THE GIRL WHO THOUGHT HER MOTHER WAS A MERMAID
Tania Unsworth
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About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
www.readzephyr.com
About The Girl Who Thought Her Mother Was A Mermaid
What would you do if you thought your mother was a mermaid?
When Stella runs away from homemon a quest to discover the truth, she has no idea just how terrifying that truth will be.
On Lastland Island, danger awaits. And a secret as deep as the ocean itself.
From a necklace that gleams dark fire, comes the word of the sea. Beings with strange, and disturbing power...
‘the speed of the orca, the restless eye of the great white shark, the liquid shiver of the squid…’
Contents
Welcome Page
About The Girl Who Thought Her Mother Was A Mermaid
Dedication
Frontispiece
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Acknowledgements
About Tania Unsworth
About Zephyr
Copyright
For my mother,
who also came from far away
Frontispiece
One
The first time Stella Martin ran away, it was in her sleep. The second was by accident. But the third time she did it on purpose, to find out whether she was human or not.
The sleepwalking began when she was eight, soon after her mum died, and at first Stella didn’t get any further than her bedroom door. The moment she touched the handle – which had always been slightly loose – it rattled and woke her. One night, though, the door was left ajar and there was nothing to stop her passing through, into the silent, carpeted corridor beyond.
She padded down the broad staircase, across the hall, into the kitchen where the marble countertops, polished by Mrs Chapman every day, gleamed liquid in the moonlight. Out of the back door she went, on to the patio, moving without hesitation, as if on command.
The grass was wet from the sprinklers, but Stella didn’t seem to notice the chill on her bare toes. She stepped on to the lawn, still fast asleep, passing through the circle of light from the porch lantern, moving into deeper and deeper shadow. When she reached the low stone wall, she swung her legs over, her feet finding the flagstones on the other side.
Ten metres away lay the swimming pool, its water black as flint.
It was lucky Stella’s dad was having another of his sleepless nights. Luckier still that, sunk in his trance of sorrow, he had forgotten to lower the window, and happened to catch sight of Stella’s fluttering white nightgown. Even so, he was almost too late. Stella’s body was tilting towards the water when he caught her around the waist and pulled her to safety.
Stella’s mum had loved the pool. She had been a superb swimmer. It wasn’t just that she was fast, there was more to it than that. It was the way she used to move. As if she was made of water itself.
She had taught Stella how to swim. Stella could remember the feel of her mum’s hand cupping the back of her head. Her mum’s smiling face blocked out the sun, and her hair glittered at the edges like a red-gold crown.
I’ve got you, she had said, as Stella hesitated. I’ve got you.
Stella raised her body and suddenly she was floating. Her fear had gone. For a moment, staring wide-eyed at the sky, she felt as if it would never come back. Her mum had taken it away; the fear Stella had, and all she would ever have, even if she lived to be a hundred years old.
But after the sleepwalking incident, Stella didn’t want to go swimming. The sight of the pool frightened her, and she was glad when her dad finally had it emptied and covered with a heavy tarp.
‘Such a waste,’ Mrs Chapman said, casting a disapproving look at the dead leaves on the surface of the tarp. ‘And all because of a little sleepwalking! Do you recall what you were dreaming about?’
Stella nodded. She had been dreaming she was in the pool. It was daytime. Reflections danced against the white walls and bottom of the pool, holding the water in a shimmering net of light. The net would hold her too, she thought, as she waded further in. But a cloud passed over the sun and the net vanished, and there was suddenly nothing beneath her reaching feet. The bottom of the pool had disappeared and she was sinking, deeper and deeper. She twisted her head and looked up. The surface of the water was already far away, the light dwindling. Below her desperately kicking feet she sensed nothing but a vast emptiness. She was descending fast, unable to stop or cry for help, down, down, to a place so deep and dark that she could never come back…
Stella opened her mouth to explain all this to Mrs Chapman, and then closed it again.
‘Well?’ Mrs Chapman prompted. ‘What was it?’
Stella didn’t know how to describe the feeling of the dream, the panic. ‘It’s a secret,’ she said finally.
Mrs Chapman ruffled Stella’s messy hair. ‘What a strange girl you are!’
Stella didn’t argue. Mrs Chapman ran the house. She cooked their meals, and kept the floors spotless, and knew where everything was. And if Mrs Chapman said she was strange, it was probably true. Stella was filled with a mysterious dread.
It was exactly the same as the terrible, sinking feeling in her dream.
Two
Stella lived in a part of the country where the towns looked exactly the same as each other, and the land was perfectly flat. The light was flat too, with nothing but the occasional water tower to cast a shadow. The wind blew dust along the ground, clouds crossed the sky, and cars travelled the long, straight roads, without leaving a mark. The land stayed unchanged. As if the wind and the clouds and the cars had never passed by at all.
