The Brighton Mermaid

by Dorothy Koomson

  I notice how he said Nell before my parents. Is that what’s going to happen now? Is Shane going to run off with Nell and be a proud daddy with her, too?

  ‘Are you even listening to me?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ I reply. I heard you say Nell .

  ‘I’m going to bed. I know this will be cleared up in the morning, but please try and get some sleep.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  As happy as he’s ever going to be with that, Shane leaves. Probably to climb into bed and think of all the things he wants to do with Nell when he leaves me. They’ll probably write ‘proud daddy’ in millions of languages next to their happy smiling photos.

  ‘You’d better stay away from my sister,’ I whisper. ‘Or else.’

  Nell

  Monday, 23 April

  ‘You’re not going on your own,’ Aaron tells me.

  The woman with the close DNA connection to the Brighton Mermaid is called Sadie and she lives in Leeds. I’ve come back to Aaron’s house today to make the call to the number she had emailed to me because I felt I owe it to him to be around while I pursue this lead. After Sadie and I arrange to meet tomorrow (another one who is very keen), I take her address and put down the phone. To be told by Aaron that I’m not going on my own.

  I blink at him, surprised at the forcefulness in his voice – and the presumption that I will do as he tells me.

  ‘I think I am,’ I reply.

  ‘You know nothing about this woman and you’re just going to rock up at her house and have a nice little chat? I don’t think so. She could be dangerous.’

  ‘I know lots about your dad, I know he’s dangerous, yet I still spend time here.’

  ‘This is different,’ he says. ‘Anything could happen to you if you go there alone.’

  ‘Anything could happen to me if I go there with you. What do you think you’re going to be able to do that I can’t?’

  ‘I can’t let you go on your own.’

  ‘You’re not “letting” me do anything. You’re not the boss of me.’ Despite what I’m saying, he is right, of course. I can’t go on my own, but I’m not sure I want to go with him. We shouldn’t spend any more time together than we have to. I can’t ask Zach, though, and Macy would have a purple fit if I asked her. Hmmm … My world of trusted people is really quite small.

  ‘I suppose we could go in separate cars,’ I say.

  ‘You think your comedy car is going to make it all the way up to Leeds?’ He smirks. ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘How dare you! Pootle can go anywhere she wants to.’ Even I have to admit my very old, very little Mini would struggle with the journey. ‘But, I suppose it would not be very environmentally friendly to go in separate cars. All right, we can go together if you don’t mention “the thing”.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘The thing, the thing . You know, what we were talking about when this DNA match pinged on the computer.’

  ‘Oh, you mean me being in love with you?’

  I roll my eyes.

  ‘And me suspecting that you’re in love with me but won’t “go there” because of my father? You mean that?’

  I clear my throat and pretend he hasn’t just said that. ‘If we don’t talk about the thing , then we can go up there in your car.’

  ‘What would you do if I did start talking about it? I mean, we’d be trapped in a car together for more than five hours – why wouldn’t I try to talk to you about it?’

  ‘All right, since it relates to the Brighton Mermaid, maybe I’ll get your father to go instead. I can hire a car that will fit his wheelchair. I’m sure his personality will win over the brown-skinned people he is so respectful towards, and I’m sure a few minutes with him and they’ll be telling us all about the family legends of people who disappeared. Yeah, I think that’s the best way forward since you are so not like your father and wouldn’t dream of imposing a conversation on me that I don’t want to have.’

  Aaron hangs his head. Every time he does that I feel like I am seeing child-Aaron responding to another telling-off by his dad; I feel like he is dying inside because he knows he could be in for a beating, and even if he isn’t, that he is such a disappointment to his father. And every time I see child-Aaron, it kicks me in the stomach. I can’t stand that he went through that. I can’t stand that he is still going through that because his father may not hit him any more, but he still treats Aaron like the fifth-class citizen he believes him to be. I’ve never heard him use Aaron’s name – only ever ‘boy’ or ‘you’. He never says thank you, he never speaks to him in kind tones. He may not be able to physically hurt his son any more, but he’s continued with his psychological abuse quite effectively.

