Silver Bay Read online

  'I've called the authorities,' said Greg, who was already there, trying to stop the animal being sucked too deep into the grit of the shore. It was no longer legal to try to move a whale without official help: if it was sick you could do more harm than good. And if well-wishers turned it towards the sea, it might call in an entire pod: the next day they would be beaching themselves in terrifying numbers, as if in sympathy. 'He might be sick,' Greg said. 'Pretty weak, but.' His jeans were wet to half-way up his legs where he had been kneeling. 'He'll still be nursing, and he's not going to last long without milk. Reckon he could have been here a few hours already.'

  The calf lay on its side, its nose pointed towards the shore, its eyes half closed as if in contemplation of its misery. It looked pitiful, somehow too unformed to be alone in this environment.

  'He didn't beach because he's sick. It's those bloody boats,' hissed Liza, grabbing her bucket and heading to the sea to fill it. 'The music is so loud it's disorientating them. The little ones haven't got a chance.'

  There were no man-made lights along our coast road, and the three of us worked in near silence for almost an hour waiting for the National Parks people or the lifeguards to arrive from down the coast, the light from our torches swinging backwards and forwards as we walked down to the sea and back again, trying to keep the beast wet. We were as quiet as possible. A whale's size gives a misleading impression of its robustness. In reality it is as easy to lose the life of this vast creature as it is to lose that of a fairground goldfish.

  'Come on, baby boy,' whispered Liza, kneeling in the sand periodically to stroke its head. 'Hang on in there while we get you a stretcher. Your mum's out there, waiting for you.'

  We suspected this was true. Every half an hour or so we heard a distant splash, bouncing off the pine-covered hills behind the main stretch - the sound perhaps of her searching the seas, judging how close she could come. It was heartbreaking to listen to that mother's anguish. I tried to block my ears to it as we moved round each other. I was afraid that the mother, in her desperation, would beach herself.

  Three times Greg called up on his phone, and once I drove up the road, trying to raise the lifeguards. But it was past midnight before the National Parks and Wildlife rangers reached us. Communications had apparently broken down; the wrong location had been reported; someone else had vanished with the only available stretcher. Liza barely heard their explanation, saying, 'Look, we need to get him out into the water. Quickly. We know his mother's still out there.'

  'We'll try and float him,' they said, and rolled the baby on to the dolphin stretcher. Then, grunting with the effort, they walked it into the shallows, apparently heedless of the unforgiving cold of the waves. Standing on the shore, I watched as they discussed whether to try to put him on one of the boats and take him out to his mother, but the National Parks man said he wasn't sure that the calf was strong enough to survive the upheaval, let alone swim. And they were fearful that the mother would feel threatened by the boat, and leave the area.

  'If we can stabilise him,' someone was muttering, 'we might be able to get him further out to the bay . . .'

  They rocked the calf gently, helping it recover its water balance, which it would have lost during its time on the shore. After an hour or so, they went deeper, Liza and Greg now submerged to their chests, neither wearing a wet-suit, shivering as they urged the little creature to swim towards its mother. Liza's teeth were chattering and I was chilled too.

  Still the baby didn't move.

  'Okay, we won't push him off,' said one of the men, when they had given up hope of him swimming. 'We'll just stand here for a bit and let him work out where he is while he's supported. Perhaps he needs a little more time to orient himself.'

  Even half elevated by water a baby whale is awesomely heavy. From the shore, Yoshi at my side, I watched as the four of them stood, Liza's thin shoulders braced against the weight, and whispered words of encouragement to the calf, trying to will it into swimming back to its mother.

  By that time it was getting on for two a.m. and it was obvious to us all that the calf was in a bad way. It seemed exhausted; its breathing was irregular, its eye closing periodically. Perhaps it had been sick before, I thought. Perhaps its mother knew this but still couldn't let it go.

  I don't know how long they stood there. The night took on a weird, timeless quality, the hours creeping along in a fug of cold, muttered conversations and growing despair. Two cars came past, lured by the sight of torchlight on the beach. One was full of giggling young people who got out and offered to help. We thanked them and sent them away - the last thing the poor creature needed was a load of drunken teenagers careering about the place. At one point Yoshi and I made coffee on the berthed Moby One, then she and Lance stepped in so that each helper could break for fifteen minutes and warm themselves with a hot drink. But the night dragged, and I borrowed a jacket to go on top of the one I was already wearing because somehow the bones of the old chill that much deeper.

  Then we heard it: a terrible, faint sound from out at sea, a strange keening and lowing, the rare sound of whalesong above water.

  'It's his mother!' cried Liza. 'She's calling him.'

  Yoshi shook her head. 'The females don't sing,' she said. 'It's far more likely to be a male.'

  'How many times have you heard whalesong with your head above water?' Liza demanded. 'It's the mother, I know it.'

  Yoshi didn't push the point. Eventually she said, 'There have been studies that showed a singer accompanying the mother and child at a distance. Like an escort. He may have been looking out for them.'

  'Doesn't seem to have done this little fellow much good,' said one of the National Parks men, as we sat on the damp sand. 'He doesn't seem to have the energy to fight.'

  Next to me, Liza shook her head. Her fingers were blue with cold. 'He's got to. He's just disorientated. If we give him long enough, he might work out where his mother is. That he can hear her must count for something.'

