The Girl Who Dreamt of Dolphins

by James Carmody

  Spirit swum on, wondering about Shimmer and what had become of her. He thought of his pod, of Dancer, Storm and the others and what they might be doing or saying now. He thought about Lucy and the strange and inexplicable way that she had of coming to him. Would he end up like Shimmer’s sister, neglecting his pod and losing his own life as a result? He thought not. He wondered what the next week might hold in store for him and how he would feel when once again he returned to his pod. Would they be angry or happy to see him once again?

  Spirit sensed a change in the current, in its smell and temperature and adjusted his course slightly as he headed onwards towards the mainland which he knew to be far off in the distance. He felt as though he had been swimming for ever. He was becoming tired and knew that he needed to eat again soon.

  With Shimmer’s disappearance, Spirit started to feel lonely again and a distant, hollow ache of emptiness came upon him, reminding him of the time just after his mother had disappeared. It had been a horrible feeling, as though his world had been torn in two. Of course it wasn’t so bad now, ‘I’m on an adventure!’ he told himself resolutely. But still, he wished that Dancer was with him right now to share his adventure, or Lucy, or Summer or even Storm.

  Spirit remembered what his mother had told him when he was still just a young calf. He would swim close to her in the water, just by her left flank, where he felt safe and protected. When they stopped he would rest his side against hers to drop off to sleep.

  ‘Remember’, she would say to him, ‘that we are all connected. All life in the ocean. Not only you and me and the other dolphins in our pod, but we are connected, each and every one of us, to all living things that dwell here. You may think that krill and plankton are too small and inconspicuous to notice, but without them, we could not survive. They are the stuff of life and are eaten by the small fry and the great whales alike. Octopus, hermit crabs, shell fish, dolphins and whales. We all rely on each other, even when it is not obvious how.’

  ‘Even sharks?’ the young Spirit had asked his mother.

  ‘Yes, sharks too’ his mother had assured him. ‘Even though sometimes they may attack us, they have a place in the oceans too and we would be poorer without them.’

  ‘And humans?’ Spirit had heard of humans, but had never seen them at that point. He knew that they were creatures of the land, but that sometimes they swum in the sea too. His mother paused and turned to look at him, smiling gently.

  ‘Humans are the most dangerous creatures of all, because they are not of the sea and they do not understand how to behave here. But yes, even they are connected to us, more than you might think. Come now, let’s catch up with the others’ she had said and they swam off to join the rest of the pod. Spirit wondered now whether she had known it was possible to have links with humans as he now had with Lucy, but he would never know. She was gone and lost to him forever. Whatever she might have been able to teach him, he could only guess at.

  Slowly Spirit became aware of sounds in the distance. There was a high, metallic, clanging noise, quite alien to the types of sounds he normally heard in the sea and which caused a jarring, discordant feeling in his head. Even though the strange sounds were far off, he didn’t like them at all. They gave him a sharp headache with a dull throbbing behind his eyes as if he’d swum headlong into a submerged rock. He’d have swum away from the noise if he could, but he couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from.

  Spirit was determined to persevere though and before long he put his head up above the waves and was rewarded with the view of cliffs in the distance. Soon he would be in waters where he would be safe from all predators and it would be great to explore along the coast. When he returned to the pod he’d be able to regale them with his adventures. He’d know as much as Storm and Summer and all of the rest of them he thought. He’d be an equal to them all at last. With these thoughts, he swam on with a firmer stroke of his tail, in the knowledge that soon he’d be able to rest and then feed. Even though the distant metallic noise was still causing him a headache, he felt happy and eager to have almost arrived.

  Two miles away, at the edge of a small sandy beach snuck away between the granite stone cliffs, a man stood on a wooden landing stage talking into his mobile phone. The man, in his early thirties, wore black sunglasses, although it was hardly sunny enough to justify them and his hair was slicked back with hair cream. He wore brightly coloured Bermuda shorts and his tee shirt was obscured by the life jacket that was half zipped up. He idly tapped the toe of his flip-flop against the wooden decking as he talked away into his mobile phone.

