I Play the Mermaid Song
At
the age of 53 Richard has given up playing his violin, works as a
librarian, and lives in his now dead mother’s cottage on the south
coast of Wellington. He gradually unpicks the tapestry he has woven
about his life, and the threads of heredity, convention and fantasy,
to find his true identity and make decisions about his future. All
his life he has lived between two worlds – his public face of
Richard the violinist, and his inner heart of Nora, and it is only
now that he is trying to reconcile them.
Was
it his father’s liking for silken underwear, his music and silence
and grief, that gave Richard the thoughts, dreams and the secret
clothes of a woman? Was it the taunts of his sisters, and his
feelings of alienation from the world? Was it his wise mother, who
infused him with poetry and the restlessness of the sea?
His
story starts with his birth in a little thatched cottage in a village
in England.
His
family migrate to New Plymouth in slightly mysterious circumstances.
It is there that he starts to learn the violin. But he also has
dreams where he is a young girl swimming down the rivers to the sea.
He starts his own nightly adventures, dressed as a ragged Nora. His
experiences at a boys’ secondary school are only endured through
the comforting presence of his secret confidante.
At
university in Wellington he resolutely keeps a cap on Nora during the
day, as he becomes increasingly well-known as a fiddler, but by night
she frees herself and intrudes in his clumsy first attempts at
affairs. He develops new friends in the shadowy world of gays and
transsexuals. He is ‘outed’ unexpectedly at his 21st birthday
party, and has to face up to the burden of living his life with his
split identity.
Richard
starts a theme restaurant with friends. As Leonora the fiddler he
finds a safe way to give expression to his secret self, but still he
finds his confused sexuality means that he can’t develop
satisfactory long-term relations He longs for companionship and
partnership, but though he falls in love with Meg, and later has an
affair with the boy-doll Violet, he finds that he is disengaged and
unable to fully belong in any relationship. The only one who fulfils
his ambiguous desires is Katie, a petite librarian awaiting a
sex-change operation, and similarly lonely and isolated. When Katie
rejects his love and instead engages in a marriage with the sea,
Richard is devastated.
Increasingly
Richard finds that there is little reassurance in his past, and that
it seems that he has been putting on different disguises to hide who
he really is. He is no closer to resolving the mysteries of his
sexual ambiguities, and his gradual rejection of his music as a
creative force. He always thought he had been following in his
father’s footsteps, but his journey to England had made him realise
that he could find no comfort there. His mother’s death however has
had a huge impact on him – now he is living in her house and
suffused with her presence, he tries to wear her mantle and sing her
song. He thinks it is a song about transformation.
But
the message she gives him is hard to bear. It is in the form of a
rhyme:
One
must be silent before one can sing.
One
must be naked to find one’s skin.
Richard
must learn to embrace what he realises is his true heritage, the
ancient song of sea and storm. He must peel off his past, his
disguises, the elaborate patchwork of lies and deceits and shadows
that he has built up. He must lose both Richard and Nora, and all the
trappings of his life. Only then will he find his true skin.
The
book is written in the form of a weaving or tapestry, with the warp
of the past and the weft of Richard’s growing understanding of his
own ‘skin’ (though this is not made explicit). It moves back and
forward from the past to the present, as Richard’s understanding
and resolution builds. It explores issues of cross-dressing, as well
as sexual and gender identity, but those are not the main themes,
which concern the subjective nature of history, processes of death
and rebirth, and the way people are trapped by social conventions.
