Not As We Know It (2 page)

Our granddad is a seaman. He's lived his whole life on or near the deep blue. He's hauled cargo back and forth across the oceans, on a ship longer than our street. He captained a trawler, heaving tons of mackerel and herring and sprat ashore. Later he dived for scallops, bringing those crusty shells up from the deep. He isn't retired. Just on an extended break.

I think Dad's job as a quarryman is a disappointment to Granddad. He always says, “I am married to the sea. Your father's married to the rock and stone.”

Granddad brings us great slabs of fish: a choice plaice, a dover sole, the largest pollock you've ever seen. A forty-pounder he reckoned. Granddad taught us to gut and debone, fillet, butterfly. Once he tried to teach me and Ned to suck the eye from a fish's socket.

Ned had tapped his chest and said, “Sorry, Granddad, just feeling a bit congested today.” Then he laughed.

I managed a grin; Ned's chest wasn't something to laugh about.

Granddad asked me what my excuse was. He didn't make me suck out any eyeballs, though.

So, growing up with all that fish around, all that squelchy flesh, it wasn't squeamishness that made us hesitate before bundling our find into the sack. It was fear. There was fear pulsing through both of us.

We gulped air as we pulled ourselves up from the weeds.

“I'll get…I'll get…Granddad,” I said.

Ned stared at the thing, at the being. He didn't answer for a long moment. The sea's crash rose in our ears again, a wild call.

“No,” my brother said at last. “This is
our
find. It's our find. We'll take him home first.”

That word,
first.
I
heard,
First
we'll take him home, then we'll tell someone. But
Ned
meant,
First
we'll take him home, then we'll see what we'll see.

So we bundled the creature into the sack. Ned rolled him gently as I held the bag open.

“Watch the mouth. It might bite,” I said.

Its cold, wet skin brushed against my fingers. No hair. Scales and skin and skeleton beneath.

I shuddered at the cold, at the wild.

“Find anything good?” the fisherman called as we stepped lightly back along the ridge.

“Erm,” I said with an urge to shout,
We've found a living thing. Something awesome and terrible.

Ned coughed, not his usual wet rattle. “Just shoes and stuff,” he said.

The fisherman sniffed, nodded and returned to his rod.

I pulled and turned the sack. The creature wasn't heavy. It was terrifyingly light, like its bones were hollow. Its pointed elbow dug into my back.

The couple smiled at us as we passed. I didn't smile back. Ned did, brightly beaming.

Usually we tied the sack to my handlebars and it clattered along against my front wheel as we ground our way up the hill. I did not think our little creature would thank us for the bruises, though.

“You wheel the bikes,” my brother said. “I'll carry Leonard.”

“Leonard?”

Ned's pet crab had also been called Leonard, after his favorite member of the starship
Enterprise
crew, Leonard “Bones” McCoy. We'd kept it in the tub in the garage until the water turned green and we found Leonard still and unmoving. We'd buried the crab alongside the seal.

If Ned wanted to call the creature Leonard, we'd call it Leonard. Ned usually had his way.

I wheeled the bikes, one in each hand. Ned carried Leonard.

There's a spot, halfway up, where a second path leaves ours, going quickly down, scrabbling and hopping from rock to rock to a platform, thrusting into the sea. A spot where we always stop. On that clear day we stared back down along the beach, the sea on both sides of it. We could see far beyond Weymouth.

We'd walked the whole beach once, eighteen long miles. Just me and Ned. On a day he'd wanted to escape. We'd had to get the bus back. Not because Ned moaned—Ned never moaned—but I could see when he winced that his knees were bad and his coughing had got worse with every mile. I told him I was too tired for the walk back, otherwise he would have insisted he was fine and stumbled and coughed all the way home, or fallen somewhere along the lonely bank. When we got back, Dad was angrier than I'd ever seen him. Mum just cried. We haven't walked it again. Now we just gazed back along it.

The fisherman was still there. Two more had joined him, dots along the shoreline.

“Come on,” I said, stooping to attack the last five hundred meters.

Ned coughed and wheezed behind me. We turned onto our tiny road with its handful of cottages, their backs to the English Channel.

I was glad Mrs. Clarke wasn't by her garden gate; she always quizzed us on what we were up to.

Mum saw us from the kitchen. I watched her turn down the radio and open the window.

“Is he all right?” she called to me.

“I'm fine,” Ned replied.

“Come in soon,” she said.

We nodded and waved.

We knew where we would put the creature. Without talking, I dumped our bikes by the front gate and Ned opened the side door of the garage. The old hinges squeaked.

“In the tub,” Ned said.

Once I'd removed it from the sack, we stared again. We stared a long time, Ned wheezing.

There's only two other kids on our road: Lucy, my friend, who was in our class when we went to school and her little brother Peter. Peter's tiny, even for a three-year-old. Lucy calls him Peewee.

