‘I’ll have another coffee please Jue,’ he said. ‘There’s still time for him to come this morning before the Village gets busy.’ Julia went inside and shut the door.
When he glanced back at the island, the woman was gone. There was no sign of her on the Riverbank or evidence of her swimming to it.
‘That was strange,’ Jim said out loud. ‘People disappear like anything around here.’ He wondered if he would see her again, maybe next time he would wave.
When Bob’s friend Callum woke up in the morning, the eggs had already hatched. All of the remnants of the eggs lay at the bottom of the coke bottle. He got up quickly thinking it was empty and that everything had died.
On closer examination, it looked like only one hadn’t made it, as there were two left in there. There they were, crawling up inside the bottle, hidden behind the label on the outside.
The previous night, he had put one of his mother’s knitting needles into the gas flame on the cooker and made holes in the lid of his cola bottle. Three large ones. He didn’t think he needed it last night, as they were still eggs, so had left it off. Callum now put it on, to keep the remaining two inside. There was no sign of the third anywhere. Sadly, he concluded that the other two had eaten it.
Callum was already late and felt like he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep. He also felt quite strange, detached from the world, numb. However, he was excited to show his mates his hatchlings. They had no idea about this. Callum liked to be the one to discover new things. Stuff the lads loved to talk about. Whether it was new movies or games, it always made people popular, if they had been the first.
Callum looked at them as he walked down to School. One was swimming around inside, the other was still stuck to the side of the bottle
They had not turned out how he had imagined. Instead of being tadpole-like, they had lots of feelers or tentacles underneath and a solid lump of a body at the top, more like a little octopus. He could tell it wasn’t an octopus. This had a lot more legs. It was still cool though and especially as it had been for free.
This was way better than a cat or dog. You couldn’t take them to school, and these pair were quite maintenance free.
He kept his eye on the bottle at all times. Callum was fortunate that he wasn’t knocked over, as entirely distracted, he walked on autopilot all the way to school.
When he got there, he wasted no time showing the other boys in the gang, what he had collected from the river.
They all agreed that it was no tadpole, sea monkey or type of newt. Bob thought it looked more like a grey jellyfish. It had way too many tentacles to be a squid or an octopus. Callum had not considered that. It sounded inferior to a squid, so he didn’t like that theory, to him Bob was just jealous.
’I’m going there tonight, buying a cola and getting some of my own,’ Jake said.
’I don’t know if the spawn will still be there today,’ Callum said. ‘If these have hatched, they could have all hatched and swam away.’
‘It's worth a try,’ Jake said.
‘I think you should try. Everyone should have one,’ replied Callum, after a moment’s thought.
Jake and a couple of others agreed that they would go to the river right after School. Bob and Adam were not interested in getting any spawn. They thought if anything hatched, their Mum’s three cats would soon make a meal of it, which was cruel. They would go along with the others gathering theirs. It looked like it might be a laugh. They could always change their mind when they got there if it became too good an opportunity to pass up.
During the day Callum checked out his two new pets. He thought that they had grown considerably bigger since this morning. The egg fragments had gone too. That must have been their breakfast. He would have to find something else tonight to put them in if they grew at this rate. They seemed to look out at him, watching him. Although as they were so small, he could not see their eyes. He didn’t even know if they were ever going to have any. They pressed their suckers onto the side of the plastic bottle, little bodies throbbing constantly.
Callum jumped when he heard the bell go for afternoon lessons. He had checked the bottle the minute he had come out at lunch time. He had planned to go inside to have his lunch and thought he had been watching them for about 30 seconds, not 30 minutes. He really must be tired or coming down with something. Now on top of that, he had missed lunch.
He looked at the creatures again. Callum would have to try and feed them something. He didn’t want them going hungry as well as him. He had no idea of what they ate. Callum would have to think of something nutritious quickly.
On the way to the river after School, the group of boys were talking about Callum’s new find.
‘What do you think they eat?’ Callum asked.
’Who knows? They might eat shit for as much as you know,’ Jake said.
’Why would you say that?’ Callum said.
’They probably won’t,’ Bob added.
’Plenty of animals do, you know. Rats in the sewers and even cats and dogs, if the food hasn’t properly digested. They just think its food, not shit,’ Adam said, knowledgeably.
‘Gross,’ Jake said, laughing.
’Well they’re pretty small at the moment,’ Bob said. ‘They probably just eat the type of things that filter through the water. Suck them up through their gills or tentacles or whatever they use. Little amoebas and stuff and bits of plant.’
Callum thought about that. He examined the water in the bottle. It was very clear. Yesterday it had been full of bits.
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Callum said. ‘I’ll put some fresh river water in and see if they get better. They probably won’t live on that forever. Especially when they cut their teeth. I’m going to have to start researching what things like this eat or put in a bit of fish.’
