Island of the Aunts (21 page)

“I don’t want to see them drown, I don’t want to,” yelled Lambert, twisting in his father’s grasp.

The children moved closer together. It was going to happen, then—and almost straight away.

Boris and Des had fetched the weights they were going to tie to their victims’ ankles; not that there was much chance that they would be able to swim to safety. The
Hurricane
had been steaming steadily away from the Island.

The aunts had come to stand behind the children; Etta behind Minette, Coral behind Fabio as though by some miracle they could still protect them.

Fabio and Minette had linked hands. Everything inside them seemed to have turned to stone.

Don’t let me make a fuss, Fabio was praying. Don’t let me be like Lambert.

“We’ll start with the fat one,” ordered Sprott. “Take her to the rails and get the weights on.”

Des went over to Aunt Coral.

“Move,” he said, prodding her with the butt of his gun—and as he did so, Fabio went mad.

“How dare you!” he shouted and tried to attack the bodyguard with his fists.

Sprott thought this was very funny. “All right, you can go first then if you’re so full of beans,” he said, and the two thugs pinned Fabio’s arms behind his back and started to carry him to the side.

They were trying to fix weights on to his thrashing legs when the skipper put his head out of the wheelhouse.

“Better hurry,” he said. “I don’t like the look of the sky.”

There was nothing to like the look of. Not the sea, not the sky, not the surface of the water, not the clouds. Some dreadful weather was on the way.

The waves darkened, the water boiled; the sun vanished behind a mushroom cloud.

The gulls flew up screeching.

And on the deck of the
Hurricane—
someone began to scream.

“Hold on to me,” Fabio had shouted to Minette, but they were torn apart at once by the mountainous icy waves.

Minette had thought of herself as a good swimmer but this was nothing to do with swimming—she was being hurled up, then sucked down, rolled over…

And the cold was beyond belief.

All round her were broken planks and debris from the
Hurricane.
The ship had split in two the instant the great kraken had rammed her. She saw the roof of the boobrie’s splintered cage bobbing close by; two of the chicks were clinging to the top of it—but where was the third?

A wave broke over her head and she went under again; the weight of the water pressed her down and down; her lungs were bursting. I’m going to die, she thought, as far as she could think at all.

Then with a last thrust of her legs she reached the surface. And as she did so, she saw someone quite close to her, swimming as masterfully and strongly as if he was in a millpond rather than the raging sea.

“Wait, I’m coming,” called Herbert, and she reached out for him, but then another wave took her and she went under yet again and was sure she was lost. Then she felt herself pulled up and up by her hair…and found that she was clinging on to Herbert’s back and able to breathe once more.

“Hold on tight, but don’t choke me,” called Herbert—and set off through the waves as calmly as he had done when he was still a seal.

“Fabio?” she managed to ask.

But Herbert had not seen Fabio.

They passed the stoorworm and saw something large gripped tightly in the coils of his tail. The worm’s ancestors had come from the sea and Herbert wasted no time on him. He would get Aunt Coral to safety if anybody could.

A mattress swam past them, then the galley table with the third boobrie chick clinging on by his yellow feet.

“Keep still, Aunt Etta,” came Queenie’s high-pitched voice above the sound of the waves. “You mustn’t wriggle.”

The twins were holding Aunt Etta up between them as she spluttered and kicked her feet.

Hanging on to Herbert’s back took all Minette’s strength, but she was still searching desperately for Fabio.

“Please, Herbert, we must find him.”

After he and Minette were torn apart, Fabio had sighted the lifeboat which had been thrown clear when the
Hurricane
sank. He managed to swim towards it…to get a hand on the gunnel…If the people inside it would help him he could pull himself up.

But the people inside it were Stanley Sprott and his crew.

Sprott looked over the side and saw the struggling boy. “Get rid of him,” he said.

And as the small hand came up, Boris hit it with an oar and pushed the boy back into the water.

There was not much hope for Fabio after that. He was going down for the last time when Herbert found him.

