Dolphin Song Page 4

But Grace, straightening her headscarf and checking the health of the plant, took her time answering. Vital seconds passed. Martine glanced over her shoulder and Miss Volkner tapped her watch. “Be-ware,” Grace said at last.

  “Beware?” echoed Martine. “Beware of what?”

  “The boat fence. Watch out for the boat fence.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Martine. “What boat fence?”

  “That’s it!” Miss Volkner interrupted. “Time’s up. Onto the bus this very second or I’m removing your bags and leaving you behind.”

  Grace thrust the plant at Martine. “This here is a present for you.”

  Martine took it uncertainly. “Umm, thanks, Grace. What do you mean by . . . ?”

  “I take it that you’d prefer to stay here?” Miss Volkner demanded, her voice shrill with exasperation. “Driver, open the luggage compartment and we’ll remove Martine’s bag.”

  Grace gave Martine a squeeze and a shove. “Go, chile. When the time comes, you will know what to do.”

  The bus was already moving when Martine leaped on board. The doors snapped shut. Grace’s fiery plumage vanished in a swirl of dust.

  Carrying the little plant, Martine walked the gauntlet of eyes down the aisle of the bus. She was bemused by Grace’s warning and more than a little annoyed with Miss Volkner for wrenching her away before she could hear what the sangoma had come to say. It was obviously very important. Now she would never know. Now she would have to sail up one of the most treacherous coastlines in the world, unsure of what Grace had been trying to protect her from.

  “Any other stops you’d like to make, Martine?” Claudius called. “Should we pop into the game ranch? Or perhaps you’d like to pay a visit to all the other relatives and acquaintances you haven’t seen recently? Don’t mind us. We’ll just come along for the ride.”

  Martine could feel a beetroot flush spreading up her neck. She speeded up to get past her tormentor, and her foot caught the handle of a sports bag. She tripped and the plant shot into the air. Martine almost did the same, but she managed to grab a seat back and right herself. Claudius snatched the plant off the floor. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and regarded it with a comical expression of distaste. “I didn’t know you were a vegetarian,” he said to Martine. “Hey, Sherilyn, have a bite of this!”

  Before she could stop him, he’d tossed it across the aisle, where its gritty roots caught in Sherilyn’s hair. Sherilyn gave a screech and batted it away. Luke caught it and threw it on, and after that it did the rounds of the bus, to the accompaniment of hoots and laughter. Martine tried pleading for its return but finally gave up and went to her seat, hot tears pricking the backs of her eyes.

  “I don’t know what’s going on back there, but I’ve had about as much as I can take for one morning!” warned Miss Volkner from her seat beside the driver. “If I hear so much as a squeak between here and Cape Town, we’re turning the bus around and going back to Caracal, and you’ll all spend the rest of the month in detention.”

  Martine sat down beside Ben, avoiding his gaze. The grueling morning had been too much for her. A few tears escaped and splashed onto the leather seat. Embarrassed, she rubbed her eyes roughly. When she opened them again, Ben was holding out a faded red bandanna. Martine took it from him gratefully. She held the soft cloth against her face and somehow the clean cotton smell of it and Ben’s simple act of kindness made her feel better almost immediately. She went to give it back to him but he shook his head. Instead he handed her the two leaves and thread of root that were all that remained of Grace’s plant. Martine tried to thank him but he had already turned away and seemed to be absorbed in his book.

  As the bus sped along the highway and the savannah gave way to the sharp-edged mountains and mist-wreathed forest cabins of the wintry Cape landscape, Martine tried to make head or tail of the events of the past eight hours. First the image on the cave wall and now Grace with the incomprehensible warning about a “boat fence.” What was she talking about? And why would she give Martine a plant for a present?

  She opened her hand and studied the scrap of green. The thin leaves oozed a milky sap where they’d been torn. With the plant destroyed, there didn’t seem much point in keeping them, but she couldn’t bear the thought of throwing away a gift from Grace. She wrapped the leaves in Ben’s bandanna and found a space for them in her survival kit. The waterproof pouch had been a gift from Tendai for helping him find two missing leopard cubs. She planned to keep it around her waist for the duration of the school trip. She knew she’d probably be teased about it, but she’d made up her mind not to care.

