A Drop in the Ocean

by Jenni Ogden

  When I was eight everything changed. Back then I didn’t realize that the happiest days of my life were already over. Dad moved out. He and Mum told me one Saturday night after Dad and I had spent the afternoon at the Science Museum. It was cold and wet, so that was about all there was to do. Mum was trying not to cry and Dad was sad. I screamed at them and stamped my foot and ran out of the kitchen and locked myself in my bedroom. Next morning, when I finally came out, Dad had gone. Mum and I had to move to a tiny flat over a greengrocer’s shop in a horrible street in a horrible, scary part of London. The street smelled and was always filthy. I had to go to a different school where nobody liked me. They all had their little groups of friends and they weren’t letting me in. Not that I wanted to be friends with any of them. They were rude and scruffy and laughed at my voice and my clothes. They called me toffy-face. I told Dad when he came to take me out for the day, and he said it was because they didn’t know any better. They thought I was posh, and that made them uncomfortable. He told me to just keep being friendly and in a while they would see I wasn’t really any different from them. But he was wrong and they never liked me.

  I went out on the deck and looked up at the starry sky. Through the trees I could see the lagoon, as still as a swimming pool. The moon was rising late tonight, and I watched as it peeked above the horizon, then soared into the heavens, perfectly round. Back in the cabin, I made a cup of tea and sat down at my computer again. Better that than lying in my hot bunk feeling sorry for myself.

  Once a week in the summer term our whole class would get the bus to the public swimming baths and have swimming lessons. Dad had already taught me to swim because that was one of his favorite things. He loved scuba diving and he always said he’d take me away when I was older to a tropical beach where I could learn to snorkel and see the amazing world beneath the ocean. So I was quite excited about going to the swimming baths and thought that the other kids might like me better when they saw I could swim.

  How wrong I was. First we all had to swim across the pool one at a time so the swimming instructor could see what level we were at. Most of the kids couldn’t swim at all and just walked or floated holding on to a board. I did freestyle and then the instructor asked me if I could do other strokes so I went across the pool again doing breast-stroke, then again doing backstroke. After that, the instructor said we could all play together in the shallow end for ten minutes before we had a lesson, and he went off to the other end of the baths for a smoke with our teacher. As soon as he had gone, two of the biggest boys jumped on me and pushed me under and held me there. I was sure I was going to drown. When they let me up I was coughing and spluttering and crying and I could hear all the kids laughing, and they pushed me under again. But I came straight up because the teacher had heard them and was shouting at them from the side. The instructor hauled me out and I scraped my knee on the side. Then the teacher told me to go and get dressed, and when I came out I had to sit and watch while the other kids had their lesson. That night I couldn’t go to sleep and I was crying and Mum came in and asked me what was wrong. When I told her she gave me a quick hug but then said I just had to toughen up now that I was nearly nine. She said that if I acted like I was scared they would just bully me more. So I decided there and then never to cry in front of anyone ever again. And I never have. But I never made a single friend at that school.

  When I was eleven, I passed the eleven-plus exam and went to grammar school. That was better because the girls there were more like me, and I got on all right with a couple of them. I didn’t very often do much with them outside school hours, though, partly because I had to get the bus home and it was an hour’s drive. Mum said I could invite someone home for tea and to stay overnight, but I never did. I think I was a bit ashamed of our flat and the smelly street. Once I went to a party at one of the girls’ homes and stayed the night—it was a pajama party—and her house was about three times the size of the house we used to live in.

  Mum didn’t seem to have any friends either. She worked in a bookshop a couple of streets over from our flat and all she did apart from that was read. So Dad was still my best friend. I saw him about once a month, when he was in London, and he would take me out for the day on a Saturday or Sunday. But best of all was in my summer school holidays when Dad and I would go away together for a whole month. When I was nine he took me to Greece, where we sailed around the islands on a boat with friends of his. He had a girlfriend who was nice to me but she didn’t last. When I was ten we went to Egypt, just the two of us, and stayed in an apartment on the Red Sea. That’s where I first went snorkeling. It was beyond words and made up for all the bad things I had ever experienced. When I was eleven we went to the Bahamas and stayed in different places where Dad and his new girlfriend could scuba dive and I could snorkel. That’s where I had my first scuba diving lesson. The next year it was Belize. Dad had the same girlfriend this time. We went to a little island and as soon as we got there Dad said he’d go and check out the diving first and we could all go together the next day after we’d had a good sleep. But we didn’t and I’ve never been in the ocean since.

