Last Christmas a mermaid died in the school swimming pool. It was only a small pool, built up at the sides with wooden panels, more like a tank for training children in. That meant it froze over very easily, but a mermaid couldn’t know that. It stood in a courtyard in the shadow of the school, and the sun reached it only at rare intervals.
Behind it lurked a stone and sulking outhouse, pebbledash walls lashed together with a corrugated plastic roof. In its damp darkness the children undressed, and tripped, and snapped tight, powdered rubber caps over their skulls. Under its benches something black grew wetly out towards them. It was the hut that Freya hated most of all.
Miss Wallace had caught Archie Dorrick from Upper Third belting down the corridor but she hadn’t told him off, not properly, just asked him why he needed to be rushing so quick. He said there was a mermaid dead in the pool, that it must have happened in the holidays, and Miss Wallace was so interested that she didn’t ask Archie why he had been down there on his own, which was definitely cigarettes.
Miss Wallace was young and pretty and was allowed to wear any jumper she liked, unlike Freya, who was a pupil and had to wear a plain grey one like everybody else. Miss Wallace also had colourful bracelets on her arms and hair that rose up above her head and fanned out like branches. When she moved they swayed about her; the bracelets and the hair both. In the older years they had a teacher for English and a teacher for history and a teacher for comparative mythography, but Freya was only nine so Miss Wallace was her everything teacher, and she needed no other.
Freya’s last teacher had been Mr Heagerty, who had folded himself into a corner of the classroom, spiderlike, and spoke to them only in riddles. His interest in the outside world was oblique at best, and he’d never once worn a bracelet or even a colourful tie. For Miss Wallace, the outside world was the whole point, it was something to push both your hands into and wiggle about. That was why Class 7C were allowed to follow her, symmetrical grey cygnets, through the hall and out the fire escape and down the iron stairway that led to the pool with the mermaid in it.
The ice was frozen over most of it, a thin sheet, breakable. One arm punctured the surface, a long, grey-brown javelin that reached up and out and seized around the metal rung of the ladder in a tight fist. Frost followed up it and caught on the trail of fine hairs that sloped along its back. Freya couldn’t see down below the ice, Miss Wallace had them at a distance, she had first dibs on exploration. Freya jostled her way to the front of the group. She knew she had to be as close as was allowed.
Miss Wallace stared down at the mermaid, and her hair quivered, and her breath came out in clouds. Below her the arm was stiff, and quiet, and altogether too close to her throat. In the end it was Juno Clarke who asked the question that held them all close with a ferocious anxiety. Juno asked if Miss Wallace was sure it was really dead, and Miss Wallace said yes, and everyone turned to Juno and sneered at her stupidity.
Then Miss Wallace said “I can prove it,” which was something she said a lot, and she felt around inside her pockets and pulled out her fountain pen. Freya had long watched and desired that pen, it shone bronze and under Miss Wallace’s direction bled blue, looping calligraphy that far outranked Freya’s lumpen hieroglyphs. Miss Wallace took off the lid, and lifted the pen high, and then stuck it deep, deep into the mermaid’s arm.
Later, when Miss Wallace encouraged them to come close, to huddle around and stroke the arm for themselves, to learn what they could from this rare chance, Freya’s finger found the hole the pen had made. Without really meaning to, she dipped it inside, into the cold and sleepy meat. It resisted her, but she felt deeper, she wriggled her finger down to the end of the incision and scratched at the bone. Freya thought to herself that she might be the first person in history to reach inside a mermaid’s arm and scrape their nail across the bone, and in that thought there was no horror, but a realisation that for the first time, in her life of classmates and brothers and older cousins, she had experienced something truly private, something that could not be shared and that belonged to her alone. And Freya understood that there was and would be nothing else she desired as she desired the mermaid, and she knew what she had to do next.
