“Where have you been?”
I watched her smooth down her hair. She was still beautiful. Her naked breasts
bobbed on the water and her skin had a silverfish glow.
“I came back when I thought you’d need me.”
“Well, you’re a year too late.”
“A year? So this isn’t your first change? Ah, well I’m sorry.”
“You don’t sound very sorry.”
She sighed. “Well, I couldn’t have known you’d be an early developer. I didn’t have
my first change until I was fifteen.”
She sounded so blasé I wanted to scream at her. Tell her about the torment of the
past year. The time I tried to slice my tail off with a kitchen knife, when I started to
change at school and barely made it to our street before my tail sprouted, and the
times I let boys fuck me just to prove to myself I was still human.
“Didn’t you think of coming back for any other reason?”
“What else would you need me for?”
“You’re my mother. How could you leave?”
“I’m a wanderer. A free spirit. I told your dad this when we married, but he thought
I’d change.” She picked at a cuticle. “Do you have to interrogate me, Lydia? You
sound just like that old crone. I’m beginning to wonder why I came back. Although
it’s clear you’re making a mess of this whole thing. Drinking when the change is due.
Have you no sense?”
“I apologise.”
She didn’t hear the sarcasm, or chose not to. “We have a reputation to uphold.
Mermaids are meant to be beautiful, enigmatic. Not drunk and bedraggled. You need
to be more like me, Lydia.”
“You think I want to be like you?”
“Well," she blinked at me, her eyes puzzled. "You are.”
“So you’re going to stay?”
“Of course not. You’re coming with me.”
“What about Hannah?”
“She isn’t a mermaid. At least not yet.”
“Don’t you even want to see her?”
“Why?”
“Have you always been this fucking selfish?”
She thought about the question.
After a while she said: “I suppose so. Now, are you coming?”
I stared at her. She grew bored and let her eyes drift around. Water lapped against
her breasts, sunlight poured over
her flawless skin. She reminded me
of a fortune-teller I’d once seen at
the carnival. Reading a bad fortune
with as much emotion as she might
read a shopping-list. My thoughts
turned to Hannah, and how different things could have been if someone had prepared
me for all this.
“No,” I said. “I have to stay.”
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