Lit

by Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod

  She sat at the lighthouse and waited, even after it began to drizzle, then pour. The deluge would leave nothing untouched. She unleashed Rutherford and turned, reluctantly, inland.

  She started to sprint, roused by an urgent vision of carcasses and bodies in the tide. Ahead of her, Rutherford tore through the bush. Together they thundered through salt scrub, leaping over tree roots, Kim nearly turning an ankle on a stone. They veered right, banking into the stand of golden tussock that buffered the ocean from land. When they broke through onto the sinking sand, she could hear them.

  They were not carcasses, they were alive. Calling to each other over the droning waves, thrashing dorsal fins slapping uselessly against the sea. Shallow surf broke over their backs making them gleam like polished onyx. They were the darkest things she had ever seen, as if they were black holes that could absorb all light. She didn’t want to go near them, afraid to see her reflection in their skin. She watched Rutherford charge into the knot of whales. He sniffed one, then sprang back, as if hit.

  “Come back!” Kim called.

  He lifted his snout and ran, so fast it looked like he was levitating. Flecks of slate-coloured sand flicked behind him as he bolted away from her. She hollered again, but her voice was stolen by the ocean’s roar. She could still make him out—grey fur slicked smooth by rain—as he faded into the monochrome landscape. She did not want to go near them, but she forced herself onto the beach, feeling the hundreds of whales watching her with dying eyes.

  When she finally found him at the farthest end of the beach, Rutherford was panting in front of a large mound of whales. They formed a solid mass behind him, a thick wall of drowning mammals, eyes reflective like dark marbles.

  Kim avoided their gaze. “Guo lai,” she said quietly, focusing only on Rutherford.

  She held out dog biscuits. Nothing. She tossed one at him. It hit his nose and bounced onto the wet sand, untouched.

  Row-ruff. Rutherford circled the whales, pawing the beach. He nosed the closest one, sat down, then barked again. Kim suppressed an unfamiliar rage, stopping herself from lunging over to clamp his jaw shut. The ease of their relationship betrayed—quite abruptly—by this strange urgency.

  She ignored the pulsing mass of bodies, their iodine smell, their heaving breath. She kept Rutherford in her vision and in one motion, snapped the leash onto his collar.

  “We have to go home!”

  He dug into the sand. She yanked at the leash, unintentionally jerking his neck. Her frenzied terror came as a surprise. Rutherford made his body heavy and started whining, as if in chorus with the dying whales.

  ---

  DIGGING IN

  It was the summer of

  hundreds of long-haired boys

  with slim waists and slogans,

  girls with big hair in polyester prints

  with their placards and proclamations

  chanting and starving in unison.

  The place became a field hospital

  my job to check saline drips attached

  to young things lying inert on cots,

  side by side, who called to each other,

  with lips dried, desiccating in the summer sun.

  I could have been them

  stubborn young children,

  but I shone nurses’ torches into eyes

  that glowed like marbles,

  scanning for consciousness, hydration, sanity.

  Stayed past my shift,

  changed into plain clothes

  to sit under makeshift tents,

  listening to young people

  with strength to sing after hungry weeks

  refusing to leave

  as the night drowned on.

  —-

  Kim forced herself to leave Rutherford on the beach. She had to make calls. It was a relief to get away from those staring animals with their marble eyes. She hugged Rutherford, scooped all the dog biscuits from her pockets and piled them beside him. And then she ran to escape the oil-slick bodies. She imagined the rain pelting Rutherford until he lost his fur, until he grew smaller and smaller as the mass of whales grew larger, each wave bringing in another mound of bodies until finally, he dissolved completely.

  Kim made it home in under 20 minutes, crashed into the kitchen, grappled with the phonebook, leaving damp prints on the pages. She was shaking as she jabbed the numbers. Six rings until someone picked up.

  “Wei?!…. I meanImeanImean Hello? Coastguard?”

  “This the coastguard. Do you need assistance?”

