Shallow Breath

29

Kate




Kate’s memories of her mother are synonymous with nighttime. Later she realised that was because Elizabeth had worked seven days a week, either studying or supporting them both. She usually arrived home in the twilight, in time to snuggle with her daughter in one of their big bay windows and read stories before bed.

Every night, before Kate climbed onto the padded seat, they would go across to the dresser. On the lacquered surface, a band of polished brown elephants were on permanent migration. During the day, they were set out single file, the matriarch leading the pack and the bull bringing up the rear. But when the day was over, and the golden lamplight shone like an evening’s soft sun on the mukwa wood, Kate would push them together, and draw the babies close to their mothers. The bull would take his place at the front, for protection. Then she would say good-night to them, touching them one at a time and calling them by name. Mali. Nkeche. Laka. Bululu. Mwana. And afterwards, if she was lucky, her mother would tell her their story.

‘There was once a family of five naughty elephants,’ Elizabeth would begin, pointing at the ornaments on her dresser, and Kate would giggle, cuddling closer. ‘And their favourite food was maize and bananas. Unfortunately, the African savannah was sorely lacking in these treats, so where do you think they would go?’

‘To the village!’

‘That’s right. But, understandably, the villagers didn’t appreciate the elephants eating all their crops. And while the elephants were very clever at getting across fences and stealing, they weren’t so great at sharing. So eventually the villagers got really, really fed up, and they put up these nasty things called snares. And the next time the elephants came, little Mwana got caught in one and hurt her foot pretty badly.’

‘Poor Mwana.’

‘Yes, poor Mwana. And the other elephants became very distressed, and refused to leave Mwana. It was a difficult situation, because if the elephants or the villagers ran out of patience with one another, either side could easily get hurt. But fortunately the villagers called a local man named Bullo, who ran an elephant sanctuary. The only problem was that it was over forty kilometres away, and there was only one truck available to take five elephants. No one could figure out what to do. But then one clever lady came up with an idea.

‘All the elephants were tranquilised while Mwana’s wound was treated, and then baby Mwana was loaded onto a van. Now, when Mwana’s mother, Mali, woke up, she was very upset to find her baby on a truck. She bellowed, but before she could charge after the truck, the truck began to move. This was a dangerous moment for everyone – the elephants could have stampeded and badly hurt the people in the truck. Or they could have refused to come at all. But, as everyone had hoped, Mali began to follow the truck, and the other elephants fell in behind Mali. The truck took them all the way to an elephant sanctuary, which was a big area with a fence all around it to stop them getting out and into more trouble. The villagers were thankful, and the elephants lived happily ever after.’

‘And you lived happily ever after too?’

Elizabeth would squeeze Kate closer. ‘I did.’

But one evening, when Kate was nearly six years old, Elizabeth had avoided telling the story. Instead, they had raced through a boring picture book, and then Kate had been hurried to bed. Once she was lying there, Elizabeth said sadly, ‘Listen, honey, I have to go away for a week or so.’

Kate had touched her mother’s pale face. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ Elizabeth had whispered, kissing her and leaning down to gather her in tight for a moment. ‘Nana will be here all the time. I’ll be home as soon as I can.’

That night, Kate had tried to feign sleep, sure that her mother would creep in again sometime later and readjust the covers on the bed, as she always did, making sure Kate was warm. But she was simply too tired to keep watch. When she woke up, a cold, empty light had already pushed its way through the windows, and she hastily got up to check her mother’s room, to make sure she hadn’t dreamt the goodbye.

Elizabeth’s bed was neatly made. On the dresser, the elephant family had been moved. The four larger elephants had been arranged in a circle, facing outward, the smallest baby hidden in the centre. Kate went across, hesitated, but left them that way. She didn’t understand, but she would ask her mother about it when she came home.





Kate lies in her tent on the western edge of Australia, listening beyond the dunes to the incessant lisp and rasp of the ocean, thinking of her mother. Each memory is a treasure to cling to. Whenever the details grow hazy, she goes over them obsessively, repainting blurred edges, trying to remember the colours, the sounds, the smells, the exact tone of her mother’s voice. But she has been doing this for so long now, forcing this vividness, that these recollections are overlaid with the stories she has told herself. She can rarely conjure them spontaneously any more.

When Kate discovered the truth about her parents, she had been angry with them for putting other things in life ahead of her. While Nana Jacobs had been understanding, she had not allowed Kate’s resentment to go unchecked. ‘I think that, if you take something from their example, it should be about following your passion,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t think either of them would have gone anywhere had they imagined they wouldn’t get to come home to you. I think they were trying to make their treasured corners of the world a little better. They wanted to preserve the things they knew were beautiful, so that not only you but your children will get to experience them.’

And now she has lost Nana Jacobs too. Kate is not sure what she believes about the afterlife, but maybe, just maybe, they are all together and watching her somewhere. What would they think of the decisions she has made recently? She hopes they would understand.

