—

  I’d been looking for the wheelchair and, seeing it, had relaxed into an awful scared boredom. Then I registered the high-backed dark red chair, set facing the fire. I couldn’t see him, and he was totally silent, yet I knew at once the chair was full of him. A type of electric charge went off under my heart. I felt quite horrible, as if I’d screamed with laughter at a funeral.

  “Take your coat off,” said Mrs. Besmouth. I protested feebly, trying not to gaze at the red chair. But she was used to managing those who could not help themselves, and she pulled the garment from me.

  “Sit down by the fire. I’m making a pot of tea.”

  I wondered why she was doing it, including me, offering her hospitality. She didn’t want to, at least, I didn’t think she did. Maybe she was lonely. There appeared to be no Mr. Besmouth. Those unmistakable spoors of the suburban male were everywhere absent.

  To sit on the settee by the fire, I had to go round the chair. As I did so, he came into view. He was just as I recalled, even his position was unaltered, His hands rested loosely and beautifully on his knees. He watched the fire, or something beyond the fire. He was dressed neatly, as he had been in the shop. I wondered if she dressed him in these universal faded jeans, the dark pullover. Nondescript. The fire streamed down his hair and beaded the ends of his lashes.

  “Hallo,” I said. I wanted to touch his shoulder quietly, but did not dare.

  Immediately as I spoke, she called from her kitchen: “It’s no good talking to him. Just leave him be, he’ll be all right.”

  Admonished and intimidated, I sat down. The heavy anger was slow in coming. Whatever was wrong with him, this couldn’t be the answer. My back to the kitchen, my feet still in their plastic boots which let water, I sat and looked at him.

  I hadn’t made a mistake. He really was amazing.

  How could she have mothered anything like this? The looks must have been on the father’s side. And where had the illness come from? And what was it? Could I ask her, in front of him?

  He was so far away, not here in this room at all.

  But where was he? He didn’t look—oh God what word would do?—deficient. Leonardo da Vinci, staring through the face of one of his own half-finished, exquisite, lunar Madonnas, staring through at some truth he was still seeking . . . that was the look. Not vacant. Not . . . missing—

  She came through with her pot of tea, the cups and sugar and milk.

  “This is very kind of you,” I said.

  She grunted. She poured the tea in a cup and gave it to me. She had put sugar in, without asking me, and I don’t take sugar. The tea became a strange, alien, sickly brew, drunk for ritual. She poured tea into a mug, sugared it, and took it to the chair. I watched, breathing through my mouth. What would happen?

  She took up his hand briskly, and introduced the mug into it. I saw his long fingers grip the handle. His face did not change. With a remote gliding gesture, he brought the mug to his lips. He drank. We both, she and I, looked up, as if at the first man, drinking.

  “That’s right,” she said.

  She fetched her own cup and sat on the settee beside me, I didn’t like to be so close to her, and yet, we were now placed together, like an audience, before the profile of the red chair, and the young man.

  I wanted to question her, ask a hundred things. His name, his age. If we could get him to speak. If he was receiving any treatment, and for what, exactly. How I wanted to know that. It burned in me, my heart hammered, I was braised in racing waves of adrenalin.

  But I asked her nothing like that.

  You could not ask her these things, or I couldn’t. And he was there, perhaps understanding, the ultimate constraint.

  “It’s very cozy here,” I said. She grunted. “But I keep wondering why you can’t hear the sea. Surely—”

  “Yes,” she said, “I don’t get much time to go into the town center. What with one thing and another.”

  That came over as weird. She belonged to the category of person who would do just that—skip an idea that had
no interest for her and pass straight on to something that did. And yet, what was it? She’d been a fraction too fast. But I was well out of my depth, and had been from the start.

  “Surely,” I said, “couldn’t the council provide some sort of assistance—a home-help—”

  “Don’t want anything like that.”

  “But you’d be entitled—”

  “I’m entitled to my peace and quiet.”

  “Well, yes—”

  “Daniel,” she said sharply, “drink your tea. Drink it. It’ll get cold.”

