The Missing One (57 page)

‘Lorry!' Finn cries. There is a big crane, lowering a crate off a boat to the right of the dock.

A couple of men are waiting on the quay. One turns and walks purposefully up towards the main street with his dog while the other stands still, watching the ferry arrive. There is something about his posture that makes my heart turn over – the slight stoop, the big black jacket, the woollen hat pulled low. I really am missing Doug. I'm missing him so much that I'm inventing him now. I need him. He is part of me. None of this works without him. I have to get home and sort this out.

I stand up on one leg and I press my face against the window. Next to me, Finn does the same, standing on the seat, his feet planted wide apart. Then he points.

‘Daddy!' he shouts. ‘Daddy!'

‘I know. He does look like Daddy.' I pat Finn's head. ‘We'll see Daddy soon.'

‘No.' He looks up at me, then points again. ‘Daddy!'

I look again.

The man standing watching the ferry isn't a stranger, coloured by my longing, it is Doug. Doug is here.

‘Daddy!' Finn shouts, wildly. ‘Dat! Daddy!'

*

Doug folds his arms around us and for a long time, we stand in a tight knot on the quay. Then he pulls back and twirls Finn round and kisses him and Finn squeals and laughs. ‘Again! Again!'

Over Finn's head, Doug looks at me. Then he lifts the hat off my head with one hand. ‘Jesus, Kal! You cut all your hair off!'

His face is pallid and unshaven, and I can see in his eyes how shaken he is by the past few days, how deeply worried he's been and how shocked he is, of all things, that my hair is gone.

‘I know.' I run my hand over it, grinning stupidly. Are we really going to talk about my hair?

He puts Finn down. ‘What the hell is happening, Kal?' he says. ‘What are you
doing
?' He looks me up and down, and despite himself, he smiles. ‘And what in God's name are you
wearing
?'

I feel as if he might vanish if I take my eyes off him.

‘How did you
get
here?' I say. ‘How on earth are you here?'

‘Well, I literally just got off the ferry from that port, what's-it-called … ' He looks at me. ‘And I was trying to work out how to get the next boat. Christ, your hair is short.' He pulls me to him again. ‘Jesus, Kal. Jesus.'

‘But how? I can't believe you got here so fast. I mean, how … '

‘After you called, and then your phone was dead I went to Heathrow and got on the first flight to Vancouver,' he says. ‘Then I got a taxi to the port, and the first island ferry. And I was about to get on that ferry to whatever it is – Raven Island. What the fuck has happened, Kal?'

Finn tugs Doug's hand. ‘Carry 'oo?'

He bends and sweeps Finn up and round and they laugh. ‘God, I missed you, matey.' Doug buries his face in Finn's neck. ‘My God, I missed you.'

Finn pulls at Doug's chin. ‘Lorry!' he calls, pointing across the dock. ‘Dat!'

‘Wow,' Doug looks at it with him. ‘Now, that's a big one. It's got a crane, see. For lifting cargo. And look, there's another one, down there, look.'

For a moment, they discuss transportation, and I just look at them, and my heart feels as if it will burst out of my chest and soar skywards like a helium balloon.

I don't know what Doug is going to tell me, when we get a chance to talk. But I know that I can face anything he has to say. I can handle just about anything now, though the pain in my lower leg is definitely a challenge.

Behind them both, I can see the main street. There are a few more people out today, carrying shopping bags, crossing the road, stopping to chat. I can see the big pink cupcake sign for the Rock Salt bakery. A woman about my age with an Afro sticking out from under a woolly hat comes out carrying a coffee, with a loaf of bread tucked under one arm and a long woolly scarf the colour of cornflowers.

Then Maggie comes out of the door next to the bakery.
Her hair is a blood-red halo, splintering in the sunlight. She smiles at someone and she has the dogs with her, on leads, one on each side of her. They look like two perfectly well-behaved pets, trotting to heel, their golden coats rippling. She turns down a street and disappears.

I will never know how much Maggie understood about what Susannah was up to. I will never know if she is as naive as she seemed about her unbalanced friend.

Doug comes back towards me, hugging Finn, who looks even smaller in his dad's arms. ‘We can't talk now, but we have to.' He gives me a look. ‘Soon.'

‘I know.' I reach up and pull Finn's hat down over his ears. ‘I've made some horrible mistakes. But I needed to do this – I can't explain now but I will. OK?'

‘You
needed to do this
?'

I hop closer. ‘Yes.' I look at him. ‘I really did.'

He peers down my leg. ‘Why are you hopping? Why can't you walk properly? What happened to your leg? Jesus – what has
happened
to you?'

‘All I know is I really need to go home. Is that OK? I know you just got all the way here, but … '

He looks at me and I can see that he has been – and possibly still is – distraught.

‘I came,' he says, ‘to take you home.'

*

We get standby seats on the overnight flight to London but it is delayed because of lightning storms.

