It came through the wall, beginning just as the dawn’s sickly grey glow suffused my closed curtains: someone singing in the flat next door that I had believed was still vacant, music unlike anything I had ever heard before. The deep sorrow of the song, the soaring pure voice that bore it. Even muffled by the cheap insulation, I was affected. Noisy neighbours (along with crowds, traffic and hipsters) had been on the laundry list of complaints that everyone back home who had ever lived in London recited to me when I told them I was moving. This noise, whoever was making it, was certainly not what they had in mind.
I’m not typically an early riser. It was only that I was out until very late the night before that I was aware enough to register the sounds leaking through to my bedroom. I realised after a while that I had heard it at the same time all that week whilst still in a befuddled, hypnagogic haze. Fragments of her songs, vague snatches, had rung through my head every day as I dressed for work, queued at Pret for my sandwich on the way in, caught the tube, but they were impossible to fix in my memory and slid away from me the way a dream does, the details fading to leave only the consciousness of something wonderful lost.
I had hoped to reinvent myself in London. Home had been too narrow, too repressive. I needed to be somewhere bigger to be me. I realised my folly when my size did not change. Now I was one of three in a tiny two-bed flat-share at the end of Chapel Market, merely a sadder, lonelier, more painfully awkward and socially anxious version of the same sad, lonely, painfully awkward, socially anxious person I always had been. I didn’t go out; I hadn’t met anyone. It seemed absurd that I had never even been to Soho, a condition I sought to rectify, getting as near as across the street from a basement club in Old Compton Street, its doors decked with rainbow flags. My hands began to tremble, and I felt a cold sweat on the back of my neck as I stared at the stairway leading down to the dark pulsating cavern. When I noticed the bouncer narrowing his gaze upon me, loitering suspiciously as I must have been, I panicked, put my head down, and strode off into the night. When I got home, I lay awake, wincing at the memory, until the singing started. Soothed now, I settled back on my pillow and closed my eyes, sinking into sleep, only to be awoken, sometime after the singing had stopped, by the rude, insistent blare of the intercom.
“Barry’s Aquatics,” rumbled through digital distortion.
I responded with an interrogative grunt.
“Got your delivery, mate.”
“I don’t – sorry, my what?”
“One fish tank, 30,000 litres, one deluxe filtration system…”
“I didn’t order a fish tank,” I said, though I was so groggy from having heaved myself out of a heavy slumber to answer the buzzer that I may not have sounded certain.
“You’re having a laugh, in’cha?” came back through the speaker, “I got a lorry down here and three lads to help me get this lot upstairs and it says deliver to flat number thirty-eight –”
I cut him off, “This is flat thirty-nine.”
The speaker fell silent. I shuffled back towards my room. It was only seven, and I did not intend to lose my last half hour of sleep without a fight. Then the box bleated again.
“Sorry to bother you again. Can you see if anyone’s in at thirty-eight? The buzzer’s not working.”
I threw some jeans on and went out onto the landing to knock on the next door to mine.
 “It’s open,” called a high, clear female voice.
The flat was a mirror image of my own. The hall opened into a kitchen on the right with the bathroom on the left, instead of vice versa, leading to the two rooms, one considerably pokier than the other. In number thirty-nine, these were also reversed. I had the smaller in ours; my flatmates shared the not-quite-as-small one.
“Through this way, if you don’t mind.”
I followed the call to the bigger of the rooms. A large inflatable paddling pool on the floor was surrounded by an imbrication of bathmats, varied in degrees of dampness according to their proximity to it. Stretched out its length, her elbows propped on one edge and her slick caudal fin draped over another, a mermaid folded down a corner of a page in Vogue and made as if to rise.
“Please, don’t get up,” I said.
She sat back while I gave a rambling explanation of my exchange with the delivery driver. Her face lit up when I mentioned the tank.
“Yes, that’s mine,” she said, “I’ve been waiting an age for it!”
She had soft, almost plump features that belied the litheness of her upper body, boyish but for her breasts, covered then by a plain white crocheted bikini top. A scallop shell girdle hung at her waist about where her scales began, flesh-toned at first, gradating to a green pastel on her front that darkened to cobalt behind. I found myself offering to help her despite not actually having the little bit of time I told her I had before I needed to be at work; she fortunately refused, and I let Barry’s men in before heading off.