First, before the science lesson had begun, Miss Wallace came back across the courtyard and told 7C that she had an important question. Her face was suddenly very serious, and she went round in turn and asked if any of them had put the mermaid there, and Freya said no and Tim said no and Fergus said no even though if anybody had put it there, it would definitely have been him. Marybeth asked Miss Wallace how the mermaid had got into the pool, since it hadn’t been any of them, and although the class glowered at her automatically, Freya felt it was a Good Question. Miss Wallace said that if it hadn’t been anybody in another class, then maybe it had crawled out of an estuary and dragged itself inland. Mermaids could manage that, for short distances. Maybe it had seen the pool and thought in its animal mind to refresh itself. It would have heaved its long body up, over the wooden side, and only when it hit the water would it have realised its mistake.
There were a lot of questions now; the pack had grown both curious and tolerant. Jason wanted to know if it was a boy mermaid or a girl mermaid. Miss Wallace said she couldn’t tell because of the ice, but that if the tail was big and squashy that might mean it was full of babies. Joanna Fitch asked if it was saltwater or freshwater, and Miss Wallace reminded her that mermaids were freshwater, that if it had been saltwater then it would have been a dead selkie instead. Juno Clarke, hungry for redemption, asked what it was that had made it dead, and Miss Wallace looked a little sad and said it was the chlorine, that would have poisoned it long before the cold snap made the water freeze over. The chlorine would have filtered its way inside very fast, she told them, in a voice that tried to make it sound less painful than Freya was sure it was.
When the questions were over, 7C clustered around the body in the pool. The head was quite visible, from this angle: smooth, with black orb eyes, wide-set on a yowling face. Its nose was otter-like, a black pad of a snout that protruded enough to disrupt the human geometry of the skull. There were sprays of thick white whiskers on either side and the teeth below were small and sharp. The lower body was more obscured, but Freya saw a long torso, studded with dark nipples, curving into one great sinuous limb coiled beneath it. It was a dumb animal, and dead, but in that it was entirely beautiful.
It was nearly time to go back inside. 7C had had their fill of the mermaid’s dead hand, some of them were getting bored and were stamping their feet. Freya took her chance when Miss Wallace was distracted by Jason, who had found a pine cone and was proud of it: an ill trophy compared to what Freya had in mind. She ran her fingers over the back of the mermaid’s hand one last time, over its thick knuckles and into the folds of frost-crackled webbing. She found her target and she closed her fingers over it and pulled down hard.
It broke under the skin first. She was compelled to swivel it around the joint until the skin was torn all around, and even then it was difficult, it nearly sent her flying to do it. There wasn’t time to inspect her prize, just to thrust it down into the quiet black of her trouser pocket. She could feel it, small and cold and curled like a monkey nut. She squeezed her fist around it and the tiny spark of selfishness that had jumped inside her blazed, she was an inferno, she would collapse, if only something separated her from this fragment, this fossil of a perfect moment and a beautiful thing now dead.
As they trooped back up the stairway and into the honey warmth of the school, Joanna said it was funny, she had expected it to look more like a person. The others scoffed, but Miss Wallace heard her and said that it just went to show there was a world of difference between bipedal and human, and then Owen said Miss, how can it be a biped, it didn’t have any feet at all. Miss Wallace said that was a good point but in a voice that made it sound like she wished it was Owen there dead under the ice and trying to scratch his way out. She said that a mermaid physiologically speaking was an honorary biped, it was a biped in every way that mattered except the feet, and for homework she set them all the project of making up a word for things with two arms that humans and mermaids and gorillas could all be part of together, but not kangaroos or meerkats. Which seemed simple enough to Freya, as she caressed the gobbet of mermaid flesh in her pocket. Really, all it came down to was thumbs.
She would have slept with it under her pillow that first night, but in the end Freya was too excited to sleep at all. She had suffered all day in longing for it, and had gone to her room with unusual keenness. From the floor above she could hear her brothers kicking at each other, and hollering, but she did not mind. She lay on her bed, with the mermaid’s thumb in her palm, and admired it, the back glossy with short grey fur, the underside more tender, bare skin a dark and smoky blue. It had a black, doglike little nail on it, and Freya imagined having a handful of such claws, of reaching out to a whale and anchoring herself to its great flank. Gently she tested it, pressing the point of the claw into her own nailbeds, so that it manifested as a dark triangle pushing into each of her fingers in turn.