  When I finished banging away it was a bit after four in the morning. I closed My Life, pulled on my shorts and a T-shirt, and went down to the beach. The moon was now high in the sky and the sea well over the reef. It was unbearably beautiful. I sat on the sand and a few tears squeezed out of my eyes. I wiped them away and licked one off the side of my hand. The salty taste made me smile, and more tears welled up and slid down my cheeks. I hadn’t cried, even when alone, since I was in my twenties, and it felt wonderful in a strange sort of way. Then I saw a dark shape pop out of the sea, only a short stone’s throw from where I was sitting. I could see her bright eye in the moonlight and then her head disappeared and I stayed still and quiet. Up her head popped again, and this time her great shell followed. I hardly dared breathe as she hauled herself on to the sand and then lolloped on her great flippers up the gentle incline of the beach. Every four or five lollops she would stop, her eyelids closing over her big eyes, and then she would start again. I felt exhausted just watching her. Exhausted but exhilarated at the same time.

  As she passed me I could have reached out and touched her, she was so close. A little farther on after another long rest she made it to where the trees began. After a few experimental flips of her long front flippers in the dry sand, she began digging, using her flippers to shoot the sand away from her, gradually making a saucer in the sand, and then a pit. When it was so deep she’d almost disappeared, she began to use her right back flipper as an elongated scoop, delicately inserting it into the deepest part of the pit and extracting the damp sand that lay below the drier sand on the surface. I had crept up to her by this time and was kneeling just behind her and to the side. Every so often I would get sprayed with sand, but I didn’t move. In the moonlight I could see into the deep hole she was fashioning, narrow at the top and ballooning out deep down in the damp sand. How long this took, I couldn’t say exactly, but at least thirty minutes.

  At last she was happy with her nest, and she squatted and inserted what looked like her tail into it. And then in the moonlight I saw a translucent, white, perfectly round egg ooze out of the end of her tail and plop down into the depths of the hole. It was bigger than a golf ball. Then came another and another, and I started counting. When she had dropped in eighty-two eggs, she blinked a few times and I could see tears in the corner of her eyes. She closed them for a few minutes before retracting her cloaca—I had figured out it wasn’t just a tail—and, using her back flippers again, began to fill in the nest.

  FIVE

  “Magic, isn’t it.” I heard his quiet voice and knew immediately whose it was. “How long have you been there?” I whispered, turning around to see him sitting in the sand behind me.

  “About half an hour,” he whispered back.

  “Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”

  “Nothing to say.” I could see his smile in the soft dawn.r />
  “Shouldn’t you be tagging or measuring her or something?” I ducked as a spray of sand hit me in the chest.

  “She already has a tag, and I didn’t want to break the spell for you. See that metal tag on her left front flipper? I’ll check her number when she’s on her way back to the sea.”

  We sat in silence, watching her. The wide pit filled up rapidly and when she was satisfied that it had been obliterated, she slowly rotated her great body, flipping sand and leaves about until there was no evidence there had ever been a hole. She rested for a few minutes, then swished her front flippers back and rowed herself down the gently sloping beach to the sea. Behind her she left wide tractor marks, picked out by dimpled shadows in the glowing sand. When she was about ten meters from the edge of sea, Tom scooted down and grabbed her front flipper, shining his torch on the tag. She increased her pace, almost lifting up on her flippers, and he let her go and picked up the clipboard he had dropped on the sand, writing her tag number on the sheet. He stood and watched her slide into the tiny waves swishing onto the beach, and then she was submerged, first the top of her shell and then just her head sticking out as she swam over the reef and out to sea.

