The Race

by Nina Allan

  “You and Alec have become very good friends,” I say instead. “Do you think you’ll keep in touch with him after the voyage?”

  At the mention of Maclane’s name, Dodie’s eyes light up immediately. She blushes.

  “Of course, you don’t know,” she says. “Alec will be disembarking with me at Brock. He has business interests there.”

  “That’s good,” I say, and then fall silent, not knowing what else to say. I feel more afraid for her than ever. I wonder if Dodie will finally be tempted to tell me about Maclane’s mysterious illness, but she just smiles, and adds that Alec has not lived in Crimond for many years.

  “Will he be staying on Brock for good, then?” I ask. Dodie clasps her hands together, and I notice that among the many items of jewellery weighing them down she still wears her wedding band. The backs of her hands are flecked with liver spots, the joints of her fingers are swollen with what looks like arthritis but could just be the heat.

  “We don’t know yet. There are still things to be decided.” She smiles again, but less forcefully. I realise I have grown fond of Dodie. When she leaves the ship at Brock I’m going to miss her.

  By the time we leave the restaurant the heat has intensified, and many of the shops have brought down their shutters. We return to the ship. The Aurelia Claydon nestles against the harbourside like a plump white bird. Dodie seems very tired and we go straight to our cabins. I remove my clothes and wash myself all over. The water runs grey with dust. I put my jeans back on and a clean T-shirt and go up to the passenger deck. It is less crowded than usual – most of the other passengers are still ashore – and I am hoping that I might find Lin. There’s no sign of her though. I decide to go and look for her in her cabin.

  I turn around to go below again, and almost collide with the bearded man, coming up.

  I can see the comb-marks in his damp hair, and his very clean white shirt looks freshly ironed. He smells faintly of some kind of aftershave or cologne.

  The idea occurs to me that he’s been following me. I know it’s stupid but it won’t go away.

  “Excuse me,” I say. I move to one side, trying to edge my way around him, but he stands still in the middle of the doorway, refusing to budge. I will either have to go back out on deck or force my way past him. Doing that will mean making physical contact, which I don’t want to do.

  “Did you enjoy seeing some of Lilyat?” he says. Again, that thought that I’m being spied on, but there’s no sense to it. Almost everyone has been ashore. The question is perfectly ordinary, a commonplace.

  Commonplace or not, I still don’t trust him.

  “It’s a beautiful city,” I say. I try to keep my tone neutral. I can feel his eyes on me. It’s as if he’s trying to catch me out in something. But again, the thought doesn’t make sense.

  “It is, a fine city,” he agrees. “I’m glad you think so.” There are tiny beads of sweat on the sides of his nose where his glasses are pressing. I see also that he has something in his hands, a book, with a red cloth binding. I cannot see the title. I wish I could. I am always curious about what people are reading.

  “Yes,” I say. Like Peter Crumb, the man has a talent for reducing me to words of one syllable.

  “Watch the step.” He stands aside at last to let me pass. My first instinct is to rush away, but now that my way is clear I feel less threatened. I find myself asking him if he’s from Lilyat himself. He speaks like an Espinol, and has the same skin coloration as the stocky taxi drivers on the quayside.

  He is a dark shadow in the doorway now. The bright sunlight, streaming past him, hides his face from me.

  “Not at all,” he says, and laughs. “I barely know the place. I lived in Madrid for a while, and liked it there. But my real home is Kontessa del Arios, where I was born.”

  So he’s from Kontessa!

  The coincidence seems bizarre, but I cannot help admitting that I feel excited by it. There are so many questions I would like to ask him!

  It’s strange, but I don’t think I fully believed in this faraway city until I heard this peculiar man speak its name aloud.

  “It means princess on the plain,” he says.

  “Is it nice there?” I ask, rather lamely.

  “Yes it is, very nice. Very temperate.” He looms above me in the doorway like a giant. “I don’t think I introduced myself. My name is Nestor Felipe. Nestor, as you may already know, means traveller.” He puts out his hand to me and I have no choice but to take it. His handshake is firm. The skin of his palm, in spite of the heat, is almost dry.

