IGMS Issue 22 (7 page)

"Silly, I wasn't asking about now."

No, she was asking about back then -- the times we'd been blessed and chosen by the sea, before the exile, before the Dark King and the exodus that had reduced us to those small, awkward beings who just couldn't seem to fit in anywhere on dry land. But I didn't feel up to voicing the shame of that.

"Did you have books, back in Morocco?" I asked.

Jamila shrugged. "Mom had some. But not many. Just the Qur'an and some cheap paperbacks. She carried them with her when she crossed the Mediterranean." She twisted one finger in the hem of her veil, in a thoughtful grimace. "Gave them all to Toufiq, who never reads them anyway."

In the sea it had been the women who ruled, Aunt Albane had said, because the males, seized with the mating frenzy, couldn't remember who they were half the time. And, when the currents kept changing, altering the feel and smell of places, you needed some anchor. The women provided it, until it all changed.

I liked Uncle Hervé because he brought me trinkets every time he visited: polished sea-shells and boxes overlaid with mother-of-pearl. His packages smelled of raw fish and iodine: a weak, quivering smell always on the edge of vanishing, which always made me hunger for more. I'd open them, alone in my room, hardly daring to breathe for fear I'd break something beyond repair.

My parents didn't like him. Whenever Uncle Hervé came, there would be that particular edge around the dinner table, as we dug into the veal
blanquette
and the mashed potatoes. Uncle Hervé himself, who had refused to have even the simplest of reconstructive surgeries, always wore a mask over his face and a flask at his hip, connected to the mask via translucent tubing: the mask sprayed water into his throat at regular intervals, to keep his gills moist. He seldom ate; and spoke little. At least, when I was there.

After dinner was over, the adults would send me to bed, and speak in the living room around coffee and biscuits. Some evenings, I managed to creep back in and crouch in the kitchen, lapping up what words I could hear.

"You shouldn't bring her gifts," Father said. "You fill her head with nonsense."

"That's rich, coming from you," Uncle Hervé said. "Do you really think you can turn her into a human?"

"She's human, Hervé," Mother said, quietly. "As much as she'll ever be."

"My name's not Hervé." His voice was low and fierce. "Neither is yours Bénédicte. You should know this."

"We said --"

"I know what you said. I know what little bargains and pacts you made. You're swaddling her in baby-clothes and hoping she never wakes up to half her inheritance. Do you think she'll thank you later?" He stopped; there was a wet, squelching sound as he put the mask back on his face and inhaled -- and another squelching sound as he took it off.

"She'll have fitted in." Father spoke as if he were still wielding a sword. "Become a true Frenchwoman. We all know there's no future left in the sea."

Uncle Hervé laughed, sharp and bitter. "You're one to talk."

"Hervé --"

"We both know what you did, all of it. What you humans did." He spat the word "human" like a rotten shrimp. "Anyway, you only have to look at her to know she won't ever be French. Grey skin and gills." He snorted. "She takes after us, not you."

"You're the one who doesn't understand," Mother said. Her voice was taut with fear -- as if she'd stretch in one fluid, easy kick, and run to the door before anyone could stop her. "If she doesn't belong, they'll just send her away. They'll send us all away, back to the sea and what's waiting for us there. Do you want to go back, Hervé?"

He was silent, then. "No," he said; but it didn't sound like a "no."

The first time I was in the water, it was a revelation.

I'd never liked sports: racing or basketball seemed needlessly tiring, with my lungs contracting to take in searing, dry air that didn't sustain me. Always out of breath, I was always last -- the last runner on the track, the last one to be picked up for the teams.

But swimming was different.

The school took us to sports at the local swimming pool. We lined up, twenty awkward girls in swimsuits and bathing caps, feeling as flat as flounders. I felt encased in stretched cloth, hardly able to draw in breath; and the others were looking at me oddly. They had never seen so much of me -- without the turtleneck sweater I used to hide my gills, and the long sleeves I wore in every season, covering the patches of shimmering, iridescent skin above my wrists.

"Come on, sleepyhead," Jamila said. She leapt into the water with her legs drawn under her, making a splash big enough to drench every lane.

I leapt after her, eager to dispel the others' gazes. The water rose up to meet me, shimmering in the winter sunlight; and then it swallowed me. It kissed my skin and blessed it, and the dry itch I always felt receded. The water pressed against me, warm and comforting, an embrace I had always longed for. I breathed in -- in and out, and my gills distended, taking in the grace being offered -- my legs stretched in an expansive kick that felt instinctive, and I dived deeper. The pressure grew greater; it took me and shaped me and made me whole as I swooped and swam, turning lithely above the blue tiles at the bottom of the pool. There was a faint aftertaste of chlorine, not salt; but I didn't care. I felt . . . at peace, at home, finally back where I belonged.

When I emerged, everyone was staring at me -- including Jamila, though her gaze wasn't hostile.

"What the matter?" I hissed, swimming closer to her.

