Saltskin (19 page)

Angelo lifted the mirror to his face and saw in it a small
boy that was his former self. He jumped as if burnt; the
glass caught the light of the sun and shot a beam out to
sea, growing immense from the small diameter of the
mirror with the blaze of a miracle. Angelo experienced a
deep certainty that the love he had been seeking was also
seeking him. He took a deep breath, slow and sure, and
sent out a call from his heart to hers.

The light darted on the bullseye of the mermaid,
targeted her, and the charge of what it meant, caused her
to surge out of the water. She flipped in mid-air, pausing
in her arc, and saw the source of light on the foreshore.
Diving with a gleeful splash, she swam towards him.

The colours of the corals and sponges blurred with her
speed. A yellow-bellied sea snake accompanied her part of
the way; a pod of octopi made a merry tunnel for her;
stingrays moved out of her way; whales serenaded her with
their love song as they continued their migration; seahorses
the size of men rocked in teams on either side of her;
a sea turtle rode her back, leaving her only as she slowed
where the sea shelf became shallow. Her skin grazed the
sand and pebbles of the bottom. Gentle waves broke over
her body, pushing her forward; the foam frothed around
her, swirling her hair.

It began to hail, with knucklebone-sized stones pelting
the sea, pitting the sand in a burst of irrational violence.
Then just as suddenly it stopped, and seven rainbows
appeared over the sea.

The mermaid reached Angelo and said, 'I know you,' her
voice an exotic blend of sounds.

Angelo smiled mistily, tears running down his face. He
waded up to his thighs and pulled her wet body into his
arms, pressed his lips to her face, over and over. She tasted
salty. A river yellow with emotions streamed through his
body. He lifted her, staggering under the massive burden
of her tail, managed two or three steps then dropped her
with a thud. He tried again, the scales cutting his hands
like tiny razors, and he dragged her inelegantly into the
cave where they wouldn't be seen.

Her beauty was astonishing; her tail in the enclosed
space was enormous and frightening, and yet a dazzle. Her
lips appeared too big for her face.

He kissed her. Their teeth and tongues crashed
and grazed in a gauche manner, the kiss of amateurs,
saliva strung between their mouths, until Angelo pulled
back, embarrassed, and looked into her purple eyes. He
watched a smile spread across her face and his own deepened
with it.

Eve threw her arms about him, offsetting his balance,
her rubbery tail the weight of ten men upon him. She smelt
oily. Eager and impatient, he gripped her face between his
palms and squeezed so that her face was squashed, then
rolled her on her back. Her tail thumped and twitched.

'What must I do? How do we?' he growled. The desire
to have her was overwhelming. He dug his nails into her tail
where her V ought to have been, ploughing and scraping at
her scales, his hands cut and bleeding.

Eve pulled his touch to her breasts, which fitted snugly
in his palms, and the wonder of their cool perfection
stunned him. His eyes met hers and in them he saw white
sparks of light flinting. The intensity of their emotions
bonded them, and then she said in the sweetest voice, 'By
giving me your heart.'

Angelo would gladly have ripped open his ribs and given
her his actual heart if it meant he could lie between her
legs, and he said, as their mouths moved closer, 'By loving
you.' The salty chill of her mouth was a shock compared
with the heat of his groin, and their kiss a melting of flesh;
their tongues and lips hit a note of harmony — no kiss
could ever have been as succulent and delicious.

Angelo lay over her, cupping her skull in his palms,
and gently moved his hips over her cold body. Her arms
pulled him to her until their embrace was fierce. Their
eyes never closed. Angelo felt his chest was fusing with
hers and he was elated and sure of his love and of hers
for him. She gave a gasp and arched her back and Angelo
pressed harder into her pelvis, moaning words of devotion
into her mouth and she swallowed them and and still
they made love with their hearts, their spirits lifted on the
wings of a great bird into euphoria, and layer after layer
of her mermaid's tail dissolved and still they kissed and
nothing could have stopped them, not an earthquake or
a fire, and Eve's mermaid tail split underneath them until
a creamy film covered her legs, streaked with red veins of
membrane.

Angelo gazed with adoration at her face and without
looking at her legs moved the tail husks aside, linked an
arm under her knee and opened her. His first thrust into
the damp clam of her insides was a blade to Eve, but she
wound her legs about him and surrendered. Like a twoheaded
beast they writhed together with urgency and
abandon. His hands clutched at the folds of her flesh,
leaving welts on her buttocks and back, and Eve clung to
him, for her heart was his.

