Read Online The Mermaid's Child by Jo Baker - Free Book Online Page B

schoolhouse, the shambling cottages. Suddenly, a precise but painless blow to my collarbone, and an instantaneous cold, which rolled over the round of my shoulder, ran down my chest, lingered in the linen of my shirt.
    â€œIt’s raining,” I said, unbelievingly.
    A low growl of thunder, another whipcord lash of wind, and the heavens opened.
    I don’t know who laughed first. I remember seeing him push back his hat, his mouth open with a great shout of laughter, his eyes closed to let the rain run over his face, and I found myself thinking of his nakedness, his honey-coloured skin. I remember him turning to me, laughing, and me laughing too and being surprised that I was laughing so naturally, so comfortably, with him, and him putting an arm around my waist, and the cold wet linen of my father’s shirt pressed against my skin. And him lifting me off my feet and spinning me round and the water falling all around us and the darkness blurring, and the breath squeezed out of me and still the laughter. That was the first time I had ever been kissed, and it is typical of me that I should spend that moment in which his body was first pressed against my own, just thin wet fabric between his limbs and mine, his hand on the small of my back and his lips wet with rain on my lips, thinking how badly I must have stank.

SIX
 
    I loped through the downpour at his heel, not hunched and collar-turned against the wet, but loose-jointed, shoulders low. After that kiss, the rain fell on me like a blessing. As I walked, I licked the water off my lips, tasted the bitterness and salt of unwashed skin. I blinked away the rain-smear from my eyes, pushed the hair back from my forehead, and lifted my face to the heavens. I felt cocksure, expansive, light-of-heart. I was glad to be alive.
    Beneath the falling rain, the villagers slept on, unaware of the puttering of water onto slates, of the quiet gathering of puddles outside their back doors. In the morning, they would wake to find the world transformed; muddied, damp, and unfamiliar. They would step outside, lift their faces to the cool sky, tears gathering in the crooks of their eyes and rain running down their skin. And in their rapture, they would notforget to bless this extraordinary man, whose doing it must have, somehow, been.
    And Uncle George, who would wake to a house empty of all but vermin, who would thump downstairs headachy, parched and farting, to find the bar room untidied, the floor unswept, and a barricade of dirty glasses on the kitchen table. He would call for me, thinking me just out-of-sight, and be answered only by the scratch of mice behind the wainscot. Then he would shout, lifting his voice to the low ceiling, his anger growing as, in his drink-muddied mind, an image began to form of me still upstairs in bed among tangled sweaty sheets. But he would hear nothing back; not even the surprised clatter of distant feet coming to his call. So he would curse, snatch up a glass from the table, and throw it at the wall. And only as he turned away from the shards and sparks that skittered out across the floor, considering what he would do with me when he finally found me, would he notice that the back door was standing open, and feel the cool breath of weatherchange on his thick old skin, and see that it was raining.
    â€œMy mother was a mermaid,” I said, by way of introduction.
    â€œOh really.”
    â€œShe left us. She went back to her own people.”
    The rummaging of branches overhead, the creak of limb on limb in wind. We walked into a deeper dark where the rain fell in fewer, fatter drops, leaf-gathered. Above, the canopy was cacophonous with birds.
    â€œThey always do.”
    â€œMermaids?” I stopped dead. He kept on walking. I ran to catch up with him. “You know about them? You’d know where to find her?”
    The road was rising: I felt running water tug my feet. A stitch pinched at my side. I knew, though I couldn’t see