Whale Boy Read online

  And with every dolphin he saw, it was his father’s voice that reminded him that perhaps there was more to be discovered in these waters.

  There’s a place where the water runs deep enough to lose the highest mountain. That’s where the whales come. So many you can walk on their backs.

  Just supposing there were still whales in these waters and the medallion really did hold the secret to finding them . . . ? If Michael could find them and show them to Spargo, then that job of skipper would surely be his. But if the place where the whales come was real and not a story, then was it also a real secret? His father’s voice had something to say about that too, of course. My daddy said it was a secret, son. It’s our secret now!

  How could he reveal to Spargo, a man he didn’t even trust, the one secret his father had left him to keep? Michael pushed these questions down under the surface like a float. But again and again they bobbed up, and wouldn’t be ignored.

  9

  It was hot. Really hot. There wasn’t the slightest breeze to cool the skin or make even a baby-finger crease on the surface of the sea. The Louisa May floated like a toy sitting on a glass table.

  For the first time in over a week, Michael hadn’t seen a dolphin all day. He was two miles offshore now, motoring along his daily survey course. The Louisa May pulled the reflection of the sky and the island into pleats behind her, and the putt-putt of her engine was lost in the big, quiet stillness of the afternoon.

  Michael shut off the outboard and stopped. He leaned over the side to scoop up a bucket of seawater to cool himself, and looked down. Long fingers of sunlight slanted into the clear water, shifting slightly in arcs of radiating lines, and were swallowed up at last into the perfect blueness of the depths.

  Water deep enough to lose the highest mountain . . .

  Not that deep just here, Michael thought, but perhaps two thousand feet. Not enough to lose Morne Pierre, the highest mountain on the island, but deep enough to be beyond the reach of sunlight and warmth. This was where sperm whales had once lived; down there in utter darkness. The only light would have come in odd spots and dots from faintly glowing sea creatures. It was a world no human could visit or know. What would it be like down there? Michael wondered.

  He poured the water over himself, savouring the delicious coolness.

  Pppfffffwwwwraa! The sound came from close behind him, and made him spin round so fast he lost his balance and fell into the bottom of the boat.

  Pppfffff – shorter and louder, even closer.

  Michael picked himself up and looked over the gunwale.

  A black shape, much, much bigger than the biggest dolphin, showed about five metres from the boat. It was like a polished rock. On its rounded side was a slit like a flattened S, bigger than a man’s two clenched fists, with a raised lip around it. As Michael watched, astonished, not understanding what he was seeing, the lips pinched together, the hole closed, and the black shape sank rapidly beneath the sluicing water.

  Now his brain had time to catch up with his racing heart.

  A whale! Its dark head and blowhole! That’s what he had seen.

  Pppfffffwwwwraa!

  Now it had surfaced on the other side of the boat. This second surfacing was hardly less shocking than the first, although Michael just managed to stay on his feet and cross the boat this time.

  The whale was a little further away now, but more of its body was thrust above the surface. Two, perhaps three metres of a giant, black oblong, smooth and rounded, stuck up out of the water. The blowhole was at the top; much lower, only visible above the waterline for a moment, was an eye. The rest of the body was a confused shadow under the surface, which had been ruffled by the whale’s movement. It was hard to judge how big the creature was, but Michael thought its head must have been bigger than his whole boat.

  A sound was coming from it. The whale was beaming it at him. A fast ticking, like a vast over-wound clock, but so powerful that Michael felt the clicks entering his body like a stream of bullets. He’d heard dolphins doing something like this. His father had said it was how they found their way around, deep down where there was no light. They made sounds and listened to the echoes to get a kind of picture.

  The whale kept doing its clicking while it swam around the boat. Michael felt pinned to the spot, unable to do anything but cling to the side of his boat and follow the whale with all his attention.

  The surface bent and buckled like molten glass, but he could see the whole of the submerged body as it swam on its side around the boat.

