The little mermaid

English, to me, had the sunny face of Jane. She arrived, straight from Sydney, on a silver winter morning. I loved her red fluffy hair and her milk white skin spread with golden freckles. Jane, a mother to me. English, my mother tongue...

Together with Jane, another australian girl, her name wa Sheila, came overseas. From Oz with love, and landed in my cousins home, where my uncle - who was a satyr and a doctor -  chased her ruby beauty from one room to the other during long sleepless evenings. She stayed for a couple of months, I don't know what happened between her and him, I only know that, one day, she packed her bags and went, in between the sobs of my cousin Betta. She then returned to her dear homeland and to  her loving mother who only loved her dead son... Her mother had no place in her wounded heart for the wounded girl that Sheila was. So Sheila, without the deep roots of maternal love, started afresh a new life. A life that she made up day by day, in rain or shine. A life that she could boast about with indifferent strangers. Every year she got the chance to chit and chat on her lovable  life during a cruise that skimmed truth and waves. She had two kids, the pigeon couple, she had a lovely husband, did someone want to see the pics? Here is Rosie and John, isn't he just gorgeous? She said she was a psycologist and a mother and a wife. But she was only a lonely woman. When the cruise was over, she was back in the sepulcral flare of her dark mother. "You are back", the old woman would say. And then the days rolled  on like clouds galopping in a winter sky. One day, during her cruise, Sheila, with a smile on her face, threw herself in the waters. No more lies. A woman said that she had turned into a mermaid...