the bearded lady

It was slow, fishing. That was one of the things Ali liked. No women, no talking, no tourists to impress. No struggling with the bastard English language, trying to get a tip. No stammering conversations with his busy wife, who spun him around in convoluted circles of words. Fishing was simple: just him and the fish, and the fish spoke Turkish.

It had been his dad’s boat first, this little crate, and there was really nothing to it. Just a tiny cabin where he kept his hooks and line, which smelled faintly of raw chicken, washed over with the aniseed scour of raki. When Ali’s dad died, Ali took the boat out to sea for two days. Every fish he’d caught had the face of his dead father. Now even the fish ghosts were skeletons, rattling around the cabin, stinking up the place.

Ali had a son of his own now, but he was shy of him. His own dad had told him a thousand stories; he said he’d fished them out of the sea. Tales of magical kingdoms below, of giant fish that he had wrestled, of treasure, the secret world of the Mediterranean. For him, talking was like throwing spinning nets over the water and scooping up a hundred silver fish. For Ali it was the opposite: when he talked he felt like he was the fish, his tongue lacerated on a metal barb. He didn’t have a story or a voice to tell it with.

Here’s how Ali found his voice: it was when he was out fishing, of course. The way Ali liked to fish was to thread a row of hooks onto a nylon line, weight it, and drop it deep beneath the boat, resting the free line on his thumb, and then just close his eyes and wait for the line to go taut. On this day, he had been snoozing for a while in the sunshine when he was woken by the heavy snagging of the line. He scrambled to his feet, heaving the catch up out of the water. This was bigger than anything he’d caught before, and Ali lost his balance for a moment and slipped backwards, bouncing his tailbone painfully off the edge of the boat.

He leaned over to see if he had lost his catch, and that’s when he saw the girl in the sea. She was fighting with a mass of floating black seaweed, but it wasn’t seaweed: it was her hair.

“Shush, it’s ok,” Ali said. “I’ll help you. Wait.”

The girl was wild and didn’t want Ali to touch her. She panicked and tried to swim away, but the hooks yanked painfully against her head, pulling at her hair. Ali was already in the water, and he was carefully, gently, easing out the metal barbs from the girl’s thick black streaming hair, washing out the blobs of meaty bait. She let him do it, wide-eyed with fear, trembling with the urge to swim away.

“Am I hurting you?” asked Ali, although his fingers were aching with tenderness. He swam around her, circled wide to pick up the lengths of her hair and comb it all through with his fingers. When Ali finally let go of her hair, the girl arched backwards to wet her head in the salt water, and the blue sea poured off her body and sparkled on her pearly scales. She flipped up her silver-aquamarine tail, showering Ali and his boat with a thousand golden drops of the ocean, and then she was gone.

It was slow, fishing, and that’s why Ali liked it. Maybe one day she’d come back again, the sea’s wild girl, hair all streaming. In the meantime he fished and waited, telling himself over and over the story of how he caught his thousand golden drops of the ocean, every one of them a gleaming eye into another world, a story to take back and tell to his son.