The Mermaid

The view from the bedsit window was none too captivating and Peter couldn't afford to replace the broken TV, so there was nothing else to look at except the mermaid. She half-sat, half-floated on a small rock that was almost enveloped by the tide. In the background, a small strech of beach was visible and a tiny figure could be seen shading its eyes and staring at the sea girl. The walls had been covered with posters, mostly pictures of rock stars, when Peter moved in. He had torn them all down, all except for a faded map of the world and the mermaid. She seemed completely at peace, endlessly combing out her long red hair, but with a song on her lips so sad that Peter almost thought he could hear it some evenings.

It was one of those evenings. The sun slanted sideways in through the old sash window, illuminating her scales from the waist down, and it left her human half in twilight. He could almost make out her mouth moving, humming a tune of ancient love and old regret. His heart ached with longing to hear that voice, to touch those lips with a finger, to urge them to silence, and then... He sighed noisily, slung a short leather jacket over his shoulder and slammed the door behind him.

Outside, the day seemed darker. The streets were full of home-going traffic and people shuffled about full of intent but with heads bent by the weather. Peter stuck his hands in his pockets and whistled as he crossed the road, walking between the stopped cars on each side of the road, and feeling like Moses holding back the deluge. As he reached the other side, the clouds opened and it began to pour. He cursed loudly. An elderly lady tottering out of a convenience store tut-tutted and gave him a stern look. Peter flushed, struggled out of his jacket and ran off down the street holding it over his head.

Two minutes further on, Peter was feeling as wet as a forgotten face-cloth on a shower floor, and he stopped to shelter in a doorway. Looking out at the drops bouncing off the footpath, he decided to give up on the pub this evening.

A woman's voice called out to him. "You can't wait there, you'll have to move on, you'll be stopping the customers." Peter was about to stand up for himself when he realised he was standing outside an old book shop that he knew. He shook the rain from his jacket, laid it over one shoulder and slipped through the narrow open door.

Just inside, an elderly woman was knitting behind a desk piled high with books. Boxes of hardbacks lay unopened on the floor. He remembered being here once before one weekend, but that time there been a studious-looking young woman hunched at the desk reading a paperback copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Funny how he remembered that now. The woman settled her glasses on her nose and peered through them at him, her eyes enlarged, huge whites around dark pupils.

"It's ok, I'm here to buy a book," Peter explained.

"Well come back to me when you've found it," she grumbled.

Peter readied and aimed a quick smile, but it glanced harmlessly off her thick-rimmed spectacles. He tucked his free hand into his jeans pocket for safe-keeping and ambled through an arch leading from the ante-room into the depths of the shop.

While the front of the shop held an encyclopaedic collection of second-hand paperback fiction, among them no less than five copies of Jaws and thirteen copies of The da Vinci Code, the shelves in the rear section were mostly lined with hardbacks, many dating from the fifties and earlier. Peter browsed around, squinting at faded titles from the second world war, flipping through an ancient Globe edition of Shakespeare's complete works and a first edition Gone With The Wind.

In the corner, partially hidden behind one of the free-standing bookshelves, Peter noticed a spiral staircase that ended at the ceiling. Books were piled in untidy heaps on the steps, with a narrow passage through the middle to allow access to the top. He flicked through the first of a small stack of pamphlets, admiring the cartoon-like images and stunned by the simplicity of an age where people could be made to believe they could survive a nearby atomic bomb blast by sheltering under the kitchen table with a few blankets.

But the stairs mutely beckoned. Glancing back through the arch to the front of the shop, he could see the elderly woman vigorously knitting and purling. He tried the first step and it didn't squeak horribly, so he threaded his way carefully upward, his eyes slowly adjusting to the sixty watts of light that penetrated the dark yellow lampshade. The way was difficult through the embankments of precariously balanced books.

At the top of the stairs, he saw that an upper storey had been sealed off with boards and sagging plaster. There was only a couple of dust-covered cardboard boxes. The corner of one box had been damaged and he could see something shiny inside. Without really knowing why, he looked back over the tops of the shelves where he could just make out the upper two feet of the archway. No one stirred.

Turning back to the box, he inserted his index finger through the corner hole. It met something metallic, cold and smooth, and his hand tingled with electricity. He pulled a key-ring out of his jeans pocket and started gnawing at the hole with the edge of his motorcycle key, cautiously at first and then faster until there was a long tear down one side. With one final tear, he could see what was inside.

A large leather-bound book with tarnished silver edging on the corners lay against the inside of the box. He ripped the flap down a little more and eased the book out, ignoring the glimpse of skulls, religious artefacts and other paraphenalia that stirred within the box. He shot another furtive glance in the direction of the doorway and started descening the stairs, careful not to dislodge any of the other books.

