Dolphin Song

by Lauren St. John

  To begin with, the outcome had been as bad as it could possibly be. The welts on Claudius’s skin had turned a horrendous color in the firelight, and he had writhed and moaned in his unconscious state. Martine was quite sure she’d killed him. But after ten minutes or so the high color faded and the welts had slowly begun to shrink. Over the next couple of hours, the swelling around his neck and face went down and his breathing became more regular. But he had remained unconscious throughout the night.

  Now Martine was alone with him. Lucy and Sherilyn had managed to sleep through Ben and Nathan’s fishing preparations, and Jake, who was restless, had gone to the lighthouse to bring down anything that looked as though it might be useful until they could move Claudius. They were all trying to put on a brave face, but an air of desperation had hung over the group the previous evening. Nobody wanted to say out loud that they had been on the island for coming up to five days and they had not seen so much as a glimmer of a search party, tourist, or fisherman. And with Claudius at death’s door, Martine and Ben had decided that it wasn’t a good time to mention undersea mines and speargun-carrying divers at the wreck.

  Martine wondered what was going to become of them. They were all so certain they were going to be rescued. But what if they weren’t? What if the men on the dhow came ashore first? What if Claudius never came out of his coma?

  It seemed to her that there were a lot of “what ifs” on the island, and none of them were pleasant.

  All at once Claudius’s eyes flew open as if he’d been startled awake. He stared around in bewilderment. “Mum!” he blurted out. “Mum!”

  “Claudius, it’s me, Martine. You’re still on the island.”

  Claudius took in the reed shelter and the white sand and palm trees visible through the entrance and took a ragged breath. In a strange, raspy voice, he mumbled almost to himself, “It looked so pretty in the water. I was swimming and I tried to catch it. It was like touching fire, only I couldn’t get away from it. I was all tangled up in it. I felt as if I was being burned alive. I was screaming at Jake because he was too scared to take it off me, and then I couldn’t feel my legs anymore.”

  “It’s okay,” Martine said, shaken. “It’s okay. You’ve had an allergic reaction to a Portuguese man-o’-war sting, but you’re safe now. You’re going to be all right.”

  She tried a smile, and even that was an odd sensation, because Claudius was not someone she’d ever imagined smiling at. “Would you like some water?”

  He nodded and she held a gourd to his lips and, with some difficulty, supported him as he drank. He lay back down again, facing the wall of the shelter, and was quiet for a long time. Martine thought he’d gone back to sleep and she dozed a little herself. She was awakened by a hoarse “Why?”

  “Why what?” Martine asked sleepily, although she already knew what he meant.

  Claudius rolled over. His cheeks were sunken and his skin tinged with yellow. “Why did you do it? Why did you help me after the things I’ve done to you and Ben?”

  There was no easy answer, so Martine just said, “You were very ill. Anyway, it wasn’t really me who helped you. It was Grace. She’s a traditional healer. She gave me the plant that cured you.”

  “Well, she shouldn’t have!” Claudius burst out, his voice strained and unsteady. “You shouldn’t have. I don’t deserve to be cured. I wish the dolphins had never saved me. I wish I was dead. You saw what I did to Ben on the ship. I’m a coward.”

  Martine had spent a lot of hours thinking much the same thing, but when Claudius said it himself, she saw that Ben was right. He deserved pity, not contempt.

  She shook her head. “We’ve already forgotten about that.”

  It was a lie, but if ever a lie could be justified it was now. “Everybody does silly things when they’re frightened,” she consoled him. “Anyway, you’re not a coward. You were the least scared person on the Sea Kestrel at the start of the storm. I heard you telling Luke you were going stay below deck and watch a movie while everyone else was panicking up above. And you helped your father sail your yacht through a hurricane in the Cayman Islands. That takes real guts.”

  Claudius said brokenly, “It isn’t true about the yacht, you know.”

  “What isn’t true? You mean you don’t really have a yacht?”