Laid out in the little tub, Leonard was no taller than Peewee. So slender. Skinnier than Ned. His colors startled me again, from darkest brown to bright red, purple, and green.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Not it. Leonard,” Ned replied.

“What is Leonard?”

We didn't know. We knew he was a sea creature. That was it. For the first time the word
merman
swam into my mind. I did not let it dive out of my mouth, though.

I fetched the hose that lived attached to the outside tap. Ned tried to turn it on.

“I've loosened it for you, Jamie,” he said when I took over.

We let a trickle of cold water fall on Leonard's chest. The little man shivered, not a chill shiver but one of relief. I turned the tap on fully and Ned placed the hose at the end of the tub, away from Leonard.

“He's a sea creature, right? He'll need salt,” Ned said.

I nodded. “Mum's got sea salt. In the kitchen,” I replied.

I turned the tap back off and fetched the salt. Mum was upstairs; I had no questions to answer. Yet.

When I returned, Ned was crowded over the tub, ready to join the fish-man.

“How much?” I asked.

“Here,” Ned said, taking the salt and emptying in a handful.

I went outside and turned the tap on once more.

We stood and watched the bath fill. The water covered Leonard's hands and feet first.

“They're the same,” Ned said.

His hands and feet were almost identical. Feetlike hands and handlike feet. Both long, jointed and scaled. As they spread in the cool water, I could see the webbing that connected each finger to its neighbor.

The water covered his chest and stomach where the brown skin gave way to scaled legs.

“Look,” Ned said.

The gills on Leonard's neck opened and closed and opened again.

Every time Ned had to stay home from school for a week or two or more, Dad would buy a new
Star Trek
video. We've got the whole set now. All three seasons. All seventy-nine episodes aboard the USS
Enterprise.

One of my favorites has these creatures called tribbles. The tribbles seem harmless. They are small, fluffy balls that purr and quiver. But they multiply and spread all over the spaceship. They get everywhere. The episode's called “The Trouble with Tribbles.”

Our fish-man was not a tribble. Leonard, lithe and slimy, looked nothing like them. But like them, he seemed innocent. Harmless. We'd taken him in, like the
Enterprise
crew had taken on the tribbles. As we stared, mesmerized, I could not help but think of all the trouble Leonard might cause.

Then we heard footsteps. Ned leaped up.

“Come on, boys. I want you in,” Mum called as the squeak of hinges sounded over the bubbling water.

“Wait,” my brother shouted, running for the door.

“We're coming in,” Ned said, bundling Mum out before she had the door open, before she saw into the garage.

“Let's go, you've got work to do!” she said.

We hadn't been to school for months as Mum wanted us home. She wanted to look after Ned there. It had been early summer when we stopped going. The date was inked in my mind—May 5, 1983. The date marked a change, a big change for Ned, for what was happening to him.

“Maybe they'll come back after the summer holiday,” Dad had told the head teacher. “We'll see how Ned's doing.”

We didn't go back.

It was agreed we'd be homeschooled. We read and wrote with Mum. Dad did maths with us when he wasn't too tired. Granddad's job was to teach us geography and history. He mainly told us stories.

“Right, I want to hear you both read, then you're off to Granddad's,” Mum said.

Ned led Mum away and again I had an urge to shout, to call,
Help, Mum. Look at this…this thing.
But somehow it was important to Ned, this secret. Before the world saw Leonard, I needed to find out why.

I shoved the urge back down and followed them. I turned the tap off and shut the door, sliding the latch across. No one but us entered the garage anymore.

Inside the house, Ned picked a book off the shelf about sea creatures—one that Granddad had given us when Mum first pulled us out of school. I raised an eyebrow at my brother. He grinned.

Mum raised both eyebrows. “I thought you were reading that Tyke Tiler book. The man in the bookshop said it was really good.”

“Finished it,” Ned replied. “It was good.
Really good.
”

He hadn't finished it. His bookmark had moved only a few pages a day.

“Where is it?” Mum asked.

Ned and I both knew why she wanted it. She liked to ask us questions. She quizzed us on what we read. If we got less than seven out of ten, we had to read the book again.

“Erm,” Ned replied. “I think I left it at Granddad's.”

Mum opened her mouth to speak.

Ned interrupted her. “Yeah, I definitely left it at Granddad's. Didn't I, Jamie?”

I nodded but couldn't hold back a smile.

Mum narrowed her eyes at me like I was the culprit. “You can read to me first, then, Jamie. What are you reading?”

I read to Mum about a boy called Billy and a fox cub running away from home. Ned flicked through the sea creatures book.

When it was his turn to read aloud, I abandoned Billy's adventures and listened as my brother read about wolffish.

“Fearsome in looks, the wolffish is also known as the devil fish. Its strong, wide jaw and sharp teeth that give the fish its name are used to crush hard-shell mollusks and crustaceans. Despite its reputation as a bottom-feeder…”

Ned stopped reading and grinned at me. We laughed.
Bottom-feeder.

