Page 37 of The Island of Lost Girls

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Something brushes her thigh, then something else her forearm, then she’s flailing in the water because, where they’ve touched it, her skin is burning.

Medusa!Jellyfish!

Mercedes backs up and feels another brush her ankle, and then she’s sprinting as fast as she can for shore. Her progress is slow, for the last thing she wants to do is put her face in the water.

‘Puta mjerda!’

To her right, a snorkeller heads for the rocks, propelled by rubber fins. Mercedes doggy-paddles awkwardly along, hot with envy. The snorkeller reaches land and hauls themselves out. It’s a girl. Short dark hair and a turquoise bikini printed with sunflowers.

Ow, ow, ow. But dear God, it burns. The currents around La Kastellana rarely bring jellyfish inland, but she’s heard tales of their vicious stings from the fishermen. She’d never really taken in the reality of it.

She reaches the old boat ramp, lets the incoming waves carry her in until her hands and knees touch concrete, then shimmies through the shallows onto solid ground. Stumbles onto the shingle beach and inspects her injuries. They’re round, the size of coffee saucers. Little red blisters bulge from her skin, ready to pop.

‘Mjerda! Sangre de Cristo! Porco MADONNA!’

Suddenly, she doesn’t love the sea so much.

The girl, twenty metres away, pulls off her snorkel mask, treads down the backs of her flippers until they suck away from her heels. She looks at Mercedes musingly as she ruffles the water from her short hair, then picks her way barefoot across the shingle until she’s standing over her.

‘Hard luck,’ she says.

Mercedes looks up. They’ve been learning English at the school for three years now, and she understands.

‘How many times did you get stung?’ She examines the lesions. ‘You’re lucky. There’s a whole shoal out there.’

She’s not a pretty girl. She has rough, dull olive skin and a heavy jaw like a boxer’s. Her eyebrows are bushy and meet in the middle, and her nose is like two little spring potatoes, one on the end of the other. I know who this is, thinks Mercedes. She’s Sinjor Meade’s daughter. I remember her at the funeral. She looks just like him, poor girl. She’s going to need her dowry.

The blisters are beginning to ooze and the patches are throbbing. Despite the high July sun, she feels slightly chilled, slightly dizzy. She drops her head towards her knees, and props herself on rigid arms.

‘Oh, shit,’ says the girl. ‘Are you okay?’

She shakes her head. Speaking feels too much like work.

‘Okay, look, hold on.’

To Mercedes’ astonishment, the girl hooks her thumbs into her bikini briefs and pulls them down. She was already scandalously naked by Kastellani standards, but now the sight of her, of the coat of downy fluff at the tops of her thighs, makes Mercedes gasp in embarrassment. She puts her hands over her face and covers her eyes.

A hand snatches her right arm away and presses the hand on her knee so the blemished wrist is next to the sting on her thigh.

The girl begins to squat. Mercedes realises what she is preparing to do, and leaps back.

‘No! No! What you are doing?’

A huff of frustration. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, I’m helping!’

She stands up and takes hold of the arm again. Bends to look into Mercedes’s face. Her breath smells fresh, like mint.

‘I’m just – ajudate! It’ll help! It’s acid … acidio! Para el … ’ She’s clearly reached the limits of her multilingual knowledge, so she starts to invent. ‘El pico. No. La pice. The sting, for God’s sake!’

She speaks too fast for Mercedes to keep up. But she gets the drift.

‘Ajudate,’ the girl repeats, and firmly places Mercedes’s hand where it was before.

Mercedes closes her eyes and turns her head away. She is too overwhelmed to resist any more, and the girl seems determined to piss on her, whatever she does. What will be will be, she thinks, as a trickle of warm liquid splashes onto her arm and thigh, then, the girl’s hand on her shoulder for balance, moves on down her shin to her ankle. At least it doesn’t smell, she thinks, and it won’t for a while. I can wash it off when I get to … oh …

The stinging is diminishing. My God, she thinks, as the girl drains her bladder and takes her hand away. It’s actually working!