  But none of us was quite sure how much that little calf could hear now. To me the poor thing looked half dead, and he was now visibly battling for breath. I was no longer sure who they were holding it in the water for. By then I was barely able to stay on my feet; while I have a robust constitution, I'm too old to stay up all night, and found that when I sat down, as Yoshi kept telling me to do, I would drift off briefly, brought to by the urgent discussions a few feet away.

  For that is the worst thing when a whale beaches: it is as if they have chosen to die, and we humans, uncomprehending, merely prolong their agony by fighting it. Every time one is saved, every time one swims triumphantly out to sea, it makes us more certain of our actions, more sure that we should only ever fight to save them. But what if sometimes we should leave well alone? What if the baby needed to go? And if we had left him alone, would the mother have come and nudged him back into the water herself? I had heard of it happening. The idea that we might have contributed to the animals' distress was too awful to dwell on and I closed my mind to it, trying to think instead of domestic minutiae - Hannah's sports shoes, a broken kettle, the last time I did my accounts. Occasionally, I suspect, I drifted into sleep.

  Finally, as the sun broke over the headland, casting a pale blue light over our little group on the sand, I jolted properly awake as one of the National Parks guys announced that there was no hope. 'We should euthanase,' he said, rubbing his eyes. 'Leave it any longer and we'll risk the mother coming in and beaching herself.'

  'But he's still alive,' said Liza. The pale light revealed her to be grey and exhausted. She kept shivering in her wet clothes, but refused to change into the dry ones offered by Yoshi, because they'd only get wet when she went in again. 'Surely while there's life . . .'

  Greg placed his arm round her shoulders and squeezed. His eyes were rimmed with red, and his face was dark with stubble. 'We've done everything we can, Liza. We can't risk the mother too.'

  'But he's not actually sick!' she cried. 'It's just those bloody b
oats. If we can get him out to his mother, he'll be okay.'

  'No, he won't.' The National Parks man laid a hand on the baby's back. 'We've had him here for eight hours, we've walked him into deeper water and back to the shallows, and he's barely moved. He's too young to rear, and he's too frail to get back out there. If we take him deeper he'll drown, and that's not something I'm prepared to be part of. I'm sorry, guys, but he's not going anywhere.'

  'It's a bad business,' said Lance. Yoshi, drawn under his arm, had begun to cry - I was fighting tears myself.

  'Half an hour more,' Liza pleaded, her hands smoothing the baby's skin. 'Just half an hour more. If we can just get him back to his mother . . . Look, she'd know if he wasn't going to make it? Right? She'd have left him by now.'

  I had to look away. I couldn't bear what I heard in her voice. The man headed for his truck. 'His mother's not going to help him now. I'm sorry.'

  'Let him die close to her, then,' Liza pleaded. 'Don't let him die alone. We can take him out to be close to her.'

  'I can't do that. Even if the trip didn't traumatise him, there's no guarantee that she'd let us anywhere near. We might stress her even more.'

  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.

  Kathleen nodded. 'Thank you,' she said. She was stooped. It was the first time I had seen her as an old woman. 'I'm going to make a pot of tea. Do you want some?'

  I guessed that the death of the baby whale was unusual enough to have shaken her, although I was surprised that someone renowned for killing a shark could feel such grief for another sea creature. And all the while I was pondering this, sitting at the kitchen table because Kathleen had insisted on making the tea herself, I realised I was half waiting for the sound of the
door, for Liza's oilskin to swish against the wall as she came in and dropped her keys into the bowl on the hall table.

  'Poor bloody creature,' she said, when she finally sat down. 'Didn't have a chance. We should have shot it at the beginning.'

  I drank two mugs of tea before I had the courage to say anything. In the end, I tried to sound casual. I observed that Liza had obviously decided to go out early on Ishmael, and almost before the words had left my mouth Kathleen gave me a look that suggested there was no point in either of us pretending. 'She's with Greg,' she said.

  The words hung in the air.

  'I didn't realise they were an item.' My voice sounded high and false.

  'They're not,' she said wearily. And then, apparently apropos of nothing, 'She took the calf dying very personally.'

  There was a lengthy silence, during which I eyed my empty mug and tried not to let my thoughts stray. 'But surely there wasn't anything she could have done,' I said. It was a platitude. I couldn't understand how a dead whale meant she had to sleep with Greg.

  'Look, Mike, Liza lost a child five years ago, just before she came to live here. This is her way of dealing with it.' She dropped her voice, pulled her mug closer to her and took a sip of tea. Her hands, I noticed, were large and workmanlike, not soft and gentle like my mother's. 'Unfortunately it means that once or twice a year that poor fool thinks he has a hope.'

  While I was digesting this news, she stood up, using her palms as leverage, and announced through a barely suppressed yawn that she had better get Hannah up. Her abrupt change of subject told me she didn't want to discuss the matter any further. The light flooding through the kitchen window made her skin seem washed out, a far cry from her usual ruddiness. I wondered what she'd been through, down on the beach. It was easy to forget how old she was.

  'I'll drive her to school if you want,' I said. 'I've got nothing else planned.' Suddenly I knew I needed a task to stop me thinking. I wanted Hannah's cheerful chatter about the pop charts, technology lessons and school dinners. I wanted to be going somewhere in my car. I wanted to get out of this house. 'Kathleen, did you hear me? I'll take her.'