Читать книгу Bordeaux Housewives - Daisy Waugh - Страница 9

Late last summer on the beach at St Palais-sur-Mer, Superman and Tiffany were tipping plastic buckets of seawater into a rubber dingy, when Tiffany suddenly let rip with a horrible scream. Swirling around inside the dingy was a live jellyfish: they must have scooped it up by mistake.

‘Do you think we should warn people?’ Tiffany said, staring at it. ‘There must be hundreds of jellyfish out there. People are going to get stung.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Superman, taking his plastic spade and giving the jellyfish a whack.

‘Stop it!’ Tiffany yelled at him. ‘You’ll hurt her.’

He did it again.

At which point a monumental fight ensued, ending when both children somehow got sand in their eyes and Maude, fed up with all the noise, scooped the jellyfish into a bucket and released it back out to sea.

The children have never forgiven her for it. They had, they said, grown to love that jellyfish, and nothing, except possibly another one, would ever fill the void. Hence the outing today. It has taken the Haunt parents almost nine months to get around to it.

The beach at St Palais-sur-Mer is more or less empty, in spite of it being such a lovely day. But the task they have set themselves turns out to be more difficult than they had all imagined. Live jellyfish don’t often float into children’s plastic buckets, it turns out. They don’t even seem to float nearby.

‘You should never have let that one go, Mum,’ says Superman, scowling at her. He’s said it about once a minute ever since the outing began. After an hour of fruitless searching the Haunts are beginning to feel hot and hungry, and though Tiffany is being surprisingly stoical, Superman is close to tears. ‘You should never have let that one go, Mum,’ he says once again. ‘How could you do it?’

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Maude says automatically. ‘Right, then. Who feels like some lunch?’

‘That poor jellyfish probably really wanted to come home with us,’ moans Superman. ‘And now he’s out there, floating about. He’s probably still looking for us.’ At the thought of that – of his jellyfish, lost and lonely, floating about – Superman’s eyes once again begin to fill with tears.

‘Look out, Dad!’ screams Tiffany suddenly, pointing at something just in front of Horatio’s foot.

There on the sand lies the largest jellyfish any Haunt has ever before set eyes on. It’s the size of a serving plate, with the contents of its stomach quite visible through its transparent skin, and around it a very distinct aura of death. Horatio gives the jellyfish a nudge with his trainer. Nothing. No movement at all.

‘It’s dead,’ Horatio announces.

Superman whimpers first, then he fills his lungs and lets out an almighty wail. ‘You killed it!’ he cries. ‘You killed it! How could you do that? HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO HIM?’