Mermaid’s Cave

By Lauren Collee

Playa de las Catedrales, Galicia, Spain

I had a job over the summer, not because of financial necessity but because my mother held an unshakable belief in the virtue of work. She said that I needed to start building my resumé if I wanted to get ahead in life. I was fourteen, and the General Store manager, Ray, paid me in cash. I finished in the late afternoon, once I had folded all the napkins. Before I left, Ray came over to inspect my napkins. He put his hand on my shoulder as he did so, and somehow the hand slid its way to the back of my neck. 

‘Good girl,’ he said, and I felt every muscle in my body tense up. 

When I left the shop, the family car was parked outside, my mother in the driver’s seat. The number plate was J177, but the sevens hit the bottom of the frame, so it looked as though it spelled ‘JIZZ’. My mother opened the door a crack.

‘The shop’s closed, sorry,” I said.

‘I came to pick you up.’

‘It’s like, a ten-minute walk.’

‘I’m going to pick up some things from town. I thought you might want to come.’ I hesitated.  ‘I haven’t seen you all day. And Sam’s here tomorrow so I won’t see you then either.’

I climbed into the passenger seat. ‘I wanted to swim,’ I said.  

I’d already learned from Mum that it was important to remind loved ones aware of the sacrifices you had made for them. I was sharply aware of what she’d paid for my existence: firstly, her career, secondly, her Adventurous Spirit, and thirdly, her thick, glossy hair, which she claimed had come out in clumps in the shower when she was pregnant. To me, her hair looked no different now than it did in the pictures she showed me of her younger self. 

The road that led out of the village was very narrow and very steep, with rock-face on one side and a sheer drop on the other. It didn’t look as dangerous as it was. The thick canopy of trees on the drop side came right up to road level, and it seemed as though any car that veered off the path would simply get caught and hang suspended, like a kite in the branches.

‘Can I play some music?’ I tried.

‘I thought we could talk, instead,’ said my mother, and I felt my throat go all thick. ‘How was work today?’

‘Fine.’

‘Just fine?’

‘It’s a General Store. I’m not sure what you expect.’

When we rounded the hill, the ocean came into view, gently heaving and gold-flecked. It would be too late to swim by the time I got back. I avoided the water at dusk, it was when all the sharks left their dens and went looking for prey.

‘What time’s Sam coming tomorrow, anyway?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Haven’t you asked her?’

‘She said she didn’t know.’

Mum groaned and stoppered the groan just before it turned into a scream. 

The town was mostly residential, with a shopping strip four or five blocks long and several large supermarkets that had little rides shaped like bulbous insects outside them which you could pay to use. It was the kind of place we might study in Geography class at my new school as an example of a ‘commuter town.’ Dad called it a ‘funny little place,’ which was his way of saying ‘a shithole.’ It was flanked by a national park, in which were nestled little, affluent coves like the one we’d come from, each one with their own minimally-stocked General Store. Lots of the girls and their parents came to this part of the coast too, in the summer holidays, each with an allegiance to a particular nearby enclave. All of these families did their grocery shopping in the town, but they never stayed there. 

After we’d been to the supermarket, I looked around the dollar shop while Mum picked up a roast chicken. I loved it in there. There were ten aisles and the whole place smelled of plastic and dust. Everything was wrapped individually in crackly translucent bags. I bought an XL Men’s polo shirt, a bottle of turquoise nail polish, and a single plastic rose, which Mum put in a jar with some sand when we got home. 

The day Sam arrived, dad had driven me to the station to pick her up and then agreed to make a pit stop at the beach on the way home, so the two of us could sunbathe without risking having to negotiate with Mum whether we’d also have to take my siblings, Sophie and Milo. We lay down our towels and Sam pulled off her dress to reveal a red triangle bikini that cradled her full breasts perfectly. She tilted her chin and massaged sunscreen delicately into her cheeks, using just two fingers. 

‘I’m, like, a quadruple A.’ I said, staring blatantly at her chest.  

‘There’s arm exercises you can do,’ Sam said. ‘To get boobs.’ 

‘Mum keeps trying to get me to do spine exercises to get taller.’Sam gave me a beautiful, devastating look, one that I felt a sudden urge to protect my Mother against. ‘NBA players do it’, I added.  

