Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories Read online

  Amelia!

  She must be lying submerged on her back, as just her face peeps above the surface. Her skin reflects the green tint of the North Sea. Amelia stares up at him with her large, heavily-lashed eyes. As soon as Joseph thinks to call out to her, he realises that he is hallucinating. Amelia could not be floating in the North Sea. No, she would be at home, looking after their baby, tending to the fowls and the vegetable garden. This woman is a stranger.

  He gathers together his fractured thoughts.

  Without immediate help, the woman will drown. It’s a miracle that she is alive at all. The temperature of the water is a few degrees above freezing. He turns, tries to shout, but the crew is distracted, every man contemplating the sea below. Clearly, there must be other people in the water. Another fishing vessel must have capsized during last night’s storm. The captain of that doomed boat is to blame. Joseph feels a flash of temper. What kind of fool tempts fate by allowing a woman on board?

  Nevertheless, Joseph must save her.

  Like everyone else on the Mary Jane, he cannot swim. He would have to throw down a line, and hope that the woman has enough strength to hold on while he drags her aboard. Loops of rope lie amidships. However, his feet will not move. The music somehow pins his boots to the deck.

  The woman smiles up at him.

  Arching her back, she lifts her naked breasts clear of the water. Never before has a woman so brazenly exposed herself to Joseph. Her nipples are very large and very dark. Despite himself, despite his love for Amelia and their daughter, despite his solemn vow of fidelity, Joseph imagines taking those nipples into his mouth, one at a time and back again, to warm them with his tongue, over and over.

  A caudal fin breaks the water.

  The music falters.

  Joseph knows every fish that swims the North Sea, but he doesn’t recognise that fin. A tremor of fear runs through him. The woman allows the whole length of her body to breach. Instead of legs, she has the lower half of a silver-scaled fish.

  He grips the gunwale to keep from staggering.

  Every sailor knows the folklore of mermaids. Unlucky omens, they foretell maritime disaster. But had not the Mary Jane already survived the storm? The sea is flat, the sky is blue. The music intensifies. Now the melody has a form to it; voices, lovely angelic voices, gentle, beguiling, otherworldly. Some of the crew members are climbing the gunwale and dropping out of sight. The occasional splash sounds as each man hits the water. Joseph should ring the bell; call the remaining crew to order.

  The mermaid runs both hands over her breasts, along her stomach, across the scales, finally stopping at a little slit that she holds open. She dips a finger, two fingers, inside herself. Joseph’s cock is the hardest it has ever been; swollen enough, surely, to tear its own skin. The mermaid raises her arms to him.

  He clambers over the side.

  The icy water encloses and shocks him. He remembers that he cannot swim. A flood of panic makes him thrash. The mermaid rises up beneath him like an island. Now, lying face down upon her, he is safe.

  She feels as cold as the sea. The choir of countless female voices reverberates throughout Joseph’s body and smooths away every trace of concern. His mermaid’s hair floats in coils as thick as kelp. She is not green from the reflection of the water; in fact, her flesh itself is green, a light tint, reminding him of the first flush of grass in spring. The mermaid is beautiful.

  Her hand reaches between their bodies to unbutton his trousers. Quickly, she guides him inside her. He gasps. Unlike Amelia, the mermaid is ice-cold. The surprise of it frightens him. This moment of clarity—what in God’s name is he doing?—shrivels his cock, but the mermaid has muscles that clamp down and ripple in powerful undulations, so that he soon becomes hard again.

  He clutches the mermaid’s breasts. They are dense, frigid. She lifts her caudal fin between his legs and presses against his buttocks. The realisation that she must want him deeper inside her body speeds Joseph’s need to come. He tries to kiss her.

  She has no teeth.

  The mermaid’s upper lip protrudes over her lower lip, which has a barbule. Her eyes are perfectly round and unblinking, the eyes of a fish. Where her ears should be are gills, opening and closing, sucking and expelling. A creeping horror races along Joseph’s spine, but it is too late to stop, the muscular actions of the mermaid’s innards have brought him to the brink of climax. She wraps her icy arms about him, presses her caudal fin harder against his buttocks, and takes him under.

  The music stops.

