Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

  Shannon scours the waters with her binoculars. I turn away. I’m not going to look any more. I’m not going to let those whales know that I’m desperate.

  Suddenly, casually, on the other side of the boat, the whale is there. A black curve breaks the water. Much too big for a porpoise. Sleek and streaming and then it’s gone. I pull at Shannon’s arm.

  ‘There. There. Over there. It’s a whale. I saw a whale.’

  ‘Hey, you did?’ She acts thrilled and surprised, and I know she’s never had any doubts. Of course the whales would come.

  ‘Hey, guys, over here,’ says Shannon, lifting her voice, and everyone stares at the water where the whale was. And then the water is alive with whales. A back shows above the water again, a fin rises, a tail lifts in the perfect forked whale shape we all know from a thousand pictures.

  ‘Over there. Look. It’s another. It dived, just there.’

  No one calls out or rushes to the side. Calm spreads over the boat and the water as the whales show themselves more and more. They are playing, I’m sure of it, not hunting. They are playing with us. I stare, trying to print it on my mind forever. Whales in the grey, shining Pacific which turns dark in the distance. Their clicking sounds bubble through the acoustic device.

  ‘There’s Shaker,’ says Shannon.

  ‘Shaker?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s him. His mum’ll be around here too.’

  ‘Do you give them all names?’

  I’m not sure I like the idea of naming whales.

  ‘Yeah, pretty much. Shaker’s really playful.’

  ‘Is he a baby whale?’ I ask foolishly.

  ‘Nah, he’s twenty-five, twenty-six. But these whales stay with their mothers all their lives. He’s got a sister in this pod too. If his mum dies he’ll stay with her.’

  ‘All their lives – really?’

  ‘If you think of it, it makes sense,’ says Shannon. ‘Their home is the pod. They won’t leave unless there’s something seriously wrong.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘There was a big story last year about a whale that got separated from the pod. Boats were tracking it; people were wanting to reunite it. But it wasn’t lost. It had something wrong, some genetic issue, and the pod rejected it. That can happen.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘That’s tough,’ says a young woman in a red jacket.

  ‘No sentiment in the animal kingdom,’ says the man with the camcorder.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Shannon surprisingly. ‘Whales have deep feelings; I do know that.’

  She lifts her binoculars again, and is silent. She’s a sensitive girl. She wants this to be our experience, not hers.

  The whale she called Shaker has disappeared. There are two more whales moving through the water in the distance, west to east, sometimes showing, sometimes not. They travel purposefully. Even though I can see them clearly, it doesn’t make them any less mysterious.

  Everyone in the boat is filming or taking photos. I take some photos myself and think of showing them to Luke. But they won’t come out the way it was. My photos rarely do. I’m always having to explain what’s in them.

  See that shape there, Luke? No, not there, there. That’s part of a whale. Which part? Um, well, maybe it’s the back. Or it could be the tail …

  The young woman in the red jacket taps my arm. ‘You want me to take a photo of you with a whale in the background?’

  Close up, I see how bright and eager she is. It would be churlish to turn her down.

  She takes a long time, trying to get the best shot, waiting for a whale to rise behind me. At last it’s done.

  ‘He was distant, but it should come out OK.’

  ‘Thanks a lot. Do you want me to take one of you?’

  She hands me her camera. ‘It’ll be something to show my kids. They’re back at the hotel. They’re so jealous of me for taking this trip, but three and five, they’re pretty young for it. And it’s expensive …’

  ‘You have every right to take a trip on your own,’ I say firmly. ‘That’s what I’m doing, too.’

  ‘You got kids?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘I’m Julie. I’m from Moose Jaw. Yeah, I know. It’s a real place; that’s what it’s called. I was born there. You’re British, right?’

  By the time we’ve all finished taking photos, a wind off the mountains is chopping up the water. The whales have hidden themselves. It’s time to go back inside.

  We settle ourselves in the cramped cabin. Shannon starts the engine and our boat bucks and slaps across the water. The engine noise makes me sleepy, but Shannon is telling us something above the racket.

