Claire Kendal - I Spy

‘I don’t normally do this.’ Eliza lifts her shoulders in pretend embarrassment. ‘I mean, pick up new friends in hospital clinics. But we’ve not long moved here, and I barely know anyone. Would you like to meet for coffee? I wrote down my name and number.’ She offers me the MMR sheet.

I take the sheet. ‘Coffee would be lovely.’ It is quiet here, a brief lull, and Trudy has gone on a break. Nobody will notice that I do not dutifully tell my would-be friend Eliza that I am not supposed to do this sort of thing with the parents of patients. I smile with what I think is perfect composure, though the fizzing electrical noises that are a constant in this place seem to be bleeping and pinging from inside my own body.

That night, I cannot sleep. I squirm beneath sheets that are sticky with my own sweat, feeling as alone as a lighthouse keeper trapped on a rock island in a storm so terrible no relief boat can get to him. I grab the phone from the floor by my bed and dial Peggy, with my number blocked and the mute button engaged, my heart beating so much faster than the ringtone.

Peggy is still half-asleep, sounding scared, thinking something has happened to Milly, repeating the word ‘Hello’ over and over, and Milly’s name as if it were a question. I can hear James in the background, asking who it is and what has happened. I disconnect, telling myself it was worth it just to hear their voices after almost two years. I feel dreadful that I’ve frightened them, but tell myself they will soon discover that Milly is fine.

I pull off the quilt and drag myself from the single bed beneath the crypt-like brick archway I’d painted bright yellow. I sit in a rocking chair I’d stained deep teal, and I sew the tiniest of tiny baby clothes for the most premature of premature babies. I am one of a handful of volunteers who make these so that hospitals can keep a few on hand. And though I hope they will never be worn, I know all too well that they will be. I prick my finger with the needle and feel certain that somewhere out in the world a bad thing is happening.

It was the Mermaid of Zennor who prompted my move into Zac’s rented farmhouse two months after we first slept together. We made the decision when I took him to see her in the village church.

The Mermaid is six centuries old, and carved into the side of a little bench, holding her looking glass and comb. The dark wood is scarred and scratched and discoloured. Some of it is peeling away. She has a rounded belly and breasts that you can’t help but want to touch, though countless hands have smoothed her features away through the years.

Zac and I knelt side by side and trailed our fingers over the Mermaid as I told him her story.

What happens to her is nothing like Hans Christian Andersen’s version or the Disney film. She is enchanted by the beautiful voice of a local man, drifting out of the church towards the waves. And it is the man who then goes to live with her in the kingdom of the Merpeople. She doesn’t need to give up her tail and grow legs to have a life with him on land.

Milly and I had always planned to write a book about her, with my words and her illustrations.

‘You’re my mermaid,’ Zac said, as soon as I finished the story. ‘That is what I want to do for you.’ He knew I would never want to leave Cornwall, though before he met me he’d viewed his job there as a brief stop on his starry route to someplace else. ‘We’ll stay here,’ he said, ‘in your world.’ I was moved by that. And in his debt.

That was four months ago. Since then, we’d spent just three nights apart, when he attended a medical congress in Moldova towards the end of the summer. I’d missed him during that trip, despite the fact that living with a man for the first time wasn’t entirely easy for me. My grandmother brought me up with a strange mixture of regulation that I didn’t miss and freedom that I did. I felt so visible, so watched and accountable, when before I could disappear for what seemed endless stretches of time. But none of that was Zac’s fault.

I’d come to my special place to consider all this. It was where I liked to read and think and scribble hospital stories in my secret journal, which I kept hidden from Zac. I was wearing his parka, hugging it around myself, and sipping from the thermos of coffee I brought with me. The bench that I was sitting on was erected by the town soon after my parents died. The tarnished plaque behind my back was engraved with the words, In Remembrance of Squadron Leader Edward Lawrence and His Wife, Matilda Lawrence.

The bench sat on a section of the coastal path my parents had often walked together, above a gorge in the cliff that made a kind of waterfall down to the rocks below. Usually the waterfall sounded like thunder, and the sea churned and heaved its foam. On that October day, though, the waterfall was a trickle of gentle music, and the sea was so calm I could see the rocks below its glassy surface. Already it was past the high season. There were few other walkers despite the unseasonally mild autumn morning.

It was a short walk to that isolated stretch of the coastal path and I made it whenever I could, as if in my parents’ footsteps. Zac’s rented house was a few hundred metres inland. I thought of my bright charity shop clothes, stuffed in his drawers and wardrobe, mixed with the sleek designer wear he organised with military precision. The tall, narrow house I grew up in next door to Milly and James and Peggy was virtually abandoned, but I understood Zac’s reluctance to live so close to them.

I pictured my childhood bed in the attic, and its bright pink quilt dotted with red poppies. That bed seemed to fade. Instead, I saw the new one I shared with Zac, the white sheets thrown on the floor, and the two of us in it the night before.

My clothes were off, and Zac’s hands seemed to be everywhere, and I reached towards the drawer in the bedside table where I kept my diaphragm, and he caught my arm before I could get to it and pinned my wrists above my head and held me down and kissed any words away, and it was impossible to make him wait any longer, though I was uncertain about whether I wanted him to, and in a haze of confusion over what had just happened, my head foggy from too much wine, and my body seeming not to be my own.

There was a noise, coming from the coastal path, and my replay of the night before blew away. A figure was striding towards me, dressed in baggy walking trousers and a sweatshirt, wearing a small backpack. Her hair was hidden beneath a khaki bush hat, her eyes shielded by dark sunglasses.

I aimed a polite ‘Morning’ vaguely in her direction, hoping that she would walk on and leave me with my thoughts. Instead, she lowered herself onto the bench beside me. Because I had arranged myself in the middle, she seemed too close. I slid over, until my right side was pressed against the wooden arm. I studied the copy of Jane Eyre in my lap, trying to signal that I wasn’t interested in talking.