Finding Love at Mermaid Terrace

by Kate Forster

  Remi rubbed his face with his hands, and then he ran them through his hair.

  ‘I don’t know, Dan, but I think I need some advice.’

  Dan sat back in his chair and nodded. ‘I can do my best. Talk to me.’

  He watched Remi think, start to open his mouth to speak and then stop again.

  Dan knew that silence was the best way for Remi to feel comfortable. He wasn’t going to make false promises or false reassurances. It wasn’t his way. Instead he sat quietly, while Richie snored gently under the desk.

  Finally Remi spoke. ‘I need to tell my story.’

  28

  Penny was sitting on her chair while Primrose played with Tegan’s dollhouse that Penny had saved for exactly this moment. The dollhouse belonged to Penny as a child and she had saved it for Tegan; now it was with Primmy.

  The decor of the dollhouse was old-fashioned, Victorian-style, not that Penny or had Tegan had minded as children. There was a mother doll and a baby doll but the father had gone missing before Tegan ever played with it, something that Penny now thought was a harbinger of her own experience as a mother and then Tegan as a single mother also. Although Primrose’s father was very involved in her life, and he and Tegan got along well, it wasn’t a serious relationship, Tegan told Penny when she announced she was pregnant and keeping the baby.

  ‘But it’s so hard,’ Penny had said, feeling her heart drop at the news.

  ‘You did it,’ Tegan had replied. ‘And I never wished for my father – you did such a wonderful job.’

  Penny had cried that night for many reasons but Tegan had more possibilities than she’d had at the time. Tegan had a university education, she had her own money and she had left Port Lowdy. Society didn’t think twice about single parents now, and there were so many resources available compared to when she had Tegan so many years ago. The idea of Penny leaving home and raising her daughter alone was never even an option. She was stuck in the post office from the moment she told her parents she was keeping Tegan and not putting her up for adoption.

  Tegan turned on the television and sat in the other chair and Penny watched as the theme music played and then there was Port Lowdy. They had used something called a drone to film Port Lowdy from above and it looked wonderful.

  ‘This is going to do a lot for tourism,’ said Tegan but Penny didn’t answer as the drone was filming coming up the hill to the post office and – there was her home.

  The interviewer started to talk about Port Lowdy using words like charming, and timeless, and simple, and then they were inside the post office, and there was the photo of Penny as Miss Crab.

  ‘I feel sick,’ she said to Tegan.

  ‘It’ll be fine, Mum, I promise,’ said Tegan.

  And it was fine; it was better than fine. Penny’s phone rang so often with text messages, she had to turn it off so she could hear the interview and the talking. Penny laughed as Primmy ran on the beach and smiled when they interviewed Marcel and Pamela about Port Lowdy, and Rosemary March talked about what a good friend Penny had always been.

  There was an odd part with Dan Byrne being shown off and a bit where the interviewer said that Port Lowdy was a place where people hid from their futures but she ignored that; she didn’t want anything to spoil her night. Dan could be a grump sometimes but she knew he was just covering up whatever was irking him.

  Tegan brought her a glass of wine midway through and it was very nice, sipping the cold liquid as she watched her life on screen.

  When the end credits finished she raised her glass to her daughter. ‘To Port Lowdy,’ she said and Tegan raised her glass in return.

  ‘And to the last Miss Crab of Port Lowdy! You deserve the world, Mum, and I love you very much.’

  Penny sat in happy silence, the programme running over in her memory. She did matter and so did the village. They might be considered old-fashioned and out of touch but there was more love and support in this village than she realised and for that, she was grateful beyond measure.

  ‘It all worked out in the end,’ she said to herself. ‘Funny how that happens.’

  *

  At Mermaid Terrace Dan was fuming. ‘What a feckin’ insult. I should sue him. I should sue the network.’

  From the sofa Tressa watched him pace the small living room. Richie was lying on the floor so Dan had to keep stepping over him, thus the pacing had a slight goose step in the middle but she didn’t want to bring it up.

