The Brighton Mermaid

by Dorothy Koomson

  I stand on the pavement and watch him drive away in his new black car before I turn my attention to my building. I loved this flat when I first came here. Despite its location at a dead end of a maze of roads, the converted factory is beautiful, stylish, spacious – all things that will be written on the seller’s notes if I don’t get over my fear.

  This building is scary now. Everything feels threatening as I make my way inside. I jump when the front door clicks shut behind me, a reminder of the loud bang that came with the burglar leaving the building after he’d slammed me into the door frame. I have to take deep breaths as I climb the stairs, remembering that he was probably in my flat listening to my arrival, wondering if it was me and if he would be able to get out of there in time. On autopilot I hit the light timer light switch next to the stairs on my floor and wait for it to flicker on. Nothing. It’s been over a week now and it still hasn’t been fixed. It’s dusk, so there is still light enough to walk around, but I’d feel safer if I could have a bit more light, be able to see something like my door being ajar from a distance.

  Before I start down the corridor to my flat, I pause and take another deep breath. I can do this. I can honestly do this.

  I take strong, bold steps. I can do this. I make it to my front door in no time. And it is fine. It is locked, it is secure. And there is a large brown box on my doorstep. I roll my eyes at the postie. They’ve done this before. Knocked, got no answer, got no answer from my neighbours, so they have just left the parcel on the doorstep. It’s a good thing I don’t order expensive stuff, I’ve often thought.

  I put down my many bags (of course I didn’t pack light) to unlock the door. So far, so uneventful. I do keep looking over my shoulder but that’s normal. Wise. It is not the start of me turning into an even more paranoid wreck.

  There is a bit of post behind the door, which reminds me I need to go and check my post office box for any DNA results. I dump my bags in the hallway then retrieve the parcel. It’s not very heavy for such a big box, but there is a bit of weight to it. I resist the urge to shake it in case it’s fragile.

  I don’t remember ordering anything recently. In fact, I know I haven’t ordered anything recently because I’m still trying to claw back the money I overspent the night I met Zach, as well as the cash that was in my purse when my bag was stolen.

  I place the package on the floor and get down on my knees to open it. There are no postmarks of any kind so it must have been hand-delivered. Probably Macy sending me a care package, although the label is printed with my name and address.

  It takes an age to unpeel the tape holding the top flaps of the box together. When I finally get into it, I’m met with swathes of pink tissue paper. Definitely Macy. ‘This had better be worth it,’ I mumble. I pull it out, encountering more and more of it until I pull at a layer and it comes away, revealing my present.

  On the bottom of the tissue paper-lined box is a huge dead rat.

  Nell

  Wednesday, 2 May

  ‘Someone’s out to get you, aren’t they?’ Macy says while pacing up and down her kitchen.

  I’m still shaking, my mind quivering right along with my body. Hours later, and I can’t stop shaking. I have to throw my arms around myself and rock to try to dislodge the memory every time I think about the rat’s fat, lifeless body, its thick, ribbed tail flopped over its body, its throat glittering red where its jugular had been ripped out, its black, blank eyes. It’s anchored there, though. I hate rats. They are the one thing about which I have what is bordering on a phobia. Alive or dead, I hate rats. And someone sent me one. Left it on my doorstep, wrapped up in an ordinary way. A warning. A reminder of what could happen to me. A pretty clear message that, yes, someone is out to get me.

  I don’t need Macy’s version of I told you so right now. I don’t need to hear anything except: ‘Here is some good-quality alcohol that will erase the last seven hours from your mind .’

  ‘Someone is out to get you. And they’re not going to stop until you’re dead.’ Her voice is wild and high – she’s about to start screaming at me, I can tell.

  ‘Macy, hush,’ Shane says. He comes to crouch down beside where I sit on a kitchen chair. ‘Can’t you see she’s traumatised?’

  ‘Yes, I can see that,’ she replies, her voice still uncontrolled. ‘But she can’t.’