  “Most people keep their survival kit in a drawer in their house, or in a locked box in their garage, or some other place where they’re probably never going to have an emergency,” Tendai had told her. “They think they will be able to see an emergency coming. Unfortunately, that almost never happens. Keep your survival kit with you for when you most need it, little one—when you need to survive.”

  The Zulu had helped her pick out what to take on this particular trip. As well as her pink Maglite flashlight, Martine had some matches she’d waterproofed with candle wax, her Swiss Army knife, a coil of extra-strength fishing line with a hook fastened to it, three corked bottles containing Grace’s special preparations for wounds, headaches, and upset stomachs, a whistle, a piece of root ginger she could chew on if she felt seasick, and a tin lid with a hole in it for signaling airplanes.

  “Surely I don’t need all these things,” she’d said to Tendai. “I mean, why would I need to signal an airplane?”

  But Tendai replied that that was the whole point of a survival kit. You took things for every eventuality. Chances were you’d never need any of them, but if you did, you wanted to be sure that all bases were covered.

  By the time the cloud-scattered crags of Table Mountain came into view the kids on the bus were singing African songs, and the spirit of freedom—the feeling that by going off on a sea adventure, they were somehow playing truant—was infectious. But Martine still couldn’t shake the sense that something darker lay ahead. She put a hand on her survival kit. She had a bad feeling she was going to need it.

  6

  In a matter of hours, Martine’s misgivings had been banished by the powerful, salt-laden winds of the Cape and the sheer visual wonder of the sapphire-blue sea that pounded its shores. It helped too that she hadn’t had a moment to think. After a tour of the penguin colonies of Simon’s Town, home to South Africa’s largest naval base, and a lunch of mango juice and smoked snoek pâté batter-bread sandwiches, Miss Volkner had sprung a surprise on them. Before boarding the ship for the Sardine Run, they were going to “Shark Alley” to watch tourists cage diving with great whites.

  Shark Alley! Even the name made Martine shiver. Her gut reaction when she’d heard the news was to pretend she’d come down with food poisoning. That way, there’d be no danger of her nightmares coming true. That way, she was unlikely to end up in the choppy blue bay, encircled by sharks. Then it occurred to her that feigning illness at this stage of the journey, before they were on board the main ship, would result in her being sent back to Sawubona to face her grandmother, and even the sharks seemed preferable to that.

  Barreling over the white-capped sea a little while later on a deep-sea fishing boat named Prowler IV, Martine was glad she hadn’t given in to her fears. She told herself they were ridiculous. It’s not as if every dream she had came true. Once she’d dreamt that she’d forgotten to put on her uniform and only realized her mistake when she walked into assembly at Caracal School, and, to the best of her knowledge, that had never even come close to happening!

  As for the image on the cave wall, well, perhaps it only meant that she’d be spending a lot of time surrounded by sharks and dolphins. Which she would. Perhaps the Bushmen had simply neglected to draw in the boat. Martine decided to stop fretting and enjoy the day. After all, what could go wrong? Safety checks on Prowler IV had been stringent. Stinging pell
ets of spray peppered her face each time the boat hit a wave, but short of being bodily hurled overboard, there was very little chance of her ending up in the sea.

  Geyser Rock was home to a colony of around 40,000 Cape fur seals and several hundred African penguins. The seals flopped around the rocks, barking and moaning and posing for pictures, their whiskered snouts turning this way and that. Their bodies shone like bronze in the pale sunshine.

  “Gourmet food for sharks,” joked Greg, Prowler’s skipper, a freckled South African with a bushy ginger beard. “This is like restaurant row for great whites.”

  Martine felt a twinge of sadness at the thought, but she understood that if too many seals were competing for space, mates, and food, it would devastate their colony. The seals needed the sharks as much as the sharks needed the seals.

