Saltskin (15 page)

Angelo shoved Percy back, fearful, for the mermaid
belonged only to him. He stroked the faces of the other
men like a mesmerist, willing them to stay in their slumber.
Then he climbed stiffly out of the dinghy into the shallow
waters and half floated towards her. There was such heat
and excitement in his blood it was as if he had been dunked
in the hottest of baths. Flushes shot through him and he
was vibrant and sure of purpose.

'If I let you go, will you meet me here at midnight?' he
asked her.

The mermaid kissed his Adam's apple and pulled back
to receive his glassy look, inordinately flattered by what she
read there. She liked very much the way he looked at her,
as though she were extraordinary. She clapped her hands
and tilted her head coquettishly, then dove flirtatiously
into the ocean.

Angelo watched the glimmer of her beneath the shallow
water. 'But will you?' he beseeched.

Angelo was woken by sunbeams blaring down on his face,
the dawn a brilliant red. He thought: Without doubt this
is paradise, this is Eden.

A group of men ran in his direction.

Captain Angus stood on the beach filling his pipe. The
whales had been slow coming in and the fog had lifted
only briefly, then fallen thicker than ever and merged itself
into dusk. It had been a mistake to work in such blindness,
the likes of which he had experienced only once, when
the ship he served on was blown weeks off course and
trespassed into waters wedged with icebergs invisible in the
dark. He gave the order to wind it up for the day.

He was uneasy, and not for the first time that day —
nor the last. He attributed it to lack of sleep. Angelo came
into his mind like a nudge in the ribs. Why was that man
important? Angus was not a religious man, yet he was deeply
aware of the spiritual nature of existence. He believed in
the afterlife, in ghosts, in two-headed beasts, and believed
without doubt in the vivacity of the devil, for had he not
seen the red of it in other men — and in himself?

Davy, peeved and tight-bottomed, shoulders hunched,
walked past the captain looking as if he had contracted
the Black Death, his nose red and dripping like a rotting
strawberry. He was seething with a churn of emotions:
jealousy, anger. A sense of inferiority. His mind brooded
on Angie: the way she had barely looked in his direction.
Was he invisible as a man? He made up for his lack of good
looks with a friendly demeanour and mostly he hoped for
the best. But by God he wanted Angie. He reasoned that
if he had her, he would be somebody. So absorbed was
he that he didn't hear Angus call his name, and only when
he was held by the wrist did he halt.

Captain Angus surprised himself by asking Davy about
the woman Angelo was seeking, the woman he had referred
to in his cabin.

The mention of Angelo smarted — Angus caught
the change in Davy's expression. Davy wrestled with his
conscience. Telling someone about Angelo's obsession
with a mermaid would certainly discredit his friend, make
him appear loony. But it would mean betrayal, and after
all, Angelo had not mentioned the mermaid since they set
sail. Yet the urge to tip the scales in his own favour was too
tempting.

Angus watched Davy and knew that knowledge lay
within. He sought to coax it out by putting a number of
silver coins in Davy's palm, squeezing reassuringly and
nodding with closed eyes. He told him to seek bed-rest at
the Rusty Rose.

Every man has his price. Oh, Angus could see Davy
in the act of betrayal as clearly as an A on an adulteress's
bodice.

Davy sighed. He circled his finger around his ear to
imply stupidity. 'Big on imagination is Angelo,' he finally
said. 'He reckons he can find himself a mermaid — which
is a fish, isn't it?' He laughed. A beat passed. Davy looked
at the money in his palm. He could pretend the prostitute
was Angie . . . He failed to note the expression of triumph
on Angus' face, quickly masked.

Angus thumped Davy on the back a little too hard, and pushed
him on with words to the effect that a real woman is not always as good as
an imagined one. As Davy moved away, Angus shook his head in disappointment
at mankind. Did Angelo have no real friends at all? He took a deep breath
that quivered in his chest. So, Angelo was seeking a mermaid, was he? He felt
stirred by it. He glanced about him, not seeing anything, and his eyes had
the light of a crusader.

In his cabin the captain heaved a sigh that came out like
a strangled wail. He had to think, or he had to act, for
he was sick of the madness of thinking — he had thought
and thought for the past twenty-odd years. He doubted
his ability to recall truthfully, for none of it was linear or
followed the laws of time.

