The Mermaid's Child, page 13
“Ssssshhhht,” he said again.
I was about to ask why, but as my lips parted there was another, more furious repeat of the shushing, accompanied this time by a shower of spit. He turned and moved away, but didn’t straighten up. His back was so bent that his neck and shoulders were almost parallel to the floor, though he held his head up to peer ahead. That’s why, though I was seated, we’d been face to face. I watched as he picked his way across the book-strewn floor. Like a heron, I thought; hunched, wild-eyebrowed, intent.
I sat there, wiping away the spray of spit from my face with a knuckle, tugging the coverlet tighter round me. I was itching to call out after him, to ask him his name, how I’d ended up here, and what kind of ship this was, but it would obviously get me nowhere. I watched him reach the far end of the room and dissolve into the shadows. It seemed to be his natural habitat: camouflaged as a peppered moth against a lichened tree, his dark vestments and straggling hair faded entirely out of sight.
I swung my legs, glanced round the room again, then looked back towards him. Though the room had seemed empty when I’d woken, he must have been there all the time. I spent a moment or two half-heartedly trying to pick him out, but soon lost patience. He was invisible, uncommunicative, and apparently busy, and as I was patently not going to be getting any information from that quarter, and could not sit there swinging my legs indefinitely, I slid off the chair and walked over to the bookshelves. The books were obviously significant: after all, from the shape of the room it was clear that it took up the majority of the vessel’s tonnage. They must be the ship’s main cargo.
They were of many different colours, rich and soft and deep. Burgundies, purples, blues, browns and greens. I ran my fingertips down their spines, traced the letters embossed there in gold and black: I recognized the individual marks, and here or there could put them together to make up a word, occasionally a phrase: the book of something, I read, and the life of somebody, and someone else’s thoughts. I found myself wondering if I was still contained within the schoolroom map, bobbing around on the green waves near the corner of the frame, or if I had by now slipped underneath the wooden rim and was off somewhere across the bulging plaster of the schoolroom wall.
A sigh issued from the far end of the shelves. I turned to watch the old man shuffle from the shadows. He came to one of the stepladders and hitched his skirts up for the climb. I caught a glimpse of thin and hairy ankles, of greying canvas slippers. There were three or four books tucked beneath his arm. As he climbed, the ladder rolled along the shelves with the motion of the ship. Unperturbed, he slotted the books into their places as he rolled past. The ladder stopped, then slid back towards its original position, and he climbed carefully down to alight just at the point he had got on. He shambled back into his corner, leaving the stepladder to roll back and forth on its own. He didn’t even glance my way. I was obviously not of any particular interest to him: he wouldn’t notice if I left. And I had to find out what was going on. I headed aft, towards the door set into the bulkhead. As I moved, every joint, from neck to ankle, seemed to grate as if it had been dusted with fine sand.
I pushed my way through the door. It fell shut behind me. In front of me there was another door, to my right a steep staircase. What little light there was came from above, spilling itself down over the stair-treads like milk. An opening onto deck, I thought: otherwise, the stairwell was quite windowless. I was in no rush to climb the stairs. Instead I tried the doorhandle.
A little light came in through a porthole, alternately white and green as the vessel pitched. The cabin was plain and spare: a slung cot, a trunk, two or three piles of books, some crates and boxes piled up in the corner. One of the boxes had been opened: scrolled manuscripts and sheaves of paper strayed across the floor, slithering and rolling with the ocean swell. I stooped, picked up a sheet, held it to the light. Line upon line of tiny spidery writing crossing the page without a break. The same hand filled the margins at right angles to the main text, the writing even more crabbed and compressed. I released my hold upon the paper, watched as it descended, in abbreviated arcs, towards the floor. It landed near the others, immediately rejoined their drift back and forth across the boards. I went back out into the stairwell, pulled the door shut behind me, and began the climb.
