by Eva Ibbotson
‘Huge, they were,’ Captain Harper would say, throwing out his arms. ‘Great big cow seals with big bosoms and eyes like cartwheels, and look at them now!’
No one liked to say that it was probably because he couldn’t see or hear too well that things had changed, and when he told the same stories for the hundredth time, his daughters just smiled and tiptoed out of the room because they were fond of him and knew that being old is difficult.
‘Here are the children, Father,’ yelled Coral. ‘The ones that have come to stay with us.’
The old man put down his telescope and stared at them.
‘They’re too small,’ he said. ‘They won’t be a mite of use. You need ones with muscles. When I was their age I had muscles like footballs.’
He put out a skinny arm and flexed his biceps, and they could see a bump like a very small pea come up on his arm. ‘We were all strong in those days. There was a boy in my class who could lift the teacher’s desk with one hand. Freddie Boyle he was called. He was the one who put the grass snake down the teacher’s trouser leg.’
The aunts let him tell the story about the grass snake and the teacher’s trouser leg because it was a short one, but when he began on the one about Freddie Boyle’s brother, who’d run over his own false teeth in a milk float, they shepherded the children out quietly.
‘He won’t notice,’ they said.
When they went downstairs again they found Art, the cook, wiping porridge off his trouser leg. He had tried to give Lambert some breakfast and had it thrown in his face.
‘Nasty little perisher you’ve got in there,’ he said. ‘Best drown him, I’d say. Shouldn’t think his parents would want him back.’
Before he escaped and was washed up on the Island, Art had worked in the prison kitchens, which was why he made such good porridge. Because he’d killed a man once, Art didn’t like the sight of blood and it was always the aunts who had to chop the heads off the fish before they went into the frying pan or get the chickens ready for the pot. Another thing Art didn’t like to do was anything energetic.
‘I don’t know my own strength,’ he would say, when there was anything messy or difficult to be done. ‘I might forget myself and do someone an injury.’
This didn’t seem likely – Art was a skinny person who hardly came up to Aunt Etta’s shoulder – but he’d quickly locked the door on Lambert and, leaving him to scream for his mobile telephone, retreated to his kitchen.
But Aunt Etta and Aunt Coral now led the children into the garden behind the house. It was time to explain.
The garden was surrounded by grey walls to give shelter from the wind; but no walls on the Island were built so high that they shut out the view of the sea. Aunt Myrtle had gone down to play her cello to the seals. A bumblebee droned on a clump of thrift. It was very peaceful.
‘Perhaps I’d better tell you a story,’ said Etta. ‘It’s a true story and it begins with five girls coming to an island with their widowed father to look for a new life.
‘They found a lovely and deserted place, but ruined, abandoned. All the people who had lived there had left long, long ago. Even the ghost in the old graveyard seemed to have gone away.’
Minette sat with her arms hugging her knees and her eyes closed. She loved stories.
‘So the girls and their father repaired the house and planted a garden and learnt to fish and cut peat and do all the things the Islanders had done before they left. But of course the world outside was changing. Oil was spilled into the sea, and sewage, and trawlers started to use nets that caught even the smallest fish. The water became overheated by nuclear power stations. You’ll have learnt all that at school.’
Minette nodded, but Fabio only scowled. Absolutely nothing useful had been taught at Greymarsh Towers.
‘Soon the sisters and their father found themselves looking after things that came ashore. Oiled seabirds … stunned seals … poisoned squids … And other things …’
Etta paused and looked up at Coral who raised her eyebrows in a warning way. Not yet, said Coral’s eyebrows. Remember what we decided.
Etta nodded and turned back to the children.
‘The sisters worked from dawn to dusk. One of them was an idiot; she started shaving her legs and marrying tax inspectors, so she was no good … And one went off to foreign parts to stop people eating rare animals. And the others got older and became aunts …
‘And then one day they realized they might die before long – they might become extinct – and then what would happen to all the creatures? So they decided to find people to carry on after them. Sensible people. Young ones. People who knew how to work.’
There was a long pause. Then:
‘Us?’ said Fabio shyly.
Both aunts nodded.
‘Yes,’ said Aunt Etta. ‘You.’
Chapter Four
So Fabio and Minette were set to work.
It was the hardest work they had ever done and it didn’t stop from morning to night.
The day began with fifty press-ups on the grass behind the house. Etta was in charge of these, rising up and down on her elbows with her skirt tucked into her navy-blue knickers. She had thirty-one pairs of these, one for each day of the month. The children had seen seven of them on the washing line and she explained that it made it easier having things the same colour and the same shape so that one didn’t have to think about things which didn’t matter – like which of one’s knickers were which.
