Elijah’s Mermaid (3 page)

‘Lily, is that you?’ Papa’s earthbound voice is croaked with sleep. ‘What are you doing over there?’

I look up from his desk with a nervous smile, feeling guilty for prying where I should not and hurriedly slipping that handful of papers back into the covers of the book – because Papa seems angry to see me there, and so I try to reassure, ‘You’ve been dozing, Papa. I’ve been looking at all our old treasures.’

This ivory box contains the charms which once inspired Papa’s dreams. A white scallop shell. A child’s milk tooth. The shadowgraph picture of a fern: a silhouette drawn by the pencil of nature, leaving white where there should be blackness, leaving black where there should be white – an alternative version of the truth. There is a beetle’s metallic gleam. A goose’s quill. A dragonfly, its green wings a delicate webbing of gauze, so fine they would crumble away into dust if anyone dared to touch them now.

Papa has no inclination to try. He only grunts his stern reply, ‘Burn them, Lily. Burn them all!’

Of course, he does not mean it. He is confused again. His gnarled and trembling fingers pluck at the shawl that lies across his lap, and his rheumy blue eyes are staring out, well beyond the world of the ivory box and into the artificial gloom – though goodness knows what he can see when so little light ever enters this room owing to the many layers of dust that have settled like ice on the windowpanes, and the ivy that smothers the house façade, penetrating the mortar and rotting the frames, even the wainscoting nailed to the walls. Month by month it encroaches more. One morning I fully expect to wake and find ourselves trapped in its dark embrace; imprisoned inside our own castle, locked up in a fairy tale. And perhaps that is what Papa desires, to sleep and forget for a hundred years. But I do not, and so I
plead while standing and walking to his side, ‘Can we not cut the ivy back this year?’

His answer is always the same, though remarkably lucid and prompt today. ‘You may do as you wish when I’m gone. I like it like this. It keeps the outside world away . . . and what about the birds . . . the nests? What about the rose?’

Ah yes, what about the rose?

Some years before she died, long before my brother and I were born, long before Papa came to find us in London, his wife had planted a climbing rose, and however short-lived its blooms may be, the big blowsy petals as white as snow have stems inextricably entwined with the vigorous growth of that monstrous vine. How could we think to chop it down? How could we think to cause Papa distress when it is all that he can do to cling on to what’s left of past happiness, though he rarely ever mentions his wife, and the same with Gabriel – their son – both of them sleeping side by side in a grave in the village churchyard.

One time, when Elijah and I were small, only living in Kingsland a very short time, I remember standing in front of a grave as Papa explained that from that day on our name would be Lamb, the same as the one carved there on the stone before which he placed a single rose, afterwards taking our hands in his as he knelt in a quiet contemplation – which seemed to go on for a
very
long time – and soon growing bored and restless with that, I gazed to the top of the church’s grey tower where an old iron weathercock was perched. I liked to see it spin around, but that day there was barely any breeze, nothing to disturb the humid air that circled Elijah, and Papa, and me, that seemed to hold us in its spell, until my brother suddenly asked, ‘Is our mother buried here as well?’

‘No.’ Papa’s voice was blunt. No fanciful stories to weave that day. ‘I’m afraid no one knows where your mother is.’

‘
So . . . who gives her flowers?
’ I thought, but did not say the words, already sensing Papa’s response. She had no grave. She had no face, not in the way our father did, because every day we
could look at him in the oval-framed portrait that hung on the wall right next to the desk where Papa worked. And Gabriel had been such a pretty child, the same age as us when that picture was made, with curling fair hair and the palest grey eyes – eyes very much like Elijah’s were. But apart from that one distinction our decidedly darker appearances must surely have favoured our mother instead, and reminded of her by Elijah’s words, I felt a burning ache in my throat, dragging my fingers away from Papa’s and ignoring my brother’s plaintive shouts when running past weathered stone angels and crosses, on through the whine of the churchyard gate, and over the field, then the rickety bridge that spanned the stream at the end of our gardens – and from there I burst in through the open door to where Papa’s housekeeper, Ellen Page, was taking a nap by the kitchen range.

