Dancing with Mermaids

by Miles Gibson

  He looked around the shed and tried to imagine the woman made helpless on the floor, a toppled giantess, tied by the hands and feet, her skirt slashed to ribbons and her hair in her eyes. He tried to imagine her naked but it proved too much for him. He had never seen a naked woman.

  ‘What happens if she starts struggling?’ asked Vernie.

  ‘We knock her down and tie her up,’ explained Smudger.

  ‘We could get a mattress and a little table and a paraffin stove for when it gets cold at night.’

  ‘We could keep her in the shed forever,’ said Smudger who harboured a secret belief that she would finally fall in love and run away with him.

  ‘The police would find out,’ said Sickly. The smell of the Sheep, sweet as molasses, sharp as acid drops, stung his nostrils and made him sneeze.

  ‘You can tell ’em that she’s gone on holiday,’ said Vernie fiercely.

  ‘No,’ insisted Sickly. ‘They’ll find out.’

  They glared at him. They suspected he was telling the truth. Vernie prised his tobacco tin from a crack in the floorboards and spent a long time trying to roll a cigarette. Smudger stared forlornly through the cracked window. For several minutes they sat silent and depressed.

  ‘She has lovely tits,’ said Smudger finally.

  ‘How do you know?’ said Vernie. He struck a match, sucked and coughed and wiped his eyes.

  ‘Sickly told me.’

  ‘Well?’ said Vernie, turning on Sickly.

  ‘I seen ’em,’ said Sickly smugly.

  ‘How?’ demanded Vernie.

  ‘I seen her in the bath. I looked.’

  ‘Are they big?’ said Vernie.

  ‘Enormous,’ said Sickly, measuring the air with his hands.

  ‘Does she have big nipples?’ said Smudger.

  ‘Big dark ones,’ said Sickly.

  ‘Has she got a hairy snapper?’ said Vernie gleefully.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sickly.

  ‘Is it curly?’ said Smudger.

  ‘I don’t know – I can’t remember,’ said Sickly.

  ‘Of course it’s curly,’ said Vernie impatiently. ‘Frank’s big brother cut some hair off his girlfriend’s snapper and kept it in an envelope. I saw it. Black and curly.’

  ‘Why did he keep it in an envelope?’ said Sickly.

  Vernie shrugged. ‘I suppose he liked to look at it.’

  ‘But we’d have to tie her up and everything,’ objected Vernie. He drew on the cigarette and spluttered smoke through the corner of his mouth. He felt rather queasy.

  ‘Not if she was hypnotized,’ said Sickly. ‘I read about it. You hypnotize ’em and then they do anything you want ’em to do and when they wake up they don’t remember anything about it.’

  ‘That’s right,’ coughed Vernie. ‘If we could hypnotize her we could get her to come here and take all her clothes off and walk about stark naked and then we could get a real look at her and she wouldn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘We could even sniff her snapper,’ said Smudger.

  ‘Do you know how to do it?’ said Sickly.

  ‘No,’ said Smudger sadly.

  ‘I’ve got a book somewhere that tells you,’ said Vernie. ‘I’ll bring it with me tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you going to help?’ said Smudger, leaning towards Sickly and glaring at him. Despite all their wild talk he wasn’t convinced that Sickly would help them kidnap his own mother. It seemed too good to be true.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sickly surprised.

  ‘We’ll cut your fingers off if you try and run away,’ threatened Smudger.

  Sickly picked his nose thoughtfully. His shoes were loose and his dungarees were a size too big for him. He looked like a jumble sale gnome. ‘I’ll help,’ he said mildly. ‘I’ll prove it. Tomorrow. I’ll prove it.’

  The next afternoon they met in the shed and sat patiently while Vernie read aloud the principles of mesmerism from a tattered booklet stolen from his father’s bookshelf. The booklet was called Your Secret Power to Command. The cover had a picture of a man in a turban pointing his finger at a beautiful woman. The woman had her eyes closed. The man had sparks leaping from his finger.

  ‘You stare at ’em,’ said Vernie. ‘You stare at ’em and it sort of controls ’em until they fall into a trance. Then they’ll do anything for you.’

