The Mermaid's Child (7 page)

As I slithered down the final few steps into the bar, I became aware of an unfamiliar and distracting pressure in the pit of my belly, quite different from the ache of an over-full bladder. But once I'd bolted myself into the jakes I didn't give it another thought, such was the pleasure of unburdening myself there, of that discreet rebellion against Uncle George. I recall, even now, with fondness, the impressively copious, hot, and pungent waterfall, the aching pleasure of release. There is, I will always maintain, nothing quite like a good and long-awaited piss.

I'd been right. They knew already. He'd told them something.

I was standing in the bar room, doing nothing. There were glasses everywhere, spilt drink on the tables, and the floor was filthy, but as there was no one there to see me cleaning, I wasn't going to do it. I leaned against the bar, chewed on a fingernail, and drifted.

He had a knack of observing me, I was thinking, just when I thought I was the one doing the watching. A slow blush spread across my face, and I glanced over a shoulder, but this time there was no one there.

I heard footsteps cross the landing, then Uncle George's feet heavy on the stair-treads. I picked up a glass smeared with last night's dregs, wiped it round the rim to take off the obvious marks, then held it underneath a tap and flicked the lever. As the beer began to flow I leaned over the glass and let a long slow streal of spit fall into the foam. I glanced up, wiped my
lips. Uncle George was just coming to the foot of the stairs, a shaking hand resting on the newel post. He raised the other hand to his face, wiped it. His skin was almost as grey as his cuffs. I lifted up the glass, held it out towards him. He registered me, grunted and came over to take it. He gulped down half the beer. I smiled. I wasn't going to miss these chances anymore.

“Lot of noise, this morning,” he said.

“Must've been the stranger,” I said. “I expect he's packing.”

He narrowed his eyes at me.

“I don't think so.”

Which was my first indication that he was in on something. Then there was a knock on the door, which made me jump. It was the wrong time of day. No customers, no callers, nobody came to the Anchor before noon. It was unheard of. I glanced back at Uncle George. Even in his weakened state he hadn't flinched, and didn't seem surprised. He grasped the nearest chairback, drew the seat out from underneath the table and sat down.

“Fetch me the book,” he said, “then let them in. And get this bloody place cleaned up.”

There was already a crowd outside, standing in the morning glare in their stained and stinking workclothes, their shawls and hats tugged down low against the sun. They filed in, one by one, across the darkened bar room to where Uncle George sat, stubby pencil in hand, copybook open on a fresh page.

“Is he about yet?”

“He'll be down soon.”

As each of them handed over their leather, felt or netting
purses, Uncle George would tug at the strings, spill the coins out like grain across the table top. I watched as he steered the pence and halfpence with a fingertip, sorted them into piles, then pillars, counted them, noted names and payments in his copybook. He glanced up, saw me still leaning on the bar, and said:

“Do I pay you to do nothing?”

I looked at him a moment.

“No,” I said.

“Then get to work. This place is a kip.”

I pushed myself away from the bar, began collecting glasses, scrubbing at tables with a vinegary rag. The villagers kept on coming.

“How long will it take to get here? Did he say?”

“He said three days.”

“You know, once that's gone it's all gone,” someone said. “We've nothing left. Not a bean—”

As the copybook page darkened with his scrabbled handwriting and the stacked coins grew to form a colonnade, Uncle George's hangover seemed to dissipate, and before long he seemed to be almost cheerful. I'd refilled his glass twice.

“Thank the Lord, George, thank the Lord.”

The Reverend Carr was reaching out, his purse cupped in his palm, and Uncle George had his hand stretched out to catch it when it fell.

“You'd do better thanking me, Reverend.”

The voice came from the stairwell. I looked round: every head turned the same way. The stranger. The vowels were clipped, the consonants thundering out like rolling barrels:

“Or him there for his organization. But not the Lord. This has got nothing to do with him.”

A shiver of delight raised the hair on my arms, goosepimpled me. The thrill of transgression. I looked back round at the clergyman.

