Dolphin Song

by Lauren St. John

  Martine appreciated the effort, but couldn’t bring herself to go along with it. She tried to muster a smile. “I’d really like you to give me swimming lessons sometime, but it would be nice if it was on a Cape Town beach in the summer, not Death Island in the winter.”

  The hardest part of all was that they could see the outlineof Dugong Island, and yet they had no way of letting their friends know their situation, and no way of telling what had become of their friends.

  They watched hopefully for passing fishermen or tourist ferries, but nothing but sea birds crossed the horizon. As the sun rose, the sandbank shrunk steadily. Before long, it could barely have accommodated the two of them if they’d sat down and stretched their legs out.

  “Ben,” Martine asked, “do you think that when you’re really frightened of things, you sort of attract them? I mean, you know how girls who are afraid of bats are always ending up with bats getting caught in their hair, while people who couldn’t care less about them go their whole lives without seeing a single one? Well, I have a phobia about drowning in the sea or being eaten by sharks, and I seem to keep getting into situations where I have to face it.”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” Ben said. “But maybe it’s just your destiny.”

  “To drown? Great.”

  “No, silly. To be put into situations that would lead to you helping the dolphins, and to them helping you.”

  Martine thought about it. About Mini, her life needlessly sacrificed; about the suffering in the eyes of the twenty-one dolphins beached at Dolphin Bay; of the whales in the Bahamas with bleeding eardrums. She thought too of the joy she’d experienced when the dolphin in Cape Town had swum away; of lying in the turquoise water gazing into the wise-innocent eyes of Little Storm; and of the night of the cyclone when she’d looked up to see a hundred dolphins coming through the wild waves, outlined in silver.

  She and the others had helped the dolphins, but not nearly as much as they’d helped her. Yes, they had saved her from the storm, but they’d also given her something far, far greater than that. They’d healed her. For the past two weeks, she had been so preoccupied with surviving that she wasn’t even sure when it had happened. She didn’t hurt anymore. The knot of sadness that had dwelled inside her heart ever since the death of her mum and dad, six and a half months earlier, was gone. She still felt very close to them—she felt as if they were watching over her as she stood on Death Island—but it was a good feeling, not a painful one.

  Some of the fear left her and was replaced by the same sense of acceptance and optimism that had come over her when she first took in their predicament on the island. “Ben,” she said, “you know what’s really weird? All of a sudden I’m not afraid anymore. The dolphins will save us if they can find us, I know they will.”

  “Then why don’t we try telling them where we are?”

  He took a deep breath and yelled as loudly as he could: “Sun Dancer, Cookie, Ash, Thunder, Steel, Rain Dancer, Patch, Honey, Little Storm.” Martine did the same and then they took it in turns.

  When they were almost hoarse from shouting, Martine took Ben’s brown hand in her small white one and squeezed it hard. They were up to their ankles in water. He squeezed back and then they stood together, hand in trembling hand, looking out at the encroaching sea.

  “If you could do it all again—I mean, everything that’s happened in the last couple of weeks—would you do anything differently?” Ben asked.

  “Yes,” said Martine. “I’d tell my grandmother that I love her.”

  30

  Three days later, as she stared unseeingly from the window of the South African Airways plane carrying her and Ben back to Cape Town, those words came back to Martine. She had meant them with all her heart, but that didn’t make the thought of returning to Sawubona any easier. She was almost more afraid of going home than she had been watching the approach of the wintry, shark-filled sea on Death Island. Who knew what conclusions her grandmother had come to in her absence? Maybe she’d decided that it was really rather pleasant not having a giraffe-crazy eleven-year-old around. Maybe she liked having the house to herself again.

  If so, there was not a lot Martine could do about it. She just had to hope that it wasn’t too late to say sorry, and that whatever happened, she wouldn’t be sent away to England or some other place where she’d never again feel the African sun on her skin, ride her beloved giraffe, cuddle a lion cub, or smile at dolphins.

