Saltskin (14 page)

'Oh, piss off.' Save it for rehab, she thought, and
scowled up the street. She noticed Tom scurrying along
pushing a wheelbarrow of jumbled things. He looked over,
saw her and, oddly, pretended he hadn't. She thought that
queer. Tom adored her and usually bailed her up at the
slightest opportunity.

Joel rubbed his eyebrow and followed her gaze. 'Hey,
there's that estate auction today at Mrs Stone's house. I
thought I'd go later. Do you want to come with me?' He
flourished his arm as if waving a surrender flag. His skin
brushed hers and made her jump.

She knew what he was after and he could rack off. She
ignored the invitation. Gilda was too furious to be nice to
him. She wasn't going to let him set the tone.

But Joel wanted a truce. 'Look, it's simple, isn't it?
Don't we all just want to have someone to wake up with?'

His words made her appear bitter. She wanted true love
to be true. She felt the fight go out of her, tried to save
face. 'You don't have the moral high ground here.' Yet her
voice was soft.

They were silent, both of them settling a little, like the
tide going out.

Joel glanced down and suddenly saw Gilda's bare feet.
Her toes were webbed. 'Hey! Let's have a look at your
trotters!' He made a slow-motion grab at her leg and she
slapped him away, yet the idea of him touching her jetted
adrenalin through her veins, making her belly flutter.

Gilda stood up and placed her hands on her hips,
disobedient, bold. She couldn't help it — she grinned. He
watched it move up one side of her face and then the other.
He grinned back and watched her eyes deepen.

'That smile . . .' he said wondrously.

Which she ignored. 'Yes, Joel. Not only am I not perfect
but I am actually
deformed
. Thanks for the coffee and good
day to you.' She stormed off, hoping he was watching her,
although she resisted looking over her shoulder to check.
Her legs weren't working properly; she became oddly
worried she might trip.

She had gone about ten paces before Joel yelled, 'I don't
want perfect!' And shook his head in admiration. She sure
was feisty. He took a deep breath that made him realise
how much he needed it. He stood as if he had returned
from a long, adventurous journey, and went inside the
Qualm's to set up for lunch.

Inside, he walked over to the window and watched
Gilda march up the road, arms stropping at her sides. He
felt her in his chest. He recalled the way he had landed
in Riverton: the way the car just drove him there. He'd
stopped outside the fish 'n' chip shop with a strange feeling
of expectation, and Sophia had knocked on his car window
and asked for a light.

Letting off steam at Joel had lightened Gilda's mood.
Poor guy, she thought, but she knew he could handle it —
handle it rather well, really. Her hair flew behind her and,
as usual, men, women and children all turned to watch her
pass. Gilda just could not see what others saw in her. The
way she created waves wherever she went.

She congratulated herself for leaving Ben's hotel room.
Already it seemed like ages ago, irrelevant, distant. She
didn't care. From now on life was going to be good, damn
it. No more heartache. The expression 'It is better to have
loved and lost . . .' crossed her mind, but she walked the
words out, and as her body moved, she wondered why she
felt different, buoyant. She looked out to the sea. It was a
beautiful late winter day, the blue of sky and sea merging
on the horizon. Gilda remembered a photo she'd seen of
the earth taken from the moon. It was the same blue, with
white swirling gaseous clouds like the soft wisps in the sky
today.

She tilted her head back and closed her eyes to the sun.
Ideals, she thought, are fine, but one has to be realistic.
When she opened her eyes she felt a sharp pain running
from her temple down her spine, as though she had bitten
into ice-cream. She staggered, her fingers to her temples,
focusing on her feet until the pain subsided. Once again
she felt the heaviness she carried with her, the notion that
she had forgotten something — it flew up inside her like a
stack of documents hurled around a room, and she worried
she would never get all the information straight. What were
these memories? What were her dreams? And who else was
sharing her mind?

At the homestead Gilda hesitated. For a reason she
did not care to name she was reluctant to see anyone.
She mourned the anonymity of London, but even as
she thought it she knew herself to be in the right place.
Riverton. She could hear the diamond saw Maggie used on
her sculptures, clouds of white dust, fine as talcum powder,
puffing the air.

