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.