The Mermaid's Child Read Free Page B

vividly aware of my dirty knees and palms, my sick-stained clothes, the dried urine on one foot. My head was pounding, but I watched transfixed as she dropped the brush back into the pot, then screwed it neatly shut. She shifted her position, blowing on her fingernails. And as she moved, thescales on her tail rippled, catching the moonlight. Her tailfin was lacy, like frozen spiderswebs. I may have stumbled, staggered slightly with the centrifugal force of my dizziness, or made some noise, some whimper, I don’t know, but certainly something drew her attention to me. She glanced up, looked over in my direction, squinted.
    â€œWho’s there?” she asked.
    Speechless, I found myself stumbling forward into the moonlight, wiping my hands down my shorts.
    â€œWho is it? What do you want?”
    I stared up at her. She was beautiful and fresh and clean and indisputably there. I tried to blink it away, but darkness was already gathering round my vision. I reached out to steady myself, but there was nothing to my touch. The mermaid shimmered in my fevered sight, seemed to slip away, grow distant, tiny. The darkness blinked. It swallowed her.
    â€œMother—” I said, and then I fainted.

TWO
 
    If you’re wondering how I remember all this, word for word, smell for smell, taste for taste, I wouldn’t blame you. After all, I did say that my recollection isn’t perfect. The truth is that time is seared into my memory with a clarity I myself sometimes find astonishing. Something to do with the virgin quality of my senses then, I suppose—I had seen so little, smelt so little, felt so little back then that an event such as this could record itself precisely and in minute detail on my mind. Like pissing on new snow, it was bound to make an impression.
    A lot has happened since.
    There’s another reason for the clarity of my memories: after these events there came a break in my consciousness as neat and round as a full stop. After that comes the scratchiness of a blanket and the stickiness of hot skin and a burning sensation in my eyes every time I blinked, then the scrape of a spoon on teeth and the taste of liquorice and metal and alcohol. Somekind of fever. Caught while sleeping under that damp hedge, or contracted perhaps from the scarlet of the tent.
    I don’t know how long I was ill, but by the time I was able to elude my grandmother for long enough to shuffle up to the village green, the circus had gone, the sawdust had been swept away, and all that was left was a ghost of a circle, like a fairy-ring, where the grass caught the light at a different angle.

THREE
 
    The following year saw the worst weather I’ve ever known. Not bad in the sense of extreme, not ice and snow and hail the size of apples: not weather you’d write home about. The danger in this weather was that it was so dull that it could bore you to tears, or to death. It began with a wind, so light at first that you’d hardly feel it, though the women began to notice it was good drying weather and fired up the coppers for a titanic wash. Then, gradually, over the course of several days, the wind became infested with water, droplets so minute that at first you could barely tell that it was raining, until the women began to notice that the sheets and shirts and underskirts they’d boiled and scraped and pounded and pegged out on the line were not even beginning to dry. And over the space of days and weeks, the wind grew ever stronger and its water content ever greater, so that the sheets, which had at first gently stirred in the breeze, now snapped, soaking wet, on the line, like sailcloth.
    There was no autumn that year. Leaves, debilitated by the wind and wet, turned muddy brown without bothering with the intermediate shades of red and gold, then lost their grip and fell. They gathered in wet drifts in the lee of drystone walls and hedges, and would not, despite my efforts, rustle. Depressed, the days