Silver Bay, Page 20

  'Bloody hell,' said Dennis, studying the figures. 'That's some change you're proposing.' He sucked his teeth, flicked through the two bottom pieces of paper. 'That's going to cost almost twenty per cent of the total budget.'

  He had not, I noted hopefully, dismissed it all out of hand. 'But we lose the costs of the S94 by building on an existing site. If you look at column three, you'll see there is very little in the final figures. This is a less risky option. Really.'

  'Less risky, eh?' Dennis turned to Vanessa. 'Ditch the whole thing, eh? You really think we should move the whole development to this second site?'

  She looked at him, and then she turned slowly to me. Her eyes were cold. 'No,' she said. 'I've considered this carefully. I think we should go ahead with what we've got.'

  Fifteen

  Liza

  I saw a whale today, one of the last of the season. She came right up to the boat with her calf and they sat there starboard side in the clear blue water, looking at us, as if they had nothing better to do in all the world. She was closer than she should have been, close enough for me to see each little cut of the mother's 'fingerprint', the pattern on her tail fluke, close enough to see the calf lie still and happy, half protected under the belly of its mother. The customers were thrilled - they squealed, took pictures and video footage, and said aloud it was an experience that had changed their lives, something they would never forget. They said they'd heard I had a way of finding the whales, and now that they'd seen it was true, they'd recommend me to all their friends. But I couldn't smile. I wanted to shout at the whale to take her baby far from here. I kept seeing that calf, washed up on the shore, covered with tarpaulin. I didn't want her to trust us like she did.

  I suppose I shouldn't have been shocked at what Mike had done. But I was. I'd really thought that, after everything I'd been through, I could spot someone like him a mile off. And the knowledge that I'd failed gnawed away at me, woke me up from what little sleep I ever had. It sat over me and mocked me when I woke, joined the chorus of other voices that told me much of what I had ever done was wrong.

  I suppose the raw anger I carried with me in those early days was directed at myself; for what had been my stupidity. For allowing myself to sleepwalk us all into danger. And, perhaps, for allowing myself to think, even briefly, that my life might be allowed to take a different course from the one I have long since resigned myself to.

  But I was angry with pretty much everyone; with Mike for lying to us, with the planners for considering his proposal without considering the whales, with Kathleen for letting him stay on so that I'd had to live with his perfumed accomplice floating around my house flashing her engagement ring and pretending none of it mattered, and then with Greg for - well, for being such an idiot. He was round every day, half furious with me, half wanting my forgiveness. We seemed to end up shouting at each other every time we met. I think we were both all over the place for a while, and neither of us had the energy to be kind.

  I don't know why - I hadn't felt like that for some time - but for several days during that first week while Mike and his girlfriend remained in the hotel it had been an effort to get myself out of bed. Then he had gone. And somehow that didn't make it any better.

  Hannah had picked up on it. She had told me, a little defiantly, that Mike had paid her for her photographs, showed me the brown envelope packed with notes, and before I could say a word she had announced that she was donating the money to the National Parks to help rescue stranded sea creatures. She had spoken to them, she said, and there was enough to buy another dolphin stretcher and some over. How could I refuse her? I knew there was some small part of my daughter that wanted to defend Mike, and for that I hated him even more.

  She seemed low. She had stopped asking about the New Zealand trip and spent a lot of time in her room. When I asked if anything was the matter she told me, very politely, that she was fine, in a way that let me know my presence wasn't wanted. I missed my daughter, though. At night, when she still crept into my room, I held on to her sleeping form as if I was making up for all the times in the day when she no longer chose to be near me. So, all in all, we were a disjointed household that winter. The whalechasers often stayed away in the evenings, as if sitting out together gave them too acute a sense of what might be lost. Yoshi, Lance told me, smoking furiously, was thinking of resuming her academic career. Greg's ex had finally relinquished her claim on Suzanne, but he didn't behave as if this was any great victory. I think that, having stopped scrapping with her about the boat, he had had the head space to think about what he had lost, and introspection didn't suit him.

  The demolition of the Bullen place went ahead at the end of August. Overnight, wire fencing went up round it, contractors from out of town, with their team of great yellow prehistoric machines, came and clawed it to pieces. Less than seventy-two hours later the fencing was gone and there was nothing left but a dug-out patch of disturbed earth where the old house and sheds had been. When I steered in and out of the bay it looked like a great scar on the land, a mournful O of protest.

  To add to the despondent mood, the skies were unusually grey and soulless. A seaside town enveloped by grey is a place with the joy vacuumed out. Guest numbers had fallen, the local motels dropped their rates to recapture the weekend trade. We all put our heads down against the wind and tried not to think about any of it too hard. And all the while those boats kept circling. It was as if they had heard about the hotel complex and decided it was open season. Twice I was out by Break Nose Island and those triple-deckers came thudding along the coastline, full of drunks, deafening the ocean with their music. Ironically, one was describing itself in the local paper as providing 'all the excitement of a whale-watching trip'. After I had rung the paper and told them exactly what I thought of them for carrying the advertisement, Kathleen told me baldly that if I carried on like that I'd give myself an ulcer.

