She tore her eyes away at last and began walking along by the glass cases, dazed by the sight of hundreds of jars, each containing a different animal, floating in clear liquid. There were more rooms off the main hall, and she slipped into one to find more glass cases and wide drawers that lit up when she opened them. Inside were thousands of shells, arranged in rows. Line upon line of whorled, ridged treasures, each a tiny kingdom…
They found her nearly an hour later, the museum in an uproar, everyone looking. Her name had been announced half a dozen times on the public-address system, but Stella had been too lost in wonder to hear.
That evening, back at home, she stood silently in the doorway of Deb’s room, watching her pack her suitcase.
‘I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off you,’ Deb said, jerking a dress off its hanger. ‘I wasn’t doing my job.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’ Stella squeezed her hands together until her knuckles were white. ‘It really wasn’t.’
Deb wasn’t listening to her. She seemed to be talking to herself.
‘All the same, I can’t do everything. Grief or no grief, a dad ought to spend more time at home…’
She wasn’t folding her clothes. She was just bunching them up and shoving them into the suitcase.
Deb shook her head. ‘It isn’t right!’
Stella didn’t understand what ‘it’ was, but the word made her feel uneasy. As if ‘it’ was code for something so terrible that it couldn’t be named.
Later she went to the spare room and sat for a long time looking at the painting of the sea, trying to remember her mum’s face. She thought of the skeleton of the whale, of the great hollow space where its heart had been, and tears filled her eyes.
It isn’t right!
None of it would have happened, Stella thought, if she’d just shown the man her necklace. So maybe ‘it’ wasn’t really an ‘it’ at all.
Maybe ‘it’ was Stella.
Four
Stella began spending every lunch break in the school library. She liked it there. She didn’t have to feel ashamed that she had nobody to talk to, because in the library nobody was allowed to talk anyway.
One day she came across a book about coral reefs. It had a photo of waves breaking against rocks, and another of dolphins moving through the water like silver stitches running through blue silk. Stella took a long time reading the book, then she slipped it into her bag when nobody was looking. A week later, she discovered an encyclopedia full of drawings of shells, and she took that too.
She didn’t know why she stole the books. She did it on impulse, and she kept it a secret.
One day she found a book of folk tales in the history section of the library. There was a picture of a mermaid on the cover. Stella stood still in the narrow passageway between the bookshelves. It was so quiet she could hear the hum of traffic on the distant motorway, the tiny sound of her finger against the pages as she traced the picture’s outline.
The mermaid looked slightly – very slightly – like her mum.
According to legend, mermaids could bring on storms and tell the future, she read. Some were sirens, luring sailors to their doom; others had mysterious healing powers. All were beautiful, with flowing hair and graceful features. They liked nothing better than to perch on rocks, admiring their reflections, or to glide through their underwater kingdoms, strewn with jewels and treasure—
Stella closed the book and quickly stuffed it into her bag. She took it home and put it under her bed, along with the encyclopedia of shells, and the book about coral reefs.
She hid them right at the back, next to the wall, for fear Mrs Chapman would find them. Mrs Chapman was always tidying, and you could tell how she was feeling just by watching her clean. When she was angry, her vacuum cleaner left crisscrossed lines all over the carpet. Yet in a good mood, she sorted the cutlery drawer as if putting the whole world to rights.
She always dusted Stella’s bedroom slowly, pausing at the photograph of Stella’s mum on the bedside table.
‘Beautiful,’ she would say. ‘Too beautiful for this world, and that’s a fact.’
And she would wipe the face behind the glass as gently as if it were a real one.
Mrs Chapman was kept even busier when Stella’s grandmother arrived to live in the small apartment at the top of the house. Stella liked Gramma. She was tall and always perfectly dressed and, like Stella, she had a tendency to drift.
Gramma forgot things, and then she forgot she had forgotten them and suddenly remembered them again. Her memories didn’t follow each other in order; they were more like a well-shuffled deck of cards. There was no way of telling which would come out on top.