When he reached the bottom, it struck him that he wouldn't be able to get the book out without being spotted. Somehow it never occured to him that the book wasn't his to take.

The jagged edge of his desperation cut the threads that moored his aspiration. He found a ribbon-bound encyclopaedia of similar size and tore the pages out . It took much longer to get the leather cover off the book but finally the pages were in his hands, feeling cold and naked somehow, and he put them into the encyclopaedia cover. He stuffed the unwanted pages between a couple of tall-standing books and shoved the leather sleeve under a shelf.

Now the moment caught up with him and he stood breathless, sweating and uncertain until finally he could find enough air to fill his lungs. He walked through the arch back into the front of the shop. The lady looked up at him with surprise but smiled when she saw the encyclopaedia. He flashed the prominent price sticker under her eyes and dropped the correct amount in crumpled notes on the counter, starting to walk out when she called out. "Wait, wait!"

Peter turned in fright and the woman went on. "You must take a bag - you wouldn't want it to get wet." He plucked the bag out of her hands and dropped the book carefully into it. "Thank you, thanks, really."

She smiled and sat down. "I hope the weather improves for the weekend. Days like this, it feels like it's going to rain forever."

Peter twisted the handle of the bag into a knot and looked around distractedly. "Yes, I suppose it does." He looked back through the archway and thought of the evidence he had left there, but it was too late. He turned and walked briskly out the door, feeling the lady's eyes smiling on his back.

Outside the rain was falling harder than ever. Peter ignored it and walked stolidly back to his flat. Slowly the sense of what he had done sank in. The engraved image on the leather cover, faint but discernible, was burning his mind - a mermaid, laid out with her arms across her breasts, a crucifix in her hands. And now he had her life in his hands. He clutched the bag to his chest and hurred on.

The bedsit was silent and musty when he returned. Peter opened the window and sat on the bed, trembling as he removed the pages from their over. The text on the title page was faint, but a single word in a different ink was still readable in the centre of the page - "Murgen." At the bottom of the page, he could make out "Bangor" followed by the date, five hundred and something, Anno Domini.

As the night grew old towards midnight, he studied the pages and assembled a mosaic of meaning from the medieval language and dozens of vague references. Murgen was a mermaid who loved and was beloved by a priest. Despite all his begging and threats on the stormy beach-front, she said she must leave him, never to return.

He drowned trying to swim after her, and she was impelled by the laws of her kind to complete the unfulfilled promises of her doomed lover. She allowed herself to be captured and was finally baptised and lived out a human span of days. At her death, she was canonised for her good deeds. It was clear that she had cut short a lifespan of centuries for her sin.

The answer came to him, like the remembered sound of a sea-shell from childhood. He said the words he had heard so often at church, each time hoping beyond hope for some intervention, his hare knees on the wooden step, and his heart was lashed by longing now as then. But nothing happened, nothing stirred except the blood in his temples and the sounds of the sea were just his heart pounding in his ears. He wept and stormed out into the night.

The pub was still raucous, and welcoming. The crowd he had hoped to meet had moved on, but there was always something happening and someone to share a drink with. Peter did most of the buying and though the first sips seemed like vinegar, he made up for lost time with enthusiasm.

He staggered out at gone-the-time, too drunk even to know if any of the rain drops on his face were tears. By the time he made it back the long wet road to his bedsit, he'd sobered up enough to discretely tap at the window of the ground floor when he found he'd forgotten his keyes. The window rolled up.

"Peter is that you, ye eejit." Sandra the downstairs tenant was unsympathetic and grimaced with tiredness as she opened the front door a few moments later. "The bleedin' roof must be leakin' again, the rain's comin' right through the ceiling."

He nodded his head wearily.

"Peter, I'm talking to ye, put a pot under it or somethin'. Oh jaysus, I'm sharin' a house with a gobshite." She shook her head and walked back into her room. "What a cross I have to bear," she added ironically and slammed her door behind her.

Peter muttered to himself as he mounted the stairs. "I absolve thee of thy sins, in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit." His certainly wasn't an original sin, stealing a book; and perhaps the sin of pride. Surely nothing more. His head ached and his head felt mummified.

He couldn't believe it when he made it to the landing. Sandra was right; the floor was awash and there was a smell of rotting wood. He would have to try and contact the landlord.

Before he opened the door, he knew the room would probably be a watery mess, but that didn't prepare him for the saturated wall, its strangely empty poster, the pungent smell of seaweed, the regular watery slapping sound or the quiet sad ethereal song that accompanied it...