The Mermaid's Child (30 page)

The sound of churchbells seemed to follow me. Spires stuck up from the dips and curves of the land like thorns. All day the sky didn't change: a high sheet of grey cloud covered the sun. There was no rain or snow, not a break in the grey. The smooth fields, the rows of plane trees, and here and there the copses of woodland took on a luminous, transparent quality, like a watercolour painting. My stomach was hollow, empty. My head felt light.

Around midday I spotted a figure in the distance, walking the fields with a hoe or rake angled over his shoulder. At the next gap, I pushed myself through the hedge and back onto the road, tugged my hat down over my eyes and tried to look purposeful, as if I was meant to be there. I didn't want to get caught trespassing. We passed each other at a distance, too far even to nod a greeting, the hedge a thick barrier between us for most of the time. I doubt he even noticed me. For the hour or so that I was on the roadway, between first spotting him and clearing sufficient distance to go back into the fields, it was hard not to keep glancing over my shoulder, keep turning to look for the keyhole silhouette of a caravan behind me.

The first night I slept beneath the sharp bones of the hedge. Even though I'd sailed to the southern ice and travelled over mountains, I had never in my life been as cold as I was that night, alone, without even a blanket, too anxious to light a fire.

Despite the churchbells and the spires in the distance, I'd come across no settlements. I'd found nothing to eat all day but a half-rotten mangold lying by the roadside. I'd managed to pick out a piece that seemed reasonable enough, but I'd no sooner chewed through it than I was vomiting it up again into
the roadside ditch. It was hard to bring up, heavy and dry, and I was spitting blood before I'd done. It left behind a foul taste and a lingering doubt: maybe I couldn't cope. In the past, there had almost always been someone with me who'd decided what would happen next, and I'd either gone along with it, or kicked out against it. The only time I'd had to make my own way entirely alone was in the desert, and that had nearly killed me. In the shallow sleep of that freezing night, I found myself dreaming that someone was handing me breads as soft and warm as human skin, and bowls of hot steaming stew. I cupped them in my hands, inhaled, and melted with gratitude. And when I looked up, I saw that it was Cunningham passing me the food. I woke to find my fingers pressed over my face and an uneasy sense of nostalgia lingering in my belly, a craven doubt that I would now have welcomed slavery if it came with food.

When the caravans caught up with me in the afternoon of that day, it was as much as I could do to stay where I was, crouched in ditchwater, the ice a thin crust round my boot cuffs. But stay I did. Shivering and silent, I let them pass. I watched Marguerite go by. She was hunched forward, looking intently ahead, the dog sitting bolt upright in her lap. She didn't even glance my way, but I knew that she was looking for me, expected at any moment to spot me on the road ahead. I waited until the caravans were just dark shapes in the distance before climbing out of the ditch and moving on.

I still miss her.

Now they were ahead I could continue by road. No more struggling through field hedges, snagging my clothes and scratching my hands. No more wading through ditches of ice-crusted mud. I kept on going all afternoon and into the evening. Around dusk the weather turned and a cold slap of
rain-drenched wind hit me across the face. I turned up my collar, wrapped it tighter round my body, tried to ignore the fatigue, the ache in my calf muscles, the grind of my hipbones. The wind grew bitter, squally. I pushed my hat down harder on my head, kept on walking. The light was fading. I watched water drip from my hatbrim. I watched the scuffed toes of Marguerite's old boots swing out in front of me, one and then the other, again and again. My heart beat heavily in my chest.

There'd been nothing for miles, nothing but stands of slender trees and stretches of hedge; nothing to keep out the weather. And as it grew darker I could see nothing but the vague shape of the hedgerow at my side and the paleness of my own hand when I held it out in front of me.

