The Mermaid's Child (32 page)

“What's your name?” he said.

I looked up. He was taking a bottle from an inner pocket. He uncorked it, offered it to me. I shook my head. I watched as he drank for a moment, his head thrown back.

“You don't know me,” I said.

He took the bottle from his lips, looked at me.

“Eh?”

“You don't know me,” I said again.

His eyes skimmed my clothes, the bulk of my jacket, my
scuffed and patched boots, then turned up again to look at my face.

“No, no,” he said, “Of course I do. Just give me a minute. You're—erm—”

And he stared at me, blearily, through a fog of drink.

“You're—”

And then his eyes cleared, his mouth fell open. He recognized me.

“Bloody hell.”

He brought a hand to his mouth, leaned in towards me, looked me up and down again. And then he laughed. He laughed, and for a moment I just watched him, watched the shake of his shoulders and the crease of his eyes, smelt the drink on his breath. Then I pulled my jacket tighter round me and stood up.

“No, no,” he said. “It's just after so long—” He put his hand on my arm, gripped it. “And you're still angry with me—” This set him off again. He rested his free hand on his knee, leaning down on it. I pulled away. He shook his head, sobering a little.

To the east, the sky was flushed with golden light, the clouds were pink.

“If you knew half the trouble you got me into back in Sailortown—” he said, and shook his head again. “And to think I was going to offer you a partnership tonight.”

Looking down at him seated on the tomb, I could feel the heat throbbing in my face. His eyes were wet with laughter.

“I would have said no,” I said.

He wiped an eye. “Oh really.”

“You're a liability.”

He almost choked. “I'll have you know that I'm the best—”

I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “Not anymore.”

I tried my damaged foot. It seemed to take my weight.

“You're finished now,” I said. “You're over.”

And I turned and walked away.

EIGHTEEN
 

Strange how a road can look so different on the return: you see first the other profile of a hill, come upon a copse from an entirely different angle, notice for the first time a standing stone you must have passed by oblivious on the way out. The same road can look so different, in fact, that it will take something else entirely to make you realize where you are. Something tiny, such as the colour of the stones in the bottom of a stream, or the way the harebells grow in clumps along a bank to catch the sun. Or the smell of gorse.

As I walked those last few miles, a hand to the ache in my back, I could feel you moving all the time. Low down I felt what must have been a fist, and there seemed to be a foot stuck in underneath my ribs. Already struggling against your confines. It made me smile, though for the first time I began to feel afraid of your coming. You seemed so real now, and so ready to come.

It was dusk when I arrived, boots scuffing through the road dust, the weight of my belly like a mountain cantilevered against my hips. As I came down the hill and out from underneath the trees, the same cottages shambled out towards me from the crossroads, here and there a light glowed in a bedroom window, and in one downstairs room, where the curtains had not yet been drawn, two women leaned across a table to talk. I watched as one of them spoke, lifting a hand into the air with a slight dismissive gesture, and then a little later the other nodded. A child came in and was shooed back to bed, then one of the women stood up, lifted a kettle from the stove and made tea. The Clay twins. Grown up into a kind of mild beauty, apparently content.

At the crossroads, the windows of the Anchor were uncurtained, glowing with fire- and oil-light. As I passed I caught sight of Uncle George, leaning on the counter, talking. That same unearned air of authority, the same arrogant tilt of the jaw. It looked like he hadn't changed at all. It didn't seem to matter now.

I carried on across the green, the long grass tangling round my ankles. Birds rose from sleep into the air, their voices swimming up into the sky, dissolving. Yellow eyes blinked at me; goats tethered to graze on the common land. I felt again the chill of bare legs, and remembered the pocked and freckled dockleaf in my hand, the way I'd leaned in, poised to run, tickling the old billy's nose with it. And with the memory came a shiver of apprehension, as if I were a child again. My Da had died and Gran had sent me away.

All I'd ever wanted was someone to love.

In front of me, the schoolhouse stood in darkness. From out of nowhere came the memory of something tiny, the way a plant grew in the gaps between the paving slabs outside
the schoolhouse door. It would break out into flowers in the springtime: red, like the open mouths of birds. I realized now, as I set my booted foot on the step, peered down and saw nothing but the dark, that I would never know anywhere so intimately as this. My hand reached out for the latch. The door was unbolted. I stepped inside.

A corner of a table caught me in the thigh: I hissed. A table where no table should have been. I made my way around its edge. On the dresser, the plates were patterned with sprigs and leaves, monochrome in this light. I'd remembered a willow-pattern service. Across the room, the settle sat bolt upright against the wall. And above it hung the map. I crossed the room, climbed up onto the settle, and looked at it. I reached into my pocket, struck a light, held it till the flame scorched my fingers, and looked. I struck another, then another, each one burning down to touch my fingertips, making me flinch and shake the flame away. In the morning, Miss Woodend would find a scattering of charred matches on the floor.

The map was not as I'd remembered it. It wasn't what I'd thought it had been. Obliged to observe without looking all those years ago, my peripheral vision had noted what had seemed to be the map's outlines: a squarish landmass circled by green seas, a scooped out central lake. An island country, washed by waves. I'd imagined the ways away from here, dust rising in a dot dot line across the map. I'd seen myself bobbing around in the margins, sailing right underneath the frame and out across the schoolroom wall. But now, up close, what felt like a lifetime later, I saw two green-tinged coastlines facing each other across a squarish stretch of sea, and in the centre of the sea an island, traced in green.

The cottage was in darkness, the windows shuttered, the doors bolted, but I didn't realize until I'd gone down to the river and found the ferryboat lying aslant on the shilloe, with a tarpaulin lashed over it to keep out the rain, that my grandmother was dead.

I rowed myself across the river, walked the floodplane to the churchyard. I made my way to my father's grave. The turf had been recently lifted and relaid.

It was only then that I realized that when my father had died and she had sent me away, it was because she couldn't look at me anymore. She kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see him.

The next day, I took an awl from amongst my father's tools, rolled a fallen stone from the churchyard wall. I set the stone on the grave, and carved the one word, “Reed.”

That is all the family I can give you. I hope it is enough.

I gave birth to you two weeks later, in the cottage. As I knelt at the side of the bed, my shirt rucked up about my hips, rocking back and forth and moaning, bleared with fatigue and pain, I knew her at last: my mother on her knees as I was on my knees, eyes squeezed shut on red and mouth open to shout against the pain, and before her other women, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and their mothers before them, all of them swollen and bent, bodies racked with these same waves, this agony, this love. When you slipped, toadfaced and greasy, into the world, and I sank back exhausted. I just looked at you lying there, the cord still trailing from you to me, still pulsing, and I was overwhelmed by the fierce simplicity of what I felt for you.

Then I lifted you to my chest, and touched your bloody cheek, and you opened your eyes. You looked at me.