The Mermaid's Child (19 page)

“Oh really.”

“It's some kind of learned instinct. Conditioning, if you like. After all, you're a sailor,” he said, turning away to resume his circuit of the ship. “It's what you do.”

I watched as he continued his walk, head bent, hands clasped behind his back. He didn't look my way again: I had already been dismissed from his thoughts. His exercise concluded, he went below. I waited for a moment, then picked my way down the stairs after him. Like every other night he would lie in his cot turning the pages of his dusty volumes, running a dry finger along the lines of script, though outside the sky was still as blue as a harebell, and the sun was just poised above the horizon, and would not, this evening, ever set.

An arc of lamplight spilled across the floor. I curled myself into a corner of the stairwell, wrapped my arms around my knees. It was draughty, cold: a deep shiver rippled through me, leaving an afterswell of warmth. Punctuating the silence, I heard the dry rustle of old pages being turned. Then, after what seemed like hours, I heard the old man yawn. So his eyelids would be drooping: he'd be struggling to focus on the page. The book would teeter in his grip. He yawned again. He'd slip the marker between the pages, slot the book onto the shelf beside his bed. I heard a sigh, then the sound of bedclothes being moved, then the arc of light was gone like
a fan snapped shut. I sat on in the darkness until I heard the first snore. Then I straightened up, put a hand to the wall, felt around for the library door.

I'd show him who was stupid.

The blue light of the southern summer night streamed in through the high windows, the icy green of the seawater pressed up against the portholes. And along the walls and piled on the floor and heaped upon seats and stacked on the desk, were his books.

This was what made him think he was so clever. This was what made him think he had the authority to pronounce sentence on my mother, my Da and me.

Any fool could read a book, I told myself. Even me.

At first I selected them without thought or reason. My hand kept stretching itself out towards the books with the most alluring bindings, the richest colours. The first volume I pulled off the shelf was bottle-green with gold lettering embossed along the spine. I leafed through the pages, stopping every so often to try to pick out the words, to put them together into sense. But it wasn't as easy as I had expected. The words were often long and unfamiliar, and there were no pictures. Still, I thought, there were plenty more to choose from. I placed the book back into its niche between a claret and a blue and walked on down the shelves. I ran my fingers down the books' spines as I moved along. I half expected them to ring out as I touched them, each volume chiming clear and different, according to its content. But it was not, I'd begun to realize, going to be as simple as that. I picked out another, then another, and another, but couldn't make anything of them.

How to get through the dark mesh of those black and scratchy marks? My schooling had been at best sketchy, and
it seemed a lifetime since Miss Woodend had battered the basics into us. There hadn't been much call for reading since. I remembered the agent's ledger back in Sailortown, and writing my own name, and how it hadn't looked like me.

I had come to the end of one shelved wall and was about to turn the corner, when my fingertips seemed to snag on something. A dark and worn-looking spine. I pulled the book out, turned it over in my hands. It wasn't like the others I had chosen: no gold lettering, no coloured binding, but something seemed to be drawing me to it. It was almost warm to the touch, its skin soft against my palms, and it seemed to fit into my hands as if made for them. I lifted back the cover, I turned the leaves. It had pictures.

A lithe beast with a curling mane and tail, with cruel claws hooked from each of its four feet, glaring out at me with the features of a man. I flicked forward: men with horses' legs, men with goats' legs, one creature that was half-bird half-beast. Every one of them caught between two natures. There was even a blank-eyed young person blessed with both breasts and a prick. The images were coarse, unsubtle, unlike the suave engravings in McMichaels' book. The artist had drawn savagery into these beings' features, but despite the cruelty of their expressions, I thought that they looked sad. Where, I wondered, could they belong, in this world? Where would they find peace?

I turned another page. The picture was like all the others, depicting a half-formed thing, a creature at once fierce and sad. I looked from engraving to text, from text to engraving, desperate to make the words make sense. Because I could see from the picture, though it was crude and harsh, though it did not capture the ineffable grace of their being, or the community of their kind, though it was monochrome while they
were brilliant, and coarse though they were fine, that the artist had seen, somewhere, a mermaid.

