Monster Mission (6 page)

No sooner had they got over this disaster than a French mermaid turned up from Calais and started making eyes at Loreen’s husband. French mermaids have two tails and the whole thing went to the silly man’s head and he turned his wife and children out of their cave and set up home with his new love. He even turned out his grandmother, Old Ursula, which was particularly hard on Loreen as she had to take her along. Being lumbered with your own grandmother can be difficult but when it’s your husband’s grandmother it can seem seriously unfair.

What happened next was Queenie’s fault. She was pretty and she was headstrong and though everyone had warned her what ships were like nowadays, she insisted on sitting on a rock and singing to the captain of a cargo boat coming from the Middle East.

‘Arabia’s in the Middle East,’ she said, ‘so they’ll be carrying gold and treasure like in the Arabian Nights; you’ll see.’

Queenie had a good voice and she’d kept up to date with tunes and didn’t waste time on ‘Hey Nonny No’ sort of songs, and it so happened that the captain was musical and a little drunk and when he heard her he got very excited and ran his ship on to the rocks.

But what came spilling out were not doubloons and pieces of silver which might have made the mermaids rich. What came out … was oil. Masses of thick, black, greasy oil straight from the oil wells of Saudi Arabia. It caught the whole family fair and square, half blinding them, weighing down their limbs. They just managed to reach the safety of the Island and land wearily on the shore – and there the aunts had found them.

The children learnt all this while they cleaned them up. It was incredibly hard work. The girls’ tails were slippery and surprisingly heavy – and Queenie was ticklish so when they began to scrub she started giggling and thrashing about. By the time Aunt Etta returned, the children were soaked through and dirty and tired but she took no notice at all. They had to swill down the floor of the hut, and then the mermaids’ tails were wrapped in clingfilm so they could be put into wheelbarrows and taken down to the bay without them drying out. Only Old Ursula stayed where she was and admitted that though the children might be small, they knew how to work.

When they had finished in the mermaid shed, the children were taken to the house for a drink of fruit juice and a biscuit, and then they were sent to help Aunt Coral clean out the chicken house. Fabio’s family had kept chickens in South America so he knew what to do, and he and Coral had an interesting conversation about the tango, which she was fond of dancing under the light of the moon.

‘You don’t happen to know the steps?’ she asked him.

Fabio looked doubtful. ‘I watched my mother when she danced in the cabaret.’

‘Good,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘I’ve always wanted a partner.’

Fabio was not at all sure that he wanted to dance the tango with a very large aunt who had stuffed him in a tin trunk and kidnapped him. But he was too polite to refuse and he had noticed the night before that the moon was far from full so that he could only hope she would forget.

Then in the afternoon things got strange again because Aunt Myrtle took them down to the point to meet the seals.

They lay about by the edge of the water, the cows dozing while they waited for their pups to be born, the bulls jostling each other and shoving to test their strength.

But one seal was sitting quite alone on a rock. He had turned his back on the rough games of the other seals and was staring romantically out to sea. It was the seal who had come close to the shore on the first day; they would have known him anywhere.

‘Herbert, I’d like you to meet Fabio and Minette,’ said Myrtle, just as if she was introducing someone in a drawing room.

Herbert opened his eyes very wide and looked at them. It was an extraordinary look for a seal; both children stepped back a pace; they felt as though they had been weighed up and examined by a great intelligence.

‘He can’t be an ordinary seal,’ said Fabio.

Aunt Myrtle looked at him gratefully. ‘No, dear, you’re absolutely right. Herbert
is
a seal but he’s a very special kind of seal. He’s a selkie.’

‘What’s a selkie?’ asked Fabio.

Myrtle sighed. ‘It’s not easy to explain,’ she said, ‘because it’s all to do with legends and beliefs. There aren’t a lot of
facts.’

‘Tell us,’ begged Minette.

Aunt Myrtle sat down on an outcrop of rock and the children came to sit beside her.

‘All sorts of things are told about selkies,’ she began. ‘That they are the souls of drowned men … that they are a kind of faery and if someone sticks a knife in them they will turn back into humans.’

