Island of the Aunts (12 page)

As he paced the deck, Stanley Sprott was wondering about the ransom. Why had no one asked him for money in exchange for Lambert? Not that he’d have paid it—he’d have blown the kidnappers to hell before he wasted money like that—but it was odd. Everything was odd about this child snatch.

Though Mr Sprott was wearing a uniform—a navy cut reefer and a cap covered in gold braid—he never did any real work on the boat. He had a captain who sailed it, and two crew members to whom he kept shouting orders which they ignored. If they hadn’t, they would have run aground many a time because Mr Sprott had no real knowledge or understanding of boats.

The
Hurricane
had all the silly things on board that one finds on boats that are rich men’s toys: a jacuzzi with gold taps, a vast bed covered with a leopard skin and a lounge with a built-in cocktail bar.

But the boat itself wasn’t silly. She’d been a patrol boat belonging to Naval Intelligence and she had all the latest electronic aids to help her find her position. She also had something unusual; an outsize hold with reinforced sides in which Mr Sprott carried things he didn’t want people to see.

And she was armed. A heavy calibre machine gun was fitted on the stern deck which Mr Sprott said he needed in case of robbers in the Indian Ocean. And though sometimes his passengers were pretty girls who sunbathed and did nothing except giggle and drink cocktails, sometimes his passengers were not silly at all. Like the two men now who were playing cards below deck. Their names were Boris and Casimir and they came from a country where a boy who didn’t know how to use a gun by the time he was six years old wasn’t too likely to grow up.

And always, whether the
Hurricane
was on a pleasure cruise or on serious business, Stanley Sprott took along his bodyguard, Des.

“There it is,” said the Captain, pointing to a low shape in the sea in front of them. “That’s Dooneray now.”

It was true that the island had no houses, but it had a whole rash of huts—new-looking, wooden ones. And moving round between the huts, and down on the shore, were people. Quite a lot of people.

“They’re a funny colour,” said Des, screwing up his eyes.

Des was right. The people were…pink. Quite a bright pink which caught the light and glistened a little.

The
Hurricane
shut down her engines. There was no pier; they would have to drop the anchor and go ashore in the dinghy.

Some of the pink people looked up and waved.

“I’m not going ashore,” said the first mate. “I’m not going if it costs me my job. Someone else can take the dinghy.”

“Nor me neither,” said Des. “I’ll do anything for you, boss, but I’m not going to land among that lot.”

“You’ll do exactly what I tell you,” said Stanley Sprott. But he didn’t speak with quite his usual venom. To tell the truth he too was looking a little sick.

No one could have been nicer than the leader of the pink people. He had a friendly smile and he introduced his wife, who was called Mabel, and his cousin, whose name was James.

But he wouldn’t put on any clothes. None of them would put on any clothes.

“I’m afraid you must take us as you find us. This is a nudist colony; we believe most strongly that our Creator wants us to keep our bodies open to the air and light. In fact we would be grateful if you too would take off your clothes. It is a rule of the island that no one who comes here keeps his skin muffled in unhealthy garments.”

Behind him, in the dinghy, Casimir giggled and Mr Sprott turned to glare at him. Then: “Rubbish!” he said. “Now listen carefully: I’ve got you all covered.” He pointed to the two gunmen in the boat. “And I want every man, woman and child to line up over there. I’m looking for a missing boy and I’m going to search every nook and cranny, so don’t try to hide anything or I’ll blow you all to hell.”

“We wouldn’t dream of it,” said the leader politely. “But can’t we offer you some lunch?”

Mr Sprott shuddered. On a patch of grass a group of people with nothing on were frying sausages over an open-air grill. He had never seen anything so dangerous.

A terrible hour followed. The pink people went on being polite and friendly but they still wouldn’t put on any clothes. They let him go where he liked—into their sleeping huts, their communal dining room, their gym…Though he knew really that if Lambert had been held by mad aunts who were nudists he would have mentioned it on the telephone, Mr Sprott felt obliged to search every inch of the island, and made Des search with him.

