The Whale Caller (9 page)

The usual mortification after confession. And this time he feels it weighing heavily on his shoulders. When you are carrying a load of mortification it is as if everyone you meet can see it. You want to steer away from people. You want the security of the wilderness. But it is not possible to have that in a town like Hermanus, especially at a place like Walker Bay The eyes of the world are on him. The world has joined Mr. Yodd in his guffaws.

Sharisha. That will be the balm that heals his heart. Sharisha never judges him. Never makes fun of his insecurities. She will bring back his shattered dignity. He feels guilty that she, who is usually the subject of confession to Mr. Yodd, did not feature at all this time. Only Saluni. The whole confession was about Saluni. Once more he is attacked by feelings of guilt. Despite the weight on his shoulders he walks faster. He has a good idea where Sharisha might be at this time of the day. If she is not there he will blow his horn and play her song and she will manifest herself by breaching. Even if she is not that close to shore he will know it is Sharisha because when he plays the horn she breaches rapidly, up to fifteen times in a row, keeping to the rhythm of the horn. She doesn’t have to be close to shore to respond to him because the sound of the horn, like the songs of the whales, carries for many kilometres.

He doesn’t have to walk far, for there is Sharisha rubbing her head against the kelp. She must be irritated by lice. Normally Sharisha’s callosities are free of lice; that is why they are surf white and not pink or orange or even yellow like those of other southern rights. It seems now lice are beginning to infest her, and the Whale Caller suspects it is from the randy males who had their way with her the other day. Although whale lice are quite harmless, they can irritate the joy out of a whale. Sharisha does look annoyed.

He stands there for some time, watching her struggle with the floating kelp. But soon his attention is drawn to a prolonged cough just below the crag. There is Saluni sitting on a rock, her feet in the emerald green water. Her coat is spread on the rock next to her, and her dress is up to her waist. With her thumbnails she is crushing lice from the seams of her petticoat. She seems oblivious of Sharisha, only a hundred metres from her. The Whale Caller walks down to her.

“Oh, so now you found me again!” she says. “You are not doing badly at this finding business.”

“I was not looking for you this time,” says the Whale Caller apologetically. “I was looking for Sharisha.”

“Oh, Sharisha! The big fish you have named.”

“She is not a fish,” he says emphatically. “A whale is not a fish.”

“A whale… a fish… same difference! You don’t have to get so worked up about it. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it if I were you.”

“Look at her, she is beautiful,” he says with the pride of someone who has a stake in that beauty. “She is the queen of all southern rights. See her white callosities! See the regal wave of her flippers! See the bonnet of callosity on the tip of her snout!”

“How do you know the damn thing is female?”

“She is a woman all right.”

“I can tell you I saw his thingy when he was jumping out of the water causing all that racket and disturbing the peace.”

The Whale Caller chuckles in spite of himself.

“Even if she were male you wouldn’t know where to look for
his thingy.”

“You don’t want to admit that you have gone gaga over a male. And you are so big and strong and muscular and… hard… I hope. Nothing camp about you at all.”

“I won’t stand for this kind of talk,” he says angrily “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“It shouldn’t bother you one bit. It is allowed. You were there when I was telling the pastors that it is even in the constitution of the country.”

“I won’t argue with you about Sharisha. I know what I know.”

She goes back to the business of crushing her lice. Sharisha thrusts her massive body up in the air, dives back into the water and doesn’t emerge again. She does this sometimes: dives in the water and stays many metres under the surface for up to half an hour without coming up for a breath.

“Don’t you dare think that I normally go around carrying lice on my body,” she says all of a sudden. “I am a lady, you know? I was sick. For two weeks nobody washed my things. With the damn rash my whole body was in pain. I couldn’t do a damn thing for myself.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Just so you know.”

Salunix. She arrives at the Wendy house. She has come to visit, but has no intention of ever leaving. That is why she is carrying a suitcase with all her worldly possessions. She has taken him up on
his offer, made in a moment of weakness, to come over for a thorough sprucing-up that will destroy her lice once and for all. He welcomes her with a hot cup of cream of mushroom soup, and then prepares a hot bath for her. He pours in the water the pungent solution that is usually used as sheep dip.

“Look the other way while I take my clothes off,” she says with a naughty twinkle in her voice.

“Actually, I am leaving,” he says as he dashes out of the room.

“I was only joking! Come back! I don’t have a problem if you watch!”

But he is already out. She curses his cowardice under her breath, strips naked and gets into the enamel bathtub. She screams that the solution is burning her body. He shouts back from the second room—used as a kitchen—that it is all for the best because it will kill all the vermin that is feeding on her body.

“You may come in and scrub my back if you like,” she calls out.

“I would rather not,” he responds.

“You are a shy one, aren’t you?” she observes. “I like that in a man.”

After the bath she spends the rest of the day wrapped up in a blanket because all her clothes—including those that were in the suitcase—have been soaked in the solution, and then hung on the washing line outside to dry. She goes to bed early in the evening, her body still burning from the solution. She finds it difficult to sleep, especially because it has been many years since she slept sober. Well… almost sober… because she did take a secret sip of the methylated spirits that he uses for cleaning his tuxedo. She lies awake for a long time, listening to him pottering about in the kitchen, and wondering when he will sneak into bed. But he never does. He spends the night in a sleeping bag in the kitchen.

