Dolphin Song

by Lauren St. John

  “The answers are right here on these walls,” the sangoma had told her, “but only time and experience will give you eyes to see them.”

  Martine touched the rock and felt its strange energy. It was wet. Her flashlight illuminated a trickle of water running down from a fissure. It provided an explanation of sorts; just not a very satisfactory one. If the paintings had been covered by a fine dust, a leak of rainwater would have rinsed it away and revealed the image beneath. That was one possibility, anyway. Martine didn’t buy it. She thought it more likely that Grace was right—only time and experience would allow her to see what she was meant to see.

  In the first painting, twenty-one dolphins were lying side by side on a beach. Blood trickled from one dolphin’s ear. The second painting was more of a pattern than a picture. It showed rings and rings of dolphins—more than a hundred of them—surrounded by a large circle of sharks. There was something in the middle. Martine held up her flashlight and leaned closer. It was a swimmer. A swimmer surrounded by sharks and dolphins.

  Martine’s heart did an uncomfortable flip. She was caught in the middle of some ancient prophecy. The destiny that the forefathers had predicted or mapped out for her—she was never quite sure which—was in motion once more, carrying her with it like a leaf on a current. Martine wondered if it was possible to outrun fate. Her parents had tried it with catastrophic consequences, but maybe she could simply sidestep it. She would still go on the school trip but she would refuse to swim or go anywhere near the water, no matter what. Sharks were hardly going to climb up the side of the ship to get at her.

  As if the forefathers were reaching out from beyond the grave, her flashlight fizzed and flicked. Martine, who had been trying to be brave from the moment she entered the claustrophobic tunnel, lost her nerve. She turned and fled. In her rush, she forgot about the bats and clattered down the rocky steps, flashlight beam swooping madly, startling them from their upside-down dreaming. Their silhouettes skittered across the rock walls like vampire wallpaper. Incensed squeaks, raised to the level of a cacophony by the echo, pursued her down the tunnel.

  Back in the Secret Valley, Jemmy sensed her anxiety. He bolted almost before Martine was on his back, nearly unseating her as he crashed through the twisted tree. Clinging to his mane, Martine understood for the first time that she was never really in control of the white giraffe when she rode him; that she relied totally on the bond between them, on trust, on Jemmy’s goodwill. If anything ever happened to change that, disaster would quickly follow. But, she told herself firmly, it wouldn’t. So she leaned forward, let adrenaline course through her body, and watched the dark shapes of a herd of browsing buffalo flash by.

  When the white giraffe finally bounced to a halt in the trees near the water hole, Martine slid to the ground and hugged him. His neck was wet with sweat. He put his head down and made his musical fluttering sound. Martine did her best to explain to him that she was going away for a little while, but that she’d be thinking of him constantly and loved him with all her heart.

  Locking the game reserve gate behind her, Martine sprinted through the mango trees and perfumed gardenias. When she opened the back door, the silence of the house seemed to swirl out and envelop her. Perhaps because her nerves were still jangling from the wild ride, a sense of foreboding filled her. She stepped into the kitchen. The faint scent of roast chicken lingered. Moonlight fell in white streaks across the tiled floor. Martine stole past her grandmother’s door and up the wooden staircase. Every creak sent her racing pulse into the stratosphere. When she reached her room, she didn’t turn on the light but just sank onto the bed and exhaled.

  She was unlacing her boots when she began to get the feeling that she wasn’t alone. A stifled cough cut through the stillness. Martine leaped to her feet in fright.

  A spectral figure was sitting in the wicker chair.

  4

  A switch clicked and Gwyn Thomas’s face came at her abruptly out of the darkness. The lamplight lent it a yellow tone, shadowing her brow and throwing the lines around her mouth and eyes into harsh relief. She looked like an eagle owl. Martine stood there feeling her intestines writhe like snakes and her stomach shrink into a hard, sick ball. She could almost hear the fragile bond between her and her grandmother shatter.