The Reverend Carr had bridled. I watched his face grow pale beneath the flush of summer, then flood deeper red. His fingers, on the verge of letting his purse drop onto the table, tightened instead, regripping the leather pouch. Uncle George's hand fell to rest on the table. He looked up, but only as far as the Reverend's narrow leather belt, then he glanced round unfocusedly in the direction of the stranger. I waited, my teeth tugging at a scrap of skin near a fingernail. The Reverend Carr was thinking. I watched him weighing up what he would say. Eventually, he decided on:

“I had thought better of you, George.”

Uncle George said nothing, just returned his gaze to the cassock buttons, the narrow leather belt.

“I had thought better of you than to get embroiled with such a man, in such an unholy affair.” There was a tremor in his voice. The hand, gripping his purse, was shaking. The strip of skin came off my finger. I tasted blood.

The Reverend Carr stood there a moment more, vacillating, flushed, then he turned on his heel and stalked towards the door, his vestments rustling like a woman's dress. As he passed me I caught his smell: camphor, sweat, and boiled meat. I watched as the stranger came forward from the shadows. He came up behind Uncle George, put a hand on his shoulder.

“That's all right,” the stranger said. “We'll do just fine without him.”

A pause.

He patted Uncle George's shoulder lightly. “These men of God are all the same.”

“Aye, but,” said Uncle George, “if he doesn't pay, and we all pay, it isn't fair. He'll be taking advantage.”

“Don't you worry yourself,” the stranger said, leaning over to check the copybook. “Don't give it another thought. He won't see a single drop fall on his land. That's the beauty,” he added, straightening, his eyes wandering across the room, catching mine, his face beginning to pucker with an expression that again I could not quite fathom, “of a Rain Machine.”

FIVE
 

He would leave tomorrow, he'd be gone for three days, then he'd return with the Rain Machine. And then he would go away forever. All day the idea of his coming and going and coming back again had stretched ahead of me like running stitch come adrift, like an unfinished seam.

The Rain Machine was to be hired as you would a threshing machine. I found myself imagining a vast conglomeration of whirring spinning cogs and wheels, taut drivebelts blurred with speed, and the villagers gathered on the green, gazing in wonder at these reassuringly unfathomable complexities. And, above, the clouds rolling in, massing, pale grey-brown and yellow, forming into the outline and expanse of the parish. With just a bite taken out from above the glebe, where the Reverend Carr would be standing alone, looking up desperately on clear blue sky, his purse still bulging through his fingers. Then a single clot would gather, fall, thwack down
onto the earth, making someone jump, sending up a corona of droplets, a puff of dust. Then another, and a third. Hatbrims pushed back, a whistle, laughter. And then, uncountable, the rain would come in earnest, thick and heavy. Summer rain, drenching shirts, blouses, shawls. Saturating leaky clogs. Summer rain that would poach the fields, rot the dead grass where it lay, fill the dried-out river, swell it to bursting. My grandmother, afloat for the first time in months, would sit laughing in the ferryboat. My father, the earth growing damp around him, the water table rising, lapping at his flanks, would bloat up white and fishy, would crawl with worms. And Uncle George, whooping with delight, would push me back into the brewhouse and lock the door, leaving me there forever to brew up vast vats of mouldy beer, and everyone else would drink themselves stupid in the rain. And locked into that dark swelter, sweat dripping and shoulders aching as I stirred the steaming wort, I would not even be able to watch as the stranger's figure diminished in the distance, as it grew indistinct through the thickening grey veils of rain.

