The Mermaid's Child (31 page)

“Two times,” he said, holding up his fingers to elucidate, and I closed my palm, rattled the coins a moment in my fist, then nodded at him.

“I'll be back,” I said.

The glow from the windows was warm and smoky. Standing outside on the quay, I could hear shouting, laughter and several voices conspiring to murder a tune. Now and then I'd catch a word or two, a clot of syllables I thought I might have understood if I'd heard more, if I could've just teased them apart in the right places. I ran a hand down the front of Cunningham's old jacket. It hung loose and concealing. Something to be thankful for.

I pushed open the door. The smell of the place—tobacco, spirits and stale beer—made my stomach heave. Eyes peered over the rims of glasses or were narrowed through a stream of smoke. The room had fallen silent. I moved over to the counter, hitched myself up onto a stool. The barman was a big man, pale, with a long rusty moustache. I knew he'd understand me, if he chose to.

“Dandelion and burdock, if you have it,” I said. Everyone in the room seemed to lean in towards me to listen.

He shook his head.

“Ginger beer?” I asked.

“Wine,” he said. “Beer, brandy.”

“Milk?”

He shook his head again.

“Tea, then.”

He just looked at me.

“It'll have to be a beer then, I suppose,” I said, and watched as he poured it. Then I pushed a coin across the counter. The biggest denomination that I had: Marguerite had pressed it into my palm after a performance in the mountains. I should have left it on a dairy shelf in place of those two cheeses. I
should have slipped it onto the baker's floury tabletop, or underneath a hen's warm rump. But I'd known that this moment, or a moment like it, would come eventually. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as the barman picked up the coin, raised an eyebrow. He began counting out the change.

“Haven't seen you in here before,” he said, setting the glass down in front of me.

“No,” I said, and took a sip; the stuff tasted foul, oily. I placed it back down on the counter.

“In town for long?”

“Not long,” I said, and smiled up at him. “I just came in on the last boat, it's my first time away from home.” I raised the glass to my lips, let the liquid rest against them a moment without drinking, then wiped away the foam with the back of my hand. “A year's grace, the old man said, then back home, settle down, take over the family firm.” I glanced at the barman's face. A common enough story: it could, almost, have been my own. But was he falling for it? I didn't have the money to try this again in another bar. I didn't have the time.

“So it's my last chance to live it up,” I said, leaning in, giving him a wink. He picked up a glass, began polishing it with a grimy rag.

“You got money,” he said, “I can find you a woman.”

“Er, no,” I said, and then cleared my throat. “No, not that. I was looking for a game of cards, in fact. I heard this is the place for it.”

The barman looked across the counter at me a moment, his pale eyes unreadable. I lifted my glass, tilted it, watched the foam slide and shift inside. Of course I'd heard nothing of the sort, I'd just walked into the first bar I'd come across. But I'd been in enough of these places back in Sailortown to know I couldn't be too wide of the mark. A moment passed. I
looked up at him again, gave him my biggest, broadest, most innocent smile.

“Later,” the barman said. “Midnight. Five card jack.”

I tilted my head. “I don't think I know that one,” I said.

The wick had burned down low. Tallow dripped down the candle stump, pooled out into the saucer. Sweat trickled down the side of my nose. I reached up a hand to wipe it away and glanced round the circled faces. I was finding it hard to concentrate.

He had changed, but I would have known him anywhere, and in an instant.

He'd come through to the back room after everybody else. He must have arrived at the bar just in time for the game, slipping through the front door as we were moving through to the back. If he'd been in the bar while I was there, I would have seen him. I would have turned to him without thinking, as a compass needle turns towards the north.

He was thinner, and he'd never been heavy. His cheekbones were stark and sharp, his eyes underhung with shadows. He looked faded, worn: his clothes were shiny at the seams and there was grey in his hair. But when he came into the room, scraped back the empty seat and nodded at the other players, I felt a surge of joy. It was all I could do to stop myself standing up and crossing over to him, pulling up a chair and giving him a nudge, a smile. I'd've been back at his side, and happy, before I'd even thought about it.

But I did stop myself. I thought about it. He wasn't the only one who'd changed.

