‘Hannah!’ I yelled. ‘You’ve got to swim. Come on.’
The light swung away from us, then back again. For a millisecond I saw her face, still fixed on the water, drained of colour. She was sobbing hard, lost to me, paralysed by what she now knew to be beneath her.
‘Hannah!’ I pleaded. I couldn’t climb up to her: my limbs were too cold and there was nothing for me to hang on to.
‘Hannah!’ I drew up my leg involuntarily as I felt it bump against something.
Then, over the rain, my yelling and Milly barking behind us, I caught her wail of despair: ‘Brolly!’
It was, I hope, the closest I will ever come to a vision of hell.
Hannah’s hand reached towards me, and as I turned, perhaps fifty feet of that ghost net was illuminated again with its grisly, helpless haul. I thought, with a chill, of its sheer length, of the number of creatures dying silently below, of the whalechasers and crew trying to cut the living away.
‘You’ve got to get her out!’ Hannah was screaming. ‘You’ve got to!’
‘Hannah, we’ve got to get to the boat!’ I shouted.
But she was near-hysterical. ‘Cut her free! Please, Mike. Cut her free!’
There wasn’t any time to debate. I took a deep breath and, when the light swung round again, I grasped the cutters and ducked under the water.
The most surprising thing was the silence. After the noise and wind and rain and Hannah’s screaming, I felt a strange relief at being away from all the chaos. Then the looming shape of the trapped dolphin swayed into view and I lunged for it, realising as I did so how easily my own limbs might be trapped in that net, how easily I might be dragged down. I swung at the net with the cutters, trying to keep a purchase as the surprising weight of the ghost net pulled it away. I cut, and as I wrestled with the net, I felt the nylon filaments give. The dolphin twisted, perhaps frightened out of its deathly torpor by this new threat. As the light dipped and swooped upon us I saw that the animal was bleeding, that its dorsal fin had been almost sliced away, that its skin was cut where it had fought against the fibres. I had to keep closing my eyes as the corpses of the dead kept rising up to meet me, the net swirling, threatening to make me part of that terrifying haul.
‘Mike!’
I heard, at a distance, Hannah’s muffled wail. And then, suddenly, I had cut through the last of the net and the dolphin fled, wavering, into the murky dark, heading towards what I hoped was open water.
I broke the surface, my mouth a huge retching O of relief. ‘Hannah!’ I shouted, holding up the cutters. Finally, her face white with fear, she slipped over the edge of the boat and into my arms, pressing her face against mine so that she didn’t have to see any more of what surrounded us.
After she had established that I had cut the dolphin free she said nothing during the trip back to shore. She asked, her mouth pressed to my ear, if I had seen a baby, and when I said no, she buried her face in Milly’s wet neck.
I held her close to me as we bucked and dipped back across the waves, and tried not to shiver too violently, but the looks I exchanged with the two men told me everything I needed to know about how lucky we had been.
Liza was already running towards us when we arrived at the jetty. She was wearing a wet-suit, and her eyes were dark with fear. She didn’t even see me, so desperate was she to grab her daughter to her.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ Hannah was crying, her frozen, bloodless arms wound tightly round her mother’s neck. ‘I just wanted to help them.’
‘I know you did, darling. I know . . .’
‘But Brolly . . .’ Hannah began to sob violently. ‘I saw . . .’
Liza grabbed the blanket that was held towards her, wrapped her daughter in it and rocked her gently on her haunches as if she were much younger than eleven. A small crowd had gathered, standing on the dark sand, illuminated by car headlights. ‘Oh, Hannah,’ she kept saying, and what I heard in her broken voice nearly felled me.
‘I’m so sorry, Liza,’ I said, when she finally looked up. I was shaking hard, despite the blanket someone had placed round my own shoulders. ‘I was only upstairs five minutes and—’
She shook her head mutely, and in the dark I found it impossible to say whether she was excusing me, or warning me not to come closer, perhaps shaking her head in disbelief at the unbelievable folly of a man who couldn’t keep an eye on an eleven-year-old girl for fifteen minutes.
‘I reckon the little boat’s a goner,’ said someone. ‘Nets are all wrapped round her rudder. I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes down.’
‘I don’t care about the boat.’ Liza’s face was pressed to her daughter’s. And then, as Hannah cried harder: ‘It’s okay, baby, you’re safe now.’ It was hard to tell whether she was comforting Hannah or herself.
I stared at them, wishing I could envelop them in my arms. I felt again the dragging sensation I had noticed when I was pulling against the net, as I grasped that I had sabotaged my last chance with Liza, and what my lack of watchfulness had almost cost her.
I felt something catch in my chest, and dropped my head. Then someone shouted that one of the larger boats was caught in the net, and several people headed back down the beach towards the jetty.
A woman I didn’t know handed me a mug of sweet tea. It scalded my mouth, but I didn’t care. Then Kathleen appeared behind me. ‘We’d better get you back,’ she said, laying a gnarled hand on my shoulder.
Suddenly Greg was running towards us, through the dark. ‘Liza?’ he was shouting. ‘Liza?’ His voice was full of fear. ‘I just heard. Is Hannah okay?’ There was something proprietorial in that fear, and for once I felt sympathetic, rather than indignant.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, into the blackness, hoping Liza would hear me. Then, flanked by people I didn’t know, I turned and walked slowly up the path towards the hotel.
It was almost one in the morning before I began to feel warm again. Kathleen had forbidden me the steaming bath I craved, but had plied me with hot tea until I had to plead with her to stop. She had built up the fire in my room – in the fireplace I had assumed was merely decorative – and as I shivered under several duvets, she brought up a concoction of her own, which included hot lemon, honey, something spicy and an equal measure of brandy. ‘You can’t take any chances,’ she said, tucking me in as if I were a child. ‘You’d be surprised at what being in seas like that can do to you.’