  “Have you had a good time?” her grandmother asked lightly. “Have you enjoyed yourself galloping merrily around in the moonlight, unconcerned that I might be lying awake not knowing which might maul, maim, or gore you first—a lion, leopard, rhino, or bull elephant? Afraid that the phone might ring and it would be the night guard to tell me that you’d fallen and broken every bone in your body, or been bitten by a Cape cobra, or savaged by a male baboon, or ripped to shreds by a warthog protecting its young.”

  As if to support her case, a lion roared in the starlight. “Shall I go on?”

  “I’m sorry,” Martine said inadequately. Somehow the knowledge that none of this was an exaggeration—that any time she went out into the game reserve with Jemmy, particularly at night, she was taking the risk that one or more of those things could happen to her—made the words harder to bear.

  Her grandmother’s face was a mask of fury and disappointment. “Well, I’m sorry, Martine, but sorry is no longer good enough. My first inclination when I found that you had disobeyed me was to pull you off the school trip . . .”

  Martine held her breath. It would be ironic if her grandmother’s punishment played into her hands.

  “But that,” her grandmother continued, “would be a slap in the face of Miss Volkner and everyone else who has worked so hard to put the voyage together. And I think it will do you the power of good to be away from Sawubona and the white giraffe for a while. You seem to have lost all sight of the fact that, although you have a special relationship with Jemmy, he is a wild animal and wild animals are unpredictable. To help remind you of that detail, I’m going to ban you from riding him or even entering the reserve for six weeks after you return.”

  “No!” cried Martine. “Anything but that. I’ll get up at five every morning and do the household chores; I’ll wash all the dishes or do all the ironing; I’ll even clean the sanctuary animals’ cages for a month. But please don’t take me away from Jemmy. He needs me and I can’t live without him. I’ll die.”

  Gwyn Thomas started for the door. “Don’t be melodramatic, Martine. Jemmy will manage just fine without you and, at the rate you’re going, you’ll live a lot longer without him. The discussion is closed. A six-week ban and that’s final.”

  In that instant, all the hurts long forgotten, all the times when her grandmother had seemed not to want her or snapped at her or sent her to her room, all her frustration over Jemmy being gawped at by tourists, came boiling to the surface of Martine’s mind. Combined with this fresh injustice, they caused an explosion. “I hate you, Gwyn Thomas!” she screamed.

  Her grandmother swung around as if to hurl a bitter retort, but caught herself just as swiftly. Her shoulders seemed suddenly to sag. “We’ll be leaving at eight a.m. sharp. Make sure you’re ready,” was all she said. The light switch clicked and she was gone.

  Darkness closed in on Martine. Somehow the noisiness of Africa’s night creatures—the hunting lions, the crickets, frogs, and night birds—which she found so thrilling usually, made the silence in the house more terrible. The cruel words lingered in the air. Martine was racked with equal parts of shame and resentment. She tried, and failed, to picture two whole months without Jemmy: the school trip plus the six-week punishment. She was quite sure she’d be eaten up by loneliness. It would devour her, inch by inch, like a flesh-eating bug, until there was nothing left.

  It was almost morning before she fell into a restless sleep plagued with visions of circling sharks, and this time they were closer than ever.

  Breakfast was a tense and tasteless affair of hard-boiled eggs and toast, after which Martine and her grandmother drove to the school in silence.

  “You need to think long and hard ab
out your behavior while you’re away,” Gwyn Thomas said as she lifted Martine’s bag from the trunk of the car. “And when you come back, we’ll have to discuss your future at Sawubona.”

  They stood staring at each other for a long moment— Martine yearning so badly for her grandmother to take her in her arms and make her feel loved and okay and not like the worst person in the whole world that it was a physical ache in her chest. But Gwyn Thomas merely laid an impersonal hand on her shoulder.

  “Good-bye, Martine,” she said. “See you soon.” Then she climbed into her battered red Datsun and drove away.

