Chapter Seven
Priddy sat for a while, staring at the blank line of horizon
that was all he could see from here, one layer of grey piled on
another. It looked as though the sleet was settling to freezing
fog. He was glad he’d made all the maintenance checks on the light,
which would be badly needed once the sun went down. His
do-unto-others reflex fired, and he wrote the kind of email reply
he’d have hoped to receive himself in Kit’s circumstances: daily
life and Rosewarne gossip to show no freaking out was going on,
then an interested, mildly teasing couple of lines about
Geoff. I hope I’ll get to meet him
sometime. And look after yourself, mate, even if it is too late to
be careful.
Kit must’ve been online. His reply pinged into Priddy’s inbox
barely a minute later. I knew you’d be
cool about it. You’ll get to meet him sooner than you think. I was
telling him about all the crazy mermaid legends we have around
Rosewarne and Hagerawl, and he says stories like that are often
mistaken sightings of a really rare kind of porpoise. He wants to
come and take a look, so I’ve invited him to come and stay at the
lighthouse.
Priddy imagined himself back home at Rosewarne, sharing a
bedroom—if he could even get that—with the Portuguese chef. A
drowning panic rose up in him. Do you need
me to move out?
No, of course not. We’ll stay in the keeper’s cottage. We’ll
be busy, so we won’t get in your hair at all.
Priddy said goodbye and signed off. He was suddenly exhausted.
He’d had no desire over the past few days to sit slumped in front
of the TV, but now the idea was tempting. Were there any films in
the stack beside the DVD player he hadn’t seen a dozen times
already? He ran his finger along the spines. Well, there was
The She Creature. He’d
avoided that one so far because the title and cover were hokey even
by his standards. The blurb on the cover mentioned mermaids, and he
envisaged big-bosomed ladies sitting on rocks with their fish-tails
curled around them, singing and combing their hair.
Well, maybe it was time he got genned up. The idea of mermaids
had been powerfully with him of late, although he’d tried not to
pick up on Merou’s unsubtle hints, the
Mer and you
primates and things that happened
topside. Fingers with
webbing between them, then nothing but a trace of fish-scale
dust... Priddy had wanted to hang on, just for his own
satisfaction, to some last illusion of sanity. Now along came Kit
and Geoff the professor, pursuing rare porpoises behind a veil of
myth. Maybe that was what Merou had been—a rare fucking porpoise.
He prodded the elderly DVD player until its drawer creaked out, and
set the disc to play.
The TV signal kicked in first. The news was just ending, with
the type of tag piece the local station used to cheer viewers up
after an announcement of unemployment figures or a new contender in
the arms race. Local fisherman attacked by
mermaid! the strapline declared, in the
special perky font they used for such segments, to show the mood
had changed from grim to absurd. Priddy reached for the volume
control. “He were huge,” a terribly familiar voice announced.
“Leapt out of the water, he did, right up the side of my
boat!”
Vigo
Priddy didn’t have a boat. Priddy rubbed his eyes: sank onto the
edge of a chair. There was the old sod’s face, taking up the whole
of the screen as the cameraman zoomed in. He was pale as the cod
he’d probably stolen a client’s boat to catch, and bleeding
profusely from the nose. “Never seen anything like it,” he went on,
the pleasures of media attention getting the better of his shock.
“Ten feet long the bastard were, at least.”
The camera swung to the anchor guy, who looked bored out of
his life. Priddy could imagine his thoughts. Three years to get my media degree, and I end up on Rosewarne
harbour, interviewing the local drunk... “And what did you say he did to you, Mr Priddy?”
“Punched me right in the snout!”
The anchor guy collapsed. Laughter hit the soundtrack from
behind the camera too, and somebody offscreen said
cut, cut, cut. Vigo
snarled and backed off, giving everyone the finger, and a smooth
voice from the studio apologised to anyone who may have been
offended by the language or gestures in that story.
The DVD finished loading up, and the player overrode the TV.
Priddy sat staring at the cheap title card for The She Creature, remote still poised
in his hand. After a moment when he thought he might choke and die
on the mix of emotions boiling in his chest, a weird bark escaped
him. He dropped the remote. The upsurge was too hot, too big: he
jumped to his feet to escape it. A strangled wail followed on, and
a hooting inhalation. He flapped one hand like a teenage girl
unable to contain herself at a 1-D concert, then fell face-down on
his bunk, howling with laughter.
Someone
was knocking at the door. The sound came from a hundred and twenty
feet below, distorted by the spirals and the lighthouse’s great
hollow cone. God knew how long it had been going on for. Priddy had
been helpless, yawping and weeping into his pillow. He’d had to
clench his bladder muscles not to pee the bed. Bloody old Vigo,
terror of Rosewarne Cove, going live on TV to say he’d been punched
on the nose by a mermaid!
