Slime (17 page)

She kept up the pretence for another three or four minutes, making elaborate arrangements to phone Mrs Barnes the following week just to check. Not that she would, of course; she had all she wanted.

A drink, she decided.

Even without her interview with Sue her trip had already paid off. She’d something to celebrate and to hell with Bill. Oh, Bill knew his trade all right, no one better, but his inhibitions would always hold him back. Well, now she was in the fast lane and God help anyone who got in her way.

She headed for the four-star hotel by the river, ignoring the little pub which was nearer. Nothing but the best would fit her present mood. At the bar she ordered a large vodka and tonic which she carried over to a corner table. Save for a group of three or four customers who had taken their drinks into the garden, the place was empty, but that suited her well enough. She began to sketch out a couple of paragraphs in her notebook while it was all fresh in her mind. Knowing innuendo – that was the style. Leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.

Two cyclists, a boy and a girl, were fooling around on the river bank just beyond the hotel garden. Their bicycles stood propped up together near the trees where they’d been picnicking.

Sue watched them idly as she sat with her drink at one of the rustic tables. It was a relief to escape from that theatre at last. And from that bloody director with his long-winded theories. Rehearsals had been going badly. For one thing – she couldn’t say this, not even to Mark – it should have been Tim playing Benedick, not the useless idiot they’d chosen. At least Tim had style.
And
he understood the play. In the early days, cooped up in their bed-sitter waiting for the phone to ring, they’d learned all the great parts: Beatrice and Benedick; Rosalind and Orlando; Antony and Cleopatra… They were going to be a famous Shakespearean partnership, she and Tim.

‘Don’t you think so, Sue?’ Mark interrupted her musings.

‘Er… yes…’ She hadn’t been listening. ‘Of course.’

‘Life has to go on, jellyfish or no jellyfish, I realise that, but all the seaside shows have been cancelled. Think what that means in terms of unemployment. Even here we’re playing to empty houses. Equity should insist on jellyfish relief money being available to theatres, just as to other businesses.’

Mark had been arguing with Adrian and Tony – as usual – about the latest Equity pronouncements. He was a dear, she didn’t know what she’d do without him, but he did tend to go on about it all. Union politics bored her, but he could never understand that. Unlike Tim, who’d always understood her. She still lay awake at night thinking about him, wondering if she’d done the right thing. Oh shit, why did it have to turn out like this?

But Mark had been there when she’d needed someone desperately. He’d been fun too, taking her out of herself. Not inspiring, the way Tim had been – but reliable, which
Tim was not. And she could relax with Mark. Yet…

Last night in bed again – everything going the way it should, everything fine until suddenly… Left up in the air, that was the only way to describe it. It shouldn’t matter, she knew that, but it did. Afterwards they’d both lain there silently, brooding.

A piercing scream from the girl cyclist on the river bank jerked Sue out of her thoughts.

‘Help him! Oh, help him, somebody! Help,
please
!’

The boy had been up to his knees in the water, laughing and protesting as she tried to stop him climbing up again. She’d given him a little push, causing him to stagger back, losing his footing. Then her own laughter suddenly became a scream of horror.

Sue dashed to the fence and scrambled over. Can’t be jellyfish, she told herself anxiously; not in fresh water. The girl was beside herself and about to jump in after him. Sue grabbed her and sent her sprawling across the grass.

‘Not with those bare legs, you idiot!’ she bawled at her. The girl wore flimsy shorts, covering practically nothing. ‘Get hold of a boathook or a broom – anything!’

She looked at the boy thrashing about in the water and gasping for breath. If he wasn’t fished out soon he’d drown, and yet –

No jellyfish, though, none that she could see. She’d have to take the risk. Luckily she had boots on, with her jeans tucked inside them; that was some protection at least. But still she hesitated. For days after that business with Mrs Wakeham in the shop she dreamed of jellyfish. Night after night she’d woken up in a sweat. What if one had swum this far upriver and was lurking somewhere among the underwater weeds?

Behind her she heard the girl sobbing.

‘Where’s that boathook?’ Sue snapped at her. ‘Go and fetch something! Don’t be so bloody useless!’