He made straight for the drawer where he kept the
mirror and stared into it. He remembered the face. In his
past he had committed a dishonourable and horrible deed.
Yet frozen in the mirror was the face of the young Angus, a
few hours before, at the point where he could have chosen
differently. The eyes that stared back at him were earnest
and without guile. The eyebrows were tamed in a youthful
arch, his mouth unfurled by cynicism. It was an image
engraved at a journey's crossroads.

He had not known that one way would lead to a
lightness of heart and the other to darkness, marking the
skin with scars that betrayed his inner character. Age is not
only about time, he acknowledged. A miser looks like a
miser, a saint like a saint. It is the thoughts a man entertains
as much as his actions that mark the skin and take away the
plumpness of innocence.

How he wished he could turn back time. Live it over,
make different choices, knowing what he knew now. Then
he could own the face he saw mirrored to him: without
deceit, without guilt, without regret. But he recalled what
he had felt back then. The cousin of love — lust. And lust
was so near to greed, and greed to gluttony, and gluttony
— was that so far removed from love?

He had to do penance, not just to be cleansed of the
guilt — the blame that stained all his actions, that covered
the innocent in him — but to restore a balance. All he
needed was a chance to put things right. He put the mirror
from him in revulsion and reached further into the recesses
of the drawer. There — he flicked his thumb as if flicking
away a gnat and the top of the drawer gave way with a
click. He lifted the lid, withdrew a logbook, and turned the
pages to an entry he had not read for twenty years.

The Ship 'Maia'

I must write this down before the vision of it is blurred
by my disbelief. Today I met and fell in love with a
mermaid. There, it is stated thus, and yet the letters are
plain in comparison to the enchantment of my afternoon
here on this isle.

The crew drunk and otherwise engaged with a
number of native females, I was able to shirk my lowly
duties and sneak away unnoticed, for to them I am
merely a boy. I had eaten my fill of the exotic fruits and
sunned myself on the shores, the palm trees tall above. I
rolled over, and to my right sat the mermaid, appraising
me with open curiosity. Her extravagant tail glistened
with the dew of the sea while her upper body was sloped
in the form of a female human. Oh, the ripe breasts small
and high, with the peculiar weight of woman's flesh and
nipples the pink of the inside of a conch shell. Oh, the
glory of awakening to the presence of a goddess.

I rubbed my eyes to clear them of the sunspots I most
assuredly was seeing through. But she remained. She
flicked her tail with a snake-like ripple. How can I tell
of how the day evolved? I believe she was as enchanted
with me as I with her. She permitted me to sketch her and
I made two drawings of which I am inordinately proud,
for my skills are less than those of an artist, and yet she
was a muse and each stroke captured her. I had not yet
touched her tail, for I felt if that I did it would be to touch
the likes of a sea monster. It gave the impression of having
its own life force and I failed myself by being fearful of it
and yet aroused. I did, however, touch her perfect breasts,
and she appeared to have no bashfulness, as though I had
fondled instead merely her elbow.

I am unable to sleep, I am sure. I will the hours of my
life to pass until I can look upon her glory once again. It
was all too brief, for she seemed to leave as suddenly as
she had first presented herself. And just before her pretty
shoulders submerged in the ocean she asked me if I loved
her and I said, 'Forsooth, yes.'

The Ship 'Maia'

My guilt is immense. I hold in my palm her mirror.
Indeed, all the belongings she came to me so trustingly
with, held in a delicate shell box. I stole it all, including a
bag containing pearls as big as my eye. I had the presence
of mind to — Lord forgive me — steal it, snatch it from
her before she slithered away in fright.

How could I have permitted such an atrocity? Why
did I tell anyone about her? By writing I hope to purge
my soul of a horror I could not ever confess to a man's
eyes, for the shame is too great. How can I say it but
straight as an arrow? I have lost my mermaid. She has
swum far from me and will never return.

I should not have boasted of it. I should not have let
others spy on what ought to have been sacred. I can never
forgive myself. I let it happen, caught up in the lure of
capture. Creatures such as these cannot be harnessed. It
must be given and deserved. Her trust. Her love.

I cannot go on. I am afraid of beauty. I led her
to temptation and yes, I wrestled her down, her eyes
alarmed and forgiving at once. I am a coward, for I
did not move to save her. I did not. And yet even now I
wonder whether, given the chance to do different, I would.
I fear I would not. I must remember the words of the
apostle John: It is the spirit that vivifies; the flesh is of no
worth. I can aim for a higher state of being.

