The Mermaid's Child Read Free Page A

outraged. Because, let’s face it, even first-cousin-marriages for four generations hadn’t produced, in that place, something quite as unusual as me. Sure, there were six-toed feet, webbed fingers and tucked-away tails enough among the audience—it’s a small village, you can’t help knowing that kind of thing—but whatever the inherited distinction, none, I felt, matched me for sheer difference. Birthdayless, born to a fishwoman and a ferryman, I was, I always had been, different. That fact had been made abundantly clear to me every day of my short life. I was a freak.
I
was a zoological oddity. If I belonged anywhere at all, it was inside that tent. I had to find my way in.
    In the darkness round the back, an untidy village had sprung up. Caravans and wagons described a street, courtyards, alleyways. Embers glowed inside circled rocks. A red pinprick picked out a cigarette: someone smoking on the steps of their caravan. If I wasn’t careful I would be out on my ear before I’d even got in. I edged over to the nearest conveyance, ducked down underneath it, shuffled backwards into the dark. So this was their world. Pack-up-able, wheeled, off-in-a-minute. For them, home could be anywhere; home was, perhaps, in the space between places, in the journey itself.
    A roar of applause and I jumped, hit my head on the underside of the caravan floor. A sudden corridor of light streamed past my nose and half-a-dozen pairs of silky legs flashed by, bringing with them warm scents of overworn footwear and perfume. Counter-current came a torrent of yellow longjohns. From the tent, another happy roar as the tumblers cartwheeled out across the ring. Close by, young female voices, a giggle, then feet on wooden steps and a door slammed. Overhead, the boards creaked and shifted. I caught my breath. They were just above me. Someone lit a lamp and light slipped through the gaps between the boards, blinked out here and there as they moved around. Peeling off stockings, loosening laces, smoothing out hair. I’d just turned my head and was looking for a gap or knothole that I could look through, when I heard the music. Not the swaggering come-and-get-it barrel-organ stuff, but the earlier sound, the dark sweet music that was not quite a tune, but which made me think of the way in springtime the rocks on the riverbed look golden through the peaty water. I turned, crawled towards it underneath the caravan. I scraped my toes on something sharp, dragged my leg over a thistle, put my palm in what could only be goat shit. On the far side, I peered out between the cartwheel’s wooden spokesinto stark moonlight and shadows. By now, my head was singing in sympathy, my jaw was clamped tight, my cheeks were burning hot.
    Wordless or filled with unknown words, the song spun loops out into air like spiders’ webs, like the travelling-lines that sweep across your face in autumn, invisible till sun-caught. Crouched underneath the caravan, I looked up, looked round.
    I saw the wheeled crate standing in the moonlight. Its side panel had been taken down and left leaning against the wheels. Light caught on the gilding, and I was aware, in the corner of my eye, of the words:
    make you laugh … make you cry

we’ll change your life …

… no refunds …
    But I wasn’t looking at them.
    It must have been moonlight that caught the curve of her arm, silvered her tail and stroked the fall of her hair, because oil-light makes everything warm and dirty, and she looked as clean and cold as frost. She was reclining on cushions in the opened crate. Someone had painted waterweeds, fishes and bubbles on the inside to make her feel at home. She was singing. And as she sang she dipped a tiny brush into a tiny pot beside her, studied her nails, then applied paint to each of them in turn. I crawled out from underneath the caravan and scrambled to my feet. Mouth open, eyes wide and bright with fever, I was