Daylight and a cool fresh breeze, the blood singing in my ears, my breath harsh in my throat. We must be way past the tropic. How long then, I wondered, had I been unconscious? How far, for that matter, had I swam? I glanced up, my neck stiff and creaking: the sun was to my right, and it felt like afternoon, so perhaps we were headed south, but I couldn’t be sure. I felt the wind tugging at my coverlet. My legs bristled with goosepimples, hair blew into my eyes. I wrapped the cover tighter round me. That deep, flesh-shifting shiver rippled through me again. I looked the length and breadth of the ship. She wasn’t big: nothing like the size of the Sally Ann. A lightweight, shorthaul, coastal vessel. For day-tripping, I thought, for summer jaunts: I wondered where we were headed.
I leaned upon the railing, scanned the horizon for other ships, for land. Nothing. Just the cool slate-grey ocean stretching as far as I could see. So if we were heading south, we were cruising at some distance from the coast. The major trade, if I remembered right, was a kind of leaf, sometimes dried, sometimes refined to powder. Useful stuff to a captain with an exhausted crew. Crumbled into a sailor’s tobacco, it could keep him up and awake and working for days, have him scrambling up the main topgallant shroud in a hurricane without a moment’s misgiving. Which was why, when bad weather was approaching, sailors would sniff suspiciously at their tobacco, watch each other for the first signs. It was dangerous to feel invincible on board ship. Sometimes the only thing that kept you alive was a keen sense of your mortality.
No bad weather approaching for the time being, though, as far as I could tell. A following wind, no squalls, no storm-clouds massing. The common creak and strain of shipsounds, but otherwise silence. No calls or shouted orders. No human sounds at all, I realized. I looked round: no one at the helm. I turned to glance up, caught sight of the bare rigging, of ropes flapping loose and untrained in the wind, of tattered shreds of rotten canvas, and I knew that we were drifting.
I had a sailor’s instinctive horror of being left adrift. It went against everything I had become. I was on the verge of running down to him and demanding that he tell me what was going on, when a noise caught my attention, a soft burbling coming from somewhere nearby. A familiar backyard sound that brought with it instantly the smell of blackcurrant bushes and the texture of dried earth between my fingertips.
The ship’s boat was just beside me. Inside, a dozen bantam hens were nesting, crooning, tucked into straw between the boat’s ribs. The cockerel flapped his wings at me and clambered onto a rowlock. I realized suddenly that I was ravenous. I had no idea when it was that I’d last eaten. I decided I would reach under one of the broodier-looking birds and tug out a still-warm egg to suck. I stretched out a hand; the chickens began to caw and flutter, the cockerel cocked his head and glared at me with a button eye. I dropped my arm back to my side, turned and walked away, leaving the bantams to settle back to their contemplative maternity.
I could not, I realized, go below and accost him, could not demand to know why we were drifting, just to satisfy another, less vital, impulse on my part. Having been rescued, it was not my place to question the manner of my rescue. I would find out what was going on soon enough, I told myself. In the meantime, I went looking for the galley.
Dark came slowly, creeping up on the ship like a child playing tin-can-lurky. I descended the stairs carrying a platter of cheese, sausage, greyish bread and a handful of soft pickles. On the edge of the platter I had balanced a jug and two cups. In the galley I’d found a strange contraption of pipes and vessels that bubbled and hissed, heated by a little flame. A jug stood underneath, filling slowly as water dripped from the mouth of a canister. I’d lifted the jug, sniffed it, then held it to my lips and drank. Clean, unbrackish water, about a pint of it, but not nearly enough to still my thirst. I found a cask of beer that had been broached and drew off about a quart, then gulped it down without thinking twice. The beer went straight to my head, giving everything a pleasant fuzz. I decided then that I would take supper down to the old man. We’d eat together, we’d have a few cups of beer, we’d get to know each other, and then I’d ask him what the hell was going on.
Platter in hand, I came to the bottom of the stairs, knocked the door open with a foot, and stepped over the threshold.
