The Mermaid's Child (25 page)

“Shut up,” I hissed.
“Shut up!”

“But you—I thought you—how
could
you—”

“Oh sweet suffering fuck,” I said, and pulled the gun away from his head. “I only meant to scare you.”

“Well you did!”

“I'm sorry. It's just—I need your help.”

“Fine way to go looking for it. You could've asked,” his voice was hissing, furious. “You didn't have to go and hold a gun to my head.”

He reached up, pushed my hand further away. The pistol hung loosely from my fingers, over the side of the bed.

“I don't suppose you have many friends?” he said.

I thought about this a moment.

“I've had one, or two,” I said. “Maybe.”

“I'm not surprised.”

I hadn't really known what to ask for. Quietly, as quietly as he could for a man of his stature, he moved around his tent, handing me objects, naming them in a half-whisper, a breath. I accepted everything, inarticulate with embarrassment, shamed by his kindness.

“Compass,” he said, placing a cool metal disc into my palm. “Quart flask, full. A week's hard rations. Blanket. And a bag to put it all in. And a hat, you'll need a hat.” He rummaged round in a kitbag, tugged out a dark, broad shape. “Wear it all the time, pulled down low, to keep the sun off your neck. Otherwise in a couple of days your scalp'll peel right open like an orange. I've seen it happen.” He thought a moment. “And a jacket. Take my spare one.”

It came down to my knees.

He lifted back the tent flap and we stepped out into the night. The moon had risen. The dunes were silver, their shadows black. I had never, even in all my time at sea, seen so many stars.

It was cold. I buttoned up the jacket and stuffed my hands into its pockets, pulling the fabric tight against my body. I cast around, looking up at the sky, out over the moon-silvered sands, feeling the faintest spot of warmth begin to glow somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach. It wasn't quite like excitement, it was perhaps something closer to satisfaction: I was almost on my way again, and on the cold night air I'd caught the scent of possibility, that first breath of change.

“Which way,” I asked him, “to the sea?”

He gestured. “I'd say due north would probably be most direct.”

“How far?”

“I don't know. A week maybe.”

I nodded, kept my eyes on the horizon. A moment passed in silence.

“Look, don't go,” he said.

I looked back round at him.

“I'll talk to him,” he said.

“And say what?” I asked.

“We'll find some way—”

“You won't. There is no way.” I shifted the bagstrap up my shoulder.

“Right,” he said. Then a moment later, “Right.”

I lifted the compass from my pocket, glanced up at the stars, then back down at the neat instrument in my palm.

“How does it work?”

He took the compass from me, shifted it round in his hand. “You line the arrows up, then that's north.”

“Yes.” I watched the needle flicker, settle. I took the instrument from his hand and set it on my own palm. I turned it round experimentally.

“What will you tell him?” I asked.

“I'll let him get up first. Let him discover you've escaped.”

I looked up at him. He was shivering slightly. He smiled at me.

“Thank you,” he said, “thank you for the—er—”

And I knew I should say something, something about how when we'd met I had been numb, that I had been courting death, and that the tenderness that he had made me feel was something new, and I was grateful for it, and for his kindness. That I was glad to have found him. But I felt awkward and suddenly shy. I missed my chance.

“Sorry about the gun,” I said.

He shrugged.

“You weren't to know.”

We stood there a moment, looking at each other. Then he dropped a kiss on my cheek.

“Good luck,” he said.

I nodded, smiled at him. Then I tugged the bagstrap up onto my shoulder, glanced down at the compass, and walked away.

I turned my collar up against the cold. It smelt of him.

If I hadn't been so preoccupied, if I hadn't been running the events of the night again in my head, if I hadn't been so ashamed of myself and at the same time so happy, it would probably have occurred to me to take one of the camels. As it was, I'd been walking for about an hour before I thought of it, and by then I'd gone too far to go back. It wasn't worth wasting the time. And anyway, a week's walk would be nothing to me. I could handle it.

FOURTEEN
 

But it wasn't nothing, it was not a week, and I couldn't. After nine days my strength was almost entirely exhausted, as was my water, and my hope. I was nowhere near the sea, I knew it: the air was dry as dust, and silent but for the hiss of wind-stirred sand. It did not make sense.

I tapped the compass-glass. The needle shivered, settled. Maybe it was broken. Or maybe I was reading it wrong.

It was hard going. Long ridges of dunes lay across my path. I had to wade up the face of each of them, slide step-stretched down the other side and cross a narrow corridor of flat ground just to face another ridge of sand identical to the one before. And the one before that. And hundreds before that. And from the top of every ridge all I could see, in any direction, were more and more dunes just like the one I was standing on, humped like a vast school of rising whales. I toyed with it continually, the notion of turning down the corridor between
the dunes, the dust rising from my feet, still hanging there hours after I'd passed. It seemed almost contrary to battle on the way that I was going, when this would be so much easier, but I'd glance down at the little disc in my palm, watch the shivering needle for a moment, then drag in a breath, and begin to plough my way up the next slope. A direction, even though I felt I could no longer trust it, still seemed more hopeful than having no direction at all.

