Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (47 page)

By the time the evening was over we were on a better footing and I made a second date with her. Within three weeks we had been to bed and found, in that respect, we were very good together. The fact that she was seven years older than I was seemed to be a bonus. I mean, I was only twenty-two and I knew next to nothing about sex. Jacqueline taught me everything.

Lying together one summer afternoon, the sun shining through the open window and a sea breeze blowing the lace curtains over our naked sweaty bodies, Jacqueline said to me, ‘You don’t know how much I envy you, studying cetology. I just love whales, don’t you? Magnificent creatures. All that weight and yet they are so graceful, so agile, their flukes kicking up spray—the utter delight on their faces as they roll and leap...’

‘You’re anthropomorphizing. That smile of happiness on the face of dolphins and whales is not a smile at all, it’s just the way their skin wrinkles. How can you know they’re enjoying themselves?’

She turned on her side and began stroking my hair.
‘The sheer joy in their movements.
And the sounds they make. Look at the belugas, your favourite whales—the
sea canaries
. Look at the songs they sing, the range of sounds. From squawks, yelps, warbles, trills, chirps and whistles, to blats, snores, croaks, clicks, creaks and brays. How can you listen to the recordings and remain unconvinced?’

‘The, er, sounds—most of them—originate from sacs and organs near the oil-filled melon in the beluga’s forehead. There are fatty pouches through which they force the air to sputter. During the moulting season...’

‘Oh, come on Danny, less of the biology—
why
do they do it? I think it’s because they’re full of the joy of life. By the way, have you chosen your special subject yet?’

I hesitated before answering, but finally told her, ‘I’m studying the migrational routes of the belugas.’

She frowned when I said this, as I knew she would, but it would not have been any use lying to her.

‘I hope your security is good. If those routes were to fall into the wrong hands it would endanger over a
hundred-thousand
white whales. I think...’

‘Jacqueline,’ I said, ‘Professor Kinchmier is happy with the arrangements, so I don’t think you need to worry. To enter the files and get at the charts you have to use five different codewords at each stage.’

‘Who’s supplying you with your source material?’

‘The professor herself of course—who else has tracked the belugas across the Arctic?
We all know they move with the ice fronts, staying ahead of the solidifying sea, but precisely
where
the processions of belugas travel along that front is known only to Kinchmier and a handful of her students
. I’m to be one of them, as it happens, whether you like it or not.’

She sat up and stared at me for a moment, a trickle of sweat running down between her breasts, catching my attention. I licked it away, trying to divert her, but she was not to be distracted that easily.

‘Oh God, Danny,’ she said, ‘I hope you’re who I think you are—who I want you to be—under that skin. I’m in love with you—
really
in love with you—but if you should turn out to be a louse, I’d kill you, you know that don’t you?’

I tried to laugh this off. ‘The vegetarian animal lover, member of Greenpeace, Earthwatch and a dozen conservationist organisations, is in reality a cold-hearted killer who would destroy her lover at a stroke.’

‘I would too, Danny—oh, darling, please be who I think you are. Please be you.’

I began to get annoyed with all this melodrama and pulled away from her to sit on the edge of the bed.

‘Hell, what do you think I am, some kind of monster? Would I betray my own profession?’

‘What
is
your profession, Danny? What do you want to do with your life?’

This irritated me even more. ‘I don’t
know
yet, Jacqueline. Shit, it’s all right for you—you come from a family whose expectations for you are low—almost non-existent. Mine expect success—and success in their terms is money. My father was a millionaire by the time he was thirty. If I don’t at least repeat that I’ll be considered a failure. Actually my generation is supposed to do much better.’

She hooked an arm around my neck and hugged me to her.

‘I know—I know. Just don’t betray me, Danny, that’s all, because I’m deadly when it comes to saving the creatures of the sea.’

It was a good time to tell her that my
great-great-granddaddy
was a whaler and my reason for choosing the creatures as my area of study. I was surprised to find she was not angry. In fact, she approved of my reasoning.

‘It’s right that you should study whales when your ancestor was a hunter of them. In hunting them he must have come to understand them a little. You want to deepen that understanding, in a more enlightened age.’

‘You don’t—disapprove of him?’

‘Then was then, now is now. I haven’t any patience with people who judge another age in retrospect. It’s easy to look back and condemn the buffalo hunters, the foresters, the whalers, but they didn’t know any better then. We shouldn’t be ashamed of our ancestors for doing what was acceptable in their time. The fact is
,
it’s unacceptable now. No one has an excuse in this day and age. We have proof of whale intelligence, we have proof of deforestation,
we
have proof of endangered species. What may have been right then, is wrong now.’

Moby Jack is still in cold pursuit. Now that it has cut us away from the main school of belugas, it bears down hard on our stern. The distance between us is gradually increasing, but if I’m right about it, that won’t make any difference to the eventual outcome.

The belugas are moving into the shallows of a river outlet from Somerset Island, presumably to feed on cod and squid. They fill the blue basin of water with their twelve-foot-long bodies, rubbing against each other, their flukes slapping the surface, creating great gouts of water, which fly up and then fall to smack on the surface. The river delta is a writhing mass of white giants, thrashing and surging, spilling the flow over the alluvial plain where the wading birds are gathered. The birds protest but their complaints go unheeded. The whales are too full of themselves to notice that they’re disturbing others: like a crowd of football fans when their team has won.

