Deeper (14 page)

Chapter 20

Caz came with her boat to get you.  When she saw me waiting, she argued with you, in a low voice, because she didn’t want me to come.  But you just shrugged and wouldn’t change your mind, so she gave up. 

I climbed into the boat with the two of you
.  I couldn’t help thinking, wouldn’t the pod be amazed to see me in a floater, with two humans, and to be on the sea, and not in it. 

It was
the strangest thing I’ve ever known.  Caz pulled a rope and the boat began to roar, an old seal scaring his rivals, so loudly that I had to put my hands over my ears so I wouldn’t be deafened.  Then the boat bucked and I nearly fell backwards into the bottom of it, and it drove through the swell like a knife, beating the water down on either side as we passed.  Fast, so fast – much faster even than I could swim, when I had my tail – and I was fast then.  It made me dizzy to watch.

In a while, I looked up and
couldn’t see the Trapped Moon any more.  It had gone over the horizon.  But now I could see a long low line of green, and white sand.

I threw myself into the bottom of the boat and hid my face in the dirty seawater there
, and wailed.

“
What is it?” you asked, pulling at my shoulder, and Caz called to me too, impatiently.

“
Melur, it’s ok.  Melur?  What’s the matter?”

I couldn’t explain. 
The Big Dry looked just as Grandmother had described it.  I thought of the tattered black skin she kept in her sack, and whimpered. 

“It’s alright,” you said, stroking my hair
, impatient.  Caz pulled my clothes out of the wet, and wrung the seawater out.  I kept my face down, refusing to look.  Maybe, when you and Caz went away, I could slip back in to the ocean and swim back.  If I could find the place.  How did you humans find your way on the sea, when you couldn’t feel the currents stroking your skin and pulling at your hair and your tail fins?

Caz
let out her breath in a puff, and climbed out on the sand with her long brown legs, stretching.

You bent down close to me.

“Melur.”

You still couldn’t say my name properly, and it made me laugh a little.  That was
your way in.  You laughed back, and said it again.

“
Melur?”

I lifted my face, wet with bilge water, and you kissed
the top of my head.

“Come to my birthday
party?  Please?”

The sand was like other sand, no dryer.  The line of green was just trees – not palm trees only, the kind that grew in the channels, but other trees.  Still, they were just trees. 
Behind the trees, was a cave, like yours but flatter and darker.  Human-made, like yours.  I might not like Caz but she never licked her lips when she looked at me, or bit me to see what I tasted like.  Grandmother was full of shit.  So I told myself.

To get to Caz’s cave
, we travelled in another growling box, but this time it went through the Dry.  I lay in the back on a blanket and clutched my belly and retched, eyes shut against the horrible sight of land.  Sometimes, you stopped, and I leaned out to vomit beside the black river we travelled on.  When we stopped, I heard the sounds of the Dry.  There were more birds than I’d ever heard or seen before, of all kinds and colours.  Sometimes, another growling box went by, so fast that if you looked away it was gone. 

We came to a place with many humans walking about or
travelling in boxes like ours – cars, you said.  My eyes felt stretched with looking, and bleached with all the colours.  I closed them again and saw the blues and greens of the sea inside my head, and felt a little better.  My ears throbbed with noise.

Your party was at the
place where Caz lived.  It wasn’t like your home.  There were a lot less objects and I could tell she liked to clean things. 

I sat in a corner and watched the humans getting drunk.  I knew what that was now, Caz explained it to me
.  It was like chewing trance weed.

Soon I wasn’t afraid of the humans any longer, because I could see they
were nervous of me, too.  They came by and smiled crookedly, their eyes darting, and drifted on.  Sometimes a drunk human would come to look at my face, and stare a little, and then at my legs, and then my eyes, and down to the floor, as if it was wrong to look.  They were curious but human-polite.  Sometimes someone would say something, and laugh with embarrassment – because I didn’t know enough to speak back.

Now that I was among humans, I saw that some of the males were
stronger and younger and more beautiful than you – but I loved you now for your imperfections, that had once seemed to me so perfect.  Some of them looked at me as a male does when he has mating on his mind.  Maybe I wasn’t so ugly and strange, in your world – or maybe they liked the strangeness, just as I used to.

Once
I tried out the words I’d learnt on two women, and they leaned closer, and tried not to giggle – I sounded as strange as you do trying to speak mer.  So they just stood there and drank until their spirits came out in their eyes, loud or silly or angry or just sleepy sometimes, and you all burned those things you call cigarettes.

Later, you showed them the
totem I’d made for you.  The females gasped and screamed a little, and the males slapped you on the shoulder and made noises of admiration.  Some of them looked at me as if I’d cut you from cruelty – and at you as if you’d gone completely mad.  But they soon forgot, drinking the spell-water they’d brought with them, all different kinds of spell-water but the same kind of spell.  I tried some myself but it tasted like the stuff Grandmother gave me when she cut me, so I spat it out.

In the question I caught words I knew, and some I didn’t. 

“Girlfriend?” they said, and looked at me, and then at Caz, bringing things to eat from the food place. 

Girlfriend?
What is girlfriend?

Am I ‘girlfriend’?

Is Caz ‘girlfriend’?

I watched you
courting, rolling and twisting in the smiles of your friends.  You went from one to another, touching shoulders, eye to eye, listening to their words, laughing when they laughed.  You played a game with the other humans and you played it very well.  The prize for winning the game was to be loved, and you had this prize.  People seemed to grow in your light, like new grass in rainwater.  They talked and talked, twisting their faces this way and that – and you said very little, but just smiled, and shook your head in that way I was coming to learn, your face changing with every expression on theirs, like a mirror. Or you talked, and they laughed, and clustered around you, and waited for you to give them more to feed on.  On the Trapped Moon, you were troubled, and nervous, but here you were alive and triumphant.  It made me uneasy to see you so happy, when I should have been glad.