Jackson’s mention of White Wave has shaken her to the core. Why does it feel as though she betrayed them? The charity had seemed like her salvation for a long time. When her grandparents had told her the truth, life had slipped from its moorings. Nothing she had planned for the following year felt right any more. She did everything her family most feared she would do: she deferred her studies and ran away while she tried to come to terms with this sudden shift in her history.

She travelled to Thailand – somewhere neither of her parents had been – in an attempt to escape their ghosts for a little while. The south was still struggling to get on its feet after the Boxing Day tsunami, and when she heard of White Wave she instantly loved the idea. It was a way to make life meaningful again. For a while it had been redemptive, but the more she got involved, the more she began to see the politics, the bureaucracy, the endless red tape and the misappropriated funds. On almost every project, she witnessed cultural clashes and a slow erosion of values, which were replaced by the desire to keep heads down, do the job, chalk it up as a victory and then get out. Did all waves turn murky in the end, she began to ask herself, with the detritus of their journey? Even waves of kindness, of wanting to do the right thing?

It was obvious there were others who felt the same way. People began to meet in offshoot groups, to discuss different ideas and objectives. Other plans were formed, some more radical than others. And, perhaps inevitably, she was drawn to one particular alliance: those who thought that helping the wildlife was an integral part of helping the community. They were generally in the minority, but they were probably the most passionate group of all. And that’s how she got to know Lexie, Adam, Nick and Carl.

She doesn’t want to think of them – it still hurts terribly. She needs to sleep. But if she does, the dream will come again. The one where she stands at the top of a tall tower as the white tide gets sucked back, and back, until it’s beyond the horizon. Where she’s left staring into a deepening valley she’d never known was there, at the dropping void of exposed rock, sand and coral, watching thousands of flapping, fitting fish. And where she hears the defiant roar of water again before she can see it, before it charges towards her faster than she can run, transfigured into a solid black wall of oblivion.

She knows it is only a dream. Even though she wasn’t there, she understands it wouldn’t have been like this. But still, she’s seen the footage – the shallow pools of water, the relentless roll of the tide, the stick figures and toy cars and houses gathered up and obliterated by the charging fury of water. She wishes she could stop thinking in metaphors – she understands that tectonic plates slowly wear each other down, to the point that one of them has to give in and shift, and the sea’s response to an earthquake is as reflexive as fingers jumping away from a flame. But it doesn’t stop the same dream from coming each night, and terror flooding her until she bolts awake, shaking. Will it stop when all this is over? God, she hopes so.

They were meant to be in Iwate Prefecture together, but Carl had some last-minute business to attend to, and Kate was running late after her unexpected trip back to America. So on 11 March 2011, she had been stepping out of a taxi in central Tokyo, heading for the train station and Iwate, when the warning sirens went off and people began to run. The driver hauled her with him into a building, but it was her ailing grandmother who had saved her life, because she had been the reason for Kate’s hasty visit to San Francisco.

In the weeks that followed, she had seen the events in Iwate on the television. She had watched the water racing greedily over the land, swallowing everything in its path. Kate and Carl had tried to reach Lexie, Adam and Nick by all means available to them. But there was never an answer. The three of them had been staying at a small guesthouse close to the harbour. The guesthouse definitely wasn’t there any more. Neither were many other buildings within a ten-kilometre radius.

However hard she tried not to, she found herself imagining what they might have experienced. She wondered what they were doing as the water approached. She even scrutinised all the terrible raw footage she could – just to see if she could find them. But all she saw was the distress of so many others. After a few weeks of no word, she knew, for her own sake, it was time to stop searching.

Initially, White Wave had listed all five of them as missing. Kate had seen it on the website, but soon afterwards the organisation had found out what they were doing, and had removed all traces of their group from the site. They cut ties with Kate and Carl. Carl thought it was a good thing. He persuaded her that maybe they should remain missing in some quarters, just for a little while.

The plot hatched between the five of them had become the responsibility of two. They were more determined than ever to go through with it, in the name of their absent friends. But they needed a minimum of four. Carl was looking for one replacement. Kate was working on the other.

She had originally planned to find Desi, but while Jackson had been gone she had decided to ask him instead. Wasn’t he everything they needed? She had watched him come out of the sea carrying one tank in his arms and another on his back, and she had been convinced he would do it. She had been waiting for the right moment when he’d brought up White Wave, and then she was wary, and it all went wrong.

And now, Desi has appeared. And so she will stick to her original plan, and talk to Desi first.

It is hard having Jackson so close to her, thinking she doesn’t care. But she has always known something that Jackson hasn’t – that until now they’ve been on borrowed time. She has made a commitment, and she will not back down.

‘I haven’t done anything,’ she had said to Jackson, when he had questioned her. But she had deliberately missed out one key word.

Yet.