The Brighton Mermaid

by Dorothy Koomson

I know how panic can change you. How it can stop you thinking, from properly feeling. I know how panic twists every little emotion into something giant, transforms every single breath into a cage of barbed wire that mangles itself around your very being. I know what panic is like, how it can metaphorically kill you. In this case, panic is going to kill my sister. I can’t let that happen.

  I crouch down beside Aaron. ‘Tell me about Nell,’ I say to him.

  He blinks at me behind his glasses, obviously trying to focus on me after staring so hard at the screens. He shakes his head: I don’t understand .

  ‘Tell me about Nell,’ I repeat. ‘I don’t know her. She’s been coming to you and working with you for years and I didn’t know that. There’s so much I don’t know about her. Tell me about her.’

  ‘We haven’t got ti—’ Zach begins and I hold up my hand to shush him. Neither of them knows panic like I do. I know what I am doing.

  ‘Tell me about Nell.’

  ‘Erm.’ He flops his hands up and shrugs his shoulders. ‘She’s odd, I guess. Funny in a strange way. She’s private. She’s kind. She’s caring. She can be annoying. I don’t know. How is any of this helping?’

  ‘Tell me about Nell.’

  ‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’

  ‘I want you to tell me. What has she been doing here all this time? Tell me how she works, how she thinks, how she would solve this problem. Tell me about Nell.’

  ‘I don’t know. She would … she would …’ A light suddenly comes on in his head. A light that would not have come on if he was still panicking. ‘She would look for something else. Or she would combine something else to make what we need. I need to …’

  He pushes his glasses back up his face and returns to the computer, pulls the keyboard towards him and starts to type. ‘I can’t get the triangulation to work, I can only get two points on each phone, so I’m going to combine the points on both phones. They will hopefully—’

  He stops talking when the computer pings. The map on his screen stops being a map of the whole of the south coast and instead suddenly zooms in on one area. ‘Hopefully one of those two points will act as a third for the other phone. Which is what it’s done. There. He’s – well, his phones are here.’ He points to the computer screen with his finger. On the map it looks like a sea of pale green surrounded by the white lines of largish roads. ‘I’ll get an aerial map up.’ He clicks a couple of keys on his keyboard and an aerial photo of the area appears. The pale green is replaced by dark green fields, the white lines become grey streaks. There are green hedges, boundaries of different fields, but very few buildings. And what buildings there are seem too spaced out.

  ‘Do you know this place, Macy?’ Zach asks me. ‘Do you know of any reason why Shane would be out there?’

  I shake my head. ‘No. I’ve never been there. I’ve never … no. No.’

  ‘If he’s taken her out there, then there’s only one reason why,’ Aaron says, voicing what we’re all thinking. ‘We have to get there.’ His fingers start to work on the keyboard again and he comes up with a postcode for the area, and a partial address, since the area where he managed to narrow Shane’s phones to is small on the screen but quite large in real life. ‘When we get nearer, if Macy calls him, I’ll be able to pinpoint his exact location.’

  ‘No,’ Zach says. ‘I have to call this in now. I have reasonable grounds to ask them to go and find Nell.’

  ‘Good. But I’m going, and you can’t really stop me,’ Aaron says. He gets up from his seat and grabs the piece of paper that he’s scrawled the postcode onto.

  ‘Me too,’ I say. ‘I’m going too.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Zach says. ‘We’ll all go. But you have to do exactly what I and the other police officers say. All right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Aaron says.

  ‘Yes, fine,’ I say.

  ‘Right. Let’s go.’

  Nell

  Saturday, 2 June

  The world has exploded: the air is full of shouting and the sounds of flesh hitting flesh, things being slapped, snapped, broken. I pull my legs up and watch in horror as Shane and Craig roll on the ground in front of me, a two-headed creature, writhing and roiling, fighting itself.

  I thought Craig was stronger, more dominant, that once he had pounced it would be a done deal. But Shane is stronger, more vicious than I could ever have imagined. I watch them, then I look up to see Dalton.