  It was enormous. Two or three times the length of the Louisa May, and the strangest shape, quite unlike a dolphin. This creature seemed to be almost half head. And what a head! Square from the side, with the skinny little jaw, speckled white, slung underneath like a hinge. Head and body together were like a fat torpedo that tapered towards the huge tail, which beat up and down, slow, but full of grace and power.

  Below the big expanse of head and above the paddle-shaped flipper was the eye. It sat in a moulded crease like a sort of naked eyebrow, which gave the whale an enquiring look. The white of the eye was clearly visible, with the dark iris sitting at the centre. Its gaze, like its clicks, was intense and full of energy as it looked right at him.

  The clicks stopped abruptly, and the whale began to swim around the boat the other way, showing Michael its other side: a mirror image, apart from four white parallel lines – scars perhaps – that marked the right side of its head.

  Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it turned its head downward. The triangular tail rose up like a strange sea-tree, breaking the surface of the water into a thousand reflecting fragments, then sliced downwards. Its beating left a backwash, a perfect circle of smooth water.

  Michael breathed in and out carefully, still holding the boat so tightly his fingers hurt. He struggled shakily to the tiller and put the engine into gear to move over the exact spot where the whale had gone down. He stared over the side in wonder. Somewhere below his keel the whale was swimming down and down, into the dark of the deep. The water slapped blue against the underside of the boat and the engine puttered; the only other sound was the blood pumping in his ears.

  PPPPPPFFFFFWWWWAAA!

  It was louder than the bursting valve on a pressure cooker, and even more of a shock than before, as Michael had been sure the creature had dived. But it had only gone down far enough to be invisible to him in the glint of the sun. It had bobbed up the moment his back was turned, at the stern of his boat.

  Once again Michael could see the neat white lines scored along its head. It swam around the Louisa May, only just under a thin film of water, so Michael could clearly see the eye looking up at him, its expression searching and clever. He couldn’t help feeling that the whale was laughing at him.

  Once again it turned, upended and showed its splendid tail. It left behind another circle in the water as it submerged. Michael waited, looking over one side of the boat and then the other, but this time the whale reappeared more than a hundred metres away. It looked like a log lying on the surface, its back very straight and dark. For a moment he couldn’t decide which end of the whale was its head. Then there was a puff of breath from its blowhole, a grey mist against the blue of the sea, and he had it: there was the squarish front of its head, and there, the knobbly dorsal fin. it was heading almost directly north-east. Without another thought Michael began to follow.

  For an hour or more he kept directly behind the whale as it moved along at the surface. He watched the sea sluicing over the top of the head; it looked like a big water tank. From behind, it was clear that the blowhole was not in the middle of the creature’s head but off to the left, in the extreme left-hand corner of the big ‘tank’. The only other part of its body that was visible was its back, between the dorsal fin – not so much a fin as a hump – and the tail flukes. This was a dark, knobbly line that reminded him of the mountains along the top of the island, or a picture he had seen of a crocodile’s tail.

  In th
e bright, slanting light it was impossible to see down into the water, and after a while Michael found himself longing to see the whole of the whale once more – not just the small sections of it that showed dark and shiny, and a little confusing, above the surface. When it had approached the boat before, the engine had been quiet. Perhaps if he stayed where he was, it would come close again.

  He shut off the outboard and waited, perfectly still on the glassy sea.

  Up ahead, the whale had vanished. Michael scanned the ocean all around, shading his eyes with his hand and looking intently at the smooth sea around the Louisa May, which sat light as a floating leaf.

  Nothing. No sign of a head or fluke or fin. Not even a skittering pack of flying fish, or a lone tropic bird, or the pebble-like head of a surfacing turtle.

  Michael didn’t hear or see what happened next; he felt it – a light scraping along the underside of the boat. It was the gentlest of touches that disguised an incredible strength, like being stroked by a giant’s palm. Michael froze; the whale was right underneath the boat, holding the Louisa May on top of its flipper. He was completely in its power. It could lift the boat out of the water, or tip her over and smash her to bits. And yet he wasn’t afraid. The whale was just holding itself under the boat, as if trying something out to see what it felt like.

