by Nina Allan
I can hear footsteps clanging on the upper decks, the shouted instructions of one crew member to another, the faint slap-slapping of the ocean against the ship’s plump flanks. Normally the sound of the engines makes that inaudible. I keep expecting Djibril or one of the other stewards to appear, to give us instructions on what we should do, but no one comes. There is a breathless silence among the passengers, as if we’re afraid to raise our voices, in case we are heard.
Then suddenly Dagon Krefeld raises his arm. “The baer!” Fear and excitement lend his normally melodious speaking voice an edge of coarseness. We all press forward against the guard rail, looking to where he is pointing. At first I can see nothing, just the foaming water. Then the baer-whale raises his tail like a gigantic flag.
The tail is vast, wide as a street maybe. Its upward movement, like an underwater earthquake, causes a miniature tidal wave. The Aurelia Claydon rocks under the force of its impact and for a second I am convinced we will capsize but it doesn’t happen. All I can see now is that tail, impossible, ship-sized. Beyond the glare of the searchlights the night is dark, but that tail is blacker still. It’s as if someone has torn a hole in the sky.
Then the baer-whale slams the tail down upon the sea’s quaking surface and pulls it under. There are more and more violent shock waves, and then it is gone. I release my pent-up breath, thinking that the baer-whale has dived deep, away from the surface and away from our ship. Then I gasp again in horror at what Dagon Krefeld and Ana Carola and everyone else has already seen: the steady line of ripples, a hump-shaped displacement of water rushing towards us, crossing the distance so quickly and so near-invisibly it’s as if we’re about to be attacked by a ghost.
“It’s coming alongside,” yells Nestor Felipe. He points, and it’s like something is tunnelling through the water to get to us, a giant rat beneath a giant black hearthrug. Everyone but Lin Hamada and the Carola sisters scrambles back from the rail.
“Where the hell’s the damned crew?” says Nestor Felipe. I see that his teeth are chattering, and I realise from his voice that he’s afraid, more afraid than I am even. A sense of unreality has descended upon me, like a dome of glass. I can see but I can’t feel, not for the moment, and in this way I am protected from the worst of my terror.
I move quickly to his side and take his hand. His fingers tighten around mine, a panicky, reflexive grip that hurts my knuckles. When he looks down and sees who it is he seems reassured at once, and a little calmer.
“Do you know,” he says. “I always dreamed of seeing one of these creatures for myself. Now I wish I’d never wished that. Do you think it might be all that wishing that helped them find us?”
I search his face for signs that he is joking and do not find them. His expression is blank and white as a frightened child’s.
“I don’t believe in such things,” I say. “The old orthodoxies. The whales would still be here, whether we were or not.”
I gaze down at the water. The baer-whale appears to be circling now, some two-hundred metres from our starboard flank perhaps, cutting steep runnels in the black water. From time to time it lifts the front of its head, a blunt, featureless mass that is like a vast brick wall. Its movements seem indecisive, ragged, almost a taunt. Suddenly I have a horrible realisation: the baer-whale is trying to make up its mind whether to ram us.
A sick, wet panic comes over me at the thought of that blunt head, like a thousand-ton mallet, striking the side of the ship and keeling us over. I imagine flying through the darkness, hard objects striking my head, the freezing, angled catch of the viscous water.
Is this the end? I realise I cannot imagine anything beyond the moment of hitting the sea’s surface, just a sense of not being able to breathe, then a gut-churning, endless horror that I cannot dwell on.
Strangely, I think of Maud, her tangled hair and damp pubes, her schoolgirl laugh.
Tomorrow we’ll be an item on the news and nothing more.
I fix my eyes on Lin, who is still at the rail. Something about her stance – its straightness? – seems exultant, stern as the night sky and yet riotous as revolution, filled with sweat and smoking gunshots and ravishing song.
Lin Hamada does not seem frightened, not at all.
Further out to sea, beyond the pacing baer-whale, the dark shapes of its brothers and sisters lie in wait.