  He is horrified. He stares at the two fighting forms, not knowing what to do. When he inflicts violence, it is on young women, girls without strength, people who don’t fight back. But I bet he doesn’t see them as people. He sees them as tools, objects that are there for him to experiment on, break down, force himself on, dispose of once finished.

  Everyone in Dalton’s life is a pawn, something for him to control. This is horrific because this is not what he was expecting. This is out of his control.

  This is also my chance to run again.

  I don’t need to think this twice, don’t wait for them to stop fighting, stop taking chunks out of each other and return their attention to me. I jump up and then jump over them, landing awkwardly before I start to run for it.

  ‘No you don’t,’ Dalton says. I thought he was too shocked, too immobilised by the fight to notice. He grabs my arm and tries to restrain me. I try to pull my arm free, but he has me firm.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ I reply, and then stamp hard on his foot. Bring the flat of my hand up hard against his nose, then claw at his eyes. He isn’t expecting any of these assaults and lets me go when my hand connects with his face.

  I run again, not thinking how long it will take for Dalton to recover. What I did won’t hold him back for long, so I need to move. I run the length of the room, turn at the large kitchen island and head for the door.

  ‘She’s getting away!’ Dalton roars as my fingers connect with the Yale knob and I rip the door open. The night air is another assault – cold, bracing, a shock after all the heat fear has created.

  I don’t stop, as I run from the farmhouse, the gravel crunching underfoot like old autumn leaves. I have to make it to the trees this time. I can’t get caught again. If I get caught again, it’s all over.

  I am over.

  My shaky legs carry me as far as the fence, before the world is suddenly illuminated. First the bright white of headlights, closely followed by flashing blue as cars bump their way up the dirt track towards the farmhouse.

  I stand frozen, watching them approach. Hoping against hope that I am awake. That this isn’t a hallucination brought on by the after-effects of the drug I unknowingly absorbed when I pricked my finger. The cars keep on coming, the lights brightening up the whole area around the farmhouse the closer they get and the more of them that pull up next to each other.

  Automatically I throw my hands up. I don’t want to get mistaken for a criminal. I don’t want to be damaged and hurt before they can identify that I have nothing to do with the men inside. I hear those men come tearing out of the house behind me and then stop when they see who has joined us up at their secluded location.

  I have no idea how they got here, or who they have come for. But I don’t care. I’m not alone up here. I am not going to be violated by three men then disposed of like I am not human.

  That, for me, has always been the worst part of the Brighton Mermaid story, and the stories of the other mermaids: they were not treated as though they were human. It was what Jude was so angry about with the Brighton Mermaid too. They seemed to be just bodies. Things to talk about. Things to ponder and ‘solve’. But not real humans who needed dignity and respect and consideration for simply having existed. Whatever happens next, I will not be ‘just’ a body that shows up or even that is never heard from again. Whatever happens next, people will know who I am.

  There is a silver car at the front that I do not recognise, but inside I see her. Macy. Or someone who looks like Macy. I narrow my eyes to shield them from the headlights and try to l
ook again through the windscreen. Macy?

  The door opens and she climbs out. The other door opens and Zach climbs out. The back door opens and out climbs Aaron. Three people I have never been more pleased to see in my life.

  I move to run for the car, for Macy and safety and the chance to be on the other side of the line. The other cars stop and start to spill out police officers, people who have terrified me for more than half of my life because of what one of them did to my family all those years ago.

  ‘DON’T MOVE!’ a voice barks and I immediately stop, raise my hands again. I keep my hands up, the breath catching and catching in my throat, not moving to my chest.

  The police officers swarm forwards like black ants rushing towards sugar, avoiding me, a roadblock in their path, and heading for the goodies behind me. Grunts, growls, groans, the sound of handcuffs – a sound I’ve heard far too many times in my life – securing. I don’t move. I don’t move at all, not until three men are being marched towards police cars, until other police officers are heading towards the house.

