The Girl Who Dreamt of Dolphins

by James Carmody

  It took Lucy a moment or two to orientate herself. As she righted herself, she looked around. A curtain of kelp floated to her left and beyond that she could see rocks curving up behind. She glanced to her right.

  ‘Hey Spirit’ she cried happily, gliding towards him. He too, moved towards her, but she could see immediately that something was wrong. He looked grey and unhappy and he wasn’t moving naturally.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, a look of worry replacing the look of happiness of a moment before.

  ‘I am trapped’ he replied in a quiet voice. ‘This thing made by man is caught round my tail. I cannot escape.’He glanced back and Lucy followed his gaze. Only now did she see the thick steel wire snaking through the water in great loops and then curling round Spirit’s tail. She glided forward. It was looped in a noose around Spirit’s tail and his struggling had pulled it tight. She could see that it had cut into his skin, leaving a great horrible red wound. Every time he moved, Lucy could see Spirit wince, the pain searing through his face.

  ‘Let me have a go’ she exclaimed, eager to help her friend. ‘I’ll soon get you free of this!’ She stretched out her hands to grasp the thick steel wire, but although she could sense Spirit’s firm flank through her finger tips, her hands passed through the wire as though it was not there. She tried again, but the same thing happened. She looked closely at her hands. For the first time she realised that they were not quite solid. She had projected her mind into Spirit’s world, but not her physical body. It was as though she were an apparition here. She could not physically touch things. The realisation caused her heart to beat anxiously. She looked at Spirit.

  ‘I, I can’t’ she stammered in confusion, ‘I can’t touch things.’ She paused. ‘I can’t help you.’

  ‘You’ve already got me out of trouble twice’ replied Spirit, still hopeful. ‘You made suggestions that helped me escape real danger. You can do that again!’

  Lucy looked around her, hoping that a sudden flash of inspiration would somehow help her set her friend free. She followed the steel wire with her eyes as it snaked around and then glided along to see where it came from. She could see that the wire was fixed to a buoy that in turn was stuck firmly under the rocks at the base of the cliff. There seemed to be no way that it could be dislodged. She moved back to Spirits tail and looked at the loop, as if she might have missed some easy solution to the problem or a way to pull the knot so that it would fall away. She hadn’t. Lucy shook her head anxiously.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know what to do.’ She trailed off, in too much distress to say anything more. She shook her head again. Spirit swum up to the surface again to draw in a fresh lungful of air through his blowhole. Lucy followed, seeing him strain painfully to gain the surface. It was almost as though she could see the life seeping from him as she looked on. She knew that at this rate he could not last that much longer. Desperate, she glanced as well as she could over the surface of the water. There was the great craggy granite cliff looming up behind them and to the right, the empty, featureless sea. There was no boat, nothing that could come and save Spirit. It was no good.

  ‘You can do it, you can think of something’ said Spirit. But even as he said the words, Lucy could tell that he did not really believe them. She could feel the tiredness enveloping her that came over her immediately before she was drawn back to the world of land and her own physical body. She struggled against it.

  ‘Don’t worry Spirit, I’ll think of something. I’ll come back sooner than you think. You’ll see!’ The words were barely out of her mouth before Lucy was pulled away from him, back, back until she became aware of standing in Bethany’s studio once more, staring absently beyond the nearly finished portrait and out through the window into the bright morning sunlight and the field of cows beyond. She immediately collapsed into tears.

  When Bethany returned a few minutes later with two brimming shopping bags, she found her niece distraught, her body wracked with sobs, curled up in a ball on the floor of the studio.

  ‘Lucy, whatever is the matter?’ said Bethany, dropping her bags and hastening to Lucy’s side. ‘What’s happened?’ Lucy’s body shook uncontrollably, tears streaming down her face.

  ‘I can’t, I can’t help him’ she said between sobs. ‘I don’t know what to do!’ Her face was contorted with anguish.

  ‘Help who?’ asked Bethany, ‘your dad?’

