The Virgin and the Whale

by Carl Nixon

  ‘The thing is, I served with your husband. I was with him at Le Quesnoy.’

  ‘Oh.’ Elizabeth feels suddenly light-headed, her stomach hollow, as though she might be sick.

  ‘Do you mind if I come in?’

  She glances over her shoulder. Jack is asleep but her parents are both in the living room. They will be sure to come out if they hear a strange voice in the house.

  ‘I’d rather stay here if you don’t mind. I live with my parents.’

  He nods. ‘Of course, fine.’

  ‘Please, can you tell me, is Jonathan dead?’

  His eyes go wide and he grips his hat harder. ‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t have any news, nothing like that. I was just there that day, before him and the others went on patrol and I don’t know, I thought it was the right thing to see you and tell that he was greatly respected. That’s all really.’

  ‘Greatly respected?’ repeats Elizabeth.

  ‘Yes. Everybody liked him.’

  ‘But you were there when he went missing?’

  A shrug. ‘We were on the other side of the town. There was shelling into the forest but that’s all I know. I just came to pay my respects. You and your son can be proud.’

  Elizabeth tries to draw him out, to find out as much as she can, but it is like pulling teeth. Samuel Shepherd weighs his sentences carefully. He gives her the facts without embellishment, description without story. All she can get from him is that there were roughly a hundred soldiers outside the town. They were sheltering in a mixture of forest and barren fields. The walls of the town were stone, 20 feet high and in the end a small group used ladders to get inside. Once the gates were open the Germans surrendered easily.

  After ten minutes, where he circles around the same half dozen pieces of information, Elizabeth gives up. ‘Thank you for coming, Mr Shepherd. I appreciate it.’

  He seems relieved. ‘It was the least I could do.’

  ‘The best of luck with your future.’

  ‘Thank you. And with yours.’

  Satisfied that he has done his duty, Samuel Shepherd returns his crumpled hat to his head, turns and walks down the path.

  Her mother looks up from her knitting when Elizabeth comes into the lounge. She is making a winter jersey for Jack. ‘Who were you talking to, Lizzy?’

  ‘Someone who served with Jonathan overseas.’

  ‘Any news?’ asks her father anxiously.

  ‘No. Nothing like that. He just wanted to pay his respects.’

  ‘Thank God,’ says her mother.

  ‘Actually, I’d settle for any news, good or bad. I just need to know for sure.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Lizzy. No news is good news.’

  Elizabeth suddenly feels overwhelmed. She wants to scream and rant. Instead, she goes outside, to the back of the house and stands in the middle of the lawn. There are no clouds and the stars are out, the moon a sliver low in the east. A hardy moth is slowly circling the outside light and she can just make out the yellow leaves of the bean plants withered against the fence.

  Elizabeth tries to imagine Jonathan’s face, not the frozen image from Jack’s photographs but Jonathan as he was when she last saw him, when they said goodbye at the train station near the hospital and she held him warm and alive. She wants to be able to call up his smile, which always bloomed so suddenly. And the way that he cocked his head to one side when he was listening, or the habit he had of speaking out of the corner of his mouth.

  Although she knows that Johnny did all these things she can no longer see them in her mind’s eye. No matter how hard she tries or how long she stands behind her parents’ house in the darkness, her husband’s face stays just out of reach.

  Elizabeth wipes the tears away. She waits a long time before she goes back inside. She does not want her parents to know that she has been crying.

  forty-one

  ‘“Can I suggest that you start digging?” I think that was the last thing that the Tiger said to the Balloonist. Is that right?’ asks Elizabeth. It is the following evening.

  Jack nods. He is still upset at the injustice of having been forced to walk down the road before dinner to apologise to Hugh Taylor.

  ‘What happens next?’

  ‘Well, this bit is quite sad. Are you sure that you want to hear it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Through the wall, Elizabeth hears her father cough loudly and at length and imagines that she can hear the coal dust rattling around in his lungs.

