Chapter Twelve
Priddy
had forgotten one basic fact about his own nature. He was stupid.
Not in the intellectual sense: given time and a couple of re-sits,
he might even have scraped through college and into university.
Once there, though—like Kit, who had turned out to be stupid,
too—he’d doubtless have picked up some handsome bastard to screw
him over.
As things stood, he’d managed to do it without leaving home.
He stood on the slipway, dabbing blood from his mouth. Merou hadn’t
hit him very hard, because here he was, alone at the end of his
dash down the spiral stairs, in time to see the charter boat
Mirage disappearing round
Hagerawl Point. He’d even taken a moment to pull on a jumper and
jeans.
The
jumper was big on him, ruffling in the wind. Geoff’s, of course.
Priddy hadn’t bothered to look at what he’d pulled out of the
tangled pile of clothes. Merou hadn’t taken anything at all, and
why should he? His skin was all he needed. He’d have hit the water
in a slicing gannet’s dive, out of sight of the boat, in the bay
where Priddy had first found him. His two temporary legs—nothing
but a nuisance to him, like his assumed humanity, like Priddy—would
have painlessly fused, and he’d have beaten the great fluke of his
tail, once, twice, three times, and he’d have been gone.
He was gone. That was the essence of Priddy’s stupidity.
Fantasies came easily to him, stories about the world and his own
place in it, and he’d told himself a short, vivid, sweet one up
there in the top room. Merou and I will
dive into the Atlantic, breathe for shipwrecked mariners, save
them. Merou and I... “Fuck,” he shouted
into the wind. “Fuck you anyway. Why did you leave me
behind?”
A windblown strand of kelp flew up from the harbour and
cracked him wetly in the face like an answer. Everybody was heading
somewhere else apart from Priddy. That was the message of his whole
sodding life. He scraped his vision clear and stared after the
boat. There was one navigable channel past the Hell’s Teeth rocks,
risky enough in clear weather, a tightrope in a storm like this.
Kit was a fair sailor. He must be at the helm, because the
Mirage was threading her
way along the edge of the cliffs, hugging the shoreline. Maybe he
was fine, and had cheerfully volunteered to take Geoff out to sea
in a tempest. Nobody knew the waters here better than the
lighthouse-keeper’s grandson, and he was holding a good course
along the one safe track.
That yawp of the horn hadn’t sounded cheerful, though. No
reason for a sound signal at all, on a deserted coast like this,
unless you were trying to tell someone—anyone, even so useless a
creature as Priddy—that you didn’t want to leave. Priddy had
watched enough vessels come in and out of the tiny Hagerawl port
over the past three months that he knew where the boat must be
heading. In weather like this, she’d have to pass almost beneath
the overhang of rocks between here and Portheras Cove. It was a
fair drop, maybe twelve foot of clearance from deck to the
overarching cliff. You still couldn’t do it in a sailboat.
The Mirage was
motor-driven, powerful. Priddy could hear the thrum of her engines,
but they were fading fast.
He was
glad that the shoes he’d yanked out from under the bunk were his
own. The right pair for the occasion, too: his well-worn trainers,
which had carried him fleetly out of reach of many a bad situation.
Even Vigo had never been able to catch him in those. Over the
Rosewarne cobbles, up the main street, the old man—who wasn’t old
at all, only in his forties, and hard and fit despite
himself—haring along after him. Down the alley and quick round the
corner past Kit’s house, where a loose plank in the garden fence
would save him, and then Kit’s mum and Kit himself, pulling wry
faces at each other while they hustled him silently
indoors...
Friends
and friendships had their limitations, but they had their moments
of glory, too, and Priddy wasn’t about to be the one who had to go
back to that ordinary refuge of a house, stand on the doorstep and
break the news to his best mate’s mother that her boy was drowned.
As for Merou—Priddy had been the one who had taken the wild, simple
delights of his company and twisted them up into a mad dream. Merou
had looked sick with fear in Priddy’s last memory of him—fear of
Geoff Blades, and this boat and its mission, whatever the hell that
would turn out to be. Priddy checked his laces, then took off like
a greyhound along the cliff-edge track.
***
Geoff
was clearly a tougher customer than his designer oilskins
advertised, but still he let out a high-pitched shriek when Priddy
landed on the deck behind him. The sound gave Priddy some
satisfaction. He caught his balance, grabbed the rail and pressed
his advantage. “Turn this boat around,” he yelled, glad for once
he’d inherited a touch of Vigo’s boom. “Tell Kit to do it now,
before we lose the shelter of the headland.”
“Where the bloody hell did you come from?”
