Island of the Aunts

Chapter 4

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.

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.