  I jumped internally again, and again violently. She’d said his name. Not alliterative after all. Daniel . . . She’d also demonstrated he could hear, and respond to a direct order, for he was raising the mug again, drinking again.

  “Now,” she said to me, “if you’ve finished your tea, I’ll have to ask you to go. I’ve his bath to see to, you understand.”

  I sat petrified, blurting some sort of apology. My brief brush with the bizarre was over and done. I tried not to visualize, irresistibly, his slim, pale, probably flawless male body, naked in water. He would be utterly helpless, passive, and it frightened me.

  I got up.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “No, it was good of you to bring the dressing gown.”

  I couldn’t meet her eyes, and had not been able to do so at any time.

  I wanted at least to say his name, before I went away. But I couldn’t get it to my lips, my tongue wouldn’t form it.

  I was out of the room, in my coat, the door was opening. The rain had stopped. There wasn’t even an excuse to linger. I stepped on to the path.

  “Oh, well. Goodbye, Mrs. Besmouth.” Her face stayed shut, and then she shut the door too.

  I walked quickly along Sea View Terrace, walking without having yet caught up to myself, an automaton. This was naturally an act, to convince Mrs. Antacid, and the unseen watchers in their houses, and the huge dark watcher of the night itself, that I knew precisely where I wanted to go now, and no more time to squander. After about half a minute, self-awareness put me wise, and I stopped dead. Then I did what I really felt compelled to do, still without understanding why. I reversed my direction, walked back along the terrace, and into the curling alley that ran down between Number 19, and the shoulder of the cliff.

  I didn’t have very far to go to see the truth of the amorphous thing I had somehow deductively fashioned already in my mind. The back of Number 19, which would normally have looked towards the sea, was enclosed by an enormous brick wall. It was at least fourteen feet high—the topmost windows of the house were barely visible above it, I wondered how the council had been persuaded to permit such a wall. Maybe some consideration of sea-gales had come into it . . . The next door house, I now noticed for the first time, appeared empty, touched by mild dereliction. A humped black tree that looked like a deformed cypress grew in the garden there, a further barrier against open vistas. No lights were visible in either house, even where the preposterous wall allowed a glimpse of them.

  I thought about prisons, while the excluded sea roared ferociously at the bottom of the alley.

  I walked along the terrace again, and caught the bus home.

  Sunday was cold and clear, and I went out with my camera, because there was too much pure-ice wind to sketch. The water was like mercury under colorless sunlight. That evening, Angela had a party to which I had been invited. I drank too much, and a good-looking oaf called Ray mauled me about. I woke on Monday morning with the intense moral shame that results from the knowledge of truly wasted time.

  Monday was my free day, or the day on which I performed my personal chores. I was loading the bag ready for the launderette when I remembered—the connection is elusive, but possibly Freudian—that I hadn’t got the prepaid receipt back from Mrs. Besmouth. Not that it would matter too much. Such records tended to be scrappy in Angela’s department. I could leave it, and no one would die.

  At eleven-thirty, I was standing by the door of Number 19, the knocker knocked and my heart was in my mouth.

  I’ve always been obsessive. It’s brought me some success, and quite a lot of disillusion, not to mention definite hurt. But I’m used to the excitement and trauma of it, and even then I was used to my heart in my mouth, the trembling in my hands, the deep breath I must take before I could speak.

  The door opened on this occasion quite quickly. She stood in the pale hard sunlight. I was beginning to learn her face, and its recalcitrant, seldom-varying expression. But she had on a different apron.

  “Oh,” she said, “it’s you.”

  She’d expected me. She didn’t exactly show it, she hadn’t guessed what my excuse would be. But she’d known, just as l had, that I would come back.

  “Look, I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “I forgot to ask you for the receipt.”

  “What receipt?”

  “When you paid for the garment, they gave you a receipt. That one.”

  “I threw it away,” she said.

  “Oh. Oh well, never mind.”

