The Catch

John Smith went crab-fishing off Mudeford Quay. He caught no crabs that day – but he did catch a mermaid.

Now, John Smith was no ordinary man: he was a journalist. His was a profession in which the truth was created out of the correct font and page placement; in which words could be moulded into a bleaker or rosier reality; in which the truth constantly shifts and is as fluid and as changeable as the ocean.

So imagine his surprise when a deliberate misquote and a clever slogan did not conceal the plain fact of the existence of a beautiful, long-haired, long-tailed mermaid writhing at his feet. Even worse: a biased interview could not remove the painful feeling of love that suddenly sprang up in his heart at that moment. And so, failing to conceal either of these facts, Mr. John Smith decided to conceal a third, undeniably more problematic one: he stole the mermaid’s tail.

Stranded alone with a strange man, the mermaid - who was now no longer a mermaid but instead a charming and thoroughly naked young woman – appealed to the strange man for help. With wordless sounds and gestures of her hands, she asked for help. To her, her voice was expressing the words she had known and grown up with, but to John Smith they were the sound of the deepest, darkest ocean and muffled bubbles and currents. Yet he could not help but understand her plight as he watched her distressed hand signals, and he held out his arm towards her, smiling. As slow understanding dawned on the woman and she took his hands, she forgot how to be a mermaid. The tighter she grasped John Smith’s hand, the further away from the sea she became and less the yearning for the Mother Ocean held her heart enthralled. But all John Smith knew was that he wanted this woman, and he had taken her and now she was his.

The woman – whom John had told the neighbours was named Laura – never saw the sea again in waking, though in her dreams every night she visited strange places deep beneath the ocean where everybody had a tail. And she heard in those dreams a noise like… life, like breath, like home… An eerie, beautiful, melancholy and enchanting song that she no longer understood.

And whilst Laura dreamed of underwater cities and a handsome, dark-haired, blue-eyed man with fins and soft lips, John dreamed of losing his beloved beneath the waves and watching her white hands disappear beneath the surface… He had feverish nightmares of Laura visiting the seashore and finding her tail hidden – beneath a rock, under somebody’s towel, by the waves themselves – and slipping it back on over her legs as easily as if it were a skirt. Every morning John Smith awoke resolute that Laura would never have the opportunity to see or smell or hear the ocean again.

The neighbours whispered amongst themselves about the scandalous whirlwind romance. Having barely known this strange foreigner (“the girl can’t even speak a word of English would you know?”) for a month, the two were married in a small and discreet registry office (“probably not even a Christian!”). To all intents and purposes they seemed a happy couple – the woman certainly never complained, and John Smith was more content that he had ever been – and less than seven months later their first child was born. (“Well what a trollop! They can’t have known each other a day before they… you know…”)

A girl. Hair dark and thick, with eyes the brightest blue. One of the midwives (who had evidently spent her last holiday at some exotic coastal resort) said that the eyes were like the colour of the sun when you’re underneath the water and looking up to the surface. Like sunlight filtered through ocean.

John named her Emily. But his wife’s tongue and lips failed to form the word, so she crooned in something unfamiliar and alien to the child. Repetitively, as though she were renaming her daughter, her soft and enchanting voice soothed the newborn child. And as if in recognition the child’s eyes opened wider and her tiny hands gripped her mother’s finger tighter, and she sighed. But she never acknowledged her father.

Two more children followed – both boys – with hair just like their father’s and eyes green like their mother’s. And these two were curious about everything around them, wanting answers to every question asked (“Why is the sky blue?” “Where does God live?”), whilst their older sister looked at the world with weary eyes and a mind too wise for its age. By the time she had passed fourteen years the neighbours were whispering about how she surely had a psychic gift – how she saw things before they happened, and sometimes told people truths about themselves that nobody could have known. When Emily said it was going to rain, the neighbours brought their washing inside and didn’t bother watering their gardens.

But Laura still did not speak. Sometimes she could be heard singing eerie songs that sounded as thought they were coming from somewhere else, and when she tucked her children into bed at night she would lull them with these tunes, unearthly and wordless though they were. And her children too would dream of sunken cities and fish-people with eyes like the beauty of the sea, her daughter feeling drawn by the siren-like sounds and images in her night visions.

Laura died young. Although she must have been nearing her mid-thirties, Laura retained the lustrous looks of a twenty year-old. Her white corpse with its dark hair looked striking laid in the chapel of rest for the few people who wished to attend her funeral to see. John had asked her to be dressed in her white wedding gown; Emily had protested and demanded she didn’t wear anything: she was naked all the time anyway, had always been missing some vital part of her soul’s clothing… And John hushed his daughter up so she was broodingly silent. She was the only child not to cry for her dead mother.

A year later John took his three children to the seaside for the first time. He showed his sons how to fish for crabs, and gave them money to buy ice cream. They made sandcastles together and decorated them with sea shells and pebbles, then waited for the incoming tide to wash away the constructions. Emily spent her time wandering the rock pools and shoreline, looking out to the horizon and watching the sun play over the water. And as she watched and walked she sang… she sang those strange songs her mother had crooned to her so many times. And her two younger brothers, barely into their teenage years, were drawn to the sound of her voice, siren-like and beautiful beyond this world. They walked to her as if in a daydream, and took each of her hands and watched as her voice rode beyond and beneath the waves. Together the three children of the woman who had once been a mermaid walked into the ocean.

Below, an inhuman ear heard the song and heard in it his beloved’s voice. His companions recognized their own, and together they swam towards the sounds of their mother tongue and ancestry. Together they grasped the three pairs of tanned hands in their pale ones. Together they pulled them close and swam down and out to sea with them. Together they taught the children the breathings and the signs, and together they brought them to their place of origin.

John Smith was crab fishing off Mudeford Quay, and he saw nothing.

Story based on a repeating theme of folklore throughout the British Isles, wherein a man falls in love with a mermaid and steals her tail to make her his. The theme can also be found as far away as Australia, where the native aborigines tell the tale of Ngalmin, a man who falls in love with one of the daughters of the Rainbow Snake – a murinbungo, a mermaid. It seems these tales can be interpreted with our modern eyes as the way in which so many women have their ‘wildness’ stolen from them, though some voluntarily give it up. Through becoming truly woman-like in the way society says they should, women sacrifice the primitive side of themselves that links them to every other woman on the planet.

In some folktales the mermaids never find their tales again. In others, they trick their husband-captors into allowing them back to the ocean. In still others, they only become mermaids again when they hear the song of their sisters in the sea, or see them swimming: the recognition of that primal link to other women brings them back to their origins.