Why?
Why not? she asks herself.
Nor will she give it a second thought after she turns the key for the night. She will heat up some soup in a pan, make a fire in the vast grate, turn on Radio 4 and, later, run a bath, heedless of the long balloon nudging the night beyond, dowsing blindly for any breath of wind – ignorant of everything but motion.
Pilot
As we came together, as you moved above me, I remembered only then, in the hot, still spaces between our breaths.
an undertow I was I was in the undertow climbing for air
when something nosed me up
into the air into the brightness
back to shore
my limbs driftwood in the surf my lungs sponge
white sand spilled from my mouth
but life life again
as it came deep into me my arms moving to encircle it to hold
it fast
an oiled muscle of a back an an exhortation
of such love
that I was suddenly awake and wet salt water still
on my lips.
‘You were crying,’ you said as I woke, your face looming over mine.
I surfaced slowly, blinking.
‘What’s up?’ You smoothed my hair on the pillow.
‘Nothing.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure.’
You kissed my wet lashes. ‘Twenty minutes till the alarm,’ you said with a grin and opened the bedside drawer.
I wiped my face in my hands and rolled towards you as you struggled with the box. ‘Give it here,’ I said. I slid a nail under the tight folds of cellophane. You stroked my belly. Then you were over me, and it was then: I remembered… climbing for air, something nosing me into the brightness, and life, life again as my arms moved to encircle it.
Later, I heard the flush, and behind closed eyes, I saw the condom carried through pipes the size of a whale’s arteries into the amniotic sea. From below the ebb and flow of the quilt, I called to you, ‘Come here. Come back to bed. Your father can open up today.’ But my stomach was tight with a sense of betrayal I couldn’t define, and already you were rubbing your face and armpits with a towel, and shaking your foreskin dry.
‘How do you know?’
‘I know.’
‘I said, how, Helen?’
‘The line turned blue.’
‘Do it again.’
‘I’ve already done it again.’
‘But we used a –’
‘My nail must have caught it.’
‘You’ve been late before.’
‘But the line turned –’
‘Then you’re doing it wrong.’
‘You’re angry.’
‘Let me see the stick.’
‘I threw it out.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday, at work.’
‘You’re not pregnant.’
‘You are angry.’
‘Where are my keys?’
Then you were gone, I didn’t know where, till finally your father brought you home long after dark, stinking of woodsmoke and whisky. He shrugged at me and looked at the kitchen lino. ‘Congratulations,’ he whispered, taking my hand in his calloused palm. ‘That’s fine news.’
‘Is it?’ I asked, nodding to the sofa where you’d collapsed.
‘He’ll come round. You wait.’
For years, he had bullied you when you’d explained that there was no hurry for a family. I’d smile weakly as you made your point – my put-upon smile you called it – and I’d say nothing when your father asked what on earth was wrong with you.
You’d known what I wouldn’t admit: with a baby, you’d find yourself even more alone than you already were.
When I miscarried at eight weeks – dark clots of blood at the bottom of the toilet, one the size of a pudding bowl – my doctor reassured me. She said I was fine, that there was no infection, that we’d be able to try again. She said that an early miscarriage was nature’s way of ensuring the health of both mother and infant. ‘But I’ve been so well,’ I told her. ‘I’ve been exercising and –’
‘It isn’t your fault,’ she said.
‘I lost the baby.’
‘The foetus might have implanted at an unsuitable site. Or the chromosomes may have been problematic.’
‘Problematic how?’
‘Impossible to say. But miscarriages are sometimes caused by abnormal chromosomes so that a foetus, which would not have developed normally, is simply discarded.’
I wanted to say it wasn’t simple, nothing was simple, but I could only stare at the unreadable hieroglyphs of her eye chart on the back wall.
‘Do you have any questions?’
‘Yes.’ I looked up, surprised by the directness of my own voice. But no words came, and I wondered myself what I had meant.