  Ben nudged her. “It doesn’t seem real, does it? What happened to us, I mean. We swam with wild dolphins. We actually played with them. They carried us on their backs in a storm. They rescued us, then we rescued them, and then they rescued us right back again.” He laughed. “It seems like a dream.”

  “No,” said Martine, thinking of the shark nightmares that had started everything, “it’s much better than a dream.”

  The first person Martine had seen after regaining consciousness in Maputo General Hospital was Alberto. The chef was sitting in a visitor’s chair.

  “Ah, Miss Martine, you are awake,” he said with a smile, the little ruby sparkling in his front tooth. “You know, if you had mentioned you might be dropping into the Bazaruto Islands, I would have arranged for you to have a warmer welcome. Although from what I hear, you are quite the expert at building shelters!”

  Alberto was wearing a white shirt, and the combination of that, his snowy hair, and the window behind him, framing a sky of pure and perfect blue, was such that Martine, who was still bleary after thirty-six hours of sleep, thought for a second that they were meeting in the afterlife. Then he added, “You must have used your giraffe magic to talk to the dolphins and sharks, little miss. If it were not for them, you probably wouldn’t be alive.” And it all came rushing back to her.

  “Are the dolphins okay?” she asked in sudden panic. “Did they beach themselves?”

  “They are very well, thanks to you and your friend,” he assured her. “I think they would want to know the same about the two of you.”

  Martine sat up weakly. She was at the far end of a long hospital ward that smelled of disinfectant and roses. Nurses were gliding about, dispensing pills and trays of food. Ben was asleep in the bed beside her. A dazzling sun was casting stripy patterns on the green-tiled floor. A chubby-cheeked nurse came over, propped her up with pillows, and took her temperature.

  “Can ay bring you some tea and tosst?”

  “Tosst?” queried Martine.

  “Toast,” interpreted Alberto, and instructed the nurse, “Miss Martine and the boy will have some coffee but no food, thank you.”

  Martine opened her mouth to protest, but the chef winked at her and nodded in the direction of a large brown bag. No sooner had the nurse departed than he opened it up and produced four bacon and banana rolls, foil-wrapped to keep them hot, and four pieces of coconut cake. The aroma of these delicacies roused Ben from his sleep, and he was soon sitting up munching on a roll. After he and Martine had been further revived with coffee and cake, Alberto filled them in on the events of the past couple of days.

  As far as anyone could tell, they’d both lost consciousness within minutes of being swamped by the sea on Death Island. The doctor who’d examined them said that exhaustion, lack of food, and cold water had combined to near-lethal effect.

  “I was in the helicopter with the coastguard and Mr. Rapier, searching for you,” explained Alberto. “We had had no success until we saw this beautiful pattern from the air—more than a hundred dolphins in silver circles and, around them, a circle of black, white, and speckled-yellow giants—whale sharks. We flew lower to take a closer look and there, in the middle of all these animals, were you and Ben.”

  The cave painting, Martine thought. Every prediction on the Memory Room walls had come true.

  “Mr. Rapier was sure the whale sharks would swallow you whole, like canapés,” Alberto went on, “but I told him that they are as gentle as porpoises and eat only plankton. But it is the dolphins who really saved you.
You were lying across their backs, out of the cold water, and they were cradling you like babies. It was with great difficulty that we persuaded them that we were not there to hurt you.”

  Ben and Martine listened in wonder, hardly able to wait to hear what came next.

  “Why were you with Mr. Rapier?” Martine wanted to know. “How did you guess where to look for us? We heard on the news that the rescue teams had been searching in the wrong place.”

  “That is correct,” said Alberto. “The morning after the cyclone, when none of you had been found, I contacted the coastguard’s office and told them about my grandfather being helped by the dolphins. I said that maybe that had happened to you and your friends, and the dolphins had swum against the current to take you to safety, but they just laughed at me. It was ten days before somebody told Mr. Rapier about that possibility, and he contacted me right away to ask if I would help him search the Bazaruto Islands. We were on our way to there when we heard from Ben’s father that he’d received a message from you.”