‘A
knife
!’ Minette was horrified. ‘How could anyone do a thing like that?’

Aunt Myrtle shrugged. ‘I certainly couldn’t.’ But she blushed, thinking of how she had sometimes wondered what would happen if she did get up the courage. Would Herbert really turn into a man, and if so, what
kind
of a man? Might he become a showing-off kind of man like a bullfighter, always trailing his cape about? Or a really boring person who thought about nothing except making money?

Herbert had come to the Island many years ago. His mother had brought him because he had a cough which wouldn’t get better and it had got about that the Island was safe even for seals who were not well. The aunts had healed his cough and then Myrtle had played the cello to him and he had stayed.

They had known of course that he wasn’t an ordinary seal. Herbert did not speak exactly, but he understood human speech and sometimes when he and his mother talked together in the selkie language, which is halfway between human speech and the language of the seals, Myrtle could make out … not the words exactly, but the sense of what they said.

‘He had a very famous grandmother,’ said Myrtle, dropping her voice. ‘At least, we think she was his grandmother. She was called the Selkie of Rossay and there are stories told about her all over the islands.’

‘Tell us,’ begged Minette again. She could never get enough stories.

So Aunt Myrtle pushed her hair out of her eyes and began.

‘The Selkie of Rossay was a female seal who lived about a hundred years ago. One night she came out of the sea and shed her sealskin and danced with nothing on by the light of the moon and a fisherman came and fell passionately in love with her.’ Myrtle paused and gave a wistful sigh. ‘You know how it is,’ she said, ‘when people are dancing by the light of the moon.’

The children nodded politely though they didn’t really.

‘So he hid her sealskin and brought her some clothes and married her and she stayed with him and had seven children and they were perfectly happy. Though when they sat down, even on dry days and in completely dry clothes, the children left a damp patch. Not … you know … anything to do with nappies. Nothing nasty – it was an absolutely
fresh
damp patch – but it showed they had seal blood.’

Herbert was listening most intently. He moved closer, he cleared his throat.

‘Then one day when she was rummaging in a trunk, the selkie found her old sealskin and she put it on and the sea called to her – it called to her so strongly there was nothing she could do – and she dived back into the sea and after a while she married a seal and had seven seal children. But for the rest of her life she was in a terrible muddle, calling her sea children by the names of her land children and her land children by the names of her sea children and never really knowing where she belonged. At least, that is the story.’

Myrtle stopped and Herbert gave an enormous sigh and rolled over on to his side. He might have forgotten how to speak like a human, but he had understood every word and the story Myrtle told was his own.

The Selkie of Rossay
had
been his grandmother. She had gone crazy in the end from not knowing whether it was better to be a woman or a seal, and Herbert’s mother, the youngest of her seal children, had stayed with her till she died, seeing that she didn’t starve even when her teeth fell out and her eyes filmed over.

Herbert’s mother was still alive; she came ashore sometimes and nudged her son and tried to get him to make up his mind about what he wanted to be because she knew it didn’t matter whether one was a man or a seal so long as one stuck to it.

But Herbert took after his grandmother. He couldn’t decide. When Myrtle played the cello to him it seemed that being human was the best that he could hope for. But when he watched Art and saw what he would have to do if he was a man – wear trousers with braces or zips, and shoelaces and all that kind of thing – he would dive back into the water and turn over and over in the waves and think: This is my world; it is here that I belong.

When the children got back to the house, they found Art with a large piece of sticking plaster on his forehead. He had tried to give Lambert some lunch and Lambert had torn the plate out of his hand and hurled it across the room. Then he’d lain down on the floor and drummed his heels and screamed for his father and his mobile telephone.

‘I’d have thumped him,’ said Art now, ‘but I daren’t. I don’t know my own strength. I might have pulped him into a jelly.’

Fabio didn’t say anything but he was beginning to wonder about Art’s great strength. Meanwhile Lambert was still in the room above the boathouse.