It was fully dark. A nasty, bitter night. My face was stinging with cold. When I looked directly, I couldn't see anything at all: only when I turned away and caught it in the corner of my eye could I make something out: a vague looming shape, paler than the night. Buildings of some kind, on a hill above the road. I moved forward and reached out a hand, touched the smoothness of much-used wood. I pushed and the wood moved forward a little, hinged. A gate. Beyond, there seemed to be a lighter streak which must be a gravel track leading up to the buildings. I felt around for the fastening of the gate, unhitched it and slipped through the gap. The gravel crunched beneath my feet. I walked up the track.

In the shadow of the courtyard I caught the cowbyre's warm stink and turned towards it. There would be straw and the heat of gathered bodies. I felt along rough granular stone, found a windowledge and then a doorframe. My fingertips brushed the cold metal plate of a latch. I unbolted the door, pushed it open. Inside, warmth, the smell of cowshit, hay
and milk, the stamp and shift of cattle, the sweet scent of cattle-breath. I pulled the door shut behind me. It was pitch black in there. I reached out a hand in front and there was nothing to my touch. I couldn't even see my hand. I reached out to the left and touched a milch-cow's bony rump: her flesh quivered as if a fly had settled on her. To my right there seemed to be a wooden partition wall: I felt the planes and grooves of planking. I ran my hand along it as I moved down the byre, keeping the other hand stretched out in front of me. A cow shifted, unsettled, as I passed. My right hand knocked against an upright, slipped over it, then ran along a wooden bar. I felt along its length, came to another upright. Above, another bar parallel to the first. And below. A ladder. I felt around with a foot, found a low rung, and heaved myself up. I climbed up into the darkness, came through a narrow gap between wooden boards and was in a sweet summer-smelling drift of hay.

Warmth rose from the cattle below. As I waded through it, the hay felt soft against my legs. I stopped a little way from the trapdoor, wary of straying over an edge in the dark. I took off my sodden jacket, britches and boots and laid myself down in the hay, dragging armfuls across myself, digging my feet down into the drifts. I lay there shivering, and gradually the shivers warmed me, and after a little while I fell asleep.

I woke to the clank of milkpails, the clatter of wooden shoes on cobblestones, and an argument in a language that I didn't understand. I remembered that I'd left the byre door unbolted: someone else was getting blamed for it. An old voice, a man's, was doing the scolding and a younger woman was defending herself. I lay still, dreading that they would become suspicious and search the place, or just that they would need to fetch hay for the cattle. Although I was pretty
much buried in the stuff, my jacket and britches were lying dark and conspicuous on top of the drifts. But the quarrelling soon petered out, and before long all I heard were the murmuring sounds that people make when soothing animals, and the squirt of milk into buckets.

When I woke again it was dark and the hay was tickling my cheek. My joints were stiff, my throat sore, and for just a moment I had no idea of where I was or where Marguerite had gone. Then I remembered. I stirred myself, pushed away the mounds of hay and felt around for my clothes. They were dry, and faintly warm, and smelt of hay and cowdung.

Outside, the weather had changed: a sky scudding with clouds, a bright full moon, stars. How long had I been asleep, I wondered; how much time had passed? A hand strayed down to my belly, round and firm beneath my palm. As I moved across the courtyard, I passed a barrel resting on its side and heard the rattle of a chain as the sleeping dog inside it stirred.

The dairy was pale and cold in the moonlight. I helped myself to a long drink of milk, found two small curd cheeses and dropped them in my pockets. I took apples from the applestore, a piece of bacon from the meatsafe. They didn't have much, certainly didn't have anything to spare, but hunger sends the conscience straight to sleep: it only stirred as day broke on the open road and the last soft crumb of cheese was melting on my tongue. All compulsion gone, I was left with a full belly and the slow aching rise of guilt.

But it was forgotten soon enough. It was two days before I reached the next settlement. Two days in which I found it more and more difficult to stop myself from just curling up beneath the roadside hedge and sleeping. Two days in which my legs became weak, in which I became increasingly aware of my own heart beating, in which all I found to eat were a
few frost-softened windfalls lying in the grass of a wayside orchard.