I could get nothing done that day, nothing finished. Late into the night, after Uncle George and the stranger had scraped their way up the stairs to bed, I sat at the kitchen table, cleaning glasses. I'd never get the chance to speak to him before he left, I thought. Not now he was confederate with Uncle George. And I had to speak to him. Because beyond the bend in the valley road, over the cusp of the hill, there were places familiar to him, which seemed to him entirely unremarkable, but which would be strange and wonderful to me. As he walked out from underneath our tailored-to-requirements fully-guaranteed parish-shaped rain cloud, he would shake the water from his hat, begin to steam in the heat of the sun. He'd watch his scuffed boots as they swung
out along the road, consider, perhaps, the urgency of their need for dubbin. In front of him, first would rise whalebacked slate-grey moors, then the smooth rolling slopes of the fatter land beyond. After that, perhaps, there would come an expanse of tree-pooled silvered grass that seemed to stretch forever, until at last you heard the sound of the waves, tasted salt, and realized that what had seemed to be just the continuing sweep of grassland was in fact wet sky-reflecting sand, and the sea. The sea, where my father had travelled, where my mother might still be found. Thick crashing waves, a bite in the air, and the ever-present dark enticement of the mermaids' song. My people. At last my people. The schoolroom map behind its dusty glass, observed peripherally and years ago, came again into my mind; the outline of this island country, green waves nibbling round its coastline, pale waters lying in its heart. I could almost see the dust trails rising from the paper, as together he and I paced out the pathways, the roads and the trackways my mother might have taken. As we traced the way away from here.

I was going with him, I realized. So I should probably let him know.

It was not a voice that woke me, not a jolt. I opened my eyes on a battlement of dirty glasses, my cheek pressed to the hardness of the kitchen table. From my curled fingers came the sharp stink of vinegar. I straightened up, raised a hand to my aching neck. Moonlight poured in from the deep-set window, silvering the tabletop, conferring on the glasses a temporary beauty. I swallowed dryly. Silence. No sign of what had woken me, no sound from the bar, no creak from overhead. My eyes came to rest on the back door, shut, slightly askew on its hinges. It
could not, I knew, be closed without the boards scraping on the flagstones, without the door thumping against the frame.

I was on my feet and out in an instant, the door flung back and left gaping. Outside, the moon was full and high and cast only the most slender of shadows. I hesitated, looking round. The burgage plot was empty. And, beyond, the fields stretched out bare and silver, the hedges stark in the moonlight. No one to be seen. Out the front, then. Of course. Off along the valley road. I ducked into the ginnel, pounded along its darkness, clogs clattering on the cobbles loud enough, it seemed, to wake the dead, and in spite of my haste I found myself recalling for a moment my father's gentle presence, the hard skin of his hand, the smell of his tobacco. I swallowed again, gulping at the unexpected ache in my throat.

I came to a halt out on the road, skidding to a stop. The dust settled round my feet. I felt the hooded gaze of the sleeping pub on my back; the straggling cottages, village green and schoolhouse were monochrome in the moonlight. He was there. Ahead, a hundred yards down the valley road, he had heard me, and stopped. He stood, half-turned, his eyes shadowed by his hatbrim. A slight misty trail of footdust slowly settled back to earth around him.

A moment passed.

Standing on the crossroads, looking out down the valley road at the stranger. Body feeling light and hollow and disconnected. Fingers fluttering lightly at my sides. Not the faintest idea of what to do. And then, moonlight caught white: he had smiled, I realized. And on such slight gestures are whole futures founded. I grinned back, then clattered up to him, fingers still fluttering uselessly at my sides. I halted some feet away. Now that it came to speaking, I was once more at a loss. Again, that faint whiff of mist and moss off him. I opened my
mouth. And for some unfathomable reason, my voice sounding creaky and uneven, I said:

“You know me, don't you.”

A slight turn of the head, as if in acknowledgement. I swallowed.

“When you come back,” I said, “with the Rain Machine …”

The creases from nose to lip deepened. His eyebrows, in the shadow of his hat, seemed to rise a little, to tilt sideways. He looked down at me directly, his eyes bright and clear in the moonlight, and I realized that I had always known he was never coming back. My skin bristled again with that sweet and sudden thrill of transgression. He hefted his bagstrap up his shoulder, settled it there with the air of someone just about to go, and, once gone, be gone for good. I found myself stretching out a hand, placing it on his arm, noticing as I did so that my hand was shaking. The fabric of his sleeve was cool and soft, and beneath I felt the long smooth curve of muscle.