The Missing One (21 page)

‘It's so cold out here! Look at the sea, Finn. Look at the big waves.' I stuff him into his downy red suit while he protests, and I zip it right up. Then I wedge his boots onto his feet. ‘There you go. All warm now.' His limbs stick out, padded. I realize I haven't got his new gloves and hat. I left them in the suitcase. I pull up his hood – he looks like a small red astronaut.

‘Dat!' he shouts, pointing at the sky behind me. ‘Dat!'

I look where he's pointing, above the cliff and the house, and I see it too – a huge bird of prey riding the wind tides with glorious hooked wings outstretched, its body and white head perfectly still. I can see the tips of its feathers fluttering. Its head is perfectly still.

‘Bird,' I say. ‘That's a big bird.'

I turn back to Susannah. She is looking the other way,
out to sea. When I look back at the sky above the house the bird of prey has gone.

I persuade Finn to get into the backpack and I strap him safely in. His hands are red and freezing already. I pull up his hood again, and tug the sleeves down over his hands. Then, unsteadily, I heave him up on to my back. The straps dig into my shoulders through the parka. I clip it round my waist. He really is getting heavy.

I clamber over the rocks towards Susannah. ‘We just saw this huge black bird back there, like a vulture.' I am out of breath already. ‘A great big thing with dark wings and a white head!'

But she seems to want to get moving. ‘I usually go round the rocks,' she says. ‘And then there's a longer beach. You up to it, Elle?'

‘What?' I wonder if I heard the slip right. The wind is so strong and the waves are loud. ‘Yes, definitely.' The bagels are heavy in my belly. I swallow a mouthful of saliva and my ears buzz. The sun is very bright and the wind is so cold it makes my face feel immobile.

‘Is he warm enough?' She glances at Finn.

‘Don't worry, he'll let us know if he gets cold.' I try to smile. ‘He isn't one to suffer in silence.'

‘Needs gloves,' she says, disapprovingly, and starts to walk.

I want to point out that it was her who brought him down here without even a coat, and in socks – socks! – but I don't say anything. It occurs to me that my mother's disengagement, when it came to her grandson, might have been something of a blessing.

I follow Susannah over the frozen rocks. Her thighs are solid and strong as she leaps from one to another and I have to work hard to keep up, with Finn weighing me down, and the added instability of his weight on my spine. I lurch and slide over the slippery surfaces, arms out for balance.

We round the headland onto a long shingle beach. The dogs bound ahead, their glossy coats rippling. The coast is nothing but forest – an ocean of pines in different hues, some dead, some sprinkled with snow. The big flat rocks along the shore remind me of a magnified picture of the epidermis, layer upon grey layer. I see a flash of white between the tree trunks and a tall animal leaps and vanishes, a deer or maybe even a moose. Ravens circle overhead and I spot a wisp of smoke rising from the pines, and further over to the left, another smoky line.

Susannah walks fast, a few steps ahead. Her feet know every nook and hollow. She is staring out to sea as she goes, as if expecting to see someone in a boat, skimming towards the shore. My thighs and shoulders are aching and I wonder how far and fast she is planning to go.

‘See the harbour seals on that rock.' She stops, and points to a peninsula just ahead of us, raising her voice over the wind. I catch up and stand close to her, breathing too hard. She is pointing at an enormous black boulder further over to the left of the bay. It seems to undulate. I blink hard. Then I realize that the rock isn't undulating. It's covered in living things – seals.

‘You get transients up here, hunting them.'

‘Transients?' For a moment, I picture shabby people with spears.

‘Orca?'

‘Oh. Right. Killer whales?'

‘Yeah. But I guess you know all about this, don't you?'

‘Well, no.' I shrug. ‘I don't know anything about killer whales actually.' I have a vague image of black-and-white creatures in Florida theme parks. I remembered a news story a few years back, about a whale that dragged a trainer under by her ponytail and held her there until she drowned, while officials ushered away the appalled spectators.

She looks at me. ‘Seriously? You don't?'

It's not clear what she's trying to imply. She blinks, looks away, then back at me again. ‘Really?'