But it is no good: I was a partner in the degradation
of the mermaid. I have sinned. I held her wrists to be
bound by rope, I lit the flame to scorch her tail. I cannot
bear the weight of her goodness. Were it not for her
almighty strength she would be tethered now in shackles
below deck, and would I, if she were so trapped, be up
here mourning? Or would I be with the others, poking her
with sticks?

And despite it all I wish to have her trapped. We have
tarried in these waters too long, forgone our original mission in the hope
of seizing the prize of a mermaid. I never asked her name. I will not see
her to the circus awaiting in Europe.

Angus' mind drifted back to Angelo.

Mrs Orchid Faullen had spent only one long year in
Australia, yet carried on her tongue the brogue of the illbred
colony. Her mother, Clarisse, had been arrested in
London for assault, and since she was simultaneously being
hounded for witchcraft, Clarisse considered the sentence
of deportation to Botany Bay perfect timing.

Clarisse was a sensitive: a midwife, an astrologer, a
palm-reader; indeed, adept in divination of all kinds and
far from being a charlatan. Aside from her abundance of
knowledge when it came to childbirth, prevention and
cure, she could mend the unmendable simply by laying
on her hands. She could see with all-knowingness the train
of a patient's future as if it were already written. For these
purposes she employed a variety of tools, from tea leaves
to bowls of water, but these were merely props, for her
vision was clear as air and right as light. It was not that
Clarisse believed in the supernatural but rather that she
knew nature itself to be super.

These skills did not make her rich. For payment for
her services she received all manner of bartered goods —
cheeses, eggs, meats, clothing, jewels. And where possible
she encouraged and accepted children's teeth, for a number
of reasons. Firstly as a joke, for children's teeth were said
to ward off black magic and this made Clarisse cackle.
Secondly, she believed — as many did — that a child's
articles and pieces contained great power. Thirdly, the
quirk of it appealed and added to her eccentricity.

Her lacklustre child, Orchid, did not possess the gift.
Indeed, she seemed to have come from another set of eggs
entirely. Where Clarisse was confident and wise, Orchid
was timid and reticent, with too much regard for her own
fears. However, her daughter was a scholar of sorts for she
understood the recipes and spells and could mix a potion
well enough.

When young Orchid, infected with the red dust of
the colony, left their home to embark on a mismatched
marriage, Clarisse gave her a mystic dowry packed into a
small tea chest: the very same tea chest she herself had
carried upon her deportation, allowed aboard after she cast
a spell to the effect that the barren wife of the magistrate
would bear twins. The promise proved true and provided
good mileage in Botany Bay. Where others were starved
and raped, Clarisse was able to live in relative luxury.

In the chest she optimistically and clairvoyantly packed
for Orchid:

1. A book titled
The New and Complete Illustration of the
Occult Sciences
by Ebenezer Sibly.

2. A book titled
La Très Sainte Trinosophie
(The Most Holy
Triple Philosophy), by Saint-Germain.

3. A spell book for common ailments.

4. A black beaded purse containing 113 children's teeth.

5. A gold velvet quilt.

6. Two low-cut gowns secured from the Dutch. She
suspected her daughter would never wear them, for
their decadence, but hoped she would. One was green
and one red.

7. A douche set.

Clarisse's last words to her daughter were: 'There comes
a crossroads in all of our lives where one must choose.
And the right or wrong of these actions can only be read
backwards, like a spool of thread unravelling. A saga that
on our deathbeds we review: the incidents hurtful and kind,
the ones that were pivotal and, like the wings of a butterfly,
set off a storm in another land. We do not know how our
choices and actions will affect the greater world but they
do. And if we did understand we would be dazzled by the
brilliance of chance.'

For a long while she regretted the words, for they had
been gabbled, and she knew they made little sense to
Orchid. She wished she had simply said: 'I will miss you.
Be well.'

And yet she knew that wasn't the way of the world.

Clarisse could foresee all that was to happen; she knew
that her daughter's life was not just for the present but
that her descendants would play a vital role in the wellbeing
of the world — the essential realignment of balance,
when civilisation was ready to hear the truth once again,
the truth submerged but ever present, a truth as powerful
as natural law. And so the glory box was packed with the
far future in mind. But, knowing as she did all the trouble,
the bedlam that was to follow, Clarisse released the clasp of
the gold locket she wore and fastened it around her
daughter's throat. Inside it was empty.