Once I had my degree, I went to work for a company making radar equipment for luxury yachts, but promotion was slow and I became dispirited. Jacqueline told me not to panic, to wait for a while before looking elsewhere. I did. I waited four years. The whole time my father was on my back, asking me when I was going to start making some ‘real money’ so that he could call me
his
son. ‘You’re just like your Uncle Timothy,’ he told me on my twenty-sixth birthday, ‘a slow loser. You’ll be old and grey before your time, trudging to work with hunched shoulders, earning a pittance all your life, scared to say boo to anyone looking like an accountant.’ Dad owned a stock brokering firm and was impatient of losers of any variety, slow, fast or medium, especially his progeny.

It was shortly after this birthday that I was contacted by an international company interested in my work on the beluga migration
routes which
they had heard about. I asked, where they had heard about it? ‘Oh,’ the voice on the end of the line said, ‘we listen in the right places’. Was I interested? Yes, of course I was interested, and a meeting was arranged. The source of the information, as it turned out, was not as I imagined the result of industrial spying, but a clever remark of my father’s at a businessman’s dinner. ‘My son studied whale spawning grounds during his time at university,’ my father had said, ‘can you imagine anything more bloody useless than charting the places where fish go to fuck?’

Apparently someone did not think it useless, because they offered me an enormous salary to work for them. I spent several weeks in making the most important decision of my life, walking the floor at night, weighing the consequences. Finally, I made my resolution and resigned myself to that decision.

I went the same night to say goodbye to Jacqueline.

Apart from negotiating an increase in the salary I had made the stipulation that if I was to hand over the information they required, I would do it on the spot, on the bridge of the ship. I was no fool, despite what my father thought of me. If I’d given them what they wanted straight away, they would have taken it and said thanks very much ta-ta fellah. I was going to eke it out to them, at the same time they would pump money into my account at an offshore bank on the Cayman Islands. I could make checks from the ship to the bank, regarding my account, using a codeword. I wasn’t going to be cheated out of my earnings. They smiled knowingly and said they understood. If there was one thing they did understand, it was avarice.

Before joining the ship I went into hospital for a minor operation on my right leg.

Then I went off, without a companion Queequeg, to hunt the white whale. Captain Jisteain was a weedy-looking man, with yellow-rimmed eyes and a heavy smoking habit. Unlike Ahab he had no passion driving his blood like hot mercury through his veins, no obsessive vengeance urging him on. He had no dark and wonderful oaths to scream into the wind, no skin that burned feverishly while he stared out at the wild sea. I could not imagine him lifting his streaming face to the storm and cursing God for sending a typhoon that robbed him of his kill, nor blaspheming with such marvellous inventiveness that it actually added to the depth and breadth of human thought and language. His eyes never strayed to where the crow’s nest once reigned, nor did his ears listen for that heart-stopping ‘Thar she blows!’ which sent the captains of former whaling ships into shivers of excitement. Jisteain spent most of his time in his cabin, reading Regency novels and smoking Turkish cigarettes.

We were bound for the Arctic
circle
, where the white whale formed a hoop around the axis of the Earth. I spent my days staring at changing skies, interesting seas, that melded into one another at some times, and broke and separated cleanly at others. The horizon was on some days a line as sharp as the edge of typing paper and on others a mountainous seascape. The colours varied as much as the shapes of the waves: green, blue, purple, black, and with dozens of different shades between.

On the deck in the morning there would be fish which had tried to jump the ship and had struck an obstruction halfway across—or had simply not leaped strongly enough. We ate these for breakfast, along with seaweed and shellfish gathered during motion. The chef was resourceful. Even flotsam and jetsam was harvested from the sea: one evening we came across a whole armada of coconuts, presumably shaken into the sea during a hurricane somewhere in the tropics and carried by the currents towards the magnetic north.

Finally, the
Titan
, with its arsenal of defensive computers and anti-missile missiles, not to speak of its whale-killing potential, arrived in the Arctic and found the belugas. The school I led them to
was
not the largest in the area, but this particular school would, I knew from former intelligence, contain Moby Jack. I was in fact leading the ship to Moby Jack and its doom and not to the killing seas.

Captain Jisteain has come onto the bridge rubbing the sleep from his eyes. I’m leaving the black box running, so that it catches our conversation. Later, Jacqueline, when you transpose this into the written word, please
fill
in the gaps so that it flows like a narrative. It’ll make much more interesting reading that way, for the members of our organisation. I am after all about to make the ultimate sacrifice: my life for that of my fellow creatures. Forgive me if I want to dramatise that moment to give it some power. I don’t want to go out with whimper, but with a bang. A hero’s death deserves dramatic telling. My ego requires that the world recognise me and become emotional at the mention of my name. I am not a modest man, my darling.

‘Why aren’t we killing whales? Coxswain, why are we heading out to open waters?’

The coxswain looks towards me with a worried expression and the captain turns to stare. Giving Jisteain a tight smile, I say, ‘We’re heading this way on my orders.’ He whirls on me, his little moustache twitching. ‘Who gave you the

bloody
right to give orders?’