  Carefully, Michael leaned over to look: on the starboard side of the boat lay the whale’s tapering tail stock and the flukes; on the port side, the head with its scarred lines, lay like a piece of huge, dark wreckage. This close, Michael could see that big sections of skin had peeled off in straight lines, giving the whale’s head a patchwork look in greys and blacks. And closest of all to the boat, only just submerged, was the whale’s eye. Michael looked right into it, and the whale looked back. It was so very, very close. He leaned out further and further, stretching his hand slowly towards it. The whale didn’t draw away. He reached down, until his fingertips touched the crease of skin that gave the whale a kind of eyebrow. It was cool and smooth, like a carved stone covered in a finely stretched coat of rubber.

  And as his fingertips touched the whale, he looked into its eye. It was impossible to say what colour it was: dark but with rays of brightness. It was like a window into a whole galaxy, with stars and planets, comets and supernovae moving inside.

  Effortlessly, as if movement and thought were the same thing, the whale submerged out of reach of Michael’s hand. There was a last shushing sigh as the flipper caressed the boat one more time, and then they were separate again. Michael watched as the whale sank directly below him. Against the background of featureless blue that gave no clue to distance, the whale seemed to be shrinking. At last it hung suspended in the water, looking no longer than Michael’s forearm: the grey cylinder of its head and body, then the tapering tail stock, and finally the lovely triangular tail. The whale turned its head away from the surface, and the tail beat with a slow, sad rhythm, propelling the creature down and down, until finally it was lost in the blue deep.

  The setting sun made a path over the sea, bathing Michael in golden light. He felt as if he were lit up inside too. He had touched a whale and looked into its eye! Like a sleeper waking from a dream, he looked around, dazed.

  He was much further north than he’d expected. The jagged outline of Cape Paradis, the most northerly point of the island, was within sight. He took some bearings and fixed his position with the compass. He lined up the top of Morne Pierre and then the rocks of Cape Paradis: where the two lines crossed, that was where the whale had dived.

  Michael wrote in the log book: date, time, position, but where the words sperm whale should have been, he left a blank. The medallion with its silver whale rested cool on his skin, reminding him that, for now at least, the whale should remain his secret.

  10

  It was really too late for visiting hours by the time he got to the hospital, but Sister Taylor was just going off duty and she let him in to see Gran.

  ‘She’s a bit agitated tonight, Michael,’ she said. ‘She may ramble a bit.’

  Gran’s eyes weren’t open but she wasn’t sleeping. Her body was tense, and under their lids her eyes darted about. Her fingers danced on the sheet as if playing an invisible keyboard, and wouldn’t lie still even when Michael took her hand.

  ‘Gran?’ he said softly. ‘Gran? How are you feeling?’

  To Michael’s surprise, she snapped at him, but without opening her eyes. ‘Well, that’s a foolish question, Samuel Fontaine!’ she said. ‘I’m fine. I’m not the one going on a wild-goose chase to England! She’s a wicked woman – she always was, and you’re a fool to be going after her!’

  Michael realized at once that Gran was talking about his mother.

  ‘What’s wicked about her, Ma?’ he asked; Samuel always called Gran ‘Ma’.

  ‘You know what’s wicked about her, Sam. Her family made servants of the likes of you and me, and they’re still doing it. Don’t go after her, Samuel! Don’t go!’

  Gran clutched his hand and opened her eyes at last. ‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘I was dreaming . . . Michael, it’s you!’ All the tension went out of her, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She sank back into the bed and shut her eyes; this time she really was asleep.

  Michael had never heard Gran or Samuel say so much about his mother, or anything at all about her family. Yet here was a glimpse of a bigger, darker history than he had ever imagined. It was like a reef lying invisible under the surface. He sat holding Gran’s hand and feeling very alone, shut out of his own life, until the night nurse told him he had to leave.

