Sea Legs – by Sophie Overett
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‘Okay,’ he says, knocking a sand-covered knee against hers. ‘You have to tell me why.’
And she gives him that look. The one she knows will burrow under his skin, feasting on any wriggling uncertainty, an emerita in the beach of him.
‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’
He laughs like he gets it, which he doesn’t, because if he did, he wouldn’t have asked in the first place. She pulls the towel a little tighter around herself.
‘Maybe I can’t swim,’ she says.
‘In Australia?’
‘Maybe I got in a tangle with a jellyfish.’
‘I mean, sure.’
‘Maybe I drowned. Maybe you’re talking to my ghost. Maybe my mother drowned, and you’re triggering me.’
“Maybe I drowned. Maybe you’re talking to my ghost. Maybe my mother drowned, and you’re triggering me.”
The sand is crusty on the sides of his glasses and caught up in the hair on his lower belly, just above the lip of his swim trunks.
‘Maybe I’m a mermaid,’ she says. ‘And I left the sea behind for you.’
He laughs again, heady. The sun’s been relentless – tropics-hot – and has already reddened his cheeks, nose, shoulders. The shells of his ears. Pressed itself to the curve of his back. It means she can’t tell if he’s blushing when he starts humming Part of Your World, and she wants to tell him that the song isn’t hers. She was never a princess.
He was never a prince.
Not that he knows the rest of it either.
She wonders about telling him about life before legs. When she didn’t breathe with her mouth, but through scaly flaps at her neck. Or the way the water felt – not like the air does here: thick, dirty, carrying the writhing bodies of insects, the tangled limbs of mosquitoes that latch their little mouths into your plump flesh, that catch in the fold where your thigh meets your crotch. She’d torn the wings off one, just to see what would happen, but it had just died, a twist of broken lines and a dot of blood, drying on her palm.
The water she could tell him about is not water he would recognise.
‘You’re sure you don’t want to come in? We don’t have to swim. Knee deep, you’ll cool down. I’ll look after you.’
He grins something close to charming, and maybe it would be, if she was somebody else, or if he was. I gave it all up for this, she thinks, as he keeps smiling, kind and oblivious, the ocean lapping at the shore behind them like the gentle open and shut of a door. ▼
Image: Daniela Beleva
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