Deeper (4 page)

I peered into
her slack mouthed face, eyes still open and blind and strangely dark, like all human eyes. She looked back at me and through me. I didn’t like it.  I tried to push the eyelids shut to stop her looking.  They wouldn’t stay that way, but flipped open again every time I took my fingers from them.  I drew the lids down and poured sand on top, to keep them closed.  Her eyes of sand looked back at me still, silver in the growing night.

“She
looks like us.  Except for…” I gestured at the legs, the parting below the hips.

“
She does not. Not like me, anyway.” Che showed his teeth in a snarl.  He didn’t like being compared to a human. 

“She
does.  Except for the tail.  See, she has a nose, lips, ears…when have you ever seen a fish with a nose?”

“Not a great big honker like this,”
Che agreed. 

You would call our noses flat, but yours, to us, look like
swordfish.  I stroked the bones of her face – thin pale lips around square white teeth, tongue hanging limp far back in the red yawning throat.  I tried to shut that too, but couldn’t.  The jaw had stiffened now: the rest of her, too, was getting rigid as bone.  The long legs lay like two wooden logs.  I pinched one, feeling the strong bones and muscle underneath.  There was hair on them too, short and blonde and spiky.  In mer, only the males have body hair, and it grows like thick soft moss, not in short wiry strands. 

“What do you think it’d
be like to have legs, instead of a tail, and walk on the Dry?”

To stand on two flat feet,
upright and steady, like a bird. 

“Perhaps humans a
re just mer, sort of gone wrong,” I said, thinking out loud.

Che
snorted.

“And maybe mer are just dolphin, sort of gone wrong.  Maybe a mer mated with a
dolphin and got this!”

He flicked sand
into the open mouth.  I hissed and slapped.  Even dead, it seemed wrong.  Maybe it had a totem, I thought, still watching, waiting to punish disrespect. 

I dragged my human down to
the water again, pushing and puffing.  Che wouldn’t help, but sat sullen and clumsy.  I pulled her bare and scratched into the black water and down to the drop off.  It took me a while to find the hole in the dark, but when I found it I shoved her through, head first, and pushed her legs in after, hoping that something wouldn’t find her and eat her before I could come back.  I wanted to have a long look, alone.  When I came back in the grey dawn, she was gone. 

Chapter 4

Che
grew to almost-adult, moss-furred and dank.  By then he should have been mated, but it hadn’t happened yet.  So he hung around the outside of his pod, looking in, hungry, stir crazy. 

The males of the
pod wouldn’t let him hunt with them now.  They said he broke up the shoals too early and the fish could hear him coming for miles.  When he tried to follow along, they’d flick him away with their tails, a flick that could have killed a small shark, but Che just turned his head aside and dropped back, swimming behind with the females.  Shamed and hurt. 

“You shouldn’t be
hanging around with him.  Father won’t be happy if you two mate – a lot of deformed pups, swimming along behind you like sardines with their fins cut off!” and Azura jerked along in imitation, all goggle eyes and stub tail.

“You shut
up, dirt-face.”

It was time for me to mate too. 
Azura was promised to a mer from Che’s pod, she’d be his third so far.  We’d been born almost on the same day, Che and me, and I knew Che secretly hoped I’d mate with him – who else would.  But I’d seen Casih give birth, and Dayang, and I don’t know how many others, heaving and groaning on the wet sand, and it didn’t look like much fun to me.  Plus when you had pups, they were always on your tail, following you around like a little school.  You were never alone and to me that seemed like a bad thing, then.  There would be no going out to Deep Sea alone when I had pups of my own.

So
Che tagged along with his sisters, and sometimes with us, sticking close by me, ignoring the sneers and giggles.

“He holds us back,” complained
Azura, not even bothering to lower her voice, “If you let him come we’ll never catch anything. Besides, he makes the other pods laugh at us.”

“So?
They’re probably laughing at us already cause you’re so skinny and stub-tailed.”

It i
sn’t good to be skinny in the mer world.  Skinny means cold and weak, and plump means fast and sleek and healthy. 

“
They’re probably laughing at
you
cause you can’t get a mate.  Except for Che the cripple.”

Azura
made tight circles around Che, churning the water and snapping, half teasing, half meaning to hurt.  He snapped back and missed by an eel-length.  He was slow and clumsy as a mating turtle. 

“
See, he can’t even bite properly.  Probably couldn’t even beat me in a fight.  Could you, cripple-boy!”

Che
let a stream of bubbles erupt from his arse, and watched as my sisters scattered, whistling with disgust. 