Yet she feared what might happen if he ever withdrew his
devotion, for all was unknown, and with the desperation to
become one with him, Eve asked her Angelo if they would
be together forever. He nodded vigorously in time with
his thrusts, and she demanded he repeat it to her over and
over and he said, 'Yes, yes, I promise to love you forever.'

And he brushed the hair off her forehead and buried
his face in her neck, where the skin was as smooth and
ice-like as the marble against his shins. Briefly he imagined
that he had made a pact with the devil; but his hand found
the perfect bud of her nipple and the glory of her was too
much and with a cry that sounded like agony his muscles
spasmed and he sent his semen high into her womb, and
then again until she overflowed. Their mouths still together
they drowsed, waking often in the blurry-eyed wet way of
new lovers, to touch and whisper and sleep.

And when they finally came to, after their ardour had
softened, Angelo etched with a shell into the marble ceiling
of the cave a heart, and inside the words:

Angelo loves Eve forever.

And his hair turned a rosy gold.

Angelo held her steady while she delicately took her first
step. And then another. She gasped, because sharpness
shot through her with each, but she smiled bravely.

Angelo could not stand it, and, lifting her, he carried
his new woman out of the cave into the lagoon. He set
her in a rockpool, green with algae, and washed her white
legs, smooth as if carved from soft stone — legs that in that
moment he vowed he would always protect.

And because she had no clothes he dressed her in his
shirt. It reached below her knees.

It snowed all week, layer upon fresh layer covering people's
treads, hiding where they had been. Gilda's headache felt
like lack of oxygen; she felt like a diver down too long.
It made her giddy. The throbbing at the top of her spine
increased, and with it the imminence of a blackout. She
just hoped that when it hit, she would be alone. She always
carried painkillers with her but she didn't take any. She
had come to think of the event as more like a light that
would lead her somewhere.

She did a few shifts at the Qualm's Arms and chatted
with Val over the bar, listening to his plans for settling in
Riverton and starting a fishing charter business.

If Joel wasn't at work with Gilda she was listless, yet if he
was there she avoided him. He in turn carried on as though
they had never had the conversation on the step, but he
watched as she waved a final goodbye to Ben Johnston.

Ben's eyes were milky with unsaid things but Gilda was
gay and brisk, as if she were ushering a child out into the
sunshine. She was breezy as he rode out of town in his
white minivan, smiling forlornly out the back window.

'Y'know, if a woman sleeps with a man once she forms
an attachment to him,' Sophia had breathed down her
neck. 'And if she doesn't, he forms an attachment to her.'

Gilda thought: She doesn't know; she wasn't there.

She set up a darkroom in the old wash-house. Painted
the windows black, rigged up a red light, hauled in tables
and set up dishes of solution. She was energised by the
chemical smell with its sense of purpose; her ambition was
back.

She strung up a line and pinched wooden pegs onto
it. There was a photographic competition coming up and
she intended to enter. First prize was a National Geographic
cover. Gilda went on a binge of photo-taking.

She passed Tom in the street and he smiled at the sight
of her with her camera. It was like a woman with a guitar:
brainy and beautiful.

'Stand still, Tom.' Through her viewfinder she zoomed
in on his eyes, surrounded by the velvet crinkles of age,
and captured the tenderness she found there, the light
crisp and silver.

'Gilda, why don't you come in and have a cuppa with
Blanche and me?'

'Not today, Tom.' Still with the camera on him,
she snapped his disappointment. 'But soon,' she said,
experimentally changing angle and shooting the shift in
his face: the hopefulness, and behind that a thought he
seemed to be about to share, until he changed his mind.
She caught it all.

Dear Tom. She felt sorry for him — had always felt sorry
for him — but didn't know why, something connected to a
happier time, now lost.

Tom turned to walk away.

'Okay, I will pop in,' she yelled.

Tom hesitated in his step, waved, and said he would be
there soon, to head on over. When he moved on again he
seemed taller. She watched him walk towards the Qualm's;
saw Sophia come out to meet him. They both turned in
her direction.

Gilda zoomed in on their faces and clicked, once,
closer, twice. They looked furtive, the look of strangers in
the underground back in London. Guilty of something.

She walked down a dead-end street, where the houses
became sparse and then petered out. Her breath blew
clouds. The streetlights were on and the snow was almost
violet. Her socks bunched at the toes of her gumboots. She
had the urge to take off all her clothes but instead took off
her cardigan, wrapping it around her waist.

She slipped and crunched on the iced gravel until she
came to the barbed-wire fence of Tom's collection, his own
personal museum: the state house with sewed-on garage
and rusty caravans grafted on over time, all standing in
a junkyard of piled-up old tyres and scrap metal, with an
incongruously lush vegetable patch in the centre.