Her frizzy white head was lolling back. Wrinkled cheeks were two mottled slabs of meat either side of a mouth that was drooling and slack – whereas, when awake, it was always clamped in the thinnest thread of a smiling grimace, not due to any lack of warmth but because Ellen Page was adamant that: ‘there’s no Tom, Dick or Harry shall see how deficient my ivories’.

But Elijah and I had seen them, being obsessed with teeth at the time, having just begun to lose our own. One day we’d found her snoring, when we’d left Papa working and went to the kitchen, tiptoeing close to Ellen’s chair, inhaling her sour and peppery breath and the rising reek of mustard and lard from the embrocation she often applied for the easing of her rheumatical knees. Holding our breath, we peered inside, between the lips then hanging loose. We poked with our fingers and prodded her gums. All pink and slimy with spittle they were. And we counted five black rotting stumps – those same stumps to make a rare public appearance on the day when I came running back from graveyard, when Ellen woke with a snuffling grunt before scooping me up to sit in her lap while she dabbed at my cheeks with her apron hems, and her voice, which
was usually stern and gruff, only crooning when she smiled and asked, ‘Why . . . what’s this, Little Lily? What’s happened to make my best girl cry?’

I spluttered an answer through snot and tears. ‘Papa took us to visit our father’s grave, and then . . .’

‘Ah, your father . . .’ She heaved a great sigh. ‘Gabriel was the dearest child. If only he’d never grown up and left us. And his mother, Rose Lamb . . . a mere slip of a girl when she died, she was. A good twenty years younger than Mr Lamb . . . the most gentle of souls who walked God’s earth. I dare say that’s why God claimed her back, another angel to grace his clouds, though his greed nearly sent your poor grandfather mad. I’ve never known a man to grieve as he did when she lost her life like that . . . so soon after bearing their only child. And now, Rose and Gabriel joined again, sleeping fast within that grave.’

‘But . . .’ I tugged at a strand of hair that was dangling loose from one of my plaits, sucking it hard between my lips before continuing with my thoughts, ‘If they’re only sleeping, why can’t they come back and sleep here in the house? Why do dead people have to go under the ground?’

‘You’ll swallow that hair and clog up your lungs. It’ll wrap itself around your heart – tighter and tighter until it stops beating . . . and then you’ll be under the ground as well.’ Ellen let out a wheezy groan and I feared her lungs were full of hair when she set me back down on the red-tiled floor, smoothing the creases out of my skirts and giving my skinny rump a pat before struggling to stand herself and say, ‘And haven’t I got enough washing to do! Who wants mouldy old bones hanging round in the house, rotting and festering under the sheets? When a body dies, the soul flies out and . . .’ She paused for a while and stroked my head, before hobbling off towards the sink, glancing back over her shoulder to say, ‘and of those of us left to toil below I shall need to get on and look sharpish, my girl. Mr Lamb and your brother will soon be back and I’ve not even started to peel these spuds. Here I am nattering, letting
things slip, getting slower with every passing day. Never grow up, Lily. Always stay young. This old age and decay is a terrible thing.’

This old age and decay is a terrible thing
. Such words meant all too little then. How could they when I was new and eternal, when the world turned around me – me and Elijah. But I think of them very often now, especially here in the study where my heart sinks to see the damp seeping in and the peeling of the papered walls, and a wet black mould is rotting the drapes, and I fear for the books piled up on the shelves; so many spines with Papa’s name.

Sometimes, at night, when the doctor has been to give the injection to help Papa sleep, allowing his frail body to lay off its shaking, I have taken to coming back down again, led on by the flickering light of my candle and the wuthering wind that moans soft in the hearth. An eerie sound it is. When I was a little child I used to think it was calling my name. But I am no longer so whimsical. I barely even notice it, my disembodied chimney friend, the accompaniment to my lonely task of pulling the books from Papa’s shelves, dusting the covers, then flicking through pages as I search for the signs of insidious worms; silent as the illness that eats through his mind, silent as the spiders that watch from their cobwebs which drip like lace from the ceiling rose, its plaster still stained a tarry brown from those years when Papa worked below while puffing and sucking his pipe of tobacco.