“Stay close
to me,” I said, not bothering to move.  “I’ll deal with
her
for you,” not understanding that I’d made it even worse.  Che turned his head away, reddening.

I thrust after
Azura and caught her by the hair from behind.  I twisted and pulled till her face turned pink with temper and she clawed back, but missed. 

“
Leave him alone, shit for brains, understand? He’s my friend.”

I snapped my teeth in her face a few times, to show her I meant it, and she bared hers, and scratched me.  I still have the scar, on my left shoulder.  Maybe she still has
the mark, too, where I tore her ear and made it bleed.  We’re not clawed like lobster, but our nails grow long and sharp and hardened by the salt.  Our wounds fill with seawater and heal fast, luckily.

On my menstruation
, it was time for me to be carved with the totem I’d have for life, the spirit who’d look after me in the hunt and giving birth, and who’d receive me when I sank into darkness.  I had no other decoration yet, because I didn’t have the patience to sit around waiting for the tiny grains of pearl and gold to bind to the skin of my arms and shoulders, or to inlay shining shells over my hips until they grew into my flesh and became part of me.  I’d always rather play and think.  Besides, I never liked the pain, which Casih said was part of being a woman.

I swam to
Grandmother’s cave, quaking.  To come there, you had to dive to the floor of the lagoon and swim through a dark, narrow passage, close enough that you had to keep your arms by your sides and push yourself along with a flick of your tail.  Then you’d come up in half-darkness, into a pool with a little sandy beach, littered with the bones of creatures who’d died or been brought there long ago and eaten.  The coral sand sloped up steeply until it met the dark rock, and there Grandmother sat, out of reach of the tide.  Above her, light filtered down from wherever the cave met the sky, but you couldn’t see the bright air, or even smell it.  The air in the cave was thick with rotten fish and old mer smell, musty like seaweed left to dry.  We all held our breath.

Grandmother
must have been fifty at least, an old, old woman, with eyes white and blind as a deep sea slit-mouth.  Her skin hung in folds from her neck to her belly, encrusted over with small shell creatures which would grow on anything which stopped still long enough.

I pushed the skin of
silvertail that I’d brought towards her, and she sat sucking on it with her broken, yellow teeth, and staring evilly in my direction. 

“What do you want? It’s not your Day.”

I knew it wasn’t my Day and so did she.  Once every two weeks or so, I had to stay with Grandmother, feed her, listen to her stories of killings and maimings and the punishments of spirits upset by some small piece of disrespect.  Sometimes I thought her spirits must be different from the ones that we all knew - spirits of the cave, dank and vengeful.  I’d have to clean her toe-claws, pick her teeth, and clear up the cave so that the next grand child could at least find their way in there over the mess of half-eaten food. 

“
I’ve had my first bleed, Grandmother.”

She sat chewing and sucking, ignoring me.  If I was that old, I thought, I’d swim out far into the deep ocean and dive till I drowned. 
Better to be eaten by sharks than be that ugly.

“You think you’re different from the rest of us, don’t you, little fish?”

Grandmother’s voice whispered low sometimes, like a stick scraped over rock.  You had to lean in to hear her, even though you didn’t want to come near.  But if you didn’t answer, she’d swipe about with her long clawed fingers, hoping to catch you with them and score your tender hide.

I shook my head, and then, remembering she couldn’t see me, muttered “No”.

She laughed, a thin, mucous sound like someone choking on a shellfish gone down the wrong way, and pointed a finger at me.

“Yes you do.  I know all about you, you needn’t think just because I can’t see you that I don’t know.
”

I trawled through my mind for all the things that Grandmother might know. 
Maybe that I’d gone to Deep Sea, without the pod.  That I’d bitten Azura till a chunk came out (I didn’t swallow it though).  That I’d been out all day exploring yesterday with Che and then stolen a bag of dried fish Casih had put aside for Father and eaten them all.  That Casih had gone to Father and said she ate them herself, and come back nursing a bruise as big as an abalone.  There were so many things, that was the trouble!

“
You think you should have been born among the humans, don’t you, in the Big Dry, with legs?  Let me tell you, little fish, you’re lucky you weren’t.”

“Yes Grandmother.
I mean no.”

Legs?
I’d never said I wanted to have legs.  Although I’d always wondered what it would be like.  Of course I wouldn’t want to have those feeble legs in place of my beautiful strong tail - who would!  I wondered how she knew those things, anyway. Dayang, Azura, Suria, any of them could have told her, I guess, chattering away to keep their minds off the smell.  I should have kept my stupid mouth shut.  I’d tell them so when I got out of here.