  ‘He said this is where people went to hide from the world. How fecking rude is he? I knew when he stopped us he was trying to get an angle. He’s a television hack now; he hates serious journos.’

  Tressa said nothing as she watched Dan wrestle with his ego. The TV interviewer had definitely had a dig at Port Lowdy, and Tressa had every right to be insulted but she wasn’t because she knew it simply wasn’t true. Port Lowdy wasn’t a place to hide; it was a place to escape.

  ‘I’ll show him,’ said Dan, walking into the kitchen and taking a glass. He poured himself a large whisky from the bottle he’d bought a few days ago. Tressa noticed the bottle was nearly half empty and she wondered if he was drinking when she was painting. He had seemed fine, but now she wasn’t sure.

  He sipped his drink and sat in the chair instead of back where he had been sitting next to her on the sofa.

  Tressa turned off the television and looked at him. ‘What is it that upset you so much?’ she asked him. ‘The personal dig, or is it that you think you’re hiding here?’

  Dan crossed his legs. ‘I don’t know. Am I hiding here?’

  Tressa shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Are you? You took a job to get away from something stressful. You’ve helped George and the paper. The last edition sold double what it normally would. And you’re holding my hand, so I am glad you’re here – many of us are.’

  Dan said nothing.

  Tressa got up and walked to the back door and called Richie to let him out.

  ‘He doesn’t want to go out,’ snapped Dan as Richie dutifully got up and walked outside.

  ‘Seems like he does,’ said Tressa peaceably. She looked at him sitting in her chair like an angry statue.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said, picking up their plates from dinner and putting them in the sink and running hot water on them. ‘These can wait till morning.’

  Dan said nothing as Richie wandered back inside.

  From the top of the refrigerator Ginger Pickles sat watching them like a spectator at a tennis match.

  Tressa locked the back door and walked into the lounge room. She stood by the stairs.

  ‘So, you coming to bed?’ she said with a smile, but Dan didn’t get the hint or if he did, he ignored her.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said and paused.

  ‘Night,’ said Dan and she felt her eyes sting as she turned and walked up the stairs to bed.

  She had lost him at some point tonight. She knew it, and she wondered why she had thought she or Port Lowdy would ever be enough to make a man like Dan stay.

  29

  After the television show aired the tourists were arriving in their droves. Penny had Rosemary March working behind the counter as she greeted those who came to see the post office and have their photo taken with her at the front.

  Everywhere was booked out and the pub was full for dinner every night – not that Tressa and Dan would have gone. Dan was working ferociously on a story and Tressa was labouring on the paintings the gallery had requested.

  Someone had bought all the works she had given the gallery and now they wanted her to put on an exhibition.

  ‘Who bought them?’ she asked Barbara from the gallery. But Barbara said the person wished to remain anonymous. It was a private collector; that was all she could say.

  Tressa’s mind ran over who would have bought them. Dan? He didn’t have any money.

  Caro and George? They already had many of her works and they had bigger things to worry about right now.

  Her family? She scoffed at the thou
ght.

  Tressa wished she had Caro to talk to. But Caro was still in hospital. The surgery had gone well but she was struggling to regain her strength enough to start chemotherapy.

  George had called her the previous evening.

  ‘We won’t be home for months,’ he’d told her. He had sounded so worn.

  ‘Oh God, it’s so exhausting for you.’ Tressa wished she could fix it all for them.

  ‘She’ll have to have the treatment here. No idea how long that’ll be. Especially with complications, which could happen.’

  ‘We have to remain optimistic,’ Tressa had said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  ‘The thing is…’ George had paused. ‘I think we might sell the house.’

  Tressa had gasped at the thought. Caro’s house was her pride and joy. Why wouldn’t it be? With sweeping views over the village and the bay, it was a true sea captain’s house with a history to match.

  ‘So many ghosts,’ Caro used to say, shaking her head as she looked in some corner of the room where Tressa could see nothing but reality.