  ‘All right then, if you’re sure.’

  The Balloonist quickly gathered up as many diamonds as he could. Wrapping them in a handkerchief, he shoved them into his bag.

  ‘Will that be enough?’ asked the Tiger.

  ‘There’s a king’s ransom here,’ said the man.

  ‘What about a tiger’s ransom?’

  ‘Believe me, it’s enough. Let’s go.’

  He followed the Tiger out of the mine. When they arrived back at the entrance, however, they found that the dark of the mine had leaked out into the world, which was to say that night had fallen.

  ‘I won’t be able to follow you in the dark,’ said the man. ‘We should camp here tonight.’

  The Tiger sighed deeply. ‘If you must.’

  The man made a fire and the Tiger went off to hunt. When he returned he dropped the remains of what looked like a small deer onto the ground at the man’s feet.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the man.

  The Tiger did not reply but lay down well away from the fire and seemed to sleep. The man cooked the meat over the flames and, to his surprise, found that it was delicious.

  At dawn he was woken by the Tiger standing over him. For a moment the sight of the great striped head so close to his face frightened him and the man’s hand darted towards the jibjab thorn in his pocket. The Tiger gave a rumbling growl and the man froze.

  ‘We will go now,’ said the Tiger.

  The jungle birds were singing the dawn chorus from the treetops so loudly that the noise was almost deafening as the Balloonist followed the Tiger back down the side of the mountain. They travelled as quickly as the man was able, which, as the Tiger pointed out several times, was not particularly fast. Even so, within a few hours they arrived at a wide brown river. There was a ramshackle jetty and a hut with mud walls. But they were too late.

  ‘What do you mean, too late?’ asks Jack, sitting up in bed. ‘They can’t be too late.’

  Elizabeth shakes her head. ‘But they were. The kidnappers were gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yes, and they had taken the Tiger’s wife and cub with them.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait and see.’

  With a sigh of frustration Jack lies back on his pillow and stares up expectantly at his mother.

  The Tiger sniffed at the warm embers where someone had recently roasted a mudfish. He walked out onto the jetty and tasted the air with his thick pink tongue.

  ‘My wife and cub were here only minutes ago. They have been taken downriver in a boat.’ He growled sadly. ‘They are gone forever.’

  But the Balloonist had seen something that even the Tiger’s keen eyes had not. A native canoe was half hidden among the bushes on the bank.

  ‘We can follow them in this,’ he said, dragging what was little more than a hollowed-out log into the shallow water. Lying in the bottom was a wide paddle.

  The Tiger shook his head. ‘Their boat is much larger and has an engine.’

  ‘Then I will just have to paddle hard,’ said the man.

  The Tiger gave him a look that was as close to gratitude as tigers allow themselves.

  If you have ever seen a fully grown male tiger trying to get from a rickety jetty into a narrow and precarious canoe without tipping it over, you will know exactly how awkward the next few minutes were. But eventually the Tiger was settled safely in the rear of the canoe and the man sat in front of him facing forward and began to paddle. It was fortunate that they were he
ading towards the sea because out near the middle of the river the current was strong.

  The man paddled for many hours.

  Sometimes he thought that he heard the chug of a boat’s engine just around the next bend and he would dig the blade of his paddle deeper into the brown water and force his aching shoulders to pull harder. But when they came around the bend there was never anything to see except another stretch of river hemmed in between tree-and vine-covered banks.

  That is how the chase went on all through that day until the sun sank in the west. Dragonflies began to skim low over the river and countless fish rose to feed on them, making a sound like raindrops on water and leaving ripples that spread out and touched and melted into each other.

  ‘We must stop for the night,’ said the man.

  ‘Just a little longer,’ said the Tiger.

  ‘If it is too dark for us to carry on then it will also be too dark for them. They will not want to risk hitting a sandbank or a floating log. Trust me, they will stop.’