  “Ja, we have a yacht. And not just any yacht, we have a yacht that once belonged to one of the richest men in Greece. No, I mean it’s not true about the hurricane, or about my father asking me to take the wheel. My dad doesn’t know one end of a yacht from another, and even if he did, I’m the last person he would trust with it. I did see a hurricane when I was in the Cayman Islands, but it was on the news in our hotel room. Our windows were lashed by wind and rain, and the palm trees were bending double, but we were never in any danger. The eye of the hurricane never came within fifty miles of us. A father and son came on the television and talked about how they’d battled the storm in their little boat, and the father was so proud of his son, I decided to pretend that their story was mine.”

  He looked away. “I spend a lot of time watching TV in hotel rooms when my mum and dad are out at cocktail parties with their rich and famous friends. Those kinds of people don’t like kids around, especially fat ones.”

  Martine pictured her own life at Sawubona—the campfire breakfasts with Tendai where he would talk to her about bushcraft and Zulu legends; the newly-cut-grass scent of Jemmy and the feel of his whiskers when he nuzzled her; the homey evenings with her grandmother when they’d celebrate the successful rehabilitation of a sanctuary orphan with a special African dinner. She realized then how fortunate she was. Yes, she’d lost her parents, but they’d given her more love than many people had from families who were with them for a lifetime. And her grandmother constantly showed Martine that she cared with actions, even if she couldn’t always do it with words.

  “Is that why . . . why you’re not very nice to us?” she asked Claudius. “Because you’re unhappy?”

  “Is that why I bully you, you mean? You can say it. No, I give you a hard time because you’re the opposite of me; because I envy you. Because your life seems so simple. Because even though Ben doesn’t speak, it’s obvious that you’re there for each other.”

  Martine was stunned. “Look,” she said, “my life might seem perfect to you, but you wouldn’t believe how many people I’ve managed to upset or disappoint over the past few weeks. I’ve even hurt Ben—the nicest person I’ve ever met. But, earlier this year, when the white giraffe was stolen because of something dumb I did, somebody told me it’s never too late to fix things.”

  Claudius gave a tired laugh. “I’m not sure about that. Anyway, now that you know the truth about me, you can take your revenge. Go on. Tell everyone what a loser I am.”

  Nathan’s dark head came around the door of the shelter. He thrust forward a bamboo pole with five fat fish speared on it. “Ta-dah!” he trumpeted. His eyes widened when he saw that Claudius was conscious. “Is everything okay in here? We heard voices.”

  “Everything’s fantastic,” Martine assured him. “Claudius has just woken up. He was wondering if anyone has had a chance to go to McDonald’s yet. If not, he says some coconut milk and a fish barbecue breakfast would be perfect.”

  20

  The revival of Claudius changed everything. There was no longer any separation between the seven of them, and nobody suggested that there should be. It was agreed that they would all sleep on the beach until Claudius was well enough to climb the steep dunes, and then they would all stay together in the lighthouse.

  Martine had spent a good proportion of her school days in solitude, and had never been involved in any team sports (vacancies on basketball and hockey teams at school had an uncanny way of being conveniently full when she applied to join them), so it was a novel experience for her to be part of a group, especially since she was a very appreciated part because of what she’d done for Claudius.

  “It’s not me you have to thank; it’s Gr
ace,” Martine kept saying to everyone. “She gave me the plant.”

  “Yes,” said Sherilyn, “but you guessed what the leaves were for. You kept them alive. I mean, when you put them in that bottle in our cabin, I thought you were a fruit-cake.”

  One of the first things Martine discovered about being in a group was that, while at school you could fool yourself into thinking you knew people really well because you saw them every day, you never actually knew them until you had to live with them.

  Take Sherilyn. Martine had always thought of Sherilyn as being nice but a bit dim, and had taken it for granted that she came from a perfect family living behind electric gates in a suburb packed with other perfect families. Yet she couldn’t have been more wrong. It turned out that Sherilyn’s actress mum had walked out of the house when Sherilyn was one and her brother and sister were two and three, and hadn’t been seen since. For the past seven years, Sherilyn had been living with her dad, siblings, and Thai stepmother in one of Storm Crossing’s most bohemian neighborhoods.