At the base of the thumb was a broken flap of webbing, a rag of tissue torn loose in her imperfect haste. This Freya resented: it was a distraction, untrue to life. She gave it a lot of thought and looked in her desk for her small pair of scissors, and she cut off the loose skin, she trimmed the thumb down until only a thin seam showed the point where anything had once connected. The thumb was neater now, she was pleased with that, but almost immediately Freya felt a wrench of deep and desperate loss, and knew what she had done had been wrong. She ought to have kept that scrap of flesh, and treasured it for as long as she could. Already there was so much less of her talisman than there was before.
As she lay sleepless, Freya pictured the mermaids she had seen before, at the docks, where they clicked and barked at each other and slithered down from the jetties and tangled together in the shallows, or else on the far banks of the river that ran through the town. They had never intrigued her. She had regarded them as essentially an optical illusion: not people, but seals with elbows. She remembered how they would rest with their arms on the stone paving at the river’s edge, their fur sparkling with water drops, and their tails thrumming in the water like great motors. Mermaids had no external ears, Miss Wallace had pointed that out, and so they would delicately lay their heads between their arms, against the stone, and look out at the world with black and adoring eyes as they drank in the signals and vibrations of the people passing by. They would chirrup their appreciation, and smile animal smiles, and occasionally someone would throw them an ice cream, or a handful of chips. Despite their warbles and their trills, Freya had never once fed them anything.
She spent the next day in despair at her recklessness, her foolish excision of the webbing. In her dearest fantasy she would take the thumb from her pocket and find the webbing regrown, regenerated like a severed starfish limb. Freya slept badly that night, she dreamt that the thumb had grown into something new, a crawling five-pronged thing with a black nail at the end of each long leg. She scrambled herself out of the nightmare and fumbled on the bedside lamp. She looked at once to the precious digit, and anxiety spiked out of her in an entirely new direction, because everything had gone wrong.
Meat doesn’t last forever. If the thumb had seemed a little shrivelled during the day, Freya had been able to look past that, but as she examined it in the midnight lamplight she knew it would be no use to pretend. The skin was loose, and baggy, and far underneath it the muscle felt as if it was folding in on itself. There was a stain on the bedsheets where something had been leaking out of the open end, and the whole thing was beginning to smell.
Freya tucked her pillows up behind her so that she could think properly. She took a drink of water from the glass her mother had brought her before she went to bed. This was important. She didn’t want a repeat of the webbing fiasco. This had to be done properly.
There was freezing, or mummification. Each of those would reduce the thumb, move it further from the object of her desire. She thought about the mermaid under the ice, fresh and perfect and somehow through that alive, even in death. She could not let it rot away, not her one little sliver. She thought about the hole in its arm, how her flesh had fitted inside its flesh, how they had in that moment unified and been whole. She wanted the thumb. She needed it, forever. There really was only one option.
The bone was difficult, that and the nail, but Freya drank plenty of water and eventually managed to swallow the entire thing.
She felt good. The mermaid would be with her always; she was likely part mermaid herself at this point. Its bones had become her bones. As she stamped her usual route across the playground Freya glowed. Even the sight of Jason playing catch by himself and missing couldn’t lower her mood. In class Miss Wallace said thank you Freya when she handed out the pens and it was clear to her that it was a different, better, deeper thank you than she would have got on any other day.
Everybody at school was very excited, because Jamie Pine from 6F had thrown a ball up onto the roof, and when he had gone round to a side window to hang out and get it he said he had seen a griffin there, dead and mummified and buried under Frisbees. It was only a small one, he cautioned, and all dried out, but it was a griffin all the same which was at least as good as a mermaid if not better.
When Miss Wallace heard about that she just said “hmm,” and this time 7C weren’t allowed out to see it, they didn’t go to crowd round the janitor on his ladder as he went to fetch the corpse down, as he carefully left both ball and Frisbees behind. Miss Wallace told them later it had just been a dead cat, nothing exciting, and she was fairly sure Jamie had known that all along, in his heart.
