Luke looked up from the kitchen table where he was making himself a massive sandwich.
“Hey,” he said, frowning, “it looks like you scratched yourself.” He pointed at my neck.
Josh twisted around in the couch to see.
“Sorry, Alex, that must have been me.”
My hand automatically flew to my neck and came away red, wet and sticky.
“I’d better go and clean this up,” I muttered, stumbling off to the bathroom.
Safely locked in the bathroom, and with the shower beginning to envelop me in steam as it warmed up, I stood in front of the mirror and gingerly wiped the little droplets of blood off my neck with some tissue.
The skin of my neck was perfectly intact.
My stomach flipped nervously as I allowed my fingertips to carefully explore my neck, working from my hairline up towards my temples. An intense stinging in the crease behind my ears, and a flicker of the pain I’d felt in the pool, was enough for me to know that this was the source of the blood.
I was too frightened to do much except stare at myself in the mirror, my eyes pulled open wide enough to show white all the way around my irises, because I’d had this experience before. In the chaos after Brent had been pulled from the pool no one had been paying much attention to me until the paramedics had arrived. One of them had taken me aside and asked my parents terse questions about why my still water-slick body was covered in rivulets of blood. It had taken the paramedic a few minutes to find the source of it: tiny, inexplicable gashes behind my ears.
Standing beneath the warm shower I eventually found the courage to feel behind my ears again.
The sensation was odd at first, my brain unable to make sense of the information my fingertips were telling it. It was as if the crease behind my ears had widened.
Not by much. If someone else were to look at it they probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. But there was a difference because the creases that had once been only a hair’s breadth wide were now triple that, and the texture had changed from soft skin to rigid gristle.
Chapter 3
Dreams
It’d taken me a good half an hour to calm down enough to appear at least vaguely normal. I re-entered the lounge quietly, relieved that the boys were too ensconced in their sport to notice my red-rimmed anxious eyes.
The Van Heerdens’ computer was set up in such a way that anyone sitting at it had the wall behind them and a full view of the lounge and dining room.
I decided to start with newspaper articles, and the term “mermaid” – as ridiculous as it felt to type the phrase in – thinking that if anything as big as a mermaid spotting had been reported it would have surely hit the press.
There was nothing.
I tried magazines, remembering a movie I’d watched about alien spotting, which had been reported in American weekly.
Again, nothing.
Finally, I resorted to a Myths and Legends search. This yielded a plethora of information. Most of it referred to a long and complicated family tree of a variety of gods. I needed something simpler, more concise, a sort of summary of all the information on mermaids. In a last-ditch attempt, I went to my favourite source of information, Wikipedia, and typed in mermaid.
I scanned through the many snippets of information, doubt nibbling away at the certainty that Josh’s legend was based on truth. Most of the descriptions of mermaids were similar to what I had already heard of as a child: a human torso and head with a fish tail.
I was surprised at how many cultures had mermaids as part of their mythology: China, Africa, India, East and Western Europe, Britain, all had some form of mermaid legend associated with it. Each description had a slightly different twist, but in essence they were the same.
Halfway through another article on the “Mami-wata”, the African mermaid, the Van Heerdens called to say that they would only be back the next morning. Maryka’s aunt had had a bad fall and she would need to stay with her for a few days to help move her into frail care.
Josh and Luke arranged for Josh to stay the night before they returned to their rugby match, and I returned to my research.
I’d pretty much ruled out Josh’s legend about the fish-people by now, as no description matched them properly.
And then my stomach dropped, because there in black and white was a description of sea people, the only distinguishing feature from humans being their ability to breathe underwater.
My excited gaze drifted down the distressingly short description of them and locked on two sentences. Two sentences I couldn’t wrench my eyes from, because they described the offspring of a human and a sea creature.
The idea intrigued me because it was an idea I’d been toying with for most of my life. Not in the crude sense of having a mermaid partner, but rather the idea of being able to be a sea creature of some sorts.
In the quiet moments of childhood, when I’d been waiting for my Mom to fetch me from school, I’d drawn pictures of the underwater world I’d wished was mine.
I’d seen the shapes of turtles and whales and manta rays in the clouds as I’d watched them drift in cottony replicas of my daydreaming in the azure blue sky.
Whenever I’d had friends over to play, the games had inevitably veered in the direction of the ocean. We’d pretend – normally at my insistence, because I’d been a fairly assertive and bossy child – to be rays or dolphins, and sometimes even mermaids. My friends had often asked me to describe the castle we would live in, or the island we’d play around, and I’d done so in clear detail.
Sometimes these play dates had ended in fighting, normally because my friend would want to add a detail to our imaginary world, and I’d refuse to allow them to, arguing vehemently that they were wrong.
My mother had tried to explain to me that I couldn’t be angry at my friends about changing an imaginary word. She’d tried to explain that imaginary things were only in our heads, and that my friends could imagine whatever they wanted. I’d agreed with her on every other imaginary topic except when it came to the ocean.
No amount of threatened punishment would change my opinion. I felt certain that I knew what that world should be like. I knew how the animals in it behaved. I knew what it felt like to be a part of it.
The certainty I felt in my waking hours was cemented as I slept because every night for as long as I could remember I’d been dreaming about the ocean.
Each new snippet of information I managed to glean from the books I read or the documentaries I watched would find their way into the dreams. They were never scary, always vividly colourful and serenely beautiful. They were filled with light and songs and life and I was part of the dream, not just a spectator of the magical world beneath the waves, but it was my home. My refuge.But that was before the nightmares.
A shiver of anticipation slithered up my spine as I read the incredible description of how normal human DNA could be combined with another species to create a being that could be both human and mermaid, and for the first time in a long time a bubble of joy and excitement pushed its way up through the anger and grief that had been my constant unwanted companions for the last three years.
“You guys have to see this,” I called.
Luke waved a hand at me in dismissal. “Yeah, after the game, Alex.”
Josh got up and walked around to the pc.
“There they are, Josh.” I pointed at the screen.
He was quiet for a long time while he read.
“Luke,