  “That’s her first laying this season,” Tom said as he walked back towards me. “You’re honored. Eve is one of the first turtles ever tagged on this island.”

  “So you won’t see her again now until next summer?”

  “Oh yes, she’ll likely come up to nest a number more times yet over the next three months, but then we won’t see her again for two or three years.”

  “How amazing it is. All that effort. I’m so glad I saw her,” I whispered, although the need for whispering had obviously passed. “Do you have names for all your turtles?”

  Tom dropped down onto the sand and wrapped his arms around his bent knees. “No, only Eve. The others are just tag numbers. Scientists aren’t meant to get close and personal with their subjects; it might bias their research.” His grin flashed in the luminescent light.

  “Yes, it’s rather the same in my line of research. Best to keep it impersonal,” I said. Tom didn’t comment, and we sat for a while in what felt like a comfortable silence. Then Tom shifted, and looked as if he were about to get up.

  “Was Eve the only turtle nesting tonight?” I asked.

  “Two others, a bit earlier. Eve was cutting it fine. They come up to lay on the high tide but need to leave enough time to get back before the tide goes out again and it becomes too shallow for them to swim back to the deep water. It’s early days yet, and by December on some nights there might be eighty or more turtles coming up.”

  “Ben was telling me you had been to one of the other islands looking for nesting turtles.”

  “Yes. Two coral cays close to here. I visit them fairly regularly. One of them seems to attract more loggerheads than here for some reason. I found six nesting on one cay last night.”

  “Eve is a green turtle?”

  “She is. Greens are by far the most common turtle here, then loggerheads. Just occasionally we get a hawksbill nesting; they’re much more common farther north, around Cairns.”

  “Are the coral islands you go to inhabited? By people, I mean,” I asked.

  “No. That’s their beauty. They’re pristine.”

  “Not even a hut to sleep in?”

  “No, not even that. At this time of the year, a sleeping mat is all I need. The main downside is being used as a landing site for shearwaters. But I don’t get much time for sleep usually, once the turtle nesting season is in full swing.”

  “It must be amazing, sleeping there under the stars, the only human in the middle of all that ocean.”

  “Everyone should sleep on a beach under the stars at least once in their lives,” Tom said.

  I felt the jagged edge of pain slice through my chest and tighten my throat, and I turned my head away from Tom’s gaze.

  “You should try it one night before there are too many turtles coming up.” Tom’s voice was quiet.

  I swallowed, and waited as the pain receded. “I’d like that,” I finally managed to croak. “Once, when I was a kid, I slept on the beach with my father.”

  Tom was silent.

  “We were going to do it again, but my father died, and I’ve never been anywhere since where it would have been possible.” My fingers felt for my dolphin pendant.

  “Until now,” Tom said.

  We sat for a while, not speaking, as the sun rose out of the sea and the light lost its early magic. The tide was rapidly retreating, exposing bits of coral.

  Tom yawned and then laughed. “That’s my day job over. If I want to get in some shut-eye before lunch I’d better be on my way.” He got up, and made a funny sort of wave-salute in my direction. “I’m glad you met Eve. If you want to give us a hand later when the nesting is in full swing, let me know.”

  “Oh yes, please,” I said. “I would like that.”

  Tom nodded, smiled his lovely smile, and walked away.

  BACK IN MY CABIN I TREATED MYSELF TO A FEED OF pancakes, made in the English way as my mother used to make them for me when I was a child, not artificial and puffy like the American ones. In the small fry pan I fried three rashers of bacon while I mixed a batter of flour, egg, milk, water, melted butter, and a pinch of salt, beaten to the consistency of runny cream. I took the large fry pan, melted a lump of butter in it, and poured in just enough batter to film the bottom. When bubbles began to form and pop, I flipped the pancake over with the help of my only spatula and browned the other side. Two minutes and then it was ready to be flipped onto a plate, slathered with lemon juice and sugar, and rolled into a long sausage. While I consumed the first pancake with one of the crisp bacon rashers, my next pancake was cooking. After three large pancakes, I could hardly move, so I lay on my bed and fell fast asleep.

