The Colour of Mermaids

by Catherine Curzon

She closed her eyes, but dancing before them were the pretty young mum and the frightened boy and the beaming schoolgirl.

  There was more silence, and this time, Daniel didn’t break it. Just as he had after his arrest, Lee Carswell was refusing to speak.

  “Do you want me to come over, darling? Sod the washing, it doesn’t matter.” Eva was now a snivelling, snotty mess. She staggered from her lounge up the stairs to her bathroom, searching for a packet of tissues. “Darling, are you still there?”

  “What do you want me to say?” Daniel asked in a whisper. “What should you have remembered?”

  “That name, Carswell. Your real name.” Eva sank onto the landing, the packet of tissues torn open, her eyes sore from where she had rubbed them. “I know who you really are. At least, who you were.”

  “I… Can I see you?” His next words were quicker, betraying a hint of panic. “You don’t need to worry, Eva, I’m not— I won’t hurt you. I just want to see you.”

  “I want to see you too. And I know you won’t hurt me.”

  “Should I come over there?”

  “You can if you like. I’ll get the kettle on.” Eva got back up to her feet and headed downstairs. “There’s still some of my mum’s rock buns left, if you’d like one?”

  She heard Daniel release a long breath, then he said, “I’ll see you really soon. I love you, honestly.”

  “I know,” Eva whispered, and with infinite care typed out her address. She heard the sound of him moving the phone, pictured him reading the message, there in that bright studio.

  “Please don’t tell anyone,” was all he said.

  Eva occupied herself by washing up her grandma’s teapot and choosing a plate for the rock buns. She wouldn’t allow herself to think of anything else, because as soon as she paused, the faces came back to her. The dead women and the little boy. She set everything up in the front room and stood in a gap in the curtains, watching for the man she had called Daniel, holding her vase without a clue where to put it. She had moved it, and so had an invisible, unknown hand. But she knew without a doubt that it hadn’t been Daniel who’d come here.

  From outside came that jet engine roar a few seconds before the car itself appeared, top down, paint job gleaming in the coastal sun. He was wearing the sunglasses, of course, and when he left the car she saw that Daniel was still in his paint-spattered pyjamas and black T-shirt, his feet bare. He pushed the Wayfarers into his hair and headed for the door at something that wasn’t quite a run, but wasn’t just a walk.

  Eva rushed to the door, opening it before he could knock or ring the bell. She hugged him despite the vase in her hand, and covered his face in kisses.

  “Darling…” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry.” He sank into her embrace, holding her. “I’m so sorry, I couldn’t tell you.”

  Eva closed the door behind him. “It’s okay, it’s okay…honest. Will you—?” Eva was struck by the oddest sensation, as if he was too big for her arms. She was hugging a man, then suddenly a boy, the child in the mugshot. She almost dropped her vase. “I really need to put this down. Sorry. Just…rearranging the ornaments.”

  He nodded mutely, then drew back and gazed at her through large, dark eyes.

  “It was so long ago.” Eva stroked his cheek. That face… She saw the crass attempt at the Andy Warhol print again. “You weren’t a monster. They were.”

  “I used his name, my name, because—” Daniel took the vase from her and set it down on the carpet beside them so he could embrace her again. “Lee never got a chance to grow up. I thought—I felt as though you and me had a connection and I knew it wouldn’t last because I’m fucked up and— It was a way to let Lee have a moment of happiness. To close the door and be with a woman like you, just once, just to let him breathe one last time.”

  Eva rested her head on his shoulder. She tried to speak but was convulsed with sobs. “I’m so sorry for what happened to you. I can’t begin to— I can’t bear the thought that you think your mother took her own life because of you. Darling, it was them, all those people who want…” She took his hand and twined it tightly in her own. “Now look here, Mr Carswell-Scott. I love you. Whatever your name is, I don’t care. You do know that, don’t you? I love you.”

  “I’ll tell you all of it.” He pressed his face to her hair. “But if it gets out— There was nothing weird about using Carswell, I just wanted to hear the name and it not be followed by a pack of lies about me and Mum.”

  “I won’t say anything, you can trust me.” Eva scuffed her fingers against his cheek. “It’s your name, you have every right to use it.”

