There will be other developments, and other threats, and we’ll keep fighting. But now we do it without fear. Nino Gaines – or should I say my husband? – bought the old Bullen place. A wedding present for me, he said. A bit of security for the girls. I don’t like to think too hard about how much he paid for it. He and Mike have ideas for the space. They occasionally go down together to the faded hoardings and walk the land, but when it comes down to it, neither of them seems like they actually want to do anything. And I get on with doing what I always have, running a slightly ramshackle hotel at the end of the bay and getting a little fidgety if we have too many visitors.
Down the coast road, the southern migration is shaping up just fine. There are reports every day of pods, mothers and babies, and on the surface, passenger numbers are pretty well what they were at the same time last year. The whalechasers come and go, the occasional new face replacing the old, bringing the same salty tales, the same jokes and complaints to my benches each evening. Yoshi went back to Townsville to study whale conservation, promising to return, and Lance often talks about visiting her, but I doubt he will. Greg is courting – although that may be too delicate a word for it – a twenty-four-year-old barmaid from the RSL, and she seems to give him as good as she gets. He spends less time around the hotel, anyhow, and I can see that suits Mike fine.
And Letty thrives. She and Hannah hang on to each other as if it was five days they were separated, not five years. Several times I’ve found them sharing a bed, and made to move them, but Liza says not to bother. ‘Let them sleep,’ she says, looking at them entwined. ‘They’ll want space from each other soon enough.’ When she speaks there’s such a lightness in her voice that I can’t believe she’s the same woman.
The first few weeks were strange. We tiptoed round the child, afraid that this strange series of events, this sudden shift of circumstance would leave her shattered. For a long time she stayed glued to her mother, as if afraid that she would be ripped apart from her again, and in the end I took her down to the museum and showed her my harpoon and told her that anyone who thought they were coming near any of my girls would have Old Harry to answer to. She was a little surprised, but I think she was reassured. Nino tells me drily that there was probably a reason I never had children.
She was better once her father had called: he told her he was happy for her to stay here, and would allow all decisions to be hers. From that point on she slept properly – albeit in her sister’s bed. And there it ends. Mike’s sister, true to her word, never printed her story. Mike says it’s actually a love story – not about him and Liza, although you only have to look at them laughing together to know that that’s the case – but about Liza and her daughters. Sometimes, if he’s teasing me, he says it’s about me and Nino.
I tell him I don’t see it that way. Look out at the sea for long enough, at its moods and frenzies, at its beauties and terrors, and you’ll have all the stories you need – of love and danger, and about what life lands in your nets. And the fact that sometimes it’s not your hand on the tiller, and you can do no more than trust that it’ll all work out okay.
Almost every day now, if Liza doesn’t have too many trips booked, they head out together on Ishmael to see the whales still making their way back to their feeding grounds. At first I thought it was Liza’s way of creating a family, of binding them together, but soon I realised that they were as drawn to it as she was. It’s not just about the creatures they see, they tell me. It’s about what they don’t. The girls like to watch the humpbacks disappear, enjoy the thought that, after some spectacular breach, there’s a whole life beneath that they cannot see. Songs being sung into an abyss and lost forever, relationships being forged, babies being nurtured and loved. A world in which we and the mindless things we do to each other are unimportant.
At first Mike laughed at them for being fanciful, but now he shrugs and admits: what the hell does he know? What does any of us know? Stranger things have happened, especially in our little corner of the world.
And I watch the four of them now, running down Whale Jetty in the sunshine, and I think of my sister, and perhaps my father, who would have enjoyed a story like this. (‘We thought you had company,’ I tell them, wherever they are. ‘But, boy, were we mistaken.’) They would have understood that this story is about an elusive balance; about a truth we all struggle with whenever we’re blessed enough to be visited by those creatures or, indeed, whenever we open our hearts – that sometimes you can damage something wonderful merely through proximity.
And that sometimes, Mike adds firmly, you don’t have a choice. Not if you want to really live.
I never let him know, of course. I can’t let him think he has it all his own way. But I have to say in this case, just in this case, I agree with him.