The Mermaids Singing (10 page)

When I got outside, I saw Clíona and Marcus across the lot; they were speaking in a close, secretive posture to the priest, who looked silly standing on the gravel in his robes. The priest handed Clíona
an envelope; she opened it and read the paper inside. Marcus was shaking his head. I went up to them.

“Look,” I said, startling them, “do I have a father here or not?”

Clíona sighed. “It seems your father's been delayed in Dublin,” she said. The priest and Marcus were avoiding my eyes. I snatched the note away from her and, before I could open it, I saw the priest looking at me strangely, as if he couldn't decide whether to scold me or laugh.

My father's handwriting. His letters were carefully formed; he followed those old rules of penmanship my mother used to use. I stared at those lines for a long time. Not ready to face me. As though I were a chore. An interruption in his otherwise contented life.

“He doesn't want to see me?” I said. No one answered.

I put the note back in its envelope and thrust it at Clíona. I started walking away without them, in the opposite direction from the hotel.

“Gráinne?” Clíona called out, but I didn't look.

“Let her alone,” I heard Marcus say. “She won't go far.”

Fuck you, I thought. I can leave anytime I want to.

 

I walked on the road past the cliffs I'd found the night before and came to a strip of ocean that reminded me of Singing Beach. There was the same squealing sand, the seaweed in bubbled piles on the barnacle rocks. I wondered if my mother had thought of this place while she was at home, dying in that little room.

I followed a road up around the corner of the island that led steeply into deserted fields. There were no real houses here, only remnants of stone huts. I could hear the ocean, and I followed the sound, crunching up through the dry grass until I started wheezing. I thought there was a ringing in my ears, but it started to sound like music, and as I came over the last hill, I saw a boy sitting in the grass, blowing on a tin instrument. The boy turned around; it was Liam.

“Howaya, Gráinne,” he said. He didn't seem surprised to see me—more like he'd been waiting for me. I remembered Clíona saying he was happy I was back. Maybe he had a crush on me, I thought, so I smiled at him and sat down. His hair had fallen out of its Sunday combing, into a dark blanket above his eyes. He was cute, not as beautiful as Stephen, but close. I felt that old anticipation well up. Something familiar to focus on.

We were at the top of the island; at the edge the land shot down in steep cliffs to the water below. My hair was so short it was no comfort in the cold, and I felt dizzy. Liam got down on his stomach and motioned for me to do the same. We leaned our heads over the edge. The black slices of the cliff went so far down, it was hard to capture the depth. The only way I knew how high we were was by looking at the seagulls, some of which looked like pieces of lint floating far below.

“You wouldn't want to walk up this way at night, without someone who knows the island,” Liam said. “You'd walk right off the edge of the world.” Our arms were touching now, and I looked at him, thinking this view was all his ploy to make a pass at me.

“Aren't you watching?” he said, so I looked back down. The seagulls, hundreds of them, weren't flying so much as spreading their wings and letting the wind carry them.

Liam sat up and watched me, his elbows propped on his bent knees. I shifted my position so he wasn't looking at the worst side of my hair.

“Do you not remember me?” he said. His eyes were so blue they looked drawn in with layers of thick pastels.

“No,” I said, plucking at a rock that was covered with something like sharp, light green hair. “Do you remember me?” He looked serious, then broke into a wide smile.

“Ah, no,” he said. He was teasing. “Sure, why would I? We were only babies.”

“So why would I remember you?” I asked.

“No girl ever forgets me,” he said.

“You wish,” I said.

He blushed and threw a clump of dry grass at me. “Do you want to hear a tune?” he said.

“Are you going to sing?” I said sarcastically.

“Ah, I could now, but not during our first reunion, I'd be too shy.” He picked his whistle out of his pocket. It had six holes and a blue plastic mouthpiece. He blew into it, playing some notes, then started a song. He was really good; his fingers blurred they were going so fast. The tune sounded sad, and fluttery. I liked the look of his mouth, and waited for him to finish playing, and kiss me.