  “It’s not me, though, not anymore.” He kissed her forehead. “Can we sit down, maybe?”

  “Come on in.” Eva led him into her front room. She indicated the sofa to him and held up the teapot. “Sugar? Milk? I can’t offer a slice of lemon, I’m afraid. How terribly unsophisticated.”

  “Builder’s tea,” Daniel admitted, sinking into the sofa. It was a valiant effort at jollity, but she could see tears sparkling in his eyes. “You can take the boy out of Middlesbrough but he’ll still want builder’s tea.”

  Eva poured milk into a mug decorated with a photograph of fireworks shooting above the pier. She added the tea, then offered Daniel the sugar bowl before pouring a mug for herself. “Help yourself to a rock bun.”

  It was odd how normal this seemed. On the surface, at least.

  “What do you want to know?” Daniel picked up a bun, though he didn’t bite it. “Where do I start?”

  “Start wherever’s easiest for you.” Eva sipped her tea. It was too hot, but she swallowed anyway. He nodded but said nothing, then held out his hand to her. It was a plaintive gesture, the bad boy more vulnerable even than when he had fallen apart. Eva gripped his hand tightly. “I told you you’d have as many hugs as you want, whenever you need them. I haven’t changed my mind.”

  “Do you want to ask me if I did it? Is that the important thing?” Daniel kissed her hand. “That’s what they always asked.”

  Eva couldn’t pretend that she wasn’t curious, but she didn’t feel as if she could ask. “They never found her, did they? I wondered… Maybe she slipped, and I could never understand why they were so certain she hadn’t. That someone had…” Pushed.

  “We were dirt poor, Mum and me, and I’m not going to dress this up, because I was a little bastard. I shoplifted and stole whatever I wanted, I was always fighting, skipping school. I just didn’t care.” He closed his eyes for a second. “I was nowhere near an angel. There was this one woman and I made her life miserable because she was the weirdo, crazy hair, wild eyes, all that. She lived in a massive house on the edge of town, huge place, and I’d go over there with my mates and smash her windows, just to mess with her. She’d come screaming out the house shouting about how you bairns are gunna knock me badly. We’d cuss right back at her. If it was my kid, I’d go mad.”

  He smiled, perhaps at his own recollection of the Middlesbrough accent, but the smile faded too quickly and he went on.

  “My friends were as bad as me, but there was one boy at school and he was as different as you could be. Ollie. He wanted to hang out with us, nine years old and smoking, swaggering about thinking we were really something.” Daniel broke the bun in half and put it on the arm of the sofa. “And he always had plenty of cash, so he was the best kind of friend. His sister was Emily—”

  His voice cracked and he bit down hard on his lip, breathing deeply.

  Emily Shaw.

  Eva stroked his shoulders. He really had been the sort of tearaway that came to her outreach workshops. Although none of them had— “It’s okay. We’ve got as much time as you need. You don’t need to rush.”

  “Emily was her. The girl they said— I didn’t, Eva, I said I did because—” He took another deep breath. “Typical little sister, always hanging around, trying to be part of the gang.”

  Eva nodded. Her own younger sister had been the same, following Eva and her
friends wherever they went. Until that summer, when the bike rides had stopped and they’d had to play in the back garden, always under a parent’s watchful eye. “Why did you say you did it?”

  “Because I wanted to go to the seaside, and they don’t let you out if they don’t think you’re sorry.” He gave a defeated shrug.

  “Did you have a nice day out?” Eva asked. What a thing to ask. Was it worth confessing to a crime he hadn’t committed? And when he’d seen the sea again, had he thought of Emily Shaw?

  “I was going to throw myself off the cliff like they said I had her,” he whispered, his eyes filling with fresh tears. “But when I got there… When I got there I thought of Mum and that one holiday we had in Brighton and—”

  Daniel threw his hand back against his eyes and let out a sob. Then he crumpled against her, a sound like a man in agony torn from his lips.

  Eva held him, rocking him from side to side. What an awful thing for a child to contemplate. To find themselves in a situation so hellish and impossible that they would plan to destroy their young life. “And you didn’t, you held on, you found the strength from somewhere to keep going. You were—you are—so brave.”