She pulled on the heavy padlock and when it didn't
budge she walked around the corner and knocked on the
corrugated-iron garage door, yelling out for Blanche.

The door shimmied, jerked and rolled up. The spraypainted
words RELICS folded up too.

'Hi.' Tom's daughter welcomed Gilda with a flash of
her big front teeth.

'Hello, Miss Blanche. Tell me, did you get back at that
boy in the end?' Gilda walked inside the museum, where
few visitors ever went. It smelt of oil, soil, dust and, oddly,
freshly baked bread.

'I rose above it and wiped him from my life.'

'You are a class act,' Gilda said with honest admiration.
'I don't know if I have ever been in here,' she went on,
wandering among the exhibits. 'I've always tried to avoid
the past.' Above each was a handwritten card in blue biro,
pinned to the wall. She stopped to read a document nailed
at eye level: a letter signed by Captain Cook in curly
lettering.

'Shouldn't this be in a glass cabinet?' She looked at
Blanche, who shrugged. 'And what's this?'

'Shackleton's sled.'

Gilda stared, marvelling that there was no protective
rope around it, as if it were no more valuable than a
broken lawnmower. A garden chair stood beside it, with an
upturned beer crate positioned as a footstool. Beside that
sat a full ashtray and some empty beer stubbies. A sign
above it all read: DESTINY BECOMES YOU.

Blanche could tell that Gilda thought it all a bit of a
joke. 'We're amateurs and amateurs do it for love,' she said
proudly, defensively. 'By summer we'll have it all cleaned
up. Dad's been working hard at the new place on the hill
to make money so we can get some storage cabinets made
and do a roaring trade come summer, and he can rest his
gout.'

'Sorry — you're doing a great job.' She raised her
camera.

'I'll bring us afternoon tea,' said Blanche, and Gilda
recognised the voice of a child playing grown-up.

Gilda made her way down the end of the garage,
where the wall had been knocked out, exposing wires,
pink building paper and the candyfloss of insulation. She
stepped up into a grafted caravan, in a chain strung like
carriages on a train. She sat down on a rocking chair and
absently toyed with a black ribbon tied to the arm. Looking
closely, she saw that it was made of silk.

Blanche returned, carrying a silver tray with a pot of tea
and thick fresh bread slathered in butter and jam.

'Yum,' said Gilda.

'I made the jam and the bread.'

Gilda raised her eyebrows in admiration.

'Tom says you're afraid to swim.' Blanche leant against
the wall in an awkward pose that seemed too practised.
Gilda coughed, taken aback. 'I am not.'

'Tom says you used to swim like a fish, that you could
swim before you walked but you stopped when your mum
drowned and now you're afraid of the sea.'

Gilda leant back in the chair and rocked a little, chewing.
'Well, we don't know if Mum drowned. She might be alive
in Acapulco for all we know. No corpse.' But she realised
it was true: she hadn't been swimming since. She also
realised the silliness of imagining that her mother might
still be alive.

'Tom said your mum could swim as if she didn't need
to breathe. That she swam across the bay and could swim
upriver. Is that true?'

'If Tom says so, then it must be so. Do you want me to
help you for a bit?'

Blanche clapped her hands, delighted, and flicked on
a one-bar heater. She made a line in the air, indicating the
beginning of the next caravan. 'I've got up to here with
sorting.' She was excited and chattered almost non-stop
as she went off into the recesses and returned dragging
cardboard boxes, pens, cards and string.

Tom came back and clearly felt a little overwhelmed
with the intensity of females working. He went out the
back and brought a fresh box for each of them, then took
a box himself back to his garden chair in the garage. He
turned on the radio and the sped-up voice of the horse
races was his background music.

Gilda was fascinated with the odd things people kept.
She took photos of cups with special lips to protect
moustaches, carved wooden rosary beads, old thimbles,
redundant spectacles.

Blanche had made a pile of stuff she deemed not worth
keeping, and that pile grew large. After a while she brought
out refreshments in the form of tomato sauce and cheese
mousetraps. Gilda licked her fingers and wiped them on
her jeans before picking up a tattered old journal. Leatherbound.
She put her hand to her neck and randomly opened
the book. It fell open to a watermarked page yellowed with
age and singed.

What I most feared has come to pass. Tragedy of
tragedies. He has betrayed her, and now she is lost to us
and the curse has been set, as sure as ink on paper. Seven
years, as is the lore: if he loved her fully in that time,
prized her above all else, then and only then would she
be mortal, with a mortal soul. If not, then a terrible fate
would befall.

