Poached Egg on Toast (3 page)

The waves below the cliff on the other side of the barn were lashing in on a rising wind. The sky was clouding over. Clayton felt a reluctance to lift the glasses to his eyes once more, a reluctance to watch the unfolding of detail and fantasy—if indeed he had imagined what had come before. And there was fear, fear that all of his past would somehow present itself, come tumbling out. He did not want that. He allowed the binocular strap to slip from his hands, and he heard the thud on the ground below. He walked the wide beam and climbed down the ladder. Drove the tractor back up the slope and into the shed, and closed the big double doors behind him.

While Zeta set the table for supper, Clayton stretched out on the kitchen sofa, his feet pointed towards the stove. He was thinking of a story he had once read to the children at bedtime. It was a Japanese story in a collection called
Animal Tales for Children Around the World
, and was called “Kachi-Kachi-Yama.” He had never forgotten. The principal animal was a crafty badger that sneaked up to an old woman’s farm while the old man was in the fields. The badger cut the old woman into pieces and made soup from her bones. The badger then dressed in the old woman’s clothing and served the soup to the old man when he came in for his midday meal. The old man sat clicking his tongue to show how delicious was the soup, and ate bowl after bowl of—his wife.

The children had asked suspiciously, “Dad, are you changing the story?” as he’d floundered with the ending. Why did the grotesque endure? Was he a fool for imagining that if his own past would settle he might get on with his present, even look to what might be left to him of future?

Although it had not escaped his notice that scalloped potatoes, his favourite, were on the table, he pushed back his chair after eating and mumbled in Zeta’s direction that he was going for a walk before it got too dark.

“The wind’s coming up,” she said, without looking at him. “You’d better wear your heavy jacket.”

In the declining light, Clayton saw the massive grey-black form as a huge silhouette, when he reached the edge of the cliff. His heart gave a jump inside his chest and he wondered for a second if he were imagining what he saw below. He took the path down to the beach, seeing and hearing the white-tipped waves as they battered the shore. As each wave broke, its curl ran along the surface of the water. The wind was softer in shelter of the cliffs.

The whale had come in head-on up the gently sloping beach. It was almost as long as the old barn, and had a huge squarish head and a great flat forehead that was scarred and glistening. Its skin was black and sleek, and Clayton knew before he stood beside it that it was a sperm. He’d heard of whales stranding, but had never seen such a thing; all his memory could supply was that they sometimes came in in large numbers. He looked up and down the beach and out into the waves, but this was the only whale to be seen. It gave a sudden shudder, and slammed its flukes against the sand. As the reverberation went through Clayton’s body, he jumped three feet back, knowing it was alive. An eye, a purplish-dark eye as big as a grapefruit, opened and looked straight at Clayton. Clayton felt an immense surge of pity for the creature and was not afraid. The whale had come in to die on Clayton’s land.

He did not know what to do, whether he should go to get Zeta or get help. But how could he help? It was useless to think that anyone could get this old whale back into the water. The sea had begun to ebb, and the huge body had already made a deep impression in the sand. And the whale itself seemed to be ebbing. Clayton put his hand on the side of the whale’s head and wondered at the feel of it. The great eye closed, and the blowhole high up on the left released a soft moan of air. For a long time, Clayton stood with his hand on the whale. At times, it made clicking sounds. After long intervals, it released air from its lungs and snapped its blowhole shut with a soft sucking sound.

Clayton took off his plaid jacket and waded into the water in trousers and boots, the icy water numbing his legs. He soaked the jacket through and brought it back to the whale and tried to spread it along part of the whale’s head and back. It was like putting a postage stamp on a boxcar but Clayton somehow felt, rather than knew, that the whale was more comfortable because of it. The narrow lower jaw had flattened into the sand, and there were small pools of water around its astonishing white mouth. The whale had begun to bleed, and the blood was trickling into these little pools. The sky was almost completely dark.

Clayton removed the jacket and soaked it in the sea again, bringing it back to the whale. Although for the rest of his life he would never know how he did it, he felt himself slipping and sliding and climbing up onto the massive rippled back. The whale made no sound. Clayton stretched his length out over the huge long back, and lay his head near the blowhole. A wide whoosh of humid warm air blew back strands of Clayton’s grey hair. Clayton put his face down, and mourned.