It was the same with Stella’s mum after she died. Her things were put in boxes, and one day even the boxes disappeared. It felt almost as if she had never lived there.
But not quite. On the living room windowsill – right in the corner – Stella’s mum had once made a pencil sketch of a lamppost. You could see the real lamppost through the window, on the street beyond the house. Stella sometimes stood there, looking from the real lamppost to the drawing and back again, as if she could somehow get inside her mum’s head even though she wasn’t there any longer.
Her mum had often drawn things, although hardly ever in her notebook. Instead she used whatever happened to be around; an old receipt, the flap on a cereal box, a corner of a newspaper. For a while after she had gone, Stella kept finding the drawings in unexpected places. A sketch of a tree in the bac
k of a book. A tiny elephant on a shopping list lying in the kitchen cabinet.
The cabinet was a jumble of mugs and jugs and wine glasses because Stella’s mum had always stored everything together. It was the same in her small vegetable garden, where radishes sprouted among the carrots, and the herbs and lettuces were all mixed up. It was as if she didn’t notice – or see the need of – rows and borders, and separate places for things.
One year, for Stella’s birthday, her mum had hung fairy lights under the dining room table, and the three of them had eaten supper sitting on the rug, the edges of the tablecloth hanging down like the walls of a glowing tent.
But after her mum died, Mrs Chapman came to be their housekeeper. The mugs in the kitchen were made to line up, and the vegetable garden returned to lawn, and every meal was served where it ought to be. Stella didn’t find any more of her mum’s drawings, although she continued to look for them, more out of habit than any real hope. Despite her efforts, her memories began to grow thin.
She began to wonder whether she was remembering her real mum, or just the photo by her bed.
She would have liked to ask her dad, but talking about Stella’s mum made his face change, and his voice falter. For a long time after she died, he didn’t talk much about anything. He ran a large company and had to travel a lot for work. He was often away from home for days and days.
Whenever she was feeling particularly lonely, Stella would go and look at the picture of the sea. When her mum was alive, the painting had hung in the dining room. Now it was kept in a spare room at the back of the house. Stella didn’t know who had painted it, or where it had come from, but she felt sure her mum had liked it.
In her memories, her mum had always been smiling, or laughing. But sometimes another expression would cross her face. It wasn’t sadness, or even thoughtfulness, it was much too still for that. As if her mind was so far away that her body had simply been left behind.
That expression had often been on her mum’s face when she looked at the painting of the sea.
It was an unusual picture. First, because it was extremely big, almost taking up the whole wall and, second, because despite its size, there was hardly anything in it. There was no white-sailed yacht tacking against the wind, or fishing boat struggling home in stormy seas, or lonely lighthouse, or anything you normally found in pictures of the sea. There was just sky and choppy water, rising in weighty peaks and deep green troughs all the way to the horizon.
Stella sat in the spare room and stared at the picture. There was something mesmerising about its emptiness. If she looked at it long enough, the walls of the room seemed to fall away, and the painted sea looked more and more real, until she felt she was actually there.
Her hand moved up to touch the stone that hung around her neck from a gold chain. It had been a gift from her mum, and Stella had never taken it off from the moment it was given to her.
At first glance, the stone looked like an ordinary pebble. But it was marbled with fine green veins, and when it caught the light in the right way, it gleamed with a dark fire, richer than velvet. The day Stella had been given it was the last time she had ever seen her mum.
It was in the hospital. Her mum was in bed, under a long strip of cold light. Her hair was spread out, covering the whole pillow, and it shone like polished copper. It looked even more beautiful than usual against the white bed linen in that bare, white room.
When she saw Stella, her mum’s hand crept from under the covers. The necklace lay in her palm.
‘It’s the best thing I have,’ her mum said.
‘What is it?’
Stella could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall above the bed.
‘Keep it safe,’ her mum said. At least Stella thought that was what she said.
She took the necklace. The stone was still warm.
‘What is it?’ she asked again.
Her mum’s hand was a small, empty cup on top of the sheet. ‘It’s the word of the sea,’ she said, her voice faint.
Stella didn’t understand. She wanted to push the necklace back into her mum’s hand and tell her that she couldn’t possibly give it away, because when she got better, she would wear it herself.
Stella stood helplessly by her side.
‘Mum?’ she whispered.
She climbed on to the bed and laid her head on the still form beneath the sheets, her ear pressed to her mum’s heart. As if she was listening at the mouth of some rare, fragile shell, hoping to hear the ocean inside. Yet no sound came.