  “But if I’d not been so bad, nobody would’ve believed what Ollie said, but they wouldn’t listen to me, some council house kid who was always in trouble.” He sobbed out the words against her shoulder. “They wouldn’t listen so I just stopped talking.”

  “Is that when you started to paint?”

  Daniel nodded. “But I wanted to since we came to Brighton, me and Mum. That’s why they didn’t believe me about that day, because how would I want to paint?’

  He lifted his head and blinked through bloodshot eyes. “When Mum took me to the gallery, I’d never seen anything like it. It was like magic, but I kept it to myself because I was Lee, and Lee wouldn’t do something so stupid as paint pictures.”

  “But Daniel would?”

  “Daniel did.” He nodded. “Ollie’s parents took us to the seaside for the weekend and because we were shits, we thought it’d be funny to give them a fright and go off to the cliffs. When we got there though, Emily trailing after us, I didn’t want to just hang about and chuck rocks or whatever. All I wanted to do was explore, picture how those amazing scenes would look if I painted them, so I left Ollie and Emily to it. It was dark when I found my way back to the car and…and the police were there and Ollie was saying—”

  “It’s okay, you don’t have to say it.” Eva held his hand again. He hadn’t done it. She believed him.

  “But I didn’t, and he had this whole story and he was crying and her parents were screaming but I didn’t! I kept on saying that I hadn’t been there, that I never did anything, and they wouldn’t listen so I stopped saying it.” He clenched his free hand into a fist. “And he told the police and the court and the judge and they said that I’d done it too, and I said nothing. I bit my tongue and I made it bleed and I said nothing.”

  “It’s odd to think that Oliver Shaw is out there somewhere, isn’t it?” Eva took his fist in both her hands and tried to ease it open. “I hope one day he apologises. I hope he finally tells the truth. Kids make stuff up, they elaborate, and they don’t go back on it because they’re scared they’ll get in trouble. Even if it ends up with someone else. Did he see her slip, and was so shocked that he…”

  Or did Ollie push her? The irritating little sister who had tagged along all the time.

  “I think he did it, but they were so close… A couple of weeks before, Ollie found Emily face down in their garden pond and dragged her out, so— It was in the local papers and everything, little hero Oliver.” He pinched his fingers to his eyes, wiping away the tears. “And they put me away for it and Mum— You know what happened to Mum.”

  Eva nodded. “She loved you, you know that? It must have been awful for her, to feel as if she couldn’t help you.”

  “The first time I won the Turner, I stuck a bundle of cash in an envelope with anonymous instructions for a stonemason back home and gave her a headstone, because she didn’t have one. I just wanted her to be remembered.” He shook his head. “I knew they’d go to the press, so I added a few extra thousand and asked them to keep it to themselves. I didn’t realise until then how money can change things.”

  “Have you visited her resting place?” Eva knew the story was bleak, but the very idea that his mother had lain in an unmarked plot for years, after the newspapers had coined it in from pull-out spreads shrieking about The Middlesbrough Monster’s Mum, was grotesque and cruel.

  “A few times.” He nodded. “It’s very peaceful up there. I’m not supposed to, really, I don’t know how it’d go down with my probation, but I’ve behaved for nearly twenty years, so they don’t seem to think I need too much monitoring these days.”

  “I’m glad it’s peaceful.” Eva hoped like hell that no one had graffitied the headstone. His mother didn’t deserve to be hounded in death after the way she had been treated in life. “I’m sorry, by the way, for joking about you being the bad boy, and I’m incredibly sorry for what I said the other day, when I called you a monster. I can’t imagine how much that must’ve hurt.”

  “A bad boy I don’t mind, because I’ll admit to that. Not a monster though, I was never that.” Daniel blinked and a fresh tear rolled over his cheek. “They let me out when I turned eighteen and the press went nuts, you must remember that, so I got this anonymity order. New name, new history, new everything. And Lee Carswell disappeared into Daniel Scott, once and for all. But he comes out in every single painting.”

  “What did Lee think of my critique?” Eva caught his tear with her fingertip. “I hope you didn’t think I was being rude, Lee.”

