The Mermaid Beside the Stream

THE MERMAID BESIDE THE STREAM …As always, I had approached this particular part of the short cut nearest to the stream with a cautious rumbling as if the butterflies were fluttering in my stomach, which was accentuated that day, more so, because I was alone! No noisy school companions chattering about how much the teacher’s whip stung, how Arikpo had been beaten-up in a school fight by a girl, or whose mother had served soured mgbolo i.e. watery soup to her European guests last Christmas! No palm wine tapper whistling by on his bicycle with his huge hernia swinging left right, left right as he pedalled along! No! No one but me… …my stomach refused to be still! Not only that, I kept hearing a strange discordant, intermittent but persistent voice inside my head chanting an unknown song in an odd tongue, about some incorrigible youths who trespassed into a part of the hallowed ancestral forest; ate the kola nut and drank the honey offered in sacrifice to some god and got lost in that forest. …Almost as soon as I stepped on the muddy banks of the stream, I began to feel its clammy caress under my slippers and in-between my toes. I began to hear its sluggish movement sloshing down towards the east! Then my heart skipped as I saw someone! A white woman probably in her early twenties, she was in dreamy-like fashion, repeatedly brushing her long strands of wavy hair, which had the colour of elephant grass scorched during the harmattan dryness. She seemed to be naked from her waist up! Sitting on the cleared side of the stream where women usually did their Saturday laundry with their children close by playing a game of ‘splash me - I splash you’ in the water… See her! …As I continued looking at her, I saw that her comb caught the rays of the sun at a point whenever her hand came back up to the top of her head and as she commenced the backward and downward strokes, sent sudden sparks of the sun’s rays flickering on the water’s cascading surface, like a mirror full of cracks when used to catch the sun’s reflection. The comb was also ornamented like the white woman’s stool and so also in fact were her other accessories, all seeming to have oddly arranged themselves conveniently just beside the stool and within reach of her right hand. She was seating so close to the stream side, that the rest of her body from the thighs dipped in, and each move she made sent ripples tumbling from the point where her body met the water in rhythmic, trembling, broadening circles fading briefly only to start again and again all around her in tandem with her well trained motions. By now, a sudden calm had settled my nervousness, so I proceeded to greet the woman. And saw that her skirt stuck too close to the skin as if it were the beginning of another layer of the skin round her waist and seemed to be made of greenish silvery fish scales, which also reflected in the sun! “G-g-ood m-orning mah!” I said unsteadily. Repeating the greeting my Elementary One schoolteacher had taught us in class the previous school day. Said Mrs. Abameyong in heavy Ibibio accent, “When you see your father in the morning, class, what do you say?” And the class in one voice answered, “Gooood morning, sah!” Mrs. Abameyong; “It’s not sah! It’s sirrr! All say ‘sirrr’!” “Srroh!” All answered with a few giggles. Whack! Whack! Replied Mrs. Abameyong’s impatient and ever handy long whip on a few heads near where she was standing, very effective in stinging strict silence into the tiny frames in her classes. So in like manner, I greeted the mysterious white woman. But she had replied not, only continuing to brush her hair, with long languorous strokes.