The Leper's Companions (2 page)

Following a path that led to the sea, she reached a rickety wooden hut and a few fishing boats. She accidentally trod on a pile of empty oyster shells and felt them splintering under her feet.

A dog with pale eyes watched as she approached and that
surprised her because she had somehow presumed there would be no life here, nothing apart from the shifting of wind and sunlight and the movement of the waves.

She sat with her back to the hut and looked out across the shimmering expanse of sand and sea. “I have left one place and come to another,” she thought to herself. “I have stepped out of the time I was in and now I will be here for a while, until things change and pass.”

I
was sitting with my back propped against a wooden hut and I was lost in thought, although if anyone had asked me what I was thinking about I would not have had an answer. I was drifting in the dark while all around me the sun was bright and the sky was blue and the air was filled with that yearning cry of seabirds which can so easily bring me close to tears.

Far away on the glistening sand I saw the silhouetted figure of a man bending over something that lay heaped at his feet. It could have been part of a wrecked ship, the trunk of a tree, a bundle of sail. It could have been a fish or a seal or even a person drowned and washed ashore by the tide.

I knew I could pull the whole image nearer to me just by concentrating on it and then I would understand what was
happening, but for the moment I chose to leave it undisturbed. Even from this distance I could sense that the man was fascinated by the thing he had found, but afraid of it as well.

I became aware of someone sitting next to me, his back also leaning against the hut. It was an old man busy mending the broken mesh of a fishing net and singing to himself in a soft monotone as he struggled with the task. His fingers were bunched together like the feet of dead birds and I could feel the tiredness in them, and the ache. I knew that in a few days he would be setting out alone in a boat and he would never return to this place, but for now he was here in the sunshine with the sound of his own voice echoing around his head.

I got up and followed the path that led to the village. Mud as hard as stone and grass burnt yellow by the last frost. Nervous chickens scratching for food, a goat tethered to a post, a pig in a pen and a dog with pale eyes watching me. There were people here as well and I could recognize each one of their restless faces, although I could not necessarily put a name to them. Even the smiling mermaid carved above the church door and the man with a wide mouth through which the rainwater streamed were as familiar to me as the details of my own life.

The first to move close was a young woman called Sally, the fisherman's daughter. She had gap teeth, rough awkward hands, and a round moon face in which the shadows of her own uncertainty were clearly visible. She blushed easily and I
could feel how the sudden heat swept across the surface of her skin, making her tremble with confusion.

The shoemaker's wife was next, with big breasts and softly curling hair, her body heavy with the weight of the baby she was carrying: an elbow pushing sharp against the inside of her womb, a head poised above the bone cup of the pelvis, ready for the slow fall. Only a few more days and the process of birth would begin. This was to be her last child.

Her husband the shoemaker was there working at his bench, his shoulders hunched forward. He looked tired and the blindness which would make him feel cut off from the world was already closing in, tightening its grip. The priest was standing silently beside him, staring towards me but not seeing me. I recognized him as the angel from the church window, but then again as someone I had once known long ago.

I walked on through the village. Walls were pulled back like curtains so that I could see inside the houses. In one there was a woman lying in the sour stink of a dark room while a mass of devils crawled over her naked body. Her husband was with her, and even though his face was turned from me I was suddenly afraid of him.

In another room in another house a woman was sitting upright in bed while all her life walked before her eyes, fast and then slow, the years unfolding into each other as she watched them.

There was the man who was old enough to remember the time when the Great Pestilence had come to the village. And
there was the red-haired girl and the man with a red tongue, and all the others who lived here; a crowd of them jostling together.

Which was when I saw the leper, or to be more precise, I heard him, since it was the beating of the wooden clapper that warned me of his approach. He was just passing the boundary stone close to the last house and was walking straight towards me. His body was draped in a long brown cloak and his face was shielded by a hood.

The leper was the only one here who was a complete stranger to me. I knew nothing about where he had come from or where he was going. I had no idea of what he had looked like before he became ill or how badly he had been disfigured by the sickness. He walked past me without saying a word and was gone.

I went back along the path that led to the wooden hut and the fishing boats. I had decided to see what it was that the man had found washed up by the tide.

T
he man was poised in indecision, staring at the thing which lay heaped at his feet. I saw then that it was not a human corpse, or the trunk of a tree, or a bundle of sail that he had found, but a mermaid. She was lying facedown, her body twisted into a loose curl, her hair matted with scraps of seaweed.

The year was fourteen hundred and ten, and it was very early in the morning, with the sun pushing its way gently through a covering of mist that floated aimlessly over the land and the water.

The man had never seen a mermaid before except for the one carved in stone above the east door of the church. She had very pointed teeth and a double tail like two soft and
tapering legs, while this one had a single tail which could have belonged to a large halibut or a cod.

The man stepped forward and squatted down beside her. The pattern of her interlinking scales glinted with an oily light. He stroked them along the direction in which they lay and they were wet and slippery, leaving a coating of slime on his palm. But when his hand moved over the pale skin of her back it was dry and cold and as rough as a cat's tongue.

He lifted a hank of dark hair, feeling its weight. Little translucent shrimps were tangled within its mesh and struggling to free themselves. A yellow crab scuttled around the curve of the waist and dropped out of sight.

He hesitated for a moment, but then he took hold of the mermaid's shoulders and rolled her over. The sand clung in patches on her body like the map of some forgotten country. Her nipples were as red as sea anemones. Her navel was deep and round. Her eyes were wide open and as blue as the sky could ever be. As he gazed at her, a lopsided smile drifted over her face.

He had presumed that she was dead and with the shock of finding her alive he let out a cry and jumped to his feet. He turned and began to run as fast as he could over the ridges of muddy sand and towards the village.