Every day after school, Stella climbed the stairs to Gramma’s apartment and drank tea out of her teacups with the blue rims.
‘How lovely to see you!’ Gramma said, sounding surprised, whenever Stella appeared at her door.
She sat on the sofa knitting, although no matter how much time she spent, the knitting never seemed to grow. It was as if all her stitches somehow undid themselves overnight, so next day she was back where she started.
‘What are you making?’ Stella asked.
‘A dear little sweater for Anthony,’ Gramma said.
‘For Dad? Isn’t it a bit small?’ Stella said, looking at the tiny sleeve.
‘Well,’ Gramma said calmly, ‘I expect it will stretch.’
Gramma had such a kind, untroubled face that Stella felt she could tell her anything.
‘Do you think I’m strange, Gramma?’ she asked one day.
Gramma smiled. ‘Isn’t everyone?’
Stella shook her head. ‘Most people are… normal.’
‘That’s only because you don’t know them.’ Gramma poured her another cup of tea, the liquid clear and golden in the white china cup. ‘In my opinion, the more you know a person, the stranger they become.’
‘I stole three books from the library and hid them under my bed,’ Stella said.
‘How unusual.’
‘I don’t even know why I did it,’ Stella said. ‘One was a book about shells, one was about coral reefs, and I took the last one because it had a mermaid on the cover.’
As she said the word ‘mermaid’, a memory came to Stella. It was so clear and fully formed that it felt as though it had always been there, just below the surface of her mind. The memory was of her mum. She was sitting on the window seat, with her knees drawn up and her bare feet resting on the padded fabric.
Stella’s mum had had extremely large feet for her height. They looked, Stella often thought, as if they didn’t quite belong to her. It was why she had been so accident prone, forever tripping over things…
In the memory, Stella was standing next to the window, and she must have been very young because her head only came up to the level of her mum’s hands. She was showing her mum something in a book. It was a picture of a mermaid. Her mum looked down at the page.
‘There’s no such thing,’ she said.
Stella wasn’t sure why she remembered this tiny incident, out of all the thousands of others. Maybe it had stuck in her mind because her mum’s voice had sounded different. Not sharp – her mum was never sharp – but unusually abrupt. Or maybe it was the way Stella had felt in that moment. As if she had done something wrong without knowing quite what.
But whatever the reason for the memory, now that it had come it wouldn’t go away.
Stella thought about it as she stared out of the window of the school bus, watching the flat land speed by. Perhaps Mrs Chapman was right. Her mum had never belonged here. She had belonged somewhere else; in a world that was beautiful enough even for her. She had belonged to the sea.
A mermaid! Stella thought.
Then she stopped and shook her head. She was letting her mind wander again, she was drifting. Stella forced her gaze away from the window, back to the interior of the bus, and the empty seat beside her.
A mermaid? she thought. How did she come up with s
uch stupid things? No wonder nobody ever wanted to sit next to her.
Five
Cam arrived in Stella’s life when she turned twelve. The school year had already begun, and nobody was expecting a new girl to join the class. The day before she came was like any other.
Stella got off the bus after school, and walked down the street like she always did, passing the identical houses with their neat front gardens and tidy driveways. She unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway.
Tina, her current nanny, was in the front room. She looked up from her phone as Stella came in.
‘Hi! How was your day?’
‘Good,’ Stella said.
‘Awesome!’ Tina said, with her big, automatic smile. ‘Got much homework?’
‘Not too much.’
‘Awesome!’ Tina said again. She thought a lot of things were awesome. It was her favourite word.
‘Let me know if you need help with anything,’ she said, already glancing back at her phone.
Stella dumped her bag and went up the stairs to Gramma’s apartment.
‘Stella!’ Gramma cried. ‘How lovely to see you!’
Stella hugged her.
‘How about some tea?’