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble,”

  “No, it’s all right. Really.” I pulled air down into me like the drag of a cigarette, or a reefer. “How’s Daniel today?”

  She looked at me, her face unchanging.

  “He’s all right.”

  “I hoped I hadn’t—well—upset him. By being there,” I said.

  “He doesn’t notice,” she said. “He didn’t notice you.”

  There was a tiny flash of spite when she said that. It really was there. Because of it, I knew she had fathomed me, perhaps from the beginning. Now was therefore the moment to retreat in good order.

  “I was wondering,” I said. “What you told me, that you find it difficult to make the time to get to the town center.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “I have to go shopping there today. If there’s anything you need I could get you.”

  “Oh no,” she said swiftly. “There’s local shops on The Rise.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said.

  “I can manage.”

  “I’d really like to. It’s no bother. For one thing,” I added, “the local shops are all daylight robbers round here, aren’t they?”

  She faltered. Part of her wanted to slam the door in my face. The other part was nudging her: Go on, let this stupid girl fetch and carry for you, if she wants to.

  “If you want to, there are a few things. I’ll make you out a list.”

  “Yes, do.”

  “You’d better come in,” she said, just like last time.

  I followed her, and she left me to close the door, a sign of submission indeed. As we went into the back room, the adrenalin stopped coming, and I knew he wasn’t there. There was something else, though. The lights were on, and the curtains were drawn across the windows. She saw me looking, but she said nothing. She began to write on a piece of paper.

  I wandered to the red chair, and rested my hands on the back of it.

  “Daniel’s upstairs,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “But he’s—he’s well.”

  “He’s all right. I don’t get him up until dinnertime. He just has to sit anyway, when he’s up.”

  “It must be difficult for you, lifting him.”

  “I manage. I have to.”

  “But—”

  “It’s no use going on about home-helps again,” she said. “It’s none of their business.”

  She meant mine, of course. I swallowed, and said: “Was it an accident?” I’m rarely so blunt, and when I am, it somehow comes out rougher from disuse. She reacted obscurely, staring at me across the table.

  “No, it wasn’t. He’s always been that way. He’s got no strength in his lower limbs, he doesn’t talk, and he doesn’t understand much. His father was at sea, and he went off and left me before Daniel was born. He didn’t marry me, either. So now you know everything, don’t you?”

  I took my hand off the c
hair.

  “But somebody should—”

  “No, they shouldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t he be helped—” I blurted.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “So if that’s what you’re after, you can get out now.”

  I was beginning to be terrified of her, I couldn’t work it out if Daniel was officially beyond aid, and that’s where her hatred sprang from, or if she had never attempted to have him aided, if she liked or needed or had just reasonlessly decided (God’s Will, My Cross) to let him rot alive. I didn’t ask.

  “I think you have a lot to cope with,” I said. “I can give you a hand, if you want it. I’d like to.”

  She nodded.

  “Here’s the list.”

  It was a long list, and after my boast, I’d have to make sure I saved her money on the local shops. She walked into the kitchen and took a box out of a drawer. She came back with a five-pound note I wasn’t sure would be enough.

  When I got out of the house, I was coldly sweating. If I had any sense I would now, having stuck myself with it, honorably do her shopping, hand it to her at the door, and get on my way. I wasn’t any kind of a crusader, and, as one of life’s more accomplished actors, even I could see I had blundered into the wrong play.

  It was one o’clock before I’d finished her shopping.

  My own excursion to the launderette had been passed over, but her fiver had just lasted. The list was quite commonplace; washing powder, jam, flour, kitchen towels . . . I went into the pub opposite the store and had a gin and tonic. Nevertheless, I was shaking with nerves by the time I got back to Number 19. This was the last visit. This was it.

  Gusts of white sunlight were blowing over the cliff. It was getting up rough in the bay, and the no-swimming notices had gone up.

  She was a long while opening the door. When she did, she looked very odd, yellow-pale and tottery. Not as I’d come to anticipate. She was in her fifties, and suddenly childlike, insubstantial.

  “Come in,” she said, and wandered away down the passage.