It will be obvious to any reader how futile an exercise it would be to try and render our conversation in the Sunken Tongue literally, with all the poetic flashes of seascape it contained; mine, I’m afraid, rather clumsy and discordant.
I answered the mermaid’s question rather disingenuously.
‘So, they were yours were they? I found them lying on the rocks on the beach. I’m a beachcomber, you see, and I collect things that are washed up—like you.’
‘You have taken some of the Kraken powder, haven’t you? I must warn you, it is very useful, but it is a poison, and if you take too much, you will go mad.’
She delivered this last sentence in a manner that was almost jaunty, and punctuated it with a quick flash of raised eyebrow. Lines curled at the corner of her mouth like the shadows of shallow water eddying around a small rock. I sensed something closely related to sarcasm in her overall attitude and was fascinated.
‘Suddenly I have questions,’ I said. ‘Tell me, how is it that the Kraken powder enables me not only to understand the Sunken Tongue but also to speak it?’
‘The Kraken is a wise and terrible creature and understands all languages. The powder is made from the flesh of its tentacles. Language is just a state of mind. The powder allows you to drift freely into other states of mind.’
‘I see. How did you get washed up on the beach?’
‘I was looking for my box and things. There was nowhere else I could have left them. But they weren’t there. And I looked and looked and the tide went out and left me stranded.’
I was charmed by the concern she showed for her possessions, as if she were a little girl giving names and characters to her trinkets. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘perhaps you will do as you promised and answer my questions.’ I nodded. ‘Why did you bring me here? Are you going to give me what belongs to me and return me to the sea?’
‘Ah! To answer those questions in order, I brought you here because you are the most amazing thing I have ever discovered. You can have your things back immediately, although perhaps I would be wise to hang onto the powder for a while. And I am not going to return you to the sea in the near future. Please do not be alarmed or angry. I can understand why my keeping you here might tend to make you hate me. But please try to see things from my point of view. I’ve never been in such a position before, having to make something that seems so unreasonable sound reasonable, but if you understand that I mean you no harm, then things will be better for us both. I mean, for a start—did I save your life, by any chance?’
She remained silent.
‘Surely you owe me something, if indeed I did save your life. The tide was still going out, when I found you. How long can you live out of water?’
‘Longer than you think, it’s just hard to move about.’
‘Well, never mind that. All I can say is, please give me a chance. If you really don’t like it here with me, then I will take you back. But right now I am building a tank for you. You ought, at least, to try it out. Don’t you think? No? By the way, what’s your name?’
Her name was an unpronounceable but beautiful cluster of sounds, which I can only render as something like ‘Gwthen douhl yiyn’.
Its meaning sounds rather ornate and stilted in English, ‘Shooting star, fallen to the darkling depths of ocean.’ I also noticed the meta-suggestions of her name’s meaning as a sort of evocation of some long and powerful body, half hid in shadows, whose flank was undulating in slow strokes, strong as iron. It took me a while to grasp the meaning firmly enough to work out a crude English equivalent, ‘The wild and unsummoned serpent’.
‘But I summoned you,’ was my response when I finally understood.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Never mind,’ I replied, regretting my words. ‘If I must not use the Kraken powder too much, then perhaps you should teach me the Sunken Tongue, and I will teach you my own language.’
Whatever her reasons, and I was soon to find her depths deceptive and unfathomable, Gwendoline (as I came to call her) decided to co-operate with me for the time being. Perhaps she was as curious about me as I was about her. Perhaps she felt she was at my mercy and wished to gain my confidence. I do not know.
After our conversation, I climbed up into the attic again and remembered my shame when I had unthinkingly blurted out that I had summoned her. The first thing I did was to destroy the mermaid idol. It was a lewd and degraded mockery of Gwendoline’s beauty. In anger, I tore it from its place and threw it to the floor. It fell into pieces. The head remained intact and seemed to stare at me accusingly as if sneering at my hypocrisy for destroying it now that I had used it to get what I wanted. I was deeply unsettled by this impression and stamped on the hideous face. I wanted no trace of it to remain. I never again used the materials I had used for the idol in any other sculpture.
Aware of Gwendoline’s discomfort I set to work finishing the tank that would house her. The tank proved to be less difficult to build than I had anticipated. It was nothing other than a large but very simple sculpture. What was difficult was tending to Gwendoline’s needs in the meantime. There was little in the house that she found palatable, so that I had to go into the village to buy some fresh fish. The necessary duty and privilege also fell to me of carrying her about, so that she didn’t get too cramped and bored in the bathroom. I even took her for walks outside, feeling secure that the cottage’s isolation would mean there were no witnesses.
When, in a few days, the work was completed, I carried Gwendoline up into the attic studio, almost as if I were carrying my bride across the threshold of a new home. I let her fall in with a splash like a little celebration. The tank was large, but I felt some compunction that it could never be as wide and deep as the sea she was accustomed to. Still, it was not then enough to make me set her free. Despite those omens of which I was half-conscious, of which I would perhaps have been fully conscious had I not been determined to ignore them, looking back it seems to me that, on the brink of everything that was to come, with everything to come present in the moment, my happiness was complete.