“Could you speak to them?” says Nestor Felipe. “Do you think you could try?”
He speaks so quietly I wonder if I’ve misheard him, if I’ve imagined the words inside my own head. And yet I grasp the sense of what he’s saying almost at once.
He’s asking me to make contact with the whales, to try and persuade them not to attack us, to assure them that we mean them no harm.
His knowledge of me explodes inside me like a thunderbolt. He knows what I am, then. But how?
As for his question, I don’t know how to answer. I gape at him, wide-eyed.
“I don’t know,” I say. I have not, until this moment, even considered it. My mind is clamped tight with fear. It’s said that fear sharpens the senses but it deadens them, too. When you’re frightened nothing makes sense except the need to escape.
Is the baer-whale even aware of us as living creatures, or is the Aurelia Claydon, with her rasping engines and buzzing radio emissions, its infuriating light beams, as insignificant and maddening as a hornet?
Can I make the baer-whale perceive us, as we really are?
The deck is slopping ankle-deep in water but I barely notice. It takes a conscious effort to open my senses but somehow I do it, I make that leap, and suddenly it’s as if I’m waking in another world.
Suddenly I’m in a splinter of nowhere. I gather the sound-pictures inside my head and fling them outwards, images of the sea in all her vastness, and of ourselves and the ship upon it, travelling westwards, like the whales. I grasp for an image of the baer-whale himself, a beast so vast and so powerful he is hard for us to comprehend.
I see you, I mind-speak. And I am speaking to you – my name is Maree, maree, maree, like the call of the gulls.
I try to welcome him into our world. What a fool I am.
For a short while there is nothing, just the gusting wind, the crash and crump of broken deckchairs sliding in a muddled heap across the soaking boards.
Then I hear him laughing inside my head. His great mind, like an open hand, flaps lazily at my song, perhaps to dispel it, then he turns his back on me and for a cold and endless moment I can sense the truth.
The baer-whale doesn’t give a damn what I am thinking. The idea that I am thinking at all is an amusement to him. He cares as little for my song as the captain of the Aurelia Claydon might care for the thoughts of a tuna fish or a flounder.
From far away, as from another room, I hear him calling to the waiting members of his convoy. There is something in his calling to them that goes beyond tenderness. As the strain of quartz in a block of granite is part of its substance, so his vast concern for his brethren is an interwoven fibre of his being.
I do not know yet what they intend. It could be that they will leave us alone, it could be that they will destroy us. If my brief and pathetic attempt at contact will affect our fate in either direction I have no idea.
“What’s happening?” says Nestor Felipe. He has grabbed my elbow, bracing himself against the deck to support my weight. Was I falling, or have I fallen? I can’t remember.
“The whales are singing,” I tell him. “They are singing each other stories about their world.”
I have a moment to consider Lin’s words from before, about the Atlantic whales being gateways to another universe, and then Alec Maclane is hurling himself at the guard rail and toppling over. Plummeting, like a plump, pale toad, into the sea.
He falls so fast, his limbs crooked out at odd angles, and there is something horrible about the whiteness of his body against the darkness. I see that he is naked apart from his underpants. Where has he been until now? I realise I have not laid eyes
on him since the siren sounded, since the saloon, and in those moments of his falling I gain an image of him, going below to undress, then lumbering, fat belly jiggling, along the companionway. I can even see his discarded clothes, neatly folded across the pull-out chair in his cabin. For some reason it is this image that disturbs me most of all.
In his final flight towards the water he is beyond vulnerability, reduced to a thing. The loud smack of his flesh upon the ocean’s surface is like the slap of raw meat upon a butcher’s slab.
“Man overboard!” cries Dagon Krefeld. He is leaning so far out over the guard rail that for a moment I am convinced he is going to fall in also. I stare at his feet, slipping and sliding on the wet boards. I clap my hand to my mouth in horror but I cannot move. It is Lin who rescues him, catching hold of him by his blazer and yanking him to safety.