I watched as he trampled on the gray scrub of sea lavender and the low samphire bushes, their thin skins so easily broken. But he trod more carefully once he had reached the strip of pale stones littered with the sharp empty shells of clams
and oysters, and with his heart thumping in his throat he was beside the fishing boats and the wooden hut battered out of shape by the north wind.

The old fisherman was sitting there just as before, his legs stretched out stiffly in front of him and his bones aching. He made no response when the young man tried to explain what the sea had thrown onto the land; he didn't even raise his head to look at the speaker.

The young man ran on again until he arrived at the first house of the village. The shoemaker's wife was standing by the door, her arms cradling her huge belly.

“There is a mermaid!” he said to her, but she was lost in thought and hardly heard him, although her baby lurched violently inside her womb as if shocked by the news. She remembered that later.

The man went into the house and from a back room he fetched one of those narrow wooden spades that are used for digging lugworms. Then he returned the way he had come. He meant to bury the mermaid even if she was still alive and his task made him walk slowly now, with the solemnity of an executioner.

He looked out across the expanse of sand shimmering like an ocean of calm water. He saw how a flock of gulls had settled in a noisy mass on the place where the mermaid was lying, and as he drew closer they lifted, screaming and turning into the air.

But the mermaid had gone. Nothing remained of her
except for a single lock of dark hair which resembled a ribbon of torn seaweed.

Nevertheless the man dug a hole as deep as a grave: the salty water seeping into it, the sides crumbling away and seeming to melt like snow. And as he dug the surface brightness of the sand was replaced by greasy layers of black and gray mud smelling of age and decay.

When the hole was ready he picked up the hair and dropped it in, covering it over quickly and stamping it down. He marked the place with a big black stone.

That evening he sat with the old fisherman, drinking from a jug of beer and going over and over the story of what he had seen and what he had done. During the night his wife Sally shook him awake because she could hear the sound of a woman crying, desperate and inconsolable. On the following morning a cow died for no good reason and the shoemaker's wife gave birth to a baby with the head of a monstrous fish which only lived for a few hours.

Everyone agreed that this must be the mermaid's fault and they told the priest to do something. So the priest went with the man to where the hair was buried. He took a holy candle with him which kept on going out in the wind and he had a bottle of holy water to sprinkle over the sand. In his spidery handwriting he had copied three paternosters onto a scrap of vellum and he tucked these under the black stone while reciting a prayer to protect them all from harm.

After that things were quiet again for a while, but it was as
if a lid had been clamped down on a pot that was bound to boil over sooner or later. The mermaid had disturbed the pattern of life in the village and people waited with growing apprehension for what might follow.

The man who had stroked her rough skin had a dream in which she slithered over his body like a huge eel and wrapped her tail tight around his legs. He was crying when he woke up. He kept on stumbling against her image in a corner of his mind. Whenever he went out with his boat he would hope to find her glistening among the fish he had caught in his nets. He began to travel farther and farther from the shore, searching for her.

T
he old fisherman stopped mending his nets. His hands were stiff and painful and he laid them side by side on his lap, the fingers bunched together like the feet of dead birds.

For as long as he kept singing he was cocooned in images: he was out at sea among the rolling waves of a storm, the backs of whales and silver fishes breaking through the surface of the water all around him. A catch of living things was thrashing at his feet in the boat, struggling for breath. But then as soon as his voice was silent, he was only here, frail in the sunshine and thinking about his daughter Sally.

She was not yet fifteen but already pregnant with her first child. The old fisherman was afraid that the birth might kill her and with that thought he realized he could not bear to
lose her. She was what connected him to the village and to the land itself and if she was gone he would be homeless.

Every night he dreamed of his fear. He saw her as a child giving birth to a child much bigger than she was. He saw her body split open like a ripe seedpod and a mass of maggot babies crawling over her, eating her flesh until there was nothing left but the clean white bones. He told no one of these dreams because that would only make them more solid and more dangerous.

Sometimes in the morning he would wake to imagine finding her beside his bed, a tiny moonfaced child who had just learned to walk, staring at him with all the tenderness and seriousness of the very young.

He rarely went out to sea these days, but when he did, Sally was the one who waited for his return. She would stand on the beach pulling at the thread which connected them as if he were a fish on a line.

Her husband was also uneasy about what was happening to her; the skin of her swollen belly luminous and blue, so that you could see every detail of the vast creature inhabiting her.

He gave her oily herrings to eat, saying the oil would help the baby slip out. He lay awake at night, watching her in the moonlight, her face flickering with shifting emotions, now peaceful, now in despair.

The straw of the mattress rustled as she moved and turned. She often talked in her sleep, although he could
never understand what she was saying. He stroked her damp skin and as he did so she sometimes became the mermaid lying next to him, rough and cold and smiling, with hair that wrapped itself around his fingers.

On the morning when the waters broke and soaked into the straw they fetched the woman who knew how to deliver babies. She brought a flask of water that had been used to wash the hands of a murderer, ground pepper to help with the contractions, and a greasy salve smelling of rancid butter to rub over the tight belly.

The yellow sunlight flickered on the walls of the room and the bed creaked when the girl was thrown sideways with the first spasm of pain.

“You have to let go,” the midwife said. “It will be easier once you have let go.”

She unplaited Sally's flat hair and spread it loose across her shoulders. She opened the lid of a wooden chest and took out the few clothes and the sheepskin rug it contained, scattering them over the floor. She opened the door of a cupboard and removed a bundle of knotted ropes that had been left there, carefully undoing the knots and laying the pieces in straight lines. The spasms continued and became more violent than ever.