  I place my fingers under Aaron’s chin and lift his head. ‘Don’t do that,’ I say to him. ‘Don’t get that look on your face.’ It’s so complicated being around him; tangled and confusing. No matter what I might feel or could feel, he’ll always be John Pope’s son. ‘Look, Aaron, let’s just be friends, all right? It’s the best way for both of us. We’re good mates, aren’t we? Let’s just stick to that.’

  ‘Yeah, fine.’

  I want to hug away his misery, but I know even rubbing his arm to reassure him would cause more blurring of boundaries and more confusion – for both of us.

  Nell

  Tuesday, 24 April

  I’m standing on the street corner near my flat waiting for Aaron to arrive. I’m a little early because I couldn’t sleep last night. This is the first real breakthrough I’ve had with the Brighton Mermaid and my insomnia was well and truly out to play. I almost considered calling Zach to see if he was free, but then decided against it because I had to get up early to be here on this street corner.

  Aaron pulls up in his silver car and it is extra shiny, as though he’s given it a special polish after a special clean.

  ‘Got enough stuff with you?’ he asks, looking at my bags: the small rucksack, the snacks bag and the laptop bag. And the bag of bags as well as my post-mugging handbag, of course. I have a change of clothes, a blanket, a book, my laptop, some toiletries and a couple of mobile phone chargers. And slippers. Now, thinking over what I packed, I seem to have prepared myself to go and stay overnight at my parents’ house, not to go and meet the woman who could possibly transform my life.

  ‘Yes. You’re lucky I didn’t bring my pillow and duvet,’ I say. He climbs out of the driver’s seat and starts to load my stuff into the boot.

  ‘Don’t put the snacks bag or my handbag or the laptop bag in the boot,’ I tell him. While he starts to load the back seat with all the bags, I climb into the driver’s seat.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asks when he returns to the front of the car.

  ‘You didn’t think I was going to let you drive, did you?’

  ‘Let me drive? It’s my car.’

  ‘And it’s my road trip that you’ve tagged on to.’

  ‘Get out of my seat, Nell.’

  ‘No.’

  He stands with his hands open and his mouth frozen in shock. ‘Get out of my seat,’ he repeats.

  ‘No,’ I reply. I reach across my shoulder for the seat belt. ‘If you’re coming, get in. If you’re not, you can call a taxi to take you home.’

  ‘But it’s my car,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, and I’m driving it.’ I sigh. ‘All right, if it makes you feel any better, you can choose the music. As long as it’s not classical ’cos that makes me sleepy, and no heavy metal ’cos that makes me drive like a loony, and not country ’cos I can’t be doing with that in my head.’

  Aaron closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. I know what he’s thinking when he makes his way around the front of the car and gets into the passenger seat. He’s thinking the second we stop for a loo break he’s going to take over the driving. Shame for him that I can go without stopping for hours and hours and hours.

  Once he’s clipped hi
mself in, I turn to him and grin. ‘Now, tell me, which one of these is the clutch?’ I ask.

  His eyes widen in horror. ‘This is an automatic,’ he replies. ‘You have driven one before, haven’t you?’

  ‘Oh, chill out, Aaron, I’m just kidding.’ I shake my head as I slip my replacement driving glasses into place and adjust the mirrors. ‘You are going to have to lighten up – a lot, if this is going to be a fun road trip.’

  One of those affection-filled smiles that he gets on his face when he’s been staring at me appears. I whip my gaze away.

  I force neutrality onto my face and sunshine into my voice when I say, ‘Leeds, here we come.’

  We arrive in Moortown, just outside Leeds city centre, around 12 o’clock. We stopped once at services near Leicester and Aaron was most disgruntled that I didn’t climb out of the driver’s seat to stretch my legs or use the loo. He refused to pass me any snacks or water and hung around for ages until he couldn’t hold off any longer and had to go to the toilet.