“Hold on to my shoulder,” he ordered. “And don’t talk,”

Herbert was an amazing swimmer but he knew that to support two children all the long way back to the Island might be beyond his strength. Even a seal would not try to swim with two pups on his back.

Everyone was in difficulties. The raft on which the boobrie chicks balanced was sinking and above them the boobrie mother squawked in anguish, not knowing which of the two to pick up in her beak. The worm’s tail muscles had gone into cramp from holding up the waterlogged Aunt Coral…

Herbert measured the long way to the Island and set his teeth.

“Come on, everybody, follow me,” he called manfully.

One could only do one’s best.

The kraken had found his son. He cared for nothing else. He swam away from the shipwreck with the child on his back. Anger still coursed through his body. He was not the Healer of the Sea now. He was a father whose child had been hurt. Let everyone else beware for he and his son were on their way!

But after the first joy of being safe, the little kraken wriggled forward so that his mouth was right against his father’s ear, and began to talk very fast in Polar. He was explaining what had happened and how the people on the Island had tried to keep him safe.

And then he said the word which the great kraken had spoken when he first swam into the bay.

“Children?” said the little kraken. And again, looking back at the wreckage: “Children?”

But it was not really a question. It was an order. The little kraken was growing up.

And the great kraken sighed because he wanted above all to be away from the shrieks and the splintered wood of the wreckage and be in the quietness of the sea. But he heeded his son—and he turned and swam back to the wreck and to the struggling creatures trying to hold each other up in the water.

Then Minette and Fabio felt something below them…the strong living island of muscle that was the kraken’s back…and felt it rise and rise till everyone was safely gathered on it—the aunts and the creatures, the boobries in their cage…and they themselves, sliding off Herbert’s weary shoulders to feel firm ground beneath their feet.

It was an incredible, magic journey that they took after the panic and terror they had been through—floating secure and safe on the great creature’s back, until the Island was in sight, and there was no more danger and no more fear.

But the kraken had not saved everybody.

Stanley Sprott lay sprawled across the bottom of the battered, leaking lifeboat. Boris, only half conscious, was clinging to the gunnel. Des was hanging over the side, trying to be sick; he had been drinking seawater. Lambert was curled up like a baby between the skipper and the mate.

Casimir had drowned in the struggle to reach the lifeboat after the
Hurricane
was rammed.

They had been drifting for a long time. The sea was still strange; slate colour one minute; the colour of blood the next. No rescue ships were setting out in this awesome ocean.

In the lifeboat there was no more water and no more food. The men’s lips were blistered. Their swollen tongues stuck to the roof of their mouths. Befuddled as they were, they tried to make sense of what had happened.

Only they couldn’t. No one could make sense of it.

“An island?” muttered Sprott. He could see it, bigger than anyone could believe, moving towards them with the speed of a comet.

But how could it? How could an island move?

“It wasn’t there,” said Lambert suddenly. Weakened by hunger and thirst, those were the only words he could still say.

Sprott’s head was a jumble of pictures.

A mermaid holding up…an aunt. But had there really been mermaids? And a great bird the size of an elephant flapping over the wreckage…

No, it was ridiculous. It was impossible. He fingered the bruise on his forehead. He must have concussion.

“Not…really there…” murmured Lambert. He wouldn’t last much longer unless they were rescued soon.

I’m going mad, thought Sprott. I’ll have to be careful. We’ll all have to be careful or they’ll put us in a loony bin if we’re rescued. All that happened was that a storm came up and the
Hurricane
was wrecked. Everything else is nonsense.

“Not…there…” said Lambert faintly.

Sprott looked at his son. He had always despised Lambert but he was sorry now. Lambert was right. He had said all along that the…things…weren’t really there and they weren’t. How could they have been?

“Quite right, Lambert,” said Stanley Sprott, and leant back and closed his eyes.

If they were rescued he’d say nothing—and see that the others said nothing too. He wasn’t going to be locked up as a loony, that was for sure…

The last days on the Island were strangely happy. The children knew they would soon be fetched away but they were able to enjoy each moment as it came and being in an adventure seemed to have done everybody good.

