The Girl Who Thought Her Mother Was a Mermaid

by Tania Unsworth

  The instant I knew she was safe, I was even more desperate to return home myself. The thought of waiting another day, another hour, even another minute, felt more than I could bear.

  The utility room was one of the few places in the Crystal Cove with a window; a skylight, two or three metres above my head. It didn’t look as if it had been opened for years, the frame stuck fast under layers of crusted paint. I thought perhaps it would come free with the help of the right tool.

  I found a stepladder behind a pile of planks stacked untidily against the wall. I retrieved it, and set it up as silently as I could. It was too short, even when I was standing on the top. So I got down, fetched a tin of paint, placed it on the ladder, and then climbed up again with a screwdriver clenched between my teeth to open the window.

  Standing on tiptoe, on top of the paint can, on top of the ladder, I managed to reach the window. I shoved hard at the frame and felt it give. I was about to shove it again, when one of the bolts holding the stepladder together snapped in half.

  I might have guessed the thing was shoddy, like everything else in the Crystal Cove.

  I don’t remember falling. All I remember is not being able to get up again. Marcie’s face filled my vision. Someone was saying they should call an ambulance.

  ‘Certainly not!’ Marcie said. ‘She just needs rest…’

  I lay in bed for three weeks, concussed and delirious. I dreamed of a lost ocean; of vast, abandoned caverns, and empty sea floors, and ghost towns of dead coral, whiter than bone. Far off, someone with a broken heart was crying, but when I woke up, it was my own face wet with tears.

  Eventually the fever passed, and I recovered most of my strength, although my legs remained weak. I could pull myself up, and stand for only a few, teetering seconds. It was obvious I couldn’t perform, and Marcie, bitter with disappointment, quickly grew tired of looking after me.

  One day, she came back with an old wheelchair she’d found in a skip.

  ‘You’ll have to start working for your keep,’ she told me. ‘There must be some use to having you around.’

  I only found out much later about Aquabelle and Anthony coming back to get me. It had happened the day after the accident, when I was in bed, only half-conscious. They had a lawyer with them, and Marcie couldn’t win by arguing. She didn’t even try. Instead she took them to the utility room. She’d had time to set the ladder back up, and open the window, and even attach a scrap of my shirt to a nail, so it looked as if I’d torn it getting out.

  I’d run away, Marcie said, and Aquabelle believed her. She knew how I longed for the sea.

  The Crystal Cove was never the same again. Each year it grew shabbier, the shows less impressive, the visitors fewer. Damp hung in the air, and algae began its slow green march across the tank.

  Bit by bit, Marcie was forced to sell her finery. The chandeliers, the silk shirts and the red satin jacket, until only the cowboy boots remained. Marcie wore them every day, no matter the weather. She kept the leather buffed, and the silver spurs polished. They were all she had left to remind her of the glory days of the Crystal Cove.

  Except for me, of course.

  Thirty-one

  ‘Why didn’t you leave?’ Stella asked.

  They had been talking for hours.

  ‘Where would I have gone? I didn’t have a single penny – or a single friend.’

  ‘Why not back to the ocean?’

  Pearl was silent, her face pinched.

  ‘I just realised something,’ Stella said. ‘The older woman in your story – on holiday with my dad – that was Gramma! She told me Mum was a mermaid because she saw her in the show!’

  Gramma was always right, Stella thought. One way or another.

  ‘So all this time my mum thought you’d gone back,’ she said. ‘She never knew you were here.’

  Pearl shook her head. ‘And I couldn’t contact her because I didn’t know where she’d gone.’

  ‘We lived about as far from the sea as it’s possible to get,’ Stella said.

  ‘Perhaps she didn’t want to be reminded,’ Pearl suggested. ‘She gave it up for love, but it must have been hard at times.’

  Stella nodded, thinking of the painting in the spare room of their house.

  ‘I wonder if she ever thought of me,’ Pearl said.

