A Drop in the Ocean

by Jenni Ogden

  “Have a seat and I’ll be back in the flick of a turtle’s tail.”

  I sat on the edge of his deck with my back to the wide-open French doors. I didn’t want to risk seeing him drop his towel. I heard him moving about inside and then he reappeared, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, his hair still damp and roughened from a brisk toweling. “Red wine okay for you?” he asked.

  I nodded, and he bent down and put the bottle and two wine glasses on the deck, then disappeared inside, returning with a packet of biscuits and a wooden board complete with two types of cheese—a wedge of blue and a hunk of tasty—and a bunch of purple grapes.

  “Gosh, this looks very civilized,” I said, accepting a glass of wine.

  “It does, doesn’t it,” he agreed, grinning again. “I like my little luxuries; got to have something to stop myself turning into a wild man.”

  “How long have you been here?” I sipped the wine. It was good: rich and round and Australian.

  “Six years, off and on. Before that I spent about three months a year here while I was doing my PhD research. Fell in love with the place and decided to stay a while.”

  “Your PhD was on turtles?”

  “Yep. Addictive creatures.”

  “Do you work on them all year round, or only when they’re mating?”

  “The full-on field work is now—October, when they’re courting, and we study mainly the males—then November to March, when the females are laying, and through to about May we study the babies when they’re hatching. But there’s plenty to do the rest of the year, analyzing data and writing papers and thinking up new research projects, as well as less frantic field work on the health of the reef more generally, and the distribution of the turtles, what they’re feeding on and so on.”

  “How fascinating. It sounds the perfect job,” I said, realizing that I was envious. I also noticed that my stomach had stopped churning and my heart had stopped thumping. Perhaps it was the wine, but I felt relaxed sitting there talking to this unusual young man.

  “I think so,” he was saying. “If you’re interested, you should come out one night when the females start nesting. It’s pretty special.”

  “I’d love to. I’ve seen documentaries on it, but never the real thing. When does it start?”

  “Any day now. At first just one or two females will come up, but by late December and through January we can have any number from fifty to one hundred a night laying.” He poured me some more wine and then refilled his own glass.

  “What do you do? Count the eggs?”

  “Sometimes. We wait until they’ve dug their nest and started laying, and then we read their tag if they already have one, or if not, we tag and measure them. That way we can keep a record of how often they nest in a season, where they lay, and any damage they have.”

  “Doesn’t that disturb them?” I asked.

  “Not usually. They’re easily upset before they begin dropping their eggs, but once they’re at that point nothing can stop it. A physiological imperative. A bit like orgasm, or I suppose birth, although I can’t relate to that experience so easily.”

  I felt myself flushing and bent to smear some more blue cheese on a cracker. The light was going. I should leave before it became too dark to find my way. I stuffed the biscuit into my mouth and tried to eat it fast without making too much noise.

  “What about you?” he was saying. “Are you here for long?”

  I swallowed the last of my biscuit and gulped down the last of my wine. “I’m here for a year, looking after Jeff’s campsite and doing some writing.” I wanted to take that revelation back the second my words hit the air.

  “What are you writing?” he asked.

  “I’m a researcher too. Well, I was a researcher. I lost my grant and thought I’d have some time off to rethink what I want to do. When this opportunity came up it seemed far enough away from what I’d been doing to be very attractive. So far I haven’t had a single camper, so it’s not exactly a big job.”

  “What is your research area? Are you writing papers?” He sounded genuinely interested, and I looked over at him, his face blurred in the dusk.

  “Not interesting like your research. It’s medical laboratory research. And to be honest, I’m not sure what I’m writing; it’s a sort of memoir on my work. Pretty silly, really.”

  “No writing is silly. It’ll happen. Just give yourself some slack. This is a pretty magic place to write. Just let it work on you in its own good time.” I could sense the warmth in his tone and I was glad it was nearly dark. I felt quite shaky. Clearly too much wine.

