Not As We Know It (4 page)

We went to London once. Mum says everyone should visit the capital even if it does take hours and hours crammed in Dad's van. When we were there, she wanted us to go to all the museums and see dinosaur bones and paintings of old ladies. Dad just wanted to take photos of all the buildings made of Portland stone, cathedrals and banks and galleries. Even a palace. Ned said that the island must be almost hollow seeing as how so much of it is in London.

Portland is like the holey cheese Mum gets when it's on special offer. The one with the red wax. It's full of holes. On Portland, if your dad's not a fisherman, he's a quarryman. Apart from Tibs's dad, who runs the post office. And Lucy and Peewee's. He's a policeman.
The
policeman. Officer Taylor.

Before a rockfall in the quarries, or a cave-in, rabbits escape the burrows. You can't say “rabbit” on Portland. It's bad luck. Granddad says it's silly superstition and Dad calls it the “R-word,” like it's a swear word. Ned loves to say it.

Granddad does have his own superstitions. He tells us myths and legends and stories of why the world is the way it is. Sometimes I think he belongs to another age, one before cars and Walkmans and
Star Trek.
And I guess, like all old people, he does.

Ned had left with Mum and Dad, growling,
“Let's get the hell out of here,”
before stomping through the door. Granddad came by a little later.

When I'd fixed his tea and we were sitting at the kitchen table he said, “You got me thinking, Jamie. About mermaids.”

He asked me if I remembered when we studied stars. Granddad's stories often started like this. I didn't wonder what stars had to do with mermaids. I knew we'd get there.

In the summer, when we learned about stars, Granddad took us out at night to look at them—we didn't need to go beyond our back garden. He taught us how Earth and the other planets moved, and we found Venus in the sky and the North Star and a host of constellations.

I told Granddad I remembered.

“You know all the constellations we
can
see,” Granddad said.

I did know. I also knew what Granddad told me next, that there are lots of constellations we can't see. They only appear in the southern half of the sky. People who see them can't see our constellations. Orion never fires his bow across their sky.

Granddad took a sip of tea, then continued, “There's one called
Piscis Austrinus
—the Southern Fish. It peeks into our northern sky in autumn and winter. You can see just one star, Fomalhaut: a very important star if you want to find your way.
Fum al-hut
means the mouth of the fish. It's Arabic.”

Granddad told me to get him paper and a pencil. “Get your atlas too,” he called.

Back at the table, he made seven big dots. He joined them up with bold, straight lines to make the outline of a fish.
“Piscis Austrinus,”
he said. “A very old constellation. The Greeks knew it. And the Egyptians. Goes all the way back to Babylonia.” He reached for the atlas and flicked through the pages. “Here,” Granddad said, and placed the thick book down in front of us. “Right, that's Iraq here”—he traced the outline of a country with his finger—“and Syria there.” He traced another country. “This is where the Babylonian empire was. They had lots of gods, the Babylonians. One chief one was Atargatis. You got that?”

I nodded at Granddad and mouthed, “At-ar-ga-tis.”

“Atargatis was the mistress of her people. She was responsible for their protection, making sure they were well and healthy and prosperous.

“But one day she did something no god is allowed to do. She fell in love. With a young man. The goddess took him for her lover, but she was so ashamed of what she had done that she killed the young man and threw herself into a lake.

“Of course, being a god, she didn't die but became half-fish, half-lady. And she continued to protect her people from the deep. She protected them against calamities and hardship. She and her many children protected them against illness too.”

I thought about Leonard's cold touch. I thought about Ned's cough. I wondered if the children of Atargatis were still in the business of protecting. Would that protection extend to miracles? That's what we needed: a miracle—nothing less. Maybe it would come at the touch of our strange friend.

“They named those stars in her honor.
The Great Fish,
they called them. And when they saw Fomalhaut rise, they'd know she was still watching over them.

“And that, Jamie, is the story of the first mermaid.”

Granddad had finished his tea. He put his hand up to my head. “You all right there?” he said. “Looking a bit pale.”

“I'm OK,” I said. “That's just a good story.”

Granddad said, “Ned'll be all right,” even though he didn't know that. I nodded and suggested we leave mermaids for a while and look at the atlas. We stayed in Iraq and Syria, traveled down through Jordan, then into Israel. When we hit the Mediterranean Sea, Granddad proposed we have a little rest before lunch. I made him another tea and sat in the front room.