“There.” Priddy didn’t mind if his upward jab indicated the
cliffs or heaven. “Trewin warned you about the storm. Risk your own
neck if you want, but you’re not taking Kit with you. Turn her
around.”
“You jumped off...” Geoff glanced up at the rocks now vanishing
into the spray. “You should’ve broken both your legs.”
“Are you not listening to me?”
“I am. Do you somehow think I’ve got Kit aboard this boat
against his will?”
“Against his bloody common sense. She’s a nice rig, but there’s
no way she’ll handle weather like this.”
“Come and talk to him. Jesus Christ, I can’t believe it. First
we find you apparently dead on a beach and now this.”
Geoff
turned on his heel and marched into the wheelhouse without a
backward glance. Priddy could either follow him or wait for the
next big wave to sluice him across the deck. After a moment he
scrambled in pursuit, ducking into the padded-leather shelter of
the cabin. “Kit? Kit, it’s me. I got your message. I’m
here.”
Kit
jerked round. He was too good a mariner to let go the wheel, and
Priddy saw him lay in a course for the autopilot before turning to
gawp at him. He was pale, but it looked like concentration, not
abduction and terror. “Priddy? Bloody hell, mate, what are you
doing here? What message?”
“You sounded the horn before you left the slip. I
heard.”
“Yeah, she’s new to me. I was trying to find the screen
wipers.”
“Oh. Shit. Well, you still have to turn around now. Fuck’s
sake, Kit—you know better than to tackle weather like
this!”
“Yeah, normally, but—”
“Do as he says,” Geoff interrupted. “Pull back her engines,
anyway, and hold position while I talk to him.”
“You said we had to get out there right away.”
“I know what I said. But he’s clearly upset, and he doesn’t
understand.”
“Too right, I don’t.” Priddy grabbed for a handhold as the boat
slowed, the loss of momentum destabilising her in the heaving
waves. Maybe it had been the run down here, or his admittedly crazy
leap off the rocks, but for once in his life he felt a touch
seasick. “If you’re looking for your singing dolphins, I guarantee
you they’re not gonna hang around at those coordinates I can see on
Kit’s board. That’s the place the guy from the Lovely Rose thought he’d been, but
you heard Trewin. There’s nothing there.”
“There certainly won’t be, if we wait for the storm to pass.
I’m not looking for dolphins, Priddy.” Geoff’s brow creased. “I
know I loaned you my dressing gown. What I can’t work out is how
you’re now wearing my jumper.”
Simple. My merman boyfriend came naked out of the sea, and
yours was the first open window he found. Then we went to bed
together, and got up in a hurry, and he ran off—naked again—and I
grabbed this. “Must’ve picked it up by
accident.”
“Er... right. Kit, come here. I’ll mind the helm.”
Kit
glanced over his shoulder. “Are you sure? Even at this speed, it’s
a tricky route.”
“I can pilot a damn boat! I was sailing skiffs in the Bay of
Biscay while you were still...” Geoff shut up before he could
remind himself too vividly of the age gap. “I want you to explain
to your friend what we’re doing here. He’s got no reason to trust
or believe me. And I’d rather have an extra pair of hands on board
than a wild-eyed bloody liability.”
Reluctantly Kit made room for him at the pilot’s station,
then came to sit on the leather bench seat that ran the length of
the cabin. He patted the space beside him as if Priddy had been a
small but awkward dog. “Come here and sit down, mate. You look a
bit green around the gills.”
Priddy
might have been able to stay upright if Kit had chosen different
words. But he had a fucking hole in his neck with blue-green fronds
inside, and his back was aching fiercely, a nauseating pain right
at the base of his spine. He let go his handhold and half-fell onto
the seat. “I’m fine.”
“That’s good, because you’re gonna think I’m bonkers in a
minute. Geoff believes...” He paused, then continued loyally,
“And I believe
too, after what I’ve heard, that there might be more to these
mermaid stories than meets the eye.”
“Outrageous,” said Priddy, politely.
“I know, right? But listen. Geoff was part of a research team
working off the Scilly Isles in the nineties. He kept coming across
people—fishermen in the little villages, mostly—with stories like
Michael Henderson’s. And...” He glanced up. “Seriously, Geoff? You
want me to tell him the whole lot?”
“I need him on board, so to speak, since we can’t chuck him
over. I don’t particularly care if he thinks I’m insane. Go
on.”
“Well, there was this guy living on Bryher, or at any rate
visiting his boyfriend there for a couple of days every month. When
the moon was full, apparently, and Geoff thought he was maybe a
fisherman using the bright nights to cheat on his missus or whoever
in the next village along. But one night there was a storm, and a