So Richmond it was.
He drove via Marylebone Road and Westway, staying clear of the river until he reached Kew Bridge where the telltale gaggle of sightseers and police cars told the same story. A couple of ambulances there too, but he didn’t stop to enquire the details.
In the centre of Richmond on the slipway at the foot of Water Lane a cluster of jellyfish was observing the human goings-on around it with malevolent indifference. Alan used his press card to get past the outer cordon of police but it was not until he managed to have a word with the landlord of the pub beside the slipway that he was able to piece the story together. Business had been brisk that evening; after all, there weren’t many pubs about where customers could watch the jellyfish while supping their pints. No one had noticed the two teenagers tinkering with the parked cars, then scooping up jellyfish in the shadows farther along the river and dropping them on to the driving seats.
That is, until the first driver got into his car.
They’d called an ambulance, the landlord said, and the police; but who could tell if the poor sod would live or die? As for the two teenagers, at first no one had thought to look for them, what with the hysteria over the jellyfish in the cars and all that. Then someone spotted them, he couldn’t recall who. The boy was already dead, and the girl was now in hospital under sedation.
‘God, that lad’s face! I know it was his own stupid fault, the silly bugger, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. All the years I was in the army — Aden, the Mau Mau in Kenya, a spell in Korea — I never saw anything to equal that. Poor kid. I’d seen him around; and the girl. Been in here for a drink. Then he has to go and do something mind-blowing like that! It makes me wonder… Oh, I dunno.’
15
Extinction… extinction… extinction…
Once again the message pulses out through the deep. Jellyfish shoals far off in the South Atlantic sense its meaning as clearly as those which arrive on Britain’s coasts with every tide. Their reaction is instinctive. Birth follows death as day follows night.
Multiply…
All life is part of the great cycle. The individual has no meaning outside the species. To ensure the species survives is the only purpose of existence.
All hold the precious eggs within them; all spew out the seed-clouds to be ingested by others. For jellyfish are both male and female, programmed to continue that mystery which is life. The command is implicit.
Multiply.
16
One after another, local authorities in holiday resorts all the way around the coast decided to clear the jellyfish hordes from their beaches by burning them. It was like cauterising a wound, one councillor said. Every evening the main television news bulletins carried pictures of surging flames and palls of thick smoke drifting above them.
On the following tides more jellyfish arrived to replace the first wave, only to meet with the same fate. Kerosene was the usual weapon. Its stench carried on the prevailing winds and hardly anywhere in the country was free of it.
Away from the holiday playgrounds other stretches of coast were equally affected, including tidal rivers and inlets. They remained for the most part untreated. Helicopter shots revealed mile upon mile of jellyfish, most dramatically at dusk when they bathed their entire surroundings in that sickly green light. While officials and politicians argued over what to do next, they lay there undisturbed save for the swooping seagulls.
‘I don’t approve of burning them,’ Jocelyn stated uncompromisingly as she spread a thin layer of honey over her toast.
Jane stared at her sister in despair: how could she be so blind?
At Alan Brewer’s request she was staying with Jocelyn and her husband Robin at their converted Somerset farmhouse high above the ‘jellyfish line’ — as one commentator put it — on a hill from which they enjoyed a panoramic view of the Bristol Channel. Her task — Alan’s own words — was ‘to keep an eye on the scientific end of the equation’, whatever that might mean. Jocelyn welcomed her visit. Her lab assistant was off with ’flu and she was short-handed. Jane was not so sure. On her local paper she was used to seeing her name in print every so often; she’d been a big fish, if only in a very small pond. What no one had told her was that in television a research assistant — glamorous though the title may sound — was no more than the smallest of sprats.
Added to which, she now realised she’d been offered a contract merely because Tim had insisted. They’d been forced into it in order to land him as presenter.
Once they had her signed up, they’d pushed her down to Somerset where she could do least harm, her only task being to write up page after page on the habits of jellyfish. Probably no one in the office read them, least of all the omnipotent Brewer. But they’d paid her money, which was something. Enough to restore the dour smile to her bank manager’s face and to get her Mini running again.
Jocelyn crunched at her toast, oblivious of the smear of honey around her mouth. She was oblivious of most things, Jane mused, when her mind was on her creepy-crawlies. She was the oldest of the three of them — there was a middle sister, Barbie, who had married an Arab and now lived, divorced, in Australia — and had the same grey eyes. Her hair was a mess, always had been, and when she turned her head there was just the slightest trace already of a double chin. Not a bad figure though, considering she was over thirty and did nothing about it. Of the three, she was the most like their mother.
The laboratory was in a couple of Nissen huts at the end of the field. She spent long hours there observing the jellyfish Jane had brought her, making endless notes, and never tired of explaining everything. Throughout the country a dozen or more institutes of marine biology were involved in studying the new jellyfish, but that didn’t seem to worry her in the least.
As far as Jane could judge, her sister had no competitive instinct whatsoever.
The postman that morning had delivered yet another report from the Department of the Environment, listing the growing number of coastal resorts affected by jellyfish swarms and the steps being taken to help them. Not all areas were happy with the idea of roasting them alive, although it was generally agreed that fire caused less long-term ecological damage than spraying them first with a strong pesticide solution, or even detergent. Both methods had been suggested.
Jocelyn snorted in disgust as she turned over the pages and, through a mouthful of toast, commented that in her opinion the authorities were mad. Worse than mad: criminal.
‘How would you deal with them, then?’ Jane demanded.
‘The authorities? Shoot the lot!’
‘The jellyfish, idiot! You’ve never actually seen what they can do to people. It’s not funny.’
‘Then people should keep away from them.’ She took another bite of toast, then licked her fingers. ‘I suppose that’s one bit of good your actor boyfriend did in his TV programme. At least he warned people to stay clear, although the way he did it was crazy. More likely to cause a panic than anything else. I hold him responsible for all this burning.’
‘He didn’t start it,’ Jane defended him coolly.
The transmission date of Tim’s documentary had been brought forward to meet the sudden public demand for information triggered off by the mass assault of jellyfish. It had been a rush job, hastily cut together from whatever material was already in the can, but a big scoop for the company. It had certainly put Tim on the map again. The editor of that boobs-and-bums magazine had been on the phone to Jane that same evening, demanding the article she’d promised him. She’d upped the price, claiming she could get material on Tim no one else knew about, and agreed to an eight-day deadline.