Page 15

The heart of a whale is the heaviest on the planet. It is big enough for a human to swim through. And it is very slow. These are the things that occupy ’s thoughts. He thinks of that weight and feels overwhelmed by it.

In the communications building on the island he keeps a hydrophone, a prized possession second only to his violin, which was a gift from his mother and which, at the time, was too big for his little arms and hands to wield but which he has grown into like a fifth limb. The hydrophone was from his dad for his fourteenth birthday, and he is aware that it cost a lot of money and that his dad had to save up for it, he is aware that he loves it almost as much as the instrument but without the entangled pain.

When he can find enough time among chores and schoolwork, sets up his waterproofing and dives beneath the surface of the ocean to capture whatever sounds he comes across. It is best in deep water because there is less noise pollution, and sound transmits better in cold water. The sounds aren’t what he first imagined they’d be, they aren’t what you hear in movies. There are no friction-based sounds, which can occur only when you add wind or sand or plants into the equation. But for this is the thrill. The discovery of the unexpected. And while he enjoys it all