  As a consequence of her stepmother’s influence, she had become quite a good cook. Nobody had found that out until now because Sherilyn had spent a lot of her time on the island homesick, weeping, and trying to escape from crabs and insects. Also, for the most part, there hadn’t been any food for her to cook or any fire for her to cook with. Now she had both. Claudius’s near-death experience had made her pull herself together and she was determined to contribute. There was limited fare on the island, but Sherilyn worked wonders with what there was. It was she who recognized the grizzled old tubers in a cupboard in the lighthouse as cassava, a root vegetable. Jake improvised a pot for her using bulb protectors from the lighthouse. She boiled the cassava and mashed it and served it up on banana leaves, accompanied by fish cooked in coconut milk and flavored with wild chilies, herbs, and green lemons. They ate it with their hands, and somehow that made it extra tasty.

  The fish were provided by Nathan and Ben, their chief fishers. There wasn’t too much to discover about Nathan, who was sweet but dull and would probably grow up to be an accountant, but he was very likeable and a good person to have around. He was never going to be a nature-lover, but he did enjoy fishing, and once, when he and Ben had come across a bees’ nest in the hollow of an old tree, he’d unexpectedly revealed that his uncle was a beekeeper. Before anyone could stop him he was smoking the bees out of their hole. He earned a great, dripping wedge of honeycomb and two stings for his trouble.

  Lucy, meanwhile, had recovered her airs and graces— something Martine found oddly comforting. She spent a lot of time lying in the sun complaining about the stains and rips in her white tracksuit, and being nostalgic about Luke. She was nice (well, nice-ish) to Martine, but not exactly industrious. Most of her energy seemed to have been expended on the night Claudius fell ill.

  “I’m so bored,” she told anyone who would listen. “I miss TV, I miss music, I miss my room. I miss Luke and my mum and dad and my bed and soap and toothpaste and shampoo and coffee and chocolate. Boy, do I miss chocolate. But mostly I’m just bored. Bored, bored, bored.”

  Jake had set himself the task of maintaining the giant SOS (large enough to be seen by passing aircraft) on Runway Beach. He did everything that was asked of him, effortlessly gathering great piles of wood, but he kept himself to himself. To varying degrees, they all went through parts of every day where they hated their island prison, lovely as it was, but Jake agonized most over the rugby training he was missing. He made a crude rugby ball out of coconut husk and string, and whiled away the hours kicking it over palm trees and doing push-ups so that he’d be match-fit when he eventually returned to Storm Crossing.

  Not surprisingly, Ben was the subject of much interest. Jake had not yet forgiven him for “deceiving everyone,” as he saw it, by making them think he was mute, and Lucy, who had always ridiculed him as a tree-hugging nutcase, now had to live with the remembrance of how she had treated him. But everyone was fascinated to hear his story. Not that he gave them much information. When Sherilyn asked him the question they all wanted the answer to, namely, why had he never spoken at school, Ben replied simply, “I didn’t have anything to say.”

  But after years of being an outcast, he, like Martine, couldn’t help but enjoy being included or asked for his opinion or help, which he frequently was. Of everyone, Ben had adapted best to island life. It was as if he was born to it. It made Martine proud to see the envious faces of kids who had always bullied or belittled him, when they saw him swim, fish, or build beds or shelters.

  “Where did you learn all that?” Sherilyn wanted to know.

  “All what?” Ben said, and then pretended he had an urgent appointment with Nathan on the other side of the island.

  Over the next three evenings, the seven of them came together around a fire on the seashore, and everyone except Claudius talked about the things they had in common—the dolphins, or their feelings on the night of the storm, or how desperately they missed their families, or how terrified they were of never being found, or whether or not they would do things differently when they left the island. Topics like pop music and the bizarre behavior of celebrities, favorites at school, seemed trivial after what they’d been through.

