The Missing One (14 page)

I stare at the email. It contains more information than I've had from my father over my entire lifetime.

I type right back:

The minute I press ‘send' I regret it. I should never have mentioned the affair. He is vulnerable and grief-stricken and we don't talk like this – ever. I can't know what I've just
brought up for him, or how that feels. He may have done things he regrets, but he must be in pain right now, and I have just made it worse.

I start another mail.

I shut down my emails and chuck the phone into my bag, aware that every time I open my emails this situation gets worse.

I look at Finn, fast asleep on his back, hands thrown up. As long as he has me, he really doesn't care where he is. I certainly won't be taking him to any more old people's homes. I'm sure there was something I didn't tell Alice about Harry Halmstrom, but I can't remember what it was now.

If I do meet Susannah Gillespie and find out things about my mother as a young woman then maybe this jet lag will be worth it. I begin to feel sleepy. I feel as if I might wake up in the morning in my bed in Oxford, with Doug, and all this will have been a deranged dream.

As I begin to slip in and out of sleep, I suddenly remember what it was that I didn't tell Alice. My eyes snap open. It was something else that Harry Halmstrom said as I stood in his overheated room.

‘Changed your hair, though … ' he said. ‘Changed your hair … '

Lately, Elena had taken to pausing at the tank on her way home to spend a few minutes with the whales. It didn't feel right to just walk by every night. No one was ever around at that time, so she'd sit with them for a bit. The male always kept his distance, but the female, Bella, recognized her and would swim slowly over. Once, sitting on the edge of the tank, Elena leaned her head right down so that her hair trailed into the water. The whale came up and nosed the strands, curiously, and very gently. She knew that each tooth in the whale's mouth was the size of a man's thumb, but there was no sense of threat; Elena could feel the whale's curiosity. There was something tender about it.

But today Bella wasn't paying any attention to humans. Elena could picture the massive heart pumping inside her chest as she circled the tank. She felt as if the sound of that heart should be audible through the headphones but all she could hear was the rushing noise of the colossal body pushing through the water as Bella circled. Then the
contraction passed, and she sank again, obviously exhausted.

Elena yanked off one side of the earphones and addressed the backs of the men's heads. ‘Do you think it's getting close?'

None of them looked round, or answered.

She leaned through them, and poked Dan's arm. ‘Dan? It feels close. Doesn't it?'

The head trainer turned to her. His face was pallid. Like her, he'd been up most of the night before, and this had been a long day. Still no sign of a baby. He shrugged and turned back, hands in the pockets of his shorts.

The truth was, none of them had a clue how this would pan out, not even the vet with his Yankees cap drawn down, and a beaten-up jacket always on, despite the warmth of the evening, a toothpick perpetually twirling at the corner of his mouth. None of them knew if this was how a killer whale birth was supposed to go. They were all impotent, standing there like spectators at a show that is somehow going wrong.

She flipped the headphones back on and glanced at the sound dials on the tape recorder. She peered, again, through the glass tank wall at the hydrophone, down behind the ladder. The whales had ignored the black wire at first, when she dropped it into the tank. Finally Orpheus had come over to inspect it: he stared at it, carefully, for twenty minutes. Then he swam away. Neither orca had looked at it since.

The whale was silent during her contractions, but between them she spoke to Orpheus in low chirrups. He didn't make any sound during the contractions either,
but he replied as she spoke to him, and moved across the tank to her. Elena wondered what the exchange meant. Their sounds were so much deeper, and slower than those of the dolphins. They had an almost spiritual effect on her as if they were tapping into a hidden rhythm in her subconscious. Every time they stopped, she felt a wrench.

Orpheus seemed calm, coming close but not too close, and even when he was out of Bella's way, he kept his eye on her all the time. Elena wondered if both of them understood, instinctively, what was happening. Perhaps he knew, through echolocation, that there was a baby inside her. Then again, how could they know the true implications of this? Neither of them would surely remember the births they might have witnessed in the wild. She wondered if they were afraid. Were these sounds reassurance? She had to be careful. It was far too easy to anthropomorphize. But they did seem to be talking to one another.

There were more contractions, each one coming a few minutes after the last. She had to remind herself that the baby was likely to come out just fine. She knew from anatomy that orcas are better adapted to birth than humans: their babies don't have to navigate a narrow pelvis and they emerge through soft tissue, not bone. But still, this seemed like an awfully long and hard process. The baby could be stuck, or in the wrong position – or dead – but none of them would know, or be able to help even if they did know. There was something brutal and experimental about just standing there, watching. She looked at the men's backs, and wanted, suddenly, to shove
them between their broad shoulder blades and shout, ‘Do something!'

Another hour passed.

And then, suddenly, the whale pulled away from her partner. She began to swim fast and then to corkscrew just below the surface, moving round the rim, as if she was rehearsing a new trick, swirling in tight spirals, astonishingly quick.

The guys pressed closer to the glass.

Elena slid off one headphone again and heard their voices – ‘What?' ‘This is it!' ‘What's this?' ‘Come on!' They were a crowd, heckling at a sport's game. She pressed the headphones to her ears to block out their voices and she heard the rush of water as the whale spiralled – no vocalizations – she glanced at the sound levels again and made a couple of small adjustments.

Suddenly, there was a collective gasp. A pair of folded flukes appeared from Bella's underbelly.