Whether that had any effect or not, she didn’t wait to find out. Carefully she lowered herself into the river, clutching at the fragile twigs of a nearby bush until she was sure of her footing. With the water well above her knees, lapping at her crotch, she waded towards the boy. His struggles were getting weaker, as though his limbs were seizing up.

What she saw made her swallow with apprehension. They were jellyfish, no doubt about it, but not the big speckled kind she’d met before. These were tiny, some no more than half an inch across, others smaller: thirty of them at least, maybe more. They swarmed over his legs, quite unhurried, as though they knew time was on their side.

Already red weals had appeared on the boy’s skin wherever their tentacles had made contact, but the jellyfish themselves were quite colourless in the water. Almost transparent, in fact. Sue gaped at them, uncertain what to do next.

‘Can you manage, Sue?’ Mark was calling to her. ‘D’you need a hand?’

The boy was drifting with the current. She waded after him, grasping him by the hair to hold his face above water. He was still conscious, she noticed; his lips were moving, yet he seemed quite incapable of helping himself.

‘I’ll get him to the bank, then you pull him out!’ she shouted back, trying to suppress the fear in her voice. She’d just seen yet more red weals – on his neck, this time. ‘Put something on your hands. Gloves, or something!’

‘Why?’

‘Jellyfish!’

Sue made slowly for the bank, tugging the boy along by his hair and praying that those miniature jellyfish would content themselves with just the one victim. Her hands, already reddening from the cold water, seemed terribly vulnerable. She had to fight down an urge to leave the boy
to his fate and get out of that river as quickly as she could before they started investigating
her
.

Mark came splashing towards her. ‘You can’t do this by yourself – Bloody hell!’

He’d noticed the jellyfish. The colour drained out of his lean, angular face; its lines sharpened, betraying his age. He stood there as though hypnotised.

‘Mark, what’s the point of both of us risking it?’ she started to argue wearily, but she gave up.

He’d already hooked his fingers under the boy’s belt and was heading for the bank where Adrian and Tony – good old Adrian and Tony, the only two to come to the hotel bar rather than crowd into that smelly scrumpy pub with the rest of the
Much Ado
cast – were kneeling on the grassy edge, waiting to pull him out. Sue clambered on to the bank to help.

The girl cyclist merely looked on helplessly, dazed with terror.

A light flashed several times. At first Sue took no notice. Mark was still in the water, trying to ease the boy’s bare legs over the hefty stones used to strengthen the bank.

‘Mark, get out of the water!’ she yelled at him fiercely. At any moment those jellyfish were going to shift over on to
his
skin, she was sure of it. ‘For God’s sake, Mark! Oh, no!’

Already they were attaching themselves to the backs of his hands… moving up to his wrists…

With a heave, Mark threw himself on to the bank, rolling over away from the river, his face twisting with pain. Again that light flashed, and this time Sue realised what it was. Furiously she swung around to find a girl she’d never seen before calmly taking photographs.

‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’

‘Press.’ Quite calmly, the girl took one more, then stuffed the miniature camera into her jacket pocket.
‘You’re Sue, aren’t you? I came here to interview you. What’s going on?’

‘What does it look like?’ Bitterly, Sue began to examine Mark’s hands. The baby jellyfish were scattered over his skin like freckles – a dozen or more, the largest being about the size of a five-pence coin. ‘Oh, why don’t you call an ambulance or something?’

She felt dizzy with exhaustion.

‘The barman’s already phoned.’ The girl bent over Mark who was muttering incoherently that his hands were dead, he’d no feeling in them. ‘They’re a bit small. Are you quite sure they’re jellyfish?’

Sue had a vague impression of two men running towards them from the hotel. Somewhere very far in the background an ambulance siren wailed, approaching. Her hands were smarting intolerably, as though she’d dropped acid on them. She felt herself swaying, her eyes losing focus.

Focus? Was Tim filming?

She’d seen his documentary on TV, him standing there in that sea of jellyfish. She’d wanted to scream then. To scream
now
, out loud. But she held it back, refusing to give way. There’d been a girl reporter with him that first time, hadn’t there?

‘Of course I’m… bloody… sure…’

With a great effort, she managed to get the words out before she fainted.

Jane drove back to Somerset that afternoon with two Kilner fruit-bottling jars on the seat beside her. Each contained a dozen or more baby jellyfish swimming in river water, knocking futilely against the glass. She’d fished them out herself, buying a kid’s fishing net on the end of a stick for the purpose. All in all, she felt, she’d accomplished quite a bit on her journey to Totnes.