  Apart from a walk on the beach late that afternoon, I didn’t do much else, but after a solitary meal that evening—just a slice of cold ham and a green salad after my breakfast extravagance—I sat at my computer, trying to decide whether I should continue with my account of my research career or write more of My Life. Truth to tell, I had been thinking about my father all day, and I suppose it was inevitable that I would feel an urgency to write it down.

  It was in the Bahamas that I slept under the stars with my father. It was our third summer holiday after he and Mum broke up, and we—Dad and his girlfriend, Louise, and me—were staying in a holiday apartment right on the beach. One night, Dad said he had a surprise for me, and we drove quite a way to a secluded little bay along the beach, away from the houses and apartments. Louise didn’t come; she said this was to be a special father-daughter treat. We had brought a large tarpaulin, pillows, and our sleeping bags. I was beside myself, I was so excited.

  We spread the tarpaulin out on the sand, not far above high tide mark, and snuggled into our sleeping bags, although it was warm enough not to need them. Dad had brought a plastic box of supper—cold chicken, bread, cheese, cake, and mangoes. We ate the lot, and then after sneaking into the trees higher up the beach for a pee, we lay in our sleeping bags looking up at the starry sky. Dad pointed out Orion and lots of the other constellations, although I think he made some of them up. We talked about everything: school, my favorite books, what I wanted to do when I left school—that was easy, I wanted to be a journalist like him, and travel the world—and the scuba diving adventures we’d have on our holiday. He told me about all the adventures he had had that year, seeking out stories.

  When I woke up it was just getting light, and the sea was pink. I felt as if I’d died and gone to heaven. When Dad woke up, we changed into our swimsuits and went for a swim and then a run along the beach. After that we went back to the apartment and went out to a café for breakfast with Louise. We had pancakes, of course. All the next year, whenever I felt gloomy or sad, I’d think about that night under the stars, and count the months, then weeks, then finally days until our next summer holiday, this time to Belize. Dad an
d I had made a solemn pact to sleep under the stars again.

  I stopped writing then. Enough was enough. I wandered down the beach but the sea was way out. The turtles wouldn’t start coming in until around two in the morning, on the incoming tide. I walked along the beach until I came to the spot I’d stopped that morning, when I talked to Tom. I could just make out the disturbed sand where Eve had covered up her nest, and I sat on it thinking about the eighty-two eggs beneath me and the millions of eggs that had been laid by turtles over millions of years on isolated beaches like this. How Dad would have loved it.

  SIX NEW CAMPERS ARRIVED ON JACK’S BOAT ON Saturday. It was mid-November, and the end-of-year university exams were over. Jack had given them two letters for me, and my boxes of food arrived on Nick’s trailer. One of the letters was a long one from Mum, and I put it aside to read later. The other was from the secretary in my old university department. I had asked her to open my mail and send on any she thought I would want. She had enclosed a letter from a small funding body I had applied to before I left. The letter politely declined my application for a pitiful amount of research money. The other enclosure was a reprint of a recently published research article I had had accepted almost a year ago. I could hardly understand the title it was so full of jargon. About the only term that made any sense was “Huntington’s disease.” A slither of nostalgia—or guilt, perhaps—froze my snigger as I scanned the list of co-authors—all my research assistants and my last doctoral student. I wonder what they’re doing now?

  The campers were loaded up with the usual scuba equipment. Four of them had never been to Turtle Island before, and I found myself telling them all about the birds and turtles as if I had lived there for years. I’d been finding out more from Basil and Pat. By now there were more than one hundred thousand birds nesting on this tiny island. The most numerous by far were the wedge-tailed shearwaters, with their ghostly night cries, and the charming noddy terns busily putting the finishing touches to their scruffy nests, which balanced precariously on every branch of the sticky Pisonia trees—sometimes thirty nests in a single small tree. Reef herons also nested there, and quaint little buff-banded rails fussed about on the sandy ground, bobbing their heads. Tiny silvereyes darted through the trees and I had learned to identify the common migratory birds—ruddy turnstones and eastern golden plovers—who returned from the Northern Hemisphere every September, and flew north again every March.