  Shane keeps going to touch me, rub my back maybe, then changes his mind as it would be crossing many, many lines. ‘Macy—’

  ‘No. NO!’ Macy says, holding up her finger to hush him. ‘Look at her. Look at her . If she could see herself she would stop what she’s doing. She would just quit. But no, she won’t. Even after this. Even after having her head bashed in she won’t stop. What’s it going to take? Huh? What’s it going to take to get her to stop? Because this is all about her need to feel real or some shit like that. How real are you going to feel when you’re dead?’

  I slowly look up from the black and white tiles of the kitchen floor and face my sister. Standing there, dressed in her sensible pyjamas and faded navy towelling dressing gown, she’s right in so many ways. In every way, actually. But being right doesn’t mean being like this.

  It’s her anxieties, it’s always her worries and fears and the things – big and small – she obsesses on that make her like this. Always. If I could strip away those layers of worries, unburden my sister of every single terror that pokes at her, creeps around inside her, I know she would be different to this. She would be the sister I love all the time.

  ‘You’re rubbish at being comforting, Macy,’ I say to her, trying to magic up a smile. ‘Absolutely rubbish.’

  ‘This isn’t funny!’ she shrieks.

  Shane leaves my side and dashes to her. ‘Shhhhh, the kids,’ he reminds her. ‘You’ll wake the kids.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she says and shoves him off her. ‘In fact, I’m going to go and wake them up right now so they can get a good final look at their aunt who they love so much before she’s murdered trying to solve a mystery the police haven’t been able to solve in twenty-five years.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Shane says.

  ‘No. I won’t stop it.’

  ‘I need to leave,’ I decide. Me being here is going to break my sister. It was only a week ago that she had to rush to the hospital – this is too much for her. I stand on my shaky legs, and pull around my shoulders the blanket my neighbours gave me earlier. I’m not a screamer, but I started screaming when I saw what was in the box. So much so my next-door neighbour, who I’ve always had a nodding relationship with, came tearing out of his flat and hammered on my door until I opened it. I felt bad because he was in his underwear and his girlfriend came out in a silk dressing gown with very little underneath it. They both baulked at the rat in the box and he valiantly pulled on a pair of jeans to go and dispose of it in the downstairs bins.

  I had to sit on the floor of my hallway because I couldn’t move and eventually the girlfriend brought me a blanket and some hot sweet tea because I was shaking so severely and my body temperature kept dropping. Even more eventually, I asked them to call me a cab and I gathered up the bags I’d taken to Mum and Dad’s and I came here to Macy’s. To be greeted with this.

  I expected at least a little tea and sympathy before she started laying into me. But no such luck.

  ‘No, sit down,’ Shane says. ‘Go on, sit down,’ he adds forcefully when I don’t comply. ‘Sit. Now.’ I do as I’m told. ‘And you,’ he turns to my sister. ‘You need to stop this, now . I get that you’re upset with Nell, and I can completely understand why – she’s been reckless. But we don’t turn on family, do we? No matter how stupid they’ve been and how much disregard they’ve shown for their own safety, we don’t turn on them.’

  ‘Erm, thank you ,’ I say.

  This manages to stop Macy going for me verbally, but she continues to glare at me.

  Shane carries on: ‘This is all part of some weird sister stuff that I can’t ever fully understand, and I know that it a
ll began way, way back when, but you can’t let this come between you. We’re the only people that Nell has and we have to look after her, right? What else is she going to do? We’re lucky, we have each other, but she has no one.’

  ‘Erm, thank you !’

  ‘Oh, that’s not true, is it? Nell has a boyfriend ,’ Macy spits.

  ‘Yes, yes I do, which is clearly where I should be right now. Silly me, thinking I’d come here and you’d be nice to me. Yep, I should have gone to my boyfriend’s and not told you. ’Cos, you know, it’s not like you’d make something that happened to me all about the effect it’s having on you. Silly, silly me.’

  ‘Nell, you’re going nowhere,’ Shane says. ‘Macy, apologise.’