“That's ‘The Cliffs of Moher,'” he said when he was finished. “The place is in Clare, but the song reminds me of this. The gulls.” He gestured toward the cliff's edge, and played some more. The music was like the way those gulls let themselves be blown up down and around with the wind.

“Where did you learn to play that?” I said. Liam wiped the mouthpiece on his sleeve and pushed the whistle back in his pocket.

“My father taught me,” he said. “He plays fiddle with the lads in the pub. Sometimes they let me in on a session, in the afternoons. When I'm eighteen they'll let me play the night hours. I play the flute in the sessions, sometimes the guitar.”

“You're pretty good,” I said. He stood up, brushing grass from his legs.

“Everyone's good at something,” he said. I hoped he would ask me what I was good at, so I could say “kissing,” and grab him. My mother would have done something that bold in an instant. I won
dered whether his mouth would have that heat, like Stephen's, and whether he would step away at the last minute.

“Will I show you the island?” he said instead.

“Oh,” I said. I looked back toward the harbor. “How do you get out there?” I said.

“Granuaile's castle?” he said. “I should have known you'd want to go there; you're named for the pirate queen.” I stood up and tried to look ready for an adventure, though secretly I was afraid we'd have to swim there.

We walked back to the pier and Liam untied one of the large black rowboats with a high pointed front and thin oars.

“You can't walk out unless the tide's low,” Liam said. “So we'll take my Da's curragh. Da's out in the trawler now, but years back everyone fished in these. They'd harpoon sunfish, big as whales, and drag them in to shore.”

I couldn't imagine being far out to sea in such a little boat. It looked thick, layered with tar, but vulnerable. I heard my mother's scold, how it was ridiculous for me to be afraid of the water after all the time she'd spent teaching me how to swim.

We rowed across the harbor toward the jutting finger of land where Granuaile's castle stood alone. Liam was stronger than he looked; his arms pulled the oars through the water like it was air. The harbor streamed by my side like a highway. He pulled us up into a sandy cove and I climbed clumsily out of the boat.

We walked up a grassy hill, potholed with nooks of sand. The castle rose slowly up ahead of us, gray stone walls reaching up with no roof. Inside was a huge room carpeted with grass. Stairways were carved into the walls and led to narrow pathways all around the top of the castle. There were openings in the stone, slits just wide enough to peer out with one eye. At the front, which I had seen from the ferry, part of the wall had fallen away, leaving a gap looking down on a slide of sharp rocks and the crashing waves of the open sea outside the harbor. To the right, a grassy stairway led to another
room, where tiny white flowers pushed up between the pebbles of the floor.

“This was Granuaile's bedroom,” Liam said. “One of her children was born here, and while she was in labor, the castle was attacked. Her men kept interrupting her, asking for instructions on how to handle it. Gráinne gave birth to the boy, then marched down to the fighting, roaring about the eejits who couldn't do without her for ten minutes.” Liam laughed. “Fearless, that one,” he said.

She who inspires terror, I thought, like my mother had always wanted me to be.

Liam sat down by an indent in the wall that looked like it had once been a fireplace. The stone above it was slightly lighter than the rest, and when I looked closer I saw that it was a carving. The upper half of a naked woman, her breasts pointy and severe, her head bowed so that her hair covered most of her face. Her eyelids peeked out, lowered in what looked like sadness. Her bottom half had fallen away; severed by the rough inside of stone.

“That's a mermaid,” Liam said. “There's lots of these old carvings on the island. I wasn't let to look at them as a boy, on account of what Nana called their ‘pornographic bosoms.' The lads and I used to sneak around, peeking and poking at all the stone tits on the island.”

“Couldn't you find any real ones?” I said. I meant it to be flirtatious, but he took it as a geography question.

“Ah, there's real mermaids here as well. There have been for ages. Some of the island surnames, like mine and your Da's, are supposed to be those of the descendants of captured merrows.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. How naive did he think I was?