Mum growled, “Get on with it.”

“…the wolffish is not small, growing up to five feet in length. This shy creature lives on the ocean floor in rocky nooks and small caves…”

“Look at it, look at it…,” Ned said, holding the book up to me as we walked toward Granddad's, just a few streets away. You could only see the sea from Granddad's top windows. “It looks like Leonard, right?”

There was something in the wide mouth, something in the jaw. And the fin that ran the length of the fish's back was identical to those that ran in rows down Leonard's head. Leonard wasn't a wolffish, but he wasn't a wolffish like Ned and I weren't monkeys. Distant relations.

“We should show it to Granddad,” I said.

Ned frowned at me.

“We should show Leonard to Granddad,” I tried again.

Ned thought for a moment. Then shook his blond head. “They'll take it away like they did with E.T.” He had made Dad take us to see
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
three times at the cinema. It was his favorite film after the
Star Trek
ones.

But later, after a lunch of potted shrimp on toast, I couldn't help but say, “Have you ever heard of people living in the sea, Granddad?”

“Of course, Jamie. Lots of people live their lives in boats. In 1963, I only spent three days on dry land.”

We knew this story. Granddad had crewed a ship called the
Dublin.
The crew called it
Great White.
They'd made their money ferrying spices. Granddad said a crate of saffron could buy a small house. And a little crate at that.

“No, I mean,
in the sea.
”

Ned coughed. Not a real one at first, but it became a fit, hacking and hacking till he spat into his handkerchief.

“All right, Captain?” Granddad said to Ned. My brother nodded and Granddad turned to me. “You mean mermaids.”

So instead of a lesson, Granddad told us the stories he could remember about mermaids. Explorers' stories. Pirates' stories. Myths and legends. The mermaids were usually beautiful. Mostly the head and torso of a woman and the tail of a fish, rising from the water, enchanting men.

Nothing like Leonard.

“Do they always look like that?” I asked.

“In the stories,” Ned added.

“Not always,” Granddad said. “We heard a good story in the war. A Japanese ship, posted to Indonesia, found itself in calm water, off a small, unfamiliar island. The captain, an old seadog, had suffered from a heart attack on the voyage. He'd survived it but was quite happy to wait there for orders.

“They waited for days, the crew restless, the captain bedbound and growing weaker by the day. As they waited, they saw things in the water; things no one had seen before. The captain wouldn't believe his crew's stories till he hauled himself from his sick bed and saw for himself.

“He peered into the depths, groaning from his aching body, and they surfaced in the water all around the boat. Merpeople! These weren't like the mermaids in legends. They were more like tiny humans. About yay high.” Granddad held out his hand two feet off the ground. “They had limbs like you and I, but a mouth like a carp and spiked fins on their heads.”

I gasped, not a loud dramatic gasp, just a short sucking of air. Ned made a
hmm
noise.

Granddad continued. “The creatures stayed with the ship for days on end while the water was calm and no orders came. The captain was enchanted and seemed to be returning to health. An artist in a previous life, he spent hours trying again and again to draw them.

“The ship had been at anchor for over a week when, one night, the captain disappeared. His drawings went with him and the mysterious creatures were not seen again. Had the merpeople taken the captain? Had he gone willingly? Nobody knew. Nobody had been on deck to see him. The captain had sent the night watchman to his bunk under a strict command not to come back to his post that night.

“The next day orders came to return to port. The crew took the ship and their story back home.”

Granddad looked at us. Our eyes were wide. Our mouths hung open.

“That story slivered like an eel from ship to ship. I don't think the Japanese liked being laughed at. The first mate and half the crew were tried for mutiny. Their commanders believed they had killed the captain and flung him overboard. The crew stuck to their story, though. Even when they stood in front of the firing squad.

“But if there
were
mermaids out there,” Granddad finished, “I'd have seen 'em. Not a drop of ocean I haven't been in.”

I looked at Ned. Ned stared at me.

“What if there were, Granddad?” I said at the same time as my brother blurted, “I need to talk to you, Jamie.”

Granddad shook his head. “You boys are in a funny mood today. I'm going to make some tea. You work it out.”

When Granddad had left, my brother, usually all smiles and laughter, looked at me seriously.

“Jamie, I don't want to tell him.”

“We've got to. What if it's dangerous?”

Ned scratched his head just behind his ear. “What does that matter anymore?” he said.

I had no answer for this. I shrugged and frowned.

“Everything's going, Jamie. This, this”—Ned pointed to his chest, to where his lungs were filling with rubbish—“is taking everything. Everything. Soon.”

We stared at each other. My lips hardened. I scrubbed a hand across my eyes.

Ned had no fear of his future. He said, “If this is our last adventure, I want it to be just
ours.
”