  ‘I will not!’

  ‘All right, if your sister walks out and you end up not speaking for years, just accept that it’ll be on your head. No one else’s.’

  Immediately Macy starts to wring her hands. My head snaps round to look at Shane, horrified that he’s just used one of her anxieties against her. Yes, she’s being awful to me, but I can see where it’s coming from and I can’t promise I’d be any better in her shoes. If I step outside of myself and look at my situation from Macy’s point of view, what I am doing is unintentionally recreating the horrific parts of our childhood for her. Having someone she loves violently ripped away from her is one of Macy’s ultimate fears. I can understand – even in my traumatised state – why she is freaking out. And, even though she is being awful to me, I wouldn’t dream of using another of her fears to stop her.

  ‘There’s no need to say that,’ I say to Shane. ‘I wouldn’t cut Macy out, not for something I’ve caused.’

  ‘No, he’s right,’ Macy utters quietly, her eyes slightly widened, her hands moving over and over each other like snakes in a barrel. I can see she’s playing out the scenario now: she keeps being horrible, venting at me, and I walk out. I intend to fix things between us, she intends to fix things between us, but the hours become days become weeks become months become years and we will have lost time and something will happen to one of us before we can start to talk again.

  ‘He’s not right,’ I reply. ‘You’ve every right to be annoyed. I’ve brought all this to your door. Nothing’s going to break us up. You know you’re stuck with me for ever, right?’

  She nods quickly; the strain of listening to me while her scenarios play in her mind causes lines of worry to stretch themselves over her face.

  ‘I’m going to put some new linen on the bed in the spare room,’ she mumbles. As she heads for the door, I jump up and take her in my arms. I don’t like to see her like this. I don’t like to think of all the worries that sit like boulders in my sister’s mind.

  Once she is out of the room, I turn on Shane. ‘What the hell!’ I snarl at him. ‘What the actual hell! How could you do that?’

  ‘I know, I know, but I had to get her to calm down.’

  ‘Not like that. NEVER like that.’

  ‘She was winding herself up and she was going to wake the kids.’

  ‘I don’t care! You never do that. She would have calmed down eventually. And it was me she was having the go at. I would never have used that against her no matter what she was saying to me, and neither should you.’

  ‘And what if it’s one of the children, eh? What if she’s having a go at one of them and they can’t stand up for themselves? Because she already does go over the top at some of the things they do, about their safety. She keeps them on a tight leash, won’t let them do half the stuff their friends do because of her anxieties. She controls every single part of their lives and it’s suffocating sometimes. But what if one of them does something exceptionally dangerous?’ He raises his arm to indicate where she was standing a minute earlier. ‘That is how she’s going to react. That is the damage she’s going to do to them. I just had to get her to stop.’

  He’s possibly right. I know Macy mainly only has a go at me when she thinks I’m being reckless, and I don’t doubt that she and Shane get into it, too, but what if she does turn on the children or turn her worries into the children’s fear and anxieties? As I told Zach, I wouldn’t wish me on anyone. That goes double for children. The thought of messing them up like I am messed up is too scary to contemplate. Macy always wanted kids. Right from an early age. But what if she is passing onto them not only her creativity, her warmth and generosity, but also her terrors, her continual fretful-ness about safety, her angst about one of her own being harmed? It must feel like she constantly lives in a cage made with bars of angst, worry and unease. What must it be like to be a child watching your mother locked in such a cage? I don’t know why I’m asking. My mother flitted in and out of a similar prison, well before Dad was first arrested – what John Pope did, though, shoved her into it, locked the door and threw away the key. I remember what it was like to grow up with Mum’s anxieties at the forefront of everything we did.

  I don’t want those fears for Willow, Clara and Aubrey.

  ‘I don’t care, Shane. You may think it was necessary to ultimately protect the children, but don’t do that again. Find another way to stop her next time. Not that.’

