Water (3 page)

The question I couldn’t answer was what on earth they were doing four hundred kilometres from the sea?

Luke and Josh were already cannonballing into the pool when I got back to the house. I changed quickly into my pale yellow bikini, shuffling to the pool wrapped in a towel before stepping cautiously into the water.

I blushed as Josh whistled at me.

‘Looking good there, Ally Cat.”

I didn’t jump into water any more, mainly because that’s how I’d got into trouble that day with Brent but, more recently, because I preferred my bikini to stay on the newly developed curves of my body.

Before Brent’s accident, swimming had been a sort of refuge for me. I’d competed nationally in swimming competitions and, when I wasn’t training or doing homework, I was in the pool, floating on my back, or diving underwater, the thick silence a relaxing haven from the world above.

I remembered games I’d played as a kid, pretending to be a dolphin, or a ray, or some other oceanic creature, longing to be able to stay submerged for longer than the short time I could hold my breath.

As a child I’d had vivid dreams of swimming in the ocean, completely submerged, twirling and spiralling in the currents, drifting in the great kelp forests that looked, to me at least, as comforting as a lullaby as they swayed in the tide.

Now, though, I was wary of water. It held a dark fascination for me, one I was too afraid to entertain.

Josh and Luke had pulled lilos into the pool, Luke pushing a spare one towards me. We climbed, laughing, onto them, slipping and splashing each other as we did so.

The boys had been sidetracked from the legend of the fish-people by a local rugby game that was on that afternoon. They spent a good ten minutes discussing tactics and team strategy before the conversation lapsed enough for me to change the subject back to the legend.

“Josh,” I started, swishing my hand in the water so that my lilo faced him better, “what are the fish-people supposed to look like?”

Luke laughed. “You really believe there might be some half-fish half-human thing in the mountains?” he asked incredulously.

“It’s not impossible,” I replied with as much dignity as I could muster. “Anyway, while you guys watch rugby, I’m going to do some internet research, and it would help if I had an idea of what they’re supposed to look like.”

He laughed again, before tipping out of his lilo and swimming to the edge of the pool. “I’m going to make lunch while you two dreamers make up stories.” He pulled himself out of the pool.

I turned back to Josh.

“Sorry about that.” He waved his hand in Luke’s direction. “He’s been a bit grumpy the last few days hasn’t he?”

I grinned and nodded.

“Yeah, it’s just ‘cause he can’t go on this youth camp because…”

“I’m here?” I guessed.

Josh blushed, looking sheepish. “Yeah, there’s this girl he’s interested in… anyway, he shouldn’t take it out on you.”

“So the fish-people?” I asked, wanting desperately to change the subject.

“Well, I’ve never actually seen one myself,” he admitted, “but they’re apparently very humanlike, except that they can breathe underwater.”

I hadn’t expected that. My mental picture of them had been a typical mermaid picture – a human torso and head, and fishlike tail.

“You mean they have legs?”

He nodded, grinning. “Yup, apparently you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart from normal humans, except that they’re supposedly really beautiful, unless of course you find yourself underwater with one of them.”

“What happens underwater?” I asked, feeling breathlessly frightened and strangely excited at the same time.

“Well, apart from their ability to breathe underwater –” he dropped his voice to a whisper, looking furtively around him “– legend has it that they are carnivorous.”

“As in they eat fish?” I asked, trying to dispel the underlying menace that sparked a bubble of excited nervousness in the pit of my stomach.

He shook his head, leaning towards me across the shimmering strip of water that separated our lilos. I leaned toward him, almost holding my breath in anticipation.

“When they are in the water,” he whispered, “another side of them takes over… a predatory side.”

I nodded leaning towards him. “So if you were anywhere near them, you would become…”

“PREY”

The sudden volume of his voice, combined with him launching himself onto me and tipping me into the water, paled next to the fear that engulfed me as the water closed over my head.

Josh had wrapped his arms and legs around me and was pulling me towards the bottom of the pool, a big stupid grin all over his face.

Panic ripped through me as everything seemed to move in slow motion, the bubbles of air rising from Josh’s mouth as he laughed at me, expanding outward in ever widening, glistening rings, the ineffective thrashing of my arms and legs as I struggled to reach the surface a backdrop to the pain that was arcing up my neck.

We surfaced, what must have been only a few seconds later, Josh still giggling as I turned on him.

“Are you insane?” I gasped, most of the volume I’d intended to be in my voice fading as my whole body began to shake.

He laughed. “Come on, Alex, you were taking it all so seriously, I thought you’d appreciate a bit of humour.”

I turned and waded out of the water, trying to contain the unexpected fury that burnt red hot at my centre. I knew this feeling, even though I tried to deny it: it was the same feeling I’d had that day in the pool with Brent. An illogical and violent reaction to being unable to move in the water.

I stood with my towel clutched around my body, sucking great lungfuls of air in as I desperately willed my pounding heart to slow and the panic that tunnelled my vision to ebb.

Josh didn’t seem to notice and was still chortling as he walked through the wide-flung sliding doors into the house and flopped onto the couch facing the TV.

