3

Crusoe

“THE WATER HORSE!” breathed Kirstie.

“Well, I’ll be scuppered!” said Angus.

“I don’t care what it is,” said Mother. “It’s not staying in my bathtub. I’m going to get the breakfast now and as soon as you’ve eaten it, that thing goes—out of the bathtub, out of this house, I don’t care what you do with it. Is that understood?” And off she went. Kirstie and Angus looked so woebegone that Grumble put an arm around each of them.

“Cheer up,” he said. “We’ll think of some way to make sure he’s all right.”

“How d’you know it’s a he?” said Kirstie. “It might be a she.”

“That’s true,” said Grumble. “I don’t know how you could tell. But we’ll have to decide, one way or another.”

“Why?” said Angus.

“So that we can give it a name. It must have a name if we’re going to keep it.”

“Keep it?” cried the children. “But Mother just said…”

“Your mother only said it must go out of the house. ‘I don’t care what you do with it’—that’s what she said. So we’ll decide what we want to do and then we’ll do it. Now go to my room, Kirstie, and you’ll see some loose change on top of the dresser. Bring me a coin—any coin will do.”

When Kirstie came back with a sixpence, Grumble balanced it on his thumbnail.

“Now,” he said, “heads it’s a boy, tails it’s a girl. All right?” and when the children nodded, he flicked the coin high in the air. It fell on its edge and rolled underneath the claw-footed bathtub. Angus, the smallest, crawled on his tummy to retrieve it.

“What is it?” asked Kirstie.

“It’s a boy!” called Angus triumphantly.

“What shall we call him then?” said Grumble.

Between them, in the next few minutes, they managed to suggest a host of names, but no one approved of anyone else’s choices. Kirstie liked the kind of names that might have suited a real horse or pony—Starlight, Bonnieboy, Surefoot, Trusty, and Thunderer. Grumble favored good Scottish family names such as Stuart and Sinclair, Mackenzie, McGregor, and Tullibane. Angus chose fierce, aggressive names suitable for the enormous monster that he thought the creature would one day be, names like Skullcruncher, Superjaws, Backbreaker, Cowkiller, and Drinkblood. But they could not agree, and when Mother called that breakfast was ready, they all went to get dressed, leaving the infant Water Horse paddling namelessly around the bathtub.

Breakfast was an unusually silent meal at first. Grumble, Kirstie, and Angus were all still busy trying to think of a name. Mother was feeling a little guilty that she had reacted so harshly in ordering the immediate expulsion of the animal. After all, whatever it was, it was certainly quite extraordinary, and the children were so thrilled about it, and as for her father, why, she hadn’t seen him look so happy in years. There he was now, eating his breakfast without a word of complaint. Usually the porridge wasn’t salty enough, or the egg wasn’t done, the toast was too light or too dark, or the tea too weak or too strong. She caught his eye and he actually winked at her.

“All right,” said Mother. “I’ve changed my mind. You can have the rest of the day to decide among the three of you what you’re going to do with the creature. But I want it out of the house by this evening. And that’s my last word.”

“A good decision,” said Grumble.

The children beamed. Mother was encouraged to go further. “And I suppose you might as well feed it the rest of that can of sardines,” she said.

“Can’t I have them?” said Angus.

“No.”

“A good decision,” said Kirstie.

“We’ve been trying to think of a name for him,” said Grumble.

“It’s a boy,” said Angus again with satisfaction.

“But we couldn’t agree,” said Kirstie.

“Got any ideas?” said Grumble to Mother.

Mother thought for a minute. “Well, he was washed up on the shore, wasn’t he?” she said. “He was a castaway. And the most famous storybook castaway I can think of was Robinson Crusoe. How about that?”

“Now there’s an idea!” said Grumble to the children. “That story was based on a real-life castaway and he was called Alexander Selkirk and he was a Scot! And whatever the Water Horse is, there’s no doubt about one thing. He’s a Scottish beastie!”

“Robinson Crusoe,” said Kirstie doubtfully. “It’s rather long, isn’t it?”

“Just Crusoe then,” said Angus. Grumble and Kirstie looked at one another and nodded.

“A good decision,” they said.

But the decision they had to make after breakfast was not so easy. It was, of course, what to do with the newly christened Crusoe. They stood looking down at him as he paddled around the tub, chirruping loudly for food.

“Now, I’ve been thinking,” Grumble said. “First of all, d’you think we should simply put him back in the sea? That’s where he would have hatched if the storm hadn’t blown him ashore.”

“Oh, no!” said Kirstie. “We’d never see him again. Couldn’t we find a big rock pool and keep him there?”

“We could. But the spring tides might wash him out. Anyway, it’d be a terrible business feeding him, up and down the cliff path half a dozen times a day.”

“Could we put him in the lochan, Grumble?” said Angus. The lochan was a small loch, no bigger than a couple of soccer fields, in the glen below the house.

“We could, Angus, and that’s where he’ll have to go when he’s a lot bigger. But he wouldn’t last long at the moment. There are pike in there big enough to swallow him whole,” said Grumble, and he picked up a sardine by its tail and dropped it into the bathtub. With a swirl of water, Crusoe was on it, worrying it like a shark.

“We must wait till he’s big enough to treat the pike like that,” said Grumble.

“But where can we keep him?” said Kirstie.

“I know!” said Grumble. “In the goldfish pond, of course. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it straightaway.”

Sunk in the lawn at one side of the white house was an oblong concrete pond the size of a pool table. In it lived two goldfish named Janet and John that Kirstie had won at a fair when she was no older than Angus. Since then she had in fact taken no notice at all of them, but the sight now of Crusoe tearing chunks out of a sardine made her blood run cold.

“Oh, no!” she cried. “What about Janet and John?”

“Lunch and dinner,” said Angus dryly.

“No, no,” said Grumble. “We can’t have that. We’ll mount a rescue operation. We’ll fish ’em out with the shrimping net. There’s an old goldfish bowl in my garden shed. They can live in that till Crusoe’s big enough to move to the lochan. Now, one of you can come and help me catch them, and one of you can feed this fellow the rest of the can.”

Kirstie looked at her little brother. His eyes were glued to the remaining sardines. “I’ll stay here,” she said quickly.

When the others had gone, she knelt by the side of the bathtub, balancing the sardine can on the rim, and began to feed the Water Horse. She fed him very small scraps of fish.

“Gulping your food is bad for you,” she said. “Grumble shouldn’t have given you a whole one like that.” Crusoe looked directly at her. His eyes, she noticed, were lozenge-shaped, very dark, and bright with a look of intelligence. He seemed to be listening to what she was saying.

When he had finished the third of the four sardines, he appeared to be full, for he sank to the bottom of the bathtub and lay there for a little while. Then he floated up like a bubble rising in a fizzy drink, poked his nostrils out, drew a breath of air, and sank again. He continued to do this, and Kirstie timed him with her watch.

She found he was able to hold his breath for about a minute, and his rises for air seemed quite automatic since his eyes were shut and he seemed to be fast asleep. After around a quarter of an hour of this, Crusoe surfaced properly and looked up at Kirstie once more. He did not, however, chirrup.

“You’ve had enough, haven’t you?” said Kirstie. “We’ll keep the last sardine for later.” Her fingers were oily, and she was just about to rinse them in the water when it occurred to her that Crusoe just might treat them as he had treated the fish.

“Don’t be such a baby, Kirstie,” she said to herself. “His teeth aren’t all that big, and anyway it will never do to let him think I’m afraid of him.” So she put one finger down slowly, saying all the while in a quiet voice, “Good boy, Crusoe, good boy,” until it was touching his nose.

Very gently, he licked it.