  “There are hundreds. So many. All over the beach dying. Hundreds. Please. Please.”

  “Ma’am? What do you need assistance with?”

  “Whaleswhalesatthebeach!!!”

  “Ma’am, slow down.”

  “Hundreds of whales stranded. At the beach. Please.”

  “I understand. I’m dispatching a boat now. They’ll meet you there in thirty minutes.”

  She stripped out of her soaked clothes, changed into a heavy raincoat, canvas pants, gumboots. Grabbed three bath towels, the half-empty sack of dog biscuits, and crammed herself into her car, flooring it through the rain.

  Only when she was parked at the beach did her vision begin to spin. Kim gripped the steering wheel, gulping air in shallow mouthfuls.

  ---

  DEJA VU

  The skies blistered and burned

  heart thrumming too hard

  legs and lungs searing as if fried

  tearing away from the city’s square,

  running an impossible distance

  until the hospital loomed

  like a face, a mouth, waiting for a meal of bodies.

  I ran as if they were chasing me.

  Armoured creatures, beast with long noses

  barrelling into children

  a thousand-headed machine, made

  of faceless country boys

  vomiting metal into soft bellies and young heads.

  —-

  When the scientists arrive on Friday evening, the light is nearly gone. They join the coast guards and the Project Jonah rescue team who are working on a cluster of whales; wrapping towels over the bodies and digging moats around them. Kim watches them fill shallow trenches with seawater which they scoop over the animals, again and again, to hydrate their skin and stop them from desiccating. She turns away, blocking out the whales and the sea.

  When they are done, she beckons the scientific team over. Wordlessly, she heaves Rutherford—fur still damp, wrapped in towels—into her arms, and trudges to her waiting car. For some reason, the group understands to not offer help, even as Kim’s short frame is engulfed by the dog. Rutherford seems to weigh nothing, as if the rain and ocean have devoured him from the outside. The scientists follow the short Chinese woman who drives them to her home in silence. The enormous grey dog sits, curled in the front seat.

  Kim shows them the toilet, the kitchen and the living room where makeshift beds have been made with spare mattresses. “I’ll be in the granny flat if you need me.”

  The marine biologist, James, touches her arm before she leaves, “Thank you. We know it’s short notice.”

  “It’s fine.” She studies his face, he looks to be the same age as her, but there is something in his eyes that reminds Kim of her father. She walks into the garden and hoists Rutherford into her arms. Her knees crack as she bears his weight, treading barefoot over the rain-fed grass.

  ***

  Kim wakes around four am. Where am I? Rutherford. Where is he? Oh. Granny flat. She slumps back into bed. Rutherford is sleeping by the door. She lies back down, watching his flanks rising with each breath.

  She can still see them, heaving whales superimposed against the ceiling, side by side. She closes her eyes and they are still there, the gleam of their skin vivid, glowing.

  “I will not walk to the lighthouse today,” she decides.

  Unable to sleep, she crosses the garden and slips into the house without a sound. She makes tea and takes it to
the steps of her porch. A half-moon is surrounded by the last smattering of stars. The roar of the ocean travels over the range, even louder now that everything is asleep.

  She tries to warm her chilled hands around the mug. She’d slept in all her clothes, yet it felt as if part of the sea rain had followed her home. The sliding door opens.

  “Can I join you?” James mouths.

  Kim nods, “There’s tea in the kitchen.”

  They sit wordlessly in the dark. He drinks from the mug with the garish photograph of Hong Kong’s skyline. The one she never uses. The one she bought when she left China and washed up in Hong Kong. It had been a talisman of sorts. Now, it just seems naive. She drains her mug. “Why do they do that?” she asks, “why do they die together like that?”

  “We have a few ideas,” James rubs his face, “but it’s still one of the mysteries of the sea. We don’t know enough about their lives to make conclusive theories.”

  She sets her mug down, “What do you know?”

