Granta 133

by Неизвестный

  He tried to sound like his father, like any father: ‘Hello, George, how are you? How was your flight? Well that’s grand. What’s your life like these days?’

  Pattern stared at him.

  ‘Honestly,’ said George. ‘I can’t stand making small talk with people who have seen me naked. Or who fed me. Or spanked me. I mean once you spank someone, you owe them a nickname. Was that just me or were Mom and Dad like completely opposed to nicknames? Or even just Honey or Sweetie or any of that.’

  ‘Jesus, George, what do you want from people? You have some kind of intimacy fantasy. Do you think other people go around hugging each other and holding hands, mainlining secrets and confessions into each other’s veins?’

  ‘I have accepted the fact of strangers,’ said George. ‘After some struggle. But it’s harder when they are in your own family.’

  ‘Violin music for you,’ said Pattern, and she snapped her fingers.

  He looked up, perked his ears, expecting to hear music.

  ‘Wow,’ she marveled. ‘You think I’m very powerful, don’t you?’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know. I have no idea. Are you in trouble? Everything I read is so scary.’

  ‘I am in a little bit of trouble, yes. But don’t worry. It’s nothing. And you. You seem so sad to me,’ Pattern said. ‘Such a sad, sad young man.’ She stroked his face, and it felt ridiculously, treacherously comforting.

  George waved this off, insisted that he wasn’t. He just wanted to know about her. He really did. Who knows where she’d vanish to after this, and he genuinely wanted to know what her life was like, where she lived. Was she married? Had she gotten married in secret or something?

  ‘I don’t get to act interested and really mean it,’ George explained. ‘I mean ever, so please tell me who you are. It’s kind of a selfish question, because I can’t figure some things out about myself, so maybe if I hear about you, something will click.’

  ‘Me? I tend to date the house-husband type. Self-effacing, generous, asexual. Which is something I’m really attracted to, I should say. Men with Low T, who go to bed in a full rack of pajamas. That’s my thing. I don’t go for the super-carnal hetero men; they seem like zoo animals. Those guys who know what they want, and have weird and highly developed skills as lovers, invariably have the worst possible taste – we’re supposed to congratulate them for knowing that they like to lick butter right off the stick. What a nightmare, to be subject to someone else’s expertise. The guys I tend to date, at first, are out to prove that they endorse equality, that my career matters, that my interests are primary – they make really extravagant displays of selflessness, burying all of their own needs. I go along with it, and over time I watch them deflate and lose all reason to live, by which point I have steadily lost all of my attraction for them. I imagine something like that is mirrored in the animal kingdom, but honestly that’s not my specialty. I should have an airgun in my home so I could put these guys out of their misery. Or a time-lapse video documenting the slow and steady loss of self-respect they go through. It’s a turn-off, but, you know, it’s my turn-off. Part of what initially arouses me is the feeling that I am about to mate with someone who will soon be ineffectual and powerless. I’ve come to rely on the arc. It’s part of my process.’

  ‘You think these guys don’t mean it that they believe in equality?’

  ‘No, I think they do, and that it has a kind of cost. They just distort themselves so much trying to do the right thing that there’s nothing left.’

  ‘And you enjoy that?’

  ‘Well, they enjoy that. They’re driven to it. I’m just a bystander to their quest. And I enjoy that. It’s old school, but I like to watch.’

  ‘So you are basically fun times to date.’

  ‘I pull my weight, romantically. I’m not stingy. I supply locations. I supply funding. Transportation. I’m kind of an executive producer. I can green-light stuff.’

  ‘Nobody cums unless you say so, right?’

  ‘That’s not real power,’ she said, as if such a thing was actually under her control. She frowned. ‘That’s bookkeeping. Not my thing at all. Anyway, I think the romantic phase of my life is probably over now. My options won’t be the same. Freedom.’

  ‘Jail time?’ asked George.

  ‘It’s not exactly jail for someone like me. But it’s fine if you imagine it that way. That would be nice.’