‘What does she want you to be taller for? You’re not, like, short or anything.’

‘She thinks tall people have an advantage in life.’ 

The sand was already warm from the morning’s sun. Sam talked about her current boyfriend, about how he kept saying ‘intense things,’ like that he wanted to marry her one day. Sam kept all her ex-boyfriends as ‘friends.’ They orbited her like flies in the hope that they might take her to the year twelve dance. 

Despite having never had a boyfriend myself, I was good at these conversations. I listened carefully when other girls talked about boys, and I had picked up snippets that I learned to formulate into responses that sounded coherent and wise. In this way, I had managed to not only gain friends like Sam, but also to incite them to tell me all kinds of secrets, small precious things that I carried around inside me without revealing my own, so that the secrets—mine and others—accumulated quickly. I knew, for example, that Bodil liked Tom, who was Sam’s ex. I also knew that Bodil’s brother had once had a threesome with his girlfriend and the radio host from Nova 96.9. I didn’t know if the latter was true, but this didn’t disqualify it from being a secret in my view.

‘I’m going for a swim,’ I said, even though the water was full of seaweed on this end of the beach. Sam had her period so she stayed on the sand. I made the walk to the water’s edge as quickly as possible, then I dove under and swam out, looking back at the beach from the water. I usually loved this perspective—seeing what the waves saw as they rolled forward—but this time as my eyes scanned the sand they were consistently drawn back to Sam’s red bikini. 

I wasn’t the only one watching Sam. There was a dog approaching her, maybe drawn to the scent of her coconut tan oil. And just beyond the dog was a man, or maybe a boy, I couldn’t see properly. The dog was right up next to Sam’s thigh, sticking its nose nearly into her crotch, but she hadn’t noticed—her headphones were on. She must have felt the tip of its nose on her skin, because she instinctively brought her arm down forcefully on her thigh as she sat up. Her hand caught the dog’s nose and it jumped back. I watched Sam put her hands to her mouth and shake her head at the owner, as if apologizing. Sam loved animals. Above her bed, she kept photos of some of the animals she had adopted, who lived in sanctuaries around the world and had names like Glossy, and Marmalade, and Tidbit. She said that when she graduated, she would do a world tour and visit them all. The boy-man was approaching her and making hand gestures to signify that it was alright, the dog was fine. They spoke for a while. Sam was paying the dog lots of attention. At one point she looked up and scanned the water, then pointed at me. Both of them looked in my direction and I dived under again. When I resurfaced they weren’t looking anymore. I started to get cold and paddled around a bit. Eventually, it became apparent that their conversation wasn’t coming to an end. I swam right up to where the water was extremely shallow and then hauled myself up, hugging my chest, although the air was warmer than the water. The two of them turned and watched me as I drew closer, without saying a word. 

The next morning I was on shift again, only for a few hours. Sam was still asleep when I woke up, the shape of her blue and soft in the morning light, her ear like a seashell where it split the curtain of her hair in two. She ambled into the shop some time in the late morning, looking older than she was. Just behind her was the guy from the beach, whose age I was still unable to place. He was achingly attractive, with a deep tan and lovely pointed incisors. 

‘Sup,’ he said.

‘Sup,’ I said.

From behind the till I watched them moving in and out of sight between the aisles. Eventually, they appeared in front of me with an orange Fanta and a packet of sour straps. 

‘Just pretend like you’re checking them out, ok?’ said Sam, and the way she said this made me feel powerful. I kept my eye on Ray over the other side of the store as I slipped the items through, tapping the screen performatively. I felt a bead of sweat slip make its way from my armpit all the way down to my wrist, where it finally landed on the countertop. After Sam and the boy left, I wiped the little wet spot away with my sleeve.  

Sometime later in the early afternoon, the shop got busy again, and I spotted my brother and sister in the queue. They were holding ice-creams and speaking together in low voices. I watched them nervously as the queue receded and they were pulled closer and closer to the till. 

‘Can we have them for free,’ whispered Sophie, her eyes wide.

‘No’

‘Why not?’

‘I’ll get in trouble.’ I said. 

The weird energy that fermented between my two younger siblings made me feel uneasy. I often felt that they were conspiring to drag me back down into the chaos of childhood, into their realm of saliva and warm milk, curses and tokens.

