Page 31 - The Mermaid Call

The Tail of Lake Splendour
“Now you’ve made me feel stupid again,” Alice said stiffly.
When that was the last thing I wanted to do. The look on my face must have given me
away: I could never read someone’s diary, never mind break into a dead girl’s room and steal one! “Forget I mentioned it.” Alice stalked away, back towards the door, sending evils at
Erik’s dad’s clickety-click knitting needles.
“How about we go to Atlantis Arcades?” I said, catching up with her outside. I bent to
pick up an empty coke can. “I can show you how to win big at the penny drop, there’s a special way of dropping your coin so – hey –”
She’d flicked my hand so I dropped the can. “Ewww, germs! What are you doing?”
I started to babble in a flush of redness about littering and libraries and how it kills our water birds, but she cut across me again: “Show me where the Mermaid Girls met Emmeline.”
We got behind a straggly line of damp-looking tourists following the wooden shell-shaped sign to “The Tail of Lake Splendour – this way to mermaid magic!” Through the tunnel carved from jagged grey quarry rock, water drip-dripping from the ceiling, and into the Mermaid Shell Grotto. A couple of tourists were gathered like bird-watchers at its open window over the lake, camera phones at the ready to catch a sparkly tail.
“You’ve really never been here before?” I said, watching Alice gaze round the grotto walls, plastered with every kind of shell, ordinary and exotic: cones and clams, cowries and conchs; sundials, strombus, scallops, spindles; tritons, turbos, turitellas. I knew them all.
Alice yawned. “The Dragon avoids anything mermaid when I visit,” she said, idly passing the shell-made Mermaid Throne (small girl, tiara, fish tail, being ‘crowned’ for her Dad’s photo). We came to a stop in front of the fountain with its grey statue of the Lake Mermaid erect in a pool of water, carpeted with gold and silver coins the tourists throw in to make a wish. The village collects them for upkeep as well as the ‘reward’, a bit like our own lottery, in case any tourist – as if – ever manages to get an authentic snap of our magical water creature.