She had her story; in fact, more than she’d dared expect. Tim’s wife living with another actor, a divorce in the offing… That was a scoop in itself, and the boobs-and-bums merchant who edited the magazine would love her for it, bless his cotton socks. Two actors from the company had filled her in on a few details while they waited at the hospital for news.

All three casualties were to be kept in overnight. The young cyclist – just twenty-one years old and recently engaged, she discovered – was still unconscious when Jane left the hospital. Surgeons had already extracted thousands of the little hair-like tentacles which had penetrated his skin and then broken off. Hardly any part of his body was free of them. With Mark the damage was less extensive: only his hands and forearms seemed to have been affected, although an off-duty nurse Jane had chatted up afterwards had said the doctors were uncertain what effect that amount of poison might have on the nervous system.

As she reached the motorway Jane wondered whether or not to phone Tim about Sue being in hospital, but she decided against. It was better he shouldn’t know she’d been anywhere near the place. Sue was suffering from shock more than anything else. A good night’s rest and a sedative was all she needed, one of the doctors had announced. But then Sue had been lucky in having no more than four or five jellyfish on her hands, sticking flat against her skin like little round patches. Jane had tugged on her driving gloves and already held one between her finger and thumb, trying to squeeze it to death, when the barman came with a bottle of Johnnie Walker which he sloshed generously over Sue’s hands. One by one, the tiny jellyfish curled up and fell away.

‘Only way to deal with the buggers!’ he declared cheerfully. ‘Pour some spirit over ’em! They don’t like that. Meths is just as good. Don’t ask me why. Stings ’em, I
imagine.’

When she got home, Jane passed the tip on to Jocelyn who merely grunted and said it was worth remembering. She held the Kilner jars up to the light, unable to take her eyes off the baby jellyfish. Oh yes, these were probably the young of the red-and-pink speckled variety they were investigating, she confirmed enthusiastically. There were of course a number of medusae which never grew any larger than these, but from what Jane had told her…

‘How do they give birth?’ Jane asked bluntly. ‘I mean, do they lay eggs or are they…?’

‘Or are they viviparous?’ Her sister finished the question for her. ‘No, what happens is this. I showed you the genitals – those little U-shaped organs. Each jellyfish can produce both eggs and spermatozoa, but they can’t fertilise themselves. A jellyfish releases a cloud of spermatozoa into the water. This is ingested by other jellyfish with their food – through the mouth. The fertilised eggs become planula larvae and when they’re released – after a time – they attach themselves to some suitable surface such as a rock. Something firm.’

‘How big are they?’ asked Jane.

‘You’d not see them without a magnifying glass.’

‘So they could be swallowed – say, by a fish? Or a bird?’

‘Or a bird that eats fish.’

‘And stay alive?’

‘Possibly. But they’re not jellyfish yet. Once the planula finds a suitable home, it becomes a polyp. And that feeds in much the same way. It has tentacles, and so on, though of course it doesn’t swim around freely. It’s fixed to the rock.’

‘So where do jellyfish come in?’

‘The next stage.’ From the note of excitement in Jocelyn’s voice Jane realised once again how fascinated her sister was with this whole underwater world. ‘The
stem grows and becomes segmented. It’s like a pile of plates. Each segment breaks away and becomes a tiny jellyfish.’

Again she held up the jar to look at them.

‘That river where you found these,’ she added soberly, ‘must have quite a number of polyps around the rocks. The only question is – how did they get there?’

For some time they went over the possibilities. That part of the river was well above the reach of the tide, although it was still conceivable that a few jellyfish had swum upstream against the current. It was the explanation Jocelyn favoured. Jane had doubts, and so did Robin who argued that, if that were the case, why had no one seen them?

After an early supper, Jocelyn excused herself and went down to her laboratory bearing the two jars of baby jellyfish. Jane tried to telephone Alan Brewer but was unable to get through. She could not rid her mind of the thought that some planula larvae might well be carried in bird droppings, which meant that any pond, stream, lake or reservoir anywhere in the country could sooner or later breed a population of jellyfish. That might be fantasy of course, but people ought to be warned.