  When it’s clear they have everyone they need, and that they are going to leave me alone, I lower my arms. I close my eyes, I take a huge breath in and I let the fear take over. She’s by me in an instant, her arms are around me the moment after and my sister is holding me, propping me up while I break into a million tiny, terrified pieces.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK,’ Macy hushes. ‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.’

  Nell

  Sunday, 3 June

  I’m fine. Now .

  Before, I was hysterical. So hysterical, unable to stop crying, that I had to be given a sedative to calm me down. I’ve slept a little as a result of that and I’m fine now.

  That’s the main thing. I’m absolutely fine. Zach and Aaron are in the waiting area outside and only Macy is allowed to stay here with me. A police officer has taken an initial statement and I’m supposed to relax until I’m discharged. There’s only one thing wrong with that idea: the second I relax, everything that has happened comes rushing in and despite the medication coursing through my bloodstream I can feel the hysteria rising again.

  I hate that. I hate that I wasn’t sanguine and quipping, throwing my arms around my sister and my friends, joking about how they came together to save me.

  Instead, the whole thing hit me full-on when Macy put her arms around me. The absolute terror I’d felt since waking up in the back of Shane’s people carrier had twisted itself around my very core, had spread its tentacles through every vein, smashed into every heartbeat, compressed every tiny breath.

  I thought I was going to die .

  I thought I was going to die; that I was going to be murdered and would end up like the Brighton Mermaid, dumped somewhere, a nameless body that people would think about in passing, that someone would write a piece about twenty-five years in the future wondering if anyone would ever be able to put a name to the body.

  I wasn’t only crying about that. I was breaking down because so much of my life has been about the Brighton Mermaid, in ways I couldn’t even begin to understand – Shane, Mr Dalton, Aaron, even Zach, in the end, had become about the Brighton Mermaid.

  ‘Talk about déjà vu,’ I say to Macy once the police officer has gone. She’s been very quiet, staying close to me, but not saying much. Avoiding eye contact. She has been straightening the edges of the bedclothes I was sitting on, but she seems to have a lot of her nervous tics under control.

  ‘Yeah,’ Macy says. She closes her eyes, sighs, then says: ‘I’m so sorry, Nell.’

  ‘Funny, I was about to say the same to you,’ I reply.

  ‘What are you sorry for?’ she asks.

  ‘What are you sorry for?’

  ‘I asked first.’

  ‘And I asked second.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Nell, I had visions of us having a big emotional heart-to-heart where we sort out our differences, where we cry about you-know-who and you-know-who both being evil and we resolve to move on as the best of sisters. But no, we can’t even start the conversation, let alone actually have it.’

  ‘All right, I’m sorry for ruining your life. Back then and in the present. I’m so sorry that we’re not closer. That what I did has resulted in you feeling bad for so long. And I’m so, so, so sorry for bringing him into our lives.’

  ‘You didn’t have to say all that, you know,’ Macy responds. ‘You didn’t ruin my life in the past or in the present. I mean, it wasn’t until Zach asked me why I didn’t like you … Actually, he asked me when I was going to stop hating you and I was shocked that someone else could see that. And that it was true.’

  I stop looking at her and stare at the curtains that surround my little cubicle in casualty. I knew it, but it hurts to hear – it blasts another crater into my already devastated heart. I’m going to start crying. And I don’t know if the sedative I’m on will be enough to stop me becoming hysterical again.

  I don’t want to become hysterical again.

  I want to be in the fuzzy glow of not feeling very much at all.

  ‘I don’t really hate you,’ Macy says quickly. ‘I just thought I did. And because I thought I did, I kept finding things you did to prove that I did. I don’t hate you, Nell. I love you. I adore you. You’re who I want to be like. You’re basically my hero. My very, very flawed hero.’

  ‘You’re just saying that,’ I say, trying to sniff away the tears while wiping my eyes.