‘I think Mrs Chapman is already making it,’ Stella said, hearing the clatter of kettle and cups in the kitchenette.
Gramma patted the sofa. ‘Come and sit next to me.’
Mrs Chapman came through the door with a tray. ‘Thank you,’ Gramma said, looking at her with polite curiosity. ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced… are you new?’
‘It’s Mrs Chapman,’ Stella reminded her. ‘She makes tea for us every afternoon.’
‘How kind!’ Gramma declared. ‘What a lovely thing to do!’
Stella poured them each a cup of tea. ‘Tell me a story,’ she begged. ‘Tell me about when you were little and you went to the seaside, and your bracelet fell off in the water, and you couldn’t find it. Did you go to the sea a lot, Gramma? What’s it like?’
‘Well, it’s blue, of course,’ Gramma said vaguely. ‘Full of salt, you know.
It was such a lovely bracelet,’ she continued. ‘It had belonged to my own grandmother. The stones were semi-precious, all different. My mother thought I was far too young to wear such a thing, and certainly not in the water, but I didn’t do what I was told and—’
She broke off. ‘Where’s Anthony today?’
‘Dad’s away. He’ll be back tonight.’
‘Away? Yes, of course, the school trip. I hope he remembers to brush his teeth. He’d have fur growing on them if I didn’t remind him.’
Stella tried to imagine her quiet, serious dad with furry teeth. She couldn’t. ‘He’s grown up now,’ she told Gramma. ‘He’s forty-two years old.’
‘Is he?’ Gramma beamed. ‘How wonderful.’
Her grandmother was a time traveller, Stella thought. She was always arriving – with great delight and surprise – into her own future.
‘Why don’t you tell me about your day?’ Gramma said.
Stella sighed and leaned her head against Gramma’s shoulder, soft wool brushing her cheek. ‘It was just the same…’
Gramma squeezed her hand. ‘Things will change.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because they always do,’ Gramma said.
Six
Gramma was right. Things did change, and the change was Cam.
‘This is Camille Jenkins,’ the teacher said. ‘Please welcome her to the class.’
The girl didn’t act like a new kid. She didn’t smile, or give an embarrassed little wave, or look down at her feet.
‘It’s Camilla,’ she said. And then she walked to the back of the room, and sat down in the spare seat next to Stella.
Stella looked at her out of the corner of her eye. Her clothes were different, and her height, and even the colour of her skin.
The girl opened her bag and took out her pens and notebook, tossing them noisily on to the desk, as if she hadn’t noticed – or didn’t care – that everyone was staring at her. Stella felt a surge of admiration. She racked her brains for something interesting or funny to say.
‘I like your pencil case,’ she finally murmured.
The girl didn’t answer, and Stella wondered if she’d heard, or whether she was ignoring her. At the front of the class, the teacher was handing out books. ‘We’re going to be reading The Lord of the Flies,’ she announced.
‘I read that at my last school,’ the girl told Stella.
‘Really?’ Stella flushed with surprise.
‘It’s exactly the same as The Lord of the Rings.’
Stella stared at her uncertainly.
‘Except instead of hobbits, all the characters are bugs. Swear on my life.’
‘There’s nothing to laugh about, Stella Martin!’ the teacher scolded.
Stella didn’t care. She’d never had someone to laugh with at the back of English class before. Or any class, for that matter.
‘Her name is Camilla,’ she told Gramma over tea that day. ‘Only she said to call her Cam. You’ll never guess how many schools she’s been to – six! She has a brother and a dog called Bubble, and her mum and dad dig up things.’
‘Dig up things?’
‘Old things, pottery, stuff like that. It’s why she’s been to so many schools, because her parents keep hearing of new places to dig around in.’
‘How odd,’ Gramma remarked. She smiled. ‘It sounds as if you two really hit it off.’
‘I didn’t talk much,’ Stella admitted, ‘but it didn’t matter. Cam talks a lot.’