Three
When Stella was nearly ten, she started a new school and she became aware of something for the first time in her life: there were rules to making friends.
Perhaps the rules were new, like the school, or perhaps they had always been there without her knowing. It didn’t really matter either way, because she still didn’t have the slightest idea how they worked.
She stood in the middle of the playground, and kids jostled and raced around her as if she was invisible.
After school, she sat at the dining table at home and played drafts with her dad. He used to be good at playing games but since her mum died, he had forgotten how to. He spent a long time staring at the board, and Stella often had to remind him when it was his turn.
‘Now I’ve got you!’ he said after each move, his voice bright, as if he was having the time of his life. ‘Now, I’ve got you!’
‘I guess you have,’ Stella said, letting him win for the third time in a row.
‘Why don’t we ever go on holiday to the seaside?’ she asked, out of the blue.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a long way away. I think we live about as far from the sea as anyone can.’
‘Mum always said “maybe next year”, but we never did.’
Stella wanted to ask him why. If her mum had liked the painting of the sea, wouldn’t she have liked the real thing even more? But she was silenced by the look of sadness that instantly spread over his face.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, we never did…’
Outside, rain drummed flatly on the tarp covering the swimming pool.
‘Another game?’ he said, trying valiantly to smile.
She shook her head.
‘How about Snakes and Ladders, then? That’s always fun.’
Snakes and Ladders was fun – for six year olds, Stella thought.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’m kind of tired.’
With her dad away so much, and Mrs Chapman busy around the house, Stella needed someone to look after her. Her first nanny couldn’t speak English very well, and spent most of her time writing long, tear-stained letters home.
Stella’s second nanny never stopped talking. Her name was Deb, and it was her chattering that was to blame on the day that Stella ran away by accident. At least, that’s what Mrs Chapman said, although Stella knew the whole thing had really been her fault.
It happened after she started at the new school, when her class was taken to the Natural History Museum for the day. Deb got chatting with a couple of the other helpers on the coach, and by the time they arrived at the museum, she was deep in conversation.
Stella’s class was studying rocks, and the museum had a room full of them. There were geodes and quartz, and pillars of crystal a metre high, sparkling in a hundred different colours. A man who worked at the museum explained that the rocks didn’t look like that when they were in the earth. They had been sliced and polished to reveal their true colours.
Stella felt sorry for them, cut open and forced to give up their secrets.
The man was bald, and his bare head shone. Perhaps he polished it along with the rocks, Stella thought, her mind wandering. He handed out pieces of paper and everybody split up to collect information about the exhibits.
Stella stood before a lump of jagged silver pyrite. If she squinted, it looked a bit like a castle. There were the towers, the outline of the battlements. She squinted harder and a door appeared, although it was more like a cave than
a door. Perhaps it was an abandoned castle, falling into ruin, probably haunted…
She looked down at her piece of paper. She hadn’t written anything. Any moment, one of the teachers would notice, and tell her to pay attention. They often told her that.
Stella has a tendency to drift, a teacher had once written on her report, and the word ‘drift’ had been underlined twice.
‘Excuse me?’
Stella gave a guilty start. It was the man with the polished head.
‘I couldn’t help noticing your necklace,’ he said. ‘I wonder if I could have a look at it.’
Stella’s hand instantly shot to her neck.
‘It’s most unusual, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stone quite like it before,’ the man said. His eyes glittered.
‘My mum gave it to me.’
‘I’d like, if you don’t mind, to examine it.’
Stella shook her head. What if he sliced and polished it, and put it in one of his glass cases? Her mum had told her to keep it safe.
‘Just for a moment?’ His voice was wheedling. Stella looked for Deb, but she was sitting on the far side of the hall, still chatting.
Stella didn’t know what to do.
‘I have to use the bathroom!’ She turned and ran out of the hall, into the corridor.
She had seen a bathroom earlier in the day; it had been fairly near the main entrance. She went left at the end of the corridor, then right, then left again when it became clear she was heading in the wrong direction.
Stella’s panic deepened. Then she turned a corner and saw another hall, and her fear was suddenly forgotten.
The Gallery of Ocean Life read a sign above the entrance. It was a vast space, flooded with sunlight. Glass cases lined the walls. From the high, arched ceiling hung life-sized models of dolphins, sharks and manta rays, although what immediately drew her eye was a massive skeleton of a whale, suspended right in the centre.
Stella stepped forward softly, gazing upward. The whale looked as if it was flying. Its vast jaw, its cavern of ribs, its spine like a great highway stretching to the far horizon. Stella tried to picture how the animal looked when it was alive, with flesh covering its bones. The dark, secret weight of it, the beauty.
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