  She seemed oddly reconciled to our fate. Either way, since our discussion in her office that night we didn't talk much about it. I didn't understand why she was so willing to let Mike off the hook, and she didn't enlighten me. Night after night Kathleen lay at her end of the house, and I lay awake in my little room at the end of the corridor, listening to the sea and wondering how long I would still be able to hear that sound before, inevitably, Hannah and I were forced to pack our bags and move on.

  At the start of September the council offices announced there would be a planning inquiry and everyone would be allowed to have their say. Few in Silver Bay held out much hope that our say would make a difference: in previous years we had seen many such developments in and around the various bays, and nine times in ten they went ahead in the face of the fiercest local opposition. Given the amount of supposed benefits Mike's company was offering, I couldn't see that this inquiry would pay any more than lip service to our views.

  And, besides, the opposition was far from straightforward. It had become an issue that divided the town: there were those who accused us whalechasers of dramatising the whales' plight; a greater number who didn't seem to care much one way or the other; and some pointed out that what we did was an intrusion in itself. It was hard to refute that, especially when we were faced with the fact that other boats, with less rigorous codes of behaviour, increasingly treated our waters as their own. The cafe owners and boutique managers had an interest in a bigger, busier town and, while it sounds unlikely, I had some sympathy for them. We all had to earn a living and I knew more than most that some seasons were harder than others.

  Then there were the whalechasers, the fishermen and those who simply enjoyed the presence of the dolphins and the whales, and others who didn't want to see our quiet bay become loud and lively, like so many places that people like us would pay good money to avoid. But it felt as if we were the quieter of the voices. It felt as if we were unlikely to be heard.

  The newspapers covered the debate with what seemed unhealthy relish (it was the best story they'd had since the great pub fire of '84). They w
ithstood the accusations of bias that flew from both sides, and repeatedly called on the planners, developers and council officers to justify and rejustify their position until I guessed even they were sick of the sound of their own voices. Twice I saw Mike's name mentioned and, despite myself, read what he had said. Both times he talked about compromise. Both times I heard his voice in my head as clearly as if he'd spoken and wondered how someone could say so much and mean so little, at the same time.

  Let me tell you something about humpbacks. The first time I saw one I was a child of eight. I was on holiday, out fishing with my aunt Kathleen and my mother, who didn't like fishing but didn't want me in the boat alone with my aunt. Her big sister Kathleen, she said jokingly, was liable to forget everything if faced with the challenge of a large fish, and she didn't want me plopping over the edge while Kathleen reeled one in. I suspect now that she had just wanted an excuse to spend time with her sister - by then they had lived on separate continents for several years, and the distance hurt them both.

  I loved those holidays. I loved the sense of safety, of my own immersion within a family I had not been aware I had. I didn't have a father in England; my mother called Ray McCullen 'careless', and my aunt called h im something a little spicier, until my mother shook her head, as if it were something that shouldn't be said in front of me. It certainly wasn't to be mentioned in front of anyone else. I was brought up by women, by my mother in England and, when we were sent the money, by Aunt Kathleen and my grandmother in Australia. Kathleen's mother, my grandmother, was a shadowy sort, as indistinct a memory as Kathleen was a sharp one. She was the kind of woman who had no interests, who cooked and raised a family, and then, once those duties had been discharged, seemed a little lost. A woman of her time, Kathleen would say. My few memories of her stem from my two visits as a child, and are of a benign, distant presence in the back rooms of the hotel, lost to television soaps or asking me questions ill suited to my age.

  Kathleen, said everyone old enough to remember, was her father's daughter. She was always doing something, gutting fish or sneaking me into the empty Whalechasers Museum, which, to a child of eight, seemed the height of freedom. My mother, a good fifteen years younger, always seemed the more mature of the two, dressed to the nines with immaculate hair and makeup. Kathleen, with her worn trousers and unbrushed hair, her salty language and her shark tales, was a revelation to me. Her godlike status was sealed on our second visit when she took me out fishing with my mother, and we were joined by an unexpected visitor.

  She had been carefully explaining the different flies in her little fabric roll and attaching them to her line when, not ten feet from us, making no sound except the gentle breaking of the waters, a huge black and white head surfaced. My breath lodged in my throat and my heart was thumping so hard that I thought the terrifying creature would hear it.

  'Aunt Kathleen,' I whispered. My mother was asleep on a berth, her lipsticked mouth slightly open. I remember wondering fleetingly whether it was preferable to be asleep when you were killed so you wouldn't know what had happened.

  'Wh-what's that?'