  “Thanks for the wine and cheese. And the company. It was lovely,” I said, getting up. “I’d better make tracks before it’s completely black.”

  “Will you find your way okay? Do you want a torch?”

  “I’ll be fine. I might go back along the beach. If the moon is up it will be easy to see.” I tried to sound lighthearted. Thank heaven he hadn’t offered to walk me home.

  “It should be rising right now on your side of the island, and it’s almost full. Thanks for calling in. I’ll let you know when the girls start laying.”

  I made my way along the path to the main track, sneaking a look back towards his house. The light came on inside and I heard his whistle and a clatter of glassware.

  FOUR

  I had begun to talk to myself, out aloud. I also talked back to the radio. If this continued I’d be a raving lunatic by the time I left this island. Since I got there ten days earlier I’d spoken to only two flesh-and-blood people—Jack and Nick excluded—and in total time, I couldn’t have spent more than three hours in their company.

  In Boston, I relished my weekends of isolation after being duty-bound to communicate with the others in my lab all week. When I arrived on the island I was anticipating with rampant pleasure being on my lonesome for twelve whole months. Now I’m desperate for the sound of a human voice other than my own, or a disembodied radio substitute.

  Basil was a man of few words and I couldn’t see myself spending hours with him. And Tom the turtle whisperer was hardly going to be hanging around, waiting for another excuse to slurp wine with me. He couldn’t be much older than thirty-five.

  An image of his body inserted itself between my thoughts again. I rolled my eyes, ignoring the fact that there was no one there to notice my exasperation. Naked men do not, in theory, do anything for me. I did, after all, train as a doctor and even worked as one for a brief period. On the other hand, the last time I’d seen a naked man in the flesh had been more than twenty years ago, and my memories of that occasion were, thankfully, dim. So perhaps I could be forgiven for replaying the image of a wet, brown, healthy male body, especially as I was too embarrassed to make the most of the vision at the time. I could feel myself blushing at the very thought. And his casualness with the whole thing. He was probably used to walking about in front of women stark naked. A matter of course for the younger generation.

  But he had seemed genuine about my going out with him when the turtles were laying. I noticed he didn’t ask me if I’d like to accompany him and his friends on the turtle rodeo. Thank goodness. I might have said yes and then I’d have had to find an excuse not to go.

  Concentrate on the memoir, woman. Boring, boring, boring. Who was I kidding? No one was going to want to read this. A pedestrian account of a dried up, middle-aged academic’s broken dreams. Not even that, really—just tedious descriptions of working in a lab. But I had to do something for the rest of the year. For people not keen on going in the sea, there was a limited selection of activities to choose from. Bird watching, walking.

  I snapped shut my laptop, grabbed my binoculars and hat, and set out in the direction of the wharf. Time to find some other people to converse with. They must be out there somewhere. Where do Tom’s research assistants live? What about those kids I saw; they must have parents. Stop moping woman, and get a life.

  TO MY SURPRISE I DID MANAGE TO STRIKE UP A conversation with the mother of t
he two children I had seen. Violet was her name, and she seemed very friendly. Five-year-old Chloe and two-year-old Danny were the sort of kids I like, lots of fun, and Violet intended to homeschool them until they had to go to secondary school. Lucky, lucky kids. Bill, one of the two men who assisted Tom with the rodeo, was her husband. She invited me over for lunch on Sunday so I could meet some of the other islanders.

  As for Tom, I saw him in the distance once, on his boat leaving for another rodeo. I stayed well away from the wharf for the rest of the afternoon so I wouldn’t have to talk to him when he returned. I’d had some success in banishing his body from my thoughts, but what if he was at this lunch on Sunday? At least he was unlikely to be naked.