The total came to $5.40. Milo pulled a five-dollar note out of the pocket of his board shorts and slapped it down on the counter along with a handful of sand.

‘You’re forty cents short,’ I said. ‘You need to put something back.’ Behind them was a woman who was holding a bag of tangerines and a carton of milk and looking impatient.

I could feel my siblings weighing up their options, formulating a plan. It passed unspoken between them. 

‘Don’t worry Milo, I’ll put mine back,’ Sophie said, turning around to face Milo with an expression of deep misery. ‘We can share yours.’

The woman holding the tangerines stepped forward.

‘Here, love,’ she said, pressing a 50c coin into Sophie’s open palm. Sophie smiled, and handed it to me.

After my shift, I met Sam and the boy on the beach with two more Fantas and a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. They were playing music out of a mini speaker. 

‘My mum’s got one of those,’ I said automatically, and then felt myself go red. 

‘Yeah, I know,’ Sam said. ‘This is your mum’s. Obviously.’

When I didn’t say anything back, Sam added: ‘Just say you wanted it for the beach, kay?’

‘She’ll literally kill me.’

‘Her mum’s kinda psycho,’ Sam explained to the boy. 

I fingered a tough little nub of driftwood, trying to snap it in half. It wouldn’t give. Eventually, I stood up and said quietly that I was going home to have a shower. Sam acted concerned for a moment but ultimately let me go. 

I didn’t go straight home. I went up over the rocks, and there was no one out there because the tide was rough. I sat for a while in a perfect hollow licked out of the sandstone by the ocean, all scalloped inside. Once, I’d found the finned sternum of a gull here, delicate as lacquered paper and picked entirely clean. I had told Sam how to get here but I had not told her everything. The stories that I’d heard about the cave—from the lady with the keys to the tennis courts, and the fishermen by the water’s edge—stayed within me; little dark, pointed gleaming treasures among my precious hoard of secrets. Sitting there frightened and thrilled me. Inside I felt the air moving in ways that didn’t make sense. I always left before it got dark. 

I must have spent longer than I thought at the Mermaid’s cave because when I finally arrived home, my hair tangled and shoulders burned and skin crusted with salt, my mother, who was reading something with a pen on the porch, looked up in alarm. 

‘I borrowed your speaker, Mum,’ I said, and then slipped through the screen door. 

‘What?’

Mum followed me inside. 

‘You didn’t take it to the beach, did you?’

I didn’t respond.

‘Where is it?’

‘Sam’s got it.’

‘Well where’s Sam?’

I shrugged.

‘Where is she?’ my mother said again. I ran to the bathroom and locked the door, and over the din of the shower water I heard her groan, and then there were things being slammed down on surfaces, doors being slammed open and shut, phone calls being made to my father.

When I emerged, the light had faded out of the sky, and I could hear the evening birds flocking to the neighbors’ balcony. Mum sat on the couch, straight-backed, legs crossed, phone in her lap.

The two of us drove the four minutes to the beach in silence. When we got there, Mum waited in the car while I went to retrieve the speaker and my friend. Darkness was coming on, and the beach was largely empty. I walked back and forth along the sand for a bit but I already knew they were gone. Sam’s phone wasn’t ringing. I returned to the car and wiped the sand off my feet before I climbed in.

‘She’s not there.’

‘What do you mean she’s not there?’

‘Maybe she’s walked back to the house.’

‘Don’t be stupid. We would have seen her. Why did you leave her by herself, anyway? Did you fight?’

‘She wasn’t by herself,’ I nearly whispered.  

‘What? Who was she with?’ 

‘Some boy.’

‘Jesus Christ. What boy?’ her mother said, her eyes bright with rage. ‘What boy?’ she said again, and when I looked at her blankly, she said, ‘I’m calling the police.’

‘Wait. Mum. Please, I’m begging you. Give it an hour, okay? Sam does this kind of thing all the time. Please, Mum, please, Mum, please.’ I repeated these words over and over until they became a sort of incantation.

My mother looked at me, and then groaned again and put her phone back in her lap. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ she said.