  ‘I thought … I don’t know what I thought consciously. It’s just felt for so long that the whole world runs around after you. Mummy and Daddy weren’t the same after Daddy was arrested but they still did everything they could for you. And in my eleven-year-old brain at the time, all the horrible stuff that was happening to our family was all your fault. I kind of clung to that. And when I met … him and I found out that you and he had been together, it felt like I’d, well, that I’d finally get to be like you. To have what you had. He was so lovely and so committed that I knew that finally, finally I was going to be the centre of attention. But no, he was clearly still into you.’

  ‘He wasn’t.’

  ‘Will you not interrupt me!’ she says crossly. ‘I’m spilling my guts here, I don’t need you stopping my flow.’

  ‘Sorry. Keep going.’

  ‘I thought he was still into you. I didn’t realise it was because of … uh, I just can’t even think about it …’ Macy taps the side of her head, as though trying to dislodge any thoughts of Shane. ‘I don’t hate you. I mean that, you know? I don’t hate you. I love you. You always seem so capable and with it. Men are just falling in love with you left, right and centre while I … One guy left me with three kids, and the other one made a very good show of being with me, but he was never really there.’ She picks up my hand, slips her fingers through the gaps between mine. ‘I want us to be proper sisters. To put all this other stuff behind us and just, I don’t know, be proper sisters.’

  ‘What are proper sisters?’ I reply. ‘It’s not like we’re enemies or anything, is it?’

  ‘No, but we don’t talk, we don’t connect, we don’t spend any time together.’

  ‘Yes we do. It’s just we’ve spent a lot of time with all this unsaid stuff between us, and me keeping secrets and doing stuff that I couldn’t tell anyone in our family about because of the upset it’d cause, and you thinking Mum and Dad prefer me to you and me thinking you’re so close to them in a way I could never be, and you being resentful and me being resentful that you’re resentful but kind of understanding it as well … Wow, we have a lot of sister issues to work out, don’t we?’

  My sister grins at me. This must have detonated every single one of her worries and anxieties, but she’s hiding it well. My poor sister. She’s been living with all of this her whole life. At least I was a bit older, at least I could start to assimilate what was happening with what I knew of as an imperfect world. She couldn’t. She went from what I remember clearly as living in a place where people were good to each
other, or they got along with each other. You turned on the news and there was sometimes a terrorist attack that was removed and distant from us, there was sometimes a killing that made all the headlines, there were police appeals, there were wars in different countries, uprisings and revolutions. It was always so far away, completely removed, and then all of this came crashing into our lives and never really left. And Macy had to integrate that into her life. The way she did it was through her behaviours, her ritualistic ways of self-soothing.

  ‘So, what you going to do about those two sitting out in the waiting area?’ Macy asks. She runs her slender hands over and over the sheet on my bed, trying to smooth out the creases.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Zach and Aaron. Both of them are clearly in love with you. What are you going to do? Who are you going to choose?’

  ‘Oh, you mean who am I going to choose between the secret policeman and the son of the man who persecuted my father?’

  Macy smirks. ‘To be fair, both of those things kind of helped to rescue you.’

  ‘Yeah, well, there is that … It’s not true, you know,’ I tell her.

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘What you said about men falling in love with me left, right and centre. It’s not true. It might seem like that, but it’s not. They may like me, but that’s because they don’t know me. It’s easy to be all gooey-eyed over a person you want to fuck or you’ve fucked a few times. It’s much harder to fall in love with someone who you’ve seen every side of. The truth of the matter is, what you think is love from these blokes is the desire to fuck me and the inkling that I probably will sleep with them because I am, as Pope called me all those years ago, a slut.’

  My sister transforms in front of me: her eyes seem to catch fire, her face becomes angry, her body is rigid with rage. ‘Never say that! Never say that about yourself !’ she snaps. ‘You are not a slut! I don’t care how many people you sleep with, you are nothing like he said. Nothing. Never say that again. OK? OK? ’

  I draw back, surprised by the strength of her reaction. ‘OK … OK, I won’t say that again.’