  “Well, pilot whales are matrilineal. They live in pods of twenty to a hundred individuals, sometimes more. They navigate by echolocation—bouncing sound-waves through water to build a 3-D picture.” James lifts the mug, staring at the image. “Extreme weather and unusual ocean topography confuse them. They swim to land instead of away from it,”

  Kim watches him drag a thumbnail over the skyline as if trying to scratch the image off.

  “Underwater radar messes—”

  “Please don’t do that,” Kim says.

  “Huh—?”

  “You’re scratching my mug.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Genuine surprise in James’ voice, “I didn’t realise.”

  “It’s okay,” she watches him set it down, but doesn’t take her eyes off it. “You were saying?”

  “Radar, offshore drilling, it ruins their navigation system. Sound travels kilometres underwater, magnified by thousands of decibels. Imagine having your ear right next to an airplane at takeoff. That’s how loud it is for the whales. The ocean is not a silent place, it’s deafening for everything that lives there.”

  How ironic, Kim thinks, that animals called pilot whales could lose their navigation and end up stranded like refugees in an alien land.

  “How is it possible that they all lose their direction like that? There are hundreds of them.” She studies his face, creases that seemed to dance on his forehead exactly like her father’s did when he worked. “They don’t or can’t abandon their family pod. It’s encoded, instinctual if you will, as if they are magnetically bonded to each other.”

  “It’s mass suicide—” she whispered.

  “Yes. Some call it that.”

  ***

  After breakfast, Kim drops the scientists back at the beach. She doesn’t get out, but drives straight home and spends the day pretending to garden. Late afternoon, she forces herself into the house for a change of clothes. There are folders on her kitchen table. Duffel bags in the living room. Strangers’ clothes hanging on the back of her chair. She’s an intruder in her own home. She washes out the mug with the Hong Kong skyline and stows it at the very back of the highest shelf in her kitchen cupboard, rim down.

  It is when she arrives at the beach to pick up James and his team that the reporter finds her.

  “You see the whales for the first time. It’s so difficult, so tragic. How did you feel?” he thrusts the microphone at her.

  She can see the headlines. Disgruntled Local Disapproves of Whale Rescue. Rutherford has started again, pawing at the ground. The crowd seems to make him nervous. People digging moats, covering the whales with blankets soaked in water, carrying all sorts of containers—toy buckets, tin pails, chilly bins—dipping them into the sea, dragging them back to the mass of inert bodies, pouring water over them, most of it trickling back into the grey sand.

  The air feels thin and shallow as if too many outsiders are breathing her air. The busload of teenagers now scooping water with jerky limbed loudness. The surfers past the breakers, scanning for whales trying to rejoin their pod. Outside families making an outing of it, their toddlers building obnoxious sandcastles beside hulking dying beasts.

  The Project Jonah team are hoisting whales to the tidemark. They sandwich them between inflated bolsters and swim two-to-a-whale, steering them away from the shore and away from their dead. They do this over and over again, for hours, hoping they will leave the dead to go back to sea.

  A few swim away—if only momentarily—but the magnetic bond is too strong to be broken. They return, circling back, wave after wave, each time stranding themselves with purpose.

  Fatigue sets in, people pause, drenched. Hands rest, nervous against foreheads. Some stare in defeat at the endless, incoming tide of mammals. Some cry. Others hug the whales, stroking them cheek-to-cheek, murmuring to them as if they are dying relatives. The marble-eyed giants blink but they are unmovable and determined.

  ---

  MAGNETIC BONDS

  I didn’t ask for their names,

  and I never told them mine.

  I remember one young man

  I wanted him to eat some congee,

  tried to ease a spoonful into his mouth

  porcelain knocked against teeth that refused to open,

  he accepted only water.

  he flashed a limp peace sign with his right hand

  his smile stretched his cracked flaking lips.

  They had been doing this for weeks.