The stoorworm no longer complained about being too long for his thoughts.

“If I’d been any shorter I couldn’t have held up Aunt Coral in the sea,” he said and stopped talking about plastic surgery once and for all.

As for Loreen, when Aunt Myrtle fetched Walter out of the washbasin and put him in his mother’s arms she let out a shriek of joy.

“He’s grown hair!” she cried.

“He’s grown
a
hair,” said Queenie who was giving herself airs because she had saved Aunt Etta.

But the most exciting thing happened to the boobrie. After she waddled up to her nest with her three bedraggled chicks she found somebody sitting in it.

The boobrie paused, hissed…stretched out her neck. Who was it who
dared
to sit on
her
nest? Hooting, honking and complaining, she flapped her wings and prepared to attack.

Then suddenly she stopped. She lay down in front of the stranger, she clapped her beak against his…her eyes rolled with welcome and with love.

“My goodness,” said Fabio. “It’s her husband. He’s come back!”

And he had. He didn’t seem to be a very intelligent bird but knowing that there were two boobries now to look after the chicks was a great relief to everybody.

Herbert was of course a hero, but not at all conceited. He began straight away to tidy up the aunts’ house and to label Art’s storage jars and to show him how to cut the heads off fish.

But it was Myrtle who had been his special friend and he did everything he could to help her. He told her when her skirt was on back to front and he corrected her when she played a tune too fast on the cello, and he insisted that she had swimming lessons twice a day.

“Oh, Herbert, the water is so cold!” Myrtle would cry.

But Herbert said it was dangerous to live so close to the sea and not be able to swim, and every morning and every evening Myrtle had to get her rubber ring and put on her chill-proof vest and Aunt Etta’s navy-blue bloomers and go into the sea.

But the important thing—the thing that was on everybody’s mind—was what was going to happen to the kraken.

After he had brought them safely to the shore the great kraken had moved a little way away to the mouth of the bay. He stayed submerged most of the time and out of sight and his son stayed with him.

“He’s thinking,” said Aunt Etta and she was right.

He was thinking about what to do next. Should he give up his healing journey around the world and go back to the Arctic? Or should he find somewhere else to leave his son? For he knew without being told that things were going to be different on the Island.

Then one morning Ethelgonda appeared, shimmering above her tombstone, so they knew that it would be an important day.

And sure enough by noon the great kraken swam slowly into the bay with his son on his back. It was a most anxious moment. No one could blame the kraken if he turned his back on human beings once again and left the sea to spoil, and it was as though all those who waited by the shore were holding their breath.

Then he began to talk. He talked in Polar and it was his son who translated.

“Although people deserve that I should leave them to their mess and their wickedness, I have decided to go on with my journey around the oceans of the world. But I shall not take one year and one day to make the journey. I shall take two years and two days…or even three years and three days, so that my son, who has been restored to me, can come also and be with me at my side.”

When he said that a great cheer went up and Fabio and Minette hugged each other because it was the closest to a happy ending they could hope for.

That evening when it was quiet, the little kraken came and said goodbye all by himself to the children who had cared for him. There was just one bun left in the boobrie tin but when Fabio gave it to the kraken he did not at once open his mouth. He said:
“Share!”

So the children broke the bun into three parts and everybody had a piece. It was a most squashed and sorry-looking bun, with cracked icing and a wilting Smartie clinging to the top…but afterwards the children remembered it as tasting like a bun in Paradise.

The next morning the kraken and his son had gone.

And only a few hours later the noise they had been expecting was heard over the Island: the sound of a helicopter. But not one…three…and coming from them a whole posse of policemen with guns and handcuffs and body-armour—come to fetch back the children and arrest the aunts.

Chapter 23

Aunt Etta and Aunt Coral had been in prison for several weeks before their trial for kidnapping came to the courts. The children were not allowed to visit them and so the first time they saw them was in the dock at the Old Bailey, handcuffed to the policewomen who brought them up from the cells.