All the boys went inside the shop. None of them bought can’s, all bought bottles. Even Bob and Adam did, just in case. They immediately started to drink them dry on the way over to the Park.
When they arrived at the river's edge, Callum was shocked to see that not only was there still some spawn, but there was considerably a lot more now. The patch was about three feet in width. The lumps were domed at the top above the surface, solid masses of the little milky eggs.
Several of the boys rinsed out their coke bottles. Callum had told them that they needed to ensure that the spawn had air, so the lid had to be ventilated. His advice was that they asked their mothers for an old knitting needle to pierce it through the plastic.
Some of them looked at him as if he was talking Russian, as the majority of their mothers didn’t knit.
’Didn’t it ruin the knitting needle?’ Bob asked.
’Yes, I’ve had to hide it,’ Callum said, rubbing his ear, which had felt weird all day. Adam laughed.
‘Maybe everyone uses that one then,’ Adam muttered. Callum suggested only taking two eggs as he had taken three and one hadn’t survived. He hoped that it wasn’t because he had had too many in the bottle. They all began to take a couple each. Some of them ignored him and as he wasn’t checking the bottles took about ten instead of two.
Callum very carefully emptied some of the current water out and refilled it with fresh water. Instead of being clear, it was full of bits again. The creatures did seem happier. They swirled about, luxuriating in their refreshed environment.
All the boys, apart from two, expected new pets and in anticipation took them back home. Bob and Adam wished, in some ways that they had got them too. However, there was a nagging doubt in their minds about this new pet. While they were pretty cool, and they were free, they were also a bit weird. These two boys, from experience, were wary of weird.
8 Marsh
Jim was a little worried after going for a walk along the canal bank to the shops. On his return, he noticed from this new angle that there was a lot of algae on the bottom of his boat. This would mean at least a couple of hours work for him. It was very strange as it only usually gathered when he ha
d been moored for a long time, and they had only been there for a few days.
He went inside and moaned to Julia for a while, before getting himself sorted to begin the work. He managed to get as far as putting on his blue overalls. Then he sat muttering to himself for a long time before going out to try and scrape some of it off.
He shut the door behind him on the way, as it wasn’t too warm an evening. Jim squatted on the side of the bank and began scraping it off. He was miles away, singing the euphonium part to a Brass Band march, while also wondering why this was happening. The water didn’t look especially green or fertile.
Jim scraped for at least half an hour before his arm started hurting. He was also getting a blister on his palm. Jim had forgotten to put his gloves on. He began to hear what he could only describe as singing. It wasn’t the most beautiful song or the most melodious voice that he had ever heard, and it also wasn’t anything that he had recognised.
He looked up and down the canal bank, but no one was coming either way. The singing continued, and it wasn’t getting farther away or closer. He popped his head up over the side of the boat towards the river.
The woman was back. The woman on the island. What was she doing there again? Who would want to be swimming over to that place, just as it was about to go dark, only to sit there for no reason whatsoever? It was indeed a strange kind of song. It didn’t seem to have a chorus or a verse, a beginning or an end. It was rubbish. Jim wondered whether she had issues.
Jim squinted over to where she sat. She still seemed to be a beautiful woman. In a wetsuit, on an island, singing gibberish but still a beauty. For a fraction of a second, he saw her glance over in his direction. She was checking that he had heard her and was watching. When she knew his face was turned towards her, she carried on looking into the distance, singing and playing with her hair.
Jim decided that she was trying to deliberately attract his attention. Perhaps she had a thing for boatsmen. Jim removed his overalls, behind the boat. He wasn’t going to go speaking to a woman like that covered in algae and old boat oil. After hoisting his trousers up, he began to walk over to the river.
Now that the rhythmic sounds of his boat scraping had stopped, he could pick out lots of new sounds. A whining noise and rustles in the reeds. He noticed that the water level was very high. It had come onto the bank and was flowing in amongst the grass on the Park. This made it quite marshy.
There was no way that he was swimming over to her, and since he had started walking, she was now looking away a little but still singing. Why had he come? What was he going to say? He seemed drawn to her in a way that hadn’t happened before. Should he shout over to her? He didn’t want to appear a pest. He would pretend to just look at the river as she seemed to be giving him the cold shoulder. Maybe she wasn’t trying to attract his attention after all.
Jim went down to the water, lapping in amongst the grass. Here amongst the grass and weeds were clumps of fish eggs or some kind of water creature. This was unusual for September Jim thought. He was about to get a closer look at them when he heard a sound at the side of him. A kind of rattle. What he would imagine was similar to the rattle of a rattlesnake.
With a jolt back to reality, he was taken out of the moment as Julia shouted to him that his evening meal was ready.