  “Dad got my message?” cried Ben. “But he never responded.”

  “He did, but he said you couldn’t seem to hear him. You may have had the volume turned down on the radio.”

  Ben looked sheepish. “You might be right.”

  “It didn’t matter, because he could hear you speaking so he could tell us that you were on Paradise Island and in great danger. We arrived too late to find you there, but luckily for us the young guard, Fernando, guessed that you might have been taken to Death Island. We did find your friend Claudius, and he and his father were very overjoyed to see each other. It was quite . . . sweet.”

  “Don’t let Claudius hear you say that,” Martine advised him.

  “Did you manage to rescue our other friends?” asked Ben. “Did Claudius tell you where to find them?”

  “Yes, we took Claudius and flew right away to Dugong Island, where we found them. There were quite a few tears, I can tell you. We brought them here to Maputo Hospital to be checked out. They were all fine, just very hungry and dehydrated. The two of you had already been carried here by air ambulance and you were sleeping, but they insisted on seeing you. They left something for you.”

  Martine saw it then on the bedside locker—her survival kit. A piece of orange notepaper was taped to it. On it was scrawled: “Cheers, guys. We owe you one. Martine, there’ll be a new survival kit waiting for you in Cape Town, but we thought you might like this one as a souvenir. See you at Caracal!!” They had all scribbled their signatures, and Sherilyn’s had lots of X’s after it.

  There was a moment of silence while both Ben and Martine struggled to master their emotions.

  Martine cleared her throat. “Where are they now?”

  “They went by plane to Cape Town this morning,” Alberto told her. “Mr. Rapier was going to take them for a fast-food feast. Everyone except the big boy—Jake is it? He seemed very keen to get to a rugby match.”

  “We still don’t know what any of this was about,” Ben said. “Why did nobody ever visit the island? What were the cables? Who was testing sonar?”

  “Well,” said the chef, “it is a simple story of greed. Ten years ago Dugong Island was bought by a very rich man from overseas. He had seen it once and loved it so much he wanted to preserve it. He rarely came to see it, but he allowed the islanders to picnic, fish, or take their children there, so long as they left it the way they found it. Which we always did. We felt it was our heritage too.

  “Last year, this rich man died. His son came into possession of the island and he decided that he might one day put a hotel on it. He hired a man from the mainland, Marcos, from Maputo, to manage the project. Unlike his father, he thought of Dugong as private property and he wanted to put a stop to the islanders going there. Marcos’s idea was to put underwater mines around the island. The police found out about it and there was a lot of trouble over it, but the son was going to invest millions of dollars and employ many workers, so they let the matter drop with a warning. Marcos recruited some contract workers and they set up a base in the old hotel on Paradise Island. All were from the mainland except for the young boy Fernando, who had recently arrived in Maputo in search of work.”

  Alberto paused to let the nurse take Ben’s temperature, and clear away the coffee cups, crumbs, and discarded foil. She gave the chef a disapproving glance.

  “Perhaps all would have been well,” he continued after she’d gone, “but planning permission for the lodge was very slow in coming and, two days after the contract workers began laying cables at Dugong Island, Marcos was contacted by the navy of a country whose name I will not mention. Because Dugong is the island farthest out into the Indian Ocean, they asked if he would allow them to test sonar in the waters surrounding it. He saw a chance for some extra cash. He didn’t know that dolphins and whales might suffer because of the sonar and the stress caused by naval exercises. It was only when the son started to make inquiries about the lack of progress on Dugong Island that Marcos knew his golden goose would have to go. Still he gave permission for one last test—the one you told Ben’s father about in your message.”

  “Did anyone manage to stop it?” Ben said worriedly.

  Alberto shook his head. “Unfortunately not. It took time to find Marcos and to get him to admit what he was doing and who was carrying out the tests. The test went ahead before that happened. But we did organize for around thirty islanders to go to Dugong and wait there in case the dolphins tried to get onto the beach. But none came. It seems that every dolphin in the area was at Death Island when the test happened.”