  As a result of the feast available to them, huge numbers of great whites congregated in the shallow channel between Dyer and Geyser Islands, and tourists came from all over the world to cage dive with them. Martine wasn’t too sure what cage diving involved, but Greg explained that it provided an opportunity for everyone from nature lovers to adrenaline junkies to get up close and personal with the killers of the deep. There were different ways of doing it, but one of the most common was to use a cage made from galvanized steel mesh, half an inch thick. Three or four people climbed inside and the cage was lowered into the midst of feeding sharks, often only a yard or so beneath the surface.

  Conservationists, Greg said, were divided over cage diving. Some thought that it altered the behavior of sharks, increasing the risk of them attacking humans close to beaches. Others, like Greg, who was passionate about sharks, hoped that by showing sharks in their natural habitat, more people would realize how incredible they were. Movies like Jaws had given them a bad name. Some sharks ate only plankton and it was rare for even great whites to prey on humans. Most shark attacks happened when sharks mistook surfers or swimmers for seals or fish.

  Greg broke off his talk to maneuver Prowler alongside a smaller boat that was already moored in Shark Alley. There were ten tourists on the deck—three Japanese businessmen, two Germans, and a party of friendly, talkative Americans, all of whom had movie-star teeth. They’d spent the morning touring the islands and were very cheerful. They came aboard Prowler—which was now pretty crowded with Martine’s classmates—and drank mugs of coffee and rooibos, the Afrikaans name for red bush tea, to fortify them for the cage diving experience. Claudius immediately started telling three of the tourists about the time he helped his father land a record-breaking marlin. Martine sat chatting to Norm and Mary Weston, a couple from Florida, who were on a world tour to celebrate Norm’s retirement from the staid world of vacuum cleaner sales.

  “We’re making it our mission to do all of the things we were too chicken or too poor to do when we were young,” Mary told Martine with a wink. “Norm said, ‘Why don’t we go swimming with sharks?’ And I said, ‘I tell you what, darling, I’ll let you swim with sharks if you let me go bungee jumping and white-water rafting.’ So we made a deal!”

  Martine enjoyed talking to them and admired their spirit of adventure, but when Norm donned the thick wet suit, boots, and gloves that would protect him from the freezing temperatures of the winter water, she could tell that behind the bravado, Mary was extremely anxious. The sun had been swallowed by a bank of clouds and the sea was more gray than navy. It did not look inviting.

  Greg, meanwhile, was busy pouring “chum,” a mixture of ground-up fish heads and other foul-smelling bloody ingredients, guaranteed to lure sharks to the boat, into the sea. He helped Norm and three other men into the cage, and they gasped and whooped as trickles of seawater made contact with their skin. Once the sharks appeared, the tourists would be lowered beneath the surface and would breathe through hoses fed with air from the boat. Behind his goggles, Norm’s face was alight with anticipation. He looked twenty years younger than the sixty-five Mary had told Martine he was.

  “Over there!” Jake Emery shouted, and everyone rushed to the side of the school’s champion rugby player. He pointed at the water. A swishing black shadow was rising slowly from the deep. It was so enormous that Martine thought at first it was a whale, but as it neared the surface the unmistakable outline of a shark became visible. Without warning, it burst from the sea. The children and tourists reeled back. For one terrifying moment it hung in the air, so close to the boat it seemed it would land in it, and Martine saw at close range its flat gray snout, corpse-like eyes, and crooked rows of needle teeth, and then it belly flopped back into the ocean, sending a gruesome shower of chum and icy water their way.

  Other great whites quickly joined it, and soon there were eighteen surrounding the boat. Their fearsome jaws snapped at the fish-heads floating close to the cages. Martine could make out Norm, secure behind the steel mesh, clicking away with his underwater camera.

  All at once, he stopped taking photographs and became agitated. There seemed to be a problem with his air hose. The boat assistant ran to start the machinery to raise the cage and Greg rushed to help Norm. Even before the skipper reached him, Norm had opened the lid of the cage and was attempting to clamber out.

  “Slow down, Norm,” warned Greg, leaning out over the water. “The sharks are in a feeding frenzy. You’ll be okay, but you need to let me help you.”

  Norm smiled bravely. He put a foot on the edge of the cage and reached for Greg’s freckled hand . . .

