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‘Sometimes in the Night’ is a short story that I wrote while UNESCO/Edinburgh City of Literature Writer in Residence at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh in Autumn 2007. It’s inspired by the collections and you can read it in Issue 10 of the online magazine From Glasgow to Saturn, produced by Creative Writing MLitt students at the University of Glasgow.
“The museum shop and toilets will be closing in fifteen minutes.”
Parents start trying to coax children away from the goldfish.
“The museum will be closing in fifteen minutes.”
Teacups clatter in the café as the staff clears up for the day.
“You know we’re getting ready to close now?”
The attendants are polite but firm as they round up those who’ve lingered too long in enthralling corners, shooing them gently towards the lifts and stairs.
“The museum will close in five minutes.”
Security bands snap into place across bridges and pathways. The last coat, red wool with oversize buttons, is checked out of the cloakroom. Those who spend each and every one of their days in the museum, lurking in quiet spots, reading books or gazing into space, swapping benches with each chime of the clock, gather their belongings and disappear into the Edinburgh evening.
There’s more bustle now, all of a sudden, an occasional raised voice or trickle of laughter as the doors are locked and the lights switched off. Swift feet rattle up stairs, past the Flodden wall where one voice leaps above the others in song, punctuated by giggles:
“The flowers of the forest are a’ wede awa’”.
A man heads across the road to Sandy Bell’s for a pint of IPA and to share the things he knows with other drinkers, interested and not. A woman is tempted into a glass of dry white with friends in Negociant’s, though she’d planned an early bath and bed. Car headlights dazzle through scraps of haar, and people flow towards the Meadows, towards the town. Alone and in clusters, the front of house staff pass through Bristo Port and scatter into the city.
Curators sigh and power down their computers, put proposals and reports aside for the evening. One woman wraps her hand round a bolt from the Forth railway bridge and squeezes, another polishes a small resin block in which an undulating polychaete is frozen. One after the other they emerge from behind doors marked Private and pad down the red-carpeted stairs, blinking at the darkness of the museum corridors.
When the last person has gone home, when the alarms have been set and the staff entrance sealed, the museum breathes a sigh of relief and settles in its foundations, nudging up against the middens of the old town, the dropped coins and butchers’ bones. A fish leaps clean out the water, turns a graceful arc and splashes back down. After a while the first tentative, twitching whiskers of a mouse edge out from below a case in which a silver hoard dully glows.
It isn’t until after midnight that a new noise begins on Level 3. A persistent click; some piece of machinery trying to catch. The mice pause, look around, decide there’s nothing amiss and scurry along the hems of the cabinets, nosing towards any tasty scraps which have dropped from visitor’s bags or pockets.
Thunk.
The noise resonates through the silence, and this time the mice scatter. Click. Creak. Clunk. Thud. Another creak as the mechanism warms. A soaring moment then another clunk. A whoosh like far away wind in the eaves. Thud.
Slowly building again to click, creak, clunk, thud.
The alert spreads through the gallery, reflections plummet down the darkened glass of the cases, a tremor of impact shivers through the floor. The Newcomen engine is cranking up, remembering, pumping water from a non-existent colliery which slices through the heart of the museum. Corridors and stores fade into ladders and levels, and deep down underground shadowy men chip away at a seam of sparkling black coal.
Dredging for water that isn’t there, the engine heaves up stories instead.
Clunk.
Creak.
Thud.
Tallie whechars flicker in the dim, projecting a magic lantern show of scenes. The museum spreads just like a mine; it twists and turns into tunnels and hollows, rich lodes in each one.
In Dunbartonshire, a woman shoulders a creel of peat and begins the weary trek home. As her feet squelch in the boggy ground Jean looks toward the fermtoun and tries hard to imagine another way to live. But her daughter Annie has a fire roaring up the chimney of the cruck-framed house, and soon Jean’s feet are drying and her bones growing warm. If she knew at that moment a salmon was writhing on a leister, earmarked for dinner, she’d feel happier still. Annie has just learned to operate the spinning wheel, and though she’s a great deal slower than her mother she keeps at it, slowly teasing the wool they’ve gathered into yarn.
Clunk, thud, goes the engine, and pictures are drawn from further north and further east, halfway to Shetland, where it’s getting too dark to see by firelight. The click of knitting needles on Fair Isle ceases for the evening. Stockings and bunnets and scarves are laid carefully aside. Since the Prince wore a pullover on the golf course nimble fingers have been blistering as they rise to the demand from the stylish southern crowd, looking for complements to their plus fours and Oxford bags.