  Martine stared at him. “So by saving us they actually saved themselves?” she said.

  Alberto shrugged. “We will never know. But it looks that way.”

  “Do you think it will make a difference?” Martine said. “Will navies around the world stop using LFA sonar if they know that it’s contributing to dolphin deaths?”

  “I’m not sure about that,” responded Alberto. “On the news this morning, they were saying they needed to wait for more scientific evidence, more proof, before they acted. But our own government is talking of banning it in these waters, so at least you will know you have helped to create one sanctuary for dolphins and whales.”

  “What happens now to the reward money?” Ben said. “I take it that the skipper and his friends will not be getting it.”

  “Mr. Rapier met with the island chiefs yesterday and he has decided that half the money should go to build a new school on Benguerra Island. The other half, he and I are going to use to set up a restaurant on Benguerra. I’ve already offered Fernando a job as my sous-chef. We need bright young men like him on the islands.”

  Alberto stood up to leave then. He was halfway down the ward when he remembered something and came back. “I’m very sorry, Miss Martine, I should have told you this first, not last. We’ve had a message from your grandmother to say that she is so looking forward to seeing you.”

  Now, as the plane thudded onto the runway and the engines screamed, the nauseous feeling in Martine’s stomach intensified. Was her grandmother really looking forward to seeing her or was she dreading it? Was she scared too?

  Inside the terminal, she and Ben, wearing colorful sweatshirts and cotton trousers donated by a Bazaruto Archipelago lodge (their own clothes had apparently disintegrated in the hospital washing machine), were escorted through the baggage hall by the flight attendant who had taken care of them since Maputo. Since they had no luggage to collect (their bags had returned to Cape Town on the Sea Kestrel), they thanked her and prepared to go into the arrivals hall.

  Martine turned to Ben. How did you say good-bye to someone with whom you’d nearly died twice?

  He was thinking the same thing, so they shuffled their feet and looked at the ground awkwardly before deciding on a quick hug.

  “Everything’s going to work out fine, you know,” Ben said. She’d told him about the argument with her grandmother when they were waiting for morning on Paradis
e Island.

  “I s’pose,” mumbled Martine. “I mean, I hope so.”

  He reached out and touched her arm. “It sounds crazy, but I had a great time. Thanks for being my friend. There’s no one in the world I’d rather be marooned on a desert island with!”

  Martine couldn’t help smiling. “Same here. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had—well, apart from Jemmy.”

  Ben grinned. “That’s all right. I don’t mind being second to a giraffe.”

  31

  Tendai was waiting in the arrivals hall, his khaki game ranger clothes and general stillness—the stillness of a man who spent a lot of time in nature—setting him apart from the stressed tourist crowds at the airport. He swept Martine up in his arms and whirled her around, his booming laugh causing people to stop and stare.

  “You gave us a few sleepless nights, little one,” he said.

  “Us?” queried Martine. She didn’t know if she was relieved or devastated that Gwyn Thomas wasn’t there to greet her.

  Tendai put her down. “Don’t be too disappointed that your grandmother hasn’t come to the airport,” he said. “This has been hard on her.”

  What about me? Martine thought. I’m the one who nearly drowned, came close to being eaten by sharks, narrowly avoided being blown up by an undersea mine, and was left to die on Death Island. Whatever had been going on at Sawubona could hardly have been worse than that.

  On the drive back home, Tendai talked to her about the game reserve, updating her on the progress of the sanctuaryanimals and describing a recent addition: a caracal kitten with a sore paw. “The giraffe has been pining for you, little one,” he said. “He hasn’t left the water hole in days. The visitors have been asking why the white giant is so sad.”

  Martine couldn’t bear the idea of Jemmy being unhappy, but it was a nice feeling to know that he’d missed her. Then she remembered that she was banned from riding him.