  But in her own way, Tressa knew about ghosts. Rosewyn was the ghost who followed Tressa around from the moment she knew who her sister was. Of course, Wendy had told Tressa early about sister, older but forever a baby, and how special she had been. It was natural that Tressa would be curious. She must have been five or six when she found the boxes packed away in the storeroom. All of Rosewyn’s toys and clothes, her books and her school reports. She was smaller, but Tressa could still wear some of her clothes, like the red hooded coat that reminded her of Little Red Riding Hood. It was of thick wool and had a royal blue satin lining that made Tressa happy to look at it, and it felt cool to touch.

  But it was the smaller box that thrilled her so much, as she wore the coat and explored the contents. So many mermaids of all sizes and types. Fabric mermaids with knitted hair and delicate china mermaids painted in jewel tones, a mermaid with a silver tail. There was a mermaid family, a merfather, mermother and little children. Only two, of course. She turned them upside down and saw ‘Jago’ and ‘Rosewyn’ written by a child’s hand in marker pen underneath the figurines.

  Tressa had taken them out and lined them up along the window ledge in the storeroom and played with them, singing songs and making them dance through the imaginary sea. Until Wendy had burst in, looking for Tressa.

  Tressa would never forget the look of horror on her mother’s face as she turned around with the coat on, hood pulled over her curls, the china mermaid of Rosewyn in hand.

  Wendy had screamed and lunged at her.

  Tressa had dropped the mermaid, the figurine’s head breaking from the body at her feet.

  She remembered her father had come running to pull Wendy off her. She’d had the coat yanked from her body and she was smacked and sent upstairs to her room. She didn’t leave her room for the day or night and no one came to check on her.

  Late in the evening, the door handle to her bedroom turned and Tressa had jumped down and hid under her bed. Was it her mother? No, it was Jago. He’d given her some toffees and a can of lemonade.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he’d said, standing in the doorway of her room. ‘They’re just sad. Rosewyn really liked mermaids. She said she wanted to be one when she grew up.’

  Tressa had mulled over this insight into her dead sister. Perhaps that was what happened when you died, she thought. You became a mermaid and swam with the fish and ate oysters for dinner and rode whales to school. It sounded perfectly lovely – better than being here.

  And so that summer, when they were in Port Lowdy, she looked out for mermaids.

  Walking ahead of her father and brother, she stopped when she asaw an odd-shaped piece of seaweed. It was a square, with a tail from two corners.

  She poked at it with her foot when a woman walking with no shoes on passed her. ‘Found a mermaid’s purse? You’re in luck then.’ She was looking at the item at Tressa’s feet.

  Tressa leaned over and peered closely at the object. ‘A mermaid’s purse?’ she asked the woman, who was smiling at her.

  The woman leaned over and picked it up and Tressa was impressed at how brave she was. ‘Yes, this is where the mermaid keeps her money.’ She opened the top of the purse. ‘Do you know what mermaids use for money?’

  Tressa shook her head, trying to think what it would be.

  ‘Shells,’ she heard. ‘The limpet shells are 10p. Cowries are 20p. The cockle shells are 50p. A pink queen scallop is a pound and a great scallop is two pound.’

  Tressa listened carefully, committing the underwater currency to memory, and they walked the beach together, picking up shells and putting them into the purse.

  ‘You have quite a good fortune there for a lucky mermaid,’ said the woman.

  ‘How do I get it to her?’ asked Tressa. She liked the feeling of the purse in her hand. It wasn’t as slimy as it looked and the weight of the shells they had been collecting in the purse gave it a sense of importance.

  ‘The rock pools, my dear,’ said the woman. ‘You have to throw them into the rock pools around the bend and when the tides come in, so do the mermaids and they take the purses and head to the sea markets.’

  Maybe Rosewyn was one of the mermaids now. She wanted to pay for the china figurine she had broken by accident. Her mother hadn’t spoken to her for a week after it happened and when Tressa went downstairs again she found there was a lock on the storeroom door. She wanted to try and glue the mermaid’s head back on, but the locked door stopped that plan. But now the mermaid’s purse filled with coins might help assuage her feeling of shame.