  ‘She did think of you!’ Stella said, suddenly remembering. She reached for her jacket, lying at the end of the bed, and pulled out the sketch of the mermaid.

  ‘She must have done it from memory.’ Stella handed the drawing to Pearl. ‘It is you, isn’t it? I knew you reminded me of someone…’

  Pearl didn’t answer. She stared at the sketch.

  ‘Now I see why she drew your hand flat like that,’ Stella said. ‘I thought maybe you were waving, but it’s not a wave. It’s your hand pressed against the front of the tank, isn’t it?’

  Pearl still couldn’t speak. Tears rose in her turquoise eyes, and Stella thought of the jewels in Gramma’s lost bracelet, glinting through water, forever out of reach.

  ‘Thank you for showing it to me,’ Pearl said at last. She handed the picture back, although something of it had stayed with her. Her face had changed. She looked more like the girl in the drawing than ever before.

  ‘You’re kind, like your mother,’ she said. ‘Much kinder than I deserve.’

  There was such friendship in her voice that Stella felt like crying.

  ‘Why can’t you help me?’ she asked. ‘Why can’t you contact the police, or my dad… or anyone? Are you really that frightened of Marcie?’

  ‘I daren’t get the police involved. She has the video.’

  ‘Anyone can fake a video.’

  ‘But if they arrest me too, if they… investigate, what then? It’s not just for me; I’m the least of it. Imagine what would happen if people knew we existed. They’d tear up the ocean looking for us; we’d never be safe. And they wouldn’t stop until they’d destroyed us.’

  Stella knew she was right. Pearl and her kind would be hunted down, every last one of them. They’d be made into trophies, imprisoned and experimented upon, dissected when they died. Stella thought of the specimen jars in the Natural History Museum, and she shuddered.

  ‘Marcie could have made a lot of money if she’d used that video to expose me, although she never did,’ Pearl said. ‘Something happened to her that night, when she saw us in the tank. It messed up her mind. She was always a bad person, but I think the sight of us made her worse, drove her insane. She became obsessed with the idea that the Crystal Cove would be great again one day. Perhaps she hoped I’d get better, or that others of my people would come to find me. It wasn’t much of a hope, but it was all she had.’ Pearl paused. ‘Until you showed up.’

  Stella was speechless with sudden understanding.

  ‘She wants me for the show, doesn’t she?’ It was so obvious; she didn’t know why she hadn’t guessed it already. ‘She thinks… she thinks I’m—’

  Her voice broke off. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words aloud, although they were shouting in her head.

  She thinks I’m the real fish.

  Thirty-two

  Stella’s nanny Deb had a saying she’d been fond of repeating.

  ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

  At the time, Stella hadn’t really known what it meant, unless Deb was talking about those fairy stories where people are given three wishes and end up wasting all of them. In that case, being careful what you wished for made a lot of sense.

  Now the saying flashed into Stella’s mind, and this time she understood its meaning perfectly.

  She’d run away from home because she wished to know who – or what – she was. Yet now she’d give anything not to know. To be back home, alone and bored in her room, or fidgeting in the back of English class, or just staring out of the window of the bus as the land rolled by, flat and safe and unsurprising.

  ‘It’s not true,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t change into anything. I�
�m normal.’

  Pearl looked down at her hands.

  Why hadn’t help arrived? Stella thought in desperation. It had been ages since her phone call to Cam. Perhaps Cam hadn’t picked up on the clue, after all. Stella tried to remember exactly what she’d said. She’d been forced to say she was with her mum’s friends. She’d told Cam she was on Lastland Island; she’d made no mention of the Crystal Cove. Cam had seen the name when Stella showed her the drawing, although it was possible – even likely – that she hadn’t remembered it. In that case, the police would have to comb the whole island to find her, and that would take time. But it also meant there was still hope.

  ‘I know I’m normal,’ she told Pearl with new courage. ‘Nothing happens to me in the water. I used to swim a lot in our pool, and yesterday I went in the sea and I didn’t feel different at all.’