I feared he would not cope well under the threat. How
I wish I had impressed its importance on him with more urgency. The curse
decrees love lost for seven generations. Her legs too weak for her to live
well alone, she cannot even run. The men are vultures at her door and I fear
she will be pawed. Again she goes, again and again to the ocean, and swims
away. I worry that one day she will return to the sea forever. A creature
trapped between two realms.

Gilda frowned and took a moment to query the sense of
foreboding that half arrested her. The page in the journal
was ripped. She was turning back the pages to see who the
journal had belonged to when Blanche walked over and
placed a bundle of gold velvet on the open book in Gilda's
lap. The black ribbon that tied it matched the one tied
around her chair. Blanche motioned to Gilda to open it.

Gilda loosened the knot and folded back the fabric
and even before she saw what lay inside, time took on a
different rhythm. Her eyes widened and her skin drained
of all colour when she found, like twin eggs in a nest, a
pair of exquisite slippers. She was shocked to realise she
recognised them and, without blinking, she fondled the
snaky skin. The colours were dazzling and the sheen almost
wet.

She felt very odd. She became aware of a clicking in the background
— a clock, the creaking of the corrugated iron roof, a scuttling possum.
Her faculty for smell was suddenly acute, powerful: the leftover food, her
own feet, the musty boxes, old paint and oil and soil and salt and sweat and
fish. Blood gushed in her ears. She bit her lip to redirect the pain digging
into her neck, and noted that her mouth tasted salty, like seawater.

'Let's put them on you.' Blanche, on her knees, tugged
off Gilda's gumboots, pulled off the socks. She drew in her
breath. She'd heard, of course, about Gilda's feet but to see
them was incredible: the translucent pink webbing like the
skin under a bird's wing, fine and backlit with red veins;
enhanced as if a torch shone behind them. Blanche spread
the webbing wide like a fan. And then, feeling weird, as
though enacting a piece she had rehearsed, she put the
slippers on Gilda's feet.

They sucked onto Gilda's flesh with a wet sound,
moulding, engulfing. Gilda observed Blanche reach out to
her slowly, as if underwater, and had to shake her head to
clear the time drag of her vision. A bolt shocked her heart.
She was aware of Tom near her: she smelt the tobacco
of him. His hand on her shoulder was age-spotted and
knotted, and he was speaking, but she heard nothing but
a rushing, like waves at night, and she smelt the sea, and
her vision became a billion stars of glitter. Pain washed
her spine like boiling water poured down her back and she
feared she was close to blacking out.

'I have to go,' she said, tripping among the jumble
through the caravan and the garage and out into the snowy
night.

Blanche went to follow but Tom stopped her.

Outside Gilda glided as though her feet and the ground
were magnets of opposite poles, as if she hovered; each step
sent stitch-like sensations up her legs. The snow-covered
beach looked like the craters on the moon, disorienting
her. She felt a pressure on her chest, as if a fat man lay on
top of her, smothering her in the folds of his flesh. Pain
pressed behind her eyes and at the same time she made a
feverish attempt to control her body, but her muscles were
rebel to her will. She was held by some enchantment.

She let out a cry: an exquisite song, high like a eunuch
choir and then deep like an owl call. The force of it arched
her back; her arms became rigid as if for balance. The stars
were plentiful and gave the impression of flaring in the sky
in colours like fireworks. They dazed her, and then she saw
the man — that man — tall and lanky, with the sea frothing
around his legs, his head down, peering into the water. She
turned her song on him, beamed it to him. And she knew
he was searching for someone — had been for a long time
— and she was struck by the fact.

I know you
, she thought, and her eyes welled, and the aria
coming from her would not stop. Notes with the sorrow of
a saxophone on a breath that never seemed to end, and she
watched him double over in pain and sink to his knees, his
hands clutching in his hair, watched him teeter and fall into
the wash of the water.

Horrified, Gilda stopped singing and slowly, haltingly
— as if her legs were loosely hinged — moved, mesmerised,
toward the water's edge, then into the sea, up to her
stomach, looking for the man who had been there a second
before. She pushed her arms into the froth of the waves
with grabbing fingers, going deeper into the ocean. Salty
water splashed her mouth, went up her nose, stung her
eyes and she was searching wildly now, in the same way
he had, desperately. The waves curled up her chest and
she realised he had gone, if he had been there at all, and as
she turned, bereft, for shore, a bright light filled her vision.
Her body buckled and she collapsed into the black sea.