When they left, the leader presented them with a bunch of sea thrift and an oyster.

“Go in peace, friends,” he said.

As they set a course for the second island on their list, Mr Sprott was not in a good temper. Mr Sprott in fact boiled and snorted and raged and swore that he would get the pink people arrested and deported and imprisoned, which was silly of him since the nudists had every right to be where they were. As for the policemen manning the fishing boat which was following the
Hurricane,
they laughed so much that they could hardly keep a straight course. They had watched Mr Sprott’s landing through their binoculars and thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen.

Chapter 12

Minette woke early and immediately decided that she had to wash her hair. She didn’t usually wash it before breakfast, but on this particular morning she knew it had to be done.

When she’d finished she draped a towel round her head and went in to see Fabio. He was polishing his shoes. Not the sneakers he’d worn ever since he came to the Island, but his smart shoes; the ones he’d been wearing when he was kidnapped.

He said nothing about her hair and she said nothing about his shoes and they went down to breakfast. Minette half expected Aunt Etta to be cross with her—Minette’s long hair took ages to dry and when it was at all windy the aunts made her stay indoors till it was done. But Aunt Etta, sitting as usual behind the porridge pot, only said, “Good morning”—and then both children found themselves staring at her in a way that was undoubtedly rude.

She was wearing her usual navy-blue jersey and her usual long navy-blue skirt and they were sure that underneath it she wore her usual navy-blue knickers.

But pinned to her jersey was a bow. The bow was made of pink velvet with white spots and after this amazing sight they knew that what they had felt when they got up was real.

What happened next was that Myrtle came in, looking windblown and agitated and said, “Herbert’s gone.”

Aunt Etta merely nodded. If it was true that the time had come, Herbert would have gone out to meet him at sea.

Then Coral appeared, wearing almost all her jewellery and a wreath of dried thongweed in her hair.

“There’s a naak in the loch,” she said. “A funny sort of fellow. The stoorworm won’t be pleased.”

Naaks are Estonian; they are the ghosts of people who have drowned and are apt to be silent and grim. This one, Coral said, was the ghost of a schoolteacher.

“One of those strict ones with a cane, I should imagine,” she said, “though it’s not easy to tell under water.”

The arrival of the naak all the way from Estonia made it certain. If the ghost of a drowned schoolteacher with a cane had come nearly a thousand miles to welcome the kraken, he must be coming very soon.

It was the strangest of days. Everyone was violently excited but they didn’t dare to say aloud what they believed.

The stoorworm insisted on being wound round a tree by the north shore so that he could get a good view and, just when Fabio had fixed him up, he decided that the kraken would come straight into the bay by the house and asked to be unwound again.

“Wait for me, wait for me,” shouted Old Ursula to the other mermaids, and this time they did wait for the poor old thing and swam out to the rock they had chosen, holding Walter aloft, and sat there practising a song that Myrtle had taught them. It was a Lapp reindeer-herding song and not particularly suitable but it was the most Northern song that Myrtle had been able to find.

In Art’s kitchen, the iced buns he’d made from the boobrie’s egg overflowed the larder, were stuffed into flour bins…and still they came from his oven.

The Sybil’s face turned from blue to purple; her washed feet glistened in the light.

The Captain had pushed his bed right against the window and wouldn’t take time off even to eat.

Only Lambert felt nothing and noticed nothing and spent the day crouched over his telephone trying to get through to his father, even though his battery was now completely flat.

By the late afternoon the shore was packed with creatures of every sort. Like people lining the route of a royal wedding or a funeral, they had come early to get a good place from which they could see. There were sea otters and jellyfish, there were anemones and starfish peering out of their pools; there were shoals of haddock and flounders and codlings…Some of the animals lined the north shore, others waited in the bay by the house; the birds and rabbits and mice and voles watched from the hill. The children could hardly eat their tea and the aunts did not nag them. They too were having trouble with Art’s boobrie buns.

The sun began to dip behind the horizon. The Hum, which had been steady all day, began to change its rhythm and every so often there was this strange gap filled with a kind of exasperated rumbling.

