‘I’m looking for mermaids. I wonder if you could tell me the best place and time to catch a glimpse of one.’ I felt like a child play-acting, and there was a rejuvenating rush in involving this serious-looking adult in my imaginative games. However, it was I and not he who was to be surprised when he answered.
‘There’s no use trying to find a mermaid; they appear by chance or not at all. But I suppose if you want to find one there’s more chance of it happening here than in many other places.’
The man’s tone was not as unfriendly as his looks, and it occurred to me he was simply uninterested in putting on a genial front for customers.
‘So, you’ve seen one?’ I almost shuddered with excitement when he nodded. He looked away, past me, as if out to sea.
‘I was out in the cabin cruiser. The mist was low on the water. There was a splash and I saw her, turning in the waves, sleek as a seal. I haven’t told anybody, but I haven’t kept it hidden either. After seeing something like that you don’t much care whether people believe it or not, and you’re not surprised when someone comes asking about such things either. It almost seems obvious that someone should come to look for her.’
The man’s name turned out to be Gregory. We spoke for a little while. It seemed that his single glimpse of a mermaid had given him the ability to live a solitary life, alone with his own mind. It was from him that I learnt that the coastguard’s cottage was for sale. My conversation with him seemed nothing less than a signpost on the way to discovery, and having by that time earned some belated success, almost incidentally, in my work, I resolved to buy the cottage and begin my life utterly afresh here. Gregory I liked and respected, but he was ultimately a taciturn man, despite his surprising, almost indifferent frankness, and we had little in common. He was grimly content and I was desperately eager to hunt down and possess my dreams. I was like a man blindly in love, seduced.
The cottage was perched so close to the edge of the cliff that, looking out of the window, it seemed there was nothing but wind, cloud, mist and spray. Once I moved in I became something of a minor institution in the village, as if I had always been there. I was the lunatic beachcomber who was in love with mermaids. In many ways I must seem like a tramp, although my occupation of the cottage is testament to what might be called wealth. Carefully, I constructed my new lifestyle. I cleared out the attic, made it all one big space, flooded with the cloudy light from the dormer window, and turned it into my studio. The light resounding off the bare wood of floor and walls looked like the tight skin of a drum and helped me clear my thoughts. My work was no longer writing, or even painting. Instead it was a sort of sculpture. To the studio I took anything of interest that I found on the beach. Sometimes the objects were merely pieces of driftwood, stones, bits of glass that had struck me as having some perfection of form. At other times I found objects which were distinctly odd, although this, of course, was rarer. I would construct things with what I had found, usually abstract, occasionally resembling some landscape or figure. I was most of all determined to maintain simplicity in my new art, which often meant that all I did was find the correct place and manner in which to display what I had found. This sculpture, as I have called it, was highly personal. In my solitude I had discarded all outside standards of artistic judgement and so created pieces which had a powerful effect on me. I remember one which was like a great tower or pillar made up of tangles of driftwood, draped over with seaweed. Into this skeletal pillar I had woven shells, bottles, fishing line, mermaid’s purses and other ocean debris. I seemed to feel the submarine history of each article, mysterious, pungent. Each history was natural, full of secret incident, alive, and I had artfully pieced those histories together to make something unnatural, mosaic, as if I had made a creature out of the limbs and organs of different animals and watched it come to life.
That pillar came to assume religious significance to me for a while. I felt its power far more than I have ever felt anything in any church. But then I dismantled it and the god I had called into being dispersed again. Just as the sea is always changing the features of the landscape it covers, so my studio was moved by the tides of my creative impulses and I traced the new histories of all the objects I had collected as they became part of one sculpture then another. I placed sea-permeated stones into a nest of seaweed and called them mermaid’s eggs and waited devoutly for them to hatch. Each sculpture was a game of the imagination, in order to bring my imagination into the real world. This studio would often come to stink like some stagnant rock pool, or like some mud-choked chamber at the bottom of the ocean. I liked this heady atmosphere, thick as the buzzing of flies, which was conducive to a particular kind of daydream. But eventually I would throw out all that smelt, the old seaweed and fish heads and such, and start again.