  On Saturday there was the excitement of the supplies boat arriving. On Jeff’s instructions I had given Jack a grocery list and a blank check when he brought me over to the island, so I got three more boxes of food and drinkable water, and a letter from Fran. In return I gave Jack my next grocery list and a letter for Fran, and another for my mother, on the other side of the world in the Shetlands. Strange to think Mum and I were both living on remote islands—not a prediction either of us would have made five years earlier. Fran’s letter made me both homesick—they had already had their first snowfall—and happy that I was here in the tropics and not there for the long winter ahead. It brought home how much I missed not having Fran to talk to, although in truth we never talked more than fortnightly when I was in Boston. I couldn’t quite see Violet becoming a soul mate, nice though she was.

  I’d just finished reading Fran’s letter when four people—two guys, two gals—showed up at the cabin, large packs on their backs and each carrying a food box. My first campers. I think I disguised the fact that I was a newbie and didn’t have much clue about what my role was other than to show them the campsite and tell them how much it would cost. I asked them how long they were planning on staying and they said they didn’t know, but two weeks at least given they were dependent on the supplies boat to get away. They seemed happy enough, and I left them to it.

  At midday on Sunday, I trotted off to Violet’s lunch, carrying a bottle of wine and feeling like an adolescent going to her first teenage party. Whatever would these Aussies make of me? I could hardly be more of a fish out of water.

  I was the first to arrive, and Bill was in the process of cleaning his barbecue. He looked about forty, and he told me that he and Violet had been on the island for three years, ever since he’d been made redundant from his job in Sydney. Apart from helping Tom out when he needed it, he and Violet managed a group of four holiday cabins for an absentee owner, and also ran a low-key café in the holiday season. They loved it and intended to stay until the kids had to go to secondary school.

  Over the next hour four other guests appeared, including Basil, Ben—the third rodeo man—his partner, Diane, and Pat Anderson, a gray-haired woman who looked as if she might be in her early sixties. Ben and Diane were from England, in their twenties, and working their way around Australia. They had been there since June and planned to stay until April of the next year. Diane was helping Violet with the cabins and Ben was helping Tom. Their real love was scuba diving, and that’s what they talked about most of the time. Pat was a retired teacher. After her husband died a few years earlier she’d decided to live on the island, in their holiday house, permanently. She told me she swam and snorkeled every day, and invited me to join her. I explained I had a writing project that took most of my time and that I wasn’t a swimmer. If you can float, she informed me, you can snorkel, and if you are going to live here, snorkeling is a no-brainer. I smiled and changed the topic to books, another of her passions.

  By this time we all had plates piled high with the most delicious seafood I had ever eaten, some of it caught by Bill and some brought along by the other guests. I discovered that there were areas nearby where fishing was permitted, and Bill and Ben both offered to drop me off a fish from time to time. It seemed that the entire permanent island population was there now except for Tom. I could feel myself relaxing and enjoying the balmy air, and the laid-back conversation. I pushed away the little niggle of disappointment. Perhaps he was off island? Perhaps he went back to the mainland with Jack for some reason? I finally managed to bring his absence up in a conversation with Ben about the turtle rodeo.

  “Tom seems like he’d be a good person to work with,” I remarked. “Isn’t he into social occasions like this?”

  “He’s a bit of a loner, but he’d usually be here, especially if it’s just the locals. He’s not so keen on the tourists. But he’s off on one of the other islands for the next week checking for nesting turtles; they’ve just started coming up.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize the turtles laid on other islands. Are they far away?”

  “Depends. There are a few small cays within about two hours from here that Tom goes to regularly.”

  “How does he get there? In Jack’s boat?”

  “No. He goes in the tinnie we use for the rodeo,” Ben replied.

  “Tinnie? What’s that?”

  Ben laughed. “That’s what the Aussies call a dinghy.”

  “Isn’t that a long way to go in such a small boat?” I asked.

  “Not for Tom. He knows what he’s doing. It can be dangerous if the weather gets up, especially in cyclone season, but that’s a few months off yet. Don’t worry, he’ll be safe as houses.”

  “Goodness, I’m not concerned. I was just curious, that’s all.” I laughed gaily, and Ben grinned.

  “Ah yes, he’s an intriguing fellow, our Tom. A man of mystery.”

