Deeper Page 13

  You jerked away from me, while I was carving the eye - just one eye, on the side of the head, peeping out to sea. I put my hand up to hold your head, and said “No! “.You grimaced and burped.

  I don’t think you’d have let me do it if you hadn’t drunk so much beer. The beer made you silent and fog-eyed - but it was lucky for now.

  There.

  I showed you the finished picture, licked clean of blood, though it still ran red from the edges. You peered over your shoulder in the mirror. It was a beautiful shape, clean and delicate, the pink blurring into the brown of your skin. Grandmother would have been proud.

  You made a loud, coughing sound, and rushed to the washing-place - bathroom. I sat at the door while you spat beer into the basin, and tried to mop up the blood with a cloth. I took it from you and laid it on your back like a sponge. The cold water stopped the blood – you’d have been better dipping yourself into the sea, but this would do.

  You’d have scabs, but then a totem like no other human. You’d have a spirit to look after you. That’s what you needed, to help you when you looked sad and angry, late in the night, writing the Book.

  It was my present to you. I hoped, when it stopped hurting, that you’d like it.

  Chapter 20

  Caz came with her boat to get you. When she saw me waiting, she argued with you, in a low voice, because she didn’t want me to come. But you just shrugged and wouldn’t change your mind, so she gave up.

  I climbed into the boat with the two of you. I couldn’t help thinking, wouldn’t the pod be amazed to see me in a floater, with two humans, and to be on the sea, and not in it.

  It was the strangest thing I’ve ever known. Caz pulled a rope and the boat began to roar, an old seal scaring his rivals, so loudly that I had to put my hands over my ears so I wouldn’t be deafened. Then the boat bucked and I nearly fell backwards into the bottom of it, and it drove through the swell like a knife, beating the water down on either side as we passed. Fast, so fast – much faster even than I could swim, when I had my tail – and I was fast then. It made me dizzy to watch.

  In a while, I looked up and couldn’t see the Trapped Moon any more. It had gone over the horizon. But now I could see a long low line of green, and white sand.

  I threw myself into the bottom of the boat and hid my face in the dirty seawater there, and wailed.

  “What is it?” you asked, pulling at my shoulder, and Caz called to me too, impatiently.

  “Melur, it’s ok. Melur? What’s the matter?”

  I couldn’t explain. The Big Dry looked just as Grandmother had described it. I thought of the tattered black skin she kept in her sack, and whimpered.

  “It’s alright,” you said, stroking my hair, impatient. Caz pulled my clothes out of the wet, and wrung the seawater out. I kept my face down, refusing to look. Maybe, when you and Caz went away, I could slip back in to the ocean and swim back. If I could find the place. How did you humans find your way on the sea, when you couldn’t feel the currents stroking your skin and pulling at your hair and your tail fins?

  Caz let out her breath in a puff, and climbed out on the sand with her long brown legs, stretching.

  You bent down close to me.

  “Melur.”

  You still couldn’t say my name properly, and it made me laugh a little. That was your way in. You laughed back, and said it again.

  “Melur?”

  I lifted my face, wet with bilge water, and you kissed the top of my head.

  “Come to my birthday party? Please?”

  The sand was like other sand, no dryer. The line of green was just trees – not palm trees only, the kind that grew in the channels, but other trees. Still, they were just trees. Behind the trees, was a cave, like yours but flatter and darker. Human-made, like yours. I might not like Caz but she never licked her lips when she looked at me, or bit me to see what I tasted like. Grandmother was full of shit. So I told myself.

  To get to Caz’s cave, we travelled in another growling box, but this time it went through the Dry. I lay in the back on a blanket and clutched my belly and retched, eyes shut against the horrible sight of land. Sometimes, you stopped, and I leaned out to vomit beside the black river we travelled on. When we stopped, I heard the sounds of the Dry. There were more birds than I’d ever heard or seen before, of all kinds and colours. Sometimes, another growling box went by, so fast that if you looked away it was gone.