Freya was relieved. The mermaid was special, and people were right to be jealous. Hers was the glory. There was none left for Jamie Pine.
It was time for the weekend, and Freya had new strength to endure her brothers, and activities, and family meals. She was lucky, she knew, to have achieved her heart’s desire, at only nine years old. Her mother took her to the park and on the way she didn’t see one single person who had what they wanted, who was complete and done and finished the way she was. Her brothers splashed thin mud up her breeches and when she tackled them into a shy and dusty elm it was reflex, in her head she really didn’t care at all.
Freya’s bedroom was on the ground floor. It looked out onto the garden and had been her mother’s mother’s room, once. The boys had got the upstairs room and when Freya was born and her grandmother was dead it had been easiest just to put her in there. Freya liked the room, which was nicely and entirely hers, she liked it all the way up to that Sunday night. Sometimes in summer when it was noisy late she would open the big window and give a stern look to the adults gossiping on the patio, and they would all turn and giggle and shush each other. That was part of the downstairs bedroom routine. That was protocol. This wasn’t summer, though, and her parents were upstairs, and Freya knew that under no circumstances should she look out of the big window tonight.
It began with a crackle of disturbance, of mathematical shrubs disordered by some clambering weight. It sounded like a sack being dragged up the garden path, colliding with pots, displacing careful ornaments. Freya stared pointedly at the ceiling and felt her insides all stop working. This was a heavier breed of garden sound than she had heard before; she was the master of small and rustling things.
The sound dragged nearer, and Freya waited.
Eventually it croaked itself up a voice, hesitant first, practicing. Freya’s insides were working again, they were working too hard, she put a hand on her chest to make sure her heart wasn’t about to pop right out. The thing outside yowled madly, it screamed and yelped and whistled and throughout it all, Freya refused to go and look.
She was sorry, in her way, and she was selfish, but in the end it was far too late. The thumb atoms had days since become Freya atoms, there was no mechanism to pry them out of her. She lay nestled in a whorl of screams and what caught in her heart the most was how good it felt, to know there was no way back. They could crawl out of every river and every lake, they could come right up to the house, put their faces against the glass, they could drum on the windowpanes with mutilated, thumbless hands, it was far too late for anything to be done and even if it wasn’t Freya would refuse to do it.
After a while, the screaming stopped, and Freya listened, carefully, as whatever was in the garden dragged itself away.
“Did anyone else hear the foxes last night?” said her father, when morning came. “They’ve played merry hell with my cuttings.”
At school, Miss Wallace was in a dark mood. She knew about the thumb. She said it was very important to find out which one of them had done it, and Freya had to work especially hard to keep her breathing normal when she heard that. Jenny Creel asked if that was because mermaids had special powers. Freya wondered if her special mermaid power had maybe made Jenny ask that question. Miss Wallace laughed and her hair danced around her and she said no, it was nothing like that, it was just vitally important that they learned to take responsibility for their actions.
As usual, Fergus took the blame. It was his own fault, thought Freya, from behind her perfect mask. He never had learned to look innocent as she did. Miss Wallace landed on him by elimination, she asked the others and everyone else knew how to deny it properly, except Fergus, who blushed and squirmed and was refused going to the bathroom. Freya watched coldly as Fergus was made to go up to the front of the classroom and stand by Miss Wallace, who asked Fergus how he would like it if someone stole his thumb without asking.
Fergus mumbled bitterly that he wouldn’t mind, and then Miss Wallace opened a drawer and took out her little paper guillotine, the one she used to cut up their name cards, and Fergus shrieked and flew out of the room. Miss Wallace looked down at their faces, white with shock, apart from Freya, who was looking out of the window and following Fergus’ trajectory with interest.
“Just my little joke,” said Miss Wallace, who seemed for the first time a tad unsure.
Fergus didn’t come into school the next day, or the day after that.
