Silver Bay (27 page)

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 back’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.

But towards the end of that winter something odd happened. At first it was the slapping. When a whale is sending a warning, either to humans or other whales, it engages in ‘the peduncle slap’, thrashing the water with the flukes of its tail or, occasionally, just slapping the surface, its tail flat side down, sending out a noise that reverberates for miles. We don’t see it often – we try not to upset the whales – but suddenly I seemed to see it in all of the few that surfaced.

Then, at least two weeks earlier than they should have done according to migration patterns, they disappeared. Perhaps it was the extra boat traffic; perhaps they had sensed somehow that things were changing, and chose not to grace us with their presence. Either way those of us who operated off Whale Jetty gradually found it harder to locate them – even at a time when they should have been surfacing at a rate of two or three a trip. At first we hardly liked to admit it to each other – it was a mark of honour to be able to find the whales, and only those like Mitchell Dray hung off everyone else’s coat tails. When we got talking, each of us discovered that our experience was not unique. By mid-September, things had got so bad that both the
Moby
s switched temporarily to dolphin trips round the bay. It was less lucrative, but it meant less disappointment for the customers and, more importantly, fewer refunds.

Then the dolphins seemed to disappear too. There were so few some days that we knew them by sight, and were conscious of the risk of harassing them. As we headed for October I was the only boat still going out every day, more in hope than expectation. The seas, dark and swaying around me, seemed alien, even on the brighter days. I felt the whales’ absence, as I felt the absence of all those things I’ve loved. I couldn’t believe so many sea creatures would just leave us, that they would change the behaviour of centuries at whim. And grieved by the past weeks’ events, perhaps a little unhinged by loss, I found myself yelling at them one day when I had gone out alone. I stood, holding the wheel, my voice bouncing off the waves, ignored by the creatures who perhaps swam beneath me, hiding themselves from an increasingly unfriendly world.

‘What the hell am I meant to do?’ I shouted, until Milly stood up on the bridge and whined with uneasiness. But I knew that somehow it was my fault, that I had failed the creatures of the sea, as I had failed my children. And my question disappeared, caught and carried away on the wind: ‘What the hell am I meant to do?’

At four p.m. on the last Thursday in September John John rang to say Mr Gaines had suffered a heart attack. My aunt Kathleen was a tough woman. They didn’t call her Shark Lady for nothing. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry.

Sixteen

Mike

Monica’s guest bedroom was a guest bedroom in only the loosest of senses. It was not remotely geared up for guests, and was a bedroom only in that, along with the fourteen cardboard boxes, two electric guitars, a mountain bike, forty-nine pairs of shoes, a 1960s pine chest of drawers, framed posters of various rock groups I had never heard of and my childhood train set, it contained a camp-bed.

‘I’ll clear you a space,’ she had promised, when I had concluded that it made no financial sense for me to stay long-term in a hotel and had tentatively mentioned moving in. But in Monica’s world that didn’t mean clearing some boxes, or even transferring the bike to the communal hallway, but instead shifting a bin-bag or two of clothes so that there was room, just about, for the camp-bed to open out on the floor.

There I lay, night after night, the springs digging through the foam mattress into my back, the leathery scent of my sister’s old shoes permeating the dusty room as, like some penitent, I considered the mess I had made of what had seemed at the time a rather good life.

I had an ex-fiancée whose hatred of me was only exceeded by her determination single-handedly to propel the new hotel I didn’t want into existence. I had no home, since she had informed me in a typed letter that the very least she expected was that I should allow her to buy out my half; the same went for the car. She had promised me a market rate, although I hadn’t bothered to check what that might be and had merely agreed. It seemed pretty irrelevant now, and if it made her feel better to score a few thousand off me, then I was happy to let her.

I had a dead-man-walking role at work where, although I had retained my position as partner, I was no longer consulted on any of the remaining deals, let alone deferred to, even by the secretaries. At the moment Vanessa had contradicted me at the Silver Bay project meeting, my authority had been fatally undermined. I found that there were crucial ‘meetings’ at the pub to which I had somehow not been invited, messages for me that were somehow diverted to other people. Dennis ignored me. Even Tina, perhaps scenting my diminished status, no longer found me attractive. All of which left me with two choices: fight to hold on to my job, trampling over anyone who stood in my way, in order to become, again, a Big Swinging Dick in the office, as Dennis so elegantly put it, or leave, and take what remained of my reputation to a rival developer. I had the appetite for neither.

Worst of all, I sat in at the meetings with Vallance, read the copied-in documentation and watched, at a distance of several thousand miles, the slow but steady progress of the project that would ruin Silver Bay, and the lives of those at the Silver Bay Hotel. The site was restored, the derelict Bullen property already bulldozed. There was a planning inquiry, which, we were assured, should go through ‘on a nod and a wink’. I knew that Dennis was only holding me in position because of Vallance – if he lost such a key member of his team at this crucial moment they would look twice.

I also knew that to survive professionally beyond this deal I had to sharpen up. But I was immobilised, unable to apply my old analytical rigour to the state of my career, paralysed by indecision and guilt.

And night after night I lay sleepless on the camp-bed, surrounded by the detritus of someone else’s life, waiting for my own to make sense again.

One thing was clear: Vanessa had released me at the moment she had said she wanted the development to go ahead. When she had looked at me every last atom of love was gone, and I was sobered by the depth of her enmity.

‘Bloody hell. You can’t blame her.’ Monica handed me a glass of wine. One of the many conditions of my stay with her was that I had to put together the flat-pack chest of drawers she had bought several weekends ago, so I was seated amid piles of MDF and clear plastic bags with too few screws. In the interests of effective engineering, I should have stopped drinking several glasses earlier.

I got through quite a lot that month – in fact, I was drunk much of the time. Not that anyone would have guessed. I was not like Greg, loud, obstreperous, demanding. I was a subtle drunk. The third double whisky slipped down discreetly. The glass of wine turned into a bottle and a half. It was not that I had an addictive personality, but break-ups are not suited to male patterns of behaviour. We do not have groups of friends to prop us up and endlessly analyse our former partner’s actions. We do not go in for aromatherapy baths and scented candles to ‘pamper ourselves’ or read inspirational stories in magazines to feel better. We go to the pub or sit alone in front of the television with a drink or two.