The house was in darkness when he returned. He was cold and soaked and bloody, and he stripped in the kitchen and washed there, at the sink. He rolled up his clothes and left them by the door. Tomorrow, he would phone his neighbours, and they would try to bury or burn the remains.

And if hundreds of years from now, the earth was pushed back, churned up, would anything be found? Of the whale, of him, of Zeta? Would there be no rag, no bone, no trace of themselves?

“Zeta,” he called softly through the bedroom door. “Zeta, you awake?”

No answer.

“Zeta, I’m back.”

“I know,” she said. “You’ve been upset, haven’t you.” She lifted the covers for him and he slid into bed beside her, in the dark.

An August wind had lashed the coast for three days; not a single blue-and-white fishing boat had been seen on the horizon throughout that time.

A great white shark, weighing a ton, had drowned seven miles out in the cod nets four days before, and had been hauled to Covehead where its seventeen-foot length now hung by its tail from a hoist in the harbour so that people could ogle and touch, and take photographs. The wide teeth had been hacked from it, to be sold, and its mouth, gaping and slack, dragged the ground while fishermen stood, arms folded, impatient to get back to their nets, but glad of the diversion, which relieved the monotony of their idleness, their enforced obedience to the wind.

The sun had shone through three days of wind and was shining still on stray groups of swimmers up the coast, who had placed towels and blankets in shelter of the red cliffs. Close to shore, on dark sand that was lapped intermittently, a damselfly struggled on its side; its linear black body, its beaded head, had been crushed by some mishap of nature. Helen disturbed two sandpipers running side by side as she jumped through the waves, hearing Valerie’s screams. At first, the wind had kept them from her. Then, had brought them in a rush, flooding her ears. There was no thought in her mind as she flung herself through shallow surf, no thought but “Valerie! Valerie!” The sandpipers waited until she passed; they stood, immobile as herons, while the lash of a small wave overturned pebbles and created new eddies, which they probed hurriedly for a meal of sandcrabs. The sandpipers scurried up the shore, away from the people now running along the beach. The birds stopped, waited, and quickened their slender curved beaks to a rhythm slightly faster than the shadows of their prey.

The old woman sat on a lawnchair at the top of the red cliff, her craggy face swept in the wind by threads of her own white hair. Long ago, in a spring-swollen pond, someone had drowned, a stone around the neck. She looked down on the scene below and saw the child floundering as she screamed, where the surf became higher, where breakers tossed her, like a rag.

The sands were frantic with the activity of decay. With each large wave came other rippling, shallow waves, creating rivulets between humps of sand formed that day by sea and wind. Each movement set another in motion, causing water to trill over sandbars from three or four directions, crisscrossing, equalizing until every droplet rejoined the sea.

Up from the waves, the sand had begun to dry but it was still packed and hardened. Sand fleas, patterned like flicking doilies, created circles around upturned washed-in skates whose flat fishy moulds seemed to be made of white rubber, their long tails extended behind. Towards the dunes, the sand was loose and pale; here, large crabs had been swept by earlier waves, or by wind, or had crawled out of the ocean, or had been dropped by gulls. Now, they lay on their backs, fleshy green-white undersides exposed, their bent legs loosened or strewn helter skelter about the sand.

Helen was in deeper water now, the surf trying to pitch her back to shore. She swam, and the rhythm of her arms with each stroke cried, “Valerie! Valerie!” She had almost reached the child who, seeing her mother, began to try again; her weakened strokes brought her to Helen who pointed the child towards shore. Then, Helen gathered her strength and tried to follow.

The old woman on the cliff nodded. She turned her head and faced flat open beach, unprotected by cliffs—where a man in black swimming trunks had run and was shouting for rope, for a boat, for rescue.