It was mid-afternoon when I first spotted the village across the fields, but it was well into the night before I reached its outskirts. Kitchen gardens lined the road. In the moonlight I saw rows of frost-pinched brussels sprouts, hen-scratched earth and bleached fruit canes. The houses were dark and blindfolded with shutters.

Down back alleys and across gardens, I took a child's way through the village. I found the gaps in hedges, the loose pales in fences, the hand-and-foot-holds in drystone walls. Here and there I tried a door or window, gently tugging and pushing at the fastenings to see what would shift readily and without much noise. At one house I had barely touched the doorhandle when a dog began to bark, and I ran, scrambled over a wall and dropped down into an alley. I crouched there listening, heart beating fast, until the barking stopped. When doors were left unbolted, I slipped inside and stole whatever I could find. I took the eggs from underneath hens as they slept.

When the sun came up, I was striding out along the road in guilty haste. A child would go without breakfast. A dog would be kicked for sleeping through the theft of that day's dinner. How many chickens' necks would be wrung because it looked like they'd stopped laying? I took an egg from out of my pocket, weighed it in my hand. A clutch of three more still nestled, warm and reassuring, in my pocket. I looked at it a moment, so perfect, smooth and self-contained, then I pierced it top and bottom with a fingernail, and raised it to my lips to suck.

A few days later, in another village, almost big enough to be called a town, there was a bakery: hot and glowing at four o'clock in the morning when, sneaking down an alleyway, I
came across its back entrance. I waited outside for almost an hour before I got my chance. I took two loaves, ate the first one so quickly that I'd almost finished it before I'd got beyond the village limits. I gave myself the hiccups.

Long after daybreak and miles further on, I was still wracked with guilt and hiccups. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't help myself. I was driven by something more pressing, more compulsive than I'd ever known. Something stronger than me was working now, something far more vital. You.

At my feet the rabbit-clipped grass ended abruptly. Below, slabs of turf lay tumbled down on the muddy sand. In front of me stretched a sheet of rippling water, reflecting the grey sky. Gulls rose and fell on the evening air.

The road swung out away to the right, towards the town. The town's walls were grey and high and smooth and the buildings rose up inside them, streets spiralling up a rocky outcrop; on the seaward side, an arm of stone reached out into the grey waves, holding shipping still and close, as if by these displays of solidity the town could assert itself against the ghosts of elsewhere. Port towns are always riddled with thoughts of what might lie beyond, of what has been left behind.

A sharp breeze blew off the sea, pushing back my hatbrim, bringing the blood to my cheeks, making me gasp. It seemed like so long since I'd felt anything like awake, felt anything more than the heavy pulse of blood, the increasing inertia of the flesh. I just stood there a moment, the wind on my face and in my lungs, the blood stirring in my cheeks, the sound of the sea like breath. And then I shrugged off my jacket and shirt, stepped out of my trousers. The cold air brushed my
skin into goosepimples. My hand rested on the roundness of my belly. A moment, just standing there, looking out across the silver plane of the water. Then I stepped down the bank, from turf to turf, then onto the sand. Heels sinking deep, toes spreading wide, I walked out towards the sea.

Water sprayed up over my ankles, shins, knees. I waded on until I stood thigh-deep, then dived out and swam. And as I turned and twisted through the water, I felt you move. A flicker, silvery and soft. A minnow in my belly. I stopped, hanging still, and pressed a hand to my cold skin. Perhaps the mermaids crowded close, drawn towards that glimmer, brushing me with a cold hand, a curl of tail, a tendril of saltsoaked hair as they passed by. If they did, I didn't notice them: I was listening for you.

SEVENTEEN
 

Open-topped, single-masted, she was little more than a dinghy really, but she seemed canny enough. She was due to sail on the morning tide. The captain and I established this between us after much mugging and gesturing on my part, and a few functional but not unfriendly words on his. He, like many sailors, port-town publicans, whores and pawn-brokers, possessed the ability to negotiate in seemingly any language that was required of him. When I unknotted my handkerchief and showed him the clutch of coins Marguerite had given me, he shifted them round my palm with a fingertip, shook his head sadly.