  “Maree Forrest.”

  Felipe nods, as if I’m confirming something he knows already. “It’s very good to meet you, Maree. Now, enjoy the rest of your afternoon.” He inclines his head, then walks away from me up to the deck.

  The sense that he means me harm is beginning to fade. It is a small thing perhaps, but shaking his hand has made me feel differently about him. Also I like it that Nestor means traveller – there is a mystery surrounding that, and an elegance which I find rather suits him.

  He does want something from me, though. I feel sure of it.

  It is all very strange.

  ~*~

  Caine told me that the Hoolish people revere the whales as much as they fear them. To be taken by a whale is to die a hero’s death.

  There is a film, made many years ago by the famous anthropologist Leander Duvall, that follows a clan of seafaring Hools of the old orthodoxy as they prepare one of their number as a human sacrifice to one of the vast baer-whales that lead the whale convoys across the ocean. They named the beast Mir-Fasen, which means map of the world in old Hoolish.

  Caine says that no one really knows how long Atlantic whales live for.

  “Some people reckon it could be a century or more,” he said. If this is true then there is every chance that the whale Mir-Fasen is still alive.

  The Hools, whose native homelands are a loose scattering of islands to the north-east of Galgut, are traditionally a seafaring people. There was a time when all the Hoolish people revered the whales, worshipped them as gods. Things are different now. The Hools have expanded their trade routes all over the world. Nearly all of the two million Hools who live permanently in Crimond were born there, to parents or even grandparents who were born there also. The majority of Hools are completely secular. Most have never seen an Atlantic whale, any more than I have.

  Hools of the old orthodoxy are what Caine calls a dying breed, but they do exist. The true orthodox live permanently at sea, aboard steam-barques the size of small villages. Their life’s task is to follow the whale convoys as they pursue their decades-long migrations across the Atlantic.

  To make his film, Leander Duvall lived on board one of the barques for more than six months. He worked as a full member of the crew, and became close friends with many of the men and women whose lives he was studying. They allowed him to film those aspects of their lives and beliefs that few from outside the community had ever witnessed before, including the sacrifice.

  Orthodox Hools believe that their islands and people have a secret and ancient link with the Atlantic whales and their cycle of migrations. If the whales stay safe, then so do the Hoolish peoples and vice versa. By offering periodic sacrifices of themselves to the great baer-whales, they hope to keep that mystic relationship in balance.

  Atlantic whales are not carnivores. They feed on microscopic plankton, which they filter from the water through great sieve-like organs that form a part of their jaw structure. Atlantic whales are dangerous to humans because of their size, which is colossal, and because some of the baer-whales seem actively hostile towards any kind of shipping activity in their home waters.

  Though the Atlantic whales are our planet’s largest mammals, little is known about their habits and lifestyle and behaviours. In spite of their vast size, the whales remain elusive, a mystery. A lot of what is known about them would not be known, if not for Leander Duvall’s film.

  The film’s cli
max shows the sacrificial victim, whose name is Kollen Jonniter, being bound head to foot with ropes and then flung into the water close to where the whales are swimming. Shortly before this happens, Duvall interviews Jonniter in front of the camera. The young man appears calm, yet frightened in a way that seems to have robbed him of his personality. He does not look to be the same man who played deck quoits with his shipmates the evening before.

  Jonniter and his wife, a strongly muscled woman named Celia, have already said goodbye to one another, an hour before. Celia’s head has been shaved, according to tradition, and she has been settled below decks in the company of some of her friends. She will not be forced to watch the ceremony itself. Celia is half Glasier, which makes her unusual in this community. Most orthodox Hools still prefer to partner amongst their own people.

  Celia tells Duvall she is already pregnant with Jonniter’s child.

  “I know already that my child will be a strong child, because of its father,” she says.