Clunk, thud, goes the engine, through firedamp and roof falls and noble pit ponies, and all the while the miners chip away. “You’re pissing up my leg”, Davy shouts over the din, answering a bellow from a workmate along the tunnel. “Close the pit? With this amount of coal?” The reek of cordite fills the air.
Clunk, thud.
Out at sea, over on St Kilda, Richard Kearton watches as Finlay Gillies lays a horsehair trap along a crest of craggy rock. The puffins are canny, they circle overhead under finally curiosity gets the better of one. He alights, starts pecking, then when he tries to fly away he can’t. One foot is snagged in a noose. His wings flap, attracting another bird, then another, until the trap is a seething mass of squawking, squabbling puffins, each blaming the next for their own misfortune. So that he can photograph the drama, Richard’s brother Cherry is secured by a rope, also fashioned from horsehair, though there haven’t been any horses on the island for many years now. When Finlay goes to collect his flapping prize he spurns his heirloom rope, skimming the rock in stocking soles, never looking down into the choppy waters below. Richard makes notes in his book, Cherry’s camera shutter clicks and releases, and if either of them wonder for how much longer men – and women, for didn’t Martin Martin record that one woman snared 127 puffins in just three hours on Stac Lee? - will trap birds in this way, in this brutal place, they refrain from mentioning it, even to each other.
“Just think,” Cherry says year later, “No music, no play.”
Clunk, thud, goes the Newcomen engine, clunk, thud.
He only stole bread to stop from starving, and surely to cling to survival without causing injury to others is man’s moral right? With a hideous sizzle of flesh, a mark the size of a sixpence is branded on the forehead of Alexander Steuart. Despite this, and the heavy collar fastened around his neck, his brush with the gallows has left him glad to be alive. Whether he’ll feel the same a year – or ten – from now remains to be seen. Lying in the dark, his lungs full of dust, back crooked against a two-legged stool as he tries to get purchase on his holing pick, he might well wish he was dead rather than a serf.
Clunk, thud, goes the engine, clunk, thud. It’s 1984, and techniques have improved since Steuart’s day, but no laughter rings out 3000 feet under the Lothian soil. The strike is coming for sure, and no priest will venture down in the cage to give the pits the last rites.
Clunk, thud. “I am come home sir,” says the Bonnie Prince as his first footsteps tramp an unfamiliar seed into Hebriddean soil. A month later he toys with his fine new canteen of cutlery, untwists the cork from the neck of a bottle and sniffs, wondering how long this tour of the Highlands will take. Letting his thoughts drift forward into a fantasy of kingship. But the bindweed tangling along the shore of Eriskay will prove more lasting than the excitement of the Forty-Five. In the blink of an eye Culloden’s been and gone, and Carolina Oliphant is crafting a lament for her namesake, hoping it’ll cheer her father and grandfather, old Jacobites the pair:
“Sweet the lav’rock’s note and lang,
Lilting wildly up the glen;
And aye the o’ver world o’he sang
Will ye no’ come back again?”
Sparked by the engine, a new noise bounces around Level 3, echoing off pillars and ceiling. A bolt popping free from a girder and clattering over the pale limestone floor as Victoria’s train whisks her across the Tay, the bridge weakening a fraction more under her trunks full of tartans and plaids. Six months later, more bolts than one fly out and seventy five people plummet down with the train. The girder screams and warps at the memory of the day the bridge collapsed.
Clunk. Thud.
At Glenfield and Kennedy, a man dips a fine brush in enamel paint and sketches a swan and cygnets onto a display water meter. Thinking of fishing, of afternoons spent on the bank of the Irvine, of how when the weather improves he’ll walk there with his son, telling him of flies and lures. He adds ripples of cooling water, a few swaying reeds.
Clunk, thud goes the engine, and over in Glasgow, the silhouette of luxury flats fades and time shifts back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Seven men sweat as they guide a heavy shaft for the Great Eastern under the massive steam hammer at Lancefield Forge. The piston falls once more, clunk, thud, and the Countess of Dundonald graciously accepts a silver casket and ivory hammer from a representative of Fairfield’s, not quite sure where she’ll put them but mildly gratified nonetheless. HMS Cochrane slides out into the Clyde, primed for the Great War and destined to survive the Battle of Jutland only to be wrecked two years later in the homelier waters of the Mersey.
