Silver Bay (15 page)

We have no pictures of the time when she arrived here. What would have been the point?

And now, five years on, what would a photograph of her show? A wiser, stronger woman. Someone who might not have come to terms with the past, but whose character contains a fierce determination to elude it.

A good mother. A courageous, loving person, but sadder, more guarded than I’d like her to be. That’s what her photograph would show. If she’d let us take one.

The following morning, as Hannah and Liza sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast, a delivery man arrived, his van – like all delivery vans – skidding to a halt in the grit outside. Audibly chewing gum, he handed me a box addressed to Mike, which I signed for. By the time Mike came down – he was eating with us in the kitchen most days now – Hannah was in a frenzy of curiosity about it.

‘You got a parcel!’ she announced, as he appeared. ‘It came this morning.’

He picked up the box and sat down. He was wearing the softest-looking sweater I had ever seen. I fought the urge to ask if it was cashmere. ‘Quicker than I’d thought,’ he observed. He handed it to Liza. ‘For you,’ he said.

I’m afraid the look she gave him was of deep suspicion.

‘What?’

‘For you,’ he said.

‘What’s this?’ she said, staring at it as if she didn’t want to touch it. She hadn’t yet tied back her hair, and it fell round her cheeks, obscuring her face. Or perhaps that was the point.

‘Open it, Mum,’ said Hannah. ‘I’ll open it, if you want.’ She reached over, and Liza let it slide from her fingers.

As I sliced bread, Hannah attacked the plastic security wrapping, digging at the stubborn bits with the knife. A few moments later she ripped it off and examined the cardboard box underneath.

‘It’s a mobile phone!’ she announced.

‘With a video facility,’ said Mike, pointing to the image, ‘like mine. I thought you could use it to film those boats.’

Liza stared at the little silver gadget; so exquisitely small, it seemed to me, that you couldn’t have dialled a number without a pencil point and a microscope. After an age, she said, ‘How much did it cost?’

He was buttering a slice of toast. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘I can’t accept it,’ she said. ‘It must have cost a fortune.’

‘Can you make films on it?’ Hannah was already rifling through the box for the instructions.

Mike smiled. ‘Really, it cost nothing. I did a deal a while back with the company that manufactures them. They were happy to send it to me.’ He patted his pocket. ‘That’s how I got mine.’

Hannah was impressed. ‘Do lots of people send you stuff for free?’

‘It’s called business,’ he said.

‘Can you get anything you want?’

‘You usually only get something if the person giving it thinks they might one day get something in return,’ he said, and added hurriedly, ‘In business, I mean.’

I thought about that phrase as I put down the milk in front of him, a little harder than I’d intended. I tried not to think of our meeting the previous day.

‘Look,’ he said, when Liza had still not touched the phone, ‘treat it as a loan, if you like. Take it and use it for the whale-migration season. I didn’t like what I saw the other day, and it would be nice to know that you had some more ammo against the bad guys.’

I could see that this was a persuasive argument for my niece. I suppose he had guessed that she couldn’t have afforded a piece of equipment like that if she’d had two full boats a day for the entire season.

Finally, tentatively, she took the phone from Hannah. ‘I could send pictures straight to the National Parks,’ she said, turning it over in her hand.

‘The minute you saw anyone doing anything wrong,’ he said. ‘May I have some more coffee, Kathleen?’

‘Not just the disco boats, but all sorts of things. Creatures in distress, wrapped in fishing lines. I could lend it to other boats if I wasn’t using it.’

‘I could take a film of the dolphins in the bay and show it at school. If you took me out to see them, I mean.’ Hannah looked at her mother, but Liza was still staring at the little phone.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said eventually.

‘It’s nothing,’ said Mike, dismissively. ‘Really. You don’t have to say any more about it.’ As if to underline the point he picked up the newspaper and began to read.

But just as I could tell he wasn’t taking in the printed words before him, I had a feeling about that phone, which was confirmed later in the day when, as I was making his bed, I found the receipt. It had been ordered in Australia, through some Internet site, and had cost more than this hotel takes in a week.

The day that Liza and Hannah arrived here, I drove the three hours to Sydney airport to pick them up, and when we got back to the hotel Liza lay down on my bed and didn’t get up for nine days.