  “I thought you had a point.” He managed a smile and sniffed back another tear. “Daniel Scott got stuck, he just needed somebody to tell him.”

  “And it’s taken a bunch of kids like Lee to point you in the right direction.” Eva returned his smile. She couldn’t undo the past, but she could help to brighten his future. “Do you know, Mr Carswell-Scott, I’ve had an idea?”

  “Share it?” He squeezed her hand. “I love you so much.”

  “You know you want to jazz your house up?” Eva snuggled comfortably against him. “Why not get the outreach kids to paint murals on those lovely big blank walls?”

  “I’ll have to tell my probation officer, believe it or not,” Daniel admitted. “But she won’t say no. Shall we make it a party? Get the parents round too?”

  “Yes! And if you like, I could get my mum to come over and help with the catering.” Eva laughed. “She loves a party. And I want her to meet you.”

  “I didn’t have a dad, not even on my birth certificate. Don’t suppose there’s a dad Catesby too, is there?”

  “There is.” Eva wondered what he’d make of her parents, the hippy and the banker. “Recently retired from his banking job, just started watercolour lessons. He might even join in with the murals!”

  “I hope they’ll approve of me.” He sniffed and glanced down at himself. “I’ll look a bit smarter when I meet them.”

  “They won’t care, trust me.” Eva kissed him. “They’ll only want to know that we’re happy.”

  “I didn’t want to lie to you, but I’m not supposed to tell anybody,” Daniel admitted. “You’re the only one who knows outside of the people who have to.”

  “You didn’t lie, not really. Daniel Scott is your official name, after all. And don’t worry, I won’t say a word.”

  “Do you think Mum would be proud?” His voice was small.

  “She really, really would be, I’m sure of it.” Eva combed back his hair. “And it’s absolutely not your fault that she isn’t here to see how far you’ve come.”

  For a long moment he studied her face, then he gave another tiny smile, like a ray of sun peeping through a storm cloud.

  “I think she’d like your paintings a lot more than mine, though.”

  Eva laughed. “Do you know, I got a mess
age from my agent saying someone wants dancing saucepans for a cookery book now. I seem to have found my niche!”

  “I should sneak one in somewhere.” He offered her half of the bun that he had split earlier. “A little Daniel Scott saucepan in Wayfarers hidden in the middle of a crowd.”

  “You should!” Eva laughed again, then fell silent as she bit into the bun. After a pause, she asked, “So what happens next? We go on our date, we get the kids up to yours for murals and partying…? Nothing changes, Daniel. That’s what I mean.”

  “We go on our date,” he whispered, as though he could hardly believe it. “And somehow I love you even more than before.”

  “I love you too, Mr Carswell-Scott.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Eva sat down at the table opposite Lyndsey.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late, Lynds, I had to pop home first before I came out.” Eva gestured to her hastily applied makeup. “How are you?”

  “Not quite as glowing as you,” Lyndsey replied meaningfully. “How is Sunglasses?”

  “He’s extremely well. Gorgeous and lovely.” Eva squeezed Lyndsey’s hand. “And you and Miles?”

  “It’s like we’ve known each other all our lives.” Her friend beamed. “I adore the old sausage.”

  “Wonderful.” Eva smiled. “And your ballet date was a success, was it?”

  “Is it too early to say? Oh, Eva, I think he’s the one!”

  Eva almost squealed with excitement. “Really? Oh, that’s so adorable! And to think, he was there all along, your good friend Miles. Wow, it’s funny how these things happen, isn’t it?”

  Lyndsey’s obvious glee at her romance was enough for Eva to push aside once and for all the misgivings she’d had about Lyndsey going out with her ex. If Lyndsey and Miles were happy, then that was all that mattered.

  “All that time, there he was!” She clapped her hands together. “Now tell me about Mr Sunglasses! Is it still lovely?”

  “Yes. He lets me work in his studio, and I stay over, and…it’s like I’ve half-moved in with him already!” Eva had only gone home to change, pack some clothes in a bag and pick up her laptop. Some might think it was a bit too soon, but it was right. “And you’ll never guess. Remember I said he wasn’t the dating type? We are actually going on a date!”