Apart from the studio, I tended to furnish the whole cottage with things bought from the chandler’s. Something as simple as a twist of rope nailed to one of the old timbers made me feel as if the cottage were a vessel at sea, adrift, and that I was alone in that vessel, and the sea I was sailing upon was that of my own dreaming. This effect was heightened by the cottage’s position on the cliff edge where the sea and sky and clouds seemed one thing. Visiting the chandler’s often was also reassuring in a subtle way. Gregory and I spoke little to each other, and certainly never mentioned mermaids, but each knew that we shared a certain knowledge that perhaps no other possessed.
In the village I was also surprised to find a little shop with quaint windows that sold artwork, paintings and prints of a most unusual kind. There were a great many pictures there that were quite ordinary, but also a large proportion that depicted weird things much in keeping with my own obscure tastes.
It was here I bought for a trifling sum an old print from the 1920s that is typical of my predilections in the world of fantasy and the erotic. This print is in black and white, although the overall impression is of a sort of lush, sensual grey. It depicts a scene in some sort of chamber, perhaps a bed chamber. It is difficult to tell because the chamber is filled with a dirty mist. In the foreground a strange and beautiful woman, with something of the princess, something of the Gypsy and something of the witch about her, admires herself in a mirror proffered by a hermaphroditic, satyr-like creature. She is wrapped around, as if cobwebbed, in gauzy robes and veils through which can be discerned black stockings with frilled tops. Her body from shoulder to the top of her thighs is completely exposed, gleaming white and smooth through the mist, although her right hand, reaching towards a sparkling necklace, covers one breast. About the chamber lurk other demons. In one corner an octopus-like demon sits, stretching out hands to hold or adjust the woman’s trailing robes. In another corner is a bat-winged thing, and a horrible unhappy head, like a gnarled growth from a tree trunk, protrudes from the wall. There is a great open space behind the woman which could be a doorway, although there is no door to be seen. The walls look like dank, rotten timbers, as if this were a scene from some decrepit dockyard. Yet the rugs and trinkets still suggest a boudoir. The general eroticism of the female figure is impossible to describe. There are her large eyes, soft and round as if she were dreaming opium dreams or under the hypnotic spell of some evil slave master, as if she could draw you into the same dreaming, drowsy spell. There is her suggestive posture, shoulder against cheek, left elbow pointing out, back of wrist placed on hip, the impression of one knee bent girlishly forward in front of the other giving a leaning twist to her hips. There is her slender shape, her perfect lissomness, and the way her flesh seems to glow even through the smudging mist. But one detail continues to fascinate me and seems to symbolise the eroticism of the whole print. The woman’s pubic region is half covered by a wisp of gauze, but not hidden for that. The artist, however, has depicted no pubic hair, not even the trace of a vulva. Instead, there is a soft, wide, romantic but precise V leading with cherub tightness to the line of the close-pressed legs. At first I thought this must be some sort of omission, some self-censorship because of the mores
of the day. However, I soon decided that this was no compromise, but the deliberate work of a master of the erotic. In that empty curve, that reminded me somehow of a pumice stone, but smoother, there gleamed like porcelain such a mystery of nothingness that I found it exquisite, tantalising, irresistible.
I took the picture back to the cottage and hung it in the ticking, worm-eaten darkness of one of the corridors. I soon realised that this was the kind of picture I would often take down, sometimes just to stare at and drink in its piquancy. At other times I would feel the need for satisfaction, for something like possession, and the closest I could come to this, still unfulfilling, was masturbation. Actually, I even found the unfulfillment erotic in some twisted, agonising way. The first time I used this particular picture I started by imagining myself having sex with the woman. This seemed to spoil the effect and I realised I was taking the wrong approach. Even imagining the sexual act itself, without me, was wrong. I had to concentrate simply on seeing: nothing else. The woman was distant, infinitely distant since she was not even real, but it seemed to me suddenly that seeing—not touching or penetration—was the ultimate sexual act. By seeing I could possess the woman all at once, every inch of her, the whole conception of her—she became sex itself. I concentrated only on that wild, soft blankness between her legs, that nothingness that gleamed through the mist and gauze, making me blush and burn as if rubbed with sandpaper. I felt the pink abrasion of lust, inspired by the delicate, the sweet, the female. I ejaculated as freshly, cleanly, completely as the smoothness of the sea-washed driftwood that my lowered eyes settled on.