My job at that point was an ambiguously defined role with a start-up in Hoxton. They designed a programme that automatically compiled daily call sheets for real estate prospectors. Much of that day had been spent on calls to an unctuous American motivational guru, negotiating his fee to promote our app to his legion of would-be mogul followers. When I arrived home that evening, I discovered a note, written on moisture-wrinkled paper now dried, held to my door beneath the knocker. So sweet of you to come by this morn. Come over for a drink with me when you get this (if you like) xx Nerida.
I did – the first of many such nights. Nerida liked wine and usually had a dozen bottles of white in the fridge. I took one and a couple of glasses from her kitchen into her front room, where the paddling pool had been replaced by the fully assembled aquarium that now occupied a majority of floor space. A filter-cum-heater between it and the wall hummed quietly, and a fluorescent bar suspended above illuminated its inside, where one observed an array of spongy synthetic coral outcrops, ergonomically shaped. One of these formed something like an armchair on the built-up bank, and this allowed her to sit comfortably half in, half out of the water. I pulled an ottoman over so I could sit next to her. We talked mostly about how we were finding London, sharing tips. She had grown up off the south coast, and this was her first time living on dry land. I learned her parents were initially against it, but she had persisted, desperate to study at LSE, where she was very rarely required to be on campus, the university having accommodated her access issues. When I inquired further about her family, however, she steered the conversation away, and I noticed later that she tended to avoid mention of the topic.
Our street was a cul-de-sac at the base of which ran a short footpath through a cluster of council buildings, down to the portal where the canal comes out the tunnel and flows on towards King’s Cross. Once the friendship between the two of us was cemented, we took the occasional turn down there when the weather was fine, Nerida propelling herself laboriously along the path by her slow, ungainly means of terrestrial locomotion. Wholly graceless, she was nevertheless effective enough over short distances. She could move easily from the tank in the living room to her bedroom, where she slept in the inflatable pool, for instance, but outdoors presented greater difficulties. She wore elastane gloves of the kind favoured by cyclists, so as to protect her palms as she pushed off the ground, swinging her weight forward between her arms, thereby progressing laboriously with a series of hops, each accompanied by the splat of wet fish on pavement. We were lucky if we traversed the hundred yards from our front door to the canal in under a quarter of an hour. The undignified spectacle mortified her. She would apologise for her pace multiple times, stopping whenever we encountered anyone coming the other way, rather than be seen with her piscine half flapping about the pathway. It made her loath ever to leave the safety of her flat, but the lure of the open water was too strong. The relief she felt to be at liberty to swim was palpable the moment she was immersed. I peered over the edge as she dove so deep, I lost sight of her in the murk. The difference could hardly have been starker between the creature that shot away up the straight, a streak of quicksilver through the cloudy teal, and the one that had lumbered along and rolled herself off the towpath moments earlier. Some days, I jogged alongside her and struggled to keep up.
When she had stretched her fins sufficiently, she would cavort a while between the banks, disappearing into the darkness of the tunnel, greeting the pilots of passing narrowboats. A group of kids used to hang out and smoke weed on a stretch of the bank that saw little foot traffic. One of them was a tall latter-day hippy with long hair and an enormous beard, who rarely wore a shirt and usually had a guitar. He often invited Nerida to sing while he played, once having heard her humming along to a song she knew. She always demurred. We shared his weed, though. I had smoked very infrequently before, but Nerida had never tried it at all. In a rare mention, she said that her parents were “very traditional”, observing furthermore that it tended to be difficult to keep joints dry in the ocean.
There were a number of firsts yet to come for me as well, and it was Nerida who held my hand through the revolutions of intimidation, anticipation, and humiliation attendant on living as a single gay man in the city in the ’10s. I had never properly gone out with a guy before, so Nerida encouraged me to try dating apps (I hated them) and helped me set up an account. She chose my pics (because I hated all of them) and wrote my bio (which I didn’t hate). In spite of my reluctance, I met a few nice men and enjoyed some pleasant evenings out.
It was after one of these with a buff Norwegian, that I came home the following morning and saw an unknown, burly man leaving number thirty-eight. As he passed me on the landing, I tried my best not to gawk too obviously, lingering as if finding my keys, my unblinking stare locked on him until the lift closed, upon which I immediately knocked and let myself in to Nerida’s. She was sprawled in her paddling pool in apparent post-coital rapture. The mats around it were soaked.
“Who – was – that?”

A dazed smile slowly spread over her lips.