The old man was sitting at the table. He had been reading. Hearing me come in, he looked up, frowned, closed over the book and pushed back his chair.
“No food or drink,” he hissed, stalking over towards me. His voice rose as he came nearer the door. “Rule number two. No food or drink.” He took the platter from my hands, swept past me and out through the door. “No respect these days,” I heard him mutter, “No respect for the rules.”
I followed him into the stairwell: he was flying up the stairs, his skirts flapping. I climbed after him, back onto the deck. He was heading forward, to the galley. I was surprised to find he could move so fast. When I came to the galley door, he’d placed the platter on the table, crossed over to the water-purifier and was peering into the empty jug. He glanced up at me. I looked straight back.
He sat down at the table and began to eat. I pulled back a bench and sat down opposite him. He looked up at me through his eyebrows, continued chewing. I reached out and took a piece of bread, peeled off the crust, and was just formulating my first question, when he spoke.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
What am I doing here? I wanted to say. What are you doing here, and where is here, and what the hell is going on? But when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I’d forgotten. Somehow it had slipped my mind that I could no longer talk. I hadn’t needed to, for so long. The last words I’d said were “I loved you,” and it seemed that it was someone else who had spoken them.
“I suppose you take me for a fool?”
I looked up. I was going to have to say something, or at least try to. Something uncomplicated, to start with. I took another sip of beer.
“No,” I said, a faint and draughty sound.
The old man frowned.
“You think I’m just some credulous old pedant with his head buried in his books—”
Again, I had to settle for just saying “No,” though by this stage I wasn’t so sure what I was denying. But the word came out a little clearer this time. A smile began to pull at the corners of my lips.
“Who sent you? Hamelius, was it? De Outremeuse?”
“Nobody,” I said. “Nobody sent me.” The words were coming back. My smile broadened. But the old man wasn’t listening, he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes had glazed over. I lifted my cup, took another gulp of beer. It seemed to be helping.
“It isn’t too much to ask, is it? A little privacy? No one looking over my shoulder. No one sneaking in at night and rifling through my manuscripts. A little professional courtesy?”
“I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” I said, each word coming easier than the one before, “After you saving my life and all; I can tell you’re quite worked up about something, but to be honest with you, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“What?”
“I mean—” I swigged some more beer. “I mean, what the hell is going on? There’s no crew, you’ve spread no canvas, you’re going nowhere. You’re just drifting. In the middle of the ocean.”
He reached out to the platter and picked up a lump of cheese. He pulled it in two between his dusty fingertips, replaced one half.
“I do not consider it drifting,” he said, putting the cheese down, picking it up again. “And I am not, as you put it, ‘going nowhere.’ I am closer than I’ve ever been. It’s all coming together—that was the problem, you see—they knew it, they saw what I was about to achieve and—that’s why I had to get rid of them.”
Them? Did he mean his crew? Had he killed them? Was I drifting in the middle of the ocean with a murderer? Suddenly, my regaining the ability to speak did not seem so important. How would he have done it? Poison? I dropped my crust back onto the table. He was still eating, though.
“You’re a scholar, then, I take it?” he said through a mouthful.
“What?”
“A scholar. You must have studied.”
“No. I’m a sailor.”
“You would say that.”
“Yes, I would, because it’s true.”
I looked down at the almost empty beer-cup, realized I must already be half drunk, and tried to call my thoughts together. I remembered the soft cold feel of a slate against my palm, the smooth glide as I guided my hand round the loops and dips of the alphabet, the smell of chalkdust. “I know my numbers one-to-ten,” I said, putting down the cup, my fingers instinctively counting out the numbers as I spoke. “And I can write my name, I can read a little, but that’s all.”
“Of course you’d say that. If anything, it’s evidence against you, saying that.”
I looked down at my hands, palms up and fingers curled from counting. There were calluses on my palms, yellowed hardnesses on the pads and along the fingers’ edges. I turned them over, looked at the sundarkened skin, the scars that laced and pocked their backs. I blinked, held my hands out towards him.
