How the Mermaid got her Tale

At the back of beyond, and a little bit farther, in a time further back than memory, but nearer than lost, a woman with golden hair and a voice like a heart’s sigh lived in a small stone house, on a tussocked slope, just beyond reach of the storm spray which swept in from the sea on the worst winter’s night. The woman was married – is married – to a man who loved her in the calm, certain way in which she loved him, and they built the house together, when they recognised that they needed nothing more from the world beyond the bay in which it nestled. Each evening, the woman sat on a stool and brushed her hair with one hundred strokes, while the man checked his nets with salt toughened hands, inspecting the strings through eyes like the sea. When they had finished, they would lay down together in the bed, and entwine themselves, as tenderly and as inexorably as the roots of twinned trees.

One morning, in the spring, the man went out to fish, and did not return. On the first evening, the woman strode along the headland, swinging her lantern and calling out. But he did not return. On the second morning, the woman swam out, as far as she could swim, and shouted into the sea until the waves flowed away from the shore. But he did not return. On the second evening, the woman hung all of the three lanterns she had from a line she strung over the beach and sat in their glow searching the darkness beyond. But he did not return. As time went on, their bed grew cold, then damp, then derelict, as the woman sat each night on a smooth rock on the shore, singing songs of homecoming in her voice like the passing breeze.

In the beginning, an older woman from the village two hours walk and a rocky crossing away, came to visit the woman, bringing meat and cheese and the offer of sympathy, but when the woman silently, gently, laid her pain out and took the veil off it, the older woman got up from the table, washed her own cup in the last fresh water she ever drew from the well, and placed it back on the rack. After that, the woman heard only the chatter of the waves.

Each evening, then, the woman sat on the rock by the sea. At first, her eyes reflected the glittering ultramarine of spring’s hope, and her heart glowed with the colours of the setting sun, but as the year went on, her right ventricle faded to the dull sage of the dusk lit marram grass, her left ventricle to the brown-green of the untethered seaweed lying limp at the tide line. The atriums of her heart slowly dulled from glowing embers to the deep grey of the dark headland extending away from the bay, and the midnight blue of the sea, stretching away to forever. Her eyes showed only the gathering storms of winter. Still she sat each evening and brushed her hair, ever golden like a lantern in the dark, with one hundred strokes, and sang songs of loss in her voice like the memory of a lover’s breath.

Each night, as the light left the land, the woman rose from the rock and lay down on the rough sand amongst the seaweed, and slept. And in the night, the cold water hiding in the sand seeped through her cloak, wicking its way to her skin. Slowly, sometimes early in the night, sometimes in the depths of the dark, sometimes as dawn eased itself into being, the sea came to her, and pressed against her arms, wrapping her stomach in its chill, coiling around her legs and kissing her cheek, taking her tears for its own. And though her skin was as smooth as the rock she sat on, her wound lay open so that the salty water mingled with the blood in her veins, and entered her blue-green heart.

On the last morning, the sea came as the sky weakened to darkest grey, tugging her fingers gently, whispering a name she had forgotten was hers. The woman stirred from her sleep, reaching a pale arm towards the water. Parting her blued lips, she drew in breath and sang out the name that was his in her voice like rippling sea grass, and as her lungs closed around that song, she felt the water about her body, embracing her, pulling her in, felt her legs, entwined with weed and water and all the things of the sea, push her forward with the strength of six hundred tides, now an undulating wave, iridescent and flashing in the rising sun. The woman was gone.

And yet you may have seen her. She was sighted near Japan, and in the sea of a thousand islands. She was seen from a whaling boat in cold northern waters, and also basking in the heat of the Aegean. Ask anyone, in any port, on any continent, and they will tell you who they knew who saw her once, and heard her voice like a soul, meeting its desire.

Of course, this may not be how it happened. Older women know that some tales cast us all as villains, and bring with them despair, while others bring hope to the saddest of stories. And those stories of hope, we tell them again, passing them from village to town, onto ships and across oceans, away from the woman laying pale in the sand, the seaweed tangled through her golden hair, her lungs closed forever around a name she sang alone into the darkness.