part0027

Apart from school, Jude was allowed to come to my house and that was it. Me, I wasn’t allowed out except for school. Mum and Dad hadn’t even bothered saying it – I simply knew it.

After the shock had worn off, after the police had come to take our witness statements at home, it was business as usual for my parents. And that business was punishing me for sneaking out from Jude’s house. Secretly, I was pleased. I wasn’t like Jude, I didn’t mind staying in. I didn’t need to be constantly out. The world felt very different. I’d been near a dead body. I’d stood and waited with a dead body. People all over the city knew that I’d seen a dead body. Kids at school whispered about us, giving us a wide berth. It bothered me, a lot more than it seemed to bother Jude.

Although, today, Jude had been over for a while and there was something odd about her.

She kept walking around my room with her hand clenched in a fist. Then she would sigh and sit down. Then stand up as if she was going to do something important. Then pace around the room again.

Jude had started to dress like the woman the police and everyone else called the Brighton Mermaid. The young woman was around nineteen, they said, and had been strangled before being left on the beach. And in the time since we found her, Jude seemed to want to inhabit her persona. She’d stopped wearing make-up, she wore vests and denim skirts, and went barefoot whenever possible. She had stopped plaiting her hair in two neat cornrows like I did, and instead wore it in a cute Afro style with a headband. And the bangles. She had managed – in the time of being grounded – to get herself an armful of bracelets that sat from wrist to elbow on her left arm, so she now jingled when she walked.

The Brighton Mermaid’s face and body and tattoo were painted onto the inside of my head, they fit like filters over my eyes, so sometimes when I turned too quickly or from the corner of my eye would catch a glimpse of Jude, my heart would stop. I’d think, just for a second, that the Brighton Mermaid had come for me. It truly gave me the heebie-jeebies, Jude dressing like a dead woman. The only things Jude hadn’t copied were the tattoo on her right arm and the charm bracelet that had been the only jewellery on that same arm.

‘What did you do, Jude?’ I asked her.

It was obvious she’d done something and I was sick of her not settling, of her walking around with a clenched fist, of me seeing her from the corner of my eye and having a shock.

‘I had to do something,’ she said. ‘I had to find a way to keep her with me.’

‘What did you do, Jude?’ I repeated, a little quieter because now I was scared. She was going to get us into trouble. Huge trouble. I knew her parents were all cool and laid-back, but mine weren’t. They still looked at me with disappointment and anger about the fact I’d been out that night. And fear. As well as being let down and annoyed with me, the whole thing had terrified them. Not only because it could have been me instead of that girl without a name who’d ended up on the beach – they were horrified and shaken that I was capable of lies and subterfuge. They’d thought I was different, but I was like all those other teenagers out there who did things behind their parents’ backs.

The fact that Jude was allowed out meant that her parents weren’t still checking the windows in her bedroom were locked every night, and her mother wasn’t still considering giving up her job as a night nurse so she could be in every night. Dad had grocery stores along the coast, and when he had to open up at one of them, he would usually stay there the night before so he could start early. In the last week he’d had to leave the second Mum walked in from work. Yesterday, a staff member had called in sick over in Eastbourne and he’d had to leave the shop shut. Their lives were now about being at home, making sure I didn’t try to do anything like I had done again.

Our lives had been upended, but that didn’t seem to be enough for Jude. She wanted more awfulness to find us because she had done this thing. I knew all of a sudden what she had done and it was terrible.

‘Please tell me you didn’t,’ I said to her. ‘Please.’

Slowly her fingers uncurled and there it lay on top of the network of dark brown lines that laced across her palm like branches from a tree. There it lay, the silver charm bracelet, adorned with several different, intricate mermaids, some loops hanging empty as though they had lost their mermaid but were patiently waiting for her to swim back.

I put my hands first on my face, then they covered my mouth. I wanted to scream at her to throw it away, to take that thing out of my bedroom, out of my house because it was most likely cursed.

‘Why did you do that?’ I said from behind my hands. ‘Why?’

I was hot, that feverish type of heat I got when I had chickenpox and I couldn’t keep myself upright for very long. I felt sick, that seesaw type of nausea I’d had constantly the last time I had a stomach bug.

‘I had to have something of hers. We had to have something of hers,’ Jude quickly corrected herself. She needed to bring me in on her crime so what she had done wasn’t too bad. ‘We need something so we’ll never forget, never give up trying to find out who she is.’

‘They’ll probably lock us up when they find out what you’ve done,’ I said. She had done it, but I would get into trouble right along with her. ‘How did you do it?’

She looked unsure of herself then. She glanced at the door that she’d closed behind her, pausing as though someone might have their ear pressed against it, eavesdropping. To be fair, Macy probably was out there doing that.

Jude came closer and then sat on the edge of my bed, near where I had pulled up my legs to my chest, trying to comfort myself. ‘When I came back from the phone call, you turned your back and I took it then.’

‘Oh my God, Jude!’ I screeched.

‘Shhhh,’ she hushed desperately. ‘Shhhh.’

‘You touched a dead body to steal from it!’ I was shaking. Uncontrollably quivering. I started to bite the large knuckle of my thumb. The pain of my teeth pushing on my skin almost hard enough to draw blood was comforting in a perverse way – it kept me focused on my pain rather than the craziness of my best friend.

I hated Jude sometimes. She was my best friend and I loved her, but she was constantly doing things like this. She was always acting first and then I was paying the price later. I hated her. So much.

‘You’ve robbed from the dead, Jude,’ I said to her. ‘That’s the lowest of the low.’

‘No it’s not,’ she snapped. ‘What’s lowest of the low is that no one cares any more.’

‘Who doesn’t care?’

‘Them lot out there,’ she said, and waved her hand at the windows. ‘It’s not even on the news any more. They’ve stopped caring that she doesn’t have a name and that we don’t know who she is or if anyone cared about her and is searching for her.

‘She looks like us, Nell. That could be me or you strangled – and probably raped – on the beach and no one would care after a couple of weeks. It’s not right.’

‘But you can’t change that by stealing from her.’

‘I’m not stealing from her. I’m borrowing it. Once we find out who she is and where she comes from, I’ll give it back. Until then, we have to keep it to remind ourselves to never forget.’

I couldn’t forget, and I had tried. I had tried so hard. But her face was the one I saw every time I closed my eyes; her tattoo was what I saw when I put lotion on myself after my bath; her hair was the style I suspected my hair would be in if I didn’t plait it every week. I couldn’t forget her, and even if we did find out who she was, what her name was, where she had come from, I knew that wouldn’t change. I knew I would keep on seeing the Brighton Mermaid for ever.