Cam was quick to say something was boring. She sat next to Stella on the school bus, staring at the fields stretching into the distance.
‘I don’t know why we bother looking out of the window,’ she said. ‘What’s the point? Everything’s the same. Same, same, same. It’s like watching paint dry.
Only in slow motion,’ she added.
‘I know what you mean,’ Stella said. ‘There’s too much space, and too much sky. Sometimes it makes me feel… like I can’t breathe.’
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Cam raised her eyebrows.
‘You’re not the same, same, same,’ she said. ‘You’re weird.’
Stella’s chest felt hollow, as if her heart had suddenly shrunk. She stared down at her lap.
‘I know I am,’ she said.
Cam burst out laughing. ‘Not weird-weird,’ she said. ‘Weird-interesting.’
It was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said about her, Stella thought.
Cam came to Stella’s house after school one day, and by the Christmas holidays she was coming a couple of times a week. They did their homework together, although Stella often copied Cam’s answers because Cam finished way ahead, and then spent the rest of the time trying to distract her.
‘What does Tina actually do all day?’ she asked. ‘Why do you call Mrs Chapman, “Mrs Chapman”? Is it because she has a really embarrassing first name, like Frumtilda?’
‘Frumtilda isn’t even a name,’ Stella said.
‘That’s probably what Mrs Chapman thinks too,’ Cam said. ‘Poor old Frumtilda…’
Sometimes Cam lay on the floor in Stella’s bedroom, and read out loud from her own diary.
November 11th
Mum and Dad were droning on and on about some boring old jug handle they found. I can’t believe they are really my parents. I’ve spent AGES looking for evidence that I’m adopted, but no luck. So far. At lunch, a rat was running around the canteen only it turned out it was only Ben Fassberg’s squeaky shoes. Why does nothing exciting ever happen???
‘I thought you weren’t supposed to tell anyone what you wrote in your diary,’ Stella said.
‘What would be the point of that?’
Stella shrugged. ‘I don’t know, so you could keep it a secret? That’s what I’d do, anyway.’
Cam’s face immediately lit up. ‘What sec
rets do you have? Tell me!’
‘I don’t, I was just saying…’
‘I bet you do.’
‘I do not!’ Stella protested, although she knew it was a mistake. Cam’s teasing always got worse the instant she sensed weakness.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Cam sang. ‘You’re hiding something. Where is it, Stella? Under your bed?’
‘There isn’t anything there!’ Stella cried. But Cam was already on her knees, her arm reaching.
‘If there’s nothing there, why are you going red?’ Cam stretched her arm further under the bed and pulled out the three stolen books. She grinned with triumph. ‘So that’s your deep dark secret! Old library books! What do you do with them? Study them at night in guilty secret?’
‘No, I don’t!’
Cam opened the encyclopedia of shells at random. She held it up so Stella could see the pictures, but not the words.
‘What’s this one?’
‘Zigzag scallop,’ Stella said, shamefaced.
‘And this?’
‘Button shell,’ she admitted.
Cam closed the book, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘You really are weird.’
‘I know I am,’ Stella said. It was what she always said when Cam told her she was weird, which was quite often. It had become their private joke.
You’re weird!
I know I am!
Stella smiled. She glanced at the other library books, her gaze falling on the cover of the book of folk tales.
‘I used to think my mum was a mermaid…’ she said. ‘Ages and ages ago,’ she added hastily.
Cam shrugged. ‘I used to think my mum was a witch. And I still do.’
They turned back to their homework, the conversation already half-forgotten. And Stella may never have remembered it if Gramma hadn’t gone time travelling again.
Seven
Gramma was always forgetful, but recently she seemed to be getting worse. She had lost her glasses three times the day before, even though they were hanging on a plastic chain around her neck. Then she thought Stella’s nanny, Tina, was a stranger who had wandered into the house by mistake.
The Girl Who Thought Her Mother Was a Mermaid Page 2