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Climbing down through the mist is like trying to do your best handwriting with your fingers in thick gloves. My left foot brushes a foothold, finds it. I lower my weight gently. No. My foot slips on wet rock and I start to slide. I grab a clump of thrift and cling on. My fingers want to hold on for ever but I won’t let them. Don’t be stupid, Sapphire. You won’t fall. You can’t stay here clinging on to a cliff. No one’s going to come and rescue you, and anyway you’ve got to find Conor.
I take a deep breath. My feet will know where to go if I can just stop panicking. They know where the next foothold is, and the next, and the next. My feet have been learning the way down for years.
I take another deep breath. Slowly, slowly, I let go of the clump of thrift. My right foot finds its way down to the next ledge like a key finding its place in a lock.
Down the rocks, squeeze between the boulders, over the stones. The dripping of water sounds eerie in the mist. I can hear the waves breaking, far out, but I can’t see them. I move as quietly as I can. I don’t want anyone to hear me coming.
At last, at last, my feet touch firm, flat sand. I’m down on our beach, safe. My legs are shaking, but I did it! I did it on my own, in the mist, without Conor.
Yeah, you did it on your own, my thoughts jeer at me. But don’t get too excited. You haven’t found Conor yet, have you?
I’m going to, I tell myself firmly. And maybe – maybe the mist’s lifting a little? I can just about see the edge of the tumble of rocks that meets the sand. The cliff I climbed down has vanished back into white woolliness, but I can’t get lost. When I want to go home, all I have to do is walk away from the sound of the sea, and I’m bound to come back to the rocks, with the cliff above them.
I step forward cautiously, one foot after another on the hard sand that slopes downward slightly to the water. White, echoey swirls of mist stroke my skin.
“Conor! Conor, where are you? Are you here?” I call softly. I don’t dare call too loud. Anything could come out of this mist.
Nobody answers.
“Conor! Conor! Please, if you’re here, come out!”
I don’t like hide-and-seek when I’m the seeker, and everyone’s hiding and waiting and watching, ready to jump out. Coming, ready or not! I hate things that jump out on me. But I’m still sure I was right to come down to the cove. I’m sure Conor came this way, and that he’s here, close.
But I’m scared to call again. I glance back up the beach, but even the rocks have vanished now. I’m surrounded by white, choking mist. The sound of the sea seems to come from everywhere. Haaa… Haaa… Haaaa…
I clench my hands so tight that my nails dig into my palms. You’re safe, Sapphire. Don’t be such a stupid little baby. It’s all right, because as long as the sand slopes downward, then it must be leading towards the sea. I know the shape of this cove as well as I know the shape of my own hand. The sea bed slopes gently for a long way, nearly as far as the mouth of the cove, but then it drops down sharply. When you’re swimming you can see the water go suddenly dark, where the deep comes. Conor has tried to dive to the bottom, but neither of us has ever touched it.
I hold my arms out in front of me and step forward, fumbling through the mist.
And that’s when I hear the voice. It’s far away, over the water, and it’s singing.
I wish I was away in Ingo
Far across the briny sea,
Sailing over deepest waters
Where love nor care never trouble me—
Dad? Dad, it’s Dad! My body prickles all over as if I’m standing in lightning.
“Dad!” I call, “Dad, where are you? It’s me! It’s Sapphy! Dad, please come back!”
The singing breaks off, and there is a long silence. I hear the echo of the song in my head. I know that song so well, and the voice singing it…
But do I? Very softly, very far away, the singing starts again. And this time I am not so sure. The singing is beautiful. The voice is so sweet and pure that I can’t tell if it’s a man’s voice, or a woman’s, or a child’s. It’s so sweet that I want the mist to lift me and carry me away to where the voice is.
Come tell to me the very reason
That I am slighted so by thee…
I asked Dad once what the word “slighted” meant. He told me that to slight someone was to put them aside and take no notice of them. To make them feel that you don’t want them. In the song, the singer wants to know why that has happened. Why he’s been slighted by the one he loves.