Then they began on the chores. The aunts ran a smallholding; there were six goats and a cow, and two dozen chickens whose eggs needed to be collected, and fresh straw which needed to be put down.
There were buckets of mash to be taken to the eider ducklings whose mother had been fouled in a fishing net, and two seal pups who had to be hand-fed from a bottle. The children had thought feeding the seals might be fun, but it wasn’t. The pups prodded and squealed when the milk didn’t come fast enough; it was like being bashed into by two blubbery tanks.
A puffin with a splint on his leg lived behind the house, and in a tin bath with a wooden lid was an octopus with eye trouble.
And as they worked, the children were watched – tested, you could say – because anyone who was disgusted by a living thing, however odd, was no use on the island.
Minette was marched down to the strand by Aunt Etta and shown a pile of pink and purple slime.
‘These are stranded jellyfish,’ said Etta. ‘Put them back into the water. You’d better wear these.’
She handed Minette a pair of rubber gloves and stood over her while she carried the wobbling blobs back into the sea.
Fabio was taken to a big tank in the paddock and told to pick up an eel with a skin disease.
‘Hold him behind the head while I scrub,’ Coral ordered him. ‘He’s got scabies.’
When they were in bed at night, the children tried to think how to run away. Fabio now slept in a box room next to Minette and with the door open they could talk.
‘We can’t stay here and turn into slaves,’ said Fabio.
‘No. Except the aunts are slaves too. They work harder than us.’
This was true, but Fabio said it made no difference. ‘We’ll have to steal a boat.’
But their beds were warm; they had nightlights; the sea sighed softly beneath their open windows – and, before Minette could see even the smallest tiger on the ceiling, they were both asleep.
And while they slept the aunts discussed them.
‘Well, so far so good,’ said Etta. ‘They haven’t squealed or squirmed or wriggled. Yet. Or said “Ugh!” I can’t bear people who say “Ugh!” ’
‘And they seem to be keeping to the rules,’ said Coral.
The rules had been set out on the first day.
‘You’re not to go near the de-oiling shed in the cove,’ Etta had said. ‘Nor up to the top of the hill.’
‘Nor to the loch between the hills.’
The children had grumbled about this.
‘It’s exactly like that fairy story about Bluebeard’s Castle,’ said Minette. ‘You know … if you open the seventh door you’ll have your head chopped off.’
But they had obeyed – even Fabio who had been so difficult to control in his grandparents’ house. Nothing, though, could stop Fabio asking questions.
‘What’s that honking one hears sometimes? It sounds like a foghorn.’
‘If it sounds like a foghorn I expect it is a foghorn,’ said Etta, and that was the end of that.
But what of Lambert?
Lambert went on screaming and kicking and wailing for his mobile telephone and Art (who did not know his own strength) just put down his tray and ran for it whenever he brought him his food. They had locked him in a room above the boathouse; it had been the Captain’s study and the doors and windows were strong.
At mealtimes they tried to decide what to do with him. Coral thought they might set him adrift in a dinghy with enough food for a few days, and Fabio thought he should be dipped in boiling oil. But they never got very far because whenever they talked about Lambert, Aunt Myrtle always began to cry because she blamed herself for having kidnapped such an awful boy and brought him to the Island.
Then, on the fourth day, as they came down to breakfast, Fabio and Minette found all the aunts looking at them with a pleased expression. Their teachers at school had looked like that when they had passed an exam.
‘Your work has been satisfactory,’ said Etta.
‘And your conduct,’ said Coral, flicking her beads out of the sugar bowl.
‘So we have decided that you may work in the de-oiling shed today.’
The children thought this was an odd kind of reward for being good; de-oiling seabirds is about the messiest job there is. But they kept quiet and presently they were following Aunt Etta along the cliff path and down to the cove on the far side of the bay.
The de-oiling shed was a wooden building set back into the cliff. At high tide the water came almost to the walls but now they could reach it by scrambling over low rocks covered in seaweed, and pools full of anemones and shrimps and tiny scuttling crabs. The children would have liked to linger and explore but Aunt Etta thrust them forward and knocked loudly on the door.
‘Are you decent?’ she called.
The children looked at each other. How could sea birds not be decent?
There was a scuttling noise, followed by a plopping sound – and then the door was opened from the inside.
The children had expected rough wooden walls; shelves, perhaps; a slatted floor. But the shed was more like the inside of a Turkish bath.