  OVER THE NEXT WEEK I BEGAN TO FEEL AS IF I BELONGED. I wandered every track on the island, spent a couple of evenings talking with the campers and sharing some beers with them, and stopped by Basil’s house for a cup of tea one morning. He offered to let me check my e-mail, so I did, but found that I could delete all but about six messages without even reading them. Of the six I did read, five were related to leftover university business. The sixth e-mail was from Rachel, telling me she was enjoying her retirement but missed the lab sometimes. Fran knew not to e-mail me here. I logged off with a sigh of relief and a firm decision not to bother with e-mail again. It was too much of a reflection of my sad social life.

  One moonlit night, right before high tide—when I had been told that the nesting turtles came up—I walked the beach, and was disappointed when I didn’t see a turtle. I did meet Bill, who was also checking for turtles, and he told me that it was still too early in the nesting season for there to be many. For some reason they started nesting a week or so earlier on some of the uninhabited cays where Tom had gone.

  On Thursday morning, Violet, Diane, and Pat appeared with a plate of scones and a banana cake, and said they had come for their gossip group. I was quite overcome. I can’t imagine such generous sharing of friendship happening so easily in Boston, or for that matter in England. My new friends told me they rotated around each other’s houses every Thursday morning, and I was the first American they had ever had in the group. I explained that I was in fact British by birth and upbringing—and I thought by accent—but they said they would overlook this. They stayed for two hours and the conversation never faltered. They talked about books, food, star signs, education, politics, and their families, and drew me into every topic without me noticing. My memoir writing fascinated them, and when I tried to explain, rather unsuccessfully, what the point of it was, they enthusiastically interrupted with their own ideas. They didn’t know what they were talking about, of course, because they didn’t know me and my limitations, but later I wondered if I could write a sort of parallel personal memoir about my life. The problem is—and of course I couldn’t admit this to them—I didn’t have a personal life. That had stopped around the time I completed my PhD.

  Nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt to try. I could write up bits and pieces about my past life, just to see if I could write more creatively. As a kid, I loved to write. So on Saturday, after I ha
d eaten the fish Ben had dropped off earlier, I opened a new Word document and headed it My Life. I thought I’d begin by writing about my friendships at school as a sort of comparison with these easy relationships my new Australian friends shared. Had I always been so bereft of friends? Surely not. By midnight I had had enough of feeling miserable, angry, annoyed, irritated, frustrated, lonely, and sad about the words that spilled out of me once I got going. I went to bed and slept fitfully, waking every hour, hot and vaguely disturbed by something I had been dreaming about but which was now gone. I got up and opened my laptop and reread what I’d written:

  I remember my first friend at school when I was five. She was pretty and called Julia. We stayed friends until I was taken away from that school when I was eight. I must have had other friends back then, but can’t remember anyone in particular. Other than Julia, my best friend was my father. He was always fun, and on the weekends, when he was home, he’d take me somewhere new in London. We’d go on buses and the underground and he’d treat me just like a real person. Looking back, I’m not sure if he behaved like a kid or if I behaved like an adult—perhaps it was somewhere in between—but the important part was that we loved doing things together and being together. Sometimes Mum came with us, and that was okay, although she never quite got it—our silliness. But she tried to enjoy herself. Even when I was little I think I could sense her embarrassment when Dad tried to kiss her in public. “Stop acting the goat,” she would tell him, pulling away.

  Dad was a freelance journalist, and that’s why he spent a lot of time away from home. We lived in a smallish townhouse with an even smaller garden in Chelsea, but it was a nice house and a nice area. When Dad was home he walked me to school every morning and Mum picked me up and walked me home every afternoon. I wanted a little sister like Julia had, but when I asked Mum why she didn’t have another baby she went quiet and turned away. Dad jumped in and swung me up in the air and told me that I was all they wanted; our life was perfect without more kids. I didn’t ask again but I often wished I wasn’t the only one. Even a brother would have been better than nothing.