  How willing they were

  stranding themselves in their city,

  their 心肝,

  loving it like their heart and liver,

  in this hot, dirty place, of flying rubbish and canvas tents,

  they were all the same,

  from bed to bed, magnetically bonded

  refusing to be saved,

  banking together—all at once—like a family to shore.

  ---

  By the end of the third day, those that have deceased begin to fill the air with their salt rot, attracting blowflies. A putrid sweetness clings despite the relentless pound of the Tasman on this lip of land that Kim calls her second home.

  There are too many to transport so a bonfire is built near the cliffs where the flames can be contained. A construction company from Westport loans earth diggers with rolling caterpillar tracks. Their yellow machine bodies inch down the sand dunes, crane necks lift, themselves like creatures, moving inert bodies—carcasses limp, hanging—in grotesque procession, away from the sea.

  She watches James supervising his students who carry a small whale on a stretcher. They disappear inside a white tent. He sees Kim and waves. She pretends not to see, turning instead to the jagged rock ledges below the lighthouse. She sees him jogging over and contemplates running back to the car. In that time, he has crunched over the tussock and is standing beside her.

  “We’re nearly done, Kim. Just a little bit left before we pack it in. We can catch a ride with the Landes if you don’t want to wait.”

  “No. It’s fine.”

  ---

  CLEARING

  Bodies

  shunted to the side, under piles of wrecked bikes.

  Torn shirts. Single shoes. Crushed spectacles.

  A rumble of caterpillar tracks bearing down

  towards the magnetic centre.

  Air contagious. Sharp with panic.

  Clothes red, gashed foreheads, hands to faces.

  Stretchers made with benches, blankets, three-wheeled

  flatbed trikes,

  pulling through a pall of smoke and gas,

  shots fired at anything that moved.

  At four am, the hospital received its first meal

  they had run here, barefoot

  staunching legs, chests, heads,

  thinking they could save limp bodies

  that were already dead on arrival

  A young woman clawed at me.

  leaving streaks up my arms.

  Not enough beds, we dragged mattresses
from storage,

  Turned hallways into makeshift wards.

  Rising panic.

  flee. Flee. FLEE.

  More, pouring in like gluttony,

  air thick with iron.

  Five thirty am,

  foreign camera crew washed in with the tide.

  We dragged them through the mouth doors.

  Film everything. Film it all, we pleaded.

  Did they understand?

  We waved x-rays in their faces,

  Pointed at shrapnel

  lodged

  in faceless ribcages, organs, torsos.

  From fifteen floors up,

  We witnessed flares

  ignite in orange flashes.

  And smoke columns

  gashing the sky open.

  ---

  “Before we leave, let me show you something,” James says.

  “I don’t—”

  “Come,” he says, leading Kim to the whales.

  It’s the first time she’s looked directly at them. Some are clearly dead, overturned so that their rows of tiny milk teeth flash upwards, mouths open in tiny upside-down crescents. Project Jonah people cluster around a trio. The one in the middle is a calf, wrapped in wet towels like a second skin. When they get closer, she can hear it. A high-pitched squeaking that changes in tone, trying to communicate with its family, dead beside it.

  Kim reaches out to its smooth skin, firm and resistant. She finds herself scooping water around the moated creature, adjusting damp towels. Light slips away behind the cliffs. She sees a long march of bodies spread out as far as the beach spans. It is endless and numerous and she thinks of the bonds that drove three hundred of these creatures onto their shore.

  Is she in New Zealand where the whale blubber burns in a blistering heap, fat crackling orange in the air? Or is she back there, where rumours flew of bodies being bulldozed. Unwilling thoughts of magnetic bonds – the multiples ones she has broken – overcome her. In a flash, she gets up, “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

  ***

  That night, in the cover of dark, Kim packs her hunting rifle, ammunition, a tent, food into her car. Rutherford settles in the front seat. She drives south, away from the beach, inland. She knows that she can no longer stay. She made the decision after James left her granny flat. She had held his dry hands that smelled like the outdoors tinged with the fainter, meatier scent of whales and blubber.