  David and Jago caught up with them then and her father looked at the purse in her hand. ‘A spotted ray capsule,’ he said to Jago. ‘It’s where the embryo of the ray is stored, very unique, like an amniotic sac.’

  Jago made a face as he looked at it, and Tressa had a sense she shouldn’t tell them the real meaning of what she was holding, since her mother and father had had such a bad reaction to her playing with Rosewyn’s mermaids.

  Instead she pocketed the purse while her father introduced himself to the woman.

  ‘David Buckland – and this is Tressa and my son Jago. We’re on holiday here,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  The woman looked at Tressa and smiled. ‘Hello, Tressa, I’m Caroline, or Caro to my friends.’

  Tressa felt shy. She wasn’t used to being singled out by anyone, especially when her family were around – but this woman had a happy face and eyes so green they looked like the sea.

  They all walked to the rock pools together and when Jago and David were discussing the crabs or lack thereof, Caro whispered, ‘A penny for the mermaids means a wish for the giver. Make a wish.’ Tressa closed her eyes, squeezing them tight to give the wish more power.

  I wish my mother loved me like she loved Rosewyn, she repeated in her head. It was the same wish she made every time she blew out candles on a cake or someone found an eyelash on her cheek and held it under her chin; when she blew a dandelion or saw the occasional shooting star.

  But over the years, Rosewyn was the prize that had her mother’s heart and Tressa was merely the booby prize.

  30

  The memories felt heavy to hold. Tressa watched Dan typing on his laptop at the kitchen table. He had been writing for two days, and every time she asked him what he was working on, he said nothing. But it mustn’t have been nothing because he closed the laptop when he was finished each time, not letting her see the topic, or the words.

  She hoped it was his book but he was on the phone a lot, pacing the back garden, while Ginger Pickles and Richie watched him from their respective sunbathing positions on the brickwork.

  It had been a week since the television show about Port Lowdy and they were due to start the next edition but Dan hadn’t mentioned any of the story ideas she had sent him, and he only grunted when she brought them up at dinner.

  She was tired of him in her space giving her nothing, so s
he went next door to see Janet and Ivy.

  ‘She’s doing beautifully,’ said Janet, showing Tressa the box where the kitten lay on a towel next to a warm wheat bag. The kitten was looking better and stronger but its eyes were still closed.

  ‘I have to take her to the vet next week but I’m not concerned. She’s a strong little thing,’ Janet said proudly.

  Tressa noticed Janet wasn’t in her dressing gown, which was a change. Janet said she was planning on driving to Plymouth to see Caro. ‘Why don’t you come along?’

  She jumped at the chance, not just to see Caro but to get away from Dan for the day.

  ‘Let me go and get changed,’ Tressa said. She rushed back to Mermaid Terrace where Dan was pacing outside again, all the while talking on the phone.

  Dressed and with her hair pulled into a bun, she ran downstairs to find him sitting at the table. He closed the laptop as she entered the kitchen.

  Secrets were not part of the deal, she thought, knowing she would have to talk to him when she returned from Plymouth.

  ‘I’m going to Plymouth to see Caro. Janet’s driving.’ Her voice sounded cold to her ears and Dan must have heard it also.

  He turned to her. ‘I would have driven you,’ he said.

  Tressa shrugged. ‘You seem to be busy with whatever you’re working on, so I will leave you to it.’

  Dan pulled her to him but she stayed strong before him. ‘Are you upset with me?’ he asked and she paused, trying to see how she felt.

  ‘No, I’m not upset but I don’t understand you yet,’ she said at last, being as honest as she could.

  ‘I know. I have been a spectacular shit this week but I promise it will be worth it. I just don’t want to show you until it’s done. I’m sorry for being an idiot.’

  Tressa felt herself breathe out a sigh of relief. ‘Okay, well you have really been awful, so thank you for saying that. I’ll be back this afternoon. Can you please look at the story ideas I sent you? For the paper?’

  Dan managed to pull her to him now and he put his arms around her while he was still seated and pressed his face against her stomach.