  We came to a place with many humans walking about or travelling in boxes like ours – cars, you said. My eyes felt stretched with looking, and bleached with all the colours. I closed them again and saw the blues and greens of the sea inside my head, and felt a little better. My ears throbbed with noise.

  Your party was at the place where Caz lived. It wasn’t like your home. There were a lot less objects and I could tell she liked to clean things.

  I sat in a corner and watched the humans getting drunk. I knew what that was now, Caz explained it to me. It was like chewing trance weed.

  Soon I wasn’t afraid of the humans any longer, because I could see they were nervous of me, too. They came by and smiled crookedly, their eyes darting, and drifted on. Sometimes a drunk human would come to look at my face, and stare a little, and then at my legs, and then my eyes, and down to the floor, as if it was wrong to look. They were curious but human-polite. Sometimes someone would say something, and laugh with embarrassment – because I didn’t know enough to speak back.

  Now that I was among humans, I saw that some of the males were stronger and younger and more beautiful than you – but I loved you now for your imperfections, that had once seemed to me so perfect. Some of them looked at me as a male does when he has mating on his mind. Maybe I wasn’t so ugly and strange, in your world – or maybe they liked the strangeness, just as I used to.

  Once I tried out the words I’d learnt on two women, and they leaned closer, and tried not to giggle – I sounded as strange as you do trying to speak mer. So they just stood there and drank until their spirits came out in their eyes, loud or silly or angry or just sleepy sometimes, and you all burned those things you call cigarettes.

  Later, you showed them the totem I’d made for you. The females gasped and screamed a little, and the males slapped you on the shoulder and made noises of admiration. Some of them looked at me as if I’d cut you from cruelty – and at you as if you’d gone completely mad. But they soon forgot, drinking the spell-water they’d brought with them, all different kinds of spell-water but the same kind of spell. I tried some myself but it tasted like the stuff Grandmother gave me when she cut me, so I spat it out.

  In the question I caught words I knew, and some I didn’t.

  “Girlfriend?” they said, and looked at me, and then at Caz, bringing things to eat from the food place.

  Girlfriend? What is girlfriend?

  Am I ‘girlfriend’?

  Is Caz ‘girlfriend’?

  I watched you courting, rolling and twisting in the smiles of your friends. You went from one to another, touching shoulders, eye to eye, listening to their words, laughing when they laughed. You played a game with the other humans and you played it very well. The prize for winning the game was to be loved, and you had this prize. People seemed to grow in your light, like new grass in rainwater. They talked and talked, twisting their faces this way and that – and you said very little, but just smiled, and shook your head in that way I was coming to learn, your face changing with every expression on theirs, like a mirror. Or you talked, and they laughed, and clustered around you, and waited for you to give them more to feed on. On the Trapped Moon, you were troubled, and nervous, but here you were alive and triumphant. It made me uneasy to see you so happy, when I should have been glad.

  It grew dark and someone made the singing-box louder. It hurt my ears. The sea’s noisy enough but your human world is deafening to me. Caz’s eyes, which had been darting about looking to see if anyone spilled anything or needed food, grew large and dark and fixed on you as if you we
re prey. Faces moved slowly, muscles gone slack with the drink. People began to dance as if dreaming, as if their legs and arms and heads belonged to something else.

  It was more than the spell-drink though. I smelled other things that weren’t usually in the air – acrid things that made me wrinkle my nose and my eyes water. I covered my face with my hand and watched your friends leading each other in pairs to dark places to mate. Humans hide everything, even mating, that you would think is no secret.

  Why’d they have to act like they were eating someone else’s fish? Weren’t they humans grown? Humans have so many secrets mer wouldn’t understand, they make secrets of things we all know.

  After a while I looked around for you but you weren’t there. Maybe, I thought, you’d gone off to some dark place to mate with someone, too. I felt a stab of pain and anger. Which one? Maybe that one with the hair white at the ends but black on top, Eloise. Maybe Caroline, who smelled of sweat and dead meat. Maybe Caz, who followed you around with her glass in her hand, as if it was by accident.