  ‘We’ll be going by a seal colony on the way back. I’ll cut the engine and take you as close as I can, but we don’t want to scare them off the rocks.’

  She tells us about seals, how the seal pups are independent at six weeks, and how the transient killer whales work together to hunt them. One group of whales scares the seals off the rocks, and another group waits for them to slide into the water on the other side.

  ‘Six weeks!’ says Julie. ‘Seal mums sure get a better deal than whale mums. Didn’t you say that Shaker was still hanging out with his mother at twenty-five?’

  ‘He’ll still be hanging out with her at forty, if she’s alive,’ says Shannon.

  ‘Oh my Lord. Forty years. Can you picture that?’

  My answering smile is as quick as I can make it.

  When Luke is forty I shall be sixty-six, and still able to take care of him, unless something happens. Luke will be forty and probably his hair will be grey. My child’s hair will be grey.

  ‘How old are your kids?’ asks Julie.

  ‘Jasmine is nineteen, Luke is twenty-three.’

  ‘They’ve flown the nest, then.’ Like most parents of small children, she still sees their upbringing as a finite task. They will get to the sunlit uplands of adulthood at eighteen and that will be it. Job done.

  ‘Jasmine’s at uni. Luke is at home with us.’

  And as her expression changes slightly I decide to tell her.

  ‘He was in an accident last year. A car accident. He wasn’t driving. He had head injuries.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ says Julie. ‘How is he doing?’

  ‘Better than we thought. Much better than we thought. But he won’t be able to manage on his own. Not for a while.’

  Luke’s face rises in my mind. He is wearing the strange, lost look that comes over him sometimes. I am afraid that this look comes when he remembers that it wasn’t always like this. Most of the time the facts of his former life are like a story to him. He went to university, he shared a flat, he studied sports science and psychology and played in the university hockey team. One day last month I found him standing by the washing machine with his cereal bowl and coffee mug.

  ‘Mum,’ he asked me. ‘Do I know how to operate this article?’

  I cannot get his frowning, pained look out of my head.

  ‘It’s great that you took this trip,’ says Julie. For a moment her warm hand covers mine. ‘You’ll be able to tell Luke about the whales.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I will tell him about the cold, dark Pacific water, the American mountains, and the silence when our engine stopped. How fragile our boat was on the water.

  ALL THOSE PERSONAL SURVIVAL MEDALS

  ‘SO WHAT’S THE memory that really makes you flinch?’ asked Liz. Melanie and Ros looked at her.

  ‘Flinch?’ said Ros.

  ‘You know, like this.’ Liz shrank and shrivelled, hands over her face, body twisting away. ‘I don’t mean serious stuff, I mean those stupid things that last a lifetime. Mine – I’m not saying what it is, but if I ever stop dead and start moaning “Oh no, oh no!” for no apparent reason, that’ll be it.’

  ‘How long ago was it?’

  ‘Nineteen ninety-one.’

  ‘So you were still a student.’

  ‘Yes. Twenty-one. Peak time for collecting those “Oh no
!” moments, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Definitely.’ Ros, sitting across the table from Melanie, began to spoon organic plum purée into the mouth of her baby, Lucas. Her late baby, as everyone still thought of him. Ros had pulled a fast one on the others, settling all those arguments about whether or not they should slip in one more baby before the guillotine of the menopause crashed down. Perhaps Lucas had been an accident; Ros wouldn’t say. All the other children were between eight and twelve, long-legged, independent and way down the beach in their wetsuits, bodyboarding. The lifeguards weren’t there at Easter, so the two fathers, Liam and Carl, kept watch at the water’s edge. Lucas, six months old, lolled in his mother’s lap.

  ‘If they hadn’t changed the rules about pensions, you’d have been able to collect child benefit at the same time as the old-age pension,’ said Melanie suddenly, as if out of long thought.

  ‘Only for a year,’ Ros said, so quickly that it was clear the same idea had struck her, too, and been worked out as Ros worked everything out.