A fire escape stretched from the ground up to the tower.
Reluctant to encounter Maggie or Martha, Gilda hauled
herself up, scaling the side of the building and climbing
in her window. Her face was flushed. Joel's words kept
coming back to her; she needed to think.

She took off her musky clothes and walked into her
bathroom. Tying her hair up out of the way, she turned
on the shower and stood under the pressure before it was
hot.

She got out and splashed rosewater on her body. Hardly
drying herself, she impulsively snatched the emerald gown
from the floor and put it on, lacing it up as best she could.
She looked at the shell box on her unslept-in bed and a
quiver went through her. What if what was inside was bad?
She didn't want to know. Not just yet. She ran her palm
over the lid but did not lift it. Later, she promised herself,
and wondered when later would be. Tomorrow never
comes. She cursed herself for her cowardice.

As she stood in her room in the tower, unsure,
undecided, Gilda tried to check in with her intuition, that
little voice that was so hard to hear clearly; tried to listen to
whether she should, right now, open the shell box.

God, I have to get out of this place, she thought, and
grabbed her camera, swinging it around her neck. She
climbed back down the fire escape, her hair falling in loose
tresses around her like Rapunzel's. Near the bottom she
gathered up her skirt and sprinted down the path and
out through the gate. She gave a whoop as she leapt onto
the fawn sand dunes, which bore the marks of the wind,
resembling the Sahara.

The sand shifted under her bare feet and she ran as fast
as she could to the rocks — fleeing her past or, perhaps,
hurling herself toward the future. A strange bursting feeling
was with her the whole way.

The sea licked at the rocks. Seagulls hung like airborne
newspaper. A grin spread across Gilda's face, deepening
until the warmth spread to her tummy, and she opened her
arms wide and ran as if she were flying until she reached
the boulders, wet and slimy against the soles of her feet.
The folds of the dress bunched in her hand, she danced
recklessly over their shiny surfaces, moving too fast in light
steps to a place she had not been since she was a child: the
cave where she had once sought refuge.

The village was far behind her now. The mountain with
its waterfall was so magnificent it startled her. The strange
fear that lived inside her like white noise faded completely,
as though she were being pacified by an embrace, and as
the pink marble of the cliff face loomed vertical, close
enough to stroke, she lifted her camera and took a photo
of its rosy folds. Then she walked into the cave.

Sleeping bats lined the ceiling, and the only light came
through the cave mouth. The waterfall sounded louder, yet
muffled, as if she had her head underwater. Water dripdripped
from stalactites. Her hands felt their way along the
crystalline wall until she reached the inner recesses and a
small shelf like a mezzanine. Up she climbed, skinning her
knees. Matchboxes, old food cans with candles in them,
used condoms and cigarette packets littered the floor. It
was not only Gilda who had used the cave over the years
— it was a favourite place to make out. The lovers' cave.
She lit some candles and the wispy flames grew brighter.

She dusted a space and lay down with her eyes closed.
Breathed deeply, the perfume soil and salt and a note of
never ending. She undid the lens cap and held the camera
in both hands as her heartbeat settled. She sighed, and
the sound touched a spot in her stomach, then rose up
to choke her. She made the first sounds of a sob, on an
indrawn shudder of a breath. If only a man would give her
his heart with no reserve. Anything less wasn't worth it.
Anything else was fake.

She knew why she had come to the cave. Had known as
she had raced there, and yet the idea had just come to her,
like a subliminal force drawing her there.

Gilda willed herself to quieten, the way the minister
does at Mass, where life's pettiness and domestic demands
are set aside for one focus. Instinctively she ran her hand
along the marble cave wall until her fingers felt the indent
she had first sought a long time ago — for she had lain in
that same spot under the starlight as a child. Her fingertips
remembered for her and she traced the engraving, absorbed
the heart and the names within, the way a blind person
gleans the meaning of Braille. She paused, absorbing the
import of it, and then focused her camera. As she clicked
she opened her eyes; the camera flashed and her body
thrilled to the promise it illuminated, there, carved deeply
into the marble: a heart with two names.

