The Mermaid's Child by Jo Baker Page B

know where he’d gone, or how I could possibly string half a dozen words into a question if I caught up with him. I found myself gazing out across that view of river, land and sky. I knew that from here my feet would take me down into the dark streets, towards the gantries and the mud, back to men’s gaping flies and unwashed dicks and the scuttle of rats and the stink of shit. I felt my stomach churn again, put a hand to a wall, head reeling. If I could sail straight out there above the rooftops, over the smoking chimneys and rain-greased slates, gliding out towards the clean clipped saltmarshes and the sea; alone—something went solid in my chest, choking me. My eyes squeezed themselves shut, my face contracting. He had lost me. He had lost me in a game of dice. No skill, no foresight, no pattern of play: nothing but pure dumb luck with dice. He had run out of money,the money that I’d brought him, and so had placed my life on a single cast.
    He lived by chance. I could see that now. Everything was luck. I found myself thinking of the phials of pills, the stories he had told, the way his hands had darted like spiders as he dealt cards across a table. And the first drops of rain thwacking onto the dusty road that night, and the downfall’s sudden stop on the cusp of the hill. And me turning round, stretching out my hands, and turning to him, alive for the first time with the wonder of it all.
It’s not what you think it is
, he’d said.
It’s never what it seems to be
. He’d told me there would be mermaids here, but there were only whores.
    Something was forcing its way out of me, something uncountenanceable, something that hadn’t happened in what felt like a lifetime. I buckled in on myself, I choked. I began to cry.
    I don’t know how much later it was that I blinked away the tears, rubbed the back of a hand across my face. I’d already given myself a headache and my eyes felt raw, but for some reason I’d become suddenly self-conscious. I sniffed, glanced round, half-expecting trouble. I blinked and wiped my eyes again. I stared. Because, rounding the bend in the river, against the evening blue of the water and the green of the saltmarsh, its colours snapping silently, sails bellying, rigging and deck alive with tiny figures, steering a precise path between sandbanks and shilloe beds, came, at last, the unexpected splendour of a ship. Which changed everything.
    I’d been wasting my time, I realized. I would go and find my mother.

NINE
 
    The agent glanced up from his ledger, looked at me, then narrowed his eyes and said, “Do I know you?”
    I’d already begun to shake my head before I realized that in fact we had met before, in rather more intimate circumstances. Which was why I hadn’t immediately recognized his face. His prick, on the other hand: that might well have been a different matter, but he didn’t happen to have it currently on display. I’d been in the dress then, and now I was wearing Joe’s clothes. It made things easier for me, being a boy; but it obviously made things uncomfortable for my former customer. To put it frankly, he was no longer quite sure who he’d paid to suck his cock. A slow blush rose up his neck, flushed his cheeks.
    â€œPerhaps you’ve met my sister?” I suggested.
    He tugged at his collar.
    â€œNo, no, I don’t think so. I must have been mistaken.”Flustered, he picked up his pen, put it down to straighten his ledger, lifted it again.
    â€œName?” he said.
    He signed me there and then, scratching my name onto the page with a sputtering pen. As he reeled off the questions I answered him as well as I could.
    Name: Malin Reed.
    Age: Unknown.
    Father’s occupation: Ferryman.
    And then, without asking me, he scratched out the words:
    Engagement: to the slaver
Sally Ann
, five years.
    Position: Boy.
    He dipped the pen again, held it out to me, and spun the ledger slowly