White Dolphin (17 page)

Everyone is listening now. It’s hard not to. There’s something about Dougie Evans which holds people. I glance across the room and see Jake looking smug.

‘There’s plenty of reef round this coastline,’ Dougie goes on. ‘There’s plenty for everyone. We dredge for scallops in our bay like the farmers plough their fields.’

The room is silent. I look around and see all eyes fixed on Dougie.

He puts his fist against his chest. ‘Fishing is the heart of this town,’ he shouts out. ‘Always has been. So if you still want the freshest scallops on your plate, then support us too. Support the fishermen. Don’t sign the petition for the ban.’

The murmur of voices rises and a ripple of applause flows back across the people. It’s not just some of the fishermen who are clapping, but tourists too. Dougie Evans takes a quick bow and steps down to take his seat again.

‘Say something, Carl,’ I mutter under my breath. But Carl just stands there, shuffling his feet while Dougie grins, victorious.

‘STOP!’

Heads turn to the shout from the back of the hall. Dougie Evans squints to see who’s calling. I turn too. Chairs scrape and feet shuffle as people clear a space for Felix to get through the aisle.

He stops in front of me, the dolphin memory stick clutched in one hand. ‘Kara, I’ve found something, something important.’

‘What?’ I say.

Voices are rising in the room. It’s hot and stuffy. There’s nothing to keep people here now. I see people at the back of the hall get up to leave.

Felix glances at them too. ‘You’ve got to buy me some time. Stop them going. Get up on stage and say something, anything you want about the bay. Two minutes, that’s all I need. Tell them they’re about to see what they could lose.’

I shake my head. ‘I can’t.’

Felix glares at me. ‘Just do it.’

I watch him walk back down the aisle.

I’ve never stood in front of a crowd like this before. I see more people at the back of the hall stand up to leave. I don’t know what Felix has found, but I can’t lose this chance. I climb up the steps and face the audience. I don’t even know what I’m going to say. The sea of faces stares back at me. I feel sick and dizzy. I see Jake’s mouth curled in laughter. Dougie Evans is watching me too. His eyes bore right through me. I look around the walls of the hall, at the mural of traditional fishermen, fishing boats and nets and barrels of salted fish.

‘Dougie Evans is right,’ I say. My voice comes out much louder than I expect. The hall is silent, listening. A few people sit back down in their chairs. ‘Fishing
is
the heart of this town.’ I look around. This is my one big chance. ‘The boat my mum and dad rebuilt together, fished from this harbour a hundred years ago. Back then, she would have come home full of pilchard and herring, so full the fish would be spilling over her sides back into the sea.’ I swallow hard. The back of my throat is dry, like sawdust. I look around and fix my eye on Dougie Evans. ‘But she can’t do that any more. We’ve taken all the fish from our seas. Dougie Evans’s trawlers have to go further and deeper to find fish, and even then they sometimes come back empty. Now we’re dredging our bay for scallops, tearing up the reef. I wonder, will we still be fishing here at
all
in another hundred years?’ I glance across the hall. There’s no sign of Felix, but I remember what he wanted me to say. ‘You’re about to see what we could lose.’

I stand there in the silence and look around the hall. I don’t know what’s meant to happen now. I climb down the steps and sit next to Dad.

The hall lights go out.

The whole room holds its breath.

A clear voice cuts through the silence. I have to grab the edges of my seat. My head spins and I feel myself tip forward.

I hear Mum, speaking through the darkness.

‘
L
et me take you on a journey through our last great wilderness, a place of mountains and deep valleys. Yet it doesn’t lie in some distant land, but here, below the surface of our cold Atlantic sea.
’

Dad takes hold of my hand. The room is silent. The huge screen on the stage is dark at first. A faint greenish glow in the centre of the screen becomes brighter and brighter and we are rising up, towards the sun shining through the surface of the water. Bright green kelp fronds reach upwards to the rippling mirror screen of light. A seal swims up to the camera, his nose almost touching the lens. It’s as if he’s watching everyone in the hall. His big dog eyes are chocolate brown. He snorts a breath. Silver bubbles spiral upwards and he twists away, flippers pressed together, his grey body sliding through the water. And we’re twisting through the water too; down, down, down through shafts of rippling sunlight, past rocks jewelled with pink and green anemones, down past coral mounds and feather-stars and sea-fans.

This must have been the last film Mum made here in the bay.

Her voice guides us into dark green waters full of rocks encrusted with soft pink corals and yellow sponges. A cuckoo wrasse hovers in mid-water, bright blue and yellow, lit by torchlight. A purple sea-slug threads its way through reddish seaweed. Beneath all this, the rocky bed is alive with corals and urchins. A velvet swimming crab scuttles by. Everything is alive in here.

But suddenly, a tearing sound rips through the hall. The image on the screen changes and fills with metal chains and billowing mud and sand. When the mud settles all that’s left is a gravelly sea bed, littered with broken sea-fans. The silence in the hall is still and deep.

Mum’s voice speaks out one last time.

‘
Unless we protect our oceans, there will be nothing left but wasteland
.