The rigging sang with ice. My breath fogged the air in front of me. Everything loose had been battened down, everything broken had been fixed; the ship, which had been teetering on the brink of decrepitude, had been nudged back, had settled into order. There was nothing else to do. Up ahead, there seemed to be white clouds massing low on the horizon.

Inside my skull, a whole world had unfolded, flowered.

It had taken me the entire darkless southern night to pick out the sense of one paragraph of that book. Before I'd even finished to my satisfaction, I heard Jebb moving about in his room, then climbing the stairs for his morning walk. I stuffed the book back in its place and crept up the stairs behind him, crossed the deck unseen. I sparked a flame in the galley. Salt water boiled, steam hissed and condensation trickled in the purifier. I set a pan to heat, broke eggs on its rim. The smell of cooking quickened his footsteps, even brought him a little early to his breakfast.

The following night, slowly, my finger smudging the print, I spelt out the rest of the page. Some patterns were repeated again and again, with variations, like a melody: I began to detect refinements of emphasis, changes in nuance. Some words only appeared once, and were bold and black and difficult as iron bars. But sometimes whole phrases and sentences which had eluded me for hours would suddenly come clear, the letters melting away before my eyes, and I was beyond the black barrier of ink and into colour: I saw places, peoples, fabulous animals. I was elsewhere.

Once there, there was no stopping me. I would read all
night, and only stop when I heard Jebb's feet hit the deck in the morning. Then I'd stuff the book back into its place, rush up the stairs, dive into the galley and make a start on breakfast.

At first I read everything, fretted over every word, sounding out the syllables over and over, desperate to miss nothing, to make every little thing blossom into sense. But before long I became confident, reckless: I skipped phrases, letters, guessed at things. I put down books if they did not, after some little effort on my part, open themselves up to me. Unbeknownst to Jebb, I read my way, in a somewhat haphazard and capricious fashion, through a good part of his collection.

Morning. I was still vague and blinking from a long night's study, though Jebb of course was completely oblivious. We had eaten breakfast wordlessly, his eyes barely leaving his plate. Now he was on his way below, trudging down the stairs to the library. I always made sure to put everything back where it belonged down there: a book out of place was one thing he'd be sure to notice. Though if he went straight to the desk, he might find that the seat was warm, I thought, so recently had I left it.

I finished rinsing off the crocks, dried them and put them away. Then I hefted the washpot onto my hip and went out onto the deck. He would already be buried in a book by now, I thought, and then found myself wondering which one, and what he thought of it. I leaned over the side, watched the washing-water crash into the ocean's surface, watched the lighter patch disperse into the denser blue. I put the pot down onto the deck and leaned on the rail a moment. I could feel the ghost-weight of the volumes in my hands. When I closed
my eyes, my eyelids swam with words. I recalled the electric shiver I'd felt as I realized the incremental weight of what I'd found, these past few nights, down there in the library. There was no dismissing it. It was mentioned time and time again, in all the best sources, in travels, bestiaries and cyclopaedias. The centre of it all, the hub of their world: where they came from, where they departed to; where they were born and bred and went to die. In the centre of a great ocean, a sea as white as milk. The mermaids' home. His books hadn't just confirmed that they existed, they had told me where to find them.

The discovery had left me glowing. I'd been smiling ever since.

But I would wait till evening, I'd decided, until he came up from the library, before I told him. For now, I would just savour the knowledge. I'd enjoy the fact that he was wrong.

I looked down at my hands resting on the rail. The fingers were raw and pink. I brought them to my mouth and blew on them. Must be getting pretty far south by now. I glanced up ahead. That could not be right, I thought. That could not be right.

Ice. Cliffs towered above the ship. Up close, undeniable, cold as Hell's ninth circle. Surf was crashing and thundering against the cliffs, sending spray high up into the air. This was what I'd taken for mist, for clouds on the horizon. I glanced up, around, but could see nothing beyond, nothing but the spray and the ice. We were ploughing straight for it.