“Could you pass me that?” she said. Her hand indicated my foot, whereabouts lay the oversized rash-shirt she liked to wear around the house. She shimmied into it and put her hair up. She hadn’t told me but she had signed up to an app as well, one called MerDate. The last month, she revealed, she had talked to a number of men, most of whom turned out to be fish-fetishists. Then she met Ivor.
Not being a fish-fetishist was, as far as I could see, about the only thing Ivor had going for him. I literally could not imagine what she saw in him. A sullen, scowling, tattooed Neanderthal, he spoke to her as if she were a dog. To me, he didn’t speak at all, barely even acknowledging me whenever we happened to cross paths.
I never learned what he did for a living; he turned up at all hours and with ever-increasing frequency, entering without a knock and installing himself wordlessly in front of the TV with the volume up, banishing Nerida and I to the bedroom, “if you want to fucking yap,” as he once put it. I was agape, but my jaw dropped a good inch further when she apologised to him, and then, with her eyes down, flopped out in obedient silence, but for the slap of her tailfin on the floorboards.
She was embarrassed, as was I. We glossed over it, a choice I regret in hindsight. It only made things more awkward. Eventually, I reached a point where I would listen at her door before entering and, if I heard the voice of a football commentator, didn’t bother. Consequently, as Ivor’s presence waxed, I spent less time with Nerida, which grieved me, as I still had no real friends in London. My slight consolation was that now, so as not to wake Ivor, she sang at dawn in her bathroom where, by an obscure accident of acoustics, the sound carried into my room as clearly as if she were there on the bed next to me. Each day, tears came to my eyes as I listened, and it was as if, drying, they left a film coloured by the music of the morning, imbuing everything I would see, everything that would happen, with the afterglow of its passing splendour. Her songs, their strange rhythms, their unfamiliar scales, wrung me out like an old rag in the moment of their hearing, and then bore me through the hours that followed on waves of wonder.
Noises less distinct made their way through other walls. I routinely heard them rowing, or rather, Ivor shouting. A particularly violent outburst was partially audible from my kitchen one afternoon, followed by a slammed door and heavy footsteps retreating along the concrete landing outside. I went over directly and found Nerida in the big tank, submerged with her eyes closed at the deep end, her head laid on one of the sponges, as I knew to be her habit when she was unhappy. A column of tiny bubbles rose from her nostrils to the surface. I tapped on the glass to get her attention. Her eyes opened with an expression of expectant joy that I was stung to see dim when she recognised my features on the other side. Nevertheless, she surfaced, and I coaxed her to her beach to extract the story.
It was about par for Ivor. Nerida had brought him a beer while he sat staring at the screen, and he lost his temper when he received a faceful of foam because Nerida had shaken the can. How that outcome could have surprised anyone, given Nerida’s unsteady loping gait, was beyond me, but Ivor, who had evidently felt it in no way incumbent upon him, as possessing the only legs in the room at the time, actually to use them, berated her for it, then stormed out.
“What a –”
I caught myself before I enunciated the epithet, remembering the look of disappointment I had seen in her face refracted underwater moments before. I bit my tongue.
“Pity,” I finished.
As it was still light, we went down to the canal for the first time in a long while, spending a lovely hour that reminded me of those we had shared in better days, returning just on dusk. I sensed hope, which had been fading, that our friendship might just be able to weather the age of Ivor. In passing, I complimented Nerida on her song that morning, variations on a plaintive haunting melody, really one of her best. I made her blush.
“Thank you,” she said. “I hope you enjoy it while it lasts.”
I asked her what she meant. She told me she intended to trade in her voice. I was agog.
“For what?” I asked.
“Legs,” she replied.
It was a plan she had been mulling over for a while – since she met Ivor, I would have wagered; I could see his grubby hand in it. It was not so uncommon a procedure amongst mermaids as it once had been, she explained, and sea-witchcraft was no longer stigmatised within the mer-community. I found her disconcertingly casual at the prospect of forgoing her voice.
“It’s not like I use it, really,” she said. “I don’t want to be a professional singer. I don’t even like public speaking. I hated choir practice at school. I’ve never seen much point in singing, to be honest.”
“But your voice – it’s exquisite! I’ve never heard anything like it.”