At first I went by night, taking advantage of the cool hours to make good distance. The days I spent in whatever shade I could find, sometimes under one of the rocky outcrops that emerged here and there from the desert, sometimes at the foot of a dune, my blanket tented over my head to keep out the glare. I'd shift myself, hour by hour, to catch the last of the morning's shadow, then bear out the midday brilliance as best I could. Sitting hunched there in the stuffy, sticky heat, I would sometimes fall into a fitful sleep, my head dropping forward onto my knees. After so long with so little rest, without the chance to dream, the darkness in my head came instantly alive with vivid ghosts and intricate labyrinthine plots. These would disperse like smoke in the moment that I woke, leaving just a faint hint of story, a sense of words on the tip of my tongue, of colours slipping through my fingers.

When four days had passed without a change in the desert, without a hint of the sea, and my water was almost half-gone, I knew I would have to travel by day as well. I tied my feet with strips of blanket to shield them from the burning sand. I pulled my hat low to shade my eyes. I could sleep later, I told myself. I could sleep when I got to the coast.

The bag knocked against my shoulder. I could hear, with each step, the water slop inside the canteen. So little left.

The wind teased spindrift from the crests of the dunes. The
air seemed almost too dry to breathe. When I looked down to check the compass, sand traced the creases of my palm.

Dunes, more dunes, featureless and shifting, melting in the distance to a haze. Here and there a butte of rock. No blue but the sky stretching endless overhead, not a cloud to be seen.

So little water. So far to go. And when I got there, what then? In a place like this, there wouldn't be streams snaking across the beach. And I didn't have any means of turning saltwater into fresh. It hadn't occurred to me, back at the camp. I hadn't known then that it would take so long. I hadn't thought I would run out of water before I reached the sea.

The glass was silver in the moonlight. The cool press of water against its sides as my fingers curled around it. Against my lips, the soft taintless wet. Water knocking against the back of my mouth, rolling down my throat. My belly growing round and hard beneath my palm. Blinking once, twice, drifting into water-softened sleep.

That had been real. Whatever Jebb had said about wanting, imagining, that much at least had been real.

My eyes were narrowed to a line against the glare. The sand streamed, trailing from each lifted foot. A flake of skin was peeling from my cheek, tickling me: I raised a hand to brush it away and the movement made my head reel. The bag seemed heavy on my shoulder, even though I knew that it was light: the canteen was almost empty.

I couldn't eat. When I chewed, the biscuit stayed dry in my mouth; I couldn't swallow it. I let the pieces fall from my lips into my hand, looked at the dry crumbs a moment before scattering them. Not good. Not good at all.

A little blood on my lips. I licked it away. The skin was sharp and brittle. My tongue felt alien to me, huge.

Rest: just a moment's rest. I sank down to my knees, fumbled in my bag and drew out the canteen. I tugged at the stopper, brought the bottleneck to my lips. The water slid across my tongue and was gone. And that was it. I held the bottle there, upended, a moment more, and one more droplet gathered and fell onto my tongue. I put the stopper back in place, slipped the empty bottle back into the bag, and felt unaccountably guilty and ashamed. I would rest there just a moment, I told myself, before going on. I leaned over, lay down on my side, pillowed my cheek upon an arm.

That perfect cold glass of water. Cold as a beck straight off the fells. Cold as summer rain conjured from a cloudless sky.

But if it was chance that had brought the rain, then who had brought the water?

The sun was slamming down, my breath stirring sandwraiths before my face, and I remembered the way the light caught in the curls of a woman's hair, recalled the pattern of cracks in her workstained hands, felt the easy weight of an empty pitcher hanging from my fingers as I waited at the village pump.

My eyelashes were encrusted with tiny translucent grains of sand. A slow, sore blink. I remembered the eyes of the dead, parched in the sun. I saw them again, clustering round the
Sally Ann
, their lips peeled back, their mouths open in a silent scream. They would not let me look away. And now I heard them too: a thin wail in the pit of my skull, gathering, growing louder. They were calling for me. In my mouth, I could feel that my tongue was swelling, forcing my lips apart. Soon I would join them, I would be screaming with them, out beyond the reach of living ears.

My existence was now reduced to this: the faint trickle of blood from my lip, the graze of tiny cubes of sand behind my
eyelids, the alien thickness of my tongue filling my mouth. The wail of dead men's voices in my head.

And then something else. Faintly at first. I heard, at least I thought I heard, a soft, shambling sound, as if somewhere not too far off the sand was being disturbed, displaced by passing feet. They were coming for me, I thought, all the way from the sea, wading through the dust to claim me. I strained to lift myself, to pull myself up onto my feet, to make one last stumbling run for life. But all I could do was raise my cheek a little, mutely part my lips.

Through the ripple and shimmer of the heat haze, through the spindrift, under the sun's hot glare, something was coming. Dark, indefinite shapes, moving towards me in a grey cloud of dust. My head fell back onto my arm. The wail was growing louder, clarifying into pain, and I thought, that's it. I am going to die.

And then other sounds. Sparks and flashes of music like the chimes of tiny bells. Then the chink and jangle of something more solid, of horsebrasses, perhaps. I heard the creak of leather, then a dog's half-hearted bark. And then the smell; something I had smelt before, but could not, for a moment, place. The tang of dung, the must of straw and sawdust, and then, perhaps, the scent of cheap perfume, of sweat.

The smell of the circus.

FIFTEEN