  ‘Better than nothing,’ said Liz, rather bitterly. Everybody seemed to do better out of the system than she and Carl. Melanie no doubt had all those child tax credits now that people talked about: Melanie worked four days a week as a legal secretary. Gary, although the owner of a successful sports shop, had appeared to have very little income when it came to working out child support.

  Everybody had liked Gary, and the divorce was so recent that its shadow hung over them all. The fact that he had fallen in love with the dental nurse during a complex, costly implant procedure added a touch of the ridiculous which made things even worse for Melanie. How the hell, they asked themselves, could anyone fall in love when he had a suction tube in his mouth? As for the girl, she must have been very determined, that was all Ros and Liz could say. They would have to meet her some time, of course; Gary and Carl played squash, Liam and Gary went to football together, and all that wasn’t about to come to an end just because Gary had been playing away. But for the time being they all wanted to show Melanie that they were with her, on her side 100 per cent in the miserable battle over the children, the house and Gary’s final-salary pension scheme.

  Melanie stared out to sea, shading her eyes against the harsh April light.

  She’s looking older, thought Ros, and then quickly, loyally: But of course we all are. The fortieth birthdays were over, and the rash of celebrations. Ros felt easier in the foothills of the forties than when she’d clung to the precipice of thirty-nine.

  ‘I feel so old,’ said Melanie. The light had made teary streaks on her face.

  ‘You’re not old, what rubbish,’ said Liz stoutly, but Ros wiped her baby’s mouth and said:

  ‘It’s the spring. People think they’re glad about spring, but really they want to stay wrapped up in winter.’

  ‘We do, because we’re old. Getting old,’ Melanie corrected herself. ‘I hate having to take clothes off these days. Bare legs … my God!’

  ‘That’s where wetsuits are so good,’ said Ros, putting the baby up on her shoulder. ‘I used to dread, positively dread, walking down to the water in a swimsuit.’

  Liz suppressed the thought that Melanie was going to have to take her clothes off at some point, if she were ever to replace Gary. But that was different. It could be done in the dark; or, at the very least, in careful lighting.

  ‘What you need to do,’ instructed Liz, ‘is pretend in your mind that you’re ten years older than you really are.’

  ‘What – fifty-two? How’s that going to help?’

  ‘Well, then you think: I’m fifty-two, just imagine how great it would be if I could wake up and find I was forty-two.’

  There was thoughtful silence.

  ‘I wonder if it would still work when you were, say, ninety-two?’

  ‘I expect it would,’ said Ros with automatic, encouraging cheerfulness. She stood up carefully. Lucas was dropping off. She rocked back and forth, shielding his head from the wind with her body. She was glad she’d brought his blue hat. Her mind emptied, drowsed. There were her children, somewhere in that cold, surging sea. Specks of life that she’d made. But so strong and solid now, busy with the sea as they were busy with everything. They would come rushing to her later with some plan: a ring of stones with a fire inside to cook sausages, or a deep-dug rock-pool hospital for injured crabs. Their long hair would be tangled, slapping against their neoprene shoulders. Yes, Lucas was asleep. She wondered what Liz’s memory was, the one that made her flinch.

  It was easy enough to remember her own.

  She was back in the classroom. It was just gone half past three, and they had put their chairs up on their tables. Mrs Curtis was talking to two boys who’d been messing about with water – or worse – in the cloakrooms, so she didn’t notice Kimberley Hilton come prancing back from the cloakroom with a sheaf of party invitations in her hand. They were coloured envelopes, with stickers on them.

  Kimberley went from table to table. As far as Ros could see, everybody was getting an invitation. Kimberley was the queen of the class. The Queen Bee, Ros’s mother called her. She was smiling, sparkling, in her little black furry coat – no one else had a coat like Kimberley’s – with her very pale hair pulled tight back into a ponytail and her sharp eyes going big as she gave out each envelope and then small again as she considered the next face in front of her. They were going swimming at the Oasis, with burgers and chips afterwards, then a few of Kimberley’s special friends were going back for a sleepover. Ros knew there was no chance of her being asked to the sleepover. But she’d invited Kimberley to her party, and let Kimberley open the presents.