Clunk, thud.
At North Ronaldsay the light twinkles and flips, eight radiating beams sweeping round the horizon in their own unique pattern . The highest land-based lighthouse in Britain, in 1998 it’ll work alone, automated.
“Lighthouses, eh?” the young Stevenson says, passing by the Bell Rock. “I’ve seen enough lighthouses on this jaunt to last me a lifetime. But I’ll warrant I can dream up a tale of high adventure set on the open seas.”
Sure enough, one chill September morning at Kinnaird, an adventure for boys takes shape, and Robert Louis’s father proves the biggest boy of all. “Flint’s old ship was named the ‘Walrus’!” he cries, and his son is pleased to concur.
Clunk, thud. The Comet eases out of Leith en route to London. Emigrants and adventurers wave goodbye to Greenock and Dundee, seeking new lives and new fortunes in New Zealand and Canada. Ranges are fed and clothes put through the mangle. At crossroads and village halls, in parks and town squares, war memorials blossom all over the land.
It’s halfway through the night now, the dead hours. Darker stories approach, ones which would send a shiver down Alexander Steuart’s aching spine. The swoop of the piston mirrors that of the Maiden as it cleaves some poor hapless soul’s head from his shoulders. The next swoop conjures up another execution, less smooth, less clean. Mary’s lapdog cowers under her skirts, his yelp unnoticed as his mistress slumps to the floor.
“Sweet Jesus,” she’s heard to whisper, but it takes another blow to sever her neck, another still to slice through the last bit of gristle. Henry Grey, Earl of Kent, fastidiously notes that, “the blooddye cloathes, the blocke, & what soever els bluddye was burned, in the chimneye fyer”. Lucky then for little dog Geddon, that when he’s finally wrenched from Mary’s corpse he’s whisked off to be washed, so imbrued with her blood is he.
Tireless - clunk, thud - the engine keeps on, forcing up deeper, more distant stories. It’s check mate on Lewis, the white king tips over. A penannular brooch dazzles as it’s pinned to the breast of a cloak for the first time. A drunk man scrambles onto the back of a long-suffering pony for the hundredth time.
A Roman shyly hands a gift to a Scots woman, whose father was a Viking. She turns the pot over to see the letters he’s written, listens as he explains what they signify. She’s suspicious, but reckons that even if it’s a spell, it’s one she wouldn’t mind falling under. Love Me, he says, I Love You.
Sharp flint lodges in a man’s spine and he crumples in the long grass. Cain’s history won’t be written for another six thousand years, but this is no accident. An arrow fired through experiment rather than malice, a warped quest for knowledge, a tragic “what if?”
Down, much lower down, the first pines take root in the north, the first oaks in the south. An Arctic fox barks and a bear yawns wide.
Thud, clunk, thud, clunk, emotions surge through the building, pulses of fear and joy and hate and love. Boredom is there too, of course it is, and resignation, but the Newcomen engine sifts through it all, casting up glittering fragments on the tide of murky water. The memories which give the exhibits meaning, the people who once stained them with sweat and blood and tears, with the warmth of hope and the chill of despair.
All through the night the engine thuds, until dawn breaks and the last reverberation echoes against stone. Slowly the levels fade again, history freeze frames on pedestals and behind glass, and the museum is still. The mice conduct their last reconnaissance before the cleaners come in, and a little later the Bristo Port entrance reopens.
One man has a skip in his step, for he found a captive audience of tourists keen to hear his tales of resurrectionists and other ghouls. One woman drags her heels and curses another late night. At nine o’clock the Tower entrance admits a group of early visitors, eager and fresh. Behind them a familiar face, a man plodding up to level 5, a quiet corner seat in which to read his book. Before long children are screaming through Hawthornden Court on their way to see the Maiden. Hearts beat a fraction faster as visitors twirl to follow the declaration of Arbroath. And sometimes, just sometimes, a person stands with her nose pressed against a display, and before she knows what’s happening the light changes and the noise of the museum fades. Some tiny invisible key inside her springs the case wide open, and just for a second, she steps forward and into the past.
At 3.30pm a man in a blue boiler suit will press the button which starts the Newcomen engine. And with a somnambulant thud, the piston will begin to rise and fall, rise and fall.
[Author's Note: ‘After They’d Gone’ from Latitude (UK/Philippines), an anthology edited by Toni Davidson.