On Wednesday Miss Wallace was cheery again. She told 7C she had a special treat. It was something she had been working on arranging all week. Behind her the whiteboard said ‘Grammar’ in big letters, and ‘Science’ underneath that, and because of that Freya did not let herself get too excited. She was sleeping only very little now; the garden sounds had been peaceful, but required her constant assessment. When she was asleep, clawed starfish scraped their way through her dreams.
“Language doesn’t make sense,” said Miss Wallace, when everybody was ready. 7C leaned in; this sounded like one of the good lessons. “I was thinking this morning about words that start with ‘be’. Like bedeck. Does anyone know what bedeck means? It’s a bit old-fashioned.”
Christina Vee knew.
“That’s right, it’s sort of like putting something on something. And then there’s bedew, which is what happens in the mornings, when the weather comes and puts water on the grass in the fields. There’s beget, too. You’ll have to trust me on that one, 7C, but it’s addition, not subtraction. Eva, if I tell you to ‘beware’, would that make you more or less aware?”
Eva didn’t know.
“That’s alright, that’s alright. You’d be more aware, I expect. But it doesn’t always work. Jason, if I beheaded you – try not to take that personally – you’d have one less head, wouldn’t you? But you might think behead should mean, to give Jason an additional head. I know, I know, what a thought.”
Miss Wallace reached under her desk and lifted up a blue cool box, the kind Freya’s parents sometimes took with them on picnics to make the sandwiches colder than sandwiches should be.
“Since you were all so interested,” she said, “I thought we could take a closer look at how it worked.”
And she lifted the mermaid’s sad, bruised head out of the box, and plopped it down onto her desk.
Its thin black lips had fallen down like old elastic, and some of its whiskers had snapped away, and one of the eyes hadn’t defrosted right and looked as if it was halfway collapsed. Most of all, though, the head just looked terribly afraid.
Freya screamed, and screamed, and everyone turned to look, more in surprise than in concern, because for many of them it was the first noise they had ever known her to make.
They found Fergus face-down in the estuary. He floated there, unsteady, and on the mud banks the mermaids howled and cringed away from his puffy, uniformed body. The rescue team kicked at them with their boots, and the mermaids screamed, and dove to the very bottom of the water, they crawled into the hollows and dens they had built for themselves and watched as Fergus was dragged out and breathed into and pronounced days since dead. Freya wanted to know if his thumbs were still attached, but no one was talking about a thing like that.
Miss Wallace didn’t come back to the school, afterwards.
It didn’t take long for Freya to come to her decision. Her pillows were up behind her so she knew she was thinking properly. She had taken a thumb and Miss Wallace had taken a head, and Fergus was dead in an estuary because of it, and maybe Miss Wallace was dead too, in an oxbow lake, but that Freya couldn’t know, all she could know was her one small bit. And still her soul tore at her and said that it had been worth it, that the glory of her deeds would not be undone, even if they were redeemed.
She didn’t pack a bag, because she had no need of anything after. She left her room, and the house, and trampled her way down the paths and lanes that she had walked every day before. She passed the school, and knew that behind it was the pool, and forever with it the wet and shabby evil of the hut. She walked past the flowers at the gates and didn’t stop to look at the pictures of Fergus, in his uniform or on his bike or at somebody’s fifth birthday. She reached town, and pushed on, until she came to the square with the ice-cream shop, and fish and chips, and the small bridge that the river ran underneath.
The mermaids were there, with their heads in their arms, their tails kicking up a soft spray in the water beneath. They cocked their heads as she got near, and sniffed the air, in case she had brought them something to eat.
Freya cried, and her whole body resisted her, it fought against walking another step, but she forced it on. She went up right close to the mermaids, even though the sign next to the bins said to keep a safe distance at all times. She looked into their black eyes, not unkind, not entirely devoid of understanding – and held out her hands to them, for absolution.
Louis Inglis Hall is a civil servant living in Scotland. He has been published with Apparition Literary Magazine and Vergilius. He has had a lifelong fear of mermaids and their horribly opposable digits.