  Water closes over his head. He can’t breathe. Traitorously, his cock ejaculates anyway. He struggles but the mermaid is too strong. He opens his eyes. Through the olive green of the water, he sees the sturdy hull of the Mary Jane overhead, and all around, the crew members, each man cinched in the arms of a mermaid, sinking, like Joseph, towards the shallow bottom of the Dogger Bank. There is Skipper, motionless, as if already dead. Nearby is Young Thomas. Joseph feels a pang of terrible guilt. The lad is not yet thirteen. As an apprentice, Young Thomas relied on Joseph for protection and guidance.

  The need to breathe is overwhelming. Joseph fights wildly against the mermaid. Her grip intensifies. Beneath the Mary Jane, other mermaids armed with knives are sawing at the trawl nets, freeing the captured fish. Joseph thinks of Amelia, and then the baby, not yet one year old. He tries again to free himself for their sakes.

  The mermaid’s grasp tightens.

  As his vision fades, he realises that the Mary Jane will drift without a single crew member on board. She will be found at last, perhaps weeks or even months later, derelict, a ghost ship with no signs of battle or theft; food and drink still on the tables, rotting fish in the hold. The manifest will be inspected, to no avail. The fate of the Mary Jane will be a mystery that no one alive can ever solve.

  Joseph’s lungs won’t be denied. He takes in a breath of water. It feels cold, heavy. With a cough, he draws in again. The mermaid gapes sightlessly at him as he pulls the North Sea in and out of his lungs. Her lidless eyes are open and staring, her gills fluttering. She won’t let go. Locked together, Joseph and the mermaid continue to sink. The soft, sandy bed of the Dogger Bank lies a few feet below them.

  Far above, the Mary Jane starts to move away on the current.

  The Sundowners

  “We have a new admission,” Dr Chandler said, and indicated the old woman sitting next to him. “Staff, please say hello to Daisy.”

  The male and female nurses smiled and said, in unison, “Hello, Daisy.”

  The old woman looked around the table at the dozen or so unfamiliar faces and didn’t reply. Dr Chandler started his lecture on Daisy’s medical history, but Jill, a senior nurse at the Aged Care Facility, could not concentrate. Here it comes again, she thought, as she dabbed at her sweat moustache. Was this a hot flush or not? No one else seemed to be perspiring. If only Dr Chandler would conduct his meetings in the library, with its garden bed of conifers throwing shade over the windows, instead of here in the staff lunchroom. There weren’t any curtains or blinds you could shut. She felt as if she were boiling alive.

  “Jill,” Dr Chandler said. “You have a farming background. Is that correct?”

  “Yes sir,” Jill said. “Born and raised a farm girl.”

  “Any experience with animals?”

  “Plenty, but my family had beef cattle in particular.”

  “Excellent.” Dr Chandler rubbed his hands together. “Then I’d like to put Daisy under your direct care and supervision.”

  “Sundowning makes her fret for a homestead?”

  In this secure hospital facility, Jill specialised in helping dementia patients cope with sundowning, the increased confusion and agitation that struck the patients around dusk. Although scientists hadn’t yet found a cause, Jill had her own theory—habits die hard.

  One patient, a retired businessman, got
angry that he couldn’t find the bus stop and would miss the last ride home. Jill’s solution: push a bench against a wall, tape above it a handwritten sign that read BUS STOP, and direct him to sit and wait. And whenever he checked his non-existent watch and asked why the fucking bus was running late, Jill would say, “It’s coming very soon. Just relax.” Jill calmed another patient by letting her set and reset plastic spoons, paper plates and serviettes on one of the card tables. “If I don’t get dinner ready on time, there’ll be hell to pay,” the elderly woman said every evening. “Mike has to leave for the factory at eight. Now where are those kids?” And Jill would say, “Don’t worry. They’ll soon be home from soccer practice.”

  And once the daylight slipped away and night stole through the windows, the sundowning episodes passed like magic. The affected patients woke up from their various dreams, but Jill believed that it was always the same dream they shared—their own life, treasured yet long gone, replaced by locked doors and medications by the hour.

  Oh yes, Jill thought grimly, habits die hard.