I eventually managed to put one foot in front of the other and wobble my way into the house.

Luke looked up from the kitchen table where he was making himself a massive sandwich.

“Hey,” he said, frowning, “it looks like you scratched yourself.” He pointed at my neck.

Josh twisted around in the couch to see.

“Sorry, Alex, that must have been me.”

My hand automatically flew to my neck and came away red, wet and sticky.

“I’d better go and clean this up,” I muttered, stumbling off to the bathroom.

Safely locked in the bathroom, and with the shower beginning to envelop me in steam as it warmed up, I stood in front of the mirror and gingerly wiped the little droplets of blood off my neck with some tissue.

The skin of my neck was perfectly intact.

My stomach flipped nervously as I allowed my fingertips to carefully explore my neck, working from my hairline up towards my temples. An intense stinging in the crease behind my ears, and a flicker of the pain I’d felt in the pool, was enough for me to know that this was the source of the blood.

I was too frightened to do much except stare at myself in the mirror, my eyes pulled open wide enough to show white all the way around my irises, because I’d had this experience before. In the chaos after Brent had been pulled from the pool no one had been paying much attention to me until the paramedics had arrived. One of them had taken me aside and asked my parents terse questions about why my still water-slick body was covered in rivulets of blood. It had taken the paramedic a few minutes to find the source of it: tiny, inexplicable gashes behind my ears.

Standing beneath the warm shower I eventually found the courage to feel behind my ears again.

The sensation was odd at first, my brain unable to make sense of the information my fingertips were telling it. It was as if the crease behind my ears had widened.

Not by much. If someone else were to look at it they probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. But there was a difference because the creases that had once been only a hair’s breadth wide were now triple that, and the texture had changed from soft skin to rigid gristle.

It’d taken me a good half an hour to calm down enough to appear at least vaguely normal. I re-entered the lounge quietly, relieved that the boys were too ensconced in their sport to notice my red-rimmed anxious eyes.

The Van Heerdens’ computer was set up in such a way that anyone sitting at it had the wall behind them and a full view of the lounge and dining room.

I decided to start with newspaper articles, and the term “mermaid” – as ridiculous as it felt to type the phrase in – thinking that if anything as big as a mermaid spotting had been reported it would have surely hit the press.

There was nothing.

I tried magazines, remembering a movie I’d watched about alien spotting, which had been reported in American weekly.

Again, nothing.

Finally, I resorted to a Myths and Legends search. This yielded a plethora of information. Most of it referred to a long and complicated family tree of a variety of gods. I needed something simpler, more concise, a sort of summary of all the information on mermaids. In a last-ditch attempt, I went to my favourite source of information, Wikipedia, and typed in mermaid.

I scanned through the many snippets of information, doubt nibbling away at the certainty that Josh’s legend was based on truth. Most of the descriptions of mermaids were similar to what I had already heard of as a child: a human torso and head with a fish tail.

I was surprised at how many cultures had mermaids as part of their mythology: China, Africa, India, East and Western Europe, Britain, all had some form of mermaid legend associated with it. Each description had a slightly different twist, but in essence they were the same.

Halfway through another article on the “Mami-wata”, the African mermaid, the Van Heerdens called to say that they would only be back the next morning. Maryka’s aunt had had a bad fall and she would need to stay with her for a few days to help move her into frail care.

Josh and Luke arranged for Josh to stay the night before they returned to their rugby match, and I returned to my research.

I’d pretty much ruled out Josh’s legend about the fish-people by now, as no description matched them properly.

And then my stomach dropped, because there in black and white was a description of sea people, the only distinguishing feature from humans being their ability to breathe underwater.

My excited gaze drifted down the distressingly short description of them and locked on two sentences. Two sentences I couldn’t wrench my eyes from, because they described the offspring of a human and a sea creature.

The idea intrigued me because it was an idea I’d been toying with for most of my life. Not in the crude sense of having a mermaid partner, but rather the idea of being able to be a sea creature of some sorts.

In the quiet moments of childhood, when I’d been waiting for my Mom to fetch me from school, I’d drawn pictures of the underwater world I’d wished was mine.

I’d seen the shapes of turtles and whales and manta rays in the clouds as I’d watched them drift in cottony replicas of my daydreaming in the azure blue sky.

Whenever I’d had friends over to play, the games had inevitably veered in the direction of the ocean. We’d pretend – normally at my insistence, because I’d been a fairly assertive and bossy child – to be rays or dolphins, and sometimes even mermaids. My friends had often asked me to describe the castle we would live in, or the island we’d play around, and I’d done so in clear detail.

Sometimes these play dates had ended in fighting, normally because my friend would want to add a detail to our imaginary world, and I’d refuse to allow them to, arguing vehemently that they were wrong.

My mother had tried to explain to me that I couldn’t be angry at my friends about changing an imaginary word. She’d tried to explain that imaginary things were only in our heads, and that my friends could imagine whatever they wanted. I’d agreed with her on every other imaginary topic except when it came to the ocean.

No amount of threatened punishment would change my opinion. I felt certain that I knew what that world should be like. I knew how the animals in it behaved. I knew what it felt like to be a part of it.