She searched around beside her with blind, wrinkled hands and found her long, sharp
fishbone knife, with the point cut fine as a spine, that she always kept by her.  Maybe in case something nastier than her found its way in. 

“Sit by me, little fish, and we’ll make a start.”

I sat with my back to her, holding my fists one in the other, tight as I could.  I squeezed my eyes tight and waited, mouth trembling.

I wasn’t prepared for the
first cut, though I thought I would be.  As she dug the knife over my shoulder blade, I nearly jumped.  I gasped and shook with the pain of it and almost unclasped my fists to strike, but it was shameful to struggle or move, and after all every female mer had to do the same, when her blood came. 

The second cut was w
orse, and I would’ve shot away, but one bony hand grabbed my arm and held me still.  I could’ve moved, even so, but the pain of the pinch was as bad as the pain in my back, and somehow the one made the other feel a little better.  If she were to cut me in two places at once, I thought, maybe I wouldn’t feel either of them, my brain wouldn’t know which place to pick.

“You’re feeling a little pain now, a little suffering? It’s nothing to the suffering the humans feel.  That’s what their world is, suffering.   Take my word for
it, you wouldn’t want to live in the Dry.”

She scored my back again,
hard and deep, as if to emphasise the point.  Suria said she’d tried to work out the shape of her totem, while Grandmother was cutting her, line by line, and she’d done it too, so she said – an octopus, eight legged and goggle-eyed.  Anyone could have worked that out, I said.  Now I didn’t know, it seemed to me that it hurt too much to think about the whole picture, only each line as it burned into my shrinking skin.

Halfway through
I started to wail out loud, thinking that voicing the pain might drown it out.  Grandmother put down the knife and yanked my hair, once, hard.  I’d never thought she had so much strength in her.

“You’re shaking. Stop
that noise at once.  Do you want your totem to be a mess? Something nobody even recognises?  What’ll you do then? Who’ll mate with you when they don’t even know who you are, or what your pups will be?”

I thought of my sisters, with their beautiful scarred backs –
ray, octopus, marlin, shark – all the creatures we lived with, whose spirits inhabited us and ruled our lives.  Who would I be, without a totem? Just a nameless fish?

I bit my lip.  I wondered if the others had cried too.  I bet they did, too.

“Bend over.  And have this, it’ll shut your mewling up.”

I bent, so that Grandmother could
better reach my lower back, and felt the cuts on my shoulder blades spring apart.  I took the lump she gave me and bit into it.  It tasted unpleasant, but only for a moment, then my jaws began to numb and my lips to thicken. 

Cold trickled through me
and brought paralysis with it.  I found myself forgetting the knife, and the place, and thinking of other things entirely.  It was over. 

“Go, wash the blood off.  Not too long, I haven’t got all day.”

I slid down the beach, my body a sack of wet sand.  The water stung and cooled and burned, all at the same time, but I was glad I could feel it.  The blood swirled around me in soft pink spirals.  I stayed a little while, till the cold stopped the bleeding, then dragged myself slowly back up for the finishing.

“Colours, now.”

I fumbled clumsy-fingered through the pouches that Grandmother kept her things in.  The cave was littered.  I don’t know how she ever found anything, blind as she was.  No other mer collected such things – we spent our days in the sea and our nights on the sand - where would we have put them?

There were b
ags of dried fish, for when Grandmother got peckish.  Lots of kinds of bones, for knife making, and sharp teeth, too, from whale and shark and dolphin.  A particular kind of weed she used to make rope, and another kind, finer, for nets.  Poisons to put you to sleep and poisons to kill you, or so my sisters said.  Jelly for healing wounds.  Trance-weed, to give you waking dreams and make you forget the days and nights. Spell-weed, so that you could hear the spirits of the air and the water and the wind and understand what they said – usually, to bring more lobster and stay within sight of the channels. These were the spirits who chose your totem, and then Grandmother would cut it into you so everyone would always know who you were and what you belonged to.

I found the
inks for her, that she’d drop into the wounds to turn the scars purple and blue and green.  It was delicate work.  I wondered how she managed.  She couldn’t tell any colour from any other, or see where her dirty fingers scored and painted.  Still, she never seemed to hesitate, and the totems were clear enough and beautiful, on my sisters’ backs.  How did she know which one to give who?  Why was gentle Casih a shark, and spiteful Azura a harmless rainbow fish? Why…

Still thinking,
I turned my head towards her.

“Why do we do this?”

Grandmother hit me hard, a glancing blow just above the ear, that dizzied me and knocked the warm water out of one ear. She must have been feeling soft hearted.

“Do what?”

“Cut totems into our skin.”