  “Daisy is an unusual case,” Dr Chandler said, and leaned forward in his chair. “Personally, it’s the first case I’ve encountered. According to her referral letter, Daisy has clinical lycanthropy.”

  One of the male nurses, Xavier, started to laugh. “Lycanthropy? You mean she’s a werewolf?”

  Giggles rippled around the table. Jill glanced at the old woman, who sat with her hands folded in her lap, watching intently with her large, brown eyes.

  Dr Chandler smiled, shook his head. “The psychiatric term ‘clinical lycanthropy’ refers to the delusion that one turns into an animal, not specifically a wolf. In Daisy’s case, she has a particular type of lycanthropy known as boanthropy. During an episode, she believes herself to be a cow.”

  “A cow?” Xavier raised his eyebrows and grinned. “And her name is Daisy?”

  Some of the other nurses laughed, but not Jill. There but for the Grace of God go I, she thought, and wondered if Xavier realised that he would likely develop some kind of dementia if he lived long enough. Meanwhile, Daisy looked from one face to the other, as if committing each to memory. Jill noticed the woman’s careful gaze. She didn’t much like it.

  “Stop playing the fool, Xavier,” Dr Chandler said. “Everyone pay close attention. This isn’t a straightforward case of sundowning. Her dementia is complicated by psychotic breaks of boanthropy, which are a rare manifestation of her schizophrenia. Daisy behaves like a cow only during a full moon.”

  “Like a werewolf,” Xavier said with mock innocence. “Or is the correct term ‘were-cow’?”

  A few nurses tittered. Jill wanted to slap them. The room felt too hot.

  “Sundowning is provoked by disturbances in circadian rhythms,” Dr Chandler said, “and moon phases can be a trigger for some patients. So if it’s easier for you to understand, Xavier, then yes, Daisy is a were-cow.”

  The room fell quiet. Jill could hear the urn simmering, the hissing of the fridge compressor. The young nurses gazed at Daisy as if she might transform in front of their very eyes. Jill’s temper rose.

  “That’s fine, Dr Chandler,” she said. “I’ll take good care of her.”

  “Thank you, Jill. You have my greatest confidence.”

  Xavier flipped through his work diary and tapped his finger on a page. “Look out,” he said. “The next full moon is in ten days. Better hope she doesn’t grow horns.”

  The first time Daisy turned into a cow, Jill felt uneasy. After lunch, in the middle of the recreation room, Daisy calmly took off her clothes, got down on all fours and made lowing sounds. Most of the residents panicked. A couple leaned down to get a better look, whooping and wailing. With the help of Xavier and another male nurse, Jill manhandled Daisy into one of the storerooms. There was nowhere else to put her. The dorms and private rooms didn’t have door locks.

  The room was tiny, with a single window set high on a wall. The men put Daisy on the floor. Daisy bellowed frantically, kicked, and hobbled on her hands and knees around the room, bouncing off filing cabinets.

  “What the fuck?” Xavier said. “What the actual fuck?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Jill said.

  “It’s not even night-time.”

  “Good Lord, she’s a psychiatric patient, not a werewolf in a comic book.”

  Daylight shone through the window. A full moon hung faintly in the blue sky. How did Daisy know? You couldn’t see the moon from the recreation room. On tiptoes, Jill dragged shut the stiff grey curtains, raining a cascade of dust over her upturned face. She would not switch on the electric light. Keeping a sundowning patient in the dark sometimes tricked them into thinking that night had already fallen. Perhaps this would work on Daisy.

  “You right?” Xavier said, white-faced, already out the door with the other boy.

  “Fine, be off with you,” Jill said. “Look after the others. Play some Vera Lynn or some bush ballads, for goodness sakes.”

  The door slammed.

  Jill turned, regarded Daisy with some trepidation.

  Panting, the old woman swung her head from side to side. Exactly like a fearful cow, Jill thought in amazement. Since a cow’s eyes are on either side of its head, it can’t judge distance with only one eye. Jill moved to stand directly in front of the old woman. The head swinging stopped.

  “Can you recognise me?” Jill said. “We do jigsaw puzzles. Remember?”