  She was getting close. She was in front of Ros. She had an envelope in her hand. She was smiling and sparkling and her eyes were big. She wagged the envelope, stretching out her hand. Ros reached out too. ‘Thank you, Kimberley,’ she said, her voice too loud, clumsy with relief. The envelope quivered. Kimberley’s eyes widened farther in a pantomime of surprise. ‘Oh, sorry, Ros, I didn’t mean you! It’s a swimming party, and you can’t swim, can you? This is Clare’s. I was just going to give it to her.’

  Everyone had seen. Ros heard giggling. ‘Ros Howden can’t even swim and she thought she was coming to Kimberley’s party!’ She stood there, red and ugly, as Kimberley danced on.

  It was over. Kimberley was forty-two, for God’s sake. Probably divorced. Ros held Lucas to her. She had the children. She had Liam. There were Liz and Melanie, close enough friends to come away together for an Easter break, all eight kids crammed into two narrow loft bedrooms, knowing that it didn’t matter if quarrels broke out, because Liz or Melanie would settle them in the same way as Ros would.

  Why the hell did it matter? It didn’t, not by any possible scale of things that mattered.

  ‘Ros,’ said Melanie, shading her eyes again, her voice tight. ‘Isn’t that Amy on that dinghy?’

  ‘What dinghy?’

  ‘There.’ She pointed; Ros followed. A small yellow dinghy was bobbing just beyond the surf, with two little black figures in it.

  ‘But we haven’t got a dinghy,’ said Ros stupidly.

  One of the little figures in the dinghy stood up, wobbled, sat down again. It was Amy.

  ‘Where are Carl and Liam?’ asked Liz. But the men were looking the other way, at the bodysurfers. Ros barely thought. She pushed Lucas into Melanie’s arms and ran down the beach. Her breath was hot; her feet flew. She was so close now that the dinghy was hidden by the surf. If the wind veered – if an offshore gust sent the dinghy scudding out across the bay – if Amy panicked – why hadn’t Liam been watching her—

  Faces gaped as Ros plunged, fully dressed, into the Easter-cold water. She waded out, the sea dragging at her. She was too slow. She duck-dived under the surf, pushed herself down through the boil of the water, kicked out.

  She rose, threw her hair back, trod water, pushing herself up to see beyond the next wave that was swelling towards her. She wasn’t far enough out. She dived again, swimm
ing hard and strong underwater as the wave passed overhead. She was beyond the breaking waves. There was the dinghy, bouncing on the swell. There was a man with it, holding its rope, swimming. She saw the white, scared face of a strange child in the dinghy.

  ‘Amy!’ she screamed and the man looked her way but he couldn’t do anything, he was pulling the rope, hauling his own child to safety. ‘Amy!’ The man was pointing. Ros looked to her left and a dark head popped above the surface and went down.

  Amy hadn’t been drowning. She made that clear to Ros afterwards.

  ‘I’m a good swimmer, Mum.’

  She’d jumped out of the dinghy, because it was going the wrong way and she and the other girl – Talitha, she was called – couldn’t make it turn back. But Talitha didn’t jump even though Amy knew they could easily swim back to shore from there.

  But she said all that afterwards, when they were on the way home. After Ros had towed her back to shore, after the doctor who happened to be on the beach had checked Amy over, after they’d all stopped shaking with cold and shock, after Amy had at last stopped crying and holding on to Ros’s waist as if she would never let go. Ros kept running the same loop over and over. Amy going down. The surface of the sea with no Amy. The grapple for her underwater, nothing there but the sea. And then, as Ros dived for the third time, Amy rose.

  ‘He was very apologetic, that other father,’ said Melanie as she ladled sugar into hot coffee from the beach shack for Ros. ‘Trouble was, he’s here on his own with three of them to keep an eye on. He’s divorced.’

  ‘I don’t blame him,’ said Ros, although she did.

  ‘They live in Bristol too.’

  Melanie’s eyes were bright. And yet she’s a good friend, one of my closest friends, Ros thought. Aren’t people extraordinary? Thank God I did all those personal survival medals. And the lifesaving course.