There were tiles on the walls; water gushed from a tap into a large, blue-painted sink decorated with seashells and into two tubs set under the high windows. Hairbrushes lay on a low table, and hand mirrors, and there were more mirrors on the wall.
But it was what was inside the sink or lying on the wet floor which held them speechless. You can read about such things as often as you like but seeing them is very different.
There were four mermaids in the shed. They wore knitted tops which Myrtle had made but their tails of course were free – no one would have worn one of Myrtle’s knitted tops on their tails – and when she saw that the children, though pale, were not going to make a fuss, Aunt Etta introduced them.
‘This is Ursula,’ she said, leading them up to a very old lady who sat in the sink nearest the door. Her hair was full of broken pieces of shell and sticks; the egg case of a dogfish hung over one ear and she had only one tooth – a long one which came down over her lower lip.
But the girls who shared one of the tubs under the window were young. They were twins but they were not at all alike. Queenie was very pretty with golden ropes of hair and a pert look in her bright blue eyes; but Oona’s hair was dark with a green sheen on it and her grey eyes were sad.
And, sprawled on the floor, trying to hide a piece of gum she had been chewing, was the girls’ mother, Loreen. She was a fattish, blowzy person and looked as if she had given up on life. The knitted top she’d hastily put on was crooked and the flowers in her hair were very dead.
Aunt Etta frowned at the chewing gum, which Loreen had cadged from Art. ‘A disgusting habit,’ she said, glaring at the packet.
‘It’s my nerves,’ said Loreen. ‘I’ve got to have something for my nerves, with the state I’m in.’
She was certainly in a state. As well as a bruise on her cheek and a black eye, Loreen was very badly oiled. All of them were oiled but Loreen was really covered in the stuff.
‘Have you been taking your tonic?’ Etta asked.
‘We’ve all been taking it. But we’re not better. Oona’s ears are still bad and Queenie’s itching all over. We can’t go home yet,’ said Loreen firmly. ‘Not for a long time.’
Etta ignored this. The way absolutely nobody wanted to go away even when they were healed was beginning to annoy her.
‘They’re not very big,’ complained the old crone, staring at Fabio and Minette. Everyone knew about the children and that they had been chosen and not kidnapped.
‘We’re strong though,’ said Fabio, who was getting tired of this.
But there was one other person still to meet. In a washing-up bowl on the floor floated something pale and smooth which turned out to be a baby.
But not any baby. Probably the fattest baby in the universe. His wrists were lost in layers and layers of fat; his neck was covered by a whole waterfall of chins; his small blue eyes were sunk in his swollen cheeks like currants in a pudding and he was bald.
‘My youngest,’ said Loreen. She looked tired rather than proud. ‘His name’s Walter.’
The children did not know what to say. Walter looked more like an overgrown maggot than a merbaby – but he was not oiled! When the oil slick came his mother had held him aloft and now Aunt Etta turned away from the washing-up bowl with pursed lips because Walter was exactly the kind of spoiled, pampered male of whom she particularly disapproved.
‘Right,’ she said to the children. ‘Time to start work. The detergent’s in that bottle – it gets diluted with three parts of water. And when you’ve finished put them under the hose – all of them. Oona gets three of these drops in each ear and remember, with anything fishy, scrub in the same direction as the scales or you’ll be in trouble.’
The door closed behind her, and Queenie, the pretty pert twin, pulled a face.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said cheekily. ‘Cat got your tongue?’
‘Now, Queenie,’ said her mother wearily. ‘Maybe they’ve never seen mermaids before.’
‘As a matter of fact we haven’t,’ said Minette.
She picked up the roughest of the scrubbing brushes while Fabio poured out the detergent. Then they walked over to Queenie’s sink, picked up her tail and began to scrub.
The mermaids had not had an easy time even before they were caught in the oil slick. Loreen’s husband was a bully – mermen are often bad-tempered – and the bruise on her cheek came from him.
Then a bad thing happened to Oona, the younger of the twins. She was caught in a fishing net and dragged aboard a fishing boat, but the person who unwrapped her wasn’t an ordinary sensible fisherman; it was a chinless wonder called Lord Terence Brasenott who thought catching a mermaid was a terribly good joke.
‘I say, what jolly fun,’ he kept saying. ‘What a pretty little thing. I’ll take you back with me,’ he’d said and pawed her with his horrible hands and tried to kiss her.
Oona spent three days in his cabin, weeping piteously, and by the time she managed to free herself and dive overboard her voice had completely gone. This happens sometimes when people have a serious shock; it is bad for anyone, but for mermaids, who are famous for singing, it is particularly bad. Even now, Oona could only manage a whisper or a croak.
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.