A little tail flipped like a torn flap of skin. Bella whisked onwards, round and round, twisting even faster now, her body arched in pain or effort, or both. She was silent – no cries or whistles – and then, in a bloom of blood and fluids, her baby was born – her perfect, miniature replica, flukes still folded, dorsal flattened.

It floated, motionless. And then it sank.

‘Oh fuck!' shouted Dan. ‘Jesus shit!'

The baby didn't move. It was dead.

The men stood, aghast, faces pressed against the glass. In
the headphones a terrible watery silence filled Elena's ears. The only sound was the thud of her own heart.

And then Bella turned and prodded her limp baby with her nose. And at her touch life flooded through its body; it flipped a couple of times as if orientating itself then floated towards her. She eased it to the surface, tenderly, with her flippers, four hundred pounds of slippery perfection.

The men cheered as if the victory was theirs. Dan even punched the air.

The baby took its first breath, blowing out at exactly the same time as Bella. And after that, mother and baby moved together, breathing in synchrony, swimming slowly round the tank, side by side. Bella's breaths were far more frequent than usual: she knew, instinctively, that she had to breathe with her baby.

Dan was running alongside the pool now, following them with a great grin on his face, the blond hairs on his thighs glistening in the late evening sun. One of the new guys had a cine camera and was loping alongside too, slightly slower, trying to keep the camera steady. The vet's assistant, a skinny guy with acne, snapped pictures with a zoom. The vet chewed his toothpick and watched.

The blush-pink baby orca – it was too early to tell the sex – was a tiny match for its mother's belly and dorsal patches. It nosed steadily alongside her. Then Orpheus, who had been floating to one side, slowly swam over and joined his family. There were no vocalizations, but the three whales lapped the tank together – the baby slotted between its parents.

The guys were slapping each other on the back, like they
had pushed the baby whale out themselves. Even the vet grinned, abruptly, showing crumbling teeth, his face splitting oddly, lopsidedly, beneath the rim of his Yankees cap.

Elena took off one headphone and their voices boomed. She looked back at the whale family.

It was the perfect birth.

She bent and switched off the tape recorder, flipping the switches one by one. She knew this was insane: she should keep it running and continue to collect the data; these were groundbreaking, unique, once in a lifetime sounds. But she couldn't listen as the family circled its cramped glass prison.

There was a deep thudding in her ears. She felt sick. She couldn't look at the men any more, or the new family. Without a word she let herself out of the park, and walked away through palm tree-lined streets towards the ocean.

It wasn't long after the birth and its aftermath that Elena saw the documentary about the whale captures.

There was a screening on campus in the central auditorium, and she would have missed it entirely, because she never bothered to read campus newsletters, but today there was another anti-war demo outside the food hall, so she took a detour on the way to Graham's room. She almost bumped into the billboard.

*

It was just about to start – there was no time to run all the way across campus to Gray's room, tell him and get back for the start of the film. So she went inside.

It was about orca captures, from the first in 1961, a female called Wanda, who threw herself against the tank
walls all night and then died in the morning. Then there was Moby Doll, who survived being harpooned for an art project in 1964, and was kept, wounded, in Vancouver Aquarium, refusing food for fifty-five days. The capture stories went on like this, grim and depressing tales of human greed and ignorance. But the climax of the film was the Penn Cove round-ups.

Elena knew about these. She remembered the public outcry when the three drowned orca carcasses washed up near Seattle. Their bellies had been cut open and stones put inside – because the hunters thought they'd sink to the bottom and then no one would ever know. At least six live whales were taken to theme parks across North America that day.

One scene, in particular, was almost unwatchable. After chasing down the pod with planes and speedboats and seal bombs, the hunters dropped nets and herded the frightened animals against the Puget Sound shoreline. The whales were panicking. You could clearly hear parents calling out to their children; babies screeching back. The hunters singled out a baby orca, and a scuba diver attempted to net him. The diver, along with ten or so other men, drove the baby away from his mother. She thrashed around in the water, distraught, making haunting, high-pitched cries. The whole family stuck their noses above the surface perhaps to try and hear what was happening or to search for a way out. Meanwhile, the hunters tethered the baby tightly, nose and tail. He lay trapped and immobile, but his family didn't stop calling out to him. The men
hauled him into a cradle and hoiked him with a cherry-picker up into the air.

The baby's terrified cries, as he dangled above his family, seemed human. And from the water beneath him, his mother's screams echoed out, louder than the others.

The camera panned back to the original scuba diver as he clambered out. He pulled off his mask and bent double, hands on knees, and as he raised his head for one last look at the captured infant, his mouth distorted. Tears streamed down his face.

When the film came to an end, Elena sat in the muggy darkness with her hands on her knees, churning with rage and guilt and shame. There weren't many people in the audience, but no one spoke or moved. The film whirred and flickered to a halt. Someone, somewhere near the front, was crying. The lights came on.

Afterwards, there was a talk. She wanted to get out. She badly needed air. But she didn't trust her legs to stand.

A bearded researcher – he'd been involved in the documentary in some way, though she wasn't sure how – stood on the stage in front of the dead screen. He said that legislation had been passed to outlaw orca captures in Washington State. It was a direct result of this footage. Finally people were noticing what was happening just off their beaches, and they were objecting to it. After more than ten years of this, people were beginning to understand that ripping young animals from their mothers, and taking them to die in concrete fish bowls, was not such a great idea.