  I honestly thought we were about to be eaten. I could see what I thought were its teeth and its huge, assessing eye. I had seen the old engravings of malevolent sea creatures, had seen the broken-backed Maui II in the museum, testament to nature's fury with man. This huge creature appeared to be weighing us up, as if we were some tempting seaborne morsel.

  But my aunt just glanced behind her, then turned back to her bait. 'That, sweetie, is just a humpback. Pay it no attention, it's just being nosy. It'll go soon enough.'

  She paid it no more heed than a seagull. And, sure enough, some minutes later, the huge head slid back beneath the waves and the whale was gone.

  And this is what I love about them: despite their might, their muscular power, their fearsome appearance, they are among the most benign creatures. They come to look, and then they go. If they don't like you, their signals are pretty clear. If they think the dolphins are getting a little too much attention from our passengers, they will occasionally come part way into the bay and jealously divert them. There is often a child-like element to their behaviour, a mischievousness. It is as if they cannot resist discovering what's going on.

  Many years ago the early whalers referred to humpbacks as the 'merry whale' for the way they performed - and when I began working the boat trips five years ago I discovered the nickname held true. One day I would call up the other whalechasers on the radio and find a whale swimming upside-down on the surface, one flipper waving. The next I would come across one launching fully out of the water with a 360-degree breach, like an oversized ballerina pirouetting for the sheer joy of it.

  I'm pretty sure I could never be described as 'merry', but Kathleen once told me she suspected I felt such a bond with the whales because they are solitary creatures. There is no male-female bond - not a lasting one, anyway. The male plays no parenting role to speak of. She didn't add that the females are not monogamous - by then she hardly needed to - but they are admirable mothers. I have seen a humpback risk beaching itself to nudge her baby into deeper water. I have heard the songs of love, and loss, breaking into the silence of the deepest parts of the ocean, and I have cried with them. In those songs you hear all the joy and pain of any mother's happiness held captive by their baby's heart.

  After Letty died, there was a period when I thought I would never be happy again. There is nothing redemptive about the loss of a child, no lessons of value it can teach you. It is too big, too overwhelming, too black to articulate. It is a bleak, overwhelming physical pain, shocking in its intensity, and every time you think you might have moved forward an inch it swells back, like a tidal wave, to drown you again.

  If you can blame yourself for that child's death, the days when you can get your head above water are even fewer. I had trouble, in those early days, remembering that I had two daughters. I can thank Hannah for my existence now, but in the weeks after we got here I was so lost that I had nothing to give her. No reassurance, no physical comfort, no love. I was locked somewhere untouchable, my nerve endings seared with pain, and it was a place so ugly I half think I wanted to protect her from coming too close.

  That was when I saw the sea as my one opportunity for release. I eyed it not as a thing of beauty, of reassuring permanence, but as an alcoholic views a secret stash of whisky: savouring the fact that it was there and the potential for relief that it promised. Because there was no relief from Letty's absence, not from the moment I woke or during my disjointed, nightmare-filled sleep. I felt her resting against me, smelt the honey scent of her hair and woke screaming when I realised the truth of where she lay. I heard her voice in the silence, my head echoed with the last wrenching screams of our separation. There was a hole in my arms where her weight should have been, which, despite the presence of my other daughter, grew into an abyss.

  Kathleen is no fool. She must have guessed my intentions when I expressed interest in that boat. My depression insulated me from the idea that I might be transparent. One afternoon, when the two of us dropped anchor round the heads, she secured Ishmael, turned away and said, with a bite in her voice, 'Go on, then.'

  I had stared at her back. It was a bright afternoon, and I remember thinking absently that she wasn't wearing sun cream. 'Go on what?'

  'Jump. That's what you're planning, isn't it?'

  I had thought I was numb to feeling, but it was as if she had kicked me in the stomach.

  She turned, and fixed me with a gimlet stare. 'You'll excuse me if I don't look. I don't want to have to lie to your daughter about what happened to her mother. If I don't look I can pretend you fell overboard.'

  I let out a coughing sound then. Air kept expelling itself in little gasps from my chest, and I couldn't speak.

  'That little girl has been through too much,' Kathleen continued. 'If she knows you didn't love her enough to stay here for her, it will finish her off. So, if you're going to do it, do it now while my ba
ck's turned. I don't want to spend the next six months living on my nerves, wondering how I'm going to protect her from it.'

  I found myself shaking my head. I couldn't speak, but my head moved slowly from side to side, as if I was telling her, telling myself, even, that I wasn't going to do what she had predicted. That somehow I was making a decision to live. And even as my body made that decision for me, some small part of my mind was thinking, But how do I live? How is it possible to exist with so much pain? For a moment the prospect of having to go on, with all that inside me, seemed overwhelming.

  It was then that we saw them. Seven whales, their bodies slick with seawater as they rose and fell around Kathleen's boat. There was a kind of graceful rhythm to their movements, a flowing continuity that told us of their journey. After circling the boat, they dived. Each emerged briefly, then vanished below the waves.

  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.