  Claudius was still too weak and listless to participate. If someone addressed him, he would nod, or shake his head, or give a one-sentence answer, but most of the time he just stared into the flames.

  “I never thought I’d say this,” Ben commented privately to Martine, “but I miss the old Claudius. The spirit of him, anyway.”

  Only Martine knew the root cause of Claudius’s blues. When they were alone together on the second day of his recovery, he’d mumbled something about hating himself for letting everyone down.

  “I told everybody that my father would have us out of here in forty-eight hours,” he said. “I told you all it was hard to get lost these days. I got my friends’ hopes up. Now we could be stranded here for months.”

  “Nobody blames you for that,” she assured him. “Tendai always says it’s important to be positive in a survival situation. Anyway, it was you getting sick that brought us all together. Don’t worry. We’ll be rescued soon.”

  Inside she didn’t feel nearly as confident as she sounded. She couldn’t stop thinking about something Ben had said earlier. “Martine, I have a really bad feeling about this island. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only boat we’ve seen in nearly a week is one that came to investigate an explosion. There is a reason people are staying away. There’s something wrong with this place.”

  It was Jake who came to tell them that the dolphins were behaving strangely.

  “I was practicing sprints at Dolphin Bay and they came right up to the shore. I thought it was cool that they were watching me, but then they started milling around and acting all confused. You’d better come see what’s going on.”

  It was late afternoon. Everyone but Claudius, who was still too weak to leave his bamboo cot for more than a few hours at a time, ran the length of Runway Beach. They rounded the peninsula and were confronted with the most heartbreaking sight. Twenty-one dolphins were splayed across the white sand in golden sunlight. Something had driven them to flee the sea. The tide was going out and they were stranded, waiting to die.

  Martine couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It was the image in the cave painting, right down to the number of dolphins. The second prophecy had just come true.

  But it was worse. These were the dolphins who had saved them from the ocean’s wrath. They had become friends. They had names. Sun Dancer, Rain Queen, Patch, Honey, Thunder, Ash, Steel and Mini and, most distressingly, Little Storm—they were all there.

  Everyone turned to Martine for answers. “What do we do? How do we save them?” they clamored.

  Martine didn’t know how to respond. Even supposing they were able to keep twenty-one dolphins from dying of shock and overheating, which she doubted, there was no earthly way that they were strong enough to carry an
y dolphin apart perhaps from Little Storm to the water’s edge. Notwith the tide going out. The seawas retreating so quickly that it was already more than twenty feet from the nearest dolphin. Soon it would be a quarter of a mile away.

  She wanted to shout back, “Why are you asking me? I’m not a doctor or a vet. I’m an eleven-year-old kid. Yes, I have a gift, but I don’t know what it does, or what it’s for, or how to use it properly!”

  But that wouldn’t help the dolphins. Plus, she was not about to admit to having a gift. So she just said, “There’s only one thing we can do and that’s try to keep them wet and cool until the tide turns and we can push them back out to sea.”

  “How long will that take?” Lucy asked. “I mean, are we talking one hour? Two hours?”

  “Twelve hours,” Ben told her.

  Sherilyn gulped. “Twelve hours? We have to keep them wet and cool for twelve hours?”

  “Well, we just can’t,” Lucy declared flatly. “Simple as that. We’ll be dead as well.”

  “We can try,” Nathan said, but without much conviction.

  Martine glanced at Ben. Precious minutes were being wasted while they argued.

  “These dolphins saved our lives,” Ben reminded them.

  “Ja,” agreed Jake, “and if it was a matter of keeping them wet for an hour or two, I’d be the first to do it. But get real, guys. You’re asking us to keep twenty-one dolphins wet for a whole day.”

  “Exactly!”

  They all jumped. Unnoticed, Claudius had come up behind them. He was swaying slightly and his skin was still more yellow than gold, but there was something of his old charisma in the set of his shoulders. “That’s what you do when someone or something saves your life,” he told Jake. “You save theirs right back. Come on everyone, you heard Martine. We need to keep the dolphins wet.”