  So that night the Tiger and the man camped on the river bank. The man made a fire and ate food from his bag. The Tiger went off to hunt and returned in the night with the fur around his jaws black and matted with blood.

  At first light they set out again.

  The man paddled all that morning, until the sun was directly above them and his shoulders ached and arm muscles burned. He was just about to tell the Tiger that he couldn’t go on when the banks of the river widened and they came suddenly to the place where the river spilled out into the ocean, staining the indigo water the colour of milky coffee. The kidnappers’ boat was already out to sea, less than half a mile ahead of them. Black smoke rose from its funnel. The man and the Tiger were close enough to see the kidnappers standing looking back. They could also see the two cages on the deck containing the Tiger’s wife and his cub.

  They both knew that they had failed. They could not hope to catch the kidnappers now, not in a canoe, in open water. It was impossible.

  The man slowly paddled to the beach and they got out onto the white sand. The Tiger stood and stared at the boat as it headed towards the horizon, getting smaller and smaller. He let out a great roar of despair and rage.

  Faintly in the distance he heard his wife roar back.

  He roared again but there was no reply.

  A good place for that instalment of The Balloonist to finish. As the old showbiz adage says, you should always leave an audience wanting more.

  It is worth noting that bedtime stories have a way of creeping out from their allotted time. It is not unreasonable to think that Jack requested parts of the story during daylight hours and that, if it was convenient, Elizabeth obliged him.

  Imagine, for example, a sunny Sunday. Elizabeth and her mother, along with Jack, have packed a simple picnic lunch, sandwiches and homemade biscuits, and caught the tram to the sandy beach on the east of Mansfield. It would have to be unusually warm for that time of year; perhaps the last good day before dreary winter settles in, the final chance they will have to go to the beach. Elizabeth’s father has chosen to stay at home. Just lately his coughing has been worse, aggravated by the smoke billowing from chimneys all over the city. Now that the nights are cold every home in Mansfield has a fire burning in the grate. The air outside 22 Sydenham Street is visible in the evening, as bitter as corked wine on the tongue. Even in his retirement, the coal dust is still out to get him.

  Even though the water is cold Jack has been playing in the waves under his mother’s watchful eye. When he is finally too tired and goose-bumped to carry on, he sits next to Elizabeth on the sand, lips blue. She drapes a towel around his thin shoulders. His grandmother has gone for a walk up towards the pier that points like a wooden finger towards the curved horizon.

  ‘They can’t just give up,’ says Jack.

  ‘Who?’ asks Elizabeth, staring out to sea, although she knows very well.

  ‘The Balloonist and the Tiger. You said that they’ve given up.’

  She looks at him. ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What else could they do?’ asks Elizabeth. ‘It is impossible to catch a boat with an engine, not in that little canoe.’

  ‘Then they need to find another boat!’

  ‘It’s a remote beach. There was no boat.’

  ‘Then that’s the end of the story. It’s over,’ says Jack. He kicks out with one bare foot, threatening to spray sand onto the remains of their lunch.

  ‘Jack, don’t do that.’

  He stops kicking and they sit and stare at the foaming water and the driftwood and the seagulls.

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ says Elizabeth at last, ‘the story is over. Unless …’

  Jack turns his face towards her. ‘Unless what?’

  ‘They could, just maybe, meet someone who can help them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You’re right, there’s probably no one.’

  ‘Who? Tell me, please.’

  ‘Listen and you’ll find out.’

  The Tiger’s sensitive ears heard footsteps on the sand behind him. First the Tiger and then the Balloonist turned and saw a most unusual sight. Just a few paces away stood a young woman. Although it was not her true name, everyone called her the Moon Virgin. She was called that because the people of the village she was from were all born with coal-black hair and skin the colour of the darkest, brownest chestnuts. But when the Moon Virgin had come into the world, her skin and her hair and even her eyes were as pale as the face of the full moon.

