‘Our jobs are so stressful it feels good to take a moment like this.’ He turned to face me, and I surprised myself once more by looking back at him. The light from the tank cast rainbow-colored prisms on his face, and they moved over his features like lights on a dancefloor. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything more beautiful and started wondering what he would look like if he was a merman – obviously merpeople didn’t exist – but suddenly the vision of Andrew gliding topless through the water floated through my mind. I ran my eyes down to his bottom half, then shook my head and laughed out loud.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘I was just imagining what you would look like as a merman.’
‘WHAT?’ Andrew dissolved into a rather loud peal of laughter. ‘You know mermaids don’t exist, right?’
‘Obviously not, and even if they did for a moment in time, they’d be extinct by now.’
When he finally stopped laughing, he crossed his arms and leaned against the tank. ‘I’m very much looking forward to hearing your theory about why mermaids would be extinct.’
‘They have no sex organs!’
‘Wh—at?’ Andrew spluttered through another laugh.
‘Haven’t you ever wondered about that?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Where are their sex organs? There’s no sign of either piscine or mammalian sex organs. Unless they can pull their tails down like a pair of pants and there’s something underneath? But that doesn’t seem practical, to have to take your entire tail off every time you want to have sex. Or does the woman lay eggs and then the male fertilizes them? That doesn’t seem right either, because then a parent would have to look after five hundred or so merbabies. And I still have no idea why the principal called my mother into school after I pointed this out to the class when we watchedThe Little Mermaid.’
‘No idea?’ he asked, but it seemed rhetorical.
‘It’s a perfectly logical question. How do they have sex?’ I threw my arms in the air in frustration. This question had plagued me for many years. The answer was still unresolved and Google did not provide any adequate answers either, since it was all hypothetical. The only answers it provided were various Reddit speculations, which I did not put much stock in.
‘Do you mind,’ someone hissed. I turned in fright and came face to face with a furious-looking older woman. ‘There are children here!’ She narrowed her eyes at me and pointed to a boy next to her.
‘What?’ I asked, taken aback.
‘You cannot talk about’ – she leaned in, her eyes narrowing even more and her face becoming very twisted and ugly. I leaned back – ‘stuff like that in front of children.’
‘Stuff?’ I asked, still not getting it. ‘Oh, you mean mermaid sex?’
‘Ssssshhhh!’ she hissed again. Her face had become even more twisted, so twisted in fact that it looked like her features might actually fall off her face if she continued this current display of facial expression.
Andrew leaned in and graced the angry woman with a huge smile. Her lips and eyes unknotted themselves. ‘We were just leaving, actually,’ he said, and held his arm out for me to take. ‘She didn’t mean to be inappropriate around the kids, she—’
‘I was hardly inappropriate.’ I cut him off and looked at the child. ‘How old is he, anyway? Eleven, twelve. Surely he knows the basics of reproduction by now. If not, then I think you’ve been pretty remiss as a caregiver. Children are engaging in sexual activity at a much younger age now, and knowledge about—’
‘OKAY!’ Andrew said, and started pulling me away as the woman’s face began to twist again. ‘Come, sister. Come, come.’
I jumped in with an immediate objection. ‘I’m not your—’
‘She’s from the Netherlands. They’re much more liberal there with that sort of thing,’ Andrew said as he pulled me away by the arm.
‘I’m not from the—’
‘Amsterdam! Red-light district and coffee shops, you know,’ he said over his shoulder as we disappeared around a corner.
‘Hey, what was all that about?’ I asked when we were out of Karen’s earshot.
‘Mermaid sex? Seriously?’ He was obviously still amused. His non-stop chuckling was a dead giveaway.
‘It’s a genuine question. It wasn’t meant to be funny.’
‘Mermaid sex!’ he repeated, and continued with his chortle. ‘Amazing, truly amazing.’
‘What’s so amazing about mermaid sex?’ I asked, which seemed to cause his laughter to escalate. ‘Other than the fact that it’s obvious theycan’thave sex.’
