Ex Chapter 10 - The mermaid who could not swim

The expressions on the faces of the Kentish Town girl's under 9's swimming team were a complex combination of fear, anguish, disbelief and fear (again). Elissa Wage their coach, followed their tiny pinched mouths from left to right and back again until they became a single Munch like scream.

The woman, dressed in a tattered red one piece swimming costume decorated with smiley faces, sat on the edge of a wooden bench, her wrecked hands covering her face, her body quaking as if she was receiving electro convulsive therapy. The changing room reverberated with the sound of silent tears crashing through grasping fingers onto tiled flooring and callused toes. Elissa could see bloody fingerprints covering the half open locker above the woman's head and on the upper parts of her naked arms as if she had, at one point, embraced herself. Turning to find the entire under 9's class standing en masse behind her she wordlessly gathered them into a bouquet and ushered them to the far side of the changing room.

Elissa reached out a hand but then withdrew it, there was no part of this woman she could touch which would not somehow infringe her wordless rapture. A vocabulary limited in the main to aquatic terminology left Elissa at an immediate disadvantage when it came to assuaging this level of distress. She tried "Can I help?" although she believed herself to be at least 300 lengths of standard breast stroke away from being able to do so.

"I am here for the 9am adult’s beginner’s class." The woman replied through grey blue fingers which masked her face liked bloodied vine leaves.

"Well its 3pm now so you've missed it."

"I know I've missed it. I was here on time but then I wasn't sure if I'd left my purse in the locker, so I opened the locker to look and there it was. So I closed the locker and then I thought what if all my credit cards have expired, so I opened the locker and checked. Then I heard my mobile phone go off so I had to go back to open the locker and check but then I remembered I don't have a mobile phone. But when I looked in the locker again I remembered our dog and my son, sorry my ex son and ex dog and the parking attendant and the police and I had a little cry. So then it occurred to me - what if I go swimming and my locker key falls off into the water and I can't swim so I can't get it back and then I can't open my locker so I would have no money and no clothes. So I put my locker key into my locker so I wouldn't lose it. But then my locker key was locked in my locker. So then I didn't have my locker key or my clothes or my credit cards because they were all in my locker and I thought - I’m fucked. So I had to get it all back. But these modern lockers are really difficult to open, I had to get my fingers into this little gap that isn't big enough for fingers and it really, really hurt and at least two of my nails were just torn off - right off, but in the end I did it. Then I had my key back but of course no locker and no fingers - they were both, kind of ruined."

The woman looked up at Elissa with eyes that had endured so much wretched honesty that they had become dispossessed. They were the eyes of the drowned

"Why don’t you have a cup of tea in my office and when I’m finished with the girls I’ll give you a swimming lesson on the house?”

The woman rose almost balletically and then sat down heavily as if punched in the solar plexus. She recognised the distant glint of generosity but had no means of reaching it.

“What about all this” her expansive gesture appeared to include the entirety of human existence which was slightly beyond Elissa’s brief.

“I can give you a swimming lesson and we can keep your things in my office, which I will lock”, she added hurriedly. “I can’t help with all the rest.”

“What if you forget?”

“Forget?”

“Forget to lock the office, lose your key.”

“I won’t” Elissa proffered her hand and the woman snatched it greedily as if she intended to keep it.

“You might forget me.”

“I won’t” she held the woman’s hand in both of hers.

But Daniel’s mother knew she would. She had become bereft - a mother without her children, a wife in a fictional marriage and now a mermaid who couldn’t swim.

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Jonah’s telephone dragged him roughly from the brink of sleep. He stared at the caller display and contemplated evasion but Bernice had already discovered all his hiding places.

“Where are you?” He asked.

“I’m where you left me.”

“I left you on the edge of Beachy Head and told you to jump.”

“Well I didn’t like that advice.”

“But that was yesterday, surely....”

“Obviously I haven’t been there ever since. I have to talk to you about the list.”

“The fucking list. I destroyed the fucking list, I rammed it down the toilet and then I rammed your head down after it.”

“That didn’t work, I’m afraid, apart from making me permanently deaf in one ear and making me want to vomit when I hear your voice it didn’t work.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to save the one man left on the list. I want you to get in my way and I want you to stop me doing this a third time.”

“Don’t you mean a second time?”

There was a muffled incoherent noise, like the mewling of a poisoned rat before it dies.

“Fraid not.”

The noise became louder, imploring. Bernice grunted with effort as if pushing a huge weight away from her towards the edge of the cliff and then there was nothing.

“So” she resumed, breathlessly ‘will you stop me?”

“What have you done?” But he knew all too well what she had done.

She had just pushed Darth Vader off Beachy Head.