I left then, to be with Hannah when she woke for school, and partly to escape a scene I found unbearable. I’m glad I didn’t see the two injections go in, and the National Parks man’s anguish as both failed to send the baby to sleep. It took him a further twenty minutes to find a gun, but Yoshi told me afterwards that before they had placed the barrel to the baby whale’s head the poor little creature let out a quiet, gurgling breath and died. They had all wept then, shivering in the morning mist. Even the big National Parks guy, who said it had been his second beaching in a fortnight.
But, in Yoshi’s words, Liza had lost it. She had sobbed so hard that she had almost hyperventilated, and Greg had held on to her for fear that she was not herself. She had half waded into the water, her arms outstretched, crying out an apology to the mother, as if she, personally, had failed. She had cried so hard as they covered the body with a tarpaulin, protecting it from the curious gaze of passers-by, that the National Parks men had asked Lance, on the quiet, if she was, you know, all right.
It was then, Yoshi said, that Liza had calmed down a little. Greg had given her a large brandy – he had a bottle in the glove compartment of his truck. While Lance and Yoshi took a restorative tot, she had sunk several more. And then, after a few more still, as the sun rose over Silver Bay, illuminating the body on the beach and the blameless beauty around it, as the cries of what we all hoped had not been its mother faded away, Liza had climbed unsteadily into the truck and headed off to Greg’s.
Nine
Mike
Curse that jet-lag. It was just after six a.m. and I was uncomfortably awake, thinking about the conversation I had just had with Dennis in England, trying to tell myself I wasn’t feeling the things I was pretty sure I shouldn’t be feeling.
I didn’t need to guess what had happened. I had woken shortly after four, and lain awake for some time, my thoughts humming malevolently in the dark. Eventually I got up, discovered that the hotel was still empty, but for myself and Hannah, and wandered through the deserted rooms. Finally I came back to mine with a pair of Kathleen’s binoculars and focused them out of the side of the bay window. I could just make out the flickering of torchlight, the occasional illumination of the scene on the beach by someone’s headlights. In flashing pools of light I had watched Greg and the other whales wade in and out of the water and, some time later, I had recognised – from the colour of her jacket – Liza seated on the sand, and two guys talking beside what looked like a tarpaulin.
I cursed the jet-lag and told myself that it was possible to regain it even if you’d been sleeping perfectly well for more than a week. At that point I had drawn the curtain, made some coffee and fought the urge to look out again. There is something compelling about life-or-death drama, even when it involves an animal. But for me the compulsion to look always brought with it a slight queasiness, as if being so interested in it was indicative of something deficient in my character, something exploitative and cold.
Besides, being able to watch other people unseen made me think of secrets, things I had not told Vanessa . . . things that still threatened to swell and engulf me with the evidence of my duplicity. In Silver Bay, for the most part, I had managed to forget my own actions, losing them in distance and different time zones, and because I now felt, half the time, as if I were living someone else’s life. But in the silent hours before dawn there were no distractions. There was little way of escaping the truth about myself.
Then, before I could ponder these and other such matters of the small hours any longer, Dennis had rung, apparently heedless of the time difference, explosive with barely suppressed fury at his enforced bedridden state and insisted on me detailing every conversation, every step I had taken towards the progression of the development. He was hard to reassure at the best of times, but nigh on impossible when he was in this mood. In the office, when he was like this, we would disappear to imaginary meetings and lie low until, like a hurricane, he had blown himself out. A man of extremes, for ninety per cent of the time he could be the most generous, upbeat character, the kind of person who makes you want to be a better version of yourself, who makes you perform beyond what you had believed was your reach. This was one of the reasons I wanted to work for and with him. But for the remainder he could be simply bloody.
‘Have you secured the planning permission?’ he demanded.
‘It doesn’t work that quickly here.’ I twisted my pen in my fingers, wondering why this man, who was allegedly not that much more than my partner, my equal, could bring me out in an adolescent sweat even at a distance of twelve thousand miles. ‘I told you so before I came.’
‘You know that’s not what I want to hear. I need it to be a done deal, Mike.’
‘There may be a few problems with . . . the ecological side of things.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘The watersports might . . . be considered to impact negatively on the local sea life.’
‘It’s a bay!’ he spluttered. ‘It’s a bay that’s held ships, oyster beds, speedboats, you name it. Has done for a hundred years. How can our fun and games off one tiny bit of shoreline be thought to affect anything?’
‘We may get a bit of resistance from the whale-watchers.’
‘Whale-watchers? What are they, a load of Greenpeace-loving lentil-eaters?’
‘They’re the most important tourism attraction in the bay.’
‘So what the hell do they do day in, day out?’
I stared at the receiver. ‘Um, watch whales? . . .’
‘My point exactly. And what the hell do they watch the whales in?’
‘Boats.’
‘Yachts? Rowboats?’
‘Motorboats.’ I could see where he was going.
When I looked out of the window again everyone, even the whale, was gone.
At around six I heard the screen door, and arrived at the bottom of the stairs to find Kathleen peeling off her wet coat in the hall. In the pale glow of the morning light, she looked done in, somehow older and frailer than she had twelve hours earlier, her movements muddied by exhaustion. Liza wasn’t behind her.
‘Let me take your coat,’ I said.
She brushed me aside. ‘Don’t fuss,’ she said, and from her tone I guessed the fate of the baby whale. ‘Where’s Hannah?’
‘Still asleep.’ It was more than could be said for Liza’s dog, who had scratched at the door and whined from the moment they had left.