  ‘I won’t,’ he says. Shane runs his hands over his face. He’s showing signs of strain, too. I, with my various crises, am not helping at all. I can’t imagine what it would do to them if they found out I was mugged a few weeks back. ‘I’ll go and help Macy with the room,’ he says as he moves to the door. On the way out, he pauses to gently rub my shoulder. That’s the first time he’s touched me since we last slept together all those years ago. ‘And I’ll apologise. I’ll apologise.’

  Once I’m alone, I sit again and pull the blanket back over my shoulders. I’m not as cold, but the thick, chunky weave is comforting right now. I need something as close as possible to the sensation of having loving arms around me.

  Something I’ve done is putting my life in danger and smashing up my family again. The thing is, I can’t work out what it is.

  Nell

  Friday, 4 May

  My face is almost back to normal and I just look like I’ve had a scrape. That’s why I can do this for the second day in a row: take Willow, Clara and Aubrey to school. They all go to the same school, although in 2019, Willow will probably be going off to senior school, across the road, where Macy and I went.

  Using Macy’s car – with her permission, of course – to bring them up here is an odd sensation, almost like I’m having an out-of-body experience that has landed me in another life. This is the path I did not travel, but here I am doing the school run. Well, doing the school run in an ideal world. Because there is no way on Earth it’s this simple. The kids mainly got themselves up this morning, came down for breakfast and ate it without the need for too much cajoling. Macy then set the timer – three timers, actually, to see if they could beat their personal bests when getting washed, toothbrushed and dressed.

  ‘Shall I help?’ I asked her.

  She smiled at me and shook her head. ‘That makes all competitions null and void.’

  I’m not sure if she ever really wanted three children in four years, but that is what she has. And that is what she had to cope with when her ex walked out.

  Back then, when I helped out, they were small so I’d take Willow to playgroups and classes, while supervising Clara and trying to pacify Aubrey. It was chaos, I had no idea what I was doing and I had to just get on with it as best I could.

  Macy would sit in bed, almost zombie-like as she stared at a wall, or stared at a television screen, picking and picking at her nails. Several times I almost called Mum to ask if she could help or even just come to talk to Macy, but I couldn’t do that to her. Macy would never forgive me for ‘telling on her’, as she would see it, when Mum and Dad had never liked him anyway. What was not to love? He was arrogant and thought he was far cleverer than he was. He got into fights in pubs and regularly ended up in debt because he liked a bet. He was sweet to Macy, though. Treated her like she was his reason for livin
g, and was, as far as I could see, completely faithful to her. It was just everyone else he disliked and felt superior to.

  And he walked away, it seemed, because he couldn’t be bothered to be a father any more. Literally, just that. Over the years, Macy has let slip a few things about him and their relationship, and one night, in an uncharacteristic moment of sharing, she told me that he had – months before he left – asked her if she’d be interested in leaving the kids with our parents and going on an extended holiday. When she’d asked when they’d be back, he’d shrugged.

  She was still taken aback when he walked out, though.

  I pull up at a safe point on The Drive, which sounds like a small cul-de-sac-type street and is, in fact, a very wide, long road that would probably be classed as a dual carriageway if it went on for much longer than it does.

  Willow opens the front passenger door while I open the back door to let out Aubrey and Clara. They all look cute in their various combinations of grey trousers, grey skirts, grey pinafores, white shirts and bright blue sweatshirts and fleeces. Willow is nearly my height. She throws her arms around me. ‘Thanks for the lift, Aunty Nell,’ she says with her smile that reminds me so much of her father. When he wasn’t being an arse, you could see quite clearly how good-looking he was. Aubrey high-fives me, and Clara, for the first time since I came to stay, doesn’t give me a side-eye as if trying to work out my angle.

  I walk them to the main gate with Willow marching ahead because, at twelve, she doesn’t need a chaperone. Clara drags her heels to keep pace with Aubrey and me, even though she clearly wishes we would get a move on. At the gate, they both hug me and then disappear into the school, without so much as a backwards glance.