II. The Mermaid ( from The Sea Cabinet)

Between the imaginary iceberg and the skeletal whale is the stuffed and mounted mermaid in her case, the crudely-stitched seam between skin and scale so unlike Herbert Draper’s siren dreams, loose on the swelling tide, part virgin and part harpy. Her post-mortem hair and her terrible face look more like P.T. Barnum’s Freak of Feejee, piscene and wordless, trapped in the net of a stare. She has the head and shrivelled tits of a monkey, the green glass eyes of a porcelain doll, a pair of praying-mantis hands, and fishy lips open to reveal her sea-caved mouth, her rare ivory mermaid-teeth. Children breathe and rap on the glass to make her move. In her fixity she’s as far as can be from the selkie who slips her wet pelt on the beaches of Orkney and walks as a woman, pupils widened in light, discarding the stuffed sack of her body. Without hearing, or touch, or taste, or smell, or sight she echoes the numb roll of the whale in a sea congealed with cold, when it was thought no beast could be a nerveless as the whale.