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to entice your mermaid home
.
    What a cherished gift it was. We used the straw to make a bed upon which the mermaid might rest her head, and then we sorted every shell, going by colour and size and shape, which Elijah then glued to the grotto walls, and all sorts of patterns he made there; flowers and stars and suns and moons. But still our mermaid didn’t come.
    And so, like two scavenging magpies, we sought yet more to coax her. We ‘borrowed’ a string of milky pearls from a dusty box in an upstairs room that had once belonged to ourgrandmother. We gathered twigs and fir cones and feathers. We paddled about in the water for hours until our feet were cold and numb, careful to step on no dead baby’s bones as we looked for the prettiest of the stones that lay in the oozy slime below. But when they were plucked dripping into the air, although some of them glistened like mother-of-pearl, gleaming the loveliest blues and greens, every one of them dried to the dullest grey.
    A backward sort of alchemy.

PEARL
    ‘
The story of our lives, from year to year’ – Shakespeare
    AS EVERY DAY GOES BY
    A Weekly Journal
.
    Conducted by
    Frederick Hall
    Title page from the popular magazine
As Every Day Goes By
    A strange and contrary thing it is that with the passing of the years I almost look forward to those nights, always the last of every month, when Mrs Hibbert entertains her most important gentlemen swells. To be honest, they all seem a bit dillo to me. There’s that red-faced lush, Lord Whatshisname, and Sir Rummy Old Cove who likes nothing more than to play a game of Blind Man’s Buff while wandering round in his underwear.
Come closer, my dear. Come sit on my knee. Let me stick you with my little pin
.
    Mrs Hibbert says he’s harmless enough, but she won’t have me sit on anyone’s knees, whatever the needful they’re offering. She watches as keen as any hawk from behind those swaying veils of hers – though I always think she must see the world through the thickest pea-souper in history! Anyway, any nonsense, she’ll blow right up, and then what a hubbub and shindy there is! Cook says that when she’s in a mood not even the devil could hold up a candle. No one dares to contradict Madam – and the slaveys, what lip-lashings they get when preparing the house for those monthly events, when the hall’smarble floor is rubbed with milk, buffed up until it gleams like glass. And the kitchens, you can’t imagine how busy, with Cook toiling down there for hours on end, scraping and grating and whipping away, her temper and tongue as sharp as knives. But oh, so many lovely tastes in the hot sticky gloom of those low arched walls, with the air all fuggy from bubbling pans, and the sheets that drip on the ropes by the hearth – a hearth so big you could stand inside if not for the fire that always roars – for the laundry work it never stops, with the slaveys washing and pressing the linen, surrounded by wafting lavender scents as they chatter about the music halls. They often sing the latest songs, and when they do Cook’s cat will purr – the big ginger cat which sits by the range – though that creature is kind to none but its mistress, and best you never try to stroke for its claws will lash out and tear your flesh. More than once that creature has drawn my blood.
    ‘ ’E’s not a pet . . . ’e’s a mouser!’ Cook always used to chide before I grew wise to his fickle ways, when I would cry at the sting of my wounds until soothed by the taste of the almond cakes that she would stuff into my mouth, ‘
to feed my hungry little bird
’.
    A wonder I am not as fat as a pig, just like Miss Louisa is these days, with her eyes of blue glass and her round pink cheeks and all those lardy puffing rolls exuding around her elbows and knees, and great squashy bosoms like marshmallow pillows that spring uncontained from the top of her corset, which is often the only thing she wears as she wobbles her way down the basement