Monster Mission

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.