  Once he was out of sight, I got my snacks, ran around the car to stretch my legs, and got back in the driver’s seat before he returned.

  Aaron directs us along a road with red-brick, bow-windowed houses until we get to number 52, where Sadie, the woman who has a second-cousin DNA connection to the Brighton Mermaid, lives. She seemed nice on the phone, excited that her search had been linked to someone and that I was going to come up from Brighton to meet her.

  I’m shaking as we stand in front of the white door with double-glazed yellow block glass in the panels. This reminds me of the terror I felt when I went to Jude’s parents to ask them for their family history. I’d been shaking then, as well. Scared and nervous about what was going to happen when I knocked.

  ‘I’m really nervous now,’ I whisper to Aaron, who is standing right behind me.

  ‘I am too,’ he confesses. ‘Which is ridiculous if you think about it.’

  ‘I probably shouldn’t have come here.’ I swallow the nausea that’s rising inside me.

  I thought this was what I wanted; that I needed to find out who she was, who she could have been. I’ve had leads in the past, yes, but nothing as solid and concrete as this. I’d gone over and over the DNA matching, before I sent the initial email. I’d gone over and over it again after the phone call. There were 292 centimorgans across fifteen segments, which put her in the second-cousin category. Which meant that one of the Brighton Mermaid’s grandparents was the brother or sister of one of Sadie’s grandparents.

  But nothing is certain until we do further testing and look at her proper family tree. It could turn out that Sadie has a stronger family connection than we first thought. Sadie could turn out to be a first cousin. Whatever it is, I am scared of what could come next. I haven’t really, properly thought through what to tell her, either. I mean, she is only thirty; the whole Brighton Mermaid thing happened when she would have been about five. And I’m not sure how much it was talked about outside of East and West Sussex, really. It wasn’t on the news for long, and most of the recent articles and speculation because of the upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary have been generated mainly in the Brighton area. So how much of what happened down there would have reached up here?

  Also, will Sadie want to know that she is related to a dead body that was found on the beach all those years ago? And if she does, what will she do with that knowledge? I haven’t thought it through at all. I don’t want to lie to her, but it might be necessary to withhold some information. But if someone did that to me, if they withheld information to get stuff out of me, how would I feel?

  ‘Are you going to knock?’ Aaron asks.

  ‘I’m actually thinking of just running away, driving back to Brighton, and then packing up when I get home and going off to find a nice little hovel in the middle of nowhere to live in for the rest of time,’ I reply.

  ‘You don’t skimp on being over-dramatic, do you?’

  ‘I’m scared, Aaron. Really scared. And I don’t even really know what I’m scared of.’

  In response, Aaron reaches out and lifts the lion-shaped knocker on the door and hits it three times. ‘We need to face our fears.’

  ‘Hiii! ’ Sadie trills when she answers the door. She’s so excited that I know, instantly, we’re going to get on great.

  Sadie’s other half, Earl, sits in the corner of the room, glowering at us.

  ‘Oh, don’t mind Earl,’ Sadie says when she ushers us into her immaculately tidy living room. Everything is in place and there is not one single item on a surface that doesn’t need to be there. All the wooden surfaces are shiny and dust-free. On the phone, she told me she has three children – the oldest is nine. I have no children and my flat has never been this polished and pristine. ‘Earl doesn’t see the point in me doing all this so he’s a bit grumpy that he had to take today off to be here.’

  I smile at Earl and he practically scowls at me before shaking out his paper and then lifting it in front of his face.

  Sadie pulls a face at him. ‘He said it would be fine, you coming here, but I said you could be anyone, quite literally, you know, a serial killer or anything, so I needed him to be here.’ She looks over my shoulder at Aaron. ‘I see you did the same. Husband or boyfriend?’

  ‘Just a friend,’ I reply.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she giggles. ‘And I’m the queen of Jamaica!’

  ‘Sore point, actually,’ Aaron says. He clearly likes her too. ‘Nell is seeing someone else and we’re not allowed to talk about how I feel about her.’