The morning revealed a hoar frost. A giant hand had
sprinkled fine sugar over the settlement. Seagulls called. A
day dark and moody, as if created by a dejected boy.

Angelo sat in a rowboat hidden by sea mist. Dense fog
lay over the sea and beach, partly concealing the activity
of the whalers on land, a shroud over a cadaver. Angelo
was deeply cold, his tatty spencer coat scant protection.
The wind sneaked in through the fabric's weave, chilling
his blood. His teeth chattered incessantly. Sea salt lay over
his exposed skin and stung his wounds.

Three others were assigned with Angelo — Jake's
henchmen from the night of the fight: the mould of men
who needed a leader to give them purpose. They chugged
on bottles of spirits while giving Angelo the evil eye, their
drunkenness hampering their eyeball control. Percy had
patchy, oddly pigmented skin like mutton fat on soup.
Dick was frail and rat-featured, and Fred had hands as large
as lobsters, scaly and red, and yet, like the other two, his
demeanour was that of the runts of the litter: the weak
sadness of those who never heard an endearment worth
holding in their hearts, and if they did they might not
believe it.

Angelo longed to stretch his cramped legs. He shifted a
numb foot among the tangled ropes and limbs. He blew on
his hands to warm them, and tucked them in his armpits,
but the chill was relentless. His trousers had become
stiffened with frost, frozen to his thighs. The thin plank he
sat on was not wide enough for his bottom. He shivered.

They were waiting for one of the Unicorn's slaughterboats
to hand over a fresh kill, to be towed tail first into
shore, an ordeal that could take twelve hours. Far away,
sounds of whalers and ships drifted, partly lost and
irrelevant. Rowers were chosen for their burly strength,
which made the Angelo an odd choice, for his strength
came mostly from an exaggeration of emotion, not the
power of muscle.

There was no guarantee of an early catch and it was
feasible to expect to endure hours before being given a
whale to tow. They sat hunched as if nursing a horrid
insult. Percy, Dick and Fred drank their liquor, which lent
the illusion of warmth but masked the true danger of the
nasty temperature. Their breath crystallised before them
like puffs of smoke, and frost powdered their whiskers and
made lips blue, as though swabbed with ink.

Percy withdrew one of the new fashionable pocket-watches
from the grimy recesses of his clothing. But the
mechanics of the thing had frozen and its glass face had
cracked and frosted over, like everything else exposed to
the air. He flung it belligerently overboard and all watched
its flight into the fog until it disappeared, and then a plop
was heard.

There was no way to know the hour. No sun or stars.
The sky gave the impression of being a black hole into
nothingness. Occasionally the tiny dinghy would rise up
on a swell from the turbulence veiled by fog, like a burp
hours after supper. But the sounds grew fainter and the
men lapsed into their thoughts. A drizzle so light as to go
unnoticed coated them in a fine mist like venom spray.

They had failed to drop anchor and, without realising
it, were drifting out to sea. The mist gave motion the
impression of stillness. Unbeknown to them, the Unicorn,
which had been in front of them, was now to starboard, and
still they drifted. Their boat rose and fell on the increasing
lilt of the waves meeting the greater belly of the sea, and
they drifted further and further without alarm, out to the
never-ending ocean.

While the others slumbered, Angelo went over and
over the sound he had heard the night before. It had not
been the love song of a whale, of this he was sure. He
closed his eyes and let the memory lull him. In part it was
boy soprano, like the ones he had heard through the walls
of St Bride's Church, with an irresistible underlay like the
sigh of a woman. He longed to go towards it, to follow it
wherever it led, to let it wrap him like a cashmere shawl
on naked skin. He gave himself to the notion of being
swallowed by the sound, and so used was Angelo to his
make-believe world and its convincing landscape, he was
able to slip, meditatively, into his delusion, as if no stitch
or button separated it from reality. Unaware of the danger
he was in, he did not panic but felt sleepy, imagining he
was being swung in a cradle hung from a great tree.

The mermaid, after singing the night before and aware of her
own yearning for an end to loneliness, had dived deep into the
emerald layers of the sea to the ocean's floor.