‘I'm very ignorant, I'm afraid.'

There was another incident, I remember, on the news – a man seized by the ankle and dragged into the tank by the whale during a performance in some aquarium somewhere in America. She dragged him under and up again for what seemed like hours. In that case it turned out that the whale had heard her two-year-old baby crying just before the performance began, and was upset. ‘If you had lived in a bathtub for twenty-five years,' a newsreader had said, ‘don't you think you'd get psychotic too?' ‘Do you see a lot of killer whales up here then?' I ask.

She is staring at me and once again I get the feeling that she thinks I'm not telling the truth. We've stopped on a rock, and waves crash just ahead of us, throwing up spray. I feel it on my face – but we are just the right distance not to get too wet.

‘You're honestly telling me you know nothing about orcas?'

‘I'm sorry.' I shrug, trying not to let my irritation show. ‘I've seen them in theme parks and on TV, but apart from that, no. There aren't too many killer whales in the English Channel.'

She stares down at me, but doesn't seem amused. Then she takes a breath. ‘In spring, the transients – the carnivorous orcas – they come right up here at breeding time for the seals. People round here have seen them try to scoop a dog off a beach, or wash a trapped moose off a rock. I've seen a transient swipe a seal right off that promontory there.'

‘Whales eat dogs?'

‘Well, it's rare, obviously, but transient orcas can. Friend of mine had her terrier taken by a transient, just up the coast from here. The killer whale is top of the food chain.' She straightens. ‘Nothing can touch it. You really don't know this?'

‘No!'

‘Well, they have no predators at all – unless you count humans.'

‘I always assumed whales ate plankton or maybe fish.'

‘Baleen eat plankton, orcas don't. Resident orcas eat fish – and that's the bulk of the population round here, actually. Residents eat things like kelp and sockeye and herring. They're in trouble, now, because salmon stocks are so corrupted thanks to fish farms introducing sea lice. There's also all sorts of toxins out there now that affect the food supply. Then there's noise pollution from all the ships. It gets in the way of echolocation, so the whales can't find food or communicate. It's criminal what we're doing to the
orcas' environment. But anyway. Yeah. Residents are peaceful pescatarians. The “killer” bit is more a reflection of human fears than a biological reality.'

‘Like the explorers, naming the land,' I say. ‘Human fears written on the landscape – or on whales.'

‘Well, yeah, I guess so. It's what we do, isn't it? Name the terror in order to conquer it. The only problem is,' she fixes me with her pale eyes, ‘We
are
the terror.'

‘Do they really come right up to the shore and eat dogs?' I look for her retrievers. They are sniffing around the rock pools further up the beach. She doesn't seem concerned about their safety.

‘Well, I guess mainly they stick to sea creatures. Last year I watched three of them separate an adult male harbour seal from his family on that rock right over there.' She points to a flat rock, a bit like a stage, to the side of the cove. ‘It was like a Mafia hit. Fascinating. They stunned him and dragged him out to sea. His family – his whole seal clan – was watching from the rock as they slowly beat him to death. It's a sport for the orcas. They could kill him instantly, of course, but they prefer to take their time and have some fun with him first.' She looks back at me. Her eyes glimmer against her ruddy skin.

‘It sounds gruesome.'

‘Yup. Well. Nature is gruesome, Kali. They tossed him around like a beach ball, slowly battering him to death.'

I feel as if she's testing me, pressing to see at what point the ignorant townie gets squeamish. I can feel her eyes on my face and I look firmly into the waves, determined not to
give her the satisfaction of seeing me flinch. Finn drums his palms on the crown of my head and kicks his legs.

‘After that, they take the kill back to the matriarch,' she continues, planting one foot on the rock next to her, as if it is a step. ‘Orca society is matriarchal.'

‘Really?'