  As a child she had been tolerated by the villagers; however, when she had turned fifteen and had become a woman, the people became frightened by her. Some said that she must be a witch, and no man would marry her. After a flood and the death of one of the chief’s wives from the bite of a black snake, the Moon Virgin was unfairly blamed. She had been banished from her village and now lived alone on the beach in a hut made of bleached driftwood and banana leaves.

  The Moon Virgin spoke to the Tiger in his own language. ‘Good afternoon to you, o Most Beautiful Emperor of the Green Shadows and Most Feared of All.’ This of course is the proper way to address a fully grown male tiger. She bowed her head low.

  The Tiger bowed his head, but ever so slightly. ‘And to you, Female Ape with Very Little Hair.’ That is the politest way that tigers have of referring to human animals. The less polite ways are very rude indeed.

  The Balloonist did not understand what the Moon Virgin and the Tiger were saying to each other. To him it was just a series of soft growls and deep throaty grunts.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but you don’t happen to have a boat, do you?’

  The Moon Virgin regarded the man with her pale eyes. ‘Why do you need a boat?’ She said this in English learned from a missionary’s daughter.

  The man quickly told her about the Tiger’s wife and his cub and their mission to rescue them from the kidnappers. As he spoke the Moon Virgin looked towards the horizon where the boat was by now just a dark speck.

  ‘If I help you, how do I know that you are wise enough to do the right thing?’

  ‘What is the right thing?’ asked the man.

  ‘Exactly,’ said the Moon Virgin. ‘That is my point.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Listen and answer a question. Then we will see how wise you are.’

  ‘All right,’ said the man.

  With the music of the waves playing beneath her words the Moon Virgin told the man a story.

  ‘Once there were two men. They had been great friends as children but were now bitter enemies. Both had sworn to kill the other on sight. They agreed to meet on a certain day, on the east side of a bridge over a ravine near the town where they had been born, and fight until one of them was dead. One of the men travelled very far to get to the bridge. He had no horse, so he walked for many weeks. His path took him through a great desert with no roads, only baking rocks and shifting sand. There was no water in the desert except for the little he could carry. The sun threw its
heat down on his head day after day without a cloud ever shading him, even for a moment. Three times he had to fight off bandits who would have stolen everything he had and then taken him in chains for a slave. One night, while sleeping in a shallow cave he was stung by a black scorpion and lay for a week full of fever and only a wish away from death. Finally, exhausted, hungry and weak, he arrived at the place where his enemy was waiting, ready to attack him on sight.’

  The Moon Virgin looked at the Balloonist. ‘Tell me, what is the first thing that you would make sure of?’

  The man stared out over the ocean. At last he smiled slightly. ‘I would make sure which of the two men I was.’

  The Moon Virgin also smiled, showing teeth even whiter than her skin. ‘That is a good answer. I think you are perhaps wise enough to do the right thing. I will help you.’

  ‘How?’ asked the man.

  She did not reply but walked down to the edge of the ocean and waded in so that the waves were caressing the tops of her pale legs. She began to sing. It was singing but not as we sing in church on Sunday. At times the notes rose so high that there were parts of the song that the Balloonist could not hear (although the Tiger could). There were other parts where her voice seemed to dip as deep as the ocean itself.

  ‘What is she doing?’ whispered the man.

  ‘I do not know,’ the Tiger responded, ‘but it is more than either of us so I suggest we do not interrupt her.’

  The singing went on and on, until the black speck that was the boat disappeared over the bright curve of the horizon and even the dirty trail of smoke it left behind thinned and vanished. The Balloonist hung his head and turned away.

  ‘Wait,’ said the Tiger. ‘Look.’

  Beyond the breakers the ocean was beginning to boil. A great shape rose, lifting higher and higher. Water cascaded down its sides as if a dark and dripping island were being thrust out of the ocean.

  The word big did not begin to describe what the Balloonist saw. Neither did large or even huge. The word enormous did not come near to describing its size. Colossal comes slightly closer. Or perhaps gigantic.