  ‘Yeah darling’ he was saying ‘I’ll come over in the convertible once I’m done here. We’ll burn some rubber and scare some yokels on the way.’ He grinned at what the woman on the other end of the phone was saying and extricated some chewing gum from his mouth which he stuck to the wooden pole on which he was leaning.

  ‘See ya doll’ he said before ending the call and slipping the mobile phone into his pocket. He looked around expectantly and saw the young guy getting his jet ski ready.

  ‘You ready with that thing yet mate?’ he called. ‘I haven’t got all day!’

  ‘Almost done’ the young man called back. ‘Bloomin grockles’ he muttered under his breath to himself. These city-types could be so brash and ignorant and this one in particular was really getting on Dan’s nerves. The man was so impatient and had more money than sense. Dan had already told him carefully how to ride the Jet Ski, but he was sure the guy was not going to take any notice at all.

  ‘Ok, she’s ready to go’ said Dan.

  ‘About time too. Let’s rev her up and get on out there.’

  ‘Now remember what I said….’

  ‘Yeah, yeah yeah’ said the man, kicking off his flip-flops and getting down into the shallow water where the jet ski was waiting. ‘I’ve taken some pretty powerful motorbikes through their paces and I’ve driven cars that’d make you say sweet mother. This thing’s not going to be any problem for me.’ He started the engine and the jet ski spat out water from the back. He revved it up and the Jet Ski jerked forward before the engine cut out again.

  ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll soon have this baby going.’ This time the engine roared into life and the jet ski pulled off into open water. He gave Dan a dismissive wave.

  ‘Slowly at first’ called Dan, ‘and stay where I can keep an eye on you from here!’ He might as well have been talking to himself. The guy probably hadn’t heard a word he’d said. He watched as the man put the machine through its paces. Though Dan hated to say it, the guy seemed to get the hang of it pretty quickly. The Jet Ski scudded over the low waves and turned easily enough, left and right without getting into trouble. Most beginners would have come a-cropper by now thought Dan. ‘The jammy so and so!’ It wasn’t a warm day and no one was swimming in the sea nearby. ‘Just as well’ Dan said to himself.

  Suddenly with a roar, the man on the Jet Ski put on an extra spurt of speed and shot off in the direction of the open sea to the right of the looming cliff face.

  ‘Hey come back!’ shouted Dan, vainly waving his arms to attract the man’s attention. The man didn’t look back though and soon he’d disappeared out of site round a screen of rock at the edge of the sandy cove.

  ‘Right’ thought Dan angrily, ‘I’m charging you double, no triple, for that!’ He glanced towards his walkie-talkie back in the hut. If he couldn’t see what the guy was doing, he didn’t know if he was safe. ‘If that fool’s not back in ten minutes’ he said to himself, ‘I’m going to have to alert the coastguard. There’s no knowing what trouble that grockle is going to get himself into.’

  Spirit’s headache was getting progressively worse now. The metallic noise seemed to be all around him in the sea and nowhere at the same time. His head pulsed and the blinding pain behind his eyes made him feel woozy and sick.

  ‘You’re ok, it’ll pass’ Spirit tried to reassure himself. Spirit knew that his normally reliable sense of direction wasn’t
holding up, so he decided to stop and ride the waves a while to rest and to try to get his bearings. He glanced up as he took a lung full of air through his blow-hole. The cliffs were quite close to him now, in fact much closer than he had thought. He’d never seen anything so high and imposing. The rocks he and Dancer had explored under the waves seemed much more alive than the grey, sheer rock-face he could see above the water. Seagulls wheeled above him and he could hear the gulls call to each other. That metallic noise was so bad now that he could hardly see. There was a real danger that he might either ground himself or find himself smashed on to the rocks by the swell and currents of the sea. ‘Pull yourself together’ thought Spirit. ‘Is the coast such a safe place after all?’ he thought to himself.