Slighted. I don’t need to ask what the word means now.
Why have you left us, Dad? Didn’t you want us any more? Weren’t we good enough for you? Where are you, Dad? If you can hear me, please, please answer…
But I don’t say these words aloud. I stand as still as a stone in the mist, trying to catch the echo of the singing. It’s Dad’s song, but the more I listen the less I can believe that the voice is his. The song is Dad’s, but the singer isn’t him.
Now something else is happening. The mist is starting to lighten. It’s lifting. There’s brightness in the air and as the mist swirls again it parts to show a white disc of sun, struggling to come out. I look back and the outline of the rocks appears. There are the caves. There are the boulders. I turn towards the sea. And there, down by the water, perched on one of the high rocks at the side of the cove, is a boy.
He’s facing out to sea, away from me. I can only see his head and shoulders. But that dark wet hair… It looks like – it must be—
“Conor!”
The boy turns round. Even from here I can see that he’s not Conor, but a stranger. A shiver of fear runs through me. He raises one hand and waves as if he knows me. But I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him in my life. He waves again, and this time he beckons. He wants me to come over.
And suddenly I’ve got to go to him. My feet are pounding over the hard wet sand towards the rock. There’s a pool of water around the base of the rock, and I splash through it. The boy leans over the side of the rock and looks down.
“Can you climb up to me?” he asks.
“Of course I can.”
But it’s not so easy. The rock is overhung, slimy and covered with seaweed. There are mussels and limpets that hurt my hands. A baby crab scuttles over my fingers and I nearly lose my grip.
The boy doesn’t scramble down to help me, as Conor would. Maybe that’s because he’s wearing a wetsuit – or at least I think he is. I can’t see properly from this angle, but it looks as if he’s wearing a wetsuit pulled down to the waist.
I grab hold of a spur of rock near the top and haul myself up. And that’s when I see him clearly for the first time.
I topple backwards. I nearly fall. I would fall, except that the boy’s hand shoots out and grabs mine.
“Careful,” he says.
It’s a costume. He’s wearing a costume. He must be. It can’t be real. He can’t be—
“You can’t be,” I say aloud, without meaning to. “It’s impossible.” I look down at the hand that is still holding on to me. Human fingers, just like mine. Human arms, head, neck, chest… but then…
“I’m asleep, aren’t I? You’re part of a dream.”
He squeezes my fingers tight, and then lets go of them.
“Did that feel real enough? I can pinch you if you like.”
“No, no, that’s all right. But you can’t be a—”
I still can’t get the word out. It’s not a word I’ve ever heard outside a story. It doesn’t belong to real life. I stare at the dark curve of what I thought was a wetsuit, and the smooth place where flesh like mine joins on to – what? It reminds me of something. It’s not like the scaly fish tail you see in a kid’s book. It’s like the tail of another creature altogether. Powerful, glistening, sleek, made for water and not for land—
“A seal,” I whisper. The two halves of what I’m seeing won’t join up. I see a boy like Conor, with dark wet hair and brown eyes and suntanned skin. And I see the curving tail of a seal.
He looks as if he’s heard every thought I’ve had. “Seals can’t talk,” he points out. His teeth are perfectly white and even. His mum won’t be nagging him about going to the dentist.
Why am I thinking about dentists, when I’m looking at a—
“You thought I was Conor, didn’t you? Don’t worry, Conor’s here somewhere. He’s with my sister.”
“Your sister?” I bleat. Thoughts and pictures whirl in my head. The girl with the long wet hair. The girl in the wetsuit. His sister.
“I know your name,” he goes on. His eyes glint with satisfaction. “I know all about you. You’re Sapphire. Conor told me about you.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t you want to know mine?”
“Your what?”
“My name,” he says.
“Oh. Um, yes, that’d be good.”
“My name is Faro,” he says with grandeur, as if I must have heard it. But I still can’t get my mind working.
“How come you’re speaking English?” I blurt out. “I mean, you’re not—”
“Not English?”
