‘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.