’Jim, what the bloody are you doing over there? You are supposed to be seeing to this boat,’ Julia said.
Jim looked at her and then pointed towards the island. She followed the direction of his finger. Jim looked too, towards the island and the woman on it, but the woman was gone. Jim dropped his arm slowly. Was this a ghost … or a trick … or was this something even weirder going on?
As he strolled back slowly, he wondered whether this was one of the things that Alan was talking about.
Jim looked back a couple of times to the island, to confirm that nothing was there. He also didn’t like the noise that he had heard beside the river or the look of those eggs. Combined that with the frogman and that all this is happening so close to where he and Julia lived wasn’t a good sign. Jim had just been put right off his tea.
9 Craze
The following morning, Jim again sat out on the deck of his boat, on the lookout for the frogman. Today was a clear day at least, and as he drunk his coffee, he thought that this might be the last day he did this. The mornings were getting quite chilly and he felt that after the first day, his intruder had been scared off good and proper.
He leaned back in the chair for a few moments and closed his eyes. Jim put his face up to the sky, taking in a few refreshing breaths of the morning air. When he opened his eyes again, he noticed that the woman was back on the island again. This was getting ridiculous. If she thought she was playing games with him, she was mistaken.
She was looking over to him and held his gaze when he saw her. Then she began to sing. Tease. He wasn’t falling for that again. This was just a weird Friarmere occurrence. Which by all accounts, for Friarmere, probably wasn’t so weird after all.
If it had been one incident, he probably wouldn’t have noticed, but this was starting to, quite literally, smell a bit fishy. The clumps of frogspawn out of season, something in the bushes rattling, and the island woman’s odd singing and behaviour. He was going to tell the gang about all this. A good part about living here was that he didn’t think they would be shocked or else there was no way that he would be telling them, or anyone else. It wasn’t paranoia, after Alan’s information – he knew that.
Jim hadn’t got up the courage to tell Julia yet. He even hadn’t told her what Alan had said. If stuff got worse, he would have to. Jim liked the new Band and this place. It was all the other nonsense he didn’t like. Big Jim was going to be the one to sort it out. He would have to, he didn’t want to scare Julia off, before she had even settled in. She would definitely want to move on.
Jim noticed that there was more algae on the boat, like huge strings of pondweed. It hadn’t been 24 hours since he scraped it off and now it looked like he hadn’t even touched it. Another portion of his day would have to be spent scraping again and this annoyed him. There must be something in this canal, apart from the frogman. In fact, the algae were so fertile, that if the frogman rested too long, he’d be covered in it.
The woman was still singing, looking right at him, bold as brass. Again, he felt the urge to go over, but the other stuff had scared him. Besides that, Julia would have his guts for garters if she thought he was mooning after some other woman, especially one as young and attractive as that. Somewhere in the rational part of Jim’s mind, he began to wonder why if she was totally capable of getting on and off the island, why didn’t she come over to him if she wanted to talk to him.
Jim made his mind up. At his first opportunity, he was going to tell everyone about the happenings on the water, river and canal.
Amongst the Year 10 boys, there was a new craze. They were calling them mini squids. Now that the other boy's squids had hatched, they were saying they would swap or sell their spares. For a few select friends, they would tell them where they had actually got them.
The ones that had only taken two eggs had no spares. What seemed to happen is that these mini squids hatched at night and always consumed one of the other eggs, or hatched squids.
Callum had warned them that this might happen. In the hope that they could confirm this, Callum had asked them all to put the mini-squid containers beside their bed at night.
None of them had seen this happen, but each one of them had one gone by the morning. The ones that only taken two eggs had been left with one lonely hatched creature in the morning. They were going back for more tonight.
What started off in the morning hours as we can make a lot of money from these, soon turned into we have accidentally told each and every person where you can get them for free. The most valuable items became bottles of coke from the machine at School. Everyone seemed to be drinking one in readiness to catch themselves a few eggs on the way home that afternoon.
It was undoubtedly a type of spawn. A sticky fluid on the outside of the egg adhered it to the others. The egg was milky inside as if a strange mist was drifting through it. The eggs looked like small eyes, the developing creature, a pupil looking out at them.
Bob had touched one. They were firmer and more substantial than any frogspawn he had picked up. Plus, he had seen toads spawn, and that was in strings.
Adam thought that they looked like a little world. White clouds drifted inside the egg, but it was clear enough, that you could see the black seed of the creature inside, moving.
At home-time, every one of the year 10 boys and a couple of their brothers, made their way to the river. Callum went with them. He was not gathering more spawn but refilling his bottle with the nutritious river water. His creatures were getting bigger. They also looked a little hungry.
Hell And High Water Page 4