She liked pretty things and collected them like a magpie. She
stored them in a treasure chest salvaged from a shipwreck almost
200 years ago: a shipwreck she still recalled as if it were yesterday,
for the horror and waste of all the swollen dead sailors trapped
under beams, unable to float to the surface for the dense weight of
a thousand fathoms pressed down on them.

She had swum from one corpse to another, her hungry hands
flitting over their white Adam's apples the way the blind seek
meaning in touch. She planted kisses on the lump of a throat here,
a mouth there. She ran through her repertoire of kisses; the chance
to practise on real lips, albeit dead ones, was a real treat, like
an audience to an ageing beauty. Some of the kisses were quick,
snatched in a hurry; some passionate, complete with tongue and
twisting head; some tender; some theatrical; some mournful.

The mermaid had found a partially undressed woman and
had peeled the clothes off her to get a better look at her body. She
had almost wept at the sight of the dead girl's coveted legs — two
perfect sticks with a clove in the middle that she could split apart.
Oh, how she wished she could have legs, and die some day. She
felt the choke of tears in her chest and throat but knew it was
pointless, for a mermaid cannot cry. She had never cried, so all
sadness stayed stoppered within.

She inspected the dead she-sailor thoroughly, as if planning to
take her apart and put her back together. Then she looked hatefully
down at her great whopping tail, heavy and thick-trunked, the
way a human woman might bemoan her thick ankles.

In truth, her tail was magnificent. It measured the length of
her torso doubled, and the colours were a dazzling mix of coral
reefs and rainbows, of the pink and turquoise of snapper and
crimson purples of twilight — a chameleon of a tail — but she
wanted nothing more than to have legs. Legs, legs, legs. The only
way she could was if a mortal loved her. But how was she ever
to meet a live one?

With the dead girl lying like a lover in her arms, the mermaid
pulled the remaining whips of cloth from her body and ran her
hands over the curve of the waist, down the length of a thigh
and back up the inside leg. She prised apart the girl's thighs and
peered in: a mass of hair and curls of flesh that made the mermaid
frown. Was she only ever to find mysteries and not answers? She
had dragged the body around with her for a while before she had
tired of the game, swishing her tail in and out of the rooms of the
sunken ship searching for loot.

The mermaid marvelled at all the little things humans used.
She took for herself a teaspoon, a candlestick in a holder (because
its purpose puzzled her), a gorgeous jewel-encrusted mirror that
had since been stolen from her, a box inlaid with gorgeous shells, a
book with lovely pictures in it and words and words and words.
Over the centuries she became fluent in every language under the
sun and a lot smarter than almost anyone alive or dead, but oh,
so silly.

She was all alone and longed to find someone to converse
with. In that moment, sitting on the ocean floor, she felt she had
been forgotten before anyone had even known she existed. She
sighed, curled her tail under her and began sorting her treasure
into piles of colours.

She already had enormous numbers of pearls, jewels, necklaces,
silverware, bracelets, hat-pins, earrings, cufflinks, golden
goblets, pewter jugs, bone-handled knives encrusted with diamonds,
tiaras of pink sapphire and crowns so large her head could fit all
the way through them. She had no concept of the value of her
items; all she knew was she wanted more — what she had was
not enough.

Her current favourite was a man's boot she had found afloat
on the sea's surface. So lonesome it looked without its mate that she had
stolen it as a talisman, to remind her of the loneliness of a one-shoed man
somewhere wandering the great expanse of earth without his boot's twin sole.
She sighed wistfully with it clutched to her breast.

The fog lifted and showed the first star in the sky. Angelo
awoke and cast his gaze around. Dick and Percy stared
ahead with unseeing eyes as if their personalities had been
replaced with emptiness.

'Shouldn't we be on shore by now?' Angelo asked, his
voice raspy, disturbing.

Dick and Percy did not respond.

The whales . . . Angelo vaguely thought. His mouth
was horribly dry. He peeled it open and moved his thick
tongue. Then he raked a hand through his scalp and tiny
icicles fell in his lap. Anxiety elbowed his mind but he
resisted it. Instead he heard Magdalene saying, 'Nothing
is without meaning,' and he nodded and closed his eyes
again.