  Later, when Martine tried to piece together the events of that afternoon, the thing that struck her was that it was true about accidents happening in slow motion. In reality, obviously, they took place in a split second, but that wasn’t how they felt at the time. One moment Martine was watching Norm balance on the edge of the cage like a black-winged crane, reaching for Greg’s hand; the next, time had slowed to a crawl and she was watching as the American, unsteady from lack of oxygen, missed Greg’s fingers and fell backward into the churning gray sea.

  The wheeling gulls matched Mary’s screams.

  Norm landed with a terrific splash, temporarily scattering the sharks. The scene took on a surreal quality. It didn’t seem possible that the smiling man with whom Martine had been sharing coffee and biscuits barely half an hour earlier was now flailing about in the bloody water, fighting for his life. But this was no movie. The largest of the great whites, a prize specimen of about twenty-two feet—Greg had told them that it probably weighed close to seven thousand pounds—had already changed direction and was on its way back to see if Norm was edible. The boat was a madhouse, with Greg appealing for calm while his assistant hung over the edge with a boathook. He planned to bash the shark on the nose, its most sensitive part, if it came within range.

  The menacing shadow circled Norm twice. The pinched snout of the shark poked above the water and its mouth opened briefly as if it were testing to see how much of Norm it could bite off in one go. It was then that Martine seized her chance. She focused her green eyes on the shark’s sunken gray ones, summoned all the furious energy she could muster, and directed it at the shark in a conscious stream, the way she’d once done with a rottweiler dog. She willed it to leave Norm alone, to find something its own size to terrorize or, better still, to consider a diet of plankton.

  The shark’s head dipped beneath the surface. The assistant threw the boathook, but it fell wide and drifted away on the current.

  “Stop!” Martine yelled at the shark in her head. “Stop!”

  But the great white was already in motion. It was like a torpedo, sleek and deadly, shooting toward the stricken man. As it approached, its jaws stretched wide and its rows of serrated teeth were plainly visible. In seconds, Norm would be missing an arm, his head, or even his torso.

  “Stop!” Martine yelled silently.

  The shark veered away with an irritable flick of its tail. It vanished into the camouflage of the sea. The waves created by its passing shoved Norm hard against the side of the boat, where willing hands hauled him from the water.<
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  Mary fell on him with kisses and cries of thanks. “When you said you wanted to swim with sharks, I didn’t think you meant you’d be doing it outside the cage!” she scolded her husband in a trembling voice, but it was said with humor and a lot of love.

  A warm glow spread through Martine. She gave an involuntary cheer, but nobody noticed in the general bedlam. Everyone was talking at once as they tried to work out why the shark had changed course.

  “At the last second it figured out that you weren’t a seal, Norm,” reasoned a mightily relieved Greg, as he rushed about getting hot towels and sweet tea for his shaken client. “Humans are just not natural prey for sharks.”

  “Well, I sure am glad about that,” Norm said as the color returned to his cheeks. “Now, at least, I have a good story to tell when I’m dining out.”

  In the midst of all the chaos, something made Martine look up. While everyone else on the boat was focused on the Westons’ reunion, Ben, sitting cross-legged on the roof of Prowler’s cabin, was focused on her. He was smiling.

  7

  The following morning Martine lay on her stomach on her bunk in the Sea Kestrel watching a porthole-shaped dawn divide the ocean into sections a of pink, apricot, and blue. There was not a trace of land on the horizon. At some point during the night, Africa had slid away, taking Sawubona, Jemmy, and Martine’s only connection to a home of any kind, away with it. She was adrift once more, as she had been after her parents’ death. A stranger in a strange, watery wilderness, unsure of what lay ahead.

  And how did she feel about that?

  Well, so far, much better than she’d expected. Overnight her mood had lifted. It was reassuring to know that the shark encounter predicted by both her dreams and the cave paintings was over, especially because it had all ended happily. It was Norm in the pictures. She even had an explanation of sorts for Grace’s “boat fence” warning, because the steel mesh of the cage could be said to resemble a fence. The sharks had returned to haunt Martine’s sleep again, but that was hardly surprising given that she’d almost seen a man swallowed alive by one!