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

of the lips.
I can see you
sung out as in a child’s game, but something else too, something like complicity.
I can see you, I can keep a secret, I won’t say a word
. And maybe, less playfully,
I know as well as you do what this man is like
, and also, perhaps,
we both know I’m keeping other secrets too
. Or, I had to concede, as I climbed the stairs to bed, none of the above. Perhaps he’d just seen me standing there, alone and forgotten in the shadows, and had smiled.
    I sat down on the mattress to loosen my laces, then lay down on top of the covers and eased each clog off in turn with a toe. They hit the boards with a thud. Voices still rose from the bar below, slurred with distance and drink. My cheeks were burning. The whole village, with very few exceptions, was gathered down there with him. A real celebration. Was there something I didn’t know, something he had told them? What, after all, had that smile meant? That I was the only one who wasn’t in on the big secret?
    I must have dozed off: I’d been dreaming. Diving deep into the pool, the water clear and soft as air, and the pool deeper and deeper, diving down and down, and never coming to the bottom, just one smooth cup of water, filling the hillside and the valley, taking up the space where the village should have been. My mother, diving there beside me, said, “The pestle-stone has worn it all away,” and that was when I woke, thirsty, sweating, on top of tangled sheets.
    It was still dark. It was quiet. Everyone must have either passed out or gone home. My door stood at an angle, open: moonlight slipped in through the gap and fell across my face, illuminating a stretch of silvered floorboard. Standing on the floorboard was a pint glass, filled to brimming with clearwater. It was beautiful, laugh-out-loud beautiful: it could not possibly be real. I found myself leaning up onto an elbow, stretching out a hand towards it. My fingertips touched cold glass, sensed the unmistakable press of water against it. The tightness of the scabs across my back made me wince. I took the glass’s weight in my hand, lifted it to my lips, and drank.
    The first mouthful covered my tongue like a clean sheet, so fresh that my mouth seemed all the fouler for it. The second I let roll around, pulling it between my teeth, letting it trickle gradually down my throat. My tongue slid around my mouth like an eel woken by rain. I drank some more. My headache seemed to soften. My eyes felt wet and heavy: I blinked a few times, just savouring the sensation. The glass was empty: just a beading of droplets traced the water’s flow to the brim.
    There was only one person who could have brought it.
    When I woke the next morning the glass was still standing there quite casually with my fingerprints on its side and a tiny puddle of water, constrained by its meniscus, resting in the bottom. And behind it, my bedroom door still stood open at an angle, though it was now rinsed in plain morning light. But even if someone had come back to take the glass, and maybe stood and watched me sleeping for a moment before shutting the door, I would still have known that it hadn’t been a dream. I felt saturated, soft and full.
    I had woken early, I could tell; the air was still cool before the day’s long heat. I lay and listened awhile, conscious of the increasing pressure on my bladder, the intermittent sounds of the sleeping house. I heard the scratch and twitter of vermin from within the lath-and-plaster walls, the phatic communion of doves on the roof, the scrape and flutter as onelost, momentarily, its footing. But other than that, silence. Beneath, in the house, no one was stirring. Uncle George would be lying, sheets peeled back, chest all tangled hair and oily sweat, mouth open, sour, stinking of old drink. And just across the landing from him was the stranger. That thought, even more than the ache of my bladder, made me shove back the sheets and