  I felt disturbed in a way that I’d never felt before. My gut clenched and loosened. I was cold down to the parting of my legs, in the place where thinking of you I was usually warm. I shivered.

  I went outside, and lay smelling the winds of the Dry, and listening to strange creatures stumbling about – on their own legs I guess – among the trees. On the Dry, lots of things have four legs. There was a creature running about outside, smaller than me, black and hairy. It ran away when I looked at it – which was lucky, because it had sharp teeth and I was afraid too.

  I picked up the beat of your heart among the sounds of the night. I’d always recognise it. You were standing beside me, on your own, sucking at your burning nipple. The creature came to you and you ruffled its neck fur.

  You beckoned to me and I slid over beside you. I felt a surge of warmth and relief.

  The mosquitoes hummed around your ears. You batted at them and swore. They never bothered me. I guess they didn’t like mer blood.

  You put your hand on my calf, then slid it up under the long skirt Caz had given me for the party, holding my eyes, teasing. I forgot the smells, and the strangeness, and listened to the strong, spell-drunk feeling that grew through my body at your fingertips.

  You stroked me, on the skin of my thighs, between my legs. I couldn’t have moved if I wanted to.

  You pulled your hand out of my skirt, took another suck at your burning stick – cigarette – and kissed me, talking. It was very strange – the buzzing of your words on my lips, slow and deep and dreamlike. I wondered if you were sleeping, loving me in your sleep.

  Your fingers tangled in my hair. Caz leant over us. She touched you on the shoulder, and gestured inside. No, you said, leave me out here, or something like it, but you got up anyway. Caz looked at me and waved towards the house, but I shook my head and stayed where I was. I didn’t like the smoke and the drink and the noise.

  It wasn’t really dark outside. The humans make daylight wherever they go – I don’t know how. I could hear the beating of what you called music, and the guttural singing, and people stumbling and laughing. I covered my ears up and curled beside the wall, and tried to sleep. Later, Caz came with a man I didn’t know, and they lifted me and took me to a dark place and put me down on the bed. I lay there wondering where you were, and who with.

  You woke late in the day. I heard you falling against all the objects in Caz’s house – why do you humans have so many objects – and cursing.

  I crawled out of the bed and and with sore eyes looked outside. The box that sang was finally quiet. You were heating water, shaking brown flakes into a cup. Coffee. You always drank lots of it, in the morning, especially after you’d had the spell-drink.

  Tired, you looked even more like a turtle, a rumpled, grumpy, red-eyed old turtle who’s just laid a clutch of eggs in the sand. I loved you more dearly than ever when you were like this.

  We sat outside while you drank and I chewed your white stuff – bread. I’d got to like bread. Sitting there, I felt as close to you as I ever had, maybe because neither of us said anything, words didn’t get in the way.

  You stretched, and groaned a little when the scar on your back drew tight. I could’ve told you – in mer – that it’d only last a short while, a few suns, that’s all.

  I touched your arm, blonde hairs glinting in the sun, so very human.

  “Happy birthday.”

  I’d heard your friends saying it all night. I looked at you to see if it was the right thing to say, and it was. You hugged me close and even though I was somewhere strange, in the middle of the Great Dry, with humans and growling boxes and strange creatures staring at me from the shade – none of it mattered and I was as happy as I’d ever been and ever would be.

  Chapter 21

  Going home, we travelled in a different boat, that a friend had given you in exchange for the rustling stuff you call money. I was relieved to be alone with you again, not under the stares and questions of strange humans.

  You’d changed. The trouble in you was sharper, clearer. Sometimes you looked at me as if you wondered how I had come to be there, after all this time.

  I’d learned enough human words to understand the gist by the time you asked me, again,

  “What happened to you? Really – I need an explanation.“

  You touched my legs, which still hurt to walk on, though not so much as before.

