she’d think I was and shut-up. Hours had passed and her enthusiasm grated. I lay
sprawled on the bank, my elbows propped in the dirt, my tail frolicking on the water.
“How do you...you know... go to the toilet?”
“Through my mouth. Not everyone talks shit metaphorically, you know.”
“Gross.”
“You think I have all the answers? You think I turn into a mermaid and suddenly
know how it all works?”
“It’s all rather...” She gazed at my tail, her eyes getting misty. “Magical.”
“You mean fucked up.”
“I’ll tell about that one.”
I laughed.
“You think she’ll care about my language? Look at me. I’m a fucking mermaid.”
Hannah slipped the daisy chain onto her head. Wilted petals landed in her tangled
hair. “We have to tell her.”
“Are you mad?” I said. "When Dad married Mum she was so scandalised she didn’t
speak for over a month. And that was only because she was Eastern European. The
shock of this would probably give her a heart attack.”
My lips twisted into a smile.
“On second thoughts. You’re right. Go fetch her.”
Hannah brushed the remaining daisy heads off her lap and hurried up the lawn,
towards our house. When she was gone I tossed my book aside.
Something moved on the water and I froze. Boats rarely went past, except on their
way to the annual regatta, and that wasn’t for another week. In the past we’d picnicked
on the grass and watched them go by. Mum would sunbathe in a black playsuit, cut
so low that when she rolled over it flashed her nipple. But this afternoon there was
no boat.
The movement was my own tail, writhing like a serpent on the water.
- Grandma strode up the lawn towards me. Her skirt clung to the opaque stockings
she always wore, no matter how hot it became. She was a plain woman. Meaning
there was an absence about her,
both of beauty and ugliness. She was
born the year Queen Victoria died,
which made her almost sixty that
summer, but she looked a solid fifty.
Photographs of her as a child revealed she’d always looked a solid fifty.
As she came closer, my smile faded, because Grandma wasn’t shocked. She gave my
tail a moue of disdain, the same as when she’d caught me smoking. I half-expected
her to blame this, as she had that, on my watching too many American pictures.
“So," she said. “It’s happened. The change.”
“It’s hardly like I’ve got my period.”
Her eyes hardened. “Period is a common word.”
I laughed and my tail twitched.
“She said it would.”
“Who?”