‘But he can’t stay there,’ said Coral. ‘The boy is a fiend. We’ve
got
to get rid of him.’

But though they discussed it for the rest of the day, none of the aunts could see how this could be done short of killing the child – which they would very much have liked to do, but which was not the kind of thing that happened on the Island.

When the children came down to breakfast the next day they saw at once that the aunts were worried. Etta’s moustache stood out dark against her pale face and her nose had sharpened to something you could have used to cut cheese.

‘I really don’t want to operate,’ they heard her say, ‘but it’s serious. She’s completely egg-bound.’

‘Who’s egg-bound?’ asked Fabio.

Aunt Etta ignored him.

‘I’ve tried massage; I’ve tried Vaseline; I’ve tried a steam kettle,’ she said to her sisters.

‘What about castor oil?’ suggested Coral.

‘It’s worth a try, I suppose.’

‘Can we help?’ asked Minette.

‘No.’ Etta looked up briefly. ‘Well, perhaps you can carry the buckets. We’re going up the hill. And kindly fold your napkins properly when you leave the table. You left them in a disgusting heap yesterday.’

It was quite a procession which wound its way up the hill. Etta carried an enormous bottle of castor oil, Fabio lugged a footstool and a primus stove, Minette had two buckets and a bundle of rags.

The path was steep and the morning was warm but Aunt Etta kept up a fierce pace. She also chose to give them a lecture as she went.

‘Now I want to make it
absolutely
clear to you that I will
not
have favourites on this island. The unusual creatures you will be working with are
no more important
than the ordinary ones. A sick water flea needs help just as much as a mermaid. A flounder is
exactly
as important as a selkie. I hope you understand this because if you don’t, you’re not going to be any use doing your job.’

The children said, yes, they had understood it, but when they reached the top of the hill they were pleased they had been warned.

There were two hills, actually, with a dip in between which held a loch of dark, peaty water. On the far side of the loch was a great pile of brushwood and boulders and bracken. It looked like one of the stockades that the settlers in America used to build to protect themselves from the Indians.

But what stuck out over the top of the stockade was not an American settler. It was the head of an absolutely enormous bird.

The head was black but its beak was a bright yellow and made the children think of those great machines – crunchers or diggers or shovellers – that one sees looming over building sites. Its eyes were yellow too, huge and round and mad-looking, and as they stared they were blasted backwards by the deep honking noise they had heard on the first day.

‘What is it?’ stammered Fabio.

‘It’s a boobrie,’ said Aunt Etta, striding round the edge of the loch. ‘And I can tell you there aren’t many of those left in the world. They’re a sort of cousin of the dodo – people thought they were extinct but they weren’t. They developed on a different island and the sailors didn’t find them so they just grew and grew and grew. But then people started doing atomic tests and that kind of nonsense and the ones that were left managed to fly away.’

She led them round the other side of the stockade and they saw a short ladder propped against the side of the nest. Aunt Etta climbed up it and beckoned to the children to follow but they hung back, thinking of the huge yellow eyes, the dreadful beak.

‘Hurry up!’ said Etta and, as they still hesitated, she turned round, took a deep breath, and let them have it. ‘I have to tell you that kidnapping you was quite the most unpleasant experience any of us have had: that boarding house full of yacking women, and the London Underground with all those fumes. If you think we’d have gone to all that trouble just to let you get eaten by some bird, you need to have your heads examined. Anyway boobries are vegetarians, at least this kind are – more’s the pity.’

So the children followed her up the ladder and jumped down into the nest which was trampled flat and lined with moss and feathers.

The boobrie was not really
so
enormous. She was smaller than an African elephant – more the size of an Indian one. It took a lot of courage to look up at her but when they did the children stopped being afraid. She
could
hurt you, of course, by stepping on your feet for example, but they could see that she was a bird with serious troubles of her own.

The nest was ready for eggs but there were no eggs to be seen. The boobrie’s chest looked sadly naked so that they knew it was her own feathers she had plucked out to make a warm lining, but a lining for what? Where were the eggs and where the chicks that would follow?