Temporary Lungs
The wind is a conductor with waving arms, building crescendos across the ocean orchestra as you sit, an entranced audience. The music envelops you: the rhythmic thumping of crashing waves, the piano trickle recession from the shore to the rumbling bass rolling forward. The wind begins to sing a melody; a song for the lonely. It says you’re alone in this cold weather, and I’ve no-one to hold my hand, so let’s sit and smile together, and for a while we’ll play pretend. So you start out at the water horizon, and you start to hum along.
***
Every afternoon since you were a child you would go to the pier. Your grandfather took you the first time. You can recall kind eyes and wrinkles, seaweed and shells in hand, walking across the wooden planks.
“There are mermaids that come here sometimes,” he said.
“Mermaids aren’t real,” you replied with all the un-self-conscious seriousness only a five-year-old can generate. You’ve never been so confident of anything since that moment. You’ve also never been so wrong.
“Oh, aren't they?”
And you can’t remember the rest of the day, but your grandfather’s chuckle resonates around your head, clear and warm.
***
Betty, the owner of Tune-ah, the fish and chip shop across the road (Guaranteed musical service! Dancing waiters and a cashier who will trill out your bill!) tells all her patrons of the sad girl from Lester Lane who cries on the pier every night, heart breaking, as her feet touch the water and the fish scatter. It’s a bit much, really, but apparently it’s good for tourism. You’ve never cared. Anyway, you’ll soon be upgraded to a mermaid cursed to remain on land, who can only speak to her family via the pier, if Betty’s track record of over-dramatizing is anything to go by. You wouldn’t mind.
“But Grandpa, mermaids aren’t real.”
You don’t always feel real either.
***
School days were a jumble of jeering words jousting, rough against one another; jagged rocks of laughter thrown against you in between the punches. Pointed remarks and fingers hit against your ribs. The constant baited breath anxiety. Sometimes you wondered if you might have been able to breathe a little more easily if you had had the gills they accused you of.
“I hope you swim with the fishes, although you’d probably like that.” - “Fish freak fag!” - “Why don’t you just go to Japan already? They’ll treat you right, alongside the whales.”
And when everyone else got Christmas cards and candy canes, you found a dead fish, wrapped in newspaper, on your desk. His gills didn’t seem to have done him any good.
***
Your grandfather doesn’t speak much these days. His eyes are heavy and so are his bones; his joints rusted and creaking like a long abandoned door. And if the eyes are a window to the soul, his is a haunted house. You are endlessly curious; what horror-regret-pain lies behind the shuttered frames?
“Take me to the pier,” he pleads. But the nurses say “no”, sympathetic but firm before you have the chance to reassure him.
“Please, take me to the pier. I would like to see them just once more.”
“But who, Grandpa? Who do you want to see? I’m the only one who ever goes there.”
“The mermaids. I should have gone with them.”
And the nurses crush his hopes and some pills, and spoon feed him.
You will scatter his ashes by the sea. They will not come.
***
You sit out on the pier more than ever now. School is out, summer sun shines, and you haven’t got anything waiting for you at home. You can spend all day walking up and down the beach, exploring rocks and caves and coves. No-one ever bothers you by the seaside. Indeed, no-one else is ever there. It’s not a pretty place, you can see that, but the ocean is stunning in her sea-form unshaven, rugged waves, blue rip curls.
Some days, like today, you picnic on the pier. Picnic blanket scratching your thighs, cider bubbling next to the strawberries on your left; the waves tickle your toes.
And then something stroked your foot.
Seaweed, you reassure yourself, after inadvertently plunging your hand into the bowl of whipped cream. But seaweed doesn’t have fingernails. A practical joke, but you realize this can’t be true. There are few practical jokers willing to swim in the Atlantic Ocean, even in June.
And so, whoever had your foot also has your attention.
You whisper a soft “hello” and dip your hand into the water, fingers curled slightly towards the palm, a shelf to rest a hand upon. And sure enough, fingertips tap along calluses before threading through fingers, linking your hands.
***
Your mother had never learnt to swim. Her mother hates the sea, never let her near it. Your grandmother, who watched with a sneer as Grandpa took you to the pier to teach you your strokes.
You once joked that Grandma must be a demon, with her face always stone (“stoic”, your mother would correct). A demon who mistook salt- for holy water. You were sent to your room without dessert, a reprimand for cruelty and bad taste, apparently.
Even if it wasn’t true, it was still a better explanation than “she doesn’t like the ocean”. How could someone not love the ocean? A Pollock painting of infinite shades of blue and shines of light; a harmonious mess. How could anyone not love the beautiful, powerful, wondrous ocean which sings in the storms?
From then on, you only called her a demon when you were alone with your grandfather. He never disagreed.
***
“Hello,” you said again, slightly louder. Your hand is gripped tighter momentarily before a head appears in front of you, thrust up through the waves. Lips quirked up, a self-aware smirk. Another hand waves at you, pale and slender.
You’re seeking desperately for something to say, but truth be told, you are more than a little distracted by the clarity of her green eyes, crinkled at the edges, the wet hair curled around her face, hanging down by slender shoulders.