Mum called to check that my dad would be home in case Sam came back, and then Mum and I started driving. We drove to the tennis court, to the parking bay, the lookout point, the little bridge. We drove a careful path, feathering out from the main road, making sure we covered every street. Mum had left the car radio on, perhaps unintentionally; it was so quiet that possibly she didn’t hear it, some tune reduced to a very faint, sibilant vibration. I thought of how her hearing pulled back a little each year, her world growing smaller as mine grew larger, and at this thought I felt very afraid.

‘That’s it, I’m calling,’ Mum said.

‘Okay’, I said, ‘okay, fine, but there’s one more spot’. And then I made Mum drive back up to the parking bay at the top of the cliff. We locked the car and stepped out. It was windy up there, and dark. Mum pulled a torch out of the glove compartment and we began to pick our way down the stone steps.

‘It’s slippery’, I said. ‘Careful, Mum’. And then I took her hand and her grip was firm and solid, like a stone in the palm, and I thought: Sam’s going to tell everyone at school about how she lost her virginity in the Mermaid’s cave, and about how my pervert mum saw her doing it. The waves grew louder, and Mum’s torch lit up a circle of light in front of us. We followed the circle all the way down to the rocks.

*

After Sam changed, the group gradually shed her. I accepted that I was collateral in this process. It didn’t happen immediately. The shedding was accomplished delicately so as to save our feelings, though Sam didn’t seem to be bothered by such things anymore, and so I wasn’t either.

I took on my new role as Sam’s caretaker with pride. I had slowly come to think of the new Sam as something incredibly fragile and possibly volatile, which I had to closely monitor. I understood that I was not only protecting Sam, but protecting others from what Sam in her new form might be capable of, which in theory could be anything at all. Sam had been powerful even before her transformation, and now, beneath my friend’s new passivity, I detected something feral, which delighted me and replaced my old, empty fear of her with a new, full one. 

Sam unwrapped her sausage roll and ate it in small, quick bites. We were sitting in the shaded spot that the group used to occupy, which now felt far too spacious just for the two of us.  A group of younger girls had gradually begun occupying more of the tarmac. Sam wiped the crumbs from her mouth. A faint smear of tomato sauce clung to her chin. I thought about telling her, but I knew she wouldn’t care. Sam was staring blankly at the group of younger girls, who were huddled around a Tupperware. 

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘A bird,’ Sam said. 

I pushed myself up onto my knees and shaded my eyes. I could just make out a dark mass rolling around in the plastic. One of the younger girls looked up, scowled, snapped on the lid and tucked it furtively into her backpack. 

‘Freaks,’ I said. ‘What the hell.’

Sam didn’t say anything. She had begun unwrapping a sandwich, which she thumbed apart so that she could pick out the ham. She rolled the ham up into a cigarette shape and ate it as quickly as she had done the sausage roll, and then she put the bread back together, wrapped it in the foil, and placed it in her lap, where she folded her hands across it as if they were two small wings and the sandwich were an egg. 

‘What have you got on next?’ I said.

‘Maths,’

‘Sucks for you.’

‘Yeah, sucks for me,’ Sam repeated, and I shivered at the sound of my friend’s voice emptying these words so wholly of meaning. For a brief moment I wished I had not chosen Sam over the rest of the group, but then I looked at Sam’s long fingers in her lap, and thought of the sandwich they kept warm, and my friend’s new strangeness became something beautiful again, something beautiful and rare that was mine alone to guard and monitor. 

‘Those ones are dirty,’ Sam said.

‘What?’

‘Those ones are dirty. Their shit and feathers make you sick.’

‘Yes,’ I said eventually. ‘You’re probably right.’

Some days after school, Sam waited for me, which meant that she wanted to be invited over. Other days she left long before I was out of class. Today she waited on the inside of the gate with her arms hanging limply by her side, watching the girls as they left in groups of two or four. She was as beautiful as she had always been, but her boyfriends avoided her now when they bumped into her on the bus. I understood this, although I still found her beautiful. It’s not that she was ill at ease within her body, she just was no longer celebratory of it. And there was something else that was wrong, too. She held herself too evenly, as if she had weights in her shoes. 

When we arrived home my mother was pacing around the kitchen, on the phone to someone whose voice I could hear as a tinny whisper. When Mum saw Sam her face changed, and then something on the end of the line pulled her attention away from us again. I retrieved a packet of Oreos from the cupboard and then took my friend by the arm and led her to the garden.