A version of this story first appeared in the Scottish literary magazine NorthWords as The Song, but I had such a soft spot for it that I revisited it.]
After they’d gone
After they had gone, they became a kind of urban myth, helped by the fact that Hazel had written a song about them. It wasn’t quite Terry and Julie in Waterloo Station, but as the band became more popular people who knew the song and lived in the area might occasionally say:
“There’s the street Sylvie lived in!” or, “That’s where Jack and Sylvie met.”
Like anyone who had ever known Jack and Sylvie together, as a couple, Hazel could picture them clearly. Individually they were fairly good looking, not absolutely stunning, but more attractive than most. Put together though, they were suddenly striking. It was to do with attitude; together they behaved differently, were more quietly confident, more poised. The whole seemed greater than the sum of its two halves. Having said that, it helped that they looked a bit like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, although to be fair Jack was prettier and wore better clothes than Bob. The clothes were important. Jack and Sylvie always managed to give the impression that they’d made no effort, while looking as if they’d been carefully styled for a retro fashion feature.
The other thing which people tended to remember about Jack and Sylvie was the mermaid. Hazel had heard about the mermaid from Jack. Not long after that she bumped into Sylvie in the street and went to her flat for a cup of tea. While the kettle was boiling, Sylvie took Hazel into the bedroom to introduce her. The mermaid didn’t have a name, Sylvie just called her ‘the mermaid’. She was dark skinned and shiny, with long glossy hair which fell in waves and swirls around her breasts. She was quite obviously a mermaid, because just below her delicate little navel her smooth skin changed to scales. Unfortunately she had lost most of her tail when she was broken off the prow of her ship. Even so, she was almost as tall as Hazel.
“Let’s have our tea through here, she likes company,” Sylvie said, and went back to the kitchen to fetch it. Hazel perched on the edge of the bed, honoured to meet the mermaid but awkward at being left alone with her. She almost felt as though she should be making conversation. The mermaid had properly carved eyes, she noticed, not the blank spaces some statues had. Sylvie came back in with a teapot, cups and biscuits on a tray. Hazel half expected to see three cups instead of two.
“She’s lovely Sylvie. Where did you get her?”
Sylvie stirred her tea, took a sip.
“Well, I was in Orkney, just for some time to myself. A few years ago now. I went to see Scara Brae, then I walked along the beach at
“That’s amazing.”
“That was only the beginning. I had to drag her over the sand dunes and up to the road, hitch a lift back to Stromness and my B&B. Everyone thought I was mad. I thought I’d got pneumonia. I shivered and sneezed for days, but it was worth it.”
She patted the mermaid’s side affectionately.
“Of course, Orcadian legend has it that if you find a mermaid, you’re responsible for her forever. Whatever you do, she’ll never let you go. Not that I’d be without her.”
That was the only time Hazel met the mermaid, but the memory stayed with her. It was like a gift, to balance Sylvie falling in love with her best friend, taking him away. And so, eventually, Hazel wrote the song. She started with the evening Jack and Sylvie got together. It became the first verse. They met at a northern soul night at the RAFA club. A mutual acquaintance, drunkenly ensuring everyone knew everyone else, introduced them. To be honest they would probably have ended up with each other anyway. As it was, they couldn’t believe they had never met before. They talked together, danced together, went back to Sylvie’s together and, in the end, slept together.
When Jack thought back to that night, it wasn’t having sex with Sylvie which he particularly remembered, although that had certainly been a highlight. No, it was meeting the mermaid for the first time which really stuck in his mind. It seemed to him that even while they were in bed, he kept finding himself looking over Sylvie’s shoulder to the mermaid in the corner. He could recall her lips, her eyes, her expression.
Hazel gently edited the story, captured it in lines and rhythms. When she sang the song her mind filled it out, added pictures, remembered meeting Jack and Sylvie in a café the next day, holding hands over the table.
A while later, in the same café but at a different table, Hazel, Jack and a girl called
Jack laughed, “Depends whether you think rooting about in skips is beautiful!”
Puzzled, Hazel said, “But it was in Orkney, wasn’t it? Sylvie rescued her from the sea.”
