The Missing One (8 page)

The Sea Park whales performed their show twice a day in an above-ground tank with steep glass walls and bleachers stretching up on all sides. The male, Orpheus, had been captured in the North Atlantic by Icelandic fishermen when he was five or six years old; now he had a chest the size of a tanker and his dorsal fin was taller than a man. The female, Bella, was three years older. She'd been taken from the Pacific Northwest in the sixties, when orcas became big business. The two whales had been trained together and the Sea Park guys said they were docile: there was no threatening behaviour and they did their job placidly. The public loved them. Since the orcas arrived, park revenues had gone up by a third – all across America the crowds were going wild for killer whales.

Elena had only watched one show, early on when she first got access to the dolphins. She stood in the wings with her backpack on one day and a hat pulled down to block the glare. In one routine, Bella had to open her jaws to allow the trainer to brush her teeth with a giant toothbrush. The
crowd whooped and yelled. Some schoolkids threw popcorn. The male had been trained to drink what seemed to be the contents of a giant can of gasoline, then swim the perimeter making the sound of an outboard motor. After that Elena stayed away when the whales were performing.

Between shows, the two whales would move in slow circles around their cramped tank. Sometimes when she passed she'd find them just floating there, completely motionless, staring at the glass sides. The head trainer, Dan, said they were sleeping, but maybe he was just trying to make himself feel better because they both knew that orcas in the wild swim for miles while they sleep. They shut down half their brain at a time. They don't hang in the water.

She'd seen sleeping killer whales in the wild once – a few summers ago, up in Puget Sound, she was on a field trip with some other students, monitoring Chinook levels, when they spotted a pod out to sea. Twenty or more whales were lined up in sleeping formation, moving eerily across the horizon, surfacing to breathe – a tiny pause – then submerging for a long time.

In the wild, an orca will swim up to a hundred miles a day; here at Sea Park they could only move in tight circles. Out in the ocean, they'd dive hundreds of feet to the sea bed; here, they'd hit the bottom at thirty feet. They lived, essentially, in a bathtub.

She noticed one day that the male's dorsal fin was beginning to collapse. Dan said it was nothing to worry about – it happened to captive males, he said, it definitely wasn't a sign of ill health.

She had somehow managed to get past all this when it came to the Bottlenose family. They seemed active and healthy and she couldn't spend her time feeling bad for them. She'd had to shove these thoughts out of her head because she had work to do, and she knew she was lucky to have unfettered access. As she monitored their play patterns and the language of their play, she'd grown used to their environment – mostly she managed not to think about the life they could have had outside it. The dolphins seemed to have adapted to captivity. It was possible that they didn't remember the wild or what it felt like to skim through the waves like the pods she sometimes saw down on the beach. She felt attached to the Bottlenose family, but distanced from them at the same time. They were what they should be: research subjects of whom she'd grown fond.

But the killer whales were different. They sat like capital letters in black and white, quietly making their point.

Perhaps because she wasn't studying them, she didn't manage the same scientific detachment. She couldn't avoid them either – she had to pass their tank every night to get out of the park. Sometimes, she would catch the eye of the big female, and she had an uncomfortable feeling that the whale knew all about her. She dismissed this as tiredness – the hollow feeling you get at the end of a long day, when you are alone in a public place that has emptied out for the night.

One day she noticed that the male had scabs across his back, and the skin, which should be glossy black, was peeling and mottled. His dorsal had collapsed fully now, and hung limp, like the tail of a dejected dog.

Each night, as she passed their tank to let herself out of the lush tropical park, she would feel their silent longing settle on her like a cloak. She felt as if they were asking her for something, quietly and insistently. She could not shake off the guilt.

I can't sleep, every part of my body is jangling and my head pulses with the effort of containing all the thoughts that I can't allow myself to think. The flight is almost empty so we have a whole row of seats just for the two of us. Finn has finally fallen asleep after rampaging up and down the cabin for the first four hours with me behind him, trying to stop him from grabbing things and bothering people. He is sprawled across my lap now, fingers uncurled, mouth open, but his hair is static and wild, as if it alone refuses to admit defeat.

I sip some water and shift gently to get my back in a better position, fearful of waking him because I know that he is perfectly capable of staying awake for the whole nine hours, slowly spiralling through excitement and hyper-activity into full-blown hysteria.

I see my face reflected in the window and for a second I don't know who it is that I am looking at. I thought I loved my hair but its absence is intensely liberating. I touch my
head and it feels smooth. My fingers expect length and weight, even though I know it's gone. I can feel my curls in my hands as I twist my hair up off my neck, the same way I can feel Finn's newborn mouth suctioning onto my nipple, or Doug's hands cupping my chin. Body memories; lost things.

The cut was an impulse. As we waited in the drizzle outside the bus station for the Heathrow Express, I found myself staring at a hairdresser's sign across the road: ‘Walk-Ins Welcome'. We were far too early anyway. There was time to kill.

While bored hairdressers fussed around Finn, giving him a lollipop and letting him play with the brushes, I shed my hair. The girl kept asking if I was sure, but I could tell she was thrilled to slice off great, satisfying chunks. She held them up like curling bouquets as she snipped. Afterwards Finn looked at me with a sort of respect and tentatively patted my head with both hands. ‘All gone!'

