232. La Belle Lola and her Gorgeous Friend Ibiza

 

232. La Belle Lola and her Gorgeous Friend Ibiza

Marina, queen of the night, received us in her dressingroom, which was replete with flowers and admirers. She was delighted to see me and gave me half a dozen hugs or more and insiste don introducing me to her sister Lola, who was “more your age.” Which is why she took us, one of us hanging on each of her lovely arms to the Jealous Merrow’s Pub, property of her mother’s, and the place where the cast party was being held.

La Belle Lola, beautifully dark and with turquoise Siamese cat’s eyes, had a very blonde friend with sea-green eyes that was the daughter of a mer couple from the Northern Seas who had moved to the Balearic Islands seeking a milder climate. Both girls were a little older than Alpin and me, being like fifteen fay years old. They looked like they had made good use of those years, and being dressed to kill, might have passed for twenty year olds. As for us, we were very pleased to be able to do these older girls a favor. They had asked us to do them one, because, and it couldn’t have been otherwise, they both had boyfriends. Or had had them, to be exact. Ibiza had just broken up with hers for some ridiculous reason and Lola had decided to break up with hers too, because Merville hadn’t shunned Marmaduke when they ran into him in a restaurant even though Mer knew that Ibiza wasn’t on speaking terms with Mar. These awesome girls decided to make it clear to their ex boyfriends that they were totally free to do as they pleased and also make them regret their loss making them feel as jealous as could be. Making mermen jealous is very easy, because they are all pathologically so. They even act up about women they no longer want to have a thing to do with, or even those they have never ever had a thing to do with at all. Because of all this, Lola and Ibiza told us we four would go party all night.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Patty asked us while the girls went off for a moment to greet their aunts, seven sea hags with weird hair that looked like algae. “The case is I’m feeling worried about you, though I can’t believe it myself. Look, mermen have very bad tempers. They might decide to sock you if they hear about this. And I think the purpose of all this is precisely for them to notice.”

“Their lousy tempers are the reason why some merrows prefer to marry mortal men,” added Parrot Peter. “They say mortals are less prone to violence than mermen and much more grateful than fay men. Maybe all you will have to be grateful to the girls for when the night is over is a black eye.”

“Arley can’t say no to a lady,” said Alpin. “Especially if he is acquainted with her family. So he is going to do this, yes or yes.”

“Well, I’ll try to remember that when I have to ask him for something,” said Patty.

“You are no lady,” replied Alpin. “And who knows who your folks are? I can say no to anyone, but someone has told me this here Ibiza has a small palace under the sea full of marvels and treasures. And I mean to show some interest in her because I am interested in that.”

“I see. Well, mortals are grateful for just a good catch at sea,” said Parrot.

“Why do you keep insisting that humans are better than us fays?” scolded Alpin.

“Mortals are often more grateful and less exacting than you fay men,” said Patty.

“You are saying that, Patty, because you were a mortal once yourself. Well, return to them and marry one, will you?”

“Patty is one of us,” I said. “Leave her be.”

“You are saying that, Arley, because you thought you might be a mortal once yourself. And since you are quite dumb, you probably still think you could be one. It’s obvious this subject stresses you.”

“Those guys have teeth like barracudas. They will sink their teeth into you and you’ll return home maimed. You don’t go, Arley,” Pati advised me.

I smiled weakly.

“Ah, silly boy!” she sighed. “You think this will be worth it.”

At that moment, Aphoticus the Fatal Frenchman, one of the skeleton waiters at The Jealous Merrow’s, who is considered a jonah by everyone except Lira, approached us with a trayful of oysters.

“They will bury you with the carnival sardine,” he whispered gloomily.

“Well, I, for one, don’t see those guys anywhere about,” said Alpin, “and that is because they are nowhere near.”

And that was the end of the conversation, because while Alpin gulped down all the oysters, Lola and Ibiza returned to fetch us.

“The night is young and so are we,” they said. “We’re going to party at the coolest discos, boys!”

Alpin and I did the best we could to look a little older, and I think we also managed to look at least fifteen too.

“Should I grow a moustache?” Alpin asked me.

“Just grow taller,” I replied.

And the girls took us from club to club, making sure we attracted a lot of attention wherever we went. They took us to BIG FISH, the disco of Apple Island’s yacht club, where they have the best seafood canapés in the island, to Sargassum, owned by Jamaicans and frequented by the voodoo crowd, where we danced the limbo with people pretending to be spiders carousing on what looked like eight legs all over the dance floor and one of them kept trying to bite our ankles, to La Isleña Loca, fun-filled with Latin musicians showing off their skills, to Melhoun, where the music was rousing rai blues. All this meant we danced till we almost dropped. By the time we arrived at Katastrophic, Alpin was yelling, “We’re here to burn this place down!” So we had to leave before we were kicked out of there. Next to that is the Honolulu Baby Hawaiian Bar and Karaoke, owned by our old friends the mentalists Minafer Ominous and Gemaniah Worrywart. And we decided to step in there and say hi. The owners invited us to Blue Hawaii Jell-O shots and were the only people to bless our ears with words of encouragement. “Stay calm, whatever happens. You’ll come out of this in one piece,” they foretold. We thanked them for the shots and the happy prediction.

The mess hit the fan when we entred a waterfront bar called Grimy’s, a frightful place that not even the girls had been to before. They argued a lot with each other before deciding to enter it, but we finally did because this seemed to be necessary for their purposes.

Merville and Marmaduke were not in there either. Well, at least they weren’t until two minutes after we had stepped in and just before some bounders began to approach us to try to steal our girls. Fate chose to have the ex boyfriends clash with the trash in that place before anyone got to us, and we fled from the bar through a window in what purported to be the toilet.

Lola and Ibiza were delighted with the fray they had provoked and laughed and laughed thinking of the blows their ex boyfriends had to be receiving.

“Don’t you two be scared,” Lola said to us. “It takes two to tangle.”

“They can make themselves invisible. If they are receiving, it’s because they want to give out,” Ibiza explained.

And then they took us to the marvellous underwater palace that Alpin had heard about. And the best part of the night happened there, because the girls were very happy and grateful for our cooperation. We knew this was a one time deal, but we were happy anyway. We four parted fast friends and I am convinced we will  remain so.