The Race (36 page)

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?”

“They’re big motherfuckers, that’s all I know.” Lin laughs. “It’s not just the Hools that have a thing for them, anyway. I read an article about Atlantic whales once in a science journal. It said that according to the natural laws of biology they shouldn’t exist. In theory there’s no way an animal as large as an Atlantic whale can exist in our gravity without collapsing under its own weight, or suffocating. And yet there they are. So you could argue that what the orthodox Hools believe isn’t really any more ludicrous than the existence of the whales themselves. Leave a gap in the floorboards, that’s what I say.”

“What?”

She smiles. “My mum always used to say that every room in the house should have a gap between the floorboards, so that certainty, boredom and hubris could find their way out. The more of the world I see the more I tend to agree with her.”

“What’s hubris?” I ask.

“Calling out the gods. Being stupid enough to insist that miracles don’t exist just because you’ve never witnessed one.”

I like what she says. I can feel the truth in it.

“We never actually saw him die,” I say.

“No, we didn’t.”

“Were you scared?”

“Too right I was fucking scared. I’ve been scared before though. Fear is like any emotion. You don’t exactly get used to it, but at least you learn a little of what to expect.”

Shortly after this we go to bed together. It is hot and rather stuffy in the cabin. We take off our clothes and lie facing each other. I press my face, my lips, my tongue first to the flesh of her stomach and then to her cunt. It should feel strange to be doing this, but it does not. I close my eyes, and I find Lin is my lover, sister, comrade, everything. I slide my mouth over her face, from soft warmth to coruscated hardness and then back again. The different parts of her no longer surprise or repel me. They are simply parts of Lin, the way she is.

“Does your face still hurt?” I say afterwards.

“No,” Lin replies. “The burned parts are dead, just scar tissue. It feels like a lump of dry mud.”

We cover ourselves with the sheet and sleep for a while.

In three days Lin will disembark at Brock Island, and I will go on.

~*~

Brock Island is humped and dark, shrouded in mist. A dingy rain is falling. The
Aurelia Claydon
would normally remain berthed here for a week – a number of the ship’s crew have family on Brock – but this time for some reason it’s been decided there will be an hour’s stopover only for the unloading of cargo, then the ship will sail on to Bonita without further delay.

“There’ll be a longer stopover on the way back, though,” Lin tells me. “So keep that in mind.”

She doesn’t have a personal address yet, but she has given me the contact details of the mail company she will be working for. She has told me that if I change my mind about going to Kontessa I should come and find her. She has even given me some money, so I’ll have no problem returning to Brock, should I decide to do so.