The certainty I felt in my waking hours was cemented as I slept because every night for as long as I could remember I’d been dreaming about the ocean.

Each new snippet of information I managed to glean from the books I read or the documentaries I watched would find their way into the dreams. They were never scary, always vividly colourful and serenely beautiful. They were filled with light and songs and life and I was part of the dream, not just a spectator of the magical world beneath the waves, but it was my home. My refuge.But that was before the nightmares.

A shiver of anticipation slithered up my spine as I read the incredible description of how normal human DNA could be combined with another species to create a being that could be both human and mermaid, and for the first time in a long time a bubble of joy and excitement pushed its way up through the anger and grief that had been my constant unwanted companions for the last three years.

“You guys have to see this,” I called.

Luke waved a hand at me in dismissal. “Yeah, after the game, Alex.”

Josh got up and walked around to the pc.

“There they are, Josh.” I pointed at the screen.

He was quiet for a long time while he read.

“Luke, you really should come and see this,” he called, his voice a little breathless.

Luke hauled himself off the couch and walked over to us. He read the article quickly, and then shrugged non-commitally.

“OK,” he said, sounding less than impressed.

“It’s exactly how Josh described them,” I pushed him.

He looked at me blankly.

“Oh, you were inside already,” Josh said, proceeding to fill Luke in on the physical description of the fish-people he’d given me.

Luke was thoughtful for a few moments. “It doesn’t explain the Talita story though,” he said. “I mean, why would they want to take her?”

“So you’re saying you believe they exist?” I asked.

He grinned. “Believe is a strong word, but I’m more convinced than I was.”

“This is so cool.” Josh was bouncing on his toes. “Dude, you have mythical creatures living on your doorstep!”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Luke replied.

Josh suddenly clutched the back of my chair, spinning it around, while grabbing Luke’s arm at the same time.

“We have to go and look for them.” His face was alive with excitement.

The minute he’d suggested it, it was all I wanted to do.

“I thought you were scared of them?” I asked playfully. “You know their appetites are ferocious.”

He laughed. “Please, those stories are just to scare little kids away from the water so they won’t drown.”

“Guys, have you forgotten the ‘adventure zone’ restrictions?” Luke turned and pointed at the mountains. “Last time I checked those were a lot further than one kilometre away.”

“We could leave without telling the adults,” I suggested, clapping my hand over my mouth as soon as the words had left my lips. I couldn’t believe I’d just suggested that.

Never in my entire life had I ever even thought of sneaking out, even to go to a party. Now I was seriously considering running away from the farm, for what? To go on a wild-goose chase looking for fish-people in the mountains?

The more I tried to reason with myself that the idea of running away into Injisuthi was crazy, the more I wanted to go and look for the fish-people, wanted to do it with every cell in my body. Not just because I wanted to break out of the carefully constructed safe activities and emotions I’d created for myself since Brent died, but because something about the legend Josh had told me had made me feel more alive than I’d felt in the last three years, and I didn’t want that feeling to go away.

Josh laughed at me. “Wow, Alex, I didn’t realise you were so bored here.”

I grinned at him, relaxing a little. Josh didn’t think I was crazy, I could see by the light in his eyes that he was all for it.

“Guys, we can’t just run away.” Luke told us, looking incredulously between us. “My folks will go nuts.”

“So tell them we’re going to your youth camp thing,” I suggested, the opportune alibi turning the adventure into a real possibility. “With your Mom away, your Dad will be so busy he probably won’t even check up on us.”

Josh high-fived me, “Great idea, Alex!”

Luke was looking between the two of us like he was watching a tennis match.

“Come on, Luke, don’t be a wimp.” Josh punched him lightly on the arm. “You can’t go to the youth camp anyway, so why not do something fun this holiday. Unless you want to be stuck on the farm doing chores…”

Luke sighed and shook his head, grinning at his friend. “I am going to be in so much trouble if they find out.”

“We’ll be gone for the exact number of days and remember lots of details from the last two youth camps we’ve been on,” Josh promised. “That way when your folks ask questions we’ll have the story sorted.”

“When do we leave?” I asked, excitement fizzling through my veins.

“The camp starts tomorrow, so I’ll call Dad and let him know we’re going,” Luke promised.

We spent the rest of the afternoon packing backpacks and finding bits of food Luke didn’t think would go amiss.

Josh and I stood watching anxiously as Luke told his Dad about the youth camp, and asked if he and I could join it.

“Well, they said that one or two kids pulled out.” He’d answered a parental question.

Silence as he listened.

“No, there’s a whole group of people going, Dad, and lots of activities and stuff, we won’t wander away from the group.”

More talking from his parents.

Luke had nodded and made all the right obedient child noises before confirming that we wouldn’t see Allan before we left because the camp was due to start at eight and he was only due home at eleven.

He clicked the off button on the phone, checking carefully that the call had been disconnected, before turning to us and whooping excitedly, high-fiving as he went.

“Injisuthi, here we come!” he yelled.

I laughed, feeling happy for the first time in a long time.