‘Uh-huh. Sure. You get mothers, sons, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles in the same pod, but no fathers. The males go off to mate in other pods, but they always come back to mommy. Each pod – the extended family – revolves around a matriarch, and she can live to be eighty years old, maybe more. She makes all the decisions about where they go and when. She gives all the orders – and they obey her. Maybe because of this tight structure, they have these really powerful family bonds: loyalty, love, devotion, trust. They're highly civilized – they celebrate and play, they socialize, they have traditions, they even grieve when a family member dies.'

‘It all sounds very human.'

‘Well, yeah. It is, kinda. Though, frankly, they're a step ahead of humans, with the matriarchal thing, and their peaceful life.' She glances down at me again. I smile, but she doesn't smile back. In fact, her face is stony. She scrapes some strands of hair away from her mouth. ‘In the early days of orca research all those male scientists just assumed that the big bulls were the bosses – the massive whales you see, with those intimidating six-foot dorsals. It took them a while to realize that, in fact, the mothers were in charge. Even those great big males stay with their mothers their whole damned lives, doing what they're told. But you're
right, Kali. In some ways they aren't too different from us: it's all about Mom for them, too.'

She's staring out to sea and I can't tell whether she is teasing me or simply stating a fact of life.

Finn drums his legs against the sides of the carrier, like a rider, urging his horse to leap into the waves. I picture a killer whale matriarch rising out of the sea right here, in front of us – jaws agape, towering, ready to sweep us under.

‘So you get a lot of killer whales up here then?'

‘Oh, sure. This region is known for them. There are a couple of pods that really own this particular stretch. But there are about two hundred northern residents out there, and researchers know every single one now, literally by name – thanks to your mother, and … the others. It's amazing what they started.'

Her eyes are the same shade as the palest ice-slicked rock behind her and she has them fixed on my face.

‘I'm sorry – did you just say my mother?'

She looks away again, across the grey sea. ‘Every single orca has a name and a detailed entry on the database. The researchers know all the families now, they understand their relationships, ages, personalities, medical histories, everything. They can identify every single whale out there by its markings and the shape of its fin. Every dorsal is a unique shape – with specific scars, scratches, nicks or marks. And the researchers have records of them all. They have unique saddle patches too – those grey patches; they're like whale fingerprints. But yeah, it's incredible, really, what they started.'

I shake my head. ‘Wait – you said my mother a minute ago? I don't understand. Started
what
? She was here? What do you mean?'

But she's walking away from me, hopping effortlessly across the rocks, and my words are lost on the wind.

Finn shouts ‘Go!' And kicks his legs to and fro. He used to wind his fingers in my hair but he can't now, so he slaps the back of my head. ‘Go, Go.'

‘Susannah? What do you mean?' I call after her. I struggle to catch up, my boots slipping on the film of ice. I have to slow down. I can't fall with Finn on my back.

I pull off my hood to hear her better, but all I can hear is the howl of the wind and the thud of waves on rock. ‘Please, Susannah. Please wait – what has my mother got to do with all this? I don't know what you're talking about!'

She looks back at me and I think, but I'm not sure, that there might be a half-smile on her lips. She lets me catch up.

‘Oh? The orca-mapping project?' she says. ‘It's a very big deal. So, I guess Elena was pretty pleased by that, huh?' She reaches up, behind me, and I think she takes Finn's fingers in hers as she speaks. ‘I assume she at least kept up with the developments, back in the UK. Did she stay in touch with anyone at all from those days?'

I shake my head. Freezing gusts of wind thump my ears. ‘I really don't know what you're talking about. Are you saying she was up here? On Spring Tide Island? Studying killer whales?'

She lets go of Finn. ‘The baby's hand is very cold,' she says. And she hops onto the next rock.

The heavy feeling in my stomach has turned to a sharp triangle of pain. I try to step on to the rock after her, but I slip, and one leg shoots down. My boot dips into a rock pool, so cold it sends shock waves through my body and I only stop myself from toppling by shooting both hands out to the rock face in front of me. My elbows jar with the effort of keeping my body, and Finn, upright. Susannah leans down, and hauls at the backpack's metal frame, pulling us up and out.

‘You OK?' she says. ‘You have to be careful with a baby on your back. It's slippery here.'

‘She was up here?' I shout. ‘My mother was here?'