“No,” Jack said, “It was in
Hazel was about to argue but Pearl got in first, “Sylvie said the mermaid was a family heirloom. It came from the wreck of a pirate ship originally. Her great great grandfather brought it back from the
Jack was worried. Had Sylvie lied to him? He couldn’t imagine that, didn’t want to. Or had she just made up more romantic stories for everyone else? And if she had lied to him, why hadn’t she gone to more trouble, invented a special lie? She had crafted a whole myth for Hazel. Unless that really was the truth. He turned it over and over in his mind.
That night, as usual, Jack went round to Sylvie’s flat. They sat in her room, listening to music and chatting. Sylvie opened some wine and lit some candles. Finally Jack asked her where she’d got the mermaid.
“I told you,” Sylvie said. “I bought her in a junk shop in
“No, you told me you found her in a skip in
“Oh, did I?”
Sylvie seemed unconcerned. She poured herself another glass of wine. Jack hadn’t expected this reaction and wasn’t sure how to proceed. He looked at the mermaid, who was gleaming in the candlelight. It made her hair look shinier than usual, in fact it looked almost like real hair, as if it would be soft to touch. Jack turned to Sylvie and tried again,
“You told Hazel a story about pulling her out the sea beside Scara Brae.”
Sylvie remained non-committal.
“And you told
They were about to have their first argument about the mermaid. Sylvie insisted it didn’t matter where the mermaid came from, and if she wanted to tell different people different stories then that was her business. Jack didn’t understand why she wouldn’t tell him the truth. He could keep it secret if she wanted. In the end, Sylvie sent him away, and off he went, angry and still none the wiser.
But the next day they made up, and as a peace offering Sylvie let him help her polish the mermaid. She brought out a tin of lavender scented wax and some chamois cloths.
“Okay,” Jack said. “Where will I start?”
“Well, I like doing her hair best, so I’ll start at her head. You can begin at her scales and work your way up.”
Sylvie sang wordlessly to herself as she coated her chamois with polish and started smoothing it on to the mermaid’s hair and face. Jack watched her for a second before he began. It looked as if Sylvie was putting conditioner on the mermaid’s hair, strand by strand, applying make up to her skin. She didn’t just rub the wax all over, instead she carefully blended it on to the mermaid’s eyelids, cheekbones, lips, pausing to check the effect as she polished it up to a sheen. Jack realised that this was a ritual, and had to be performed with a suitable amount of ceremony.
He did the scales around the mermaid’s hips more or less individually, then sat back and considered her stomach and waist. The smell of the polish was strong, like incense. Warm and floral and musky all at once. He rubbed his chamois against the pale lilac balm, smeared it over the wood until it turned creamy and opaque. Then he started massaging the polish in, scooping some excess from her navel with his pinky. Meanwhile, Sylvie was working on the mermaid’s arms, which were held up, her hands clasped behind her head, buried under her hair.
Jack followed the grain, buffing the wood until it shone, acutely conscious of the shape of the mermaid’s body. He had always liked her, from the very first moment he had seen her, but he had never been this close, not until now. He felt how her tummy curved outwards while the small of her back arched in, noticed how full her hips were, the scales starting at their widest point, how she swept inwards at the waist. She had what was called an hourglass figure, he supposed, as he skimmed her sides with his chamois. Sylvie spotted him slowing.
“Put some elbow grease into it! You’ll never see your reflection like that.”
Jack renewed his efforts, trying to concentrate on the polishing, rubbing harder and harder. When he rested one hand on the mermaid for support, the wood felt warm with all the attention it had been given. Like real skin, if skin was ever that sleek or flesh ever that firm. He gave her tummy a final wipe and admired his handiwork. Sylvie was still polishing the mermaid’s hair where it flowed in front of her shoulders.
“Nearly finished. We can do one breast each if you like?”
“Okay,” Jack agreed, picking up his cloth again. The mermaid had a very impressive bosom, and both her nipples were clearly visible, carefully carved. Jack began to polish her right breast, avoiding the couple of curls of hair spiralling over it. As he followed the curve with his hand, Jack became aware of something that he hadn’t expected. He felt kind of ridiculous; all he was doing was polishing a bit of wood after all. But as his arousal grew so did his knowledge that the mermaid wasn’t just carved wood.
He sat on the bed watching Sylvie finish her half. She seemed quite happy, but her actions were more clinical, like a nurse giving a patient a bed bath. At last she folded up her cloth and sat down next to Jack. They both looked at the shining mermaid. Sylvie started to say something, but Jack pulled her towards him and kissed her.