But he’d never said anything about a maid at all.
Leapt out of the water, he did.
Vigo had said he.
“Merou,” Priddy gasped. He fell out of the bunk, rolled to his
hands and knees and leapt up. He hit the staircase at a run,
grabbing the handrail at the last second to slingshot himself
around the first curve. He’d never been so tempted to try a
spiralling slide down the banister, but he wanted to get to the
ground floor alive. “Merou,” he shouted on the sixth coil of the
stairs, halfway down and hopefully in earshot. “Merou, hang on!
Gimme a minute. Coming!”
At last
he touched down at ground level. Raced barefoot across the
concrete, wrenched the iron door inwards, and...
“Oi-oi-oi, Priddy boy!”
He
recoiled. A burly figure wrapped in a damp afghan coat shouldered
past him, reeking of ciggies and dope. He struggled for a name, and
had to bite back a cry of misery when he remembered it, all its
associations of shame. So far in Priddy’s world there had been two
kinds of drug-dealer. One was the Kit model, who would buy you some
pills as a present and spend the rest of his life regretting it.
The other type was Baz Dingwall.
Priddy trailed him slowly up the stairs. Baz, in the alley
behind the Penzance cinema. Waiting round the corner when Priddy
got off a late-night bus, or came into town for a few drinks with
Kit and the lads, or tried in any other way to enjoy himself
without getting wasted. Priddy didn’t blame Baz. The option had
been open each time for him to walk straight past. But that
greeting—oi-oi-oi,
Priddy-boy!—was the call of a merchant to a
well known customer, the one who would stop and shift his weight
longingly from leg to leg while Baz listed his wares and the other
boys walked on without him. Not Baz’s fault. Priddy had just liked
to be high.
It was
such a nice alternative to constant bloody low. “So,” Baz called
back to him, continuing a stream of chatter he’d maintained since
walking through the door, “how’s life treating you up in your tower
here, Prid? Long time no see, and when Huddy Jones blew through
town the other day, I couldn’t help but think of you.”
Why had
Priddy let Baz in? Huddy was another type of dealer again, too high
up the food chain for Priddy ever to have met him. The dealer’s
dealer, the one who drove the crack-wagon, the supplier to all the
little peddlers like Baz from Zennor to Angarrack. Huddy brought
the good stuff, in bulk. Baz ushered Priddy into his own quarters
as if he owned the place. Once inside, he took a foil-wrapped
package out of his pocket and laid it on the table. “Nothing but
the best for you, my son. Pure, sweet and simple.”
Priddy
could smell that it was. Top notes like sunshine, and then a
descending scale through hot greenery to deep, furry musk.
“Thanks,” he said distantly, holding on to the back of a chair.
“Sorry you’ve had the trip out here, but I’m not doing that stuff
anymore.”
Baz let out a low whistle. He took a slow circuit of Priddy’s
little world, hands in his pockets. “What are you doing these days? Where’s
that mate of yours—Kip, wasn’t it?”
“Kit. He went to university. You’re gonna have to get out of
here, Baz—I’m expecting the police round anytime.”
“The police?” Baz chuckled richly, propped his biker boots on
the table beside the packet of dope and folded his arms. “What’ve
you been up to, then?”
“Nothing. They’re investigating something else. I really don’t
want to be sat here with you and twenty grams of dope when they
arrive.”
“Twenty five. Don’t worry, only half of it’s for you—tailored
to your budget, which I know is never large.” Baz settled more
comfortably into his chair. Clearly he thought the police tale was
just Priddy’s weak-willed attempt to get rid of him. “About to
watch a movie, were we? I’ve got nothing better to do tonight.
Chuck us a brew from the fridge and I’ll keep you
company.”
“I don’t have any.”
“What, beer? Are you joking, mate? What kind of wagon are you
on?”
A bumpy one. I’m belly-down on the flatbed, nothing to hold
on to. That pot smells like paradise.
“Baz, please.”
“All right, all right. Make us a cup of tea and I’ll be out of
your hair.”
So
Priddy put the kettle on, like Polly in the old song. He made tea
for both of them, then returned to the armchair by the TV and tried
to pretend Baz wasn’t there. He set the DVD to play and stared
blindly at the screen.
The film was much, much better than its name and the cover
implied. The plot began to grab his attention despite the combined
distractions of Baz, the dope and his cravings. The lovely,
helpless mermaid, imprisoned in her tank by a group of travelling