  Even as she spoke, Stella knew this wasn’t quite true. Wading into the ocean, she’d felt odd, a bit light-headed. If the little boy with the bucket hadn’t called out to her, she might have actually fallen. The waves had made her dizzy, she told herself. Or was it just hunger? It was hunger, after all, that had caused her to faint over tea with Pearl and Marcie.

  ‘If I could… turn, I’d know it, wouldn’t I?’ she said.

  For a moment, she thought Pearl wasn’t going to answer.

  ‘You asked me why I didn’t return to the ocean. Marcie keeps a close eye on me, but I could have found a way to escape her. The truth is, I’ve always been too frightened to try. My body was so damaged by the accident that I don’t know whether it can change in the water like it used to. And by the time I find out, it might be too late.’

  ‘Why?’ Stella said, dread rising.

  ‘Because my body won’t transform until… it has to,’ Pearl said, stumbling over the words. ‘Until something in me shuts down. That has to happen, you see, in order to trigger the turn…’

  ‘I don’t understand. What has to happen?’

  Pearl hesitated for a second, her face contorted by anxiety.

  ‘Humans call it drowning,’ she said.

  Pearl was still talking, although Stella couldn’t hear her any longer. She was back in her dream, sinking towards endless darkness, the light no more than a pinprick above her head.

  ‘Drowning?’ she repeated.

  Pearl’s hands fluttered in agitation. ‘There’s no other way…’

  Thirty-three

  Somewhere beyond the walls of the Crystal Cove, morning must have arrived, although there was no evidence of it. Only the hand on Stella’s watch, pointing to eight a.m. She had spent the night awake, tormented by her thoughts, unable to stop imagining what it would be like to drown, not in a nightmare, but in real life. And after she drowned, what then? Would she simply die, or would she turn instead? Her mind and body changing until she wasn’t Stella Martin any more. Until she wasn’t even human any more.

  It was too much to take in, and after a while a dull despair settled over her. There was no use hoping the police were hunting for her. They would have found her by now if they were. The phone call to Cam had been pointless.

  She should have used it to scream for help while she had the chance. She lay motionless on the bed, her eyes fixed on the far wall, not even lifting her head when the door opened and Marcie came in.

  There was a dark red, trailing clump in one of Marcie’s hands. It was a wig.

  ‘Pearl is rustling up some breakfast,’ Marcie told her, ‘if you can call it that. The cupboard is bare, to say the least. Not a lot coming in from ticket sales. We get more cash out of the donation bucket.

  Don’t look at me like that,’ she added, catching Stella’s eye. ‘People think they’re giving to save the ocean, but if they really cared about it, why’d they mess it up in the first place?’

  She took the wig and gave it a little shake. ‘Stand up.’

  Stella did as she was told, her legs moving numbly. Marcie tugged the wig over her head, jerking it into place. ‘I’ve been hard at work, altering a couple of the old costumes for you,’ she said, excitement filling her voice. ‘I’ve still got a couple of finishing touches to make, and then we can have a fitting…’ She stepped back. ‘I think it suits you!’

  In the cloudy mirror, Stella saw a familiar face gazing back at her. She had always longed to look like her mum. Now, with the red wig tumbling around her face, and her eyes wide with fear and surprise, she saw that she did. The resemblance was startling.

  ‘I think we’ll call you Little Aquabelle,’ Marcie said.

  ‘I’m not like her!’ Stella cried, pulling at the wig. ‘I’m not!’

  ‘Well, we don’t know that yet, do we?’ Marcie said.

  She thumped out of the room, leaving Stella staring after her. If Marcie had already nearly finished Stella’s costume, she must be planning to try her out in the tank very soon.

  There was no time left.

  She had to escape. Staying was not an option. And if she couldn’t rely on the police, or Pearl, or anyone else, she would have to do it alone.

  She looked around the room. Surely there was something there she could use to get out. She’d been staring for hours at the two threadbare beds, the wardrobe, the light bulb dangling from its fraying cord. She could have described them with her eyes shut, down to the last detail. Yet maybe she’d missed something.

