The Mermaid's Child (9 page)

He looked up at me, that same intent look on his face.

“We'd best get you out of those wet things,” he said.

It was an agony even to consider peeling that jacket off my shoulders, let alone standing up to ease down my trousers and pull my shirt up over my head. I could have cried at the thought of moving, of exposing my flesh to the cold dawn air. But as he crouched to tease out my laces and ease off my clogs, and paused for a moment to admire the raw and oozing blisters on my feet, he insisted that it had to be done, and done soon. And that once it was done, I would feel so much the better for it: “Then,” he said, “we'll have you wrapped up nice and warm.” I didn't doubt that he was right, and I wanted to do as he said, but it seemed utterly impossible, and not just because of the cold. Because after I'd shed my clothes, for however short a moment, I would have to just stand there, naked, as he unfurled a blanket and cast it round me. Skinny white flesh patched with rusty sunburn. All bones and joints and angles, pimpled as a plucked hen. And for some reason, for the first time in my life, it seemed to matter. Again I felt that pressure swelling low down in my belly.

He was still kneeling down there at my feet, his hands on his knees, his hat pushed back. There was a crease between his eyebrows, a slight shadow beneath his eyes, but I didn't really know if he looked annoyed or weary or just cold. I didn't know him well enough to tell.

“I don't think I can,” I said. “I'll just stay like this. I'll be fine.”

“You won't,” he said. “You'll be dead.”

This was delivered solemnly and with a deepened crease between his brows, and my eyes filled unexpectedly with tears.
Pathetic, really, that I should be so easily affected: it's hardly a dazzling compliment, someone preferring that you didn't die in their company, but I was dazzled. I struggled to move myself. He leaned in to help me and I felt his hands underneath my arms again, supporting me, lifting. I was upright unexpectedly quickly, my head light, balance not what it might have been. The turf gave beneath my feet, stung at the raw skin.

Pretend he isn't there, I told myself. Strip off as quickly as possible, don't even think about what he thinks. Because probably he doesn't think anything at all.

I fumbled at my cuff. My fingers shook. I couldn't feel the buttons. “Here,” he said. “Let me help you.”

His head was bent to see what he was doing, so I couldn't quite be sure, but I thought I caught a faint smile as he moved in closer to me. Both of us watched in silence as his fingers undid the buttons at my wrists. Then his hands moved up to my throat, and his face was close, and I couldn't turn away because his hands were beneath my chin, teasing out the topmost button. Then one by one he plucked open the shirt buttons, and our eyes followed his hands down. My breath had caught high up in my chest. As he unhooked the fastening of my trousers, tugging each fly button loose, the back of his hand grazed my skin.

“There you go,” he said, and moved away. I stood there, my shirt hanging loose, my trousers sinking low around my hips. He crouched to open his knapsack. I grabbed a handful of my waistband and held my trousers up. I watched him for a moment, crouching there, absorbed, then I eased my shirt off one shoulder and let it peel itself away from my back. I shook it off the other arm then bundled it to my chest. I watched as he pulled a blanket from his knapsack, watched as he straightened
and came over towards me. He moved behind me, his hands lifting to lay the blanket over my shoulders. I couldn't breathe.

“Who did that to you?” he said.

“What?” I twisted to look over my shoulder.

I felt a fingertip touch a trace of Uncle George's belt.

“Did he do it?”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes.”

“Bastard,” he said.

His breath was warm. He bent closer. I felt the soft pressure of his lips, the warmth of his mouth on my flesh. A nerve prickled down my arm. He kissed a scar.

SEVEN
 

It was at once a strange and a familiar sight, that little village staggering out from the crossroads. Blue woodsmoke curling up from chimneypots, doves brooding on a slate roof, a dog sleeping on a hot stone doorstep. Even a pair of tethered goats wearing bald circles onto the green. A quiet, weekday place, which could so easily have been home, but wasn't. Uncanny. A shiver slid down my spine, shuffled my shoulderblades.

I had come so far, you see, and so much had changed, and I'd thought for a while that the journey would kill me. Rising at dusk that first time, my bones still sore, my feet already worn to shreds, just two things kept me going. One of them was a joyful sing-song in my head: I had got away from there, I had got away: I had left it all behind me and was going to see the world. The other was less clear, and I couldn't quite have put it into words. I found myself imagining the stranger stricken with illness in some deserted place, and me at his side
looking after him; or I'd see him fallen down a cliff face or a grike, his face just a pale oval below, and I'd haul him back up hand-over-hand, though it would nearly kill me. But he didn't need looking after, he didn't need rescuing, and anyway I didn't have a rope. All he required of me was to follow and keep up, so I had to redirect my heroic impulses towards putting one foot in front of the other, towards not complaining.

We stopped at a moorland farm one evening. A thick-built house, a shippon, a few outbuildings round the side. A skinny girl answered his knock. The way she looked out at us it was quite clear that no one ever called there. He told her our needs, held out a palm on which rested a couple of coins, and she closed the door in our faces. We looked at each other. He curled an eyebrow. We waited. There was whispering inside, then the scrape of a chair on flagstones. Then a little later the girl returned, handing through the narrow gap a misshapen brack, a shook of dried meat, and a loosely bundled jacket. He took them, held out his hand in turn for her to take her payment, but she just looked down at the coins, then up at him, her face blank. He reached out and took her by the wrist, unfurled her fingers gently and placed the money in her palm. Then we turned and walked away, leaving her standing there, looking suspiciously down at the coins. After meeting her, it was hard to believe that there could be anything beyond, that there could be an end to this wilderness.