Orchid's marriage was aborted on account of her
husband's bigamy, although she kept her married name in
preference to her bastard birth name, and Clarisse set her
up as governess to the Swan family. Mr Swan was a close
intellectual friend of hers who helped in the acquisition of
rare botanical ingredients.

It was Clarisse's tea chest that later would serve as lifebuoy
for Mrs Orchid Faullen and her charge, the capricious Miss Angela Swan. Mr
Swan was a gentleman of repute who spent his life travelling to remote locales
to collect and catalogue new and wondrous plant species for the Crown. His
last and fatal journey ended in shipwreck. Forty miles south of the rocky
coast that bordered the whaling settlement of Jacob's River. Mrs Orchid Faullen
and Miss Angela Swan were the only known survivors.

In a little hut with walls of flax and sand and dung on
the other side of the makeshift settlement, our Mrs Orchid
Faullen stood, back erect, in her cotton nightgown starched
from potato peels, at the side of Angie's bed. The girl lay
on her back, her treacle hair spread across the pillow, one
naked arm flung out to the side. Orchid reached out to
stroke the girl's head, hesitated, and instead clasped her
hands firmly to halt their tempestuous migration to the
girl, who was covered partially with a velvet quilt of gold.
Orchid was homesick and desperate for the touch of
kindness.

'Must you stare so? You really are peculiar, Orchid.
Away with you.' Angie sat up quickly and her breasts
wobbled with the motion. Her face flushed, rancorous.
Orchid's gaze fell to Angie's chest in a reflexive way, like a
hand going out to halt a falling cup, and she was startled
by Angie's harsh laugh.

'Go on then. Touch them. You know you want to,'
taunted Angie, truculently, slyly, but her eyes, her expression
were sugar sweet. Orchid glanced nervously at Angie's face
and could read only an invitation, for that was what she
wished above all else to see — a sign of acquiescence, of
permission to crawl onto the bed and to be embraced by
another living soul. Her stomach tugged on a nerve in her
womb and as always, when the black bile stirred in her, she
fondled the gold locket at her neck.

Angie pushed back the golden cover to reveal her pearl
abdomen, sunken between her hip bones. Orchid could
not move. Angie ran her own hand over her ribs and
stomach and said, 'I'll not beg you for it,' and her hand
disappeared into the golden folds of the quilt. Her legs
moved apart beneath the covers and she smiled tauntingly.
Like a trained courtesan she half closed her eyes and let
her head fall back, her neck exposed, the blue veins stark
against her pallor, as if to a vampire.

Orchid tentatively put one knee on the bed and then the other,
until she knelt like a nun in rapture, and she watched Angie, knowing that
a glass wall divided her from what she craved most: the simplicity of love.
For love, she had long known, was as elusive as a miracle.

Angie prepared carefully for the evening like a spider spinning
a web. She intended to trap Angelo, by fair means or foul.

She had her governess collect bucket after bucket of
water, carried by yoke up the bank from the river to fill
a rusty tin tub washed ashore, heated underneath with
river stones and fire. She lay in the bath up to her neck,
surrounded by the lush ferns and the star-lit sky. Hot steam
plumed to meet the cool air.

Orchid soaped and scrubbed the younger woman's
body and her hands shook. The effort rattled her bones
and stole her breath as her lathered cloth sluiced every
inch of Angie, from the nape of her cleverly arched neck to
the planes of her shoulderblades, every angle draped with
soft flesh, Angie's spine bumps like pebbles leading home.
Each of the girl's limbs she scrubbed meticulously, the way
a man polishes a hard-won prestigious trophy.

Like all people yearning for love, Orchid was tortured
by hope. She thought of her destiny, bewildered by its path
but resigned, for better for worse, for there was no other
course. Angie sensed that her governess was not focusing
so she pinched the woman, hard.

Narcissism, that peculiar trait of selfishness, was most
of Angie's charm. She was spiteful and witty, adamant and
flirtatious, baleful and petulant. It gave her hips a certain
swing, her head a beguiling angle, and her voice a lilt
that held both challenge and victory, dark and spicy like
cinnamon.

While her governess, pathetic with lovesickness,
washed her figure, Angie's mind was already anticipating
the moment she would hold Angelo Page viced between
her thighs. She was not a traditional woman who harked
after marriage and children. No, she wanted to conquer,
to have, and to squander. For her the loot would be the
wasteful misuse of power and the thrill of domination.