  If the baby is a boy she will call him Mir-Fasen, in honour of the whale. If it is a girl, she will be Mir-Fasna.

  ~*~

  “My God, it’s huge,” Maud says. “How did it fit?”

  She is staring at Jonniter’s dick, which stands exposed. It’s the first time we’ve seen the film, and we’re watching it in secret. We are thirteen. Maud giggles, then covers her mouth with both her hands.

  ~*~

  After Jonniter is thrown into the sea, Mir-Fasen rears up in the water. Duvall uses a telephoto lens to move in close. The whale’s movement causes a miniature tidal wave, and all at once it’s possible to see Kollen Jonniter, suspended in the wall of water like an insect in amber. His head is thrown right back, as if he’d trying to snatch one last lungful of breath from the sea-filled air. His arms are still bound tightly to his sides. He’s like a man-shaped parcel, a hero-sized packet of rubbish that’s been thrown overboard.

  The largest of the Atlantics, the baer-whales are so enormous that from a distance you might mistake them for small islands. It ought not to be possible for such a beast to oust its weight out of the water like this, but Mir-Fasen is doing it anyway. The whale’s great striated belly looks as big as the side of a building, pinkish-grey and blotched with algae, streaming with run-off from the disrupted ocean.

  “This all happened years ago, didn’t it though?” Maud says. “There’s no way this could happen now. No one believes in stuff like that any more.”

  She is staring, wide-eyed, at the tiny dark speck that is still Kollen Jonniter. I know that she is wondering, as I am, if the man is dead yet, or if he is still alive and aware of what is happening.

  Two seconds later and the question no longer matters. It’s impossible now for Mir-Fasen to lever himself any further out of the water – one more inch and he’ll topple backwards and be drowned. Uncannily, he seems to know this. He pitches forward with an unearthly roar, belly-flopping down on the ocean like a gigantic flatiron.

  He lands right on top of Jonniter. There is nowhere else for him to fall – Jonniter is directly beneath him now – but something in the whale’s behaviour – a kind of savage gleefulness? – convinces me that the beast knows what it has done and that it meant to do it.

  One of the things Duvall’s film highlights is how keenly intelligent the Atlantic whales are, as intelligent as human beings, maybe more so.

  “They were orthodox Hools,” I say to Maud. “I don’t think there are any of them left now.” This is a lie, but I speak it anyway. I want Maud to believe that the horrible thing she’s just seen couldn’t happen again. I want her to be reassured, because I care for her. Even if I can’t feel the same reassurance myself, making Maud feel better is important to me.

  Caine tells me that secular Hools condemn the orthodox practices as superstitious nonsense, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still go on.

  ~*~

  The second time I see Duvall’s film I am with Sarah. It is late at night, and we’re watching TV together in the downstairs kitchen. We stare at Jonniter, gasping for air in the side of the wave like a crawfish in glass. As the film ends, a printed caption informs us that Celia Jonniter left the barque six months later, when it anchored near to Brock Island to take on supplies. She did not return. When her baby was born she named her Grace.

  A second caption states that the day after Jonniter’s death, his ancestral island of Mis-Lan, which had been suffering a freak drought and water rationing, enjoyed its first substantial rainfall in nearly a year.

  The programme closes with images of Kollen Jonniter on the night before he died, leaning against the deck rail of the barque and staring out across the water.

  ~*~

  When evening comes, the Aurelia Claydon weighs anchor and steams out of the harbour. With the lights of Lilyat still in sight, she begins to head due west into the Atlantic.

  I am expecting the fore and aft searchlights to be switched on immediately, but Lin says they won’t be activated for another three days.

  “The whales never swim this close to the coast,” Lin says. “The water’s too shallow for them. There’s no point switching the beams on too early. It’s a waste of power.”

  We stay on deck until darkness falls. For the first time today the air is cool enough to feel refreshing.

  “Are you scared?” Lin asks me at some point.

