If I wasn’t watching her, if I was distracted by some domestic task, she would creep upstairs and hold on to her mother like a little monkey, as if she could hug her into life. The way she cried at night broke your heart. I remember calling up to my sister in the heavens, asking her what the hell I was meant to do with these offspring of hers.
By day nine I had had enough. I was exhausted from looking after the guests and this tearful child, who had not been able satisfactorily to explain what was going on, just as I in return could explain nothing to her. I wanted my bed back, and a moment’s peace. I had never had a family of my own, so I wasn’t used to the chaos that children bring, their endless morphing needs and demands, and I got snappy.
By that stage I half suspected it was drugs: Liza was so distanced from life, so pale and disengaged. It could have been anything, I had concluded, with some discomfiture – we had had so little contact over the past few years. Fine, I thought. If this was what she was bringing to my doorstep, she would have to address it. She would have to abide by my rules.
‘Get up,’ I yelled at her, opening the window and placing a fresh mug of tea beside her. When she didn’t respond, I pulled back the covers, trying not to wince at how painfully thin she was. ‘C’mon, Liza, it’s a beautiful day and it’s time for you to get up. Your daughter needs you, and I have to get on.’
I remember how she turned her head, her eyes dark with remembered horrors, and how my resolve vanished. I sat down on my musty bed, taking her hand between mine.
‘What is it, Liza?’ I said softly. ‘What’s going on?’
And when she told me I hauled her into my chest and held her, white-knuckled, my eyes on the distant horizon, as finally, twelve thousand miles and several hundred hours later, she wept.
It was after ten o’clock that evening when we heard that a baby whale had beached. Yoshi had called me on the radio that afternoon to tell me they had seen a female humpback in distress, swimming up and down at the mouth of the bay. She and Lance had come quite close but they hadn’t been able to work out what was wrong: she bore no obvious signs of illness, dragged no loose nets that might have cut into her. She just kept swimming, following some strange irregular path. It was abnormal behaviour for a migrating whale. That evening, as they took out a night party, a boatload of office workers from an insurance firm in Newcastle, they discovered the beached calf.
‘It’s the one we saw before,’ said Liza, as she put down the receiver. ‘I know it.’
We had been sitting in the kitchen; it was a chilly night, and Mike had retreated to the lounge to read a newspaper in front of the fire.
‘Can I help?’ he said, when he saw us in the main hallway, pulling on our jackets and boots.
‘Could you stay here so that Hannah’s not alone? Don’t tell her what’s going on if she happens to wake up.’
I was surprised that Liza asked him – she had never so much as employed a sitter since she’d been here – but we had to get out as quickly as possible, and I suppose she had made up her mind about his character as I had. ‘We may be a while,’ I said, patting his arm. ‘Don’t wait up. And whatever you do don’t let Milly out. The poor whale will have enough on its plate without a dog running around it.’
He watched as we climbed into the truck. I had the feeling he would rather have come with us and helped. In my rear-view mirror I saw him silhouetted in the doorway the whole way down the coast road.
There are few more heartbreaking sights than a beached calf. Thank God I’ve seen it only twice in all my seventy-odd years. The baby lay in the sand, maybe two metres long, alien and vulnerable, yet oddly familiar. The sea pulled at it gently, as if the waves were trying to persuade it to go home. It could only have been a few months old.
‘I’ve called the authorities,’ said Greg, who was already there, trying to stop the animal being sucked too deep into the grit of the shore. It was no longer legal to try to move a whale without official help: if it was sick you could do more harm than good. And if well-wishers turned it towards the sea, it might call in an entire pod: the next day they would be beaching themselves in terrifying numbers, as if in sympathy. ‘He might be sick,’ Greg said. ‘Pretty weak, but.’ His jeans were wet to half-way up his legs where he had been kneeling. ‘He’ll still be nursing, and he’s not going to last long without milk. Reckon he could have been here a few hours already.’
The calf lay on its side, its nose pointed towards the shore, its eyes half closed as if in contemplation of its misery. It looked pitiful, somehow too unformed to be alone in this environment.
‘He didn’t beach because he’s sick. It’s those bloody boats,’ hissed Liza, grabbing her bucket and heading to the sea to fill it. ‘The music is so loud it’s disorientating them. The little ones haven’t got a chance.’
There were no man-made lights along our coast road, and the three of us worked in near silence for almost an hour waiting for the National Parks people or the lifeguards to arrive from down the coast, the light from our torches swinging backwards and forwards as we walked down to the sea and back again, trying to keep the beast wet. We were as quiet as possible. A whale’s size gives a misleading impression of its robustness. In reality it is as easy to lose the life of this vast creature as it is to lose that of a fairground goldfish.
‘Come on, baby boy,’ whispered Liza, kneeling in the sand periodically to stroke its head. ‘Hang on in there while we get you a stretcher. Your mum’s out there, waiting for you.’
We suspected this was true. Every half an hour or so we heard a distant splash, bouncing off the pine-covered hills behind the main stretch – the sound perhaps of her searching the seas, judging how close she could come. It was heartbreaking to listen to that mother’s anguish. I tried to block my ears to it as we moved round each other. I was afraid that the mother, in her desperation, would beach herself.
Three times Greg called up on his phone, and once I drove up the road, trying to raise the lifeguards. But it was past midnight before the National Parks and Wildlife rangers reached us. Communications had apparently broken down; the wrong location had been reported; someone else had vanished with the only available stretcher. Liza barely heard their explanation, saying, ‘Look, we need to get him out into the water. Quickly. We know his mother’s still out there.’
‘We’ll try and float him,’ they said, and rolled the baby on to the dolphin stretcher. Then, grunting with the effort, they walked it into the shallows, apparently heedless of the unforgiving cold of the waves. Standing on the shore, I watched as they discussed whether to try to put him on one of the boats and take him out to his mother, but the National Parks man said he wasn’t sure that the calf was strong enough to survive the upheaval, let alone swim. And they were fearful that the mother would feel threatened by the boat, and leave the area.