A little later, lying in bed, Jack found himself comparing Sylvie to the mermaid. Sylvie’s hair was poker straight, the mermaid’s wavy. Her skin was pale and matte, the mermaid’s glowed. Sylvie had a slim, boyish figure, the mermaid was strong and voluptuous. He tried to stop thinking that way but he couldn’t get the mermaid out his mind. He didn’t open his eyes because he knew she would be standing there, looking at him, smiling at him.
“Sylvie?”
“Mmmhmm?”
Jack kept his tone casual.
“Where did the mermaid come from?”
Sylvie chuckled.
“Before I met you, a year or two before, I was going out with this boy, John, who was in his final year at art school.”
“Uhuh?”
“He was studying sculpture. He carved her for his degree show. Got a distinction. Then he gave her to me as a present. I didn’t want to tell you before in case you were jealous.”
Jack didn’t really believe Sylvie. She got up, saying she was going to have a bath, and when she was safely gone he got out of bed and went over to the mermaid.
Hazel could imagine all this vividly. She could picture Jack standing entranced, gazing at the mermaid as she gleamed softly in the darkness, not so much enticing as provocative, full of abandon. Jack was taller than her. He had to stoop to breathe in her scent. She hadn’t been carved by an art student, he knew. He could smell the sea from her, mingled with the faded aroma of lavender. His hand looked very white against her dark locks as he traced their waves and curls with his fingertips. Feeling daring, he brushed her cheek with his lips. He almost expected her to move, but of course she didn’t, she stayed absolutely still and passive. Gaining confidence, he ran his hands down her sides, stroking the curve of her waist and hips, stopping when his palms reached her scales. He kissed her mouth this time. She had very full, pouty lips, slightly parted so he could just stick the tip of his tongue between them. She tasted of salt, like sea water or sweat.
Sylvie walked into the room while Jack was caressing the mermaid. He didn’t hear her bare feet on the carpet, didn’t stop what he was doing. She saw him kneeling, naked, to kiss the mermaid’s stomach. Watched him run his tongue up between her breasts, press his lips to her nipples. All that ran through Sylvie’s mind was how? How can she, how will he? Jack stood up, wrapped his arms around the mermaid and Sylvie couldn’t watch any more, couldn’t speak, couldn’t bear to let him know she was there. The mermaid seemed to be looking at her, rather than at Jack. Sylvie crept back through to the bathroom, locked the door, and sank into the warm water.
While she was on stage, singing, Hazel often felt nervous. When she sang the song about Jack and Sylvie and the mermaid however, she became quite unaware of the audience. The thought of Sylvie tiptoeing away to cry in the bath could make her own eyes water. And Hazel still missed them. It wasn’t long after that night that Jack and Sylvie went away.
They didn’t really talk about it, and after they had gone people never quite remembered where they’d moved to, except that it was an island. Nobody got a letter, and only Hazel received an abrupt, battered postcard: “We did it.” Jack and Sylvie had decided to make a clean break. They loaded everything they wanted to keep into Jack’s rickety old car. Sylvie wrapped the mermaid in a white cotton sheet and she and Jack carried her downstairs and laid her gently along the back seat of the car. Hazel slipped her hand under the sheet to touch the mermaid’s head for the last time, surreptitiously ran her thumb over those carved wooden eyes. Then she waved goodbye to Jack and Sylvie as they drove off. She remembered it had been a bright, sunny afternoon.
They had chosen a night time ferry crossing to the island, one that would be quiet. As planned, they waited for the sleepiest, most silent moment. After checking that nobody was about, they carried the mermaid up onto the deck. Jack steadied her while Sylvie slipped the sheet off and the three of them stood for a second, looking out over the water. Jack and Sylvie exchanged glances. Without speaking, they each kissed the mermaid on the cheek, then lifted her up and pushed her over the railing so that she dived head first into the sea and disappeared beneath the waves.
That was to be the end of the song, but a coda insinuated itself in Hazel’s mind and would not leave. It is as clear an image to her as that of Jack and Sylvie walking hand in hand, or Sylvie dragging the mermaid onto a sandy shore. In the final verse, Jack and Sylvie lie sleeping in a room Hazel does not recognise. Jack is still, but Sylvie is agitated, tossing from side to side, her dark hair tangling over the pillow. She is dreaming of the sea again, Hazel knows, of water which should feel cold as it sprays up against her naked body. Saltwater tears are streaming out from under her closed and trembling eyelashes.