Ex chapter 4 - Daniel's mother is a mermaid

Ex chapter 4

Daniel’s mother was a mermaid.

This news had been greeted with a level of sarcasm from Daniel’s father that was so herculean that it had reduced their already fragile relationship, to weekly sandwich crust removal and underwear ironing. When she angrily demanded to know why he could not simply accept her for what she was, Daniel’s father had pointed out that :-

(a) She had not been a mermaid for the first 15 years of their marriage and that this damascene revelation had only occurred after a particularly heated altercation with a parking attendant in Swanage;
(b) She had two legs rather than a fishes tail;
(c) She could not swim;
(d) Neither of her parents had been, to his knowledge, mythical aquatic creatures (although he was forced to accept that they did both lack certain basic human characteristics) and
(e) She resided in a semi detached house in Highgate which, whilst rain sodden on occasions, could not be described in any sense as an underwater kingdom.

Be all that as it may, she responded, she was a mermaid and if he did not like it he could fuck off.

Their marriage had become as irretrievable and ethereal as the dream of a battery chicken. Daniel’s father saw the woman he had loved lose all connection with what is popularly thought of as reality, abandoning him to the parenthood of two sons and the stubborn memory of a third. Their children - one who had refused to live, one for whom life was as abstract as the faintest touch of a cloud on a parachutist’s cheek and one who refused to die.

---xx---

Day to day suburban life was becoming increasingly challenging for Daniel’s mother. Her waking thoughts were coloured by a longing for the sound and texture of the sea but as much as this thrilled her it also perplexed and petrified her. She knew that slapping a parking attendant around the face for being rude about her inability to parallel park would not normally inspire a life aquatic but that is what had occurred. In that instant she had understood what had been wrong with the picture up to that point. Life, her life, in the car, in the supermarket, in traditional salsa lessons, in bed with Daniel’s father, every breath taken of that life, was drowning her.

She had driven to the sea a week later – to the sea at night with its blue black roar and lumbering grace. She took her shoes and socks off and stood in the October tide, her toes thrilled and frozen and looked out its impossible shape with blind eyes. The sea could not parallel park, the sea did not play on line poker every night nor mock her poor dress sense. But the sea could be, was magnificent, it took her breath away with every salt filled swathe and in that moment, for her, she knew it was more of a husband to her than Daniel’s father could ever be.