You’d told me to phone you after the appointment. You wanted to know what the doctor said. But I didn’t. What was the hurry? You’d believed in the baby too late.
Instead I parked the Bookmobile on the dead-end road beyond the video store. I locked the door from the inside and lifted out the 1976 biology textbook from under my desk. I turned to page 223 and fingered the black-and-white picture of an X-ray: a life-sized human foetal skeleton, curled like an ammonite. I read again the tiny print below picture 4a.
At eight weeks, it is possible to detect a foetal heartbeat. However, recognizable signs of human life, such as fingers, toes, external genitalia and facial features will not be evident until the end of the first trimester. The student will note that, at this stage, it is indeed difficult to distinguish between the foetus of a human and that of a fish. See 4b. Both are characterized by the curved spinal column, the rudimentary tail, and the same fine deposit of cranial bone, which, in the human foetus, will form part of the internal ear, and in the fish foetus, the gill apparatus.
Whales are not fish. I know that. They are mammals. For them, like us, the gill apparatus gives way to an internal ear, to a complex auditory system. The tail, of course, does not recede into a sensitive mound of bone. Whale calves are born tail first into the world.
At eight weeks, there would have been no telling.
At home that evening, you ran me a bath. You added the purple bath beads you’d given me for Christmas, and the translucent globes melted into lavender oil beneath my toes. You rubbed my neck and shoulders. Sorry, you said, because you could never get the smell of engine oil out of your fingers. You brought me a glass of red wine to drink in the tub; you said it would be good for my iron levels. You stood at the side of the bath and, as I stepped out, dizzy with the heat and wine, you wrapped me in a towel and your arms. You took me on your lap and dried me like a child.
Nothing had come between us, after all.
Later, as I stood combing out my hair, you called from the porch. ‘Helen, come see this.’ Your voice was a net, hauling me back into the world. I threw the comb on to the dresser and pulled on my winter robe and old tennis shoes. Outside, you stood, your face turned towards the night sky. ‘Switch off the light,’ you said as I closed the kitchen door, and suddenly in the absolute darkness I lost you. ‘Mike?’
‘Over here,’ you called. ‘I’m over here.’
I edged my way down the four wooden stairs, gripping the thin banister, afraid to let go and worrying: about my half-tied laces, my head still wet in the frosty spring night, and the night itself, like the overturned keel of some broad-bottomed boat, trapping me beneath. Why had you made me switch off the light?
Then a rock reared up underfoot, and I was flying headlong. Your arm caught mine before I hit the ground. ‘I’m here,’ you said. ‘I’m right here.’
I pressed my fingers to my eyes, pushing back tears.
‘Relax,’ you said. ‘It’s all right.’
‘I can’t get warm.’
You pulled me close to the heat of your chest. ‘Look,’ and I followed the pale line of your arm.
I nodded. �
�A shooting star.’ But it felt as far away as it actually was.
‘And over there – another. And up there too. See? It’s a meteor shower.’
I could hardly focus.
‘Your folks won’t be seeing this in the city tonight, I can tell you that. The lights will drown out everything.’
We stood in the unpaved driveway, between the stunted pine and spruce, and stared south-east at the unending sky. Over the hum of the generator, you counted one star after another as they reeled across the sky. ‘Make a wish,’ you said and you kissed the top of my head. ‘Go on. Make a dozen wishes. I want you to have everything, Helen. I want you to have everything you want.’
‘And what’s that exactly?’ I said, my voice strange in my throat.
Your arms fell away from me. I could smell the red wine on your breath as you struggled for words. ‘I’m a mechanic, Helen.’ I could almost see the punched-in confusion of your face. ‘I’m not a god-damned mind-reader,’ and you strode back to the house, kicking any rock or root in your path.
I stood, waiting for the light at the kitchen or bathroom window to guide me back in, but you found your way to bed, as oblivious as a blind man to the dark.