  George hated to do it. They were having such a good time, and she must get this a lot, but he was her last living blood relative and didn’t he merit some consideration over all the hangers-on who no doubt lived pretty well by buzzing around in her orbit?

  ‘All right, so, I mean, you’re rich, right? Like insanely so?’

  Pattern nodded carefully.

  ‘You could, like, buy anything?’

  ‘My money is tied up in money,’ Pattern said. ‘It’s hard to explain. You get to a point where a big sadness and fatigue takes over.’

  ‘Not me,’ said George. ‘I don’t. Anyway, I mean, it wouldn’t even make a dent for you to, you know, solve my life financially. Just fucking solve it. Right?’

  Pattern smiled at him, a little too gently, he thought. It seemed like a bad-news smile.

  ‘You know the studies, right?’

  Dear God Jesus. ‘What studies?’

  ‘About what happens when people are given a lot of money. People like you, with the brain and appetites of an eleven-year-old.’

  ‘Tell me.’ He’d let the rest of the comment go.

  ‘It’s not good.’

  ‘Well I don’t fucking want it to be good. I want it to be fun.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s very fun, either, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Don’t be afraid, Pattern. Leave that to me. I will be very afraid, I will be afraid for two, and never have to worry about money again. Depraved, sordid, painful. I’ll go for those. Let me worry about how it will feel.’

  Pattern laughed into her drink.

  ‘Sweet, sweet Georgie,’ she said.

  It was getting late, and the whispering interruptions had increased, Pattern’s harried staff scurrying around them, no doubt plotting the extraction. An older gentleman in a tuxedo came out to their couch and held up a piece of paper for Pattern, at eye level, which, to George, sitting right next to her, looked perfectly blank.

  Pattern studied it, squinting, and sighed. She shifted in her seat.

  ‘Armageddon,’ said George. ‘Time to wash my drones with my drone towel!’

  Pattern didn’t smile.

  ‘I hate to say it, little George, but I think I’m going to have to break this up.’

  He didn’t like this world, standing up, having to leave. Everything had seemed fine back on the couch.

  ‘Here,’ Pattern said, giving him a card. ‘Send your bills to William.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your joke. That you obviously don’t even know you just made.’

  She was checking her phone, not listening.

  On the street they hugged for a little while and tried to say goodbye. A blue light glowed from the back seat of Pattern’s car. George had no idea who she was, what she really did, or when he would ever see her again.

  ‘Do you think I can be in your life,’ George asked. ‘I’m not sure why but it feels scary to ask you that.’

  He tried to laugh.

  ‘Oh, you are, George,’ said Pattern. ‘Here you are. In my life right now. Closer to me than anyone else on the planet.’

  ‘You know what I mean. How can I reach you?’ He didn’t particularly want to say goodbye to her.

  ‘I always know where you are, Georgie. I do. Trust me.’

  ‘But I don’t know that. I don’t really feel that. It doesn’t feel like you’re even out there. When you’re not here it’s like you never were here at all.’

  ‘No, no,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t believe that. That’s not true.’

  ‘Is something going to happen to you
? I don’t know what to believe.’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Something already has. Something has happened to all of us, right?’

  ‘Please don’t make a joke or be clever, Elizabeth. I can’t stand it. There’s nobody left but you. What if I don’t see you again? What will I do?’

  ‘Oh Georgie, I am right here. I am right here with you now.’

  George kept quiet about his sister in therapy. He talked about everything else. But sometimes he’d catch Dr Graco studying him, and he’d think that perhaps she knew. She didn’t need to be told. She might not grasp the specific details, the bare facts – who and when and what and all those things that did not matter – but it seemed to George that she could see, or was starting to, that someone out there was seeing him, watching him. That someone really knew him and that, whatever else you could say about him, it was clear that he was no longer really alone.

  At home George listened, and hoped, and waited, but his phone never made the strange tone again. He found nothing on his sister in the news, though he looked. Whoever had been calling for her blood had gone quiet. And George couldn’t decide if their silence meant that they’d lost interest, or that they had her, they got her, and Pattern was gone.