He took his cards, he made his bets, once or twice he scowled down at his hand, but he didn't look up at me. Another
change; in the past his face had always been a mask while he was playing. The memory, the intimacy of this private knowledge, gave me goosepimples. I plucked a card out from my hand, replaced it at random between two others. I wouldn't look at him again. I knew, without even taking my eyes off my cards, that he was drunk. He was drunk, he was losing, and he hadn't noticed me.

The barman shunted a final column of coins out towards the heap in the middle of the table. He took his cigarette from his mouth, tapped the ash onto the floor.

“Let's see 'em, then, lad,” he said, a smile twisting up the corner of his mouth. The smell of his tobacco was making me feel sick, was putting me off my game, as if there weren't enough distractions already.

“I think—” I said.

In the corner of my eye, the bowed head, the tremble in the hands that held the cards, the hands that had undone the buttons of my wet shirt one by one, had tugged each fly button loose and grazed the cold skin of my belly.

My mouth was watering. I swallowed. I laid my cards out flat on the table. “I think that might be what you call a five card jack,” I said.

Someone coughed. Someone's hand, resting on the tabletop, curled into a fist, the knuckles whitening. I tried a smile. No one reciprocated. No one said a word. I reached out to pull my winnings to me.

One of the men was picking up the fans of cards, forming them back into a pack, shuffling them.

Across the table, he looked up for the first time, and I looked straight back at him. I raised an eyebrow. He held
my gaze a moment, then he dropped his eyes, pushed back his chair and walked out without saying a word. What had it meant, that glance? What had he wanted to convey? It was too late to ask: he had pulled the door shut behind him, and was gone. I noticed a card land just by my hand, then another. I looked back round at the table.

“Well, that's enough for me,” I said. I dragged handfuls of coin over the tabletop, began scooping it into my pockets. “I'm done for.”

“You'll stay for another.”

The cards were skimming out across the table, were gathering in front of me.

“No, thank you, I really must be going—”

“One more game.”

“Very decent of you but—” I moved over towards the door, stretched my hand out towards the latch. My pockets were heavy with money, my jacket swinging with its weight. Behind me, I heard the scrape as chairs were pushed back. I pressed down on the thumbplate, began to draw the door back towards me, then a hand was placed on mine: I saw it before I felt it. Blunt-fingered, square-nailed, pale as milk pudding. I turned round, my hand falling away from the latch, his hand falling away with mine, the door standing half-open at my side. I raised my eyes to his face.

The barman said something, and I watched his oddly pink lips move behind the fringe of his moustache, saw the yellowed ridges of his teeth, noticed the patterning of freckles across his nose and down his cheeks, but I didn't hear a word that he was saying, because something was welling up inside me, something blind and ferocious and mad. It wasn't the money, at least, not directly. It was him, standing there, keeping me there when every fibre of my body was crying out to
be elsewhere. One more solid fleshy obstacle in my way. I felt my teeth clench, felt my right hand wrap itself up into a knot. I slipped my back foot into the gap between the door and the doorjamb, shifted my weight onto it, and then I punched him in the face.

I was out of the door in an instant. The main bar room was deserted. I ran for the front door, skidded up to it, began to fumble with the bolts. It would have been more satisfying, I found myself thinking, if I could have said something, told him that he was just the last in a long line of offenders, and that when I slammed my knuckles into his nose it was nothing personal. But there wasn't time for regrets or explanations. I heaved the door open, a blast of cold air hit me in the face, and I stumbled out into the quayside.

To the east, the sky was beginning to pale. The harbour was right in front of me. It was nearly high tide. Ships' lanterns scattered light like coins across the water. At the end of the quay, a yellow lamp bobbed and swung, waiting for me. In a little less than half an hour, the sun would be up, the tide would have turned, and my ship would have set sail.

The door fell shut behind me. From inside came raised voices, the sound of movement. I was turning towards the yellow light, about to run for the safety of the boat, when something snagged my eye. Over to the left, in the opposite direction, there'd been a movement, as if the shadows had rippled. I turned back and saw him, just as he went round the corner, just before he slipped out of sight. There was no mistaking it. It was Joe.