Now that pipe is unplugged and cold. It lies on his desk, at the side of his pen, like the relics of one who is already dead. But Papa’s spirit is fighting on, sometimes swimming up to the surface again, and then we have much better days when we think of new stories, and I write them down, and on good afternoons we might walk through the gardens, even as far as the stream at its end, and if he is tired or stumbling there is always the big bath chair to push him through the country
lanes, even as far as the village again – though Papa increasingly gets upset, the outside world too quixotic for him.

Last week when a stranger passed by on his horse, Papa thought him a knight off to slaughter a dragon. He thought the decrepit old yellow dog that lies outside the Angel Inn, its head on its paws, its tail thumping the ground – the most benign of greetings for us – was the monstrous hellhound Cerberus. Papa struck out with his stick, only thinking to try and protect himself, but the creature cowered and whined so loud that those villagers drinking inside the bar, who had always been courteous before, came running outside to curse and berate, saying high time we put the old man away.

Can they really think him mad? Would they lock him away with the lunatics? Such a prospect only fills me with dread for I have seen what goes on in these places. And the doctor assures us it won’t come to that. And Papa is still the dearest old man with the kindest heart I am blessed to know, and every day I pray to God that he goes on believing that I am his friend – even if that friend is disguised in his mind as an angel – a princess – a mermaid.

And now, there is only the sweetest smile when Papa lifts his trembling hand, his fingertips fluttering over my cheek, when he says, ‘My Lily . . . my own little Lily . . . what would I have done without you and Elijah? You brought me so many treasures. You saved me from drowning in myself.’

I bend forward. I kiss his cheek, white-stubbled and scratchy against my lips, and my voice nearly breaks when I make the reply, ‘It was you, Papa. It was
you
saved us. Me . . . and Elijah.’

‘Saved?’ In no more than that short space of time, his yellowed, bloodshot eyes grow dim. ‘Elijah? Who is Elijah?’

I draw a deep breath and I take his hand, and I speak as I’ve done so often before, in the language he likes to hear the most, ‘
Once upon a time
. . .’

Once upon a time, when I was no more than five years old, I found myself gazing up at a man with dishevelled grey hair
and sparkling eyes that were spilling with tears as he stared back down, and although I have no recollection of uttering one single word I really didn’t need to speak because my brother was there at my side, my hand clutching on to his for dear life as we stood in an enormous room with very high ceilings and very dark walls, walls covered all over with great gilt frames where I felt myself quite overwhelmed, struck dumb while my brother’s fluting tones voiced what was then our mutual thought, which was simply the question, ‘Who are you?’

‘I suppose you must call me your grandfather.’ On that answer the man’s face cracked wide in a smile. But then everyone smiled when they looked at Elijah, for even as a little boy my brother was very beautiful, with his glossy dark hair and his plump honeyed cheek, and so cheery a disposition then.

I never possessed my brother’s charm, and even though people used to say that my features might resemble his it was always as an afterthought. There were too many subtle differences, and the tiniest differences alter much. To this day I still recall the shock when I first saw myself in a photograph because
that
little girl, all grainy and blurred, was much thinner than I could ever be, with a cast of suspicion in narrowed eyes, and the hair that fell straight around her face was lifeless and lank when compared to her brother’s – although Papa insisted the camera lied, that in the world of reality my hair ‘
always shimmered like ribbons of silk
’, and my eyes ‘
sometimes brown and sometimes green, were flecked with drops of molten gold, like a shower of rain on a sunlit day
’.

Dear Papa. He could be very fanciful, but even that quaint, queer turn of phrase did little to console the child who wanted her eyes to resemble her brother’s; a liquid silver, very pale. And she wanted a nose a little less snub, and a mouth less likely to purse in a frown whenever she stood on tiptoes and peered into one of the mirrors that hung like veiled windows in Papa’s house; the windows that once you smeared a hand through all the layers of dust and grime (that Ellen Page too rarely cleaned) always refused to lie.

And then there were other hidden reflections, the secrets unfolding one page at a time, half-truths that would take many years to tell – with Papa resolved to keep us cocooned, well away from the rest of the outside world. So, the only friends we really knew were very much older than ourselves, being Papa, and Ellen, and then Uncle Freddie, who came to visit every May to celebrate our adoption month – no one knowing the actual date of our birth.