  Daisy shuffled uneasily on her hands and knees, and threw her head around, dropping it a couple of times as if preparing to charge. The behaviour was spot-on. Uncanny, Jill thought. The hairs lifted on the nape of her neck. In the faint light, the old woman’s boxy, stout body and wide back looked almost bovine.

  Jill clenched her jaw. She knew cattle and she knew sick people. And if this poor sick old lady believed herself to be a cow, then Jill was the absolute best remedy.

  “Hush now,” Jill whispered. “Everything is all right. You’re safe.” And then she began to murmur nursery rhymes, one after the other, like she used to as a girl back on the farm. She could have recited her times-tables and got the same result. Any frightened cow is soothed by the sound of a quiet, calm voice.

  Daisy stopped her shuffling and head-throwing. Only panting and drooling remained. She looked exhausted. Her large, brown eyes glittered wetly.

  “Can I give you a pat?” Jill said and approached with her hand out, palm down. “It’s all right, Daisy. You’re a good girl, aren’t you? Yes, you’re my good girl.”

  Daisy tensed a little, watched the progress of the hand. Finally, Jill touched the old woman’s head and began to stroke and pat, making shushing noises all the while. Daisy’s panting slowed down. Was the old woman cold? She was buck naked, after all. Jill decided to stock blankets in preparation for the next full moon. Daisy lowered her face and made slobbering noises. She’s looking for pasture, Jill thought. As well as blankets, Jill would have to cache this room with some feed.

  Jill reported to Dr Chandler later that day. His large, sunny office had mahogany furniture and framed pictures of his family ranging across the desk.

  “I don’t think Daisy’s behaviour is linked to the moon,” Jill said. “A full moon lasts two or three nights but her delusion stopped after an hour or so.”

  Dr Chandler looked smug. “By strict definition, the moon is full—that is, illuminated one hundred per cent—for only about one minute. Today’s full moon occurred at 2.53 pm precisely. Daisy might be exhibiting pre- and post-lunar responses.”

  “Yes sir.” Jill consulted her notes. “When Daisy came out of her delusional state, she repeated the words ‘hath or’, a quote from Old English, I guess, or maybe a fragment of a poem. Otherwise, it could be gibberish.”

  “Hathor? Are you positive?”

  Jill nodded.

  “Fascinating,” he continued. “Hathor is the Egy
ptian goddess of fertility, protector of women and children, helper of the deceased on their journey to the Underworld. Hathor is always depicted as a cow.” Dr Chandler stared off into the mid-distance for a moment with a rapt expression. “This could be the link we’re looking for. Various institutions are interested in Daisy’s case, but she’s our patient. Perhaps Daisy had a prior enthusiasm for Egyptian mythology, which influenced her psychosis. I’ll check with her family. Well done, Jill. Keep reporting back. A peer-reviewed paper might be in the offing.”

  Dr Chandler bent his head to his laptop and started typing furiously with his two forefingers: peck, peck, peck. Dismissed, Jill left the room. Closing the door behind her, she decided to Google Hathor, goddess of fertility, just as soon as she got home.

  Her husband, Graeme, turned the steaks. Fat sizzled. Jill exited the back door with two beers, and gave a can to Graeme. The moon hung low in the night sky, a brilliant white orb. It looks full to the naked eye, Jill thought, but it’s not. Daisy knows this somehow. She knows.

  “Is that barbecue too hot?” Jill said.

  “Don’t worry,” Graeme said. “I’m sealing the steaks on the flat plate, and then I’ll finish them on the grill for medium-rare. They’ll be juicy as hell, you wait.”

  “Okay,” Jill said. “After tonight, I’m thinking we shouldn’t eat beef anymore.”

  “Yeah, right.” He laughed. “Just as soon as I stop breathing.”

  She sat on one of the wrought-iron chairs and contemplated her husband, her sweetheart since high school. On their wedding day, she’d imagined a future for them that had never come true. On impulse, she said, “Let’s try again for a baby.”

  Graeme jolted, looked at her sideways. “You told me you’d had all the miscarriages you could stand.”

  She shrugged.

  “Come on now,” he said. “We’re too old.”

  “Old? We’re both only forty-eight.”