“That's the story. My surname, MacNamara, means ‘son of the sea' in Irish. The mermaids, they swim into caves like, and sing with sad voices, trying to draw in the lonely men. If a man follows, the mermaid grabs him and takes him down under the water, has her way with him, and drowns the eejit. 'Tis bad luck for a fisherman
to see a mermaid, for it means he'll drown if he's not captured first.

“But sometimes, the odd cute man can capture one of the creatures. Mermaids wear this enchanted red cap, the ‘
cohullen driuth
,' and if you nick it, their fins turn to legs and they can't return to the sea until they get it back. That's how come the MacNamaras and the O'Flahertys are said to come from a union with a mermaid. Your man somewhere along the family tree snatched her up as his bride and she had his children before she could escape. There's some that say she took one of her children under the sea with her, turned the girl into a baby mermaid who never grew any older.”

“That was cruel of her,” I said, still suspicious but drawn in.

“Ah, sure, she loved her husband as well. But the pull of the sea was too great and she had to go back eventually.”

“You don't really believe that,” I said, and Liam shrugged.

“Doesn't matter if I do or I don't. There's no harm in it. 'Tis just a story, sure.”

“Have you ever seen a mermaid?” I said.

“Ah, no. But I thought your Mum was one.”

“My mother?” I said. “You remember my mother?”

“The odd bit of her, yeah.” Liam was blushing now. “My Da used to tell me the stories in the cradle, and I remember your Mum being at Nana's house. She talked funny, I thought, and I wasn't allowed to the beach with her because she swam naked. She had all that red hair, and the eyes like seaweed, and she'd always be looking out over the water like she missed something. It was silly, I know, but I was only the wee boy. Then she vanished, and the relations were whispering, and my Da says I cried and cried because I thought she'd taken you under the water with her.” Liam snapped his mouth shut, like he'd just remembered I was listening.

“I thought you didn't remember me,” I said. He plucked a white flower out of the floor, twirling it in his dirty fingers.

“I don't, not much so,” he said. He wasn't looking at me. “I just remember missing you.”

I pictured my mother, with her hair the way it used to be,
trapped in a world where she talked funny, and myself as a little girl, dragged screaming under the sea.

“I wish I could remember you,” I said. I was tired of everyone telling me stories of a life I couldn't recall.

Liam looked up and smiled, shifted so he was kneeling by the window in the wall. When he motioned for me to join him, I was conscious of my own breathing and I licked my lips. Kneeling, we were the perfect height to see the ocean through the slit in the stone. Without looking at me, Liam took my hand, not entwining fingers like most boys, but like a child, gripping my palm and wrapping his fingers over the space above my thumb. His hand was dry and warm and it felt natural, not like the kind of pass that would send me into panicked expectation. A smell came hurtling back to me, smoke and salt and damp, and the warm grip of a hand, tiny and plump like my own. Liam let go, but I had remembered.

“We're still friends,” he said. “We're just after a gap is all.”

I watched the tide recede and thought of Stephen's hands sliding my fingers down cool ivory keys.

What does it mean, I wanted to ask Liam,
This is my body, it will be given up for you?
Why does it make me think of Stephen, of kissing, of marooned blood clots, and my mother's hair like abandoned nests in the wastebasket?

Liam was saying something about Seamus and Clíona, and my mother leaving the island.

“They were brokenhearted, the both of them. Nana just made herself busier, you know. Seamus did as well, but for years he had this desperate look about him. He used to meet the ferry in the evenings, said he was just getting his post, but everyone knew he was wishing to see you and Grace on the quay. Then, about a year after you'd gone, he disappeared for months. Folks were hoping he'd followed after you both, but he came home alone and didn't talk about where he'd been.”

“He doesn't even want to see me,” I said. “He left a note saying he can't face me.”

“Ah, I doubt that's the whole truth of it,” Liam said.

“What is, then?” I asked.