  ‘No!’ cried Lucy in reply. ‘Spirit! Spirit my dolphin!’ Bethany, who had gathered Lucy up in her arms, took a long deep breath.

  ‘Oh, I see’ she said quietly, with a sense of deadening recognition.

  ‘You do?’ asked Lucy, surprised.

  ‘I think I might’ replied Bethany.

  Eventually Lucy’s sobs subsided and she got up to go to wash her face in the bathroom. She came back, red-eyed and miserable. Finally she managed to tell Bethany what had happened.

  ‘You know Bethany, you can help me. You’ve lived here for ever and you know the sea better than anyone. Tell me what I need to do to help my dolphin’ she implored.

  Bethany sat on a kitchen chair and shook her head to herself. How could she start telling Lucy everything she knew? Lucy was so young! It was all too soon. Barely two weeks ago she had told Lucy’s Dad that she was special, that she had a gift. She never thought her words would come back to haunt her so soon. But it wasn’t a gift she thought, it was a curse. It was she who had put the idea of coming to Cornwall in Lucy’s mind. It was she who only last night had promised John that she would look after Lucy and that no harm would come to her. Yet she knew that Lucy’s fate was inextricably linked with the life of that dolphin. At this moment she only cared about Lucy and nothing else. But could she ignore the danger the dolphin was in? She knew she could not.

  ‘Look, I want to help you, I really do, but I just don’t know how’ she said to Lucy. ‘I think he’ll be alright’ she said, trying to comfort herself as well as Lucy. Lucy glanced up at her eyes, shaking her head.

  ‘No, no we can’t wait. We’ve got to do something.’

  ‘Well, what about the other dolphins, can’t they help your one?’ Bethany asked.

  ‘He sort of ran away from them. They, they don’t know where to find him. But…’ Bethany could see Lucy thinking. ‘Maybe they could search for him. At least they knew where he started from.’ The thought, once planted in Lucy’s mind, seemed to seize her. Bethany could see her niece emerge from the worst of her black cloud, as she started thinking again.

  ‘Maybe I could reach them, maybe I could…’ She looked around. The rug was as good a spot as any. She sat down cross-legged and tried to focus her mind.

  Bethany had seen this sight before, many years ago and knew better than to say anything. Lucy tried for ten long minutes, but even before she began, she realised that it was no good, not now at least. She had just expended all her energy in reaching out to Spirit. It was too much to expect of herself to stretch out to the rest of the pod, wherever they were. She broke off in frustration.

  Yet from her dreams she knew Spirit’s special friend, though she did not know that dolphin’s name. It was a girl, a little older than Spirit and in her mind’s eye she pictured the two of them, almost dancing among the waves. That was the dolphin she had to reach out to! But she had to wait until she had replenished enough energy to try again. Suddenly Lucy felt really hungry.

  ‘I’ve got to eat something.’ she announced. Bethany quickly produced a peanut-butter sandwich and Lucy wolfed it down. She still didn’t feel right. She needed more time, more energy.

  ‘You know what Kiddo?’ said Bethany. ‘Granddad used to say that when you don’t know what to do next, the best thing to do is to just do something, anything at all and then it’ll be easier to take the next step and the step after that. Get your coat. We’re going to the cove. It’s not going to do you any harm to look at the sea for half an hour.’

  Bethany bundled Lucy into her Land Rover, started the engine on the third attempt, ground
into gear and shot off up the narrow country lane. They climbed up the hill and once they reached the crest and started to go down the other side, Lucy was able to glimpse patches of blue water through the hedgerow. The sea was not far away now. The thought of the ocean gave her a thrill and a strange sense of hope. It was as if the sea had a magnetic force, pulling her nearer to it.

  ‘Old Man’s Cove is not far’ Bethany informed her, ‘It’s less than a mile now. We’ll soon be there.’ Bethany parked the truck at the side of the road by a farm gate, with a stile and a sign for a footpath down to the sea. Bethany had thrown a few things to eat into a bag before they left and she slung it over her shoulder now as they set off, climbing over the stile and heading off across the field, Lucy eagerly walking ahead.