She wanted Angelo because she knew he had resisted
her, and this fact fired her degenerate passions the way
nothing ever had. Upon first feeling his eyes on her while
she danced, she had known a magnetism that could loosely
be classed as love at first sight. It gave her more pleasure
than art or music or trinkets or gold. And Angie always got
what she wanted, no matter who was killed in the process.
Yet she was still naïve, still young enough that she had not
yet learnt she would be the cause of her own suffering.

She did not consider that it might be she who was
killed.

Angie stepped from the bath wrapped in a linen sheet;
the frost nip in the air made her alert. Her body was bath
pink and her face set with resolve. Orchid patted her dry
and fragranced her with vanilla heated in oil.

Angie refused underwear but allowed herself to be
bound into an out-of-date corset that pressed her breasts
up and her buttocks out. Her calf boots were laced to
the ankle and overlaying this was a crinoline gown of the
deepest yellow, which brought out the sugar and honey
tones of her brunette hair. She wore this loose over her
shoulders, and in her lobes she wore drop earrings of onyx,
screwed on by Orchid.

Mrs Faullen wore grey and a mourning band.

They ate a light supper of pickled eel.

Captain Angus wanted to tell Angelo his mermaid story
— to vomit it out like the tapeworms of a ridden gut. He
felt compelled to confess, for he hoped the speaking of his
sin would cleanse him, and yet, because he could not help
the way God made him, he also hoped with a fever that
Angelo knew where to find the mermaid.

Angelo most certainly did. After forcing himself to
sleep so as to be fresh, and after eating only an apple for
he was too excited to swallow much else, Angelo set about
bathing himself with a feverish radiance on the deck of the
Unicorn
. The storm-cleansed sun suffused him in a hazy
glow and the blue sky had the scent of spring.

In among the snakes of rope and giant sails he stood
in a tin washbasin filled with a foot of fresh water. With
lard soap that did not lather he rubbed down his body,
naked and unabashed, his chest and pubic hair as orange
as an orange. He opened his legs to get to the nitty gritty
of his rectum, and used handfuls of sand to scour away lice
and mites. He sang while he washed: a tuneless, toneless,
wordless warble, unattractive yet sung with such gusto it
lifted the spirits of those around him.

Angelo's manic thoughts whizzed in his mind. The
mermaid would meet him on this eve! He had found her!
He flung his arms wide like the crucifixion and howled out
over the sea to his one true love: somewhere, somewhere,
beneath the waters. In his heart he swore himself to secrecy.
He would tell no one, lest the speaking of it cussed it. He
was vindicated. His love was real; the mermaid was real.
He was not a lunatic after all! Angelo was ecstatic.

Half a dozen other men also cleaned themselves in
begged and borrowed vessels and buckets on deck, including
Davy, who stood dripping in his basin, his potato-shaped
body all gorged and at odds with itself. Three rolls of fat sat
wedged and red at the back of his neck. His pelvis seemed
to be concertinaed with his ribcage, a flap of belly skin
fell over his genitals, his legs were the shape of chicken
drumsticks and his spine curved over, sinking his chest.
Each knobbly vertebra stuck out as if the strain of holding
the body upright was too much. He stole a peep at Angelo,
who was bellowing at the world.

Davy grimaced because he was feeling bad. Shamed at
betraying a secret, sick with jealousy, and guilty that he
hadn't even noticed Angelo was missing until he returned
— hadn't looked out for his mate, who was only in the
Antipodes on his request; his mate who probably couldn't
swim, who could have perished on the high seas in a
matchstick of a dinghy. Davy resolved that come hell or
high water he would do his friend a good turn, make it up
to him the only way he knew, and that was to organise for
Angelo to be bedded that very night, once and for all.

Davy scrubbed himself a little brutally, a little petulantly.
Out of it all, it was the secret revealed that weighed most
heavily. He had told a secret, and done so on purpose, like
Judas, set up from birth to betray. And he had sensed from
the way Captain Angus froze, had known with a horrible
certainty, that he had done more wrong than he intended.
Or maybe he had known exactly what to say. Why or what
it meant he could not put words to. All he knew was that
peevishness had come upon him. He wished Angelo had
never been found. He wished he were dead. It was useless
pretending otherwise: his friend was now his enemy.