She will tease you about it later. “You were staring at me from the start,” and you will splash her. She will shake her head, and grab your hand and pull you in, pressed against her. And you will smile. She will smile. And you will kiss, open and soft and sweet.
But for now, you just gaze down at your conjoined hands, the chocolate and the cream mixing together under the water. She laughs. You blush. Her smirk widens.
***
Plaques of mechanic talking fish line the walls of the Davy Jones. There’s no bar, just a giant fish tank aquarium. Fish poke their heads up to inspect the discoloured circles left by beer glasses on their glass ceiling. One man clunks his pint down too hard. The fish scatter.
“Can I help you, lass?” The bartender is offering you a seat and a Guinness.
“My grandfather loved his place.” There’s a small noise of surprise, and perhaps understanding. He smiles as you take the seat, smiles more when you refuse the Guinness.
He begins to tell you stories of a woman who crawled out of the sea, and the man who fell in love with her, of a spectacular summer when swimming meant dancing in the sea. But life isn’t Disney and not all fairy tales have happy endings. The bartender tells you of the man who wouldn’t abandon his wife, and her unborn daughter from another man, a man who broke his own heart and another’s on the shore by the sea, and who regretted it every day, and a silent woman who despised a husband who heard the siren song, who wandered the beach alone.
You had wished that you’d met her before your grandfather had died. You’d wanted to tell him he was right, that mermaids were very real and very beautiful, and you weren’t always alone on the pier. You wanted to give him some peace.
Only now, suddenly, under the dim lights and cobwebs and a bartender’s watchful gaze, you’re not so sure he would have wanted to hear it. Maybe he was spared some pain. They never came back him, after all.
***
Her name was something unpronounceable. She says it under the water, pointing at herself. It sounds pretty, sung in the language of merfolk and whales. You call her Aurora because that’s the closest you can get, with your air-heavy tongue. She smiles as you try to pronounce it. She doesn’t seem to be able to talk but she listens, she understands you. And she gets along with gestures just fine. You think she likes your accent. You’re from New Jersey; your accent has never been worth nothing before. Or maybe you’ve just never realized; you’ve never had someone to talk to before.
***
It’s your birthday. Your mother forgot. Aurora didn’t. You’re sitting in the shallow bay, hidden behind the lichen-covered rocks, where no-one will come so no-one will see her green purple tail.
The first time you touched it was an accident, while you were wading together. It slithered against your legs. You shrieked in surprise, flailing and falling into the water. Your mother would glare at you that evening for ruining another dress in salt water crinkle stains, but it was worth it to hear the throaty laugh pour from a bright smile.
She’s giving you a gift, a sea-shell necklace.
Later, when you grab a late night meal from the diner, Betty will ask you who your beau is, giving you such pretty things. You don’t have a beau, but you don’t mind. You’ve got something better.
***
You feel like you can tell her anything. So you tell her everything. Your mouth opens and out your secrets come spilling. The time you cheated on a test (“when am I ever going to need to know how magnets work?”) and the first time you kissed a girl (“she told me I was pretty, and told everyone else I’d forced her.”)
You cry together when you tell how it rained at your grandfather’s funeral, as if the ocean he so adored was trying to come to him. She laughs when you explain setting your childhood fish free in the ocean only to learn it was a fresh-water fish, because, what else can you do with that?
You confess that you think your lungs are just temporary replacements for the gills you were supposed to have.
And just as you’re reflecting on how infrequently you are touched, she takes your hand and cradles it close.
***
Your mother takes her Prozac with port every morning, and sob through-out the day. Your house is a museum of misery in different tones. Harsh and arrhythmic, the weeping is nothing like the hypnotic wash of the waves on the shore.
Your step-father works away, upstate in the snow and deep green trees, far from this small seaside town. He doesn’t write letters and he doesn’t call. He used to bring you back presents, until he caught you with the neighbour’s daughter behind the shed; now he gives you hell. Your mother just gives you space.
But if you’re going to have space, you’d rather have the ocean than a bedroom. Walls and floorboards and windows aren’t for you when you could be washed along under rosy skies, beams of light bouncing across the ultramarine canvas.
And if you spend every moment down at the shore, your mother doesn’t ask any questions. Just leaves the back door unlocked and some food in the fridge. She leaves you be.
***
It’s getting colder now, the sun hides away sooner, the breeze flies faster. The ocean beats against the rocks, scrapes against the sand, crashes into itself. You’re shivering. You’re shaking and shuddering and sitting on the pier, waiting for Aurora. She’s late. You’re not worried. She’ll come.
She does.
It’s like the first time all over again, except she isn’t tugging on your hand to lift herself out of the water, she’s trying to pull you in. You’re sliding down from the pier into the water, and its cold, but so was the air. She’s wrapped an arm around you, a hand on your cheek, and she’s leaning in.
You’ve heard that a kiss from a mermaid will save a sailor from drowning, but you’re drowning now in her mouth and arms, and you don’t want to be saved. Your step-father isn’t here, and the kids at school aren’t here, and you’ve got no-one waiting for you at home. It’s her, it’s you, and that’s better than good.
You let yourself sink down now, holding her hand, into the depths of the ocean.
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With thanks to megyal, the 'beta', and Roy, the artist.