“Keep back,” she says. “You can’t help him now – no one can.” She barks the order angrily into his face. I feel someone tugging at my arm and when I look to see who it is I see it is Dodie Taborow.
“What’s happening?” she says. I cannot answer her. She sits down hard on the deck – it’s as if the mechanism that works her legs has given way. She is crying. I edge past her and look down over the guard rail.
Alec Maclane is swimming away from the ship and towards the whales.
He makes rapid progress through the water and I realise something I would never have suspected, that he is a strong swimmer. Perhaps his fatness makes him more buoyant. The skin of his back gleams smooth and pale, like the skin of a dolphin.
“My God,” says Nestor Felipe. “Look what he’s doing.”
Somewhere behind us the Carola sisters are trying to lift the sopping Dodie to her feet.
“We have to help him,” Dodie is weeping. “We have to launch the lifeboats.”
No one answers her, and for a moment it’s as if the people gathered around her on the deck are become a single entity with but one thought in mind.
You go, if you want to. We’re staying here.
Alec Maclane is growing more distant with every second. More distant from the ship, closer to the whales.
“What the devil,” says Dagon Krefeld. He leaves the sentence hanging. I do not believe in the devil, but I have to believe in the baer-whale because he’s there before me. As Maclane comes swimming towards him he ceases his pacing and lets his body drop downwards through the water until it’s almost submerged.
Then he raises himself once more and begins to charge.
His jaws creak open like the gates of a monstrous castle. Water pours from his sides in glistening arcs. I recall the horrific death of Kollen Jonniter in the film by Duvall, but in the glare of the searchlights I am able to see that what happens to Maclane is actually worse.
At one moment he is still in the water. In the next the whale imbibes him, drawing him inside its mouth like a floundering seal. The baer-whale shakes its head from side to side, clearly irritated by the obstruction, and I remember that Atlantic whales are unable to process solid food. The beast expels Maclane from its mouth like a child spitting out a pumpkin seed, then dips its vast head beneath the water and sucks him in again.
The baer-whale rears up like a monstrous stallion and then he dives. The ship shivers beneath my feet, and when I glance upward I see the crew are lining the guard rail of the deck above.
We wait, breathless, for the whale to resurface, but it never does.
After some moments spent in silence, Krefeld slowly raises his hand and points out to sea.
“They’re swimming away.”
We all look to where he is pointing and see it is true. The whale convoy is departing. For a long while we stay where we are. Whether we’re standing in vigil or waiting for sunrise I’m not sure.
At some point I become aware that the ship’s engines have been switched on again, and we are on the move.
~*~
Early the following morning Dodie comes to my cabin. She taps softly on the door, as if she is afraid she might wake me. She need not have worried. I have lain awake most of the night, how could I do otherwise? I could not imagine being able to sleep, or even trying to. One of the after effects of what has happened has been to make the idea of night and day as separate states lose most of its meaning. Darkness and light seem incidental. There is just the passing of hours.
Dodie is crying, very quietly, her tears falling softly and rapidly, like April rain. She is in her dressing gown, a silk kimono, printed all over with a pretty design of tiny red birds. Her face is bare of make up, and she appears both older and younger than before, as if the shock of Maclane’s death has thrown her mind back to girlhood, while propelling her aging body ten years into the future.
It is now that she finally tells me Maclane was suffering from a degenerative disease of the spine, a condition that would eventually have left him paralysed. The doctors had given him two years, three at the most.
“He was depressed about it of course,” Dodie says. “But three years is still a long time. And doctors can be wrong, everyone knows that. I told him he should carry on with his life as usual and keep hoping. Hope is always the best medicine, don’t you agree?”
I agree that it is. She gazes at me, red-eyed. There are new tears already threatening to spill over. I see one of them fall into her lap, making a small transparent blotch on the silk kimono.