“Lucky for me,” she said. “I should be able to get a quality pair for it. I’ve heard awful stories about girls whose voices weren’t so good who had it done in some cut-price back-reef and ended up mute and crippled with feet that feel like they’re stepping on knives. It’ll be fine, though. I’m not worried about that. It’s my family. It would kill my dad. He’d never forgive me. I don’t even know my sisters would.”
She took my hand and held it to her breast.
“I just want to walk,” she said, staring at her fishtail, three-and-a-half foot of coiled, solid muscle, rough as sandpaper to the touch but colder, with an odour of brine.
“Ivor says –”
“I knew it,” I cut her off. “Bad enough you want to change yourself – give up literally half of who you are – for some guy, but of all guys, really? That guy?”
I knew the moment it was out of my mouth that I had already overstepped, but I couldn’t even leave it at the damage already done. The dam was broken and the torrent poured out: the backlog of simmering resentment against Ivor, from the way he treated her to his idiotic haircut, a fauxhawk that had looked ridiculous even back when it had been fashionable; the horror I felt at the thought of her giving up so precious a gift as her voice; I got on my soapbox about her being ashamed and trying to hide from herself, which I wasn’t sure really applied in her case at all and may have been some of my own issues bubbling up; I even lectured her about respecting her heritage, for some reason, despite knowing exactly nothing about it. I was, in short, as complete an arse as it was possible to be in the space of twenty seconds.
“Gee, Dad,” she said when I paused for breath. “Don’t know how you swam up the Thames all the way to London, got on a bus to Angel, dressed up as my neighbour and came into my flat, but that’s a pretty neat trick. Just so you know, though, getting away from this judgemental bullshit is exactly why I left the water in the first place. So, thanks. You can leave now.”
I try not to recall what I said next. It pains me to remember.
Back in my room, I was shaky and flushed with anger. It took me a few hours to stop and get a hold of myself. I would have gone over to apologise as soon as I was calm, only it had got on to be fairly late by then, so I resolved to go by in the morning before work. I rose early specifically, and had in fact raised my hand to knock when I caught the distinctive cadences of commentary through the door. I went to the office instead.
I couldn’t really have afforded to be late anyway. We had back-to-back meetings all morning with an investment firm looking at funding us. Everyone was stressed, and I had a very weird exchange with my boss as I was leaving for the day that I didn’t know how to read. I hoped Nerida and I would be able to patch things up quickly so I could get on to dissecting it with her.
For the second time that day, I made a fist to knock at her flat and lowered it again. The door was ajar. I called out when I stepped inside, but no answer came. First, I went into the large room. I was a little taken aback to see her tank empty, but that in itself was not unusual; she drained it to clean it every so often. When I noticed that the television had disappeared and her pictures were no longer on the walls, though, I rounded the corner to her bedroom, suddenly fearful. The paddling pool was still there, only flaccid and dry. A knife had ripped it open. Nerida’s personal effects, never very many, were gone.
Stunned, struggling against the evidence before me, I turned around and looked down the hall. By the door lay an object I had failed to observe coming in. It was a shoebox. I picked it up. There was nothing inside. The box bore the name of a designer label, however, and on closer inspection, a price tag. She had splashed out.

More recently, I was having lunch at Ottolenghi’s and had just sat down with a plate of cold salads when I heard someone call my name. Standing before my table was a tall stranger. I smiled automatically. He was strikingly good-looking, but I could not place him. I must have made a poor show of pretending, because he volunteered his name, which unfortunately rang no more bells than his face. It was not until he said “Regent’s Canal” that it clicked. Older now, much better groomed, wearing a shirt, sans guitar and beaded necklaces, it was definitely him. I laughed out loud and invited him to join me.
          We ate together and, as was inevitable, our conversation turned at length to the subject of Nerida. He rather blindsided me by asking, a propos of nothing, whether she had ever got back in touch. I learned that Nerida had indeed undergone the procedure, and it was a success. She and Ivor had moved to Liverpool for a while, but broke up. She had come back to London since, where she once again encountered our mutual friend, who introduced her to his aunt in Stoke Newington who was in search of a lodger, where she had lived for a little while. He thought she’d got married. I thought about asking him for her contact, but decided against it, ultimately. I couldn’t think what I would have said.
          I did send a message to the ex-hippy, though. We’ve started seeing a lot of each other. He doesn’t really play guitar anymore, which is probably just as well. Someone handed him one recently, late in the evening at a party, and he sang. It wasn’t that he was bad. He was actually quite good. It’s just that nothing has ever sounded quite the same to me again.