  ‘I want to do it,’ whispered Sickly. His small white face seemed to glow with excitement. His ginger bristles stood erect. His eyes were alight.

  ‘Why?’ said Smudger.

  ‘It’s easy for me. She knows me. She won’t suspect nothing,’ said Sickly.

  ‘He’s right,’ said Vernie.

  ‘How do we know we can trust him?’ said Smudger

  Sickly grinned. He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled ball of pink cotton. He flourished it like a magician palming a flag. He was holding a pair of his mother’s pants.

  ‘I stole them,’ said Sickly proudly.

  Smudger stared at the pants in disbelief. Vernie snatched hold of them, rubbed his face in them, chortled and fell back into the potato sacks. He wriggled his ears and smirked and rubbed his stomach and shrieked like a rooster. Smudger fought for them, gained possession and pulled them over his head. Vernie made little whimpering noises and screwed up his eyes in a pantomime of simulated ecstasy.

  ‘She wore ’em,’ said Sickly.

  ‘She wriggled her bum in them,’ croaked Vernie.

  ‘Snappers,’ shouted Smudger with the pants pulled tight against his face. ‘Snappers.’ The word hissed, dark and delicious, through his teeth. His brain was a blazing bonfire. His hair crackled with lust.

  They pranced and danced and wrestled until they fell exhausted and the pants were no more than a frayed rag. Then they buried the precious fetish in the crack in the floorboards beside the tobacco tin.

  Vernie presented Sickly with Your Secret Power to Command.

  ‘I’ll have to practise on someone,’ said Sickly.

  ‘It won’t work on me,’ said Vernie quickly.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ said Sickly.

  ‘You could practise on Old George,’ suggested Smudger.

  ‘Does it work on dogs?’ asked Vernie.

  ‘It works on anything,’ said Sickly.

  Old George was a large, yellow mongrel with torn ears, bad breath and a reputation for biting the hand that fed him. He lived under a wheelbarrow in Sickly’s garden and pilfered from the neighbourhood dustbins. He was devoted to the boys and tried to follow them everywhere, snapping and snuffling at their heels.

  Sickly agreed to the experiment and, a few days later, reported that he had Old George falling asleep at his command. The following morning they bundled the dog into a cricket bag, hauled him over the brick wall and pushed him into the shed. He crouched in a corner, growling and slobbering and glaring at the boys.

  ‘He’s vicious,’ said Vernie proudly as he watched Old George try to chew on his plimsolls.

  ‘He hates the cricket bag,’ explained Sickly.

  ‘Shall we feed him before we do him?’ said Smudger helpfully. ‘I brought some biscuits.’

  ‘No,’ said Sickly. ‘I’ll fix him.’

  They watched Sickly, on his hands and knees, crawl towards the puzzled mongrel. Old George growled softly and curled his lip. Sickly stared at him, his eyes popping and his long nose quivering with concentration. Old George stopped growling and cocked his head. Sickly continued to stare, without blinking or moving, for a very long time while Old George stood frozen with fascination. And then, very quietly, he trembled, toppled sideways into the sacks and closed his eyes. He began to snore.

  ‘It works,’ whispered Smudger, horrified. They hadn’t really believed it. They had yearned for success, hoped and prayed that they might be given the magic, but they hadn’t really believed it. And now anything was possible. They had found a key to unlock all the unspeakable mysteries of the world. They could stop life dead in its tracks and dance rings around it. They coul
d walk on water, fly through the air, spit in the eye of the moon.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Vernie, crawling over to the dog and peering at him. ‘Can he hear us talking?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sickly.

  ‘Make him do something,’ said Smudger.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Sickly. ‘I tried to make him do things but he just lies there in a heap.’

  ‘We never taught him any tricks,’ said Vernie. ‘It’s obvious. You can’t expect him to turn into a genius just because he’s been hypnotized.’

  ‘How long will he sleep?’ said Smudger.

  ‘Hours,’ said Sickly.

  They sat in amazed silence like a group of pygmies confronted by the victim of the first stone axe. Old George lay at their feet with his eyes closed and his tongue peeping between his fangs. He looked dead.