  Perhaps she could make a weapon. The legs of the bed were too short for that. She could smash the mirror, and use one of the shards, except she had nothing to smash it with. Stella walked across the room and back again, looking for a chink in the wooden floorboards. Perhaps one was loose, although she wasn’t exactly sure how that would help. But she found nothing.

  She sat down on the bed again, feeling panic start to return.

  I am going to get out of here, she told herself. I have made up my mind.

  Slowly, she allowed her gaze to wander over the walls and ceiling of the room. She knew every crack, every ancient stain. On the wall by the door, there was a patch where the paint appeared different, the surface far rougher. Stella had noticed it before without giving it much thought. Now she wondered what lay underneath the paint to make it look that way. Could it be an area of crumbling plaster, a weakness?

  It was only because she was staring at the wall so intently that she happened to notice a shadow, no more than a centimetre wide, running down the side of the door. It wasn’t particularly remarkable in itself. What made it interesting was the fact that Stella was certain that it hadn’t been there before.

  It was exactly the kind of shadow a door might make, if it was no longer flush with the frame, but was very slightly open.

  She got up, terrified she might be mistaken. But she wasn’t.

  Marcie had left the room with the wig in one hand, and her head full of plans. She had unlocked the door and gone through, pulling it shut behind her. Except she hadn’t pulled it quite all the way.

  Stella peered through the crack. She could see the latch. It was pressed in halfway, the weight of the door leaning against it. Even the slightest touch might be enough to send it home.

  She stepped back and wiped her fingers on her shorts. She blew on them, and then, hardly daring to breathe, placed her fingertips against the wood, in the space where the door stuck out from the frame. She pulled gently, then pressed her fingers down harder and pulled again. There was a slight click as the latch came free. The door opened.

  The corridor was empty, the light from a cracked wall sconce sending shadows across the thinly-carpeted floor, all the way to the door at the far end.

  That was the route to the front of the building; through the kitchen and the viewing gallery, then up the ramp to the front office. Stella was about to step into the corridor, when she stopped. Pearl had told her that Marcie spent most of her time in the kitchen. If she was in there now, there was no possibility of getting past her.

  But Stella might have a chance if Marcie thought she had already escaped.

  It took all Stella
’s self-control to step back into the room, carefully leaving the door ajar. She tiptoed across the floor, suddenly grateful for the lack of furniture. The bareness of the room would make it seem empty. There was no place to hide.

  Except for one. Stella opened the wardrobe and climbed inside. There was just enough room to close the door if she sat sideways, with her knees pulled up.

  It was as dark as the back of the removal van had been. By the dim green light of her watch face, Stella retrieved the necklace from her pocket and fastened it around her neck. She had kept it hidden for fear Marcie would steal it. The chain was gold, and worth some money. But it didn’t matter now, she was getting out. If she failed, losing the necklace would be the least of her worries.

  It was a comfort to feel it in its usual place again.

  The word of the sea. Stella had always wondered why her mum had called it that. It’s the best thing I have, her mum had said.

  Pearl might have known the reason, if Stella had asked her. It was too late now. Marcie would be coming back at any moment. The wire coat hanger rattled gently on the rail above Stella’s head. She reached up and removed it, holding it tightly in the dark.

  It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was all she had.

  Thirty-four

  Stella didn’t have long to wait. Marcie returned barely five minutes later. Sound was muffled in the wardrobe, and Stella didn’t hear her footsteps until they were right outside the room.

  The steps advanced, and then stopped.

  In the two or three seconds of silence that followed, Stella had time to wonder whether she had made a fatal mistake. Maybe she would have been better off making a dash for it, while she’d had the chance. She tightened her grip on the coat hanger.

  Hiding in the wardrobe had been a bad idea. Anyone would think to check there.

  But Marcie wasn’t good at thinking, especially when she was in a rage.

  ‘Pearl!’ she bellowed. ‘PEARL!’ She turned and rushed out of the room, her boots thundering.