  Suddenly there was a great clanging roar and this metal thing almost raced over his head. The rush of metal and noise so close to him all of a sudden shocked him and Spirit felt more disorientated than ever. The pain in his head now was so severe that he did not dare dive. He could sense the nauseating smell of petrol and smoke that the Jet Ski left in its wake as it had passed almost over the top of his head.

  The man whooped to himself. This was fun! He was getting the hang of it now as the Jet Ski scudded from wave to wave. He liked the feeling of power the machine gave him as he revved its engine. He’d quickly given that yokel, Dan, the slip and now he was free to do whatever he wanted. ‘This is the life’ he thought. This’d be something to tell the lads back home about! As he powered on the man suddenly realised that he’d almost ridden over the head of a dolphin.

  ‘Hey, dolphin!’ cried the man to himself. ‘Let’s take another look at you!’ He turned the Jet Ski in a tight circle and roared back in the direction of Spirit again. Spirit, disorientated, in pain and barely able to see, turned and started swimming away, hardly able to tell which way he was headed, but not daring to fully submerge himself for fear of drowning, he felt so bad.

  ‘Yo dolphin!’ the man shouted over the roar of engine and the sound of the waves. ‘You want to race? I’ll give you a race!’ The man turned his jet ski in the water and bore down on Spirit again, throttle out, knuckles white as he gripped the handles of his machine. Spirit fled in front of him, dazed and confused and the man practically ran him down, with Spirit diving under water just as the Jet Ski passed over where his head had been a moment before. Spirit swam on underwater, even though he didn’t want to, he knew that it was the only way to escape the man and machine above.

  ‘Help me Lucy, help me!’ Spirit implored, but he had no sense that Lucy was able to hear him or realise the danger he was in, or that she would come to his rescue at all. He still felt so sick in his head and, at that moment, could see no way out. The day which had started so promisingly, he feared, might well turn out to be his last.

  Several hours after she’d sat down next to the older lady on the Truro train and after everything that had happened that day, Lucy felt physically and mentally exhausted. She slumped where she sat, resting her head in her arms, looking absently at the table beneath her elbows. Lucy was about ready to drop. Her eyelids flickered. ‘I’ll just close my eyes and rest them for a few seconds’ she thought. As soon as she did so though, sleep engulfed her. But it was not a peaceful dream. No sooner had her eyes closed, than Spirit was there in front of her, swimming for his life, while a terrible metallic engine noise droned above him, its dark shadow passing across the surface of the water. What Lucy saw so shocked her, that she jerked into consciousness, immediately finding herself back in the room, with her elbows on the table, alarmingly awake.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she thought to herself, ‘What’s happening to Spirit?’ What was certain was that Spirit was in trouble, serious trouble and if she didn’t do something right now, he might be badly hurt, or worse. Lucy couldn’t will herself back to sleep, not after the shock she’d just had and instead she had to try to find the way back there by focusing the conscious part of her mind and find that secret portal into the world of water. The trouble was though, that the only times she had done so before was in the comfort of her own bedroom at home, sitting in a position that she knew worked, while she looked out of the window and then sort of let her mind go out of focus, so she could become aware of that alternate reality just hidden out of the view of her normal conscious mind. There was no chance of doing so here though and her brain was so agitated that she didn’t know if she could slip into that relaxed state that she needed to attain.

  ‘You’ve got to, you’ve got to’ she told herself determinedly. She took her head in her hands again and focused instead on the table in front of her, studying every detail of the wood, before then letting her mind drift backwards. It wouldn’t work and so she started again, trying to maintain that delicate balance between focus and relaxation. Without quite knowing how, she suddenly found it again and felt herself plunging into the cold salty waters, floating effortlessly along to where Spirit was swimming desperately away from the menacing machine above him.

  ‘Spirit, what’s going on?’ she called to her friend. Spirit turned and smiled at her, relief breaking over his face. Lucy could tell though that he felt terrible. The engine noise above was bad enough for her, but it was much, much worse for him.

  ‘Lucy, help me, that machine…’ He trailed off, barely able to speak. Lucy glanced up. She could see the outline of the Jet Ski circling in the water above them and heard the noise of the revving engine.