  ‘When can we do your mother?’

  ‘Sunday,’ said Sickly. He had planned everything.

  ‘Will she take all her clothes off and walk about stark naked or will she go like Old George?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. When she goes into the trance she’ll be helpless,’ explained Sickly.

  ‘We can help ourselves.’

  ‘We can take off her dress.’

  ‘And pull her pants down.’

  ‘And look at her bum,’ screeched Smudger, flinging his arms around himself and rolling across the floor.

  ‘And touch her tits and everything,’ roared Vernie.

  Smudger frowned and sat up again, cobwebs in his hair. He looked around the shed. There was a problem. ‘How do we get her up here?’ he said.

  ‘We can do it at home,’ said Sickly.

  ‘Now we can hypnotize her we can do it anywhere,’ said Vernie. ‘And she won’t remember anything.’

  They emerged from the shed, scrambled over the garden wall and crept down the hill towards Rams Horn. Sickly walked beside Smudger, hands pushed deep in his dungarees, the sun gleaming on his nose. Vernie walked behind them, his long arms dangling, a plimsoll flapping in the warm dust. They walked in silence, drugged with excitement and fantastic dreams of Sickly’s mother.

  Chapter Three

  Mrs Clancy threw back the bedroom curtains, tilted her face and let the sunlight warm her throat. It was almost noon and she had slept like a child. She stared down from Regent Terrace towards the empty esplanade and the sea. Above her head gulls screamed against the gathering cloud. Below, in the street, three small boys appeared, dragging a cricket bag. One of the boys was limping and his feet looked as if they were wrapped in dirty bandages. As the procession passed beneath the window the cricket bag began to struggle and the boys began to shout. Then the cricket bag exploded and a large yellow mongrel somersaulted into the gutter. The smallest boy, a pale dwarf with ginger bristles, tried to catch the dog by its ears. But the dog broke loose and scuttled away towards the beach. Mrs Clancy stood at the window and watched until the dog had vanished on the esplanade. A faint breeze, spiced with the smell of the Sheep, ruffled the lace of her nightgown and made her shudder. She snapped the window closed and turned back to her dressing-table.

  She was a handsome woman with polished skin and a thick mane of hair, rinsed each month to the colour of chestnuts. She had the ripe bosom of a matron and the tight waist of a chorus girl. Her limbs were powerful, yet so slender at the ankle and wrist that her movements appeared very graceful and delicate. She had the muscular beauty of a Victorian courtesan and it was an illusion she liked to cultivate with the help of the most narcotic perfume and underwear of apricot silk. She took great pride in her appearance. The face she presented to the world was perfectly painted and, when she turned her back, the seams in her stockings were perfectly straight.

  Despite the smell of rain in the street the sunlight was warm and strong. It filled the room, ignited the mirrors and glowed in the carpet. In one corner a cabinet filled with glass paper-weights trapped the sunlight on its shelves in fat bubbles of brilliant colour.

  Mrs Clancy glided to the dressing-table and finished her toilet. She applied a final coat of varnish to her mouth, polished her fingernails, preened her hair into smooth curls and when, at last, she could find no more work to be done, she began to move around the room, stroking the furniture and patting the pillows on the bed.

  Finally, when everything in the room was to her complete satisfaction, she picked up her husband’s shoes from beneath a chair and blew the dust from their toecaps.

  Mrs Clancy was a widow. But she continued to sleep in the marriage bed and kept the window open at night for fear that her husband’s spirit, flying home like a storm-tossed pigeon, might find itself locked out and roost elsewhere. To help the spirit recognize its earthly home she had preserved her husband’s wardrobe of clothes and she liked to keep the doors of the wardrobe open and his favourite jacket hanging on the back of a chair. She admitted that the chances of him returning for his jacket or tobacco pouch after fifteen years were remote, but she liked to take precautions. He was more important to her in the other world than he had ever been on earth and she could not risk offending him.

