Silver Bay(16)
Author: Jojo Moyes

‘Sucking up?’ I could hardly bear to repeat the words. ‘Sucking up? What bloody kind of man do you take me for?’

‘Just go away, Greg—’

‘I’m really sorry to interrupt but—’

‘Mum?’

Hannah was standing beside the English bloke, her birthday smile wiped clean off her face. She looked from me to her mum and back again. ‘Why are you shouting at Greg?’ She spoke quietly and carefully, her eyes wide, as if we’d frightened her.

Liza took a deep breath.

‘I’ll – ah – if someone could point me towards Reception?’ Mike looked as if he wanted to be there even less than I did.

Suddenly Liza noticed our extra guest. She turned towards him, face still flushed with anger. ‘Reception? You want to speak to Kathleen, over there. Lady in the blue shirt.’

He tried to smile, muttered something about an English accent and, after a brief pause, disappeared.

Hannah was still standing next to me. Her sad little voice, when it came, made me want to give that mother of hers a slap. ‘I suppose this means I’m not allowed to keep the boat?’

When Liza turned to me, the full force of every bad thought she had ever had hit me square on. It wasn’t a pretty feeling.

‘We’ll talk about it, lovey,’ she said.

‘Liza,’ I tried to keep my voice nice, for the kid’s sake, ‘I never meant to—’

‘I’m not interested,’ she cut in. ‘Hannah. Tell your friends it’s time for the cake.’ When Hannah didn’t move, she waved an arm. ‘Go on. And I’ll see if we can light some candles. It’s not going to be easy in this breeze.’

I put my hand on Hannah’s shoulder. ‘Your boat will be waiting for you in the lock-up whenever you’re ready,’ I said, hearing the defiance in my voice. And then I walked stiffly away, muttering words I’m not proud of under my breath.

Yoshi met me at the truck. ‘Don’t go, Greg,’ she said. ‘You know how worked up she gets about stuff. Don’t ruin Hannah’s day.’ She was still holding a party bag – she’d sprinted down from the kitchen to stop me.

It wasn’t me ruining it, I wanted to say. It wasn’t me determined to stop my little girl doing the one thing she wanted most in all the world. It wasn’t me who acted like the kid’s childhood was normal but never talked about any family other than Kathleen. It wasn’t me who, three or four times a year, would be all over her like a rash and the next day act as if I was something she’d picked up on the back of her shoe. I know when I’m guilty, and I also know that sometimes it simply isn’t my fault.

‘Tell her I’ve got a boat to take out,’ I said, more sourly than I’d intended. I felt bad afterwards. It had nothing to do with Yoshi, after all.

But I wasn’t going out on the water. I was going to head for the nearest bar and drink until someone was good enough to tell me we’d made it into the next day.

Five

Kathleen

It’s hard to believe now, given the size of our land, but whaling was once one of Australia’s primary industries. From way back in the nineteenth century whaling ships would come from Britain, unload a few convicts on us, then load up with some of our whales and sell them back to us at our ports. Some exchange, as Nino said. The Aussies got wise in the end and caught their own. After all, you could use a whale for just about anything – the oil for lamp fuel, candles and soap, the baleen for corsets, furniture, umbrellas and whips. I guess there was a lot more call for whips in those days. Back then the whalers mainly hunted the southern right whale – they called it ‘right’ because it was so darn easy to catch. That poor beast was about the slowest thing in the southern hemisphere and, once dead, it would float, so that they could tow it into shore. I reckon it could only have made it easier for those whalechasers if it had harpooned itself and swum to the processing plant.

They’re protected now, of course, what remains of them. But I remember, as a girl, seeing one towed into the bay by two small boats. It seemed wrong to me, even then, as I watched the huge, swollen belly hauled inelegantly on to the shore, the blank eye gazing balefully up to the heavens as if despairing at man’s inhumanity. I would catch just about anything – even as a little girl, my father would boast, I could hook, land and gut with an efficiency that might have been construed as heartless – but the sight of that southern right made me cry.

Here on the east coast, there hadn’t been the whaling madness that we’d heard of out west. Here, fewer whales were taken before the end of the war – except in our little corner. Perhaps because the whales came so close that you could see them from dry land, this bay became a base for whalechasers. (Our whale-watching crews have inherited their nickname.) When I was a girl, they had killed them from small boats. It seemed like a fair fight, and it kept the catch down. But then they got greedy.

Between 1950 and 1962 some 12,500 humpbacks were killed and processed at stations like Norfolk Island and Moreton Island. Whale oil and meat made people rich, and the whalechasers used more and more sophisticated weaponry to increase their catch. The ships became bigger and faster, and the haul a plentiful, grim harvest. By the time humpback whaling was banned in Australian waters, they were using sonars, guns and cannon-launched harpoons – the equipment of war, my father said, in disgust.

And, of course, they killed too many. They swept those oceans until there was near none left of the humpbacks and put themselves out of business in the process. One by one the whaling operations closed, the processing plants shut down or converted to seafood processing. The area sank back slowly into shabby solitude, and most of us were relieved. My father, who had loved the romanticism of early whaling, back when it was about man versus whale rather than whale versus penthrite-charge grenade, bought Silver Bay’s own whale-processing plant, and turned it into the museum. Nowadays the scientists reckon there might be fewer than two thousand humpbacks come past us on their annual migration, and some say the numbers will never recover.

I tell this story to the crews, occasionally, when they talk about getting a bigger fleet, or trying to up their passenger numbers, of whale-watching as the tourist attraction of the future, the way to rejuvenate Silver Bay.

There’s a lesson in there for us all. But I’m darned if anyone’s listening.

‘Good afternoon.’

‘Afternoon?’ Michael Dormer hovered in the doorway, wearing the dazed expression of someone whose body clock was insisting he was in the wrong hemisphere.