‘Albert, no,’ said Dr Jones. ‘I’ve explained this to you before, but maybe I need to clarify again. There are a number of reasons why it would be very difficult to breed with a jellyfish. If, indeed, this is a jellyfish. And if, indeed, it’s female.’

‘Yes, I think that would be very useful,’ said Old Albert. ‘I would like to know more about jellyfish breeding.’ His eyes went all sideways then, but Dr Jones nodded enthusiastically, pleased at the chance to give another Biology lesson. I wasn’t sure they had the same goals in mind.

‘And if I could have babies with the Jellyfish – no offence, Martha –’ James nodded at me, ‘then would that mean that they’d be mutant jellyfish with the power to walk on land?’

‘Well, erm . . . technically . . .’ Dr Jones was planning where to begin. She had her hands up now, about to draw air diagrams with her pretend air pen. There were a few tuts from Staring Crone.

‘James, that is such a load of rubbish,’ said Lana. ‘That’s the worst idea you’ve ever had.’

‘Was I on your list at all?’ said Kate. ‘I’d understand if I wasn’t, but . . .’

And in between it all, with everybody now talking about possible jellyfish breeding, I could see James standing back, grinning at the chaos he’d caused.

Chapter 3

3

Then another thing happened that made us hopeful about escape.

‘I think it’s time to talk about mermaids.’

‘Woohoo!’

‘Hurrah!’

There was an immediate burst of clapping and cheering from the crowd in the Big House. Mermaids are always a super popular topic, and also sea serpents. We love stories about creatures from the sea, so we all settled comfortably, really wriggling nicely into the mesoglea to make a good seat, you know? I think we were all in a happy mood anyway after Pitiful Pete’s ‘almost-escape’– apart from Pitiful Pete, that is, but even he was sitting at the front vaguely listening, so he can’t have been feeling too bad. In all, we were looking forward to a good evening.

There isn’t much to do here, and sometimes, in the winter, it’s really hard to tell the difference between night-time and daytime. All of those misty, dark days blend into the misty moonlit nights, and dawn and dusk can be so long and drawn out you can’t tell when they begin and end. Even if you try to sleep for twenty-four hours, you’ll find you can’t – and believe me, we have tried. So we spend seriously a lot of our time telling stories, and it’s something that’s important to us. We all take it in turns and the rule is you have to listen. Sometimes they’re not stories, they’re maybe just rants, or something random somebody wants to tell us. But we always take it seriously.