“I know he cared for you, very much,” I say to her. “Anyone could see that.” I remember Maclane’s oddly lopsided walk, that curiously limping gait he had. I realise it wasn’t arthritis after all, but the first grim indication of the disease.
“He seemed so happy last night,” Dodie says. “We were having such a wonderful party.” As she begins to cry again, this time in earnest, I find myself thinking of the last moments of normality before the siren went off and we all rushed on deck. They were playing Quest, of course – Dodie and Luisa Carola, Dagon Krefeld in his purple blazer, Maclane’s face a little puffy from too much wine. Dodie seemed very excited. She was wearing a pair of showy teardrop earrings, set with rhinestones. They flashed daggers of bright blue light every time she moved.
I try to imagine how Maclane must have felt in those seconds when he first hit the water. Did he have time to regret what he had done? Did he think of the lighted saloon, the card game, Dodie’s breath, warm on his cheek, as she leaned in close to tell him a joke? Will we all, in our final moments, see the whole of our lives as that lighted saloon?
Later on that same day, Lin tells me something Juuli Moyse has told her, that one night of the previous week Alec Maclane went to Juuli’s cabin and offered her a thousand shillings if she would let him fuck her.
“Juuli went crazy. Asked Maclane if he was calling her a hooker. They ended up doing it anyway. Maclane shoved the thousand shillings under her cabin door when she was asleep, apparently.”
“Did Juuli keep it?” I ask.
Lin shrugs. “She was thinking about it. I mean, it’s half a year’s wages. I bet she’s glad now that she hung on to it.” She raises her one puckered eyebrow and we both burst out laughing. I am appalled at myself but at the same time I feel much better.
“He was a brave man,” I say to Dodie. “He acted to save us.”
“You don’t believe those old stories, surely?” Dodie stares at me as if she thinks I’ve gone deranged. I can see weariness in her eyes now as well as grief. It’s the first time she’s seemed normal since it happened.
“I don’t know,” I say. “There are still people who do believe them, though. Perhaps Alec was one of them.”
“People will say I was after his money,” Dodie says. “But that’s not true.”
We sit side by side on the bed and for a while neither of us says anything. In the end I ask Dodie if there’s anything I can do for her. She sighs and shakes her head. Her tears are all gone now. She looks pale and very tired but utterly calm.
“I’m too old for this kind of thing,” she says at last. “I know I’ve acted like a
fool. I’ll be glad when we get to Brock.”
She leaves my cabin shortly afterwards. For the rest of her time on board there are no more card games.
After Dodie has gone I lie down on my bed and fall asleep. I wake about three hours later and realise that I am hungry, but the thought of going to the saloon feels somehow impossible.
I go to Lin’s cabin instead. I cannot imagine she is asleep and she is not.
“Hey,” she says. “I was wondering where you’d got to. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” I realise we have not actually spoken to one another since the siren sounded, and for a little while I sense an awkwardness between us, almost a shyness. It’s as if the events of the night before have cancelled out our certainties, not just about each other but about ourselves. As if we’re having to start our friendship again from scratch.
“You saved Dagon Krefeld’s life last night,” I say to her. It’s a start, at least.
“Not really. I grabbed his jacket, that’s all. The idiot nearly gave me a heart attack, leaning over like that.”
She smiles at me cautiously and I smile back. She has some food in her cabin, bread rolls and some cold cuts of salami she must have filched from the saloon, or perhaps Juuli Moyse in the engine room keeps her supplied with provisions. We divide the food between us. I eat my share greedily. I tell Lin what Dodie has told me about Maclane’s illness. It’s a relief to share the knowledge, to reach towards a way of talking about what happened.
“I suppose that explains it,” Lin says. “He knew he was dying, and thought he might as well go out a hero. You get people in the military like that sometimes. They’re real loose cannons.”
“He wasn’t a happy man,” I say, and in the instant I speak the words I know they are true. “Do you believe any of it?”
“Any of what?”
“What the old Hools say about the whales – that they’re sacred beings?”