The Whale Caller wakes up after midnight to see a light through the cracks of her door. He thinks that she has forgotten to switch off the light. He tiptoes to the bedroom and flicks off the switch near the door. As he tiptoes back to his sleeping bag he is stopped in his tracks by a shrill scream from the bedroom.

“I wasn’t trying to do anything,” he assures her. “I was just switching off the light.”

“Never do that again! Where is the fuckin’ switch?”

He rushes back into the bedroom to switch on the light. And there she is, standing on the floor, naked, looking quite witless and bewildered.

“Never ever do that again! I hate the dark! I do not sleep in the dark! I do not walk in the dark! I do not do anything in the dark, in case you are the kind of man who does it only in the dark! Do you understand me?”

“I would not want to do anything with you in the dark,” he says defensively. “I was switching off the light because I thought you had forgotten to switch it off”

“Just never switch the light off again, that’s all.”

The Whale Caller apologises, and goes back to his sleeping bag.

When Saluni finally wakes up in the morning the aches of the sheep dip are gone. But her body is racked by something worse than a hangover—the pain of sobriety. A long-forgotten feeling! Her clothes are on the chair next to the bed, all neatly ironed. After a quick wash in the plastic basin, and an application of makeup from her sequinned handbag, she wears her green taffeta dress and her black fishnet stockings and her red pencil-heel shoes and her fawn pure-wool coat. Her wild red hair is restrained in a black net. Once more her former state of elegance has been restored. With it the mouldy yet sweet smell.

It strikes the Whale Caller that she has taken all the fuss over her in her stride, as if being pampered is her birthright. Not a
word of gratitude. This does not bother him. It is just an observation for its own sake.

She has been around for three weeks, and he has got used to her presence and to her haunting odour. She has become his shadow, except on Bored Twins days. Once in a while she makes herself useful by collecting seashells and arranging them on the wooden wall, sticking them on with glue as some form of decoration. Or by cooking an early morning millet meal porridge which they eat with milk for breakfast. She cooks only when she is hungry and he is too occupied with other things to cook at that time. At most times she just sits there for the whole day and expects to be fed and groomed and mollycoddled. He enjoys brushing and disentangling her red locks. Sometimes he braids them crudely. This activity always makes her body tingle.

When she has been to the mansion and has brought back a bottle of wine, she spends the day following him doing his rounds with the whales, while she occasionally takes a sip from her bottle, and collects the seashells. She nurses the bottle: the Whale Caller has vowed that he will not buy her wine because he’d rather she stopped drinking.

Occasionally she spends the night at the mansion and comes back the next day quite radiant and euphoric. On such days she never stops talking about the Bored Twins and their beauty and their singing and how they are such angels.

“You are the one who always visits them,” says the Whale Caller. “Why don’t we ever see them coming here to see you?”

“They can’t come to town on their own,” Saluni explains. “Their parents work all day long. Their mother doesn’t want them to come to town anyway, because she thinks someone will steal their voices. I go there to keep an eye on them because they are always all alone.”

In the first week at the Wendy house she spent the evenings at the taverns drinking and singing with her mates. She staggered back to the Wendy house, sometimes at three in the morning. She found him asleep in his sleeping bag in the kitchen and never woke him up. Instead she crept into her bed, leaving the lights on. However drunk she might be, she never forgot to leave the lights on. In the morning he would patiently warn her of the dangers of walking alone at night. She would only laugh and say: “You are beginning to behave like a husband… which is rather sweet. It would be sweeter if you did other husbandly things too.”

But by the end of the second week she had stopped going to the taverns, and she made a whole fanfare of it. She announced grandly: “I have stopped for your sake… to make you happy.” So, indeed, he should be grateful for such a wonderful gift. Now she spends all her time between the mansion and the Wendy house, and between the Wendy house and the beach.

He has taught her to waltz to the songs of the whales. These are the most exhilarating moments of his life. Sharisha has gone back to the southern seas, but other southern rights are still here, providing the music. Sometimes a humpback visits and adds its thrilling notes. At dawn the Whale Caller wakes Saluni up and together they go to the Voelklip beach. Sometimes, more often of late, it is Saluni who wakes him up, since now she has got into the spirit of things. If the whales happen not to be there that dawn he calls them with his horn and they respond. He gets hold of Saluni and together they float on the sand as if they are riding the clouds, as he used to float, albeit on a rocky surface, during his days at the Church of the Sacred Kelp Horn.

At first Saluni was not too excited about these early morning frolics. But she decided to indulge him, especially after he had deserted her for the whole day and night to be with Sharisha on the eve of her departure.

Saluni had only been staying with him in the Wendy house for
about ten days when one night the Whale Caller had a nightmare: Sharisha was being attacked by hordes of killer whales. The deadly oreas were concentrating mostly on the callosities, biting chunks away. The water around her was red. He woke up screaming. He knew at once that Sharisha would be leaving soon. Nightmares were her way of communicating that to him. He rushed to the bedroom and woke Saluni up to tell her of his fears. She was not pleased at all; especially because her head was pounding from a hangover. The previous night she had finished a whole bottle of wine brought from the mansion, while watching the Whale Caller cook his staple of macaroni and cheese. The drinking had continued while they ate the supper and while he washed the plates and pot. He had gone to sleep in the kitchen as usual, leaving her sitting on the bed, pretending to be in some tavern; singing colourful songs and cracking dirty jokes to herself, then rocking the Wendy house with her gruff laughter. To be woken up so early in the morning on account of bad dreams about whales was not something she was ready to entertain.