And she did die.
Was that because of Lucas or had something else intervened?
The Beach is particularly resistant to rational explanation. Aaron Fennymore’s dry words again, somehow more alarming for their very lack of colour.
May studied her bitten fingernails and the ragged cushions of flesh surrounding them. They looked like a stranger’s hands.
Was it possible, might she have to love Lucas just because Doone had done so before her? Was this helpless longing for a tattooed arm and dirty beige-blond hair inherited from a drowned girl? Is it me or her? Which of us is which? And the one on the island – who is she?
Suddenly May hurled the diary away from her. It landed face down with the pages splayed. Her hands flew up to cover her ears and she rocked in the old armchair.
There was a difference, a big one – Doone had had her mother to confide in, even though she was angry with her for her absences. Doone’s mother had come up to her room, hadn’t she, and put her arms round her troubled daughter and tried to make her talk?
An angry sob cranked itself out of May’s chest.
She knew how people could just die, like they could just go shopping or on vacation.
When she thought about her own mother in the earlier times the memories were dressed in colours: the clothes Alison wore, brilliant slabs of saffron or mint or cerise like exuberant abstracts out of one of her art books, and spiked with the scent that clung to her, and the sound of talk and laughter.
Then there came the reversal of all that, the dissolving of Alison into silence and darkness. She had gone so suddenly there had been no chance for anyone to make ready for the loss of her. There had been no packing, no goodbyes and all the tears had to be spent uselessly afterwards. She had left her clothes hanging in the closets, lurid ghosts of her, which still seemed ready to stir with her movements.
Alison’s disappearance out of May’s life seemed such a terrible and random assault that it had put every remaining corner of her world under threat. All the warmth and certainty drained away, leaving a place of yawning shadows and whispers she couldn’t hear.
May remembered the uneasiness that seeped through the apartment, filling the rooms like poison gas. She wondered who was guilty and what it was they were guilty of so that Alison had had to die, then she pinched down on the thought to press it into oblivion. Questions simmered in her head, about the time before her mother’s death and voices behind closed doors and murmured telephone conversations and Ivy’s mute, accusing face, but they were never spoken aloud. When Alison was gone there was no one to answer anything.
Maybe her father had never been very good at looking after people or answering their needs and she had never really noticed the deficiency because Alison had always been there. He made the right movements and gestures, and after the first weeks he found a housekeeper to take care of them all, but he did everything mechanically and painfully, as if he was too disabled by his own grief to attend to May’s. She tried to spare him by keeping still and quiet.
Ivy had been the strongest, but she turned her strength into icy withdrawal. She spent her time with her friends, and would hardly speak to her father and sister at all.
For months May had been afraid every day that Ivy and John would die too and leave her behind. One day she couldn’t keep the fear of it locked inside herself any longer. John was just leaving the apartment, in his business suit with a file of papers under his arm, and May clung to him and howled that she was sure he would be run over or murdered on the way.
He was in a hurry. He needed to get to a meeting and to win a contract; the business wasn’t doing well. ‘Nothing will happen to me, baby, I promise. I’ll be back at six o’clock, just like always.’
And he had handed her over to Carmen the housekeeper, murmuring that May seemed a little spooked and needed some extra attention. Carmen did her best, but May pushed her away. She lay on her bed, waiting and shrinking from the inevitability of the phone, the knock that would bring the news. What had once been safe was now precarious.
A few days later she cut up her mother’s clothes.
Dr Metz had been through all this with her. It was normal, she had told her. It was fine and natural for May to feel what she felt.
‘If it’s fine,’ May had snarled once, ‘why does it feel so bad?’
Dr Metz had smiled at her. ‘We can talk about it next time.’
If I had been Doone, I would have told my mother I loved Lucas. I’d tell Alison now, if she were here. May didn’t know whether she had spoken out loud or not, and the realisation made her feel that she might not even have her solid self to rely on any longer.
Restlessly, searching for an escape from her thoughts, she turned back to the story of the whaler ship.
It was the afternoon of the third day after the crossing of the Line ceremony when the exultant cry came at last from the look-out at the masthead. ‘There she blows!’
Captain Gunnell sprang to attention at once, and the rest of the watch on deck and William Corder with them.
‘Where away?’ the Captain howled.
‘Four points on the lee bow, sir.’
‘How far off?’
‘Two miles.’
‘Sperm whale?’
‘Yes, sir. A large school. There she blows again.’
‘Call all hands. Haul back the main yard and stand by to lower.’
The men from the watch below decks swarmed out of their places and joined the rest in the scurry to the boats. This urgency was like none of their practice games and even William felt the thrill of the chase in prospect, as the bow boat hit the water and he sprang over the rail and landed in his accustomed place. There was great rivalry between the boats to be the first under way and the fastest over the water, and William bent to his heavy oar with great alacrity as the mate sang out, ‘Give way, my lads, give way. A long steady stroke and we’ll have ’em.’
The four boats flew over the water, steadily closing the distance on the school of whales. They had travelled a mile and a half when the whales went down. The oarsmen stopped their work and lay on their oars until the headsmen directed them to paddle gently towards where the great beasts had last been seen. The sudden quiet and the tension prickled at the nape of William’s neck where the sweat- and spray-damped clothing stuck to his skin. He could hear Matthias Plant breathing hard and counting off the seconds into minutes. Then there was a sudden shout as a bull whale blew a great plume of water not a hundred yards away from them. He lay rolling comfortably in a trough of the waves.
William’s boat was caught at right angles to him, dead on the eye as whalemen called it, because the sperm whale has the best field of vision at that angle. As Matthias howled at his men to row round to bring them head to head, the remaining boats scattered in pursuit of the other whales now blowing all around them.
Heggy Burris, the boat steerer, stood up with his first iron grasped in his hand, ready to send it into the whale’s body once the head had slid past. At exactly the right instant he braced his foot against