  ‘It’s no good’ mumbled Spirit, barely coherent, I’ve got to breath again.’ He swam up to the surface and took another lungful of sweet air through his blowhole, but no sooner did he do so, than the Jet Ski was bearing down on him again, engine roaring.

  ‘Come on you stupid dolphin’ the man yelled into the air. ‘Show yourself, come to Daddy!’ ‘This is great sport’ the man thought to himself as he churned round in tight circles, before rushing at the sickening dolphin again. ‘The lads back home won’t believe what I’m getting an eyeful of.’

  Spirit dived back under water for safety, but Lucy knew instinctively that he couldn’t last much longer. If he was by a beach he’d have beached himself by now she thought, just to escape that terrible noise. At this rate he’ll dash himself against the rocks. The water was getting shallower here and the rocks weren’t far below. He tried to run and hide, but Lucy knew he was in no state to out-swim that terrible machine and he would soon need to surface for air again. She went up close to him again and got as near as she could to his ear.

  ‘Spirit, listen to me. You can’t outrun that thing, you can’t escape it, so you’ve got to confront it. You’ve got to fight back!’

  ‘What, how?’ Spirit answered, hardly able to concentrate on what she was trying to tell him. ‘I can’t, I’ve got to get away from it…’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to say’ replied Lucy. ‘To escape it, you’ve got to confront it. You’ve got to take a great big running jump at it!’ They both looked up at the outline of the Jet Ski in the water above them. ‘Look, it’s just about to turn’ Lucy continued. They could hear revving above them, just before the man let the throttle out for another surge of speed. ‘When it comes at you next, you have to swim at it as hard as you can and when you’re close, you must jump clean out of the water, as high as you can, right towards it.’

  ‘You think so?’ asked Spirit.

  ‘I know so’ replied Lucy with certainty. ‘He’s a coward, I’m sure of it, just like some bullies in the playground I know!’

  As the Jet Ski finished turning and began its next run, Spirit summoned up all his remaining energy. He surged forward, going headlong straight at the approaching machine. ‘Like two knights jousting’ thought Lucy to herself. He burst from the water, in a great jump, as high as he could, aiming straight at the man and machine.

  ‘What the blue blazes?!’ yelled the man as the dolphin broke through the water towards him. He had barely a moment to think and tried turning the Jet Ski as sharply as he could to avoid being struck by the dolphin flying thr
ough the air towards him. Instead he sent the machine crashing into the water and flung himself off it forcefully. The dolphin sailed elegantly over his head and sliced back into the water again. This time it was the man’s turn to feel dazed and confused as he tumbled over in the waves, the water boiling up into his eyes, mouth and ears, not knowing which way was up and which way was down.

  The engine of the Jet Ski cut out and instantly Spirit felt the terrible pain in his head subside.

  ‘You’ve done it, you’ve done it!’ cried Lucy delightedly by his side. ‘You beat him.’

  ‘We beat him’ replied Spirit with relief, ‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’

  ‘Swim away with me’ said Lucy urging him to swim away from the rocks. They swam clear and then surfacing, they turned to glance back at the man and his machine.

  ‘Do you think he’s okay?’ asked Spirit, worried now for the man that only a minute before had brought him near to death. They could see his yellow life jacket. He’d swum back to Jet Ski, floating listlessly on its side in the water. He was trying to turn the throttle, but there was no way he could get it started again. Lucy glanced away. In the distance she could see the yellow shape of the local lifeboat making its way towards them.

  ‘He’ll be ok’ she assured her friend. ‘Help is on it’s way. Let’s go!’ Spirit swam away, with Lucy gliding along by his side, but after the initial burst of adrenalin and excitement, Lucy could feel an enormous weight of tiredness pulling her back inexorably to the chair and the table where her physical self was sitting, in the dry world above.

  ‘I’ve got to go’ Lucy said to her friend. I can’t hang on any longer, it’s just too tiring. Take care of yourself!’ she called, as she began to fade away. Spirit turned.