Page 50 of The Sirens

EPILOGUE

Comber Bay, NSW

Thirty-seven years earlier

Before he was Mike Martin, before he had daughters to lose and so many secrets to keep, Robert Wilson woke in his bedroom at Cliff House and watched the moon rise over the sea.

He kissed the top of his wife’s head. She murmured in her sleep then rolled away from him, to face the wall. He could see that her hands had come to rest on the flat plane of her stomach.

Robert sighed as he folded back the cotton duvet and crept lightly from the bed. He stood for a moment, watching his wife’s sleeping form, spliced by the moonlight that came through the blinds. He was struck by the beauty of her bare arm: the lightly muscled bicep, the slope of her shoulder blade. His wife had a strong body: sturdy ankles, even sturdier hips. Childbearing hips, you might call them, if you were cruel.

A waste, his mother had said before she died.

Robert agreed that it was a waste. His wife was born to be a mother. Not because of the width of her hips or the strength of her arms, but because … well, it was hard to put into words, and even if it hadn’t been, there was no one to hear them. If there’d been anyone to listen, Robert would have said that his wife was like the grit inside an oyster, polishing the pearl. She brought out the best in all who knew her.

That was why he hated himself so much as he padded downstairs, as he changed into the clothes he’d left out the night before: fisherman’s trousers, boots, a thick jumper and a heavy waterproof. He closed the front door with a soft click. Judy wouldn’t wake, he knew. She was a fisherman’s wife and was used to him rising before the sun.

As he descended the stone stairs, the moonlit sea gleaming in the distance, the guilt gradually ebbed away, replaced by a thrill in his stomach.

The night was cool but Robert’s skin was slick with sweat by the time he reached the cave. His jaw ached from clenching: every time he edged his way down the steep sandstone steps that led to the water, he imagined his skull splitting on the rocks below, Judy in her nightgown, opening the door to the police.

Sometimes, he wasn’t sure why he kept coming back. But on certain nights he woke and dressed, his body acting almost of its own accord, dancing to some remembered song.

He had to stoop to enter the cave. He could tell already that she wasn’t yet there: he’d come to learn the smell of her. A female scent, milk and fish and blood, but somehow pleasant. Now, the cave smelled of dank rock and lichen, of emptiness.

The first time, and the next few times after that, Robert had not believed what his eyes were telling him.

He’d been alone in the Marlin , early one morning. Ryan hadn’t shown up – he hadn’t been the same, since his brother’s death – and it’d been hard work, hauling in the catch. He’d anchored in the shadow of the cliff, so that he could watch the sunrise. The catch stared, glass-eyed, from the net. He sat on a crate and poured a cup of tea from his thermos. His muscles ached. Fish scales glimmered on his hands.

A snatch of music, perhaps a woman singing, had drifted towards him. A radio from another ship, he’d thought (though none were around), or from the shore (though he was, surely, too far out to hear).

Then, a rippling sound, as though the water had swallowed something, and the music was gone. There was a tightening of his scalp, of the skin on the back of his neck. He turned, looking for the source. Just the shifting waves, pink with sun; the refracted light blinding him.

And then, out of the corner of his eye. A fin?

He’d tensed, watching the dark shifting water, the movement of something pale. And then she’d surfaced, the gleaming impossibility of her, resting her elbows on the side of the boat.

The myths did not do her justice.

Her scales glittered beneath his fingers, cold to the touch. When they kissed and his hands cupped her jaw, he felt the beat of her gills against his skin. Her voice, when she spoke, was musical but somehow wrong, like a poorly tuned instrument.

At first, when he asked, she would not tell him her name. Later, when she did, he had trouble making it out: her mouth could not form the syllables, as if it had been an age since she had uttered them.

Mare , she might have said. A word for the sea.

He could not decide if she was beautiful in spite of her monstrosity, or because of it.

‘Where do you come from?’ he’d asked her once, the tide sighing around them. She had smiled, showing the sharp rows of her teeth, as if she knew it was his way of asking: what are you? Are you real?

‘Somewhere far away,’ she’d said, in her strange, lilting voice. ‘I’m a visitor here. Like you.’