Wind lifted the sand and drove it to sea; lifted it in fine visible manes that tossed their slithering traces. And then, the wind turned, came down from the north and raised the breakers until they were over Helen’s head by fifteen inches. The undertow began to suck at her legs, and fought with the surf for her body. Valerie had been caught up by shore waves and had finally reached safety. But the men who were halfway to Helen had to turn back. They crawled up onto the beach, exhausted by the new current that was tugging Helen out to sea. Her body was pushed towards shore by one wave, dragged out by the next. Valerie, the man in black swimming trunks helping, struggled to her feet on the beach, unaware that she had, mercifully, stepped on the thread-like neck of the damselfly. Its struggle ended, it now washed out to sea.

On the beach, weed and dulse, sea lettuce and Irish moss had twisted and tangled during the three days of erratic relentless wind. Soft heaps of decay were gradually covered over, packed down. Whiskery tufts of weed clung to half-opened mussels where slipper shells had attached themselves to the hard blue curves. Limpets stuck like Oriental hats to slipper shells. Under the waves, barnacles opened and froze like yawning molars as they were swept to shore. All suffered the pounding of wind. Lashing, lifting, stinging wind.

The long grasses along the rise of the dunes bent, yielding, but did not release their grip beneath the sand. On top of the red cliffs, the soil was covered with dry stubble. In the curvatures below the edge, cliff swallows rested in chains of circular nests, watchful, waiting for early evening when they would crisscross one another’s flights like swooping bats.

Thistles and hard close weeds grew then, from the top of the cliffs, grew under the chair of the old woman with the craggy face, back, back to soil which, still red, became lush and fertile. A bumblebee was thrown off course again and again in the changing wind—now from land, now from sea. The bee swerved crazily, flying low to the grass where the old woman looked down and out to the sea.

The waves knocked at Helen’s head until she cried out in pain, “Stop!” They knocked at her as flashing lights danced before her eyes. She thought she saw Valerie in the big yellow towel, standing with the ring of people on shore, and she said to herself, “So many, staring at me.” But she closed her eyes and, when she opened them, tried to relieve the pain at the back of her head. Now, she was grateful that her vision had clouded and she could not see. She tried, though she could not, to move her neck so that she would hear the boat that would come from the side, to save her.

The waves cracked and knocked at the foot of the cliff; there was no boat that day. The old woman on the cliff could have told them that; she could see in both directions all along the coast. The nearest boats had been pulled up high in the fishing village, and the wind had tightened the knots in the ropes that held them. The wind kept the fishermen muttering, their arms folded.

Again and again, Helen’s toes tipped against a sandbar; then, she lost even that in the sway. The wind rode hard on the waves. Though she could not see them coming from behind, she knew the precise moment each would roll over her head. She held the rhythm now, of dying. She tried to close her mouth and she held her breath with each wave, thinking, “Not yet, not yet you won’t, not yet.” And felt and heard water gurgling in her throat. “I can’t hold on, but not yet,” she thought. She had stopped hoping that the boat would come. The shore could not be seen because of the cloud in her eyes. She felt for the sand with her toes again, and kept her arms at her sides when she could, to keep the heaviness from her shoulders. “I am drowning,” she allowed herself to say. “Valerie was turned back and if she is not wanted too, then she is safe on shore. I am drowning, and she is safe on shore.” And once more, she said, “Valerie, Valerie.”

The old woman pointed to the ropes as the men ran up the path of the cliff. The men flung the ropes down to shore and tied them, even the clothesline that had been strung out beside the vacant barn at the end of the field. The knots jerked and held; clothespins and colourfully braided fishing ropes sailed on the waves, out and out, a child’s gay purple raft bobbing at the end. The men and women made a chain—two with the raft, one at each section of line. The old woman watched the wooden clothespins dip in and out of the sea.

Zebra-striped wings of seabirds wagged saucily on currents of wind. Heavy casual gulls soared, crying
pit-a-tree pit-a-tree scree scree scree
. With this last cry they dived through frothy caps of the highest waves, ducking out again as the waves furled and reached for the softness of their necks.

Helen lay on the beach and accepted the warmth of blankets and the bright yellow towel. She heard voices as men and women stooped over her. She was carried up the path to the ambulance, which had backed as far as it could down the clay road. The old woman lifted herself from the chair and began the slow walk back to her farm.