September felt a wonderful calm. She didn’t know why she hadn’t always consulted machines whenever something troubled her. They had such a comforting way about them. She gave the brush one more fatherly swish-swirl and blinked back tears of missing him and daubed it all round her chin and her chops and down her smooth, slender neck. She made sure to get her upper lip, for she had a horror of mustaches. Her father had grown one when she was four and she’d cried for a week because a stranger with a slug on his mouth was sitting in the good chair. One evening in the Redcaps’ Cellar, they had played Truth or Truth (you cannot dare much in prison) and Saturday had confessed that he could not grow a mustache or a beard, for Marids are part dolphin, and their skin will not cooperate. She had felt secretly joyful, and poured him a cup of red rum with extra cherries in without telling him why.
Tropical green foam dripped from September’s face. She looked down at the cup and the brush. Fizzwilliam began to tell her what to do, but somehow, she knew before he got four words out. She held the cup over her mouth and knocked three times on the bottom with the knob of the shave brush. At once, the foam hardened a little and the cup softened a lot. They flowed together and rippled out over her face in fine, sparkling trickles, like tears flowing upward. For a moment, fear stiffened September’s body like cold lightning cracking open every vein at the same time. The ooze crept up over her mouth and her nose, then into her eyes and her ears. She didn’t want to breathe it in, she would surely choke—but it gave her no choice. September breathed in—and she could breathe in quite well! She breathed in and felt the gunk toughen up, growing stiff and glossy. The wreckage of her first shave covered her whole head in a hard shell. She wore a beautiful copper-green mask sculpted into a perfect likeness of her own dear, familiar face, down to the mole on her left cheek and the last curls of her hair.
Fizzwilliam lowered his glass dome and the Sea spilled in, filling up his tub and swallowing up September as fast as a hiccup. The water rushed over September, colder than she expected, and heavier. It felt nothing like the rivers and lakes back home, and nothing like the Perverse and Perilous Sea, either. The Obstreperous Ocean held on to her tight. It felt like nothing so much as her own mother, holding her with firm hands in the public swimming pool when she was hardly more than a baby, keeping her safe and buoyant in the sun, showing her the marvelousness of water without letting her know how deep and dark such a brightness could get. The mask let her breathe like a Marid, and September had always been a wonderful swimmer. She frog-legged out of the Bathysphere and into Mumkeep Reef, feeling the salt water against her skin. The emerald-colored smoking jacket did not greet getting dunked with quite so much delight. It spoke urgently to the Watchful Dress, and the pair of them sleeked themselves down into a tight, smooth suit like sealskin, stretching to cover both fingers and toes.
The cuttlefish watched September turn a somersault in the water, just for the feeling of doing it. She played all her colors across her skin, making mystic patterns of unguessable meaning, tsunamis of gold and rust and indigo, luminous galaxies containing all the wisdom of the infinite universe bursting open and drifting apart, then knotting together again into thick electric fists. September stopped her somersault and stared in awe. Tears rose beneath her mask. It was like looking at a star writing its last poem. Saturday’s chest ached for the endless, profound sorrow in the cuttlefish’s W-shaped eyes.
“I’m just kidding,” the cuttlefish said, and laughed uproariously. “I can talk! I just love to put on a show. You can take the cuttlefish off the stage, but you can’t pry the stage off the cuttlefish, am I right?”
September felt quite glad of the mask just then. A mask cannot show disappointment. “But the lights…,” she said. “The tsunamis, the galaxies…”
The cuttlefish preened, ruffling the veils along the sides of her body. “Pretty good, aren’t I? Would you say ‘a boffo performance’? What about ‘a tour de force’? Maybe ‘a star-making turn’? I don’t want to put words in your mouth. But I do need the love of the critics! The piping hot ardor of the audience! The generous salt of approval!”
“It brought the house down,” September said generously, though she still felt a bit cheated. But that is the way of theatre, girl. It is everything, and then the curtain comes down and all you’ve got left is a program and a half-eaten chocolate. But September did so love to give somebody what they wanted. Most of the time, it was much easier than holding it back.
“I’ll take that and live on it for a year, young penguin!” The cuttlefish smiled. This involved opening up her a face into its many thick, short tentacles and waggling them vigorously. It is rather hideous.
Hugger-Muggery leapt at the chance to prove herself the smarter of the two tentacled monsters present.
“She’s not a penguin! Even I know that.”
The cuttlefish oozed out of the coral a little to get a better look.
“She is flightless, can only breathe underwater for short intervals, and stands upright. I say penguin! And what I say goes. Young penguin, I am Sepia Siphuncle, at your service. Once, the greatest comedienne under the sea, star of the cephalopaudville stage! Now ridiculously retired tattoo artist living by her lights. You can call my Monkfish there Brother Tinpan. He was my stage manager in the good old days—days so good you only appreciate them when you’re old!”