  One night it was late and he’d let his uncertainty overpower him. It had been a year since he’d seen her. Where was she? How could she just disappear? He’d been saving up his idea for a moment just like this one, so he sat down at his desk and wrote his sister an email.

  Elizabeth—

  Is it just me now, or are you still out there? Don’t write back. I cannot imagine how busy you must be! There is a lot that I cannot imagine. But that’s OK, right? You’re out there looking, I know. I am waving at you, wherever you are. I am down here saying hello. I love you very much.

  Your brother,

  George

  WHALE FALL

  Rebecca Giggs

  A few years ago I helped push a beached humpback whale back out into the sea, only to witness it return and expire under its own weight on the sand. For the three days that it died the whale was a public attraction. People brought their children down to see it. They would stand in the surf and wave babies in pastel rompers over the whale, as if to catch the drift of an evaporating myth. The whale was black like piano wood and because it was still young, it was pink in the joints under its fins. Every few minutes it exhaled loudly and slammed its fluke against the sand – a tantrum or leverage. Its soft chest turned slack, concertinaed, when it rolled.

  At first the mood was festive. People cheered every time the whale wrestled in the breakers. Efforts made to free it from a sandbar in the morning had been aided by the tide. That the whale had re-stranded, this time higher up the beach, did not portend well for its survival but so astonished were the crowd and such a marvel was the animal that immoderate hope proved difficult to quash. What the whale inspired was wonderment, a dilation of the ordinary. Everyone was talking about it, on the buses and in the delis. There were dogs on the beach held back by their owners, sweeping flat quarter-circles in the sand with their tails. How they imagined the whale – predator, prey or distant relation – was anyone’s guess, but the dogs seemed keen to get a closer look. At sunset armfuls of grease-blotted butchers’ paper, chips and battered hake were passed around. The local lifesavers distributed zip-up hoodies. Wildlife officers, who had been standoffish with the gathering crowd, relaxed and taught some lessons on whale physiology.

  ‘Whales are mammals,’ they began, ‘as we are too.’ This surprised those who were accustomed to thinking of all marine animals as species of fish. They raised their eyebrows and nodded along. Cetacean – from the ancient Greek kētos, made Latinate as cetus: an order of mammals that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. ‘Under its skin the whale is wrapped in a subcutaneous envelope of fat called blubber.’ Trying to imagine the properties of blubber I could only conjure those agar desserts sold in Asian supermarkets: opaque, calorie-rich and more rigid than their wobble suggests. While in the ocean its blubber fat insulates the whale and allows the animal to maintain a constant inner temperature. Out of the ocean, the blubber smothers it.

  ‘That whale has the opposite problem to hypothermia,’ the wildlife officers explained. Though we were now shivering, the whale – only metres away – was boiling alive in the kettle of itself.

  A group of us slept lightly in the dunes, arrayed like question marks and commas on the white sand. Our minds cast to the cetacean huffing beyond the swale, then swooped into softer visions. I woke to the sounds of surfers arriving in the dark. Were those sharks raiding a lux channel tipped up by the moon? Hard to tell. We resolved that the whale had been washed too high on the beach for any shark to reach it. Every detail, peculiar and particular, rinsed by pewter light. Ridges in the sand. Plants like handfuls of knives. It felt cold to us.

  In the morning a part of the whale that ought not to be outside of it was outside of it. A digestive organ, frilled and pale in the foam. The whale’s billiard-ball eyes tumbled in its head and its breathing sounded laboured. The sharks slid into vapour, a squinting rumour. No blood on the tideline. People stayed back from the water nonetheless. Swept slantwise, shallow waves smoothed, over-smoothed, smoothed. I palmed an ordinary shell which still sits on my window ledge. A cordon was set up. Seagulls flew down to peck avian hieroglyphs in the whale’s back. At every nip it flinched, still intensely alive and tormented.

  Walking off some agitation I’d accrued watching the birds, I found one of the wildlife officers crouched a way down the beach. A blocky guy wearing wrap-around sunglasses, his jaw was set tight. The whale’s central nervous system was so large and complex, he explained, that euthanising it in the manner that one might kill a cow or an old horse was impossible. A bolt through the brain would take too long for the heart to register it; a shock to the heart wouldn’t transmit to the brain instant death. Suffering was inevitable and visible.

