As a spectacle, then, it diverted me from the most despairing thoughts I have ever had. But later, when we returned home and I took my poor living, grieving child in my arms, I saw that, although I was sceptical about ‘signs’, there had been a message in what I had seen. It was to do with life, death and cycles, the insignificance of things, perhaps the knowledge that everything will pass. One day I will be reunited with my Letty again, although I no longer expect to choose when that will be.
If there is a God, Hannah tells me sometimes, when we are alone in the dark, He will understand. He will know that I am a good person. And I hold my daughter close to me and think that possibly, just possibly, her mere existence is proof that that might be true.
Since that day on the boat, I have never had a problem with finding the humpbacks – Kathleen always said I could smell them and, odd as it sounded, there was some truth in it. I just seemed to know where they were. I followed my nose, and although it often seemed an impossibility, staring at those waves in the hope that one would metamorphose into a nose or a fin, nine times out of ten they would show for me.
But towards the end of that winter something odd happened. At first it was the slapping. When a whale is sending a warning, either to humans or other whales, it engages in ‘the peduncle slap’, thrashing the water with the flukes of its tail or, occasionally, just slapping the surface, its tail flat side down, sending out a noise that reverberates for miles. We don’t see it often – we try not to upset the whales – but suddenly I seemed to see it in all of the few that surfaced.
Then, at least two weeks earlier than they should have done according to migration patterns, they disappeared. Perhaps it was the extra boat traffic; perhaps they had sensed somehow that things were changing, and chose not to grace us with their presence. Either way those of us who operated off Whale Jetty gradually found it harder to locate them – even at a time when they should have been surfacing at a rate of two or three a trip. At first we hardly liked to admit it to each other – it was a mark of honour to be able to find the whales, and only those like Mitchell Dray hung off everyone else’s coat tails. When we got talking, each of us discovered that our experience was not unique. By mid-September, things had got so bad that both the Mobys switched temporarily to dolphin trips round the bay. It was less lucrative, but it meant less disappointment for the customers and, more importantly, fewer refunds.
Then the dolphins seemed to disappear too. There were so few some days that we knew them by sight, and were conscious of the risk of harassing them. As we headed for October I was the only boat still going out every day, more in hope than expectation. The seas, dark and swaying around me, seemed alien, even on the brighter days. I felt the whales’ absence, as I felt the absence of all those things I’ve loved. I couldn’t believe so many sea creatures would just leave us, that they would change the behaviour of centuries at whim. And grieved by the past weeks’ events, perhaps a little unhinged by loss, I found myself yelling at them one day when I had gone out alone. I stood, holding the wheel, my voice bouncing off the waves, ignored by the creatures who perhaps swam beneath me, hiding themselves from an increasingly unfriendly world.
‘What the hell am I meant to do?’ I shouted, until Milly stood up on the bridge and whined with uneasiness. But I knew that somehow it was my fault, that I had failed the creatures of the sea, as I had failed my children. And my question disappeared, caught and carried away on the wind: ‘What the hell am I meant to do?’
At four p.m. on the last Thursday in September John John rang to say Mr Gaines had suffered a heart attack. My aunt Kathleen was a tough woman. They didn’t call her Shark Lady for nothing. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry.
Sixteen
Mike
Monica’s guest bedroom was a guest bedroom in only the loosest of senses. It was not remotely geared up for guests, and was a bedroom only in that, along with the fourteen cardboard boxes, two electric guitars, a mountain bike, forty-nine pairs of shoes, a 1960s pine chest of drawers, framed posters of various rock groups I had never heard of and my childhood train set, it contained a camp-bed.
‘I’ll clear you a space,’ she had promised, when I had concluded that it made no financial sense for me to stay long-term in a hotel and had tentatively mentioned moving in. But in Monica’s world that didn’t mean clearing some boxes, or even transferring the bike to the communal hallway, but instead shifting a bin-bag or two of clothes so that there was room, just about, for the camp-bed to open out on the floor.
There I lay, night after night, the springs digging through the foam mattress into my back, the leathery scent of my sister’s old shoes permeating the dusty room as, like some penitent, I considered the mess I had made of what had seemed at the time a rather good life.
I had an ex-fiancée whose hatred of me was only exceeded by her determination single-handedly to propel the new hotel I didn’t want into existence. I had no home, since she had informed me in a typed letter that the very least she expected was that I should allow her to buy out my half; the same went for the car. She had promised me a market rate, although I hadn’t bothered to check what that might be and had merely agreed. It seemed pretty irrelevant now, and if it made her feel better to score a few thousand off me, then I was happy to let her.
I had a dead-man-walking role at work where, although I had retained my position as partner, I was no longer consulted on any of the remaining deals, let alone deferred to, even by the secretaries. At the moment Vanessa had contradicted me at the Silver Bay project meeting, my authority had been fatally undermined. I found that there were crucial ‘meetings’ at the pub to which I had somehow not been invited, messages for me that were somehow diverted to other people. Dennis ignored me. Even Tina, perhaps scenting my diminished status, no longer found me attractive. All of which left me with two choices: fight to hold on to my job, trampling over anyone who stood in my way, in order to become, again, a Big Swinging Dick in the office, as Dennis so elegantly put it, or leave, and take what remained of my reputation to a rival developer. I had the appetite for neither.
Worst of all, I sat in at the meetings with Vallance, read the copied-in documentation and watched, at a distance of several thousand miles, the slow but steady progress of the project that would ruin Silver Bay, and the lives of those at the Silver Bay Hotel. The site was restored, the derelict Bullen property already bulldozed. There was a planning inquiry, which, we were assured, should go through ‘on a nod and a wink’. I knew that Dennis was only holding me in position because of Vallance – if he lost such a key member of his team at this crucial moment they would look twice.