Jack asks, ‘What if the lake drains?’
‘I’ll keep an eye on the levels. I doubt it will be in the next week.’
As she reaches for the door handle to speed his departure, she can see that Jack is about to argue with her, tell her there is every chance the lake will drain in the next few days. He’s right. The event she’s waited for the whole of her seven months here could happen in the next day or so and she might miss it.
She might miss more than the lake draining.
‘Once they can fend for themselves, these two need to go back to their colony at Right Whale Bay.’ She steps away from the door and back towards him as she speaks. ‘Will you do it? If I can’t be here, will you make sure they’re OK?’
Jack is silent for several seconds. ‘What’s going on?’ he asks at last.
Felicity tries to turn away but he catches hold of her arm.
‘You’ve been jumpy for weeks,’ he says. ‘Especially when a cruise ship is due. This stuff’ – he gestures at the bed – ‘there’s no way you’ll need that on Bird Island. And now you’re talking as though you won’t come back. Seriously, Flick, what the fuck?’
And now she must lie to her best friend.
‘Of course, I’ll come back,’ she says. ‘But you know what the weather’s like. If I get delayed, I need to know someone will be watching out for these guys.’
Jack doesn’t reply immediately and she walks to the door again. Still, he doesn’t follow.
‘What did you make of that lot from the Southern Star today?’ he asks. ‘That story about the knife-wielding madwoman?’
For a moment, she can’t think what he’s talking about. Then she remembers, the group of tourists in Nigel’s office.
‘I figured they’d all had a lot to drink.’ She is thinking out loud, the visitors’ complaint had barely registered in her over-anxious brain. ‘The husband had been enjoying a bit of extra-maritals and when he was almost discovered, he invented a story about being attacked to deflect his wife’s wrath.’
Jack’s smile fades. ‘The trouble is, someone has been seen wandering around the whaling station at night. Before the Southern Star came into dock.’
Felicity hasn’t heard this before. ‘Who’d do that?’ she says. ‘It’s not safe.’
‘Even so, three people I know have seen movement down there.’
‘It’ll be a seal. A large bird.’
‘Seals tend not to light fires.’
In spite of everything, Felicity is intrigued. ‘You’re talking about someone living here alone, finding shelter, keeping themselves warm, catching enough food to survive. It simply isn’t possible.’
‘You wouldn’t think so, would you?’
5
Bamber
During the day, Grytviken is a ghost town; at night, the ghosts rise up and walk its streets again. At its commercial height, over a thousand men lived and worked here and each one left something of himself behind. Now, their footsteps echo along the dirt tracks and they call to each other across the water. They bang flensing tools against the rusting towers of the oil tanks and swear at the wind as it hurries them along the abandoned streets.
They are still here, the whalers, and Bamber is getting to know each of them.
They are black from the smoke of coal fires, these men of the sea, their clothes gore-stained, hands greasy with animal fat. They are tough, cruel, unforgiving in life, and death has not improved them. They avoid the church and the cemetery; both are reminders of the fate they’ve not escaped. They linger instead where life and death mingled on a daily basis. They’ve shed blood, these men. They ripped apart flesh, turned a deaf ear to the pain and cries of the innocent. They killed and killed until their souls bled from them, drifting away in the crimson, congealing mass of fat that the ocean became. They’ll never be able to leave.
Bamber loves the ghosts. She walks with them, eavesdropping, watches with a breathless excitement their card games and their gambling. Sometimes she lies down beside them in their rotting bunks and rises with them in the misty dawn. The ghosts are her constant friends, the only ones she needs.
On the night after the Southern Star sailed south, she approaches the settlement along the coast road. From the adjacent beach comes the sound of a dozen angry skirmishes as the seal colony fights to maintain its pecking order. Yards away, the heavy mass of a bull seal thunders over the rocks whilst the cows and the young wail in fright. The noise from the seal colonies is constant. Those who can’t get used to it leave or buy ear plugs.
The moon is nearing full by this time and the night is clear. As she turns the last bend before the settlement she sees the body in the middle of the road. Human in size, but not human. The corpse of a fur seal is being fought over by a gaggle of huge birds. Like vultures they swoop down on to what is already a ragged and bloody mess. Bamber presses close to the rocks at the side of the road. The birds are giant petrels. With their six-foot wingspan, strong legs and huge hooked bills, they are some of the most aggressive and successful scavengers on the island. The whalers called them stinkers, or gluttons, because of their voracious appetites. Bamber rather likes them. But not enough to become a meal herself.
As she passes, slowly and a little nervously – she isn’t a fool – she sees their heads and beaks are stained dark silver. Knowing that blood turns silver in the moonlight, Bamber smiles. She finds the sight of blood calming.
Once past the feeding frenzy, it is a few strides to the settlement. She avoids the big white house with its red roof. The former manager’s villa is the museum and general store now and still the province of the living. For the same reason, she never goes to the church. Keeping close to the sea, she walks past the remains of the blubber factory, hears the keening of the wind in the steam pipes. Corrugated-iron flaps beat out a rhythm and a glass bottle comes scurrying up the street towards her. She kicks it away, and it rattles along the stones until the wind, or perhaps a ghostly boot kick, catches it and sends it back.
The cold bites into her exposed flesh but she likes the pain and never dresses for the climate here. As she nears the flensing platform she can see the old accommodation block behind it. The remaining glass in the windows gleams pale in the moonlight, casting back a light of its own and, for a second, the passing clouds give the illusion of smoke rising from its chimneys. The building where the men once lived is one of her favourite places. There are still remnants of the life they had here, empty cans of the food they ate, a discarded packet of cigarettes, a photograph of a loved one. The place she likes best, though, is the flensing platform.
The steps leading up to it are rotting but she is careful, and she isn’t heavy. Twenty yards long by ten wide, made of wood and concrete, the platform is where the whales were brought to die. Exhausted, fatally wounded, they were hoisted by cranes from the sides of the boat and laid out on the platform before the flensers, skilled men armed with long sharp knives, cut the blubber away using a spiralling technique. Once separated from the meat, the blubber was rendered down into the prized and commercially valuable whale oil.
In the old days, the stink of boiling flesh and rotting meat fought with that of coal fires and the ocean. Now, a hundred or more different scents come from the land and the sea, but for Bamber, there is something missing.