From this point, my sexual tastes became ever more abstract and particular. I have become interested in the work of certain modern, European photographers whose vision centres upon private fetishes. One of these enfant terrible artists produced a series of photographs that particularly caught my attention. They simply depicted a number of young girls reclining by roadsides, in ditches, and so on. There was no blood, no mess, but all the girls had their eyes closed in what seemed a conventionalisation of death. The dresses, blouses, skirts, were taut around their stretched out bodies. There was a suggestion of peace about them. Once again, I did not try to imagine what was beneath their clothes. It was the curves and creases of the clothes themselves that I found arousing. Then there were the legs that bent inwards from thighs to knees, making a dip between the legs in the navy blue fabric of short, schoolgirl skirts. There were naked knees and calves making me think of collecting conkers on misty winter days, of falling over and grazing oneself in the playground, of washing hands that are red and frozen. It was a strangely sober eroticism.
This is how I lived for some years. I haunted the beach, following the tides. I worked in my studio. I had cupboards full of pornography, legal and otherwise, underwear of all colours, styles and fabrics (but especially those decorated with flowers), and other erotic artefacts. I tried to perfect the sombre but deliriously seductive atmosphere of the cottage by collecting bizarre art and furnishings. I even came to believe that the mer-monkey, which was displayed proudly in a glass case in the hall, that creepy fake, the centrepiece of my whole collection, was the closest I would ever come to seeing a real mermaid. Indeed, I was almost satisfied with this.
Almost satisfied. It was as if a love affair had finished years ago, and I, knowing how completely and hopelessly over it was, had endeavoured to forget it. I had come to live in a daze where much of the time even I did not know what I was daydreaming about. But I came finally to the realisation that it was not trying to forget that was the realistic thing to do, but facing the fact that I had not forgotten and could not. I had been drowsing for years. I began to mutter and curse the passion that had brought me here, to dash my heart against the rocks like the waves, in search of something impossible, some sweet, fatal dream, some euphoric, poisonous love. But I was brought fully awake one day by an unexpected discovery.
Chapter One: Beachcomber’s Delight
The waves were crushing pebbles on the beach and it was hard to tell whether the light moisture that danced in the air was mist, drizzle or sea spray. The whole beach was damp, from the sodden sand to the piled shelves of flattish stones banked up by the foot of the cliffs. I walked along the rough knuckled coastline, idly, contemplating the great shattering of the senses that so many dark, wet splinters of stone seemed to represent. In front of me were rocks usually hidden by the tide, which had now been ripped to shreds like a sheet on their sharp edges. In amongst these black, jagged shapes, where the tide had withdrawn and seaweed hung like some sort of slimy spawn wreathed in clammy vapour, there were still rock pools, their surfaces now and then dotted by some drop of moisture that sent out a tiny shiver of ripples.
I began to climb among the rocks, sure-footed since I had visited the beach nearly every day since moving to this village. It was then that I noticed something unnatural in what was otherwise a purely natural scene. A number of objects, flashing, shining, lay on one of the flatter rocks. The objects did not appear to have been washed up, rather they startled me amidst the chaos of wave and rock by appearing to have been carefully placed and left, abandoned.
This preciseness jarred with the objects’ surroundings, as did the polished glossiness and ornate appearance of the objects themselves. Perhaps most enticing of all, was the suggestion of a presence only lately gone, the presence that had placed these things so carefully, leaving behind some delicate, cooling imprint of itself upon the very air.
I moved closer to examine them. The objects were a small, gilt-edged box and matching hairbrush and looking glass. They all appeared to be in marvellous condition, showing no tarnish or blemish, no signs of age whatsoever. I was also surprised that they seemed wholly untouched by dampness from either the sea or the air. The glass reflected the whiteness of the sky coldly, with a silvered exactitude that rendered the drab, dismal firmament a thing of magical detail. The lines and ridges of the other two objects were coated with similarly pellucid reflections of light, like mercury.