  It was raining, and everyone was indoors, out of the weather. The Flying Fish was closed on Monday nights, so Michael could go home and sleep. But without Gran, the house was empty and sad. He decided to go back to Golden Cove instead. The walk would take an hour or more; then he could sleep on the floor of the hotel and get an early start. He hunched his shoulders against the wet and stomped down the street.

  Spargo’s car was parked outside the Rathborne; as Michael passed, a woman got out. She was obviously hiding her face: she wore enormous sunglasses even though it was night time. A scarf covered her hair and part of her face. Even hidden behind all that, and the umbrella held by the doorman, Michael could tell that she was pretty, and quite young. Was she Spargo’s daughter? Or even his wife? Rich old men often had pretty young wives, Michael knew.

  ‘Welcome to the Rathborne, Miss JJ,’ he heard the doorman say.

  JJ? So the mysterious JJ, head of NME, wasn’t a crusty old guy, as Michael had imagined! He stared after the woman as she disappeared into the brightness of the hotel lobby: it was odd, but there was something familiar about her. Must be the sunglasses, he told himself, that made her look like a movie star trying not to be noticed! Spargo was probably in the car, waiting for Michael to pass, so they wouldn’t be seen together again. It seemed like a lot of secrecy just to keep the location of a few dolphins quiet. Michael shrugged and headed off into the rain.

  Twenty minutes later, when he was clear of the last houses in Rose Town and walking along a dark section of coast road, Spargo’s car drew alongside.

  ‘Get in, Michael!’ Spargo ordered. ‘You’re soaked, lad. What are you up to?’

  ‘Going to get an early start!’ Michael replied. He wanted to ask about ‘JJ’, but before he could think of a polite way to do it, Spargo was scolding him:

  ‘Early starts are all very well,’ he grumbled, ‘but results are what matter. What have you found?’

  There was none of the usual cheery manner; Spargo’s voice and expression were hard and searching, and there was a knife-edge glitter to his eyes. Michael knew what he wanted to hear: about the whale; but he wasn’t going to get what he wanted.

  ‘Lots of dolphins,’ Michael told him enthusiastically. ‘Three different kinds so far.’

  ‘Hmmmm,’ Spargo said, unimpressed. ‘And is that all?’

  He lowered his voice to a gravelly whisper, and leaned even closer, big and square a
nd menacing. ‘You know,’ he growled, ‘I have good information that there are whales – sperm whales – in these waters, and it would very, very good for your future if you were to find them. You understand?’

  Spargo’s voice was like a crowbar trying to lever Michael’s mind open. It was hard to resist: he just nodded earnestly without saying a word, and was very glad that they had arrived at Golden Cove so he could get out of the car.

  Just as it was drawing away, the window wound down and Spargo peered out. He’d put on a friendly smile. Perhaps he knew that he’d shown Michael too much of what lay beneath.

  ‘I’ll be busy with the building work in town now for a while,’ he said, less gruffly. ‘But remember, our plans depend on you, lad. Find those whales!’

  Michael nodded, but when he lay down on the floor of the bar to sleep, his thoughts churned in uncomfortable circles. Telling Spargo about the whale might mean a job that would keep him and Gran in the future, but there was something about the old man and his glamorous boss that Michael found very suspicious.

  He woke to find that the sky had cleared and the stars were blazing. There was the faintest hint of grey in the eastern sky over the island. Michael took a packet of cookies and a bottle of water from the builders’ kitchen, stepped down into his boat and cast off.

  The outboard left a trail of ghostly phosphorescence, marking Michael’s course directly west from Golden Cove in faint green neon. In half an hour he would turn north, and by then it would be getting light.

  There was a sudden dark flutter in the twilight, and a noddy tern came to rest on the Louisa May’s stern, almost at Michael’s elbow. It shuffled its small webbed feet along to find a comfortable position, then tucked its head under its wing and went to sleep. The bird’s trusting presence seemed like a good omen.

  Fingers of sunlight began to fan out over the top of the island. The western horizon appeared, separating sea and sky and darkness from each other. The little tern woke, preened briefly, pulling the end of each wing through the narrow tweezers of its beak, and flew off.