  It took all the self-control Martine possessed not to run after the car. Instead she walked pale and wretched into the rose-lined school courtyard, where the rest of her class was chatting and fooling around in the morning sunshine. Usually Martine loved the aroma wafting from the cafeteria, but today it made her feel nauseous. She began to wish that she hadn’t forced down the boiled eggs.

  “Cheer up, Martine, it might never happen,” called out Claudius Rapier, who was lounging at one of the rustic wooden tables, a can of Coke in his hand. His friends, who included fair-haired twins Luke and Lucy van Heerden, two of Martine’s least favorite people, laughed raucously.

  Martine gave him the most withering look she was capable of. She wanted to tell him that something had happened and that even if it hadn’t, nothing put her in a bad mood faster than people telling her to cheer up. But she knew it wasn’t worth it. In a war of words, Claudius always came out on top.

  Claudius had been at Caracal School for little more than a term, but already he was the self-appointed leader of the “Five Star Gang,” a group of the most popular kids in school. He’d replaced Xhosa Washington, who had transferred to a school in Johannesburg after his father, the local mayor, was indicted for his part in assisting Sawubona’s last game warden to smuggle rare animals out of South Africa.

  Like Xhosa, there was something princely about Claudius, but unlike the mayor’s son, he wasn’t muscle-bound. He was overweight—fat even—in a country of athletes, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He had the permanent serene smile of someone upon whom fortune had always smiled, and for whom money had always smoothed every path and made all things possible. He had long blond hair, curling up at the ends, and, in spite of the fact that he existed entirely on fast food (the family chauffeur brought a selection of it to him piping hot each lunchtime), clear gold skin with a slight flush to it. Life was one long joke to him.

  “Hey, Martine,” he said again, nodding at her jeans, which were ripped at both knees. “We know you’re an orphan, but do you have to dress the part?”

  Before she could answer, there was a commotion at the table behind him. The enormous breakfast that he and his friends had been about to tuck into, a feast of bacon double cheeseburgers, jelly donuts, chocolate-chip cookies, strawberry milk shakes, and coffee lattes in Styrofoam cups, was now lying on the courtyard lawn, beneath the ketchup-covered newspaper they’d been using as a tablecloth.

  “Who did this?” roared Claudius, as his friends leaped to their feet with cries of distress. Martine couldn’t help giggling, but really she was as startled as he was. There was no wind and nobody near the Five’s table. The closest person to it was Ben Khumalo, the enigmatic half-Indian, half-Zulu boy, but he was at least thirty yards away, studying a bulletin board pinned to the cafeteria door. He had his back to them and his body language was relaxed, as if he’d been there for quite some time. He took a pen from his pocket and wrote something on a sheet on the board.

  Claudius glared at him for several seconds before apparently concluding that Ben was too far away and too much of a wimp to have performed so audacious an act.

  He reached for his cell phone. “Moenie, panic nie, my friends,” he said grandly. “Don’t panic. We’ll order some more.”

  “Everyone on the bus,” boomed Miss Volkner. “We’re leaving in five minutes.”

  “Well, thank you very much,” Claudius said loudly to no one in particular. “Thank you, whoever you are, for ruining my morning.”

  Martine couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw Ben’s shoulders shaking.

  5

  It was Ben whom Martine chose to sit beside on the bus to Cape Town. She gave him a wan smile as she slid onto the seat, but didn’t say anything. Ben never spoke at school, and she respected that. A lot of people thought Ben was mute—although some kids claimed to have once seen him having a perfectly normal conversation with his father—and it made Martine feel good to share a secret with him, to know that whenever they were alone together, Ben talked to her quite freely, and that he spoke much more eloquently than anyone else she knew.

  The teachers didn’t mind that Ben didn’t say anything, because he had impeccable manners and always did his work well and on time. Martine had never asked him why he didn’t communicate with their classmates, because it made perfect sense to her. Their conversations were all hot air. They talked about fashion and pop music and reality TV shows and the superficial, and sometimes just plain embarrassing, lives of the rich and famous. Ben didn’t waste energy on words. He was a nature person like Tendai, happiest when he was outdoors. He was, thought Martine, a bit like a giraffe, mostly silent but no less extraordinary for it.