A feeling of trespass made me nervous about touching the objects, but inevitably I was unable to resist. The designs chased into the metal were full of soft, whimsical curves, as were the objects themselves. These designs depicted nothing more remarkable than arabesques of seaweed encircling seahorses, jellyfish, angelfish, sharks and other ocean dwellers. But there was some quality in their style and execution that amazed me. I had never seen artwork like this before. Its very conception was so original that I could guess at no influences, but that originality was based not on cleverness or the deliberate eclecticism of post-modernism. It was based wholly on some fey spirit whose purity was isolated and apart from the rest of the world: at least, the human world. The roundness of the creatures shown seemed humorous, would have been cartoonesque had it not been tempered by a certain cool, aquatic serenity and feralness. I realised then that the creatures had been depicted with true love. And not human love. It was a wild and watery love. These designs had been fashioned by someone for whom this was the world, for whom jellyfish were floating flowers and fish either playmates or livestock or something else for which there is no human word.
On all three items there had been added the occasional whelk, limpet, or group of barnacles, all in gold, just as if they were the real thing, anchoring themselves to their chosen spot, breaking the symmetry of the designs. When I discovered two perfect strands of reddish hair among the bristles of the brush I felt suddenly and peculiarly charged up. The other two objects also held surprises. When I looked into the looking glass there appeared to be no glass at all, as if I were simply peering through a hole beyond which stood a double of myself in a phantom world the mirror image of my own. When I opened the box, I discovered spaces which were clearly meant for the brush and the glass, but there was also a neatly enclosed compartment which contained a sort of green powder. I had no idea what this powder was for and thought first, absurdly, of cosmetics. However, a moment’s thought convinced me that this was at the very lea
st unlikely. It occurred to me that the powder might be poisonous, but I could think of no better way of testing its properties than tasting it. Licking my forefinger I dabbed it in the powder and sucked at it as if it were sherbet. It tasted rather bitter, though not entirely unpleasant.
Moments after I had swallowed the powder I experienced a strange, rippling disturbance of my senses. I heard the bubbling of an underwater world, the great wash and drag of currents through a reef, like the eerie, stifled workings of the inside of a body. I saw the rush of bubbles, twists of light dissolving, drowning and beneath, and around, the restless swelling shadows of ocean, a phantasmagoria distorted by the constant motion of waves, stirring as furtively as the tentacles of an octopus. Then I began to hear the chattering of voices in a language unknown to me. It seemed a language as sad and cold and ancient as the dripping, silvery waves themselves, a language like the forgotten treasure of a sunken ship. And the voices—they were shrill, almost human, like the cries of gulls. I do not know how to describe them except to say that they brought to my mind, without me knowing why, certain very distinct images, such as the fins of fish spread thin and elegant, and fish bones, and sea storms, and fresh, dark, dripping blood, cold and salty.
The language of the voices hung like the runes of a tragic ballad in the ocean. I felt on the verge of understanding the words, but each time understanding faded, like fish disturbed by movement, darting away from the surface of the water into the depths again.
Then I saw flash before my vision the pallid torsos of the creatures I had so long desired. Their movements were quick, violent. I was struck by a devastating bolt of passion, as if I had been mortally wounded. A sudden ache of wanting had quite broken me inside, so that I felt as Samson must have; blind, chained, humiliated. The desire I felt was poison. I knew it was fatal and yet such was its sweetness that I willingly succumbed. The more foolish this love seemed, the more futile, the more the faces of the mermaids scorned me, the more I wanted it. I realised that, half-drowned, I had been swept far away from my right senses, that I was mad, not myself at all, that to die out of my wits with this love was a wretched thing—but I gave myself totally as an offering to this beautiful, cruel love, knowing there could be no greater passion, no sweeter flame, than this heavy, queasy, sensual sickness.
Morbid Tales Page 2