  “Where are you from?”

  Now that we were mated, you should know. Suppose I had a pup from you and it came with a tail! Would you be surprised?

  I took paper and pen from your desk, and drew a shape, a tail, well-muscled and blue-fronded like mine used to be, a mer woman. It was badly drawn and didn’t look much like any real mer. It wasn’t as human-beautiful as the mer woman on your thigh.

  “This is me. Melur.”

  With the pen, I cut a slash down the middle of the mer woman’s tail. The paper ripped.

  “Now I’m human.”

  You said nothing, but got up and went inside. When you came out, you had your lap top. Your fingers spattered your fingers on the keys.

  “Come here. Look.”

  You beckoned me over.

  On the screen was a baby. A human man with a white coat and mask held the baby in his huge hands, and the baby was crying, its round, dark mouth open in a wail. You pointed.

  The baby had a tail. Or, at least, it had legs, but they were somehow wound together in pink flesh so that they seemed like a tail, until you reached the ankles and then the legs parted into two stubby human feet. The man held the baby out as if to say ‘Look at this! Look what we’ve found!’

  You raised your eyebrows.

  “Like you?”

  Like Dawii’s pup, I thought. Not like me. No, I shook my head, not me. That’s a human, I wanted to say, not a mer. A mer’s tail would be blue-green, smooth, finned, and strong like a whale. Maybe we once had legs, like Grandmother said – but that was a long time ago. This – I don’t know what this is.

  “Melur is mer. Mermaid. From sea.”

  Mermaid – a human word for a human picture, but as close as you could understand, never having seen real mer. You cocked your head on one side, smiling your smile that isn’t a smile. You didn’t believe me. You rolled your eyes.

  I drew a picture of you instead, inside a shell, just your turtle face poking out. You were eating a piece of weed, which dribbled sideways out of your mouth. You looked funny.

  “Daniel”

  You frowned – you weren’t in the mood for funny. I went to hide the picture from you behind my back, so you wouldn’t be offended, but you pulled it away, and made to throw it in the bin – but then you laughed, and ruffled my hair. You took the picture, and stuck it to the front of the box-that-is-cold. Refrigerator.

  That day and the next, I drew more pictures for you. Pictures of Caz, and of some of the other humans that I remembered, but with tails, like mer, and more fat over their skin
ny human bones. You held them up, and clapped, and the boredom left your eyes, just for a while. If I could amuse you, maybe you’d love me.

  You brought me colours from the Dry, and brushes to draw with, when you went to get beer and cigarettes and cans. I drew pictures of the sea, blues and greens and whites and silver and in-between, at sunrise and noon, mid-depths and shallows, rain and wind and wet heat. The sea has so many colours – but for all of them you use the same words, green and blue and grey. There’s no way to explain the difference in words but with these colours and the brushes you gave me, I could tell you.

  When she came next, Caz brought me paper that would stand up by itself, so I could prop it against the walls or even hang it on them. Canvases, she said. I mixed colours to find the exact transparent sand-silver of the channels, and the green of mid-deep, and the dark of Deep Sea, and the blinding shimmer just below the surface when you lie on your back facing sky, the black-blue of the water in Grandmother’s cave, the white-green of the surf, and the orange and brown of mud and sea-forest.

  Your small house began to fill with my paintings. Caz looked at them, and said words like,

  “They’re beautiful,” which now I knew.

  “Maybe Melur could sell her paintings,” she said, “I know a place.”

  You looked hopeful, at that, and I understood that this was about money. You never had enough of it, and Caz, too, complained.

  You were proud of me at first, when Caz took my sea-pictures away in her boat - but then you lost interest. When I showed you something new, you’d glance for a moment and smile, then go back to your writing, your Book.

  “What is it?” I coiled myself down beside your knee, to be near you. You looked down impatiently, though you’d just been staring at nothing, as you usually did, now. “Your book?”

  “I told you. It’s a novel.”

  “Novel?”