  Sadie throws her head back and laughs. ‘And she made you drive her all the way here? Wow, you must really love her!’

  ‘Erm, excuse me,’ I cut in. ‘I didn’t make him do anything. He insisted on coming. And I drove, I’ll have you know.’

  Earl shakes his newspaper and tuts loudly.

  ‘Come into the kitchen,’ says Sadie, ‘we can sit at the table. I’ve got all the stuff I’ve done out there.’ She jerks her head briefly in her husband’s direction. ‘And we can talk without disturbing a certain grumpy someone.’

  After she has shut the glass door leading to the large kitchen behind her, she says, ‘Love the bones of him, I do.’ She moves over to the kettle. ‘Loves me too, despite all his grump. Tea?’ She doesn’t wait for an answer before she flicks on the kettle and starts cramming teabags into the spotty teapot that she’s set out on a large tray with two large spotty teacups. ‘Thing is, he’ll be all ears later. He does find it interesting but he kind of tunes out because I do go on sometimes. Don’t know if you’ve noticed.’

  As she talks, she reaches into the cupboard above the kettle and removes another teacup and saucer. ‘Sit, sit,’ she says and gestures to the padded seats around the large dining table. ‘I was watching one of those telly programmes, you know, where they get those famous people to trace family trees, and I thought, why don’t I do that? Me mam, God bless her soul, doesn’t really talk much about family stuff. There was some huge falling out and the family went their separate ways a while back. Don’t get me wrong, bits of us meet up sometimes for weddings and stuff, but not all of us. They just won’t get over it. No one can hold a grudge like the people in my family. I kid you not.’

  On her dining table, Sadie has set out many piles of papers, her laptop and a couple of family tree books.

  ‘Anyway, I watched a few of those episodes and I thought, you know what, I’m going to give it a go. I’m going to set up a huge family tree and find out who everyone in my family is. Obviously I had to do this without Mam’s help ’cos she will not be involved. Then I watched another programme and they had these people who go around looking for people who have an inheritance. And that was it, I just had to do it. Not looking for an inheritance or anything like that. Just wanting to find more family.’ She pours boiling water into the teapot. ‘I wasn’t even sure if I should do the DNA thing. His nibs said it was a waste of money but I thought, I might as well. If I’m going to do it, I might as well do it properly.
It’s really weird, isn’t it? You send off this sample and then you get contacted by people who might be related to you. Or people like you two.’

  I wonder if Aaron is as aware as I am that we haven’t said very much. Sadie is a talker, which is great, really, because it’s unlikely she’ll ask that many questions, and I won’t be as conflicted about what to and what not to tell her.

  ‘So, where do you want to start?’ Sadie asks when she sits down at the table. She places a cup in front of each of us.

  Her eyes are dancing and she has a sweet smile on her face. She does have shades of the Brighton Mermaid – maybe the shaping around the forehead and eyebrow area, maybe the curve of the chin. There is something familiar about her.

  And I decide in this moment that I’m going to tell her as much as I can. It’s only fair, and I like her. Possibly stupid given I don’t know her, but there’s something endearingly open and honest about Sadie that makes me want to share all my information with her.

  From my laptop bag, I pull out the purple plastic folder full of newspaper cuttings, my voice recorder and my notepad and pencil that I use to start sketching out a rough family tree.

  ‘There’s lots to tell you, but first, do you mind telling me as much of your family history as you can? Once we’re done, I can tell you everything I know about the woman who could be your relative.’

  Sadie claps her hands in glee. ‘This is so exciting,’ she says. She picks up her spotty teacup, sits back in her seat and begins to talk.

  Nell

  Tuesday, 24 April

  ‘I really enjoyed watching you work,’ Aaron says on our way back.

  He insisted that he drive us home because I looked tired. And I am tired. My eyes are heavy and I have a headache that feels like my head is being slowly cleaved apart.

  ‘You were so good at listening to her, and the notes you were making, I would never have thought to make myself. I was really impressed.’