Chapter 15
15
It was ironic that the tears she’d faked to gain entry were now flowing freely, and more genuinely, than they had in decades.
It had started in the professor’s office, the pain behind her eyeballs, sharper and sharper with each breath she took. Then the tears began and there was no way to stop them, Fiona realised, as the air quivered in her lungs. It was ironic. She’d not cried when her mother died, after years of watching her deteriorate in a home. Nor had she cried at any of Joseph’s milestones: birthdays, graduation, whatever. Even Stephen cheating on her and then abandoning her had left her dry eyed. But the tears were falling now and there was no way she could stop them.
‘I’m, I’m… Thank you.’ She stumbled from the professor’s office, sniffing and snivelling and barely able to see where she was going. It was easy to forget how unattractive crying was. Or at least how unattractive she was when she cried. There was none of that lightly dabbing a single tear with a frilly hanky, just ugly, gulping breaths and a streaming nose.
On arriving at the elevator, she went to press the button, only to have the doors fly open in front of her. The receptionist stepped forward, accompanied by a hefty, orange-clad colleague.
‘That’s her.’
The guard reached out to take hold of her as she flinched back.
‘No, wait! Wait!’
Had it been Fiona shouting the word wait at the top of her lungs, she had no doubt that it would have been ignored. When she turned around to the source of the voice, she was surprised to see Professor Arkell running towards them.
‘It’s fine. She’s with me. She’s with me,’ he panted.
‘I thought you said she’d broken in?’ The disgruntled security guard directed his lack of amusement at the receptionist.
‘She… She…’ He looked both confused and concerned. Fiona was still unsure as to which way this was going to go, when Professor Arkell once more came to the rescue.
‘My mistake, gentlemen, I’m sorry. I forgot to put her on the visitors’ list for today. Ms Reeves, wasn’t it?’
She took a second to realise he was talking to her.
‘Oh, me? Yes. Mrs actually, Mrs Reeves.’
‘Sorry, Mrs Reeves. I realise there are a couple more images I hadn’t shown you. If you would like to come back through and take a look?’
Fiona’s eyes widened. Professor Arkell blinked, in a manner even less subtle than a wink.
‘Oh, oh yes. Thank you. Of course.’
Leaving a confused receptionist and a frustrated security guard behind her, and feeling totally bemused by what had just occurred, she turned on her heel and hurried down the corridor after the professor.
Back in the office, fresh from his heroics, he seemed to have forgotten she was there and stood staring out of the window. After waiting for what she felt was a reasonable length of time, she decided to take a seat. Still nothing.
‘Are those the photos?’ she asked, innocently, implying that she hadn’t already been looking at them five minutes earlier.
‘Ahh yes,’ he sounded relieved at the conversation starter. ‘The photos. Would you like to see them?’
She wasn’t entirely sure she would. The one or two she’d cast her eyes over previously were already seared into her memory. But she was here now and, given that the good professor could have easily left her to the tender mercies of the security guard, it seemed only polite to show an interest.
‘What caused all these marks on her?’ she asked, noting the lattice of white lines crisscrossing the animal’s head. ‘They’re scars, aren’t they?’
‘They are. Most probably from attacks: orcas, sharks, that kind of thing. Quite often boats are involved too.’
‘But there are so many of them.’
‘She’s not a young girl.’
It wasn’t hard to imagine how much she would have suffered, to end up like that. ‘How old was she?’ she asked.
His reply came with a slight wavering of the head. ‘We can’t be exact, I’m afraid. Probably somewhere between thirty and forty.’
‘So, she was a mother?’
‘Probably a grandmother as well, by that age.’
She swallowed, her eyes moving onto the next image, this one taken from the side, with the mouth open a fraction.
There was one other question that she had to ask, if for no other reason than to put to rest, one way or the other, the na?ve hope to which she had been clinging. Perhaps the press had been exaggerating when they’d reported on the cause of death. Preferred to sensationalise. Or hadn’t listened to the experts properly. After all, they kept on about the balloon being a parrot when it was a parakeet.
‘Was it definitely…’ she started, only to stop again. ‘I mean, do you know for certain, you know, that there wasn’t any other cause? That the plastic was definitely what…’ The words caught in her throat again. ‘That there wasn’t anything else wrong with her? That she wasn’t sick too?’
Pity shone in his eyes. ‘She starved to death,’ he said. ‘A whale, of her length and size, should have been around fifteen tonnes. She was barely eleven. There was finally no way for her to digest her food.’
Fiona nodded mutely. Her throat burned and tears were threatening again.
‘Is this… is this common?’ she sniffed.
He tapped the pile of brown folders on his desk.
‘These are just what we’ve had in the last three months.’
