The Stranding (33 page)

‘Let’s go back,’ he suggested. ‘We can light a fire at my place and open a bottle of champagne.’

Callista shook her head. ‘No, you drank enough champagne at the opening. And this suits my mood today. Just give me fifteen minutes.’ She hooked his arm and pulled him into the blast.

The sea gushed high up onto the beach, reefing at the sand. They had to walk in the soft upper margins of the beach where all the sea rubbish had been deposited—chunks of tangled fishing nets, faded plastic bottles, broken buoys, dried-out mutton-bird carcasses, broken cuttlefish floats, mounds of seaweed. It was heavy walking. They battled down the beach, leaning into the wind, the sand whipping across their legs.

Further down, they passed a dune-locked lagoon, ruffled to a light chop. Intermittent sheets of sea mist made it difficult to see and the sand kept kicking up in the fitful wind, forcing them to screen their faces. Lex pulled back a little on Callista’s arm.

‘Wait,’ she said, stopping and craning down the beach. She unhooked her left arm to shield her face from the onshore wind barrage. ‘What’s that?’ She pointed. ‘There’s something down there on the beach. Way down. Can you see it?’

Lex wiped away salt-stung tears with a wet wrist and peered through the fog. There was something down there, but he couldn’t make out what it was and it looked a long way to walk in this awful weather.

‘Just some rocks,’ he said.

‘No, it doesn’t look right. Let’s go a bit further.’

He shrugged and pressed forward with her again. The mist thickened to drizzle and they didn’t bother to look up for several minutes. Callista stopped again as a wind gust picked up the curtain of drizzle and cleared the beach briefly.

‘I think it might be a whale,’ she said.

‘I hope not.’

‘It’s probably dead. Washed up in these winds.’

‘Let’s go back,’ Lex said. ‘That bottle of champagne’s calling.’

‘No, we’d better check first.’ Callista’s jaw and her hold on Lex’s arm were firm. ‘It might have been washed in last night. It could be alive.’

‘And what then?’

‘I don’t know.’

She pushed on down the beach, but Lex didn’t want to go. He had a bad feeling about it. Something to do with her determination and the fact that it might be a stranded whale. There was a collision happening in his brain, but he gave in and caught up, striding along with her, head tucked down into the wind. The mist sank over them again, wet and cold. For a while they could barely see more than ten metres in front of them. Then the wind swept the mist up and flicked it over the dunes.

They were much closer now. And it did look like a whale. A humped shape wedged in the sand, half-slumped in the water with waves riding over it. Shiny and black. Huge. Lex saw its tail rise slightly out of the water. Damn. It was alive.

Callista strained into a run, dropping Lex’s arm and labouring through the wet sand, but it was impossible to move quickly. As they approached, the whale lifted its tail flukes and slammed them down agitatedly. Water went everywhere. Poor bastard, Lex thought. It’s trying to get away.

He stopped as the whale jolted a pectoral flipper in the air, waved it wildly then dropped it with a slap against its side.

‘Don’t get too close,’ he yelled, stepping back and lapsing to shocked silence.

The whale was a spectacular animal, enormous. Lex was awed by its size. He was appalled by the hunched shape of it, swamped in the sand. From head to tail it must have been close to ten metres, slick and black on the back, stark white under the belly and jaw. It was lying on its side, head towards the beach, and he could see the great pleat-like grooves running from beneath its lower jaw down its chest and belly. He had seen all this before, swimming with the whales off the Point, but never like this. It was wrong to see a whale this way. Its body seemed twisted somehow, collapsed on itself. In the water they were rounded and buoyant.

He squatted, his heart pounding, wondering if there was something they could do to ease its breathing. But he couldn’t think of anything. He studied the knobbles that studded the whale’s great flat head and jawline, then he moved even further back as it raised its pectoral flipper again, flashing the white underside briefly before slapping it down. The whole scene was surreal. They shouldn’t be here. The whale shouldn’t be here. The poor bugger, it was fighting to breathe again. He saw its body wall rise and slump as air whooshed out through the blowhole.

‘What can we do?’ Callista walked wide around the whale to its other side. She was clasping her hands and twisting them anxiously. ‘Oh, I can see its eye,’ she called. ‘Poor thing.’ She walked back to Lex, distressed. ‘Do you think it can be moved?’

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘It’s so bloody enormous.’