The night fell heavy. Fred was now slumped partly
overboard, and with each breath he took, water lapped into
the boat and pooled on the bottom. One of his red hands
had turned a bruised blue, the other dangled in the sea. If
anyone had their wits about them they would have been
frantically baling out the water. But no one had their wits
about them and the sea had turned rough. Waves headbutted
the boat from unexpected angles.

Angelo's salt-crusted eyes stung. He blinked and saw
the face of Fred at the other end of the boat, with the
waxy, pale look of death about him. Angelo knew it by
the dread in his gut. He stood unsteadily; the boat rocked
and gallons of water sloshed in. Angelo stumbled to the
other end of the dinghy and slapped Fred's face. He had
to save him . . .

He awoke some time later on Fred's chest. He searched
the blackness around him and knew in an instant that they
were lost at sea. Angelo screamed, then took a broad, ragged
breath, filling his lungs, and bawled again. The unsteady
boat lurched. Angelo screamed until Fred wrestled him
down, knocking the oars in their oarlocks as he lurched
from his end to Angelo's.

Angelo was filled with gratitude that Fred was alive.
Alive! Alive! He embraced the man, raining kisses all over
his face in a sluggish, exhausted way, as Fred pawed him
off. One oar loosened and slipped into the ocean. They
watched it glide away, and yet it seemed to have nothing
to do with them, and the two men soon wafted off to a
place beneath awake but more sinister than sleep, the boat
tipping too heavily at one end.

When Angelo next opened his eyes he realised he was
still screaming, even though it seemed that hours had
passed. His own screams comforted him, the way a child
hums for company.

The dinghy was floating directly above the mermaid,
who felt the vibrations of Angelo's shrieks and swam up
towards the surface. As she approached the barnacled
underside of the dinghy her face was an imprint of
expectation. She broke the surface and lunged at the side
of the boat, where she clung with her arms. The lurch she
created rolled the men into one another and they mewed
and pawed the air like blind kittens.

Percy saw the flash of movement but was too delirious
to make much of it, and he didn't care. The men settled
again, curled in together, severely unbalancing their boat,
not noticing that water spilled into their laps. Fred snored
a horrid rattle as if he had liquid in the lungs. So under the
fever of their long exposure to the elements were they that
their bodies had shut down, gratefully conserving strength,
all immaterial compared with the sweetness of oblivion.
Death patiently waited.

Only Angelo saw — briefly, like an apparition in the
darkness — the pearl of the mermaid's face and a corner
flick of her tail. He silently gave thanks before he, too,
succumbed to the overwhelming desire to sleep . . .

The mermaid stared at the fallen Angelo and her heart
swelled with all the tenderness in the world. She whispered,
'I know you,' and leapt exuberantly into the air. Her body
arched, her tail flicked water in a spray of diamonds, and
mid-air she twisted, black backdrop of the sky framing her,
and dove straight down deep into the ocean. Down she
plunged, bubbles streaming off her, to where a school of
fluorescent fish flicked this way turquoise and that way
orange. Then the mermaid powered her way to the surface
again, beyond herself with joy.

She resisted the urge to clutch Angelo to her and
drag him beneath the sea. She knew, by now, that a male
human being had to stay on the surface. So she hooked
the anchor and rope about her waist, and, using her
gargantuan tail, propelled the boat and the men smoothly
through the waves towards land, and into the lagoon near
the settlement, at the mouth of a cave. She dug the anchor
into the sand, then lay, spent, beside the coffin-like boat,
fully out of the water. She held Angelo's hand in hers and
stroked the wiry hairs of his knuckles.

Angelo came to with a yelp and registered the naïve face
of the mermaid with her starry eyes. He lifted his head and
took in the full length of her monstrous tail, both repelled
and seduced by it. Not doubting what he saw, he seized
the moment. 'I will love you forever,' he groaned through
cracked and bleeding lips.

The other men stirred, sensing they were on land. Percy
sat up suddenly, startling the mermaid, who moved with
the quickest of flips into the water so only her hair could
be seen, floating and mingling with the kelp.