"Do you know how long you were in there?" She maintained herself afloat with awkward kicks of her legs.

"No." I said. It had barely been a moment; and already I craved diving again.

She rolled her eyes upwards. "I didn't count, but it's got to be minutes, Em.
Minutes
."

I tried to shrug, but it was harder in the water. "I am what I am."

"Sure." Jamila nodded, but I could tell I'd somehow breached the boundaries of what she considered normal.

When Mother came to pick me up later, and asked me how my day had been, I almost told her. But she stood there waiting for me, her grey skin shimmering in the sunlight: prim and correct, with a green cashmere cardigan and a pair of silk trousers around her surgically reconstructed legs -- the epitome of French chic, from her Lancel handbag to the discreet gold pendant around her neck. And, somehow, I couldn't find the heart to share any of this.

Aunt Albane wouldn't speak much about the sea, either; but she did tell me a few things whenever I went to her house.

Unlike my parents, Uncle Hervé and Aunt Albane had never settled in a city; but had instead chosen some god-forsaken place in the middle of the countryside, in a commune of other merpeople. Small houses, so far away from each other that you could barely guess at their presence. They were spread out in a circle around a field, with trampled grass and a few bits of coloured cloth tied to the trunks of trees: it might have been a shrine, it might have been a meeting place. I didn't know enough to tell.

I could see Mother relax every time we drove there, when the wide expanse under the sky replaced the narrow, high streets of the cities -- when everything became wide and limitless, as it had been before.

Their house wasn't exactly French: they'd used their resettlement money to knock down all the walls they could in order to make a single, wide room with barely any furniture -- not even a TV or a computer. Everything had the same smell as Uncle Hervé's packages; but here it was strong enough to permeate everything. My gills breathed in brine and algae; and the pores of my skin opened wide, trying to store enough water before we went back to the dry, polluted streets of the city. This was the true thing, or as true as it could be -- not like the spray I kept in a drawer of my bedside table for those days when I couldn't sneak off to the swimming pool.

My parents always seemed drawn into arguments with Uncle Hervé, so I took refuge in the kitchen, helping Aunt Albane cook. She walked in slow, tottering steps -- she'd had the surgery for her lungs, not for her legs, and those were weak and stunted within her walker. I helped her fetch garlic and fish-sauce, and spread it into a cooking pan -- she only cooked for our benefit, since the pan always looked brand-new, and I could see the jars of salted fish above the stove. I didn't think they ate any cooked food; just fish, as we had done under the sea. Their friends, I guessed, did likewise.

"It used to be different," Aunt Albane told me. "We followed the currents and the shoals, and took our sustenance where we could."

"You never had cities?"

Aunt Albane snorted. "Buildings, sometimes, for one ceremony or another. But not so many as here. Buildings are a human thing." She didn't sound as though she approved. "We don't need roofs over our heads, or walls to protect us from the cold."

"Predators," I said, leaving the question half-asked.

"Sharks and barracudas, sometimes. The weak died; the strong survived. That's how it had always been."

"But it changed," I said, cautiously. She was quick to share her stories of the time before; but she almost never told me about the exodus that had sent hundreds of them staggering onto the shores of France.

Aunt Albane's eyes flicked to the stove. "Salmon, please."

I took two chunks of salmon from the freezer, and handed them to her to put into the pan. Oil sizzled and sang where the flesh touched the hot metal.

Aunt Albane nodded, not moving from her place at the stove. "It wasn't much, at first. We ignored the signs. Babies born with deformed limbs -- without eyes, without gills --"

"The Twisted Ones," I said. The Dark King's servants, the ones that had chased Mother and Father all the way to the shore.

"Yes," Aunt Albane looked stubbornly at the salmon, turning pink in the pan.

"And the King," I said.

"Yes." Aunt Albane's gaze was distant. "If not for your father and his companions, we wouldn't be alive today."

"Companions?" I asked. In my mind's eye, Father was always alone -- battling monsters with his sword, dragging Mother and Aunt Albane out of the sea. "Like the Knights of the Round Table?"

Aunt Albane shook her head. "They were cleverer than your knights. Not strong or tough, but smart. Has he never shown you his papers? He and his colleagues saw the end coming long before we did, and planned for it."

"Papers? What was in them?" It didn't sound like something Father would do. Then again, swimming underwater with a sword didn't sound like him either.

"Mathematical formulas and charts -- their plans to rescue us, laid out so meticulously." Her lips twisted. "Scientists. And it all worked."

"Why shouldn't it have worked?" I asked, slowly. I couldn't understand. I'd always thought Father had been a knight; a lone hero. Companions were one thing; but scientists in a research laboratory, with flasks and white coats, and the smell of ammonium and bleach?

"Take all the mermen out of the sea, bring them all onto the shore?" Aunt Albane shook the pan as if it had offended her. "It's not an easy thing, or a simple one."

"Then . . ." Then it was all right; and Father was just another kind of hero. Not a knight; not a scientist who paved the way to the stars; but our saviour all the same.