He watched the whale trying to suck in another breath. It made a wheezing sound through its blowhole and its entire body seemed to heave with the effort. He was horrified. The poor thing was suffocating and they were powerless to help it.

‘Dad knows about this stuff,’ Callista said. ‘We’ll have to go and get him.’

She paused, looking with dismay over the long stretch of the whale’s back. Lex watched her face, feeling dread slither beneath his skin. His heart tripped. He knew what was going to happen. He could see it all before him.

‘Could you go?’ she said. ‘I think I should stay here.’

‘Hang on a minute.’ He reached anxiously for her arm. ‘We need to talk about this.’

She looked at him with blank incomprehension. ‘It’s decided,’ she said. ‘You go, I’ll stay.’

‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’

Confused, she pushed aside a strand of wet hair that had escaped her beanie. ‘What are you talking about then?’

‘We need to talk this through,’ he insisted.

‘Talk what through?’

‘We need to discuss what we’re going to do.’

‘We need to get help.’

He shook his head. ‘You’re not hearing me. We need to discuss our options.’

Callista had been stamping around in the sand. She stopped and looked at him, eyes wide with distress. ‘Options? What do you mean, options?’

His heart rolled with angst. ‘The first option is to go and get help.’

She stared at him. ‘There’s another?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’ Breathing hard, she looked back at the whale.

‘Have you been to a stranding before?’ he asked.

‘No, have you?’

‘I know a bit about what happens.’

Her tension cracked into laughter. ‘What, from reading novels, from movies?’

‘From my past life in radio. I did a few stories on strandings. Some interviews with biologists.’

‘And that makes you an expert on whales?’ She glanced at him wildly, her disbelief escalating.

He reached for her arm. ‘Do you know what’s going to happen when we go back into town and call your dad and National Parks?’

‘We’ll stop wasting time and get this rescue happening, that’s what.’

‘You think it’s going to be that straightforward? We bring in the rescue team, roll the whale back into the water and everyone lives happily ever after?’

Callista was outraged. ‘You’re being patronising.’

‘Listen to me,’ he pleaded. ‘Look how big it is. It’s going to take something more than the tide to shift it. They’ll need to use heavy machinery and that’s going to be stressful. There’ll be people everywhere, machinery, lots of noise. And what’s going to happen in the end? It’ll probably die. Not to mention the rush there’s going to be on this place. A whole horde of lunatics making life difficult. It’s going to be awful. Do you understand?’

She frowned at him, disbelieving and cross. ‘What’s the second option then? I want to hear you say it.’

‘The second option is to walk away and let the whale die in peace.’

She glanced at the whale then turned to him, eyes like daggers. ‘You call this peace? Dying of suffocation?’

‘If we get a rescue happening, it isn’t going to die peacefully.’

‘It might not die!’ she yelled. ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that a rescue might be possible?’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t kid yourself. It’s delusion.’

For a long moment, Callista stared at him, anger making her body stiff. ‘I thought you’d have more compassion,’ she said, her voice tight, ‘after your daughter.’

It was the lowest possible blow. Lex was so stunned he almost staggered. What was this woman doing? Did she have any idea what she’d just said? And how completely she had crossed the line?

‘This has nothing to do with Isabel,’ he said, livid.

Callista paled and stepped back, as if afraid he might strike her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But this is about life and death too, isn’t it?’

He stared at her, still not quite recovered. She clearly had no idea how much she had winded him. ‘This is about pain and suffering,’ he said, jaw tense with anger. ‘And this is an animal.’

‘You think that makes its suffering any less?’

‘No. But we could make it worse.’

‘This whale is alive, Lex, and I’m not going to walk away. It’s stranded on one of my beaches and I refuse to stand here arguing about what to do. For God’s sake, neither of us knows anything about whale strandings. Let’s get the experts in. People who know about whales. Some do survive, you know.’

He was too battered to fight further. Callista was crazy hell-bent on rescue, and she wouldn’t listen to what he was trying to tell her. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll go along with it. But are you sure that’s what you want? Even if the experts say it’s going to die, the public will expect a rescue effort. They won’t allow the whale to be euthanased.’

‘I’m sure they wouldn’t do anything inhumane,’ she insisted.

‘I’m glad you’re confident of that. Because I’m not.’

There was a determined wildness in her eyes. ‘It’s about giving the whale a chance.’

