The Mermaid Shore
Fiona Jones
Isla McMorran had met mermaids, or so she said, in among the rocks and seaweed at the back of the island. She only saw them when alone.
“Seals, maybe?” her father wondered. “At a distance, you know, on the rocks?”
“An exceptional imagination?” her mother wondered. “At her age, they don't always know the difference between fantasy and reality.”
They bought her mermaid dolls, a mermaid DVD and a Disney mermaid costume, but Isla showed no interest.
“They're not real,” she explained—gently, so as not to hurt her parents' feelings, and candidly, so as not to muddy the backdrop of her mind, the thin, blue-green thrill of brine lapping against shell-fragment sand behind the island.
The shell-ground sand—lighter than rock grains—shifted easily to wind or wave, sank deep footprints where you ran, and sent bubbles up through your toes where you trod the shallow water at the receding tide. The cliff-bound beaches and inlets at the back of the island, the side farthest away from the small ferryport, held a picture-postcard perfection to the eye: limpid rock-pools, rippled stretches of sandbanked water and high surf beyond. But for most of the year the elements guarded against loud, littering beachgoers with a knifelike wind and a pinching cold in the water. If any mermaids lived here they must have skin of nacre, armored scales and the wild, watchful, unexpectant eyes of night itself.
Isla, an only child, lived less than a mile from the back shore. She helped her farming parents to care for the warm, thick-smelling cattle and the noisy, milling sheep; she ran errands for the two or three holiday-rent cottages; she travelled the two miles to school in a near neighbor’s car or, if necessary, walked. But afterwards, whenever chance released her from more pressing demands, Isla wandered away to her favorite place to watch the moods of an ungentle, semi-Atlantic coast. She could have taken one of the farm dogs with her, but she preferred to go alone, letting the drizzle or sea-spray slowly wash out of mind the noise of people, the daily chafe of shrill schoolmates and strenuously enthusiastic teacher. Often Isla would arrive home again after dark, cold or wet, and her parents eventually forgot to repeat the banal threats of “you'll get lost” and “you'll catch cold,” because she never did.
Isla liked the high tides, when the sea marched slowly in to reclaim its territory. The spring tides, when the water advanced across its previous tidelines to heap clumps of weed up on to land, and smoothed the dry or rain-pitted dunes that merged into heather and grass. Best of all, however, Isla loved the low tides, the low spring tides, when she could advance down the shell-sand, down under the usual tide-zone to undiscovered pieces of beach, to new rock-pools never quite free from the grip of the sea.
Isla had walked down the sand alongside the headland one blustery autumn day at low low tide, and she had seen something a few short meters beyond the end of negotiable wading ground: a cleft in the seaward-facing cliffs, a narrow cove just around a slippery outcropping of high rocks. If the tide would only have receded a little more, she could have braved the wrenching surf to slip around and discover that tiny secret beach invisible from the land and sheltered from the powerful waves by a semi-enclosing wall of cliff-stacks. But the inconsistent tide refused to ebb that low again: for over a year the neap-tide periods widened while the spring tides seemed weaker, shorter every month.
The ferryport shop displayed tide charts. Isla learned to read them—to extrapolate for herself the daily time lag and the lunar cycle, even to find within herself a half-unconscious sense of time and tide position until it seemed as though the days, and not the tides, drifted in and out of synchrony.
“You understand these sea tables?” her father asked, relieved to find Isla taking an interest in science instead of fairy tales. “That's really clever. Maybe you're going to be a sailor.” He downloaded the daily tide readings for her perusal, and communicated to Isla's schoolteacher her newfound abilities.
“Sometimes,” the teacher said, “a highly introverted child can show unusual ability in very specific areas. Isla dear,”—heightening and sugaring her voice—“how is it you always know when high tide will be?”
Isla frowned meditatively. Yes, she could read the tide tables, but by now she knew what they would say ahead of time. “The mermaids showed me,” she replied—quietly, because they would not believe her, but steadily, to keep her hold on the undulatory transparency the sea waves have before they hit shallow water.
“And how did they show you, Isla?”
Isla took a deep breath, softly, as one picks up an empty bivalve so as not to break apart the two mirroring halves. “Their music,” she said finally. “Going up and down.”
“She's definitely her own little person,” the teacher remarked to the father. “But there's nothing wrong with that,” she added hastily.
“Except that she's eleven now.”
“I'm sure some of these things will change when she starts high school. Less time alone, more interaction, you know.”
Isla heard little of this, and cared less. She had already noticed something subtly changing, and she hardly needed the monthly tide charts to confirm a progressive stretching in the scale of the spring tides. How far would the pattern continue, and how low would the lowest tide fall? Give her a clear, free day near the June solstice, after a night or two of rolling south-westerly surf to raise the sand level just those few extra centimeters at the false corner of the headland. And there she would go, like an explorer seizing a weather-window to lay claim to pole or peak.
Unluckily, bad weather and sea-surges spoiled Isla's best options, but she found, at last, a clear summer morning shortly after the end of the school term.
“I'm going out walking,” she told her mother.
“Wear a sunhat, Isla, it's very bright. Oh, and take a water bottle too...”