I couldn't settle, though. My head was full of mermaids and mermen, protecting people, making sure they were well. My head was full of the children of Atargatis.

I thought I didn't mind if our adventure became Ned's adventure if it led to something good. If it led to a miracle, this child of Atargatis—Leonard—could have my brother to himself.

Right then, I believed a miracle was coming.

When you're homeschooled, you don't have many friends. You have to be friends with other mums who come over for tea and biscuits. And policemen who live three doors down. And fishermen whose names you don't know. We've made friends with our postman, Bill, who's a big
Star Trek
fan too. He bought Ned a Starfleet badge when he found out Ned was ill. We have friends up and down our little road.

Mrs. Clarke next door isn't among them. Dad calls her “a nosy old bat.” Tony, the policeman, says she phones the station about all sorts of tiny things. Mum says we need to look after her; she's very old. But I heard Mum calling her “cow” under her breath when she came to complain Mum was hoovering too loudly.

Ned and I still have one friend from school. Tibs. On the day Ned was at his appointment, when Granddad finished my lessons and closed his eyes for a nap, I went to check on Leonard and Tibs found me there, with my ear pressed against the garage door. He called from the front gate where he sat on his bike.

Tibs had vomited the night before. He hadn't told his mum he'd snuck a whole packet of Mint Viscounts from the cupboard and eaten half of them before dinner, so she thought he was ill and wouldn't let him go to school. But she'd seen he was “recovered” soon after breakfast and told him to get out from under her feet.

“Go see Ned and Jamie.”

“So here I am,” Tibs said. “Where's Ned?”

“Hospital.”

“He all right?”

I shrugged at this. I didn't say anything about the miracle I hoped for.

Tibs went red for a moment, then said, “So, do you want to go to the prison or something?”

The prison sits on the highest hill on Portland. The road winds up and up. You can see the beach behind you all the way. We don't go there for the prison or for the views. We go there for the ride back down. We call it the Slalom and shout the theme tune to
Ski Sunday
as we pedal.

If you go too fast, you skid off on the bends. You haven't gone fast enough if you don't lose your bike a few times.

Last time Ned went up, he came home with both his knees dripping blood and his right eyebrow split open. Ned is fearless. He's banned from the prison road now.

I agreed to go with Tibs. I couldn't stand and listen by the closed garage door all morning. And I couldn't go in. No Kirk to go before me.

I went to check with Granddad. He was asleep. I was pretty sure he'd be fine with me going, though. I fetched my bike from beside the garage and checked the latch. It was as far across as it could be.

I turned away from Tibs, who was waiting by the gate, and whispered through the door, “I'll bring some more fish later.” I would, when Ned was back. Then I remembered my brother laughing at me. Leonard can't speak English.

As we mounted our bikes outside the gate, Mrs. Clarke appeared, a broom in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Shouldn't you boys be learning something somewhere?” she called.

It was usually Ned who spoke for us when needed. I tried to think what my brother would say.

“We're going on a field trip, Mrs. Clarke” was the best I could come up with.

As we cycled away, little Peter, Peewee, waved from his front garden and shouted at us, “Hello!”

We waved back.

Tibs is fast going downhill but slow on the way up. He spends his Saturdays in the post office selling stamps and nicking sweets off his dad's shelves. He's a bit rounder than most of the boys at school.

“Slow down, Jamie,” he called to me as I pedaled away up the hill.

I was used to waiting. Ned was getting weaker all the time. I remember when we were little, apart from the cough and all the doctors, there wasn't much difference between me and my twin. He'd stopped growing, though, while I'd shot up taller than Mum.

We went as high as we could, all the way to the
No Entry for Unauthorized Personnel
sign. We stopped and stared down at Portland, the beach and the coast of the mainland spread out before us.

“So, how is Ned?” Tibs asked.

At school, sometime before we'd left, they'd had this assembly about considering people's differences and not asking about things you did not understand. Everyone knew it was about Ned. People weren't supposed to ask how he was.

Ned didn't like it. He'd rather just tell people to shut their mouths, whenever they asked.

That instruction made me happy, though, because people asked me more than they asked Ned. I had nothing to tell them; no one talked to me about the illness.

I had nothing to tell Tibs now, nothing that wasn't about a fish-man, living in our garage. I shrugged. “Let's go,” I said, and set off fast. I soon slowed. I was Leonard McCoy. I didn't go anywhere boldly.

“Damn it, Jim. I'm a doctor, not a stunt cyclist.”