Twice when I had got up I had remembered some minutes later that I had left my case in the sand, and had had to go for it, with all the handle-missing and toppling over that that now apparently entailed. I had sand everywhere, in my nose, my hair and my shoes, but I kept a tight hold of my wallet, holding it out in front of me so that I could keep an eye on it at all times. My parents had always impressed upon me the need to hang on to your wallet when in a strange country.
When I made it to the hotel I felt an almost euphoric sense of achievement, tempered only by the fact that I could no longer remember why it had been so important to get there. I dropped my case outside the door, then gazed at the note, which swam around in front of me. I snatched at it vaguely a few times, in an attempt to make it stay still.
Then, suddenly immeasurably weary, I decided I needed a lie-down. The wooden benches were too narrow – I wasn’t sure whether I could actually sit on them, let alone lie down on one – and the sand, at this end of the beach, was pebbly. I could just make out the invitingly dim interior of the Whalechasers Museum a short distance away and stumbled towards it. I would grab forty winks in there, and when I woke I would remember what the hell I was meant to be doing here.
I woke to the sound of shouting. At first it had been part of my dream – I was on an aeroplane, and the stewardess was trying to wake everybody up because until we all flapped our wings the thing would not rise off the ground. Gradually, through the fog of jet-lag and whisky, I became aware that even as the stewardess evaporated, the shouting was louder, and her grip on my arm was uncomfortably tight.
‘Let go,’ I murmured, trying to shift away from her. ‘I don’t want any peanuts.’
But then as my eyes opened and grew accustomed to the light, I realised I knew the face. Standing above me, her yellow oilskin flapping like the wings of some great bird, was Liza McCullen. And she was shouting at me: ‘I don’t believe it! Like, this is all we need – Mike bloody Dormer turning up here drunk. You stink, do you know that? You stink of whisky. And what the hell do you think you’re doing just coming in here like you own the place?’
I closed my eyes again slowly, feeling a strange calm descend on me. The weird thing was that, just before I did, I could have sworn I saw Kathleen smiling behind her.
Seventeen
Kathleen
He told me I should ‘step up’. He told me he had discussed it with his sister, who was a journalist and knew about such things, and that I could be the main focus of a feature on ‘The Shark Lady Trying to Save the Whales’, or some such. He said that publicity was the best chance we had of increasing opposition to the development and that it had to spread wider than this town, given that so many people seemed not to care much one way or the other.
I told him I didn’t want to stir all that up again and that I certainly didn’t want to feature in any newspapers. He looked at me like I was insane. ‘It would bring a lot of publicity. Helpful publicity,’ he said.
‘It might interest a few local people but there’s only so much interest a seventy-five-year-old woman who once caught a shark can generate. Better just let all that be.’
‘I thought you were seventy-six.’
I shot Hannah a look that would have stopped me in my tracks, had I been her age. But the young seem so much less mindful of such things, these days.
‘Kathleen, I told you I would fix this, and I’m doing my best. But we have to have a strategy and, believe me, this is the only strategy available to us at the moment.’
Mike had had three days to recover his equilibrium, and although he still looked tired, he had regained that peculiar self-containment, the professionalism, that had characterised his early days here. If anything, he had become more serious since his return. He had come back to save us, he had announced, with some fervour, when we stumbled across him in the Whalechasers Museum. It’s hard to take a man seriously, even a longed-for saviour, I’d told him afterwards, when he’s lying drunk on the floor with wet shoes and seaweed up his nose. He appeared to have taken this to heart.
‘Really. I’ve had specialist media advice on this.’ He was wearing an ironed shirt. It was as if he thought this might make us take him seriously.
‘Mike, I know you mean well, and I’m touched you saw fit to come back to help us. But I’ve told you, I don’t want to dredge up all that Shark Lady business again. It’s been the bane of my life, and I don’t want the attention.’
‘I thought you might be proud of it.’
‘Shows how little you know.’
‘You should be proud of it,’ said Hannah, cheerfully. She had been surprisingly pleased to see Mike – certainly more so than her mother. ‘I’d be proud of killing a shark.’
‘I don’t think killing is ever something to be proud of,’ I muttered.
‘Well, then, use the death of that shark to help the whales.’ Mike nodded at me.
‘I’m not going to be the Shark Lady again. I have enough on my plate without stirring all that up.’ I pursed my lips, and hoped he’d leave it there.
‘Liza then,’ he said. She had been doing her best to ignore him, her head buried in the newspaper. But she was, I noted, in the kitchen, rather than her bedroom or on board Ishmael, her traditional places of retreat.
‘Liza what?’ she said, not looking up from the paper.
‘You’d make a great figurehead for the campaign.’
‘Why?’
‘Well . . . there aren’t many female skippers. And you know a lot about whales. You’re . . .’ here he had the grace to cough and flush ‘. . . you’re a good-looking woman. I’ve been told how it all works and—’
‘No,’ she said abruptly.
I stood very still at the sink, wondering what she would say next.
After a moment she added, a little defensively, ‘I don’t want – Hannah exposed to . . . all that.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Hannah. ‘I’d like to be in the paper.’
‘It’s the only way to stop the development,’ Mike said. ‘You have to galvanise as much support as you can. Once people know what’s—’
‘No.’
He stared at her. ‘Why are you being so stubborn?’
‘I’m not.’
‘I thought you’d do anything for the whales.’
‘Don’t you dare tell me what I should be doing for the whales.’ Liza folded up her newspaper and slammed it down on the table. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, none of this would have happened and we wouldn’t be in this bloody mess.’