It grew dark and
someone made the singing-box louder.  It hurt my ears.  The sea’s noisy enough but your human world is deafening to me.  Caz’s eyes, which had been darting about looking to see if anyone spilled anything or needed food, grew large and dark and fixed on you as if you were prey.  Faces moved slowly, muscles gone slack with the drink.  People began to dance as if dreaming, as if their legs and arms and heads belonged to something else.

It wa
s more than the spell-drink though.  I smelled other things that weren’t usually in the air – acrid things that made me wrinkle my nose and my eyes water.  I covered my face with my hand and watched your friends leading each other in pairs to dark places to mate.  Humans hide everything, even mating, that you would think is no secret.  

Why’d they have to act like they were eating someone else’s fish?  W
eren’t they humans grown?  Humans have so many secrets mer wouldn’t understand, they make secrets of things we all know.

After a while
I looked around for you but you weren’t there.  Maybe, I thought, you’d gone off to some dark place to mate with someone, too.  I felt a stab of pain and anger.  Which one? Maybe that one with the hair white at the ends but black on top, Eloise.  Maybe Caroline, who smelled of sweat and dead meat. Maybe Caz, who followed you around with her glass in her hand, as if it was by accident.

I felt
disturbed in a way that I’d never felt before.  My gut clenched and loosened.  I was cold down to the parting of my legs, in the place where thinking of you I was usually warm.  I shivered. 

I
went outside, and lay smelling the winds of the Dry, and listening to strange creatures stumbling about – on their own legs I guess – among the trees.  On the Dry, lots of things have four legs.  There was a creature running about outside, smaller than me, black and hairy.  It ran away when I looked at it – which was lucky, because it had sharp teeth and I was afraid too. 

I picked up the beat of your heart
among the sounds of the night.  I’d always recognise it.  You were standing beside me, on your own, sucking at your burning nipple.  The creature came to you and you ruffled its neck fur.

You beckoned to me and I slid over beside you.  I felt a surge of warmth and relief.

The mosquitoes hummed around your ears.  You batted at them and swore. They never bothered me. I guess they didn’t like mer blood.

You put your hand on my calf,
then slid it up under the long skirt Caz had given me for the party, holding my eyes, teasing.  I forgot the smells, and the strangeness, and listened to the strong, spell-drunk feeling that grew through my body at your fingertips.

You stroked me, on the skin of my thighs,
between my legs.  I couldn’t have moved if I wanted to.

You pulled your hand out of my skirt, took another suck at your burning stick – cigarette – and kissed me, talking.  It was very strange – the buzzing of your words on my lips, slow and deep and dreamlike.  I wondered if you were sleeping, loving me in your sleep.

Your fingers tangled in my hair.  Caz leant over us.  She touched you on the shoulder, and gestured inside.  No, you said, leave me out here, or something like it, but you got up anyway.  Caz looked at me and waved towards the house, but I shook my head and stayed where I was.  I didn’t like the smoke and the drink and the noise.

It wasn’t
really dark outside.  The humans make daylight wherever they go – I don’t know how.  I could hear the beating of what you called music, and the guttural singing, and people stumbling and laughing.  I covered my ears up and curled beside the wall, and tried to sleep.  Later, Caz came with a man I didn’t know, and they lifted me and took me to a dark place and put me down on the bed.  I lay there wondering where you were, and who with.

You woke late in the day.  I heard you falling against all the objects in
Caz’s house – why do you humans have so many objects – and cursing.

I crawled out of the bed and and
with sore eyes looked outside.  The box that sang was finally quiet.  You were heating water, shaking brown flakes into a cup.  Coffee.  You always drank lots of it, in the morning, especially after you’d had the spell-drink.

Tired, you looked even more like a
turtle, a rumpled, grumpy, red-eyed old turtle who’s just laid a clutch of eggs in the sand.  I loved you more dearly than ever when you were like this.

We sat outside while you drank and I chewed your white stuff – bread. I’d got to like bread.  Sitting there, I felt as close to you as I ever had, maybe because neither of us said anything, words didn’t get in the way.

You stretched, and groaned a little when the scar on your back drew tight.  I could’ve told you – in mer – that it’d only last a short while, a few suns, that’s all.

I touched your arm, blonde hairs glinting in the sun, so very human. 

“Happy birthday.”

I’d heard your friends saying it all night.  I looked at you to see if it was the right thing to say, and it was.  You hugged me close and even though I was somewhere strange, in the middle of the Great Dry, with humans and growling boxes and strange creatures staring at me from the shade – none of it mattered and I was as happy as I’d ever been and ever would be.

Chapter 21

Going home, we travelled in a different boat, that a friend had given you
in exchange for the rustling stuff you call money.  I was relieved to be alone with you again, not under the stares and questions of strange humans.

You’d changed.  The trouble in you was sharper, clearer.  Sometimes you looked at me as if you wondered how I had come to be there
, after all this time. 

I’d learned enough human words to understand
the gist by the time you asked me, again,

“
What happened to you? Really – I need an explanation.“

You touched my legs
, which still hurt to walk on, though not so much as before. 

“
Where are you from?”

Now that we were mated, you should know.  Suppose I had a pup from you and it came with a tail!
  Would you be surprised?

I took
paper and pen from your desk, and drew a shape, a tail, well-muscled and blue-fronded like mine used to be, a mer woman.  It was badly drawn and didn’t look much like any real mer.  It wasn’t as human-beautiful as the mer woman on your thigh.