  There came a point when strapping the whale with dynamite was the most humane option, but the clean-up afterwards – particularly when the whale had run aground on a popular public beach – was expensive. (How expensive? In time I’d look it up. Another whale, found dead nearby a few seasons hence, cost AUS$188,000 to remove. The council and the State Fisheries Department disputed who should foot the bill. ‘Because it’s a mammal, not a fish, they believe it’s not in their jurisdiction,’ said the mayor.)

  The wildlife officer and I stared to the horizon. The sea mouthed our shoes. Then we walked up to his van so he could show me the shot.

  ‘It’s called the Green Dream,’ he said.

  The needle was at least a foot long and as thick as a car aerial. A rubber tube ran to a pump container. The whole apparatus was reminiscent of something you might use to administer herbicide in the garden; so much so that the sight of it brought on a blast of greenhouse smells (mint-ammonia-smoke, trapped heat). The liquid was a fluorescent, acid green. It might work, he speculated, because the whale was only a yearling. But you wouldn’t want to get the dosage wrong. Whose was the dream, I wondered? The officer let me hold it for a minute, this ghastly prop, heavier than it looked. I pictured the whale’s many netted veins and arteries which, if you could unpick them, would extend a hundred metres down the beach like the delicate red thread from a smashed thermometer.

  Later I asked, ‘Is it you who makes the decision?’ I knew he could get a legal gun instead, and use it. He held his hand crab-like on the wet sand and said nothing.

  People were still eating from lunch boxes, taking phone calls and posing for photographs in front of the whale. Then someone came down from the dunes with a wreath of plaited seagrasses and pigface flowers and proposed laying it over the whale’s forehead. The surfers took a knee in prayer or shame, their wetsuits half peeled to expose tattoos of constellations and regional creeds. A toddler started to cry and the whale made a cracked, tubular noise. Everyone tightened in the chest and ribs. A few families turned away. Stillness stepped through the crowd:
desperation; vigil.

  I asked the wildlife officer what would happen afterwards and he told me that they’d arranged for two mechanical bobcats to come and collect the carcass. ‘Beach and bundle,’ he called it, the policy. The whale would be chainsawed in half and transported to the Tamala Park tip in Mindarie to decay amid the household waste and disused white goods. After death its putrefaction would generate yet more heat, scorching its bones and burning its organs black: if they didn’t cut it up, it would explode. Was the council concerned a dead whale would attract malingering hammerheads and thresher sharks were they to tow it back out? I was confused about why the animal was destined for the junkyard.

  ‘This whale is malnourished,’ he offered. ‘We don’t know why. Maybe he’s sick, maybe the mother didn’t feed it right as a calf. Maybe the whale’s consumed plastic or it’s poisoned somehow, with parasites, or too tired to eat. Looks like it’s been attacked before it beached.’ He cleaned salt spots off his sunglasses. I saw his eyes were tired. ‘Killer whales pick off the weak ones,’ he said.

  A swathe of silence passed between us, gulls like asterisks overhead. ‘There’s an argument, a conservation argument, not to put a whale that’s been weeded out back in again.’

  That year forty-six whales ran aground along the Western Australian coastline. The year before there had been just thirteen, and in the years that followed the number returned to the mid-teens. Spectators on the beach that day had their suspicions. A comet had flared icily over Rottnest Island the previous week. The much-adored Antarctic Blue whale skeleton in the Western Australian Museum in Perth was set to be lifted out of the roof on a crane and dismantled. (At long last, would it be returned to the sea?) Someone’s sister talked of significant and recent naval operations. And wasn’t the weather undeniably weird all the time now? An El Niño year. Bitter mention was made by many of ‘The Japanese’; of the trauma and exhaustion of whales chased by harpoons. Almost certainly, it was said by one man, the Nyungar elders predicted the humpback – that’s why they weren’t there. What was happening was sour, something dark. A bad business for the land.