I left before you woke. I waited for the foghorn to sound as I closed the door behind me. I crossed the road and walked past your dad’s deserted garage, past the post office, the gas station, the tiny graveyard where your mother was buried, Eileen’s bakery, and the one-room library where my Bookmobile teetered on the curb. I turned at Moody’s Store and took the path through the woods down to the beach, kicking off my shoes as my feet hit seagrass and sand.
The foghorn was still alive at the mouth of the Bay, mouthing its loneliness. The islands in the Bay – three hundred and sixty-five of them in all, one for every day of the year, they say out here – were still shrouded in fog and, maybe because of that, it seemed as if the day too had disappeared, as if calendar-time had been erased. It was June the 1st. Not possible. Our third anniversary.
I stripped down to my bra and underwear, and waded into the surf. My bones seized up as the cold shot through to my marrow, and I spluttered for air. It would be weeks still before the water was warm enough for tourists. Something skimmed my thigh and I flinched – a jellyfish, like a torn-out heart in the water beside me. I turned from it as a wave hit me in the chest, cutting my breath in two. But I stayed, afraid to go deeper, afraid to turn back. And I watched. As the sun burned off the morning fog. As the horizon asserted itself. As my legs lost all feeling. I watched, scanning the Bay for the flash of a dorsal fin or the fleeting arc of a back.
At this time of year, there were pods of pilot whales at the mouth of the Bay, some in families of a hundred or more. The Bay was a perfect echo chamber. A dolphin or whale could read the whole of its breadth in sonar clicks within moments.
I remembered the British scientist on the CBC as I’d sat that day dazed on the toilet, unable to flush it, unable to look again at the clots that had slipped from me. The voices from the kitchen radio reached me as if through some faulty satellite link, time-delayed. Nothing seemed real. He was saying that most of our DNA is actually obsolete; that it’s composed largely of sequences of dead genes – for the fins we once had, for webbed feet, for a tail that had thrashed.
Three hundred millennia on, our blood is mainly, stubbornly, salt water. Yet at the age of thirty-one, I still couldn’t swim. I stood there in the rising tide, ridiculous in my underwear, my legs turning waxen-white with the cold. At home, in our bed, as you reached for me, I lost my footing in the sand. As you threw back the quilt, calling my name, a wave rolled over my head.
Panic. Seaweed in my face. Water in my nose, in my lungs.
This was madness.
I stumbled from the surf choking, while a woman in a navy pea-jacket with a Labrador looked on, bemused.
I dressed, quickly. I walked, dripping, the way I’d come. I pretended I didn’t see Donny Mullane watching me from behind the wheel of the school bus as he let the engine run. I nodded to your father as I passed the garage. He was hauling back the huge rattling doors, but you were nowhere in sight. He shouted something after me, but I only raised a hand.
I saw you before you saw me. You were hacking away at the saplings that colonized the driveway, cursing the roots that wouldn’t come free. The forest was always closing in on us, like the ocean over the wake of a boat. You were only half-dressed. Where the hell had I been? Why was I wet? Did I realize you were about to phone the RCMP? Did I remember what day today was? Mrs Dempster at the library had already phoned. Well, she wasn’t at the library yet. She was still getting her kids off to school, and did I know the Bookmobile was illegally parked?
I nodded.
You looked at me, seeing me properly at last. Why in God’s name was I wet?
‘’Fraidy cat!’ you used to shout, laughing when I wouldn’t go into the water past my knees. ‘Hold tight,’ you’d say as I climbed on to your back in the surf, even though I was scared you might lose your footing in the sand, or get knocked by a sudden wave, but I thought, yes, I can do this. At least I can do this. I can hold on to your shoulders if you want me to. I can not let go. It was all you asked of me. It was all you seemed to need.
I took the axe from your hands and let it drop to the ground. I put my arms around you.
‘You’re wet,’ you murmured.
‘It’s warm. I’ll dry in no time.’ It was early still. I stood cold and wet under the pearly June sky, and you were moved by the nearness of me, by my sudden openness to you, and you kissed me, pressing your lips to my cheek, to my lips; tasting the salt on my skin.
