The Mermaid's Child Read Free

around me. I reached out again and touched it. Fingertips brushing the warm softness, I drifted round the belly of the tent.
    Into what seemed to be a riot. A jostling crowd, loud voices, coloured light cascading over faces. Mechanical music was jangling out from everywhere. Someone had looped back folds of the red fabric, and rosy light and sawdust spilled out through the entrance. I tried to push my way through the crowd towards it: rough clothing scraped against me, my stomach heaved with the reek of tobacco, dung and damp. Boots, thick and muddied, scuffed my shins and crushed my toes. I was pressed between corduroy and tweed, between an old arse and a young crotch. Dizzied and sick, I stumbled.
    And was caught. And not just caught. Caught, lifted, held aloft. Blurred and nauseous, I saw that it was the Reverend Carr holding me up. His parboiled face went blue then green then yellow in the coloured lights. My stomach churned. I couldn’t speak.
    â€œMalin Reed,” he said. “I might have known.”
    He hoisted me higher, dumped me down beyond the margin of the crowd.
    â€œWhen all good children have been in bed for hours.”
    Scarlet-purple-blue-green. The music shook and slurred. His features shifted, seemed to melt.
    â€œI don’t know what your grandmother ever did to deserveyou. You’re nothing but a nuisance and a bother to her,” he said. “Now go home.”
    His hand was pressing on my shoulder, trying to steer me out of the coloured lights towards the darkness of the village street.
    â€œGo on, get off home, before you get into worse trouble.”
    I looked up at him, at his rainbowing skin, and he looked down at me for a moment as I stood sandal-deep in the mud, feverish, with sick now rising in my throat. A keen sense of injustice was rising with it. I wasn’t going to be kept out of this so easily. I lifted his hand from off my shoulder, raised it to my mouth, and bit.
    â€œWhy you little—” he jerked his hand away, cradled it to his chest.
    I turned and ran, pushing my way through the crowd, shoving past legs and skirts and backsides without looking up. Someone cuffed me round the head. My ear stung with the blow. I kept on running, shot out from the crowd and into the dark beyond. Crouched down on the grass, I tried to listen for footsteps, for someone coming after me, but all I could hear was my own breath, my heart pounding in my chest, and the music from the tent, distorting, stretching, reeling in my head. I leaned over, on all fours. I puked like a dog.
    When I’d sicked up the last of the hawthorn, sorrel and wild strawberries, wiped my mouth and straightened up, the music had stopped and the rainbow lights had gone. A shaft of golden light streamed through the entrance to the tent. Sick-streaked and blinking, I staggered towards it. The earth was trodden into mire and there was a shiver in the wind. The last villager, his shoulders bullish in a Sunday coat, waspushing through the opening. Looking past him, I glimpsed a golden circle, a haze of faces, and a man in a red jacket who stood with his arm raised, a top hat in his hand:
    Ladies and Gentlemen!
    And the cloth dropped back. I rushed forward and tugged at it. It wouldn’t budge. Alone, in the dark, on the trodden turf of the green, I opened my mouth again. I howled at the sky.
    I didn’t stay like that for long. I was pretty well used to not being wanted. And despite the fact that my skull now seemed to be squeezing my brain like a sponge, and my skin was rough as cows’ tongues in the cold, and there was bile in my mouth, I wouldn’t consider myself defeated. There was no way I was going home. I put my ear to the side of the tent. Voices came muted, words undifferentiated. All I could hear were inflections. I caught the polished rhythms of annunciation, soft rumblings of excitement, the bullet shots of command and confirmation. I was boiling with frustration. I was