Chapter Two: To Have and Not to Have
I don’t know how Gwendoline felt, but it seemed to me that over the days the fact of her captivity receded into the background and disappeared. Perhaps my mind was too selfishly occupied with the myriad dazzling joys that I now possessed for me to notice Gwendoline’s true feelings, but I observed nothing in her manner to suggest that she was pining for her freedom. Everything had become a feast for my senses, and for the first time in my life, deepening pleasure and excitement were at my fingertips, easily controlled.
As I had suggested, we began teaching each other our respective languages so that our conversation did not depend on the Kraken Powder. At first the powder was necessary to facilitate this process. But I took smaller and smaller doses, less and less frequently. My transition from the use of the powder to speaking the Sunken Tongue without it, was almost seamless. The Sunken Tongue itself was like a drug, having hallucinogenic effects almost identical to the powder. When I was with Gwendoline it was like living underwater, light and time distorting, surging with the currents of the imagination, blurring as with aquamarine waves, the air rippling with translucent colours like fronds of seaweed stirring in the swell and wash of the undersea. It was as if we lived in a coral garden full of beautiful sea anemones, sponges, urchins, sea horses and glinting shoals of tiny, colourful fish, turning and turning, changing direction like a trick of the light. Crabs would crawl sideways out of the corner of my vision as we talked.
I noticed that the Sunken Tongue had few really hard consonants; they were usually soft or slurred. This is apparently because vowel sounds travel better underwater. Mermaids and Mermen can apparently also speak whale and dolphin languages to which the Sunken Tongue is in some ways more closely related than it is to any human language. The Sunken Tongue is, however, constructed for use in and out of water. You could call it an amphibious language, and in fact because of its adaptation to un
derwater conditions I privately thought of it as a ‘webbed language’.
I grew acclimatised to the twilight world that the Sunken Tongue and Gwendoline’s company together created. I suppose Gwendoline, for her part, must have become a little more accustomed to the gloomy strangeness of life on land. She was a fast learner and spoke English very charmingly, her errors often being more attractive and thought provoking than correct usage.
But aside from the question of language, something else was being learnt. I was learning how the idiosyncrasies of Gwendoline’s character differed from the fantasy that her beauty had evoked in me. At first it was simply as if she did not quite live up to that fantasy and this marred her beauty for me. Then I realised that the perfection of the fantasy that I thought matched her beauty was really only emptiness and blandness compared to the unexpected creature who was revealing herself to me in a thousand chance details.
I remember an evening. It was one of those times that form lightly without you realising that they are to become a poignant memory. It is always surprising to place such memories in time. One asks oneself, curious, amazed, was it really so early on? Was it really so late? Was that really the sequence of events? Such memories seem either to stand out, or to slip their moorings, to exist somehow apart from time and the logic of cause and effect. Let me be plain. I have in my life long doubted the existence of love. That has been harder to believe in than mermaids. It is surely more fantastical. But if ever a creature was made to be loved then it was Gwendoline, and I was in love before I knew it. Literally.
On this evening I had taken Gwendoline out into the air and let her sit among the grass and flowers. When we went back inside it seemed that we took the stars with us, floating through the hall and passages and up into the studio. There the walls and ceiling became nothing more than pictures hanging in a gallery that was the night sky. It was a curious reversal. Instead of the dormer window framing a patch of starry darkness, that darkness framed everything. I even felt a wonderful chill, as if nothing stood between us and the night air.
I let Gwendoline slip from my arms into the water of her tank, and felt for a moment how her inhumanly graceful movements had come to have a soft compliance to them when I carried and helped her. I had brought some red wine and poured out two glasses. Gwendoline swam to the side of the tank as I held out her glass. She took it in both hands and drank most of it in one gulp. She made a face.
‘Don’t you like it?’ I asked. I had rather expected her not to, and had given it to her experimentally, for the sake of novelty as much as anything.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never tasted anything the same. How is it that humans have such a taste for it? It is not an obvious thing.’
‘Hmmm, I have no idea how it was first discovered, or why it’s become so popular. I wouldn’t even like it myself if I hadn’t been forced to drink it so often and learnt to associate it with certain pleasures.’
Gwendoline gamely finished off her wine and held her glass out for more, smiling.
‘It’s strange. It’s like a web made of fire and dust and blood. It is not an obvious pleasure at all.’ And she quickly drank down another glass. I suppose that I had one of those strange, sober moments, like waking up, when reality strikes one in all its bewildering wordlessness. My present reality was staggering. I was lucky. My musings led me to speak.
‘If mermaids exist, just like any other creature on earth, why is it that so few people know they exist? Do you hide? I don’t understand. How is it that I have found you when most of the human race would deny that your existence is even possible?’
‘That’s an easy question, don’t you think?’
‘Well, if I thought it was easy, I wouldn’t ask it, don’t you think?’ I said in my usual attempt to be mocking, which only served to isolate me, as if it were really myself I was mocking.