“Look,” I said. “These aren’t scholar’s hands.”
He took them between his cold dry fingers, held them for a moment palm up, then turned them over. The lines on his face shifted and looked uncomfortable for a moment, like hair combed the wrong way. He let go of my hands and looked up at me. “It’s not proof of anything,” he said. “Evidence, perhaps, but not proof.” A pause. The water-purifier gave off a hiss: he stood up and moved across to fiddle with it. Then he turned back to me. “If you weren’t sent here to spy on me how did you end up here? You say you’re a sailor but where’s your ship? There’s no sign of wreckage, no corpses, no other survivors, not even a spar for you to cling to: just you, drowning all by yourself in the middle of the ocean. Just where I’d happen to be passing. I find it very hard to believe it could just be coincidence.”
“You weren’t passing. You were drifting.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “I know a spy when I see one.”
I narrowed my eyes back at him.
“If I’m a spy and you know a spy when you see one, then why did you pick me up?”
There was a long pause. He pursed his lips. When he spoke again, if it hadn’t been for the beer, and for the unfamiliar words, I would have realized that what he was telling me was not quite the truth.
“I should never have started on the Nichomachean Ethics. I knew it would only lead to trouble. How could I let you drown after that?”
I just looked at him.
“Wha’?”
He waved the question away.
“It’s beside the point. The point is, you have yet to tell me why you are here.”
I sat back and considered this a moment, my mind grown flabby and unwilling with drink and fatigue. I remembered the slaves I had set free: I brought my hand up to my chin and touched its tenderness. I remembered the lash peeling the skin from off my back, and before that, McMichaels at his desk, and the way the light was refracted by his cut glass inkwell. I remembered John Doyle; I could almost feel her teeth grazing my flesh, her hands on my body. I could almost smell her skin. I remembered, before that, Joe’s lean body on mine and the smell of heath and heather. I remembered the rain falling on my face the night we left the village. I remembered the foul taste of drought in my mouth, the pain of Uncle George’s belt across my back. My father had died, and I had tucked a blanket round his toes. The circus had left a circle on the green, where the grass caught the light at a different angle. I had heard a mermaid singing, had watched her in the moonlight as she painted her nails.
“I was looking for a mermaid,” I said.
He nodded.
“Then you’re a fool,” he said. “They don’t exist.”
I leaned forward.
“Yes they do. I’ve seen them.”
He looked at me. “And what’s it worth, the word of a self-confessed semi-literate deckhand? I’m a scholar, and I am telling you, they don’t exist. It’s a myth.”
By now I was barely listening. I was boiling with hostility.
“My mother was a mermaid,” I said.
“I’ll hazard a guess that you never knew her? Someone told you she was a mermaid?”
“My Da—”
“Well there you are then. It’s a euphemism.” He leaned back, a fingertip placed on his upper lip. “Or maybe it’s slang.”
“What’s a euphemism? What are you saying? That he lied to me?”
“It’s like a lie. He might have said your mother was a mermaid, but what he really meant was that she was a whore.”
It was then that I decided he was the enemy. I’d have nothing more to do with him.
And it was also then that the old man decided that I was not a threat. Now that he considered me a fool, he became suddenly loquacious.
He informed me that his name was Jebb, that his ship was called the Spendlove, and that I would be allowed to roam the vessel at will, so long as I stayed away from the library and did not distract him. If I should happen to stumble in upon him at his books, I was to be sure to observe the four cardinal rules of the place. He explained them slowly, as befitted my idiocy, counting them off one by one on his fingertips: Rule One: no talking; Rule Two: no food or drink; Rule Three: no inkpots, and Rule Four: no livestock. I nodded along as he spoke, but was barely listening. The fact was, I had no intention of disturbing him. I had no intention of going anywhere near his library. I was going to be far too busy.