I could watch a movie. Or read. I pick up the
High Flyers
magazine and flick through it. There is an article about totem poles of the Pacific Northwest. I skim paragraphs about totem meanings – pride, remembrance, bereavement. How the poles, made of rainforest wood, will disintegrate over the years and how they are built in the understanding that they will be reabsorbed into the earth one day. Nothing lasts for ever. We are all part of a bigger cycle, birth and decay. A subheading catches my eye – ‘
Shame Poles
' –
totems erected by tribes to shame people for their unpaid debts or crimes
. But I can't concentrate properly on the text. My eyes are so
tired. The words won't quite line up. I stare at the pictures – faces, symbols, black beaks. I close the magazine, shut my eyes.

I mustn't think about what I'm doing. I am in flight.

Another memory surfaces – I must have been nine or ten. I told the teacher to shut up and then ran for my life – out the staff door, down the steps. As I pounded across the playground I glanced back and saw the faces of my classmates pressed against the picture window, thirty mouths hanging open. This is the feeling that I have right now: I am galloping away, but beneath the adrenalin-fuelled outrage is a strong sense that this can't end well.

When I got back to Oxford this morning – only this morning – I called Doug.

‘You're home.'

‘No – I'm going away for a bit. I need to think.'

‘What? What – where are you going? Back to Sussex?'

‘I'm going to take Finn to visit relatives – in Vancouver.'

‘You what? You're going to Vancouver? Canada? What relatives? You haven't got any relatives in Vancouver. Kal … Jesus … This is—'

‘I need to get away, Doug.'

‘Is this about the texts you saw on my phone? Look – listen – I know you're in shock right now. You just lost your mother. It's not—'

‘Oh my God!' I cut him off. ‘Are you honestly about to say “it's not what you think”?'

‘OK. We have to talk about this. Wait there. I'm coming home. Just wait there. I'm coming now.'

But I didn't wait for him to come home and explain to me that he'd fucked her because I was preoccupied with our baby. Or that he loved her – and had never really loved me. That he was leaving.

I hung up, then slotted Finn into the baby-carrier, and hauled him up onto my back. I hooked my bag across my body, and then I left, bumping the case behind me down our front steps.

Doug, presumably, got home soon afterwards. I wonder how he felt when he saw that I had gone – furious? Upset? Confused? Guilty? And that's without knowing how much of our savings I have just spent.

I kept my phone switched off after that. The only way is not to think about this, and not, under any circumstances, to read his texts or listen to his voicemails.

I reach over Finn's sleeping body and delve gently into my bag for a book. I wish I'd worn yoga pants rather than jeans. I feel as if my whole body is swelling. My hand closes around my mother's notebook and as I pull it out, the wedding photo flutters onto my lap. I forgot that I slipped it in there as I packed our things in Sussex. I catch it before it slides off. Then I hold it up to the yellowy cabin light.

My mother is wearing a long seventies-style dress with flowing sleeves, and she is laughing up at my father. Her hair is loose and hangs in thick dark waves around her shoulders, in a middle parting, and she's holding a bunch of wild flowers.

You can't see my father's expression because he's cut in half by the crease and obscured by the shadow of a
building. All you can see is flared trousers and a narrow, floral shirt. He looks sportier; surprisingly cool. They are standing outside a red-brick building. It is frustrating not to be able to see his face with the crease and the shadows, but from his thrown-back shoulders I feel sure he is grinning back at her.

I am not in the picture but I must have been there somewhere, in someone's arms. I wonder who held me during the ceremony. It is odd that in all these years my mother never mentioned any friends from school or university. She didn't even mention the woman who sent her a postcard every year for thirty-seven years. She was a student in California for – what – six years? It is astonishing how easily she cut herself off from her American life. But then, she always was excellent at cutting off.

The pilot dims the lights. All around me people shift and murmur. Another baby lets out a high-pitched wail and Finn's arms twitch, but he doesn't wake up. His eyelids flutter. I wonder what he is dreaming about – I imagine him in there, right now, perched on the backs of dragons, or diving headlong into a giant chocolate cake. He is so beautiful, with his tawny fringe and his perfect Sistine-baby mouth, the dimple on his chin. I stroke the hair gently away from his eyes and remember how, when he was born, and I breastfed him day after day, I watched his eyelashes grow.

I look at my watch, still on British time. It is 9.45 p.m. I should be on the sofa with Doug, all the toys cleared away, the washing-up done, the dishwasher trundling through
its cycle and Finn asleep upstairs in his cot under his car mobile. Doug and I should be drinking a glass of wine and watching TV. I didn't buy dishwasher powder. Or butter. I forgot to tell Doug to turn off the electric heater in the basement. I forgot to tell work that I won't be back this week, after all.

I should tell my father what I am doing too. When I woke up this morning he'd set off for London, leaving a note in his elegant handwriting:

I left him a note in reply.

He will be alone in his London flat now, shattered – but working. I wonder if he even has friends. I might have known nothing about my mother's past, though I always understood her present. But with my father I really know nothing. Beyond the layout of his office and flat, I am completely unfamiliar with his life in London. I don't even have his mobile phone number. All I have is his email, and a work number. Usually we communicate on email. Every few weeks I send him a message – these days usually about Finn – and he replies, often instantly, in one or two sentences. He signs his emails ‘G'. Not ‘Dad', not even ‘your father', but ‘G'. It is a way of communicating that avoids any real connection. But
still, he is my father and he should know what I am doing. And he may be able to tell me something about Susannah or Harry Halmstrom. Asking him about them in an email seems more doable than asking face to face.

I get out my phone and, without looking at the inbox, I compose an email. I'll send it when we touch down.