It was exactly 7 years and 135 days after Saul had died, just after M had polished off his second roast chicken and was starting on a third, on what had become a somewhat typical Sunday afternoon in front of the TV, when M’s wife told him that she was a mermaid.
The news that his wife was a mythical, sea-dwelling, water-breathing, sailor snaring, twenty-four carat, all singing, all dancing, denizen of the deep had been greeted with a level of sarcasm from M that was so Herculean it had reduced their already fragile relationship to weekly sandwich crust removal and underwear ironing. When she angrily demanded to know why he could not simply accept her for what she was, M had pointed out that:
(a) She had not been a mermaid for the first fifteen years of their marriage and that this Damascene revelation had only occurred after a particularly heated altercation with a parking attendant in Swanage;
(b) She had two legs rather than a fish’s tail;
(c) She could not swim;
(d) Neither of her parents had been, to his knowledge, mythical aquatic creatures (although he was forced to accept that they did both lack certain basic human characteristics); and
(e) She resided in a semi-detached house in Kentish Town which, whilst raining and sodden on occasions, could not be described in any sense as a mystical underwater kingdom.
Be all that as it may, she responded, she was a mermaid and if he did not like it he could fuck off.
Their marriage had become as irretrievable and ethereal as the dreams of a battery hen. M saw the woman he had loved lose all connection with what is popularly thought of as reality, abandoning him to the parenthood of one son and the stubborn memory of a second. Their children – one for whom life had been as tenuous as the faintest touch of a cloud on a parachutist’s cheek and one who refused to die.
*
Day to day suburban life was becoming increasingly challenging for Daniel’s mother. Her waking thoughts were coloured by a longing for the sound and texture of the sea but as much as this thrilled her it also perplexed and petrified her. She knew that hitting a parking attendant with a spade would not normally inspire a life aquatic but that is what had occurred. In the instant that the metal connected with his head with a resonant twang she had understood what had been wrong with the picture. Existence, her existence, in the car, in the supermarket, in traditional salsa lessons, in bed with M, with every costly breath taken, was drowning her.
She had driven to the sea a week later – to the sea at night, with its blue-black roar and lumbering grace. She had taken her shoes and socks off and stood in the October tide, her toes thrilled and frozen and looked out at its impossible shape with blind eyes. The sea could not parallel park, the sea did not eat five dinners every night, nor did it mock her poor dress sense. But the sea could be, was, magnificent, it took her breath away with every salt-filled swathe and in that moment, for her, she knew it was more of a husband to her than M could ever be.