Free The Mermaid's Child by Jo Baker Page B

wasn’t worth the fight against the tightness of my muscles, it wasn’t worth giving up being still just to do that. And it would be even more wonderful if I could be warm. If the shivers would just melt and the goosepimples smooth themselves away. And then something dense dropped round my shoulders: his jacket, dry inside, and still warm from his body. I reached up a hand and held it closed around my throat, and dipping my nose down into the collar, smelt leather. I shivered, felt the shiver warm my flesh, the jacket catch the warmth and hold it to me. I heard the hiss of grass, of heather rustling as it grazed against his boots and trouserlegs, I heard the clean snap of dry wood, the tear of greensticks, the click of stone on stone. A pause, a breath held, the scrape and silence as he struck a light and held it to the kindling. And then the first cough of smoke. I looked up. A flame begin to curl itself around a parched gorse twig, to lick at the tip of a thorn. Crouched, intent and precise,his face half cold in the morning light, half aglow from the fire, he fed uprooted heather stems into the flame.
    He looked up at me, that same intent look on his face.
    â€œWe’d best get you out of those wet things,” he said.
    It was an agony even to consider peeling that jacket off my shoulders, let alone standing up to ease down my trousers and pull my shirt up over my head. I could have cried at the thought of moving, of exposing my flesh to the cold dawn air. But as he crouched to tease out my laces and ease off my clogs, and paused for a moment to admire the raw and oozing blisters on my feet, he insisted that it had to be done, and done soon. And that once it was done, I would feel so much the better for it: “Then,” he said, “we’ll have you wrapped up nice and warm.” I didn’t doubt that he was right, and I wanted to do as he said, but it seemed utterly impossible, and not just because of the cold. Because after I’d shed my clothes, for however short a moment, I would have to just stand there, naked, as he unfurled a blanket and cast it round me. Skinny white flesh patched with rusty sunburn. All bones and joints and angles, pimpled as a plucked hen. And for some reason, for the first time in my life, it seemed to matter. Again I felt that pressure swelling low down in my belly.
    He was still kneeling down there at my feet, his hands on his knees, his hat pushed back. There was a crease between his eyebrows, a slight shadow beneath his eyes, but I didn’t really know if he looked annoyed or weary or just cold. I didn’t know him well enough to tell.
    â€œI don’t think I can,” I said. “I’ll just stay like this. I’ll be fine.”
    â€œYou won’t,” he said. “You’ll be dead.”
    This was delivered solemnly and with a deepened crease between his brows, and my eyes filled unexpectedly with tears.Pathetic, really, that I should be so easily affected: it’s hardly a dazzling compliment, someone preferring that you didn’t die in their company, but I was dazzled. I struggled to move myself. He leaned in to help me and I felt his hands underneath my arms again, supporting me, lifting. I was upright unexpectedly quickly, my head light, balance not what it might have been. The turf gave beneath my feet, stung at the raw skin.
    Pretend he isn’t there, I told myself. Strip off as quickly as possible, don’t even think about what he thinks. Because probably he doesn’t think anything at all.
    I fumbled at my cuff. My fingers shook. I couldn’t feel the buttons. “Here,” he said. “Let me help you.”
    His head was bent to see what he was doing, so I couldn’t quite be sure, but I thought I caught a faint smile as he moved in closer to me. Both of us watched in silence as his fingers undid the buttons at my wrists. Then his hands moved up to my throat, and his face was close, and I