The garden usually frightened me because it was full of spiders. Their webs were strung up invisibly all over the place and you could walk right through them and feel them brushing against your skin like the very light touch of a ghost’s fingernail. I had never actually been pounced upon by a spider in this way but I imagined what it would feel like so vividly that the memory felt like a little wound anyway, one that was activated by setting foot in the garden. 

Before, Sam had hated the garden just as much as I did. Back then, when she came over, Sam would insist we drag all the cushions off my bed and spread them out over the floor, and Sam would lie on her belly or her back on top of the cushions, and I would sit at the foot of the bed. Now the garden was the only place in the house where Sam seemed entirely at ease. Because of this, the garden no longer frightened me; or more accurately, the fear became less unpleasant and more proximate to pleasure.  

I watched Sam hover her palm over the tips of the blades of grass. They bent very slightly under her touch. Sam pushed her palm down further, making them bend even more, and then she began to move her hand side to side, so the blades of grass waved beneath her palm like weed in a tide. She carried on like this, her expression peaceful and calm. After a while, she appeared to grow unsatisfied with this motion and began to curl her fingers and drive them into the soil. When she removed her fingers again she was holding a clod of earth in her hand. She looked at the earth in her palm and on her face, there was a pained expression that was only there for a moment before it gave way once more to boredom. She tossed the clod lightly to the side.

My family’s house was not near the ocean, and before that day I had never before seen a seagull in the garden. It landed on the back of a garden chair and seemed to steady itself. The bird looked dazed. I could not be sure what happened next, because it was very quick. But it seemed to me that Sam made a lunge for the bird, and then all of a sudden Sam’s hands were around its little white body and she had snapped its neck in two. She killed the bird quickly and tenderly, with a practiced gesture. Then she lay it down on the decking. Something in the way she did this made me sure she intended to eat it. I cannot be sure, though, because Mum had emerged from the house and pulled Sam away from the bird before I got to see any more.

After that, Sam’s parents moved away, and took her with them. I heard from Mum that they were trialing a new kind of therapy, one that targeted buried trauma through eye movement. 

People stopped talking about Sam. At home, we didn’t talk about Sam either, but many nights I would be woken up by strange dreams, in which Sam would come shooting out of the water as if shot out by an underwater cannon, her teeth pointed and bloodied, bearing a silver fish in her jaws. My mother said she was woken by dreams, too; though she wouldn’t tell me what happened in hers, which was fine because I understood that it was important for her to have her own secrets. Most nights the two of us would spend an hour awake together when everybody else was asleep, at two or three in the morning, watching television and sipping tea until we both grew sleepy enough again to return to bed.

A full two years passed before we returned to that place on the coast. I didn’t accept Ray’s invitation to work in the General Store again and my mother didn’t insist, this time. During those first few days in the rental house, I thought of Sam often and wondered what had become of her, but after a while I forgot about her again. 

Then, in our last week there, I went with Mum into town to pick up groceries. I recognized the cashier before he recognized me. He was just as attractive as he had been back then, except for that he looked tired, his tan wasn’t as deep and his hair was longer. My mother and I moved towards him as the supermarket conveyor belt brought us closer and closer. Just before her bank card bleeped he looked up and clocked me. I looked at him full in the face, with what I hoped conveyed itself to him as a question.

‘Hey,’ I heard, after we’d left, before we’d made it to the car. ‘Hey.’ He was running towards me. I turned around to meet him and signaled to my mother that she should go ahead. 

‘I just wanna say,’ he said, catching his breath. ‘I didn’t do it. Whatever you lot think I did. I didn’t do it.’ 

I nodded, and then all of a sudden I felt myself begin to cry. I turned away from the boy so that he wouldn’t see. 

In the car, I decided to share one of my secrets with Mum. I picked out my most precious one, which was the story that one of the fishermen had told me about the Mermaid’s cave. When I was done telling the story, my mother asked me if I believed it.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Do you?’

‘No,’ said my mother. But she said it kindly, in a way that didn’t destroy the secret, and gave me permission to hold on to it for as long as I wished. 

About the author

Lauren Collee is a writer and Ph.D. researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared in Real Life Mag, the LA Review of Books, Another Gaze, Overland Journal, the Public Domain Review, and more.