Jake’s Mermaid
but he doesn’t believe in fairy tales
‘It’s water — just water.’
She allowed a trickle to pass her lips but refused more than that.
He eased her back into a lying position, tucked the duvet around her and sat back on his heels. Something about her features disturbed his gestalt concept of a face, though he couldn’t pick out exactly what was bothering him. Perhaps her eyes were set a little too far apart, or was it those small oddly-pointed teeth or that flattened stub of a nose? No hair. Skin smooth as a marble statue.
‘Do you remember anything?’ he said. ‘Who attacked you? How did you end up on the beach?’
He couldn’t tell whether she understood or not. Perhaps she didn’t speak English or was suffering from shock. He ought to get her to a hospital but he didn’t know this place. No phone, no way of contacting anyone.
Last night’s storm rain had battered against the side of the camper-van, winds rocking it like a savage mother threatening to uncradle a screaming babe.
Good. That’s how he wanted it — hard, rough, brutal. He didn’t want to sleep. His eyes itched, his body ached, his head chimed with Dear Prudence, the song going round and round in the circuits of his brain.
How long had he sat in darkness as enraged clouds released their venom with a flash of laser-white and the roar of a wild beast? How many times had he gone over and over the decisions he’d made that night? Paul Haggerty’s thirtieth. Not Abi’s thing. She wanted to go home.
He’d had too much to drink. Was having a good time. Refused to go with her.
Dark, winding roads. A lorry appearing out of the darkness. Dazzling lights. She must have over-reacted — tried to avoid it, hit a tree.
Would it have happened some other way? Was it in the script? What if the gods who made sport of man’s ills had already decided on what was to be?
The rage eased, the clouds wept themselves dry and pink light crept down the window. He wiped his face, stood up and made some coffee.
Cool air, fresh with ozone, smoothed his hair and filled his lungs. The tantrum of the storm had passed and the sea was subdued. Black seaweed, shelled creatures and the cracked limbs of trees littered the sand.
The obstacle ahead of him looked like another piece of driftwood until he got closer and his perception adjusted the cues.
A person? A woman? Naked.
He set off at a sprint until he reached her, crouched, felt for a pulse, strained to hear a breath. She was injured. Knife attack? Those cuts on her side looked serious.
He wrestled out of his sweater, made a fumbled effort to wrap it round her and carried her back to his camper-van. Her skin felt fish-cold and his immediate impulse was to get her warm. Once inside, he wrapped her in his duvet and held her until she fluttered awake.
Now, lying here on his scrap of a bed, she was having trouble breathing.
‘I’m going to call an ambulance.’ He hovered near her not sure if she understood anything he was saying. He spoke emphatically, slowly. ‘You. Stay here. Okay?’
‘Take me back.’
He stopped in the doorway. So she could speak…sort of. It was more of a whisper, raw in the back of her throat. ‘Take you back? Are you crazy? You’re seriously injured and you could have concussion, hypothermia -’
‘It was the shock of transition.’
‘Transition?’
‘From water to air.’
Did she mean the bends? He wasn’t sure what the symptoms were. Perhaps she a deep-sea diver, but if so what had happened to her wet-suit?
She pushed herself up on her elbows. ‘I need to get back to the sea.’
‘You,’ he said, ‘need to be in hospital. Your wounds -’
‘They are not wounds.’ She pulled herself up to a sitting position. ‘Please.’ She was gasping as if she was short of breath. ‘I can’t survive long out here.’
What was she talking about? She clearly needed help and he wasn’t going to stand here wasting time arguing. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
‘Wait.’ She slipped the duvet off her shoulders and down to her waist.
He hadn’t seen her injuries in great detail — hadn’t wanted to — but the sight arrested him. Those slits along her ribs were too neat, too precise, as if they’d been made deliberately, as if they were…functional?
His brain wavered in confusion. Who had done this to her? Why? Where had she come from? How had she ended up on the beach? How did any of this explain the refined elegance of those slits?
She rose unsteadily to her feet — staggered towards the door.
He grasped her by the shoulders, partly to steady her, partly to demand information. ‘I need you to explain who you are — what you are.’
Because a strange conclusion was formulating in his mind. She came from the sea. She wanted to go back to the sea. Did ancient mariners have real hooks to hang their fishy tales upon?
But where was her tail? Where were the long flowing locks of pale hair?
His heart was thudding, his breaths short and shallow. It sounded ridiculous, even to himself. He was jumping to the most unlikely explanations instead of looking for the simplest, most logical ones.
Which were?
She gasped again in obvious discomfort. ‘I will explain — and then you must promise to say nothing to anyone and take me back to the sea.’
He carried her across sand and cracked shells and fists and fingers of rotted wood. The sea had set itself soft against the horizon. He waded in up to his thighs, lowered her into the water and watched her disappear.
As he walked back to his camper-van he thought about what she’d told him.
Three quarters of the Earth’s surface is water. If global warming had its way and the ice-caps melted, there’d be even less land, yet we were hardly making use of this vast oceanic resource.
It was only logical to adapt the knowledge gathered in genetic research to develop a new kind of human. Was that strange, exotic woman really a new breed of human being — one artificially modified to live in a watery environment?
He paused and looked back over his shoulder but saw only sea-green depths and the promise of a blue sky.