‘Why?’
I shrugged.
‘Did you fall in?’
‘No.’
‘What then?’
‘Aren’t you going to work today? Your dad’s already –’
Under the palms of my hands, your spine stiffened. ‘Christ Jesus.’
‘I was just saying.’
‘You tried to –’
‘No. No, I swear.’
‘It’s the baby.’
‘What is?’
‘My God –’
‘I didn’t!’
‘Who hauled you out?’
‘It’s not the baby.’
‘Who?’
‘No one hauled me out. I was just being… stupid.’
‘Stupid? You can’t even swim. That’s not stupid. That’s mental!’
I shrugged and looked past you.
‘Who was down there?’
‘I don’t know…’
‘Who?’
‘I think it was Anna Maclntyre’s mother-in-law.’
‘She saw you?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Christ Jesus.’
‘What does it matter?’
‘Do you have any idea how much people whisper around here? Do you want to fit in or don’t you?’
‘The phone’s ringing.’
‘Let it.’
‘It might be –’
‘Forget the phone. I’m talking to you.’
‘I can’t think with it –’
I pushed you away, but you got to the door ahead of me and almost pulled it off the wall as you answered. ‘Yup… Now…?’ Your eyes were still bleary. ‘Jesus.’ The day’s blood hadn’t come into your face yet. ‘Sure I’ve got rope, but Christ, Tom, rope? You’ll need a friggin’ JCB.’ Your shoulders were growing rounded. Your chest seemed to be sinking these days.
You pulled on a grimy T-shirt as I followed you to the door. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
‘We’re going to sort this out when I get back. Okay? Go dry your hair and get out of those clothes. And call the library. They want to know if you’re coming in or not.’
There were no major shipping lanes near the Bay. No oil tankers. No industrial noise.
It was a mature male pilot whale. Thirteen feet long. He’d swum in too close and beached himself.
Our hamlet had a population of
just sixty-two, including the children. Far too few to shift an estimated 1,800 pounds. The Oceanographic Institute had been contacted. They were sending people, equipment. Local fishermen were put on alert. Other pilot whales might follow. That’s what the marine biologist on the phone said. Pilot whales have strong family bonds. Mass strandings are not uncommon. If necessary, the pods would have to be herded and hounded back to the mouth of the Bay. Or we’d risk a mass grave on the beach.
I crossed the road for the third time that day, and walked past the garage, the post office and the library. I took the sandy path through the woods and on to the beach. As I arrived, you looked up, angry still behind the huge fluked tail.
I avoided you and joined the makeshift team who were bucketing water from the Bay over the whale’s black flanks. Johnny Flynn was pointing out the squid sucker marks and tooth scars on him. I edged up the line, past the elbowed flippers, and when no one was looking I stroked the bulbous round of his forehead, smooth except for a few encrusted barnacles. His blowhole was the size of my palm. His eyes were shut, their huge lids fluttering beneath the markings of two pale white stripes. A biologist kept checking his watch. He recorded six minutes of sleep. REM sleep, he said. The whale was dreaming.
The haulage equipment never arrived. The director of tourism for the region did; there were implications for the summer season, he said. I gave up the vigil as the boats dropped anchor. I couldn’t watch. ‘Slow suffocation.’ I’d heard the biologist mumble the words into his cellphone. ‘God knows what took him in this close.’
You said it took three Cape Islanders and a mile of steel cable to shift him from the beach; that it was hard for the boats to get up to speed. You said he turned belly-up as he was pulled beyond the shallows, exposing – ‘You won’t believe it’ – his penis, unsheathed and huge. I did believe it. I could see it in my mind’s eye, quivering like the needle of some vast compass.
You hadn’t noticed my bags in the hall. When you did, your face went pale as a leaf turned in a gale. ‘What’s going on?’
Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction Page 9