Over time, he learned her origins, her purpose. Of the fates of the men who had disappeared, though he had only known Daniel well. Judy had never liked him, he remembered. ‘The way he looks at me,’ she’d said once, simply.

‘Will it happen to me, too?’ he’d said, feeling the nip of her teeth against the soft part of his neck. ‘What happened to Daniel, and the others.’

‘No,’ she’d said, breathing the word against his skin. ‘You’re different, aren’t you.’

He couldn’t decide if it had been a statement or a question. Perhaps it was an instruction.

He longed to take some piece of her home, to feel that she was with him, somehow. Once, returning from the cave with her briny scent in his nose and the memory of her scaly skin against his, he’d tried to draw her. But the furtive scribblings at the kitchen table (he was terrified, always, that Judy would wake) did not do her justice. He had never been good at drawing people. Perhaps because their faces changed so much, or because they themselves were always changing. That was their magic, a magic he could not capture. When Robert drew a human face he felt as if he’d pinned a butterfly for study. As if he’d taken something that flickered with life and beauty and killed it.

He would not do that to her.

And so instead he decided to draw something else to remind him, secretly, of her. Something that recalled the lustrous spread of her fins, the quivering spines. Something that was beautiful and vicious all at once.

A lionfish.

The tide brought water rushing into the cave, and there she was, her body wreathed in foam. Later, he would pick over his memory for signs. A curve to her stomach, a new heaviness to her shining breasts. But there had been nothing.

Months passed. One day, he came home to find Judy sitting at the kitchen table, hands trembling around a mug of tea. She looked at him with eyes so full of hope and fear that he had to look away. ‘Bobby – I’m pregnant,’ she said. She had waited longer to tell him, afraid that it was only a matter of time before she was curled on the bathroom floor, the beginnings of their child shuddering out of her.

When the inevitable happened again, something inside Judy seemed to die, too.

She moved away from him in bed. She said little and took long walks, her binoculars slung on a strap around her neck, preferring the birds for company. When she returned, her feet left shimmers of sand on the tiles. He wondered, half hoping, whether she had a place like the cave, a place she went to forget.

One morning he woke up feeling different. A strange pull, deep in his belly. Had it been like that before? He couldn’t remember. He put the feeling from his mind.

On the water, the sun painted the waves red, like they were fishing in blood. The nets came up empty but for tangled skeins of seaweed. The men were twitchy, bleary-eyed. Ryan’s breath stank sweetly of booze.

‘Lift the anchor,’ said Robert, powering up the motor. The feeling was back, a song humming in his bones.

‘Want me to cast?’ Ryan said when they dropped anchor in the shadow of the cliff, the Marlin bobbing gently in the current.

‘Wait a sec,’ Robert said. His eyes scanned the waves. He wasn’t sure if he was hopeful or fearful of seeing her. On the one hand he longed for it – hadn’t he driven the boat to the cave based on the strange stirring in his gut? – but he knew it wasn’t safe, not with the others here.

In the distance, something caught his eye. A flash of white. Probably just the crest of a wave, he told himself.

The waves slapped against the hull. There was a sound almost like a bird call, but strangely human, the notes of it touching his spine.

‘Christ,’ said Ryan. ‘What the bloody hell was that?’ ‘Sounded like my baby niece,’ said Dave.

‘We’re at sea, dickhead.’

Ryan and Dave started their usual sniping, but Robert didn’t hear them. There was something inside the cave. Something pale and small and—

Before he was really aware of what he was doing, Robert was tugging frantically at his waterproofs and his boots. He climbed up onto the side of the hull, touching his toes like a diver.

‘Mate, what the fuck—’

But the men’s cries were swallowed by the rush of water in his ears, down his nose. He resurfaced, coughing and blinded. His muscles drove forward, propelling him through the churn and froth of the sea.

Afterwards, in the back of the ambulance, Robert stared down at the damp bundle in his arms.

Her eyes were wide and so blue they were almost black, like the deepest part of the ocean. Her tiny hands curled open and shut, the skin between her fingers webbed. Silver shimmered around the lobes of her ears, her mouth.

She cooed, dark eyes looking up at him. Something burst open in his chest.

She was perfect, and he knew then that he would never let her go.