I was so frightened by day three that I called the doctor. It was like she was in some kind of coma. She didn’t eat, she didn’t sleep, she took only occasional sips of the sweet tea that I placed on the bedside table and declined to answer any of my questions. Most of the time she lay on her side and stared at the wall, sweating gently in the midday heat, her pale hair lank, a cut on her face and a huge bruise down the side of her arm. Dr Armstrong spoke to her, pronounced her basically healthy and said it might be something viral, or possibly a neurosis, and that she should be left to rest.

I guess I was just relieved she hadn’t come here to die, but she had brought me enough to cope with. Hannah was only six, anxious and clingy, prone to tearful outbursts and often to be found wandering weeping through the corridors at night. It was unsurprising, considering she had travelled for a day and two nights to a place she didn’t know to be looked after by an old lady she had never met. It was high summer, and she came out in a rash from the heat, got bitten half to death by mosquitoes, couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t let her run around outside. I was afraid of the sun on her fair skin, afraid of letting her too close to the water, afraid of her not coming back.

If I wasn’t watching her, if I was distracted by some domestic task, she would creep upstairs and hold on to her mother like a little monkey, as if she could hug her into life. The way she cried at night broke your heart. I remember calling up to my sister in the heavens, asking her what the hell I was meant to do with these offspring of hers.

By day nine I had had enough. I was exhausted from looking after the guests and this tearful child, who had not been able satisfactorily to explain what was going on, just as I in return could explain nothing to her. I wanted my bed back, and a moment’s peace. I had never had a family of my own, so I wasn’t used to the chaos that children bring, their endless morphing needs and demands, and I got snappy.

By that stage I half suspected it was drugs: Liza was so distanced from life, so pale and disengaged. It could have been anything, I had concluded, with some discomfiture – we had had so little contact over the past few years. Fine, I thought. If this was what she was bringing to my doorstep, she would have to address it. She would have to abide by my rules.

‘Get up,’ I yelled at her, opening the window and placing a fresh mug of tea beside her. When she didn’t respond, I pulled back the covers, trying not to wince at how painfully thin she was. ‘C’mon, Liza, it’s a beautiful day and it’s time for you to get up. Your daughter needs you, and I have to get on.’

I remember how she turned her head, her eyes dark with remembered horrors, and how my resolve vanished. I sat down on my musty bed, taking her hand between mine.

‘What is it, Liza?’ I said softly. ‘What’s going on?’

And when she told me I hauled her into my chest and held her, white-knuckled, my eyes on the distant horizon, as finally, twelve thousand miles and several hundred hours later, she wept.

It was after ten o’clock that evening when we heard that a baby whale had beached. Yoshi had called me on the radio that afternoon to tell me they had seen a female humpback in distress, swimming up and down at the mouth of the bay. She and Lance had come quite close but they hadn’t been able to work out what was wrong: she bore no obvious signs of illness, dragged no loose nets that might have cut into her. She just kept swimming, following some strange irregular path. It was abnormal behaviour for a migrating whale. That evening, as they took out a night party, a boatload of office workers from an insurance firm in Newcastle, they discovered the beached calf.

‘It’s the one we saw before,’ said Liza, as she put down the receiver. ‘I know it.’

We had been sitting in the kitchen; it was a chilly night, and Mike had retreated to the lounge to read a newspaper in front of the fire.

‘Can I help?’ he said, when he saw us in the main hallway, pulling on our jackets and boots.

‘Could you stay here so that Hannah’s not alone? Don’t tell her what’s going on if she happens to wake up.’

I was surprised that Liza asked him – she had never so much as employed a sitter since she’d been here – but we had to get out as quickly as possible, and I suppose she had made up her mind about his character as I had. ‘We may be a while,’ I said, patting his arm. ‘Don’t wait up. And whatever you do don’t let Milly out. The poor whale will have enough on its plate without a dog running around it.’

He watched as we climbed into the truck. I had the feeling he would rather have come with us and helped. In my rear-view mirror I saw him silhouetted in the doorway the whole way down the coast road.

There are few more heartbreaking sights than a beached calf. Thank God I’ve seen it only twice in all my seventy-odd years. The baby lay in the sand, maybe two metres long, alien and vulnerable, yet oddly familiar. The sea pulled at it gently, as if the waves were trying to persuade it to go home. It could only have been a few months old.

‘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.