“Not – um – human.”
“Human? I should think not,” says Faro, as if there aren’t many worse things to be. “And how do you know we’re speaking English anyway? We might be speaking Mer.”
“I can’t speak anything except English,” I say. This is one thing I am certain about, at least.
“You think you can’t,” says Faro. “But if your mother was here, she wouldn’t be able to understand a word we’re saying.”
“She wouldn’t be listening. She’d be too busy yelling at me for coming down here on my own.”
“That’s true,” says Faro, as if he knows Mum well.
“But I thought – I mean, don’t mermaids have tails like fish? With scales? I’m sure that’s what I’ve seen in pictures.”
Faro raises his eyebrows. “Mermaids. That is such a human way of talking. I suppose you’re friends with lots of maids at school, are you?”
“Well no, we don’t call them maids, not any more. That was in the olden days. The Tudors or the Victorians or something.”
“So what makes you think the Mer are living in the olden days?” asks Faro, laying a faint sarcastic emphasis on the last two words.
Of course you’re living in the olden days, I want to say. You sit on rocks and you have a golden comb in one hand and a mirror in the other and you sing all day and comb your hair and wait for sailors to come past so you can tempt them into the sea. That’s not exactly twenty-first century behaviour, is it?
“So, that’s two things you’ve got wrong,” says Faro, almost purring with satisfaction. “One, I’m male, not female, so how could I be a mermaid anyway? Anatomically impossible. Two, all that scaly-tail and hair-combing mermaid and merboy and merman stuff comes from humans. It’s got nothing to do with the way we live. It’s all up in the Air.”
“So what do you call yourselves?” I ask curiously.
Faro’s eyes darken. His smile disappears. “I can’t tell you that,” he says. “We don’t talk about it to Air people. But you can call us ‘the Mer’ if you want. That’s the word we use when we’re talking in the Air. Mer, Meor, Mor, Mare… any of those will do.” He shrugs his shoulders as if the whole subject bores him.
The sun is coming out more and more strongly now, burning up the mist. Everything is clear again. And Faro is as clear and solid as the shape of the rock. I glance sideways at his tail. I don’t want to stare too much. Now that the mist is burning off, his tail is drying too. It doesn’t shine as much. I wonder if he should dip it in the water. There are patches of sand on his skin.
Faro catches me looking and raises his eyebrows again. I feel myself blush.
“Do you think that we are speaking Mer? Really?” I ask quickly. I listen to the words as they come out of my mouth. They sound the same as always. They don’t seem to make different shapes.
“Not full Mer,” says Faro. “But you’ve got a bit of Mer in you. You must have, or you wouldn’t be here. It means we can speak to each other. But if we were speaking full Mer, you’d be able to understand what he’s saying.” And Faro nods at the gull that’s riding the air above us, screaming out gull abuse.
“What’s he saying?”
“Think of all the swear words you know, and then double them.”
I stare up at the gull. It tilts its wings to balance itself more comfortably on the air, and stares back with its cold yellow eye. It opens its beak wide and lets out another volley.
“They don’t like people looking at them,” says Faro.
“Can you talk to it?”
“Talking’s a waste of time, the mood he’s in. He doesn’t like me talking to you.”
“Why not?”
“Gulls are like that. They think it’s safer to keep separate. Humans are bad news to most of them.”
“Oh.”
Faro watches a tiny spider crab haul itself up a strand of bladder wrack.
“Can you hear what he’s saying?” he asks.
“No.”
“You might be able to – if you weren’t in the Air.”
“But I can’t live out of the air.”
“You only think you can’t,” says Faro. “Listen to that gull. Listen. Really listen.”
I strain my ears but all I can catch is the usual cry as the herring gull swoops low, skimming the water, then soars again.
“You were looking for Conor,” says Faro, after a pause.
“Yes. Yes, I was,” I say slowly, realising that I haven’t thought of him since I saw Faro. I can’t believe that I forgot I was searching for Conor.
“I told you, he’s with my sister. He’s quite safe.”