  “Not really. I don’t think so.” I want to say that having her there makes me feel safe, that as long as she’s somewhere nearby I feel that nothing bad can happen, but that would sound crazy. Instead I ask her if she’s seen Leander Duvall’s film about the Atlantic whales. Amazingly, she smiles.

  “God, yes. My brothers had a tape of it. We were always watching it. The guy who gets thrown in had an enormous cock.”

  So Lin has brothers, and they had fun together. I imagine them all bunched up together in front of the TV screen, pointing at Jonniter’s penis and nudging each other and sniggering, just as Maud did. The idea that Duvall’s film might be something to laugh over is still distressing to me. The thought of finding amusement in someone else’s pain and terror – even if it is long over – makes me deeply uncomfortable.

  The concept is alien to me, I suppose.

  The word alien makes me think of Caine.

  I wonder if we’re the aliens, after all. An alien race, forced to live inside a compound not because we’re valuable but because if people knew what we were we’d be driven out.

  Lin is watching me out of her single eye. She looks concerned.

  “I don’t think it’s funny, really,” she said. “But we were just kids. Kids can be cruel.”

  “You have brothers?”

  “Yes. Three of the buggers. You can imagine what our household was like.”

  She tells me their names are Ken and Miki and Akio and that they’re all in the military. “We’re all a bit mad,” she says. “Especially when we get together. But I do love them.”

  I wish I had a brother of my own. I can’t imagine what it feels like, to know that someone is bound to you by blood, by genes, that you’re together in the world almost as part of the same organism.

  “Some of the old orthodox philosophers believe the Atlantic whales are gateways, did you know that?” Lin says. “Tunnels in space and time, junction boxes between one part of the universe and another. According to these philosophers, the people who are sacrificed don’t die, but are spewed out into a new world, as heroes. Completely wacko, but I kind of like it.”

  I have never heard of this belief before, and I like it too, even though I know it cannot be true. It comforts me to think of Kollen Jonniter, sliding feet first into a new morning, his fight for air forgotten, his skin gleaming in the light of a different sun.

  The most northerly of the Hoolish islands is called Sar-Dat. It lies at the very edge of the Atlantic whales’ summer breeding ground, the vast, semi-saline lake-ocean that in Crimond is known as the Arctic Race but that the Hools call the Hellen-Say, the Sea of Helen.

/>   “I flew over it once,” Lin tells me. “It was so cold up there I thought my gears were going to freeze.”

  ~*~

  The days on board seem very long. The further into the voyage, the further they seem to stretch out, like the white wings of kittiwakes, like the slatted foot-worn boards of sun-bleached jetties. The decks and companionways of the Aurelia Claydon have become our whole world.

  The days are long because there is nothing to look at. The Atlantic stretches away on all sides, endless-seeming, making a nonsense of distance as well as time. Occasionally we catch sight of other ships, but this happens so rarely it would be easy to believe that we have lost our way somehow, that we’ve come unstuck from the real world and are sailing unknowingly towards a destination that will never appear.

  The passengers are like a second crew now. We have developed between ourselves a version of that same camaraderie, that same mutual antagonism. Small wars break out. New alliances form and reform. Everyone is always hungry for the next piece of gossip.

  Dodie Taborow is still spending all of her time with Alec Maclane. In spite of her expensive clothes and dominating laugh there is something brittle about Dodie, something fragile and faded and easily hurt. She makes me think of the women on the sewing patterns Maud and I found once, packed away in the attic of the Croft. The pattern templates were made out of tracing paper, carefully folded and each once sealed within a white paper packet. On the front of each packet was a drawing of what the pattern inside was for – a picture of a woman, blocked out in soft colours and wearing the dress or skirt or blouse the way it should look once all the pieces of the pattern had been sewn together. The clothes in the pictures looked so old fashioned they made Maud and me laugh. It was difficult to believe that anyone would ever have wanted to wear such things, let alone spend time in making them by hand. The faded women in the drawings all wore bright smiles, yet still they seemed sad. It was as if all they wanted was to be noticed, but they’d stopped believing inside that they ever would be.