‘May I?’
He slid the pile over. With trembling hands, she flipped open the first file. After a few sheets, she found herself staring at a photo of a beautiful pebble beach. Beautiful if you excluded the three dead whales washed up on it.
‘This was near Skegness around March time,’ he told her.
Two large carcasses and one baby. It could have almost been Martha’s family.
‘I thought sperm whales travelled in bigger pods than this. Why are there just the three of them?’ she asked.
‘Likelihood is they went a little further afield than the rest of their pod. Got themselves beached. When that happens, there’s not that much they can do to save themselves.’
‘So, this one wasn’t us? It wasn’t rubbish that killed them?’
‘It hadn’t done yet,’ he replied, scratching his temple. ‘But, judging by the contents of their stomachs, it wouldn’t have been long. This one…’ he dug down into the pile until he found what he was looking for, ‘had over 20 kg of plastic in her. Including two separate flip-flops. Can you imagine that? Flip-flops.’
She could, she realised, wondering exactly how many pairs she’d gone through in the last few years. She wasn’t a particular fan of that type of shoe. More often than not, they caused her blisters or, at the very least, ungainly strap marks across her feet. But, still, she bought a new pair every now and again, usually at the airport. She would often leave them in the hotel when she left. They weren’t even worth the effort of packing and were cheap enough to pick more up if she felt like another pair.
‘This one makes me want to cry.’ He’d selected another folder. ‘You’d think I’d have grown hardened to it by now, the number of these I’ve come across, but sometimes, well, it’s not an easy job. Pen lids, for crying out loud. This seagull swallowed a felt-tip pen lid, completely blocking its intestinal tract.’
Nothing was left to the imagination in this photograph. The bird had been dissected, with its head and tail left intact, while revealing everything in between with startling clarity.
‘Crazy, right?’ he asked. ‘We think our actions don’t make any difference in the world. But they do. Governments need to ban this stuff. I know they’re making noises, and that’s all well and good, but they need to do more. They really do. People on their own can’t be trusted to make the right choices. What has it come to when the economics and convenience of a disposable plastic pen become a bigger priority than the wellbeing of every other living thing on Earth? I mean, if you take a look at?—’
‘No,’ she raised her hands to stop him opening another file. ‘I mean, thank you and everything, but I don’t need to see any more. I don’t. I can’t.’
She rose to her feet and stretched her hand across to him, a gesture met with obvious disappointment.
‘I know,’ she said, reading his expression. ‘I should look at all these, but I can’t right now. I can’t. Martha… she was…’
He looked frustrated. Then, with a sense of urgency, he flipped to the back of the first folder and pulled out one of the photos.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take this.’
Bile rose in her throat. It was so much clearer than the television image. It was as if she had in her hand an original crime-scene photo.
‘I don’t want this,’ she said.
‘Neither does anyone here,’ he replied. ‘But maybe it’ll help you. Maybe you can use it somehow.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know.’
They stood in silence, both pairs of eyes on the reddish-brown image that she held in her hand.
Outside, seabirds called shrilly to one another and the burgeoning waves continued to buffet the shore.
As with her lunch on the way up, Fiona bought her dinner at the station. Once she’d sat down in the busy carriage, she started wishing she’d refused the unwanted gift more vehemently. The large, A4 photograph poked out of her bag and she could barely go a minute without her eyes being drawn to it. And every time her hand slipped inside for something and met its smooth surface, she would recoil.
So that was it, she thought. She would never know if it had been her balloon. And the owners of the flip-flops would never know where the missing partner of their pair had ended up, nor would all the thousands of people, who carelessly discarded small plastic items, find out their final resting place. They could all be her, she realised with a sudden wave of shock. It was hardly likely, but it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
She flicked back the lid of her coffee and gulped down half the cup.
You’re being ridiculous , she told herself. Still, it was a tough thought to shake. She’d certainly owned enough pairs of flip-flops through the years to make it possible. And pens. How many of those had she discarded at school, college, university? It was only now that Annabel ordered her decent-quality ones that she didn’t go through them at a speed of knots.
Her mind was momentarily pulled back to thoughts of the office and the box of mislabelled plastic puzzle cubes. Would whales eat those? Possibly. If not, then something else probably would. Her heart pounded. Maybe if she sent them back, the manufacturers would be able to take off the stickers and reuse them? Although what would happen to them eventually?
She bent down to her bag to pull out the photo. As she did so, her eyes landed on the tray table in front of her. The coffee lid and stirring stick were sitting next to the takeaway bowl her salad had come in. The plastic fork, which had been cracked before she’d even started to use it, was now broken in the bottom and, underneath it all, was a thin plastic shopping bag.
‘Shit,’ she said.