I'd read about this. The world's end. All the oceans of the earth must flow underneath this ice and cascade down into infinity. And they would carry us along with them.

I ran down the stairs and burst through the library doors.

Jebb was sitting at the desk, hunched in on himself like a crumpled sock. His fingertip had been moving across the
page, but it came to a halt at my entrance. He looked up. His face creased, his eyes narrowing. I went over to the desk.

“I need your help.”

“Ssshhhh.”

I planted my hands on the desk, leaned in.

“I need it now.”

“Get out of my library.”

“Listen—”

“I will not listen. If past events are anything to go by, you've probably just mended some idiotically-named piece of equipment and you're looking for praise.” His eyes flicked back up at me. “Well done,” he said. “Now run along. I have work to do.”

He gestured to the book. I leaned across, picked it up and flipped it shut.

“You can read that anytime,” I said. “I need you now. We're coming up on ice. If we don't act now the
Spendlove
will be smashed to pieces. All your books, all your manuscripts, everything you've ever worked for, gone. In an instant, forever.”

I was aloft, struggling numb-fingered with the reef points I'd tied not so long before. The wind had shifted round. I felt it stir my hair, touch my face; it smelt cold and clean and peppery. I had to get at least one of these sails unfurled, but the knots had got wet: they'd not only tightened, they'd frozen solid into little twisted blocks of ice. I found myself glancing ahead every couple of seconds, I couldn't help myself, even though I knew each glance was costing me time. That peppery smell on the wind was the smell of the ice, I realized: it was making my nose prickle, my eyes water. Finally, one of the knots came
undone between my fingers, the canvas shifted, settled, and I moved on to the next reef point, glancing up again as I slid myself along. A lurch in my belly: the cliffs were already so much closer; closer than I'd counted on. Another knot came undone between my fingertips and I shuffled on to the next. Just two more to go, three including this one. I tugged at the neat tight arcs of cord, trying to tease in some slackness, but these last few seemed even more unshiftable than the others: they had been pulled still tighter by the weight of the canvas hanging on them. They would not budge. I glanced up at the cliffs. Stupid to think that I could do it. No one in their right mind would think they could unfurl this mainsail single-handed, let alone make the turn I was attempting. I wrenched harder at the rope and a fingernail peeled back and away. The flesh was raw and began to bleed, but the knot had loosened. I pulled at the loops, teasing them apart: the knot came undone. I moved on to the next, tugged at it, another nail and then another tearing off below the quick. By the time I had loosened the final reef point my hands were running with blood. I swung myself back to the mast and scurried down the shroud like a rat, without any fear of falling. I ran over to the halyards, unhitched them, and let the canvas fall. The satisfying rush of air as it spread. It caught the wind, the boom jibbed, and the ship began to slow. I looked ahead, beyond, towards the ice. I would never get the full rig spread in time. I glanced round towards the helm. There wasn't even time, I realized, to spread another sail.

I'd told Jebb to man the helm, but he was just standing there, doing nothing. His gown fluttered round him, his hair and beard were lifted, tugged at by the wind, but otherwise, he was still. I dashed past him, grabbed the wheel, began heaving it round.

“I told you,” I shouted at him, “I told you to heave hard for port.”

I pushed my weight against the momentum of the ship, the mass of water beneath, the determination of its current.

“My books—” Jebb said.

I shifted myself to hang from the wheel, pulling down on a spoke with all my strength.

“Here,” I said, “just catch hold of this—”

“My life's work—everything I've ever—” he said, and still didn't move.

“Take hold of it and push down—”

“I can't look—I can't—Oh my God.”

Then he sat down on the deck, put his face in his hands, and didn't say another word.

Through the thrum of blood in my ears I could already hear the breakers on the cliffs. But there was something else. I could feel it, in the timbers of the ship, in the touch of the wind: the
Spendlove
was beginning, ever so slightly, to turn.