Finn and Doug are sleeping on an uncomfortable airport chair, Finn flat on Doug's chest, Doug with legs splayed,
his head lolling, and two protective arms round Finn's back.

But I can't sleep. My leg is agony and everything is churning through my mind and it's all too much. I get out my phone. I have to email my father. He orchestrated a systematic, monumental campaign of dishonesty for thirty-eight years. They both did. Either of them could have told me at any time, and they chose not to. My parents were in this one together.

I put my phone away and, to distract myself from thinking, I hobble over to the airport bookshop. On a low table, at the front, among the souvenirs of Vancouver, is the same coffee table book I saw at Susannah's.
The Magnificent Orca
. I pay for it and take it back to sit next to Doug. And I read it, cover to cover, as Doug and Finn sleep on; as the travellers come and go around us, my leg throbs beneath layers of ibuprofen, and our plane delays are relayed across the speaker system.

The killer whale, I learn, is not a whale at all, but a type of dolphin. I learn about orca social organization, the matriarchal culture, powerful mother–child bonds, orca ceremony and traditions. I read about how orcas forage, sending out pulses of sound through the ocean to locate food. I learn how these echolocation clicks allow the whale to effectively see through miles and miles of ocean – to see with sound.

Then I get to the chapter called ‘The Language of the Orca' and the first sentence catches me: ‘
The complicated vocal, social and behavioural cultures of the
Orcinus orca
have no parallel in the animal world
 –
other than among human beings
.'

Like humans, killer whales, I discover, have a natural
language. Researchers – my mother's academic descendants – have now identified their complex linguistic structures. They have mapped dialects to different pods and clans. They now understand that there are not two but three main orca communities, residents, transients and off-shores, and that these communities essentially don't speak the same language. Though nobody can ‘speak' these orca languages, researchers have documented a whole lexicon of burst-pulse sounds that signal different states and, probably, emotions.

I realize how precious my mother's notebook with those transcribed vowel sounds is. It is a historical document. My mother was a pioneer of this research, at a time when even the notion that whales were intelligent seemed fanciful. I wonder whether she sat at her desk in Sussex and followed these developments with a pain in her heart. But no. I don't think she did. I think the only way she could have possibly survived that degree of loss – of my brother, and Jonas, and also her beloved whales – was to cut off completely for ever.

She became a different person in order to survive. She became a Sussex housewife, with me and Alice and the dog and her easel, in our solid red-brick Victorian house, with the apple tree outside and my father's unwavering routines. And this reinvention might have worked – if it hadn't been for me. I was the bridge between her two worlds.

Day after day she would have seen my brother's face growing up, in mine. She would have seen Jonas in me too, presumably: in my dark-blue eyes, or maybe my gestures or my voice or my moods. I could have any number of Halmstrom traits – but I will never know, now, which ones.
She loved me but it must have so been hard to look at my face every day. I think I understand why, when she found the lump, she sat with it, watching it grow.

I wonder if she ever let herself imagine what would have happened if she and I had stayed on in the floathouse after the accident. Maybe she would be one of these researchers – maybe she would have written a book just like this one.

Perhaps it's the lateness, or the exhaustion of the past few days, but as I sit there, I feel as if she is living that life after all, and I have just paid her a visit. She is in her little floating house in the archipelago. She is silver-haired and fit and strong, without a cancer gnawing through her insides. Her floating house is dry and secure, with red geraniums at the windows, water and electricity – maybe even wireless communication by now. She still cuts wood for the log pile with a chainsaw, and collects fungi and herbs and wild fruits from the forest behind the house. And every day she goes out in her boat with headphones and a camera, photographing the whales, listening to them, watching them surface, breathe and then submerge, gathering data. The grief is in her, it always will be, but like the whales, it comes up with smooth, unhurried breaths and submerges again, without a fuss.

At home she keeps her hydrophone dropped through the floor so that she falls asleep at night to their creaks and whistles and squeaks and clicks and wakes in the morning to the sound of orca mothers calling their babies, siblings squabbling and playing: the soundtrack to a
world that few of us ever think about. Like the whales, my mother lives in two worlds: breathing in one, then diving beneath.

My phone pings. I know whose email has just come in.

I reply straight away, wiping the tears off my face with the back of one hand.

I am surprised to find that, beneath the anger, I feel protective of my father. It must be agony for him that all this has come out now, when he must feel so alone in the world. He is getting old and he has lost the love of his life. He must be afraid that he will lose me too. And Finn. And maybe even Alice.

From now on my job is to forgive. At some point I'm going to have to go to Sussex, or meet him at a London restaurant, and we'll talk about all this. And whatever he says, I will have to believe that all they wanted was to protect me.

I suddenly remember Susannah's account of the disastrous Sea Park whale birth. The captive orca was trying so hard to stop her baby from braining itself on the sides of the tank that she forgot to feed it. The instinct to protect trumped the instinct to nurture.