“Please don’t make us go to bed,” begged Minette, and Fabio said he wasn’t
going
to bed and
if
they tried to make him there’d be trouble.

But when darkness came and the old clock in the kitchen struck nine, and ten, and eleven, everyone lost hope. At midnight the children went to bed of their own accord; the lugworms and the water fleas and the starfish crawled back into the sand or burrowed under stones. On their rock, the mermaids stopped singing and the boobrie fell silent on her nest.

“We must have been mistaken,” said the aunts bleakly—and they too went to bed.

But when they woke in the morning, there was a new island out in the bay.

The island slept. It slept the sleep of the dead after the long journey—and round it and on it and under it, the creatures who had come with it slept too.

The Hum had stopped. Only a slight sighing, a soft soughing, could be heard as he drew in breath and let it out.

For the watchers on the shore, this second welcome was different from the first. It seemed to have nothing to do with velvet bows and polished shoes. It came from somewhere deeper down.

Fabio and Minette stood side by side, half hidden by an old bent alder which grew by the brook where
it
ran into the sea. They couldn’t find any words. There weren’t any to find. The aunts, down on the shore, were holding hands like children.

On their rock, the mermaids were not singing and when Walter began to grizzle, Loreen shushed him angrily. For the kraken slept and the excited welcome they had planned had become a vigil. No one would wake the great beast: not the naak with his cane, not the boobrie on her nest; no one.

They waited for one hour, for two…The sunshine grew stronger. The sea was turning the most amazing colours, as if a rainbow was hidden underneath the waves, and the air as they breathed in tasted like gorgeous fruit.

“It’s like the beginning of the world,” whispered Minette.

And then the kraken sneezed!

Everything changed after that. The moles and the mice and the rabbits on the hill were blown backwards and righted themselves again; Aunt Etta’s bun flew from its mooring of hairpins; the boobrie let out a startled squeal…and everybody laughed.

And the kraken lifted his head out of the water and began to swim very slowly, very carefully so as not to swamp the shore, towards the bay.

He was facing the house now, facing the aunts and the children.

Minette, and Fabio beside her, made exactly the same noise: a gasp of wonder and surprise. For in spite of all they had been told about the kraken—about his goodness, about his effect on the sea, about his healing powers—they had not been able to imagine anything very different from a gigantic whale.

But the kraken’s eyes were not in the least like the eyes of a whale. They were huge and round and golden: to gaze into them was like looking into a lamp which did not burn or dazzle but warmed and comforted. His nostrils were small and deep, but his mouth was large and generous, curving across his face like a bow, and tilted upwards at the corners.

As he moved towards them, the mermaids started to sing, croakily at first, then more strongly. Herbert swam beside the kraken’s head, solemn and proud.

And now they saw that his body was not black as they had imagined but dappled in soft colours—the chestnut of a chaffinch’s breast, the rose of a stippled trout, the blue grey of a moonstone—all were in his skin as it caught the light.

But he had stopped. He was looking at the aunts. He began to speak.

Unfortunately he spoke in Polar. It sounded like the rumbling and clashing of icebergs and no one understood a word.

Aunt Etta hurried into the house and fetched a megaphone. “I’m sorry, we don’t understand,” she shouted.

But the kraken had already gathered that. He tried again. This time he spoke Norwegian because Norway is further south than the Pole, and he tried only one word but still nobody understood.

“Could you try English?” shouted Aunt Etta through the megaphone.

There was a long pause while the kraken thought about this. Then he took a deep breath and said:

“Children?”

His accent was strange but they understood him perfectly and the relief was tremendous.

“What about children?” yelled Aunt Etta through her megaphone.

The kraken repeated the word.

“Children?” he asked. “Are there…here…children?”

The aunts talked excitedly among themselves. Did that mean that the kraken wanted children, or that he didn’t?

But anyway none of them were able to tell a lie. They moved over to the alder tree, pulled out Fabio and Minette and led them down to the sand. They didn’t even think about Lambert who was still shut in his room. Lambert wasn’t a child; he was a stunted adult.