Striding down the darkening track, he tossed the bundled jacket to me, and I shook it out, shrugged it onto my shoulders. He tore the brack in two, stowed one half in his pack and then divided the remaining half again. He handed me a piece, and as I chewed on the densely doughy stuff, conscious of the slight weight of the jacket, the resistance of its sleeve as I raised
and bent my arm, I couldn't help wondering whose elbows had worn the fleece thin, whose sweat had stained the collar.

“That was stupid,” he said.

“What?”

“Could have got all those things for nothing, if I'd given it some thought.”

Suddenly I saw Uncle George spilling coins across a table top, his blunt finger steering and sorting. The jacket's supple warmth seemed to settle more comfortably around me, its faint scent of sheep and someone else. I felt I'd earned it.

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

He glanced round at me.

“You're welcome,” he said. “Easy come, easy go.”

The journey didn't kill me. It didn't even take me very long to get accustomed to it. I'd been bred strong, I suppose, and I'd never had the opportunity to get soft. Before long I was stepping out eagerly, westward, face to the setting sun. I was happy.

We would walk all night, sleep out the day. He never told me why and it didn't occur to me to ask. As the sky paled behind us and the first warm touch of sun caught us on the back of the neck, we would slip into the lee of a tumbled wall, an abandoned shepherd's cabin, or a sheltering dip in the moor. We'd spread our blankets on the ground.

Not that we just slept. Sleep would come afterwards, would seep into that dreamy, sated state that followed. In the warmth between the blankets, our flesh damp, his breath on the back of my neck, sleep would come for him, then eventually for me.

He never hurt me, even that first time, but the way my body ached for him was often painful. I've never wanted anyone so much. There have been others since, of course: too many. But no one, not one of them could make me feel like that. There's been lust, and there's been comfort, and there might even have been love, but there has never been desire like that. When I looked at him it brought water to my mouth. And when we lay down together, I wanted him so fiercely that it could almost make me cry.

I always knew that he never felt the same. He liked me. I knew he liked me.

By the time we had climbed the bald crown of the last fell, I considered myself quite changed, someone altogether new, and had expected to find the world beyond as different as I felt. So when I looked down at that village straggling out along a crossroads, smoke curling from chimneypots, doves, goats, a sleeping dog, I couldn't quite believe it.

“Don't worry,” he said, standing at my side, his rounded, dark-sleeved arm visible in the corner of my eye. I wanted to take him by this arm and steer him away, head off in another direction, anywhere.

“You can't step into the same river twice,” he said. And, a moment later, “You take the bag.”

So we walked down there together, strides stretched by the steepness of the hill, the bag thumping against my back. His eyes were narrowing on the quiet settlement, one hand resting, ever so briefly, on the nape of my neck. “Just remember,” he said, sliding his hand up the back of my head, his fingertips raking my scalp, making me shudder with pleasure, “If anyone asks, you're my apprentice. You're my boy.”

“Is this it, then?”

The question had been bothering me for some time. As had the faded pattern of the sheets, the chipped enamel ewer, the bleached-out wooden floorboards. A difference merely of design, colour, grain.

“Mnh?”

“Is this it? Same but different, again and again, the world over?”

A pause, a slow breath.

“Isn't it enough?”

I considered this for a moment, head pressed back into the pillow, a mattress coil pushing up into my back.

“Isn't it enough that you're lying in a warm dry bed, that downstairs someone is making you your supper, that within the hour we'll be sitting down to a dinner of roast mutton and parsnips? Isn't that better than skivvying for that old bastard?”

“Yes,” I said.

Another pause. I studied the knots and whorls in the beam above us, listened to him breathe.

“What did you expect?”

Sweeping stretches of sand, forests alive with birds. A whispering, silver plane of sea, and the dark enticement of the mermaids' song. My mother.

“I dunno.”

“Well, then,” he said, and shifted, making the bedsprings jangle. I craned my head round to look at him. The lines as he smiled. The blue of his eyes. I smiled too, would have reached out to touch him, but didn't feel quite able to. He looked away.

“It's early days yet,” he said. “First things first. We have a job to do here.”

I turned back, looked vaguely up at the bulging plaster of the ceiling. At least this was a decent room, I told myself. At least I could stand upright in it. I thought of the skinny kid I'd seen downstairs, hovering in a doorway. It was better than that.

“What do you mean?” I asked after a while. “What job?”

I looked round at his profile. He was gazing up at the ceiling.

“I solve problems,” he said. “It's what I do.” A moment, then he looked round at me again. His eyes were serious, intent.

“We're here to save the village,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “What's wrong with it?”

He blinked.

“There's always something.”

“Oh.”

“It's just a case of finding out.”

I turned to look at the ceiling again.

“And if there isn't, then you can bet your life there's a game of cards to be had.”

What I remember best about that time is the sense of wonder. Wonder at what he did, and wonder that such an extraordinary person should want me as his companion. Everywhere he went, he seemed to generate a warm glow of gratitude and admiration, and as I went everywhere with him, I felt the glow fall on me too.

I never doubted him for a moment, but somehow I was still always amazed by him, by the successes he could pull out of what often appeared to be an entirely empty hat. He would
look at me and seem a little puzzled, perhaps, by my admiration, but then he would shrug, and laugh, and say that it was nothing, that I should merely watch and learn. And though I did watch, and I watched intently, I was not a quick learner. I couldn't begin to understand the transformations that he wrought. He gave people what they wanted, I suppose, and that is so much more satisfying, and so much more appreciated, than giving people what they need.