The Mermaid's Child by Jo Baker Read Free Book Online

doubt) and turned to go into the kitchen, where Uncle George was finishing his dinner. As I came through the doorway he lifted his head to look at me, his jaw working as he chewed.
    â€œThere’s a stranger—” I began to say. A line appeared between his eyebrows. “In the bar room.”
    He scraped his chair back, turned down his cuffs, wiped his mouth with the back of a hand.
    â€œWhat does he want?” he said.
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œWhat did he say?”
    â€œHe said, ‘Good afternoon.’ ”
    Uncle George shook his head. Still chewing, he pushed past me and through the doorway into the bar room.
    I stood there in the kitchen, looking down at his plate of food: the bits and scraps of hen meat, the messed heap of pickled cabbage, the black crescent on the plate’s rim where the enamel had been chipped. I felt my heartbeat slow back down to normal. I listened to Uncle George’s loud and overfriendly greeting. I could spit on his food, right onto the heap of cabbage; maybe if I stirred it around he wouldn’t notice. I heard the softer, deep murmur of the stranger’s voice. I felt my skin prickle.
    I moved back towards the doorway. From the threshold, I caught sight of the stranger’s passing profile as Uncle George gestured him up the stairs. For a moment I watched as he climbed but then my view was blocked by the bigger man following him up. I listened to the light scrape of the stranger’s boots as they syncopated with Uncle George’s heavier footfalls, heard the distant creak of a door, the shift and strain of floorboards as the men moved around the room above. I came back to my station behind the bar, lifted a glass from the stack, picked up my vinegary rag. I watched the stairwell’s empty shadow until Uncle George came back downstairs again alone.
    â€œWhat are you looking at?”
    I dropped my eyes back down to the glass and rubbed at the oily tracery of fingerprints, the lace of lipcreases patterning the rim. I watched in my peripheral sight as he turned his shirt cuffs again and went through to the kitchen and his unfinished dinner. I should have taken my chance and spat. Because upstairs, stretched out on the best white candlewick, eyes closed, shirt open; chest rising, falling, rising, falling, as the air cooled around him, was this stranger. And in thekitchen was Uncle George with elbows spread, stabbing at scraps of brown hen meat, shovelling heaps of pickled cabbage, the sweat soaking through his tide-marked shirt. He would keep me side-lined, silenced, out-of-sight. I knew it. And it made me want to spit.
    There was nothing to be done that afternoon that couldn’t have been done another day, another week, ten years later. But still he made me work.
    He had me clean the brewhouse. No brewing going on of course, not without water: but as far as Uncle George was concerned, this was no reason for me to slack off. Quite the opposite in fact. It meant that I could give the task my full attention.
    It would, in the best of circumstances, have been a Herculean task, but my work was rendered Sisyphean by the fact that I could not be spared one single drop of water with which to do it. A thick rime of dust, generated by years of hops and grain and fires, covered every surface: it misted windows, weighed down cobwebs, caught in my throat; it had caked hard wherever the mash or wort had been spilt. Even without the fires, it was still baking hot in there, hot enough to keep the latest and, for the foreseeable future, final batch of beer fermenting quietly in its tuns, hot enough to have me sweating like a horse. My efforts at cleaning served only to move the dust around, to heave it into fine clouds, which slowly settled back onto trestle tables, windows, the slabbed stone floor and me. As I shuffled around the room with my broom and shovel, coughing, wiping my eyes, spitting thick black spit onto the floor, I cursed him. Even