Isla reached the shore perhaps an hour before low water and paddled at the edge while she waited for the final few meters. Briefly she tried scrambling on the bordering rocks, but the seaweed of deep water, more slippery than ice, allowed no hold. For ten minutes or so she threw handfuls of silt and shell into the water where the path must lie, hoping if possible to shallow out, ever so slightly, the difficult patch between cliffside, rock and deep water. Finally she stepped in, thigh-deep round the corner of rock, into the cove she had glimpsed nearly three years earlier.
The cove widened out more than she had expected, into an almost lagoon-like shallow, shielded from the sea by a farther fold of cliff and rocks. As she splashed up through to ankle-depth, silt gave way to coarse, shell-shatter sand that sank and bubbled under her feet. Upwards of the glowing blue-green water, the gap in the cliffs looked darkish, out of reach of early sun and still wet from the last tide. Isla gazed upwards at the varying strata of mollusk and weed life on the rock walls: green weed, bladderwrack, and far above her head, limpets, bathing there in the brine only a few hours previously. She stood underwater in her imagination, blue-green depths above her and sea life swimming around and past, staring through her, unaware of the brief flicker of her presence among their slower tide-pulse of life.
If Isla could have trodden the pure, unmarked sand without footprints, she would have, but each step sank ankle-deep as she made her way up the small, sloping beach to sit down and gather this rare place into memory.
She must not stay too long. The grotto-like space grew lighter as the sun's rays reached in. The water shallowed still farther—or did it? Of course it did.
Mermaids would beach in here, to rest on the spongy sand, to untangle their storm-tossed hair, to loose into the air the music they had gathered in floorless, roofless halls of deep blue. Isla could see them, if she unfocused her eyes, and some of their notes and rhythms fell almost within her hearing range.
Isla, a land creature after all, had to go back, and had probably left it later than she ought. Sure enough, she stepped into deeper water this time, and a sudden wave, unexpected after the near-stillness inside the secret shore, chucked her against a slippery rock, hitting her head. She did not fall, but saw blackness coming, and retreated, collapsing back on to the sand of her grotto.
She awoke only when the water lapped up around her, chilling her awake. White water had begun to enter the cove, smoothing back into ripples but breaking again, more lightly, at the water's edge. Isla looked, entered the water, peered again, but saw no chance there. She looked upwards and the rocky cliffs that now hemmed her in, and saw no chance there either: slippery, overhanging in places, they would kill too.
Isla screamed for a while, from the instinct of a child or in the vague hope that one of the dogs might have somehow followed her, or even that an odd tourist might pass above her on the cliff path. But the sea, and its life, and her death, only moved closer under the coming tide.
Isla had seen a beached whale, long dead, caught between rocks, dunes and sandbank when the tide turned and stranded it. The fish at high tide and the birds at low tide pulled at it, feeding off its tragedy, gradually returning its flesh to the elements. For the whale had made a mistake. So had Isla, and the sea now approached to take vengeance.
No, not vengeance, exactly, but Isla felt the raw, blind cruelty of chance and mischance. Life, the conspiracy of earth, air and sea, had calmed and softened its own original elements—slowing water, stabilizing erosion and moderating climate. But life, the culmination of physics and chemistry, must prove itself equal to the challenges of its chosen environment. Or die—to give place to that of better fit, of greater adaptability.
Isla tried to slow her breathing. She could put none of this into words—could only sense it like the circling of elusive, latent-eyed swimmers surrounding her place and time between the tides. The sand had gone underwater now, and she trampled ankle-deep in wavelets against the slippery cliff. If only she could adapt on the spot—grow fins and tail, wings, gills, armor or even claws to scrabble upwards. Humans, so fragile and unwieldy, have little but brains to their advantage. We can swim a little, climb even less, fly not at all, and must forever combine and recalculate our feeble skills—
Isla recalculated. She could not gain enough purchase to grip and climb, but she had one arm in a cleft that would, for the time being, prevent the water sweeping her away. Looking once more upwards, she saw that cracks of one size or another came in plenty—that if she could cling on, one way or another, for a couple of meters as the water rose and bumped her, she would reach a point where she might climb yet farther....
She took her outer shirt off, leaving one arm inside its sleeve but using the length of the garment to hook around any available projection of rock. The water remained cold, but Isla had adapted from an early age to weather and water, and the sunshine that now angled up the inlet gave almost enough comfort. And now remained the long, numb, animal effort at survival—the bird on long migration, the elephant travelling for water, the wolf outrunning starvation, the polar bear swimming for ever-shrinking floes. And time proved itself long indeed, as Isla's climb reached deadlock and she found she must await the next low tide after all.
As the long tide followed its wavering cadence, Isla slowly forgot fear, her sense of the sea’s cruelty. Cruelty implies inequality, and she had demonstrated otherwise. She shared something new with the seaweed, the mermaids, the limpets: she had floated, clung, waited—and lived.
The farm dogs met Isla as soon as she splashed up the open beach that evening. Her mother, following them, took her home in the All-Terrain, and neither parent questioned Isla that night.
In the morning, and forever afterwards, Isla answered calmly and succinctly that she had walked too far, had got lost on an unknown piece of coast, but that mermaids had helped her to find her way home. And, whether because of the bruise on her head or the exhaustion of a long day outdoors, nobody could ever get more from her than that.