  ‘Be careful now’ Bethany warned her, ‘the path gets steep pretty soon. The rocks are loose and I don’t want you stumbling!’ She was right. Before long the path was so steep that she had to cling on to clumps of grass to steady herself. The hillside fell away to her left as they descended and below her she could see a small cove, with a crescent of sandy beach and beyond it the brilliant sea, glinting in the sunlight.

  ‘Not many people are brave enough to clamber down that path’ Bethany continued, ‘and so more often than not I have the place entirely to myself.’

  Lucy took one final leap from the rocky path at the bottom and her feet crunched into pebbles. She ran down to the sand and kicked off her shoes and socks before splashing into the shallow water. The sea was colder than she thought, but if felt good to be in the water, if only up to her ankles.

  She looked around her. The place seemed familiar, although she knew that she had never been there before. Bethany came up behind her.

  ‘It’s nice here isn’t it? It’s good for the soul.’ She breathed in deeply. ‘How are you feeling now Kiddo?’

  ‘Yeah, a bit better’ she said, but then she thought of Spirit again, trapped and that made her feel guilty and worried again. Lucy felt the urge to plunge into the sea to swim out and look for Spirit, but she knew that it was as pointless as it was dangerous and what was more, Bethany would never let her.

  Perhaps she could go up onto the cliffs and scour the sea below for any sign of a small dolphin trapped in the water. But that too would be next to impossible. She had no idea where Spirit might be, not really. She looked out intently at the sea beyond the mouth of the cove, but other than a sailing dinghy in the far distance, there was nothing to be seen. She thought about how much energy she needed to stretch out with her mind and contact the other dolphins to help her find Spirit. She knew that she needed a lot more if that was going to work. She turned to Bethany, who had sat down on a nearby rock, her bag of food resting by her feet on the sand.

  ‘I’ve got to eat’ she said.

  Chapter Sixteen:

  Dancer slowly awoke as the pale morning light broke over the horizon. It was the second day-break since Spirit had disappeared and she really felt his absence. It made her feel sad and lonely. If Spirit had left on his coming of age journey as she had left a year or so before, with the blessing of the pod and the good wishes of everyone, then she would still have missed him, but it would have seemed the right and natural thing to do. But Spirit had stolen away in the night. That felt very wrong. What was more, she had been tutored closely by all of the pod on how to survive alone before she had set off. Spirit had not been given the special knowledge and, swimming alone, she knew that although he was a strong and resourceful dolphin, his lack of that training made him vulnerable.

  There had been much anguish when the pod had woken the night after he left. At first Dancer had raced around searching for him, convinced that he was playing a trick on her and that he would re-appear at any moment, laughing and happy as he often did. But when she realised that he was nowhere to be found, she told Chaser, who quickly told Storm and Moonlight and all the rest of the pod.

  Storm called out angrily in a whistle that could be heard for miles across the sea, calling for Spirit to turn and come back immediately, but there was no reply. Either Spirit was too far away to hear or he did not want to reply. The whole pod swum in the direction they thought he might have gone in, hoping to pick up some sign or scent, or to hear his call across the empty seas. But they heard and found nothing and turned back towards evening, thinking that maybe Spirit would return to the same part of the sea that he had left them in. They were all worried about Spirit and all of them had an uneasy feeling about why Spirit had left in the manner that he had. No one said anything openly, but Storm knew that they were all thinking that he had driven the young dolphin away and Storm became moody and taciturn as a result. It was the right time for Spirit to take his coming of age swim and when Storm had told him that he could not, it was no surprise that the young dolphin should feel upset and frustrated. He wanted to prove himself of course and that was why he had left under the cover of night.

  So when Dancer woke up that second morning after Spirit’s disappearance, she immediately turned a circle in the water, hoping to see her friend returning through the dappled sea towards them. All she saw though was Moonlight swimming lazily around whilst the others slowly roused themselves from their waking-sleep. Dancer made a small leap to glance over the surface of the sea. It looked like it was going to be a bleak morning.

