But there was no time to tend him further. They had to cut the trawl free before they were completely swamped by the jellyfish. By now the deck was carpeted with them, all glowing with a greenish-pinkish light, so strong it might have been daylight. With every step, his boots slithered over them, unable to grip.
On the wheelhouse wall they carried an axe, but there was no way he could reach it. Instead, he thumbed open his clasp knife and was about to join Colin when he saw him fall, his hands thrown up to protect his face. The boat was still rolling and, as he tried to reach him, Dave’s feet gave way beneath him, sliding over those treacherous jellyfish which were as slippery as ice over cobbles. Oh, God, his name was on this one…
He found himself sprawling headlong among them.
He felt them shifting beneath him.
He experienced the first stings caressing his neck, followed by that sharp, exquisite pain which sent spasms of fear zipping through him.
In his hand he still held the open clasp knife. He tried to use it to fight back, stabbing into any jellyfish within reach until the blade point stuck in the worn timbers of the deck and had to be tugged out again before he could cut into the next. Ripping through that hard, muscle-like tissue was such a pleasurable sensation. They’d not find it so easy, taking him.
Then a flick from the tentacles flashed across his knuckles like a charge of high-voltage electricity, shooting through his hand to drain the strength out of it.
One attacked his throat.
Another explored his inner ear before stinging, and the agony sent his mind spinning off down dark corridors.
Oh, he’d been there before — yes, he recognised it: that scalpel-cut of a girl’s broken promises, all he’d conned himself into believing she had sincerely meant, that whole unspoken relationship — far more than words — which had been so real while it lasted; and then the bitterness of their parting, and the longing for everything to end.
But no end came, not yet: only a growing numbness, only the realisation of how hopeless it all was, how there could be no solution, ever.
That scream — was that Colin? Still alive?
But it was all so far away.
Far.
When Jane went down to the harbour the next day they were talking about the missing boat. Overdue, they said. She detected the uncertainty in their voices. A spot of engine trouble, maybe; no more than that. It was old Jack Pine’s boat and he knew what he was doing all right. He could still make it back under his own steam.
At that stage it didn’t occur to Jane to connect the story with jellyfish. Why should she? They certainly attacked people, but they could hardly cause a whole crew to abandon ship. She’d managed at last to get through to her marine biologist sister, Jocelyn, who’d said it was like being stung by nettles, no worse than that, not in these waters. In fact, that’s what they were sometimes called — sea nettles.
When Jane had described finding the dead boy, and then what had happened to Tim and Arthur, she’d listened at first with obvious disbelief. Reading from her notebook, Jane then summarised all she’d observed of the characteristics and markings of the jellyfish, including the deposit of slime on the policeman’s gloves.
‘If you’re right, it’s a type I’ve not met before,’ Jocelyn conceded. ‘Not unlike Pelagia noctiluca, but the differences might be significant. If you could get me one, Jane…?’
Was it worth bothering, Jane wondered. She’d covered the jellyfish story as far as she could, first the boy whose body they had stumbled across on the sand dunes, then that business with Tim and the punch-drunk thug, but when the morning papers had arrived she’d found only the usual disappointment: two paragraphs about Tim on an inside page; nothing about the boy. No byline for her, either. She might just as well not have bothered. Bad luck, of course, because the main story — a three-in-the-bed sex scandal involving a woman Cabinet Minister — had broken only the previous afternoon, and it pushed out everything else.
Just her bloody luck!
The men’s talk irritated her. She moved away from them, heading around the harbour wall until she reached the far side where she could be on her own. The seagulls swooped low over the dark, debris-strewn water, crying plaintively, occasionally quarrelling over some disgusting morsel. Grey clouds billowed over the narrow harbour mouth, threatening rain.
It matched her mood, this sort of day.
The truth was, she told herself, things were just not going her way any longer. If they ever had; perhaps she’d been conning herself all along. At university she’d been the leading light in student journalism; everyone in that generation knew the name Jane Lowe. When, in her third year, as a matter of form, she had gone along to see the careers advice people, it was understood immediately that her destiny lay in journalism. No question of anything else. Then came four years on her local paper, not a bad one either, serving a community of almost four hundred thousand and not afraid of taking up issues, running campaigns on subjects people really cared about, until rising costs and falling advertising revenue forced them to cut back.
Ten redundancies, and her name high on the list. Well, she’d expected as much ever since Bill — highly professional Bill, the best news editor in the business — had finally come to his senses and refused to leave his wife for her; after that, it had been intolerable working on the same paper. She hadn’t blamed him either. He loved his wife, she had evidence of that, and was devoted to his three children; their own affair had blown up so fiercely, so intensely, who could tell if it would have lasted anyway? As for the redundancy list, he’d sought her out to try and explain that he hadn’t been responsible for including her name on it, but then he’d taken no steps to remove it either; wasn’t it better that way?
Was it?
She still wasn’t certain. More sensible, yes — but better?
Then there had been the meetings to fight the redundancies, and confrontations with the editor whose tiredness was revealed in every line of his face, his skin grey with worry. The others had appointed her to be their spokesman, but her heart hadn’t been in it. She’d suspected, too, that the editor spoke the truth when he said there was little choice: either they accepted the cut-backs, the ten redundancies, and tried to make a go of it, or else the whole paper would go to the wall.
Perhaps, without realising it, she’d been indoctrinated during those illicit weekends with Bill. Or perhaps she had just wanted to go.
She’d freelance, she decided; she’d give it six months, and then see how far she’d got at the end of it. But half that time had now gone, and where was she? Two paragraphs with no byline in a national daily, some snippets sold to the magazines, a piece for her local radio station for which she was paid less than she’d spent on petrol to get the story…
Apart from the feature article about Tim, but that was no more than a half-promise, a dropped hint that he might be able to include it in the new glossy magazine which had just hit the bookstalls. He being the editor, the one with the power of yea or nay. All she had to do was set it up, convince them she could produce the right kind of material, in which case they would arrange for a photographer to spend a day with her.
Once glance was sufficient to show her what kind of magazine it was. This month — the Frankest, Most Revealing and Intimate Story of… X! His loves, his hates, the women in his life! All that crap. Bill would have told her bluntly not to do it, which was one very good reason why she was accepting the challenge.
Fuck Bill!
The magazine paid the highest rates in London.