  She had lost her husband, Captain Turnpike Clancy, in Southampton Water and spent many years and a great deal of money looking for him. She had employed countless mediums and mystics in her search yet, despite their efforts to tease and cajole him to stretch out a phantom hand and deliver a message of comfort from beyond the grave, he had remained silent. Nothing could stir him. He had been so stubborn in his resistance that Mrs Clancy had doubted sometimes that he was actually dead and thought he might be hiding somewhere in London with another name and another woman.

  Finally something happened to change her fortune. She had, by this time, given up all hope of contacting her dead husband and turned for comfort to the collecting of small antiques. The money he had left behind she began to exchange for eccentric objects made of ivory, jade and glass.

  One day, rooting through a corner of her favourite market, she had discovered a scrying crystal. She did not recognize it beneath its layer of grime but purchased it as a curiosity, took it home and scrubbed it with a soapy toothbrush. The cleaning revealed a heavy sphere of beryl, almost translucent in colour yet tinged with an acid green at its edge. It stood on a glass pedestal shaped like an eggcup and the base of the pedestal sat in a frame with tiny brass feet. It was altogether an impressive work of art.

  She displayed the crystal ball on a circular dining table which she had covered in a cloth embroidered with elaborate hexagrams. And, remembering the rituals which she had often in the past paid small fortunes to observe, it was not long before she began to search for signs of her husband in the crystal.

  After a little practice at deciphering the milky reflections she began to see vague images. She saw mountains sparkling with ice. She saw Atlantic harbours veiled in smoke. But still she saw nothing of her stubborn husband.

  Disappointed and puzzled by the pictures, she sought the advice of her friends, gathered them around the table and told them of the things she had seen. After some prompting and a measure of strong tea, an old man who had been raised in Kashmir recognized the mountains as the Himalayas and immediately feared for the life of a nurse he had not seen for half a century.

  ‘The old girl must be a hundred years old,’ he said, as he remembered himself as a boy in a valley of flowers.

  ‘I hope there’s nothing wrong,’ said Mrs Clancy.

  ‘Nonsense,’ roared the old man. ‘I hope she burns in hell.’

  Next, a neighbour, who had lost her own husband in a storm at sea, recognized the harbour from which he had sailed and took it as a sign that she was to join him.

  ‘It’s a terrible gift,’ the neighbour had said as she peered into the crystal ball and saw nothing but fog. Two months later she fell under a train at Weymouth. Mrs Clancy’s reputation as a scryer had been established.

  Throughout her long career she had never once claimed to own any particular power of vision. The claims were made by those in Rams Horn who came fo
r consultations. She merely squinted through the crystal, described whatever caught her eye and left it for others to make sense of it. The fact that she never failed to describe the secrets in someone’s life surprised her as much as it surprised them.

  When she tried to find a reason for her newly-discovered powers she always reached the same conclusion: her husband had risen at last from the grave and was using her to send messages from those around him in the ether to those around her in the living world. She turned her bedroom into a shrine and kept his photograph in a locket at her neck. She grew fat and she grew rich. In death, as in life, her husband had continued to provide.

  She stood now in the bedroom shrine and gazed lovingly at the shoes she held in her hands. They were heavy brogues, stitched from thick slabs of chocolate brown leather and tipped on the heels with steel. Shoes built by hand to fit a man’s feet like a pair of gloves. She placed them gently on the chair beside his wardrobe and tiptoed away.

  On the table in the consulting room the scrying crystal was asleep beneath a purple shroud. The walls of the room, which was empty of furniture but for the table and the chairs that surrounded it, were lined with books and small antiques. The windows of the room were draped in heavy curtains upon which extravagant gold dragons chased their own tails in an elaborate embroidery. Mrs Clancy stood at the door and smiled. A little sunlight managed to squeeze through a crack in the curtains and glowed lovingly upon her face and arms as she sat down before the crystal globe.

  Each month, when the moon was ripe, she held a magic circle. Candles were lit, the Tarot cards were spread on the cloth and the widow entertained her audience with a variety of parlour games. They were a small and satisfied group of spiritualists. There was Mrs Reynolds, who sometimes brought her daughter and helped to serve the sherry and biscuits. Mrs Dobson from Drizzle who had once been haunted by a lobster. Mr Hazlitt and Mr Vine.