I ran after him along the quay, tugging my jacket close, the bulging pockets knocking against my legs. I was out of breath almost instantly, my heart beating fast and heavy, my
head tight and spinning from lack of air. But I wouldn't let him get away. Not like that. Not without a word. Not again.

My ankle twisted sideways. I froze, half-crouched, swaying, biting at my lip. I tried my weight on it: a burst of pain, bright and sudden as a firework. I couldn't move.

I glanced over my shoulder. Back at the bar, the door had been pulled open and light spilled out across the cobbles. A dark figure stood there, was joined by another man, then another, until their bodies blocked out the light. They hadn't seen me yet. I wrapped my arms around my belly. One of the men turned his head towards me. The light streamed past him, caught on sandy-red hair, on the dark blood flowing from the barman's nose.

Then something pulled the hem of my jacket and I was tugged, sideways, into darkness.

I lost my footing. As I fell I tore my ankle again. I landed on my right thigh on the cobbles, my hand pressed into something slimy. I hunched forward, breathing, waiting for the pain to fade. He was there beside me, hunkered down in the darkness: I could feel him rather than see him, but I knew without question who it was.

“C'mon,” he breathed into my ear, and I could smell the drink on his breath as he spoke. But I couldn't move, I had to stay there, curled up, listening inwardly for changes, shifts, for the slightest indication of you.

“They're coming,” he hissed. I could already hear the clatter of footfalls on the cobbles. “Give me your hand.”

I didn't give him my hand: his fingers wrapped themselves around my wrist. He pulled me to my feet and I hissed against the shock as my foot touched the ground. He jerked at my wrist and was off, dragging me after him in a crouching
uneven half-run up the dark alleyway, my feet slipping on the dirty cobbles, my leg and hand stinging from the fall, every step jolting my ankle. I kept one arm wrapped around my belly; half my mind was still wrapped up in the warm darkness inside.

Suddenly we were out of the alleyway and into moonlight. I was hunched, limping and breathless with pain, my wrist still caught tight in his hand. He was striding along beside me, alert and assured, upright as the day he'd stood on the village road and the moonlight had caught his smile. Such a slight thing, a smile. But without it, I would have turned and walked back into the house, and into a different life.

He rounded a corner into a narrower street and I stumbled after him: we passed through wrought iron gates and were suddenly out in the open, the sky clear above us.

A graveyard. I would have stopped then, would have slumped down on a tomb or kerb, but he dragged me on between the monuments and headstones until we came to a place where the grass grew high between the graves and the stones were crumbling and aslant. He stopped. I put a hand on the lid of a tomb and sat down. I could hear nothing but the blood pounding through my skull. I leaned forward, rested my head upon a hand: I was going to be sick, I thought. Any moment now, I would be sick. I made to stand, to turn away, but as I stood a blanket seemed to come down over my senses, lights swimming and clotting, everything scrolling away into the distance, sounds coming to me muffled and distorted. There was pressure on my shoulder, pushing me back down to be seated.

“Whoa, whoa there,” he was saying. “What's the rush?”

I rested my head upon my hand again, concentrated for a moment on my breathing, on making sure I didn't throw up.

He sat himself down beside me, pushed back his hat. I turned my head and looked at him. The sky was growing paler, the light increasing. It caught the plane of his cheek, the smooth side of his nose. It caught in his eye when he turned to look at me. It picked out the map of lines and wrinkles when he smiled. I closed my eyes, shook my head, leaned down more heavily on my hand. I was wrong, I thought. He hasn't changed a bit.

“You're good,” he was saying. “You're very good.”

I opened my eyes, looked down at the dark fabric of my trouserlegs, and between them the rough cold stone of the tomb.

“With the cards, I mean. The whole shebang, in fact. The innocent abroad; it's not what you'd call original, but it's certainly effective: they had no idea.” He paused a moment, watching me, and I was about to turn to him, to speak. But when it came to it, it no longer seemed to matter how he'd come to lose me in a game of dice, or how remorseful he had felt to find me gone, or what kind of trouble he had been in as a consequence. I found I didn't want to ask him anything at all.