‘
We are not farmers of the sea. We never sow, we only reap.
’

The lights come on. No one speaks. We’ve all been brought back from another world, the images still vivid in our minds. Mum’s voice is still ringing in my head. Carl climbs back on the stage. He clutches his notes in his hand and is about to speak, but a ripple of applause starts at the back of the room and rolls forward like a wave. I look across to see some of the fishermen nodding. Others are just staring at the screen, transfixed. Only Dougie Evans is sitting hands folded tight across his chest. Jake is glaring at me from across the room. I turn away. I don’t want to spoil this moment. I heard Mum’s voice again. I want to hold it deep inside. Hold it and keep it there for ever.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t warn you,’ says Felix. ‘I didn’t have time.’

I roll my jeans up and dip my feet into the pool. Angel glides past on her side, her small eye watching me. I stretch my leg out and she lets my toes brush against her smooth warm body.

‘How did you find out?’ I say.

Felix sits beside me on the rocks and holds out the memory stick. ‘
Tepuhi
,’ he says. ‘I should have thought of it before. The Maori name for dolphin. It’s the password. The one your mum used for the memory stick.’

I take it from him and curl my fingers around the moulded plastic dolphin. It seems strange to think that it holds a memory of Mum, a snapshot of the past, as if it holds part of her inside it too. ‘Was there anything else on there?’

‘Not much else,’ he mumbles.

I want to ask him what he means by ‘not much else’ but Carl sits down beside us.

‘I’m glad that’s over,’ he says. His tie hangs loose around his neck and his pressed trousers are now crumpled. He runs his hands through his hair. ‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’

‘D’you think it’ll make a difference?’ I ask.

‘There were loads of signatures for the voluntary ban on dredging,’ he says. ‘I counted hundreds of names.’

‘What about the fishermen?’ I say.

‘I don’t know,’ Carl says. ‘I guess we’ll find out soon enough.’

Angel swims past us again and slaps the water with her tail. I reach out to run my hand along her head and the bumpy scar across her jaw.

Carl frowns. ‘She’s becoming too dependent on us,’ he says, ‘and we’re worried for her mother too. There were lots of boats out on the bay today. She could get injured by their propellers.’ He stands up to wipe the water from his trousers, then crouches down beside me and Felix. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, because no one else must know . . .’

I feel my heart sink because I know just what he’s going to say. ‘You’re going to let her go, aren’t you?’

Carl nods. ‘Sam thinks she’s ready. But we don’t want lots of people around when we release her.’

Angel lifts her head above the water. It’s as if she’s listening to us too. I want her to go back into the wild, but I feel torn apart inside. I know that once she’s gone, it could be the last time I see her.

‘When?’ I say.

‘Tomorrow,’ says Carl, ‘we release her on the beach, at dawn.’

I
’m the first on the beach. I wrap my arms around me and wish I’d brought my coat. The Milky Way is a river of stars across the sky. I remember Mum telling me the Maori story of Tama-rereti and how he scattered tiny pebbles into the sky to light up his way, and how the Sky God put Tama-rereti’s canoe up in the sky as the Milky Way to show how all the stars were made. I dig my toes into the cool sand and listen to the line of breaking surf. I want to see the mother dolphin. I strain my ears for the sound of a dolphin blowhole opening out on the water.

‘Kara, is that you?’

I turn.

Dad is walking towards me, silhouetted against the street lights. ‘I heard you leave the house. What are you doing out here?’

‘Carl’s releasing Angel at dawn.’ I can’t stop my teeth from chattering. A cool wind is blowing off the shore.

Dad takes off his fleece and slips it over me. The sleeves are far too long and the fleece comes down to just above my knees. Dad hugs me tight against him and we watch the dawn spread across the eastern sky, a pale strip of light fading out the stars. A flock of sanderlings skims low across the beach and settles further along the shoreline.

‘Here’s Carl,’ says Dad.

A pickup drives towards us, its headlights reflecting in the wet sand.

‘I hope Felix and his dad get here in time,’ I say.

The pickup stops beside us and Carl and Greg jump down followed by Felix’s dad and Sam. I lean over the back of the pickup to see Felix sitting by Angel’s head. Angel is wrapped in wet towels on the yellow flotation raft.

Carl scans the water. ‘Any sign of the mother dolphin?’

I shake my head. ‘I hope she’s not waiting by the pool.’

I take a front corner of the raft with Dad and we all help lift Angel down.

She’s heavy, a solid mass of bone and muscle. I rest one hand on her head as we carry her to the water. Her breaths are short and shallow, her eyes wide open.

‘Not too deep,’ says Carl. ‘Let’s wait for her to get used to the water. We don’t want her swimming off too early.’

We float Angel out into the waves until we’re waist deep in water. The waves are breaking further out, running to the shoreline in steps of broken surf. Angel is strangely calm, as if she’s waiting too. I feel her clicks and whistle pass right through me, invisible pulses of sound spreading out through the dark waters of the bay.

The sun’s rim rises above the hills behind us, turning the sea to liquid gold.

I feel Angel’s body tense. She’s still and silent, listening.

Maybe I can feel the vibrations of whistles through the water too, because I sense her mother near us.

‘Pfwhooosh!’ She surfaces close by.

‘Just watch her,’ says Carl. ‘She could turn aggressive if she wants her calf.’

Angel flaps her tail, desperate to swim.

Carl and Greg deflate the two long cushions of the raft and let it slip beneath her. I run my hands along her back one last time as she surges forward to meet her mother. They swim side by side, their bodies touching, and slide together beneath the sea.

Two plumes of warm breath rise in the chill dawn air.

I watch the space where they had been, and feel a strange emptiness deep inside.

It’s not for what I’ve lost.

But for what I hope will be.