  When Lucy had come to him that morning, Spirit had been filled with hope that somehow she would be able to set him free. Yet at the same time he had wanted to be able to free himself and to show that he could look after himself without even the help of Lucy. That, after all, was the reason he had left for his coming of age swim. But he knew that escape was now a forlorn hope. The wire was tight around his tail. It had cut through his skin and blood was leaching slowly into the water. No amount of struggling would help him break free. Instead it would bring him closer to death.

  He looked around him. Anything that he might be able to eat had by now taken cover and the small shoals of fish that darted from rock to rock would not come anywhere close to his shadow. He could still rise and breathe through his blowhole of course, but it hurt his tail when he did so. He was weakening and he knew it. Spirit glanced up at the weather. If high winds battered the shoreline, they would smash him against the rocks along with the waves.

  Lucy had said that she would come back to him, that she would have a plan, but he could not think what. He had spent hours now sending out his whistling call with all his might in the hope that a passing dolphin would hear him and come to his aid. There had been no answer though. Any other dolphins must have been miles away. The seas seemed empty of intelligent life. There weren’t even any humans or boats on the horizon. He was completely alone.

  When Spirit was younger, his mother had always told him that you were never alone in the ocean, no matter where you were or what the circumstance. There was life everywhere and all you had to do was seek it out. That, of course, was before she had disappeared. He looked around him again in the water. Apart from a hermit crab, creeping along a crack between two rocks and a couple of anemones, there was nothing alive to be seen. Try as he might, the presence of the crab did not really comfort him. Then he thought again, somewhere out there in the sea, Dancer must be swimming, maybe wondering where he was now. With Dancer would be Breeze, Chaser, Storm, Moonlight and Summer. They were his pod, his family. In a strange way he realised, his links to them felt stronger now that he was a long way away from them, in danger. It was easy to take them for granted, or even be irritated by them, when you lived with them all the time.

  A few moons ago, Chaser had teased him mercilessly because he had hated eating the small squid that they would occasionally catch. Chaser had poked fun at him, saying that all real dolphins ate squid without a second thought and that Spirit could never count himself amongst the adults until he did too. Spirit had seethed inside, but could not bring himself to eat those horrid rubbery, slimy squid. Right then he would gladly have been rid of the teasing Chaser and the rest of the pod for good. N
ow he was so hungry that even he would eat some squid and having Chaser around to make fun of him was better than trying to get friendly with a hermit crab.

  After another five sandwiches and forty minutes or so at Old Man’s Cove, Lucy began to feel her strength returning to her. She and Bethany leapt from rock to rock at the edge of the cove, looking in rock pools, peering through the fronds of green to see if they could see any fish hiding at the bottom, stranded where the tide had gone out. Bethany seemed to sense that Lucy was summoning up all her energy and gave her time to do so. After a while, Bethany produced a small drawing pad and a pencil from a pocket and announced that she was going to sit and sketch a seagull that was sitting on a rock nearby and eyeing them suspiciously. Bethany started drawing with swift, confident strokes of her pencil.

  Lucy wandered across the sand and sat down on a shelf of rock on the other side of the small cove. She stared out to sea, but instead of looking at the view, she started to try and focus and to stretch out with her mind across the waves to the place where, somewhere, Dancer and the rest of the pod must be. She had got used being able to make contact with Spirit, but she had never done so with Dancer and it was much, much harder.

  At first she could not do it and all her efforts to find a door in the corner of her mind that would take her to Dancer failed. What was Dancer really like? Lucy realised that she found it easier to stretch out to Spirit because she knew him so well and had dreamt about him for years and years. But she had also dreamt about the other dolphins in the pod too and in that way knew all the dolphins almost as well as Spirit. Dancer, she knew, was an agile and fast swimmer with a great sense of fun and a ready sense of humour. If she could think the way Dancer thought, maybe she could find a way to stretch out with her mind and contact the dolphin.