  With a hiss of air brakes, the bus pulled slowly down the driveway and out of Caracal School’s lynx-decorated gates. Tall pines slipped past the window. With no one to distract her, Martine sank quickly into a depression. Her grandmother’s words went around and around in her head: “When you return, Martine, we’ll have to discuss your future at Sawubona.” What did that mean? Had she made up her mind overnight that she didn’t want the responsibility of an eleven-year-old after all and decided she would just pack Martine off to a children’s home in gray, rainy England? To boarding school? To foster parents?

  And yet who could blame her?

  Martine felt sick to her stomach when she remembered how she’d screamed like a demon child at her grandmother: “I hate you, Gwyn Thomas!” She wished life came with a rewind button. If that was the case, she’d be feeling very differently now. She’d still be upset about not being allowed to see Jemmy, but maybe if she had apologized a bit more sincerely and promised faithfully never to sneak out at night again, her grandmother might have relented. She would have realized that keeping Martine and Jemmy apart for anything more than a week or two was like trying to separate Siamese twins.

  Then, thought Martine, she and Gwyn Thomas would have parted with hugs and smiles and the special feeling they’d had after the dolphin rescue. Her grandmother wouldn’t have been left believing that Martine hated her, when really the opposite was true. Martine loved her. She had just never found the right time to say it.

  Her reverie was interrupted by a commotion at the back of the bus. Most of the kids were out of their seats. They were pointing at something outside and shrieking.

  “What’s going on?” demanded Miss Volkner. “We’ve hardly left the school gates and already you’re up to no good.” She pushed between them. “What on earth . . . ?”

  Martine twisted around and was startled to see Grace rushing after the bus, signaling for it to stop. She seemed to be carrying something. For a woman of her extravagant proportions, she moved with astonishing speed and, well, grace. Her billowing scarlet, orange, and black African traditional dress made her an arresting spectacle.

  Relief flooded through Martine. Grace might have a message from her grandmother. She levered open a side window. “Grace!” she yelled. “Grace!”

  Miss Volkner raised her eyebrows. “Do you know this person?”

  “That’s Grace,” Martine answered with pride. “She’s my friend.”

  “Strange company you keep, Martine,” remarked Lucy van Heerden with a smirk. She tossed her silky blond hair over her shoulder, and cast a disdainful glance at Ben. “But then you always did like really peculiar people.”

  Martine paid no attention to her.

  “Be qui
et, Lucy,” snapped Miss Volkner. “I’m not sure why this friend of yours is pursuing the bus, Martine, but I’m afraid we can’t stop to find out. If you’ve forgotten something,it’s too bad. You’ll just have to manage without it.”

  “Oh, you have to stop, Miss Volkner,” implored Martine. “You just have to.”

  “I don’t have to do anything, Martine. Try to understand that it’s out of my hands. If we’re not there on time, the boat will leave without us. Is that what you want?”

  “I’ll be really quick. Grace wouldn’t have come unless it was an emergency. And she definitely wouldn’t be running. What if something’s happened at Sawubona?”

  Miss Volkner pursed her lips. “In the half hour or so that has elapsed since you left Sawubona, I very much doubt all the animals have escaped . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, never let it be said I’m not fair. You have one minute. I mean it, one minute and that’s it.”

  She called to the driver and the bus stopped so abruptly that Martine was almost catapulted through the windshield. The doors popped open. Martine jumped onto the roadside, dew soaking her socks and sneakers. Grace was waiting for her, still out of breath from her run. Her volcano-bright headscarf was unraveling and her rich brown skin glowed. She looked like a magnificent bird that had been subjected to some undignified ritual. She was holding a small rubbery plant with orange flowers.

  “What’s wrong, Grace?” asked Martine, speaking rapidly in the hope of getting information in the shortest time possible. “Is everything okay? Has something happened at Sawubona? Have you been speaking to my grandmother?”