Lex gave up. ‘Okay then. I’m going.’

The drizzle closed in again, pattering on their raincoats.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘Call Parks.’

‘Thank you.’

She turned away from him and started walking towards the whale. Lex watched her go. In the seeping grey mist she looked small and cold and lonely. He hesitated a moment, delaying the immensity of his decision to help her in this task. It didn’t sit easily with him. And he was arrested too by an odd mix of concern, confusion and fear for her. He wanted to tell her not to try anything stupid, not to get too close, that she could be injured, that he cared about her. But he said nothing and started powering back up the beach.

As soon as Lex was lost in the drizzle, Callista felt isolation thicken around her. Turning her back to the weather, she tugged her coat-hood over her beanie and sat in the wet sand about ten metres from the whale, just beyond the foaming lick of the tide. There was time now for that rapid surge of anger and panic to subside and slip out with the backwash of the waves.

She was embarrassed she had let slip that comment about Isabel. It had been a terrible insensitivity. No wonder Lex had been upset. Despite her shock and angst about the whale, she had gone a step too far. And the more she considered it, the less she felt he would be able to forgive her. What a shame they hadn’t been able to come to some sort of understanding before things had deteriorated so far. She realised there was as much distance between them now as there had ever been. It was hopeless. One step forward, two steps back. Would they never find a way to get it together?

Perhaps she ought to let it go.

Miserable, she examined the slumped mass of the whale. It looked so wrong hunched on the beach with the waves sloshing around it. So enormous and heavy, its body skewed and partly bogged in the sand. It was a humpback whale. That much she knew. Living on the coast all her life, it was impossible not to know humpbacks. Back when she was a kid, sighting a humpback from Grandpa’s house at the Point had been a rare event. Now sightings were part of a visit to the beach, at the right times of year.

She closed her eyes and folded herself inside her coat. No, you couldn’t be a Wallace without knowing whales. It was heritage. Whales and the sea had coloured her childhood. Grandpa made sure of that, threading his whaling stories through her early days at the Point so they were as familiar as the winds that raked the heath on the headland. She remembered his faraway look when he searched the horizon for signs of whales, pipe clamped between his teeth. He had never talked about killing whales, but dwelled instead on tales of epic chases, following great bold whales through wild southern seas. He had so entranced them with his tales they felt like they were there with him, floundering around on deck in stormy weather trying to keep sight of a pod.

As a child, Callista had never thought about the end point. Grandpa never mentioned that. It was only when she grew up and became more politically aware that she realised exactly what Grandpa had done and what he had been involved in. She understood it had been his job, but still hadn’t been quite convinced. Surely, it had been his choice to go all that way west so he could go whaling. Times had already moved beyond the age of necessity. There were other products that could be used instead of whale. He must have wanted to do it. That had been hardest thing to rationalise—that he had chosen to kill whales for a living. Despite all those tales of adventure, she couldn’t overlook the bottom line. But how could you tackle an issue like that with a grandparent? Someone you loved, who had always been an important part of your life. How could you question and denigrate the very root of their existence? Especially when they were ageing, when they’d moved beyond their past and were powerless to change it. No, she had decided that it was her responsibility to make things better for the future. It was for younger people to carry the load. God knows her father had paid for it in the guilt he had carried through his life.

Hot tears stung the stiff chill of her cheeks. There really was no escape from the past. Perhaps her attachment to this rescue was her attempt to make amends for Grandpa’s history.

She stood up and inspected her beach companion. She watched the whale’s back rise and fall with the huge shuddering effort of breathing. She could hear the hollow gush of air exiting the blowhole after each breath. Rolling up her trousers, she walked into the water and around the whale’s head. She could see its heavy-lidded eye rolled unblinkingly open. Crouching down a little, she moved slowly towards the whale’s flat head. Close up, the knobbles along its jaw were surprisingly gnarly and its white throat was beautifully riven with furrows. The sweeping curve of its mouth ended just beneath the eye, and the whale lay with its mouth half-open, exposing the baleen on one side like a great fine comb. Every now and then while Callista squatted there, the whale slowly hefted its pectoral flipper in the air, waved it briefly and let it slap back down with a crack onto its exposed upper side. The other flipper must be buried in the sand somewhere beneath that great heavy body. She hadn’t realised how long the pectoral flippers were—great knobbled paddles for slicing through water.