‘You seem to think that everyone lives in the same world. But there are many worlds. The world you live in isn’t just a place, it’s a path that begins with your beginning and ends with your ending. That’s the world you live in, and no one else can visit it. In the world you live in and the world I live in, mermaids and humans seldom meet. But perhaps there are some who live in a world where mermaids and humans know about each other and take each other for granted. Their world would be very distant from the world of those who don’t believe in mermaids, and it would be unlikely for the two to meet each other, although they both exist. It is distance that makes things seem unreal, don’t you agree?’
‘You have a very open and fluid view of things,’ I said in my foolish analytical manner, distancing myself. Yes, I know this trait. I deplore the way I can assume I have more insight into what someone has said than they have themselves, as if everything spoken needs some commentary, some explanation. I realised what I was doing and hung my head, hoping to find my real self, my heart, somewhere in the shadow that now hooded my eyes. I sat pensively on a stool by the side of the tank, one hand dangling awkwardly, sipping my wine.
‘I suppose I’ve always thought something similar,’ I said ‘I’m just surprised to find that I’m right.’
I pondered awhile.
‘Talking of different worlds, I’ve always been attracted by differences. I’ve always wanted to make myself known to the other, to feel the friction of interacting with a different sex or culture or class. It always seemed fascinating to me, people speaking with different accents, swapping notes on their different backgrounds, learning each other’s different senses of humour. But now, with us, our worlds are so far apart that I wonder if our differences can even mean anything to each other, perhaps there has to be some shared point of reference for any differences to be interesting.’
‘And what is it you want to say to me?’ she asked, smiling in amusement.
‘I seem to be losing myself,’ I said, embarrassed, ‘I only really meant to say that I’d like to get to know you better, but I don’t know where to start.’
‘Don’t you have any more questions you would like to ask me?’
‘Yes. Yes. Lots, but . . . ’
‘Then perhaps you should start with them.’
‘Okay. When you were a girl, what were your favourite things? What did you like doing most?’
‘I am a girl. Mostly I like doing the things I always liked, playing with the lobsters and the eels, finding things on the sea-bed, talking and singing with the other mermaids, watching the sunlight start to decay in the deepening waters.’
‘Ah, now, you see, that’s one of those things that I don’t understand. How do you play with the lobsters and eels exactly? I can’t quite imagine it.’
She looked sideways and tipped her head back in a curious, unfamiliar gesture which I have come to recognise as something like a shrug.
‘I always have played with them. It is difficult to describe. When you know them so well you can play games without any rules, games where you feel each other’s minds.’
‘And you enjoy that?’
‘Oh yes. Of course.’ Here she laughed at some memory. ‘The lobsters, they are gloomy, they pretend they are not playing at all. They try to get past you as if they are ignoring you. Like this.’
She bent her head down and held her arms out like claws jerkily turning from side to side in a comically haughty fashion. Mirth seemed to well up within her and burst from her lips without her volition so that she seemed almost to hum before laughing sporadically. She smiled such a sweet and elastic smile that her gleaming lips formed little ovals of ecstasy at the sides of her mouth. I smiled, too, and laughed, with such a feeling of relief, of being touched by something genuine and radiant, that it was like grief. For an instant there was a lump in my throat. The merest shadow of a lump, and a painful, brittle brightness as my Adam’s apple bobbed back into place. I suppose the hurt in my laughter, and my lapse into diffident silence as I sat on my hands, my eyes suddenly empty and confused beneath the shadow of my scruffy hair, must have without my knowledge revealed that vulnerable,
elusive real self that I had spent so much of my life desperately trying to show to others. I say this because there is such a sense of ‘if only’ associated with that real self. If only I could let it live then there would be no barrier between me and the world. Something like that happened now.
Gwendoline looked at me, and since for an instant I was not protected from that gaze, she saw me as I have always wanted to be seen. For possibly the first time in my life I did not feel invisible.
‘If you would like to feel that friction you were talking about, perhaps we are too different for you to really feel it when we are just talking. There is a better way. Would you like to play with me?’
‘Play with you?’ There was something disarmingly and childishly candid in her offer.
‘Yes, like the lobsters and the eels.’
‘The lobsters and the eels? Yes. Yes, I would like that very much.’
‘Come into the water.’
At first, I almost went in fully dressed. I realised what I was doing and for a moment it seemed like a spontaneous and liberating thing to do. Then I realised that it wasn’t right. I stopped and slowly, carefully, removed all my clothes. Finally, my awkward, cadaverous body stood naked and a little chilly in the attic air, and strange to say, I felt actually physically beautiful, like a Roman statue. Then, still taking my time, I climbed over the side of the pool and divided the water with my limbs, quite as if I were tumbling into someone else’s bed, the ripples that enveloped me satin sheets. Gwendoline’s continuing smile was an enigma to me, utterly unexplainable, seemingly inspired by a serenity and a passion beyond that known to mortals, as if a capricious goddess were choosing to be indulgent and merciful. I could not imagine that her reasons for smiling might have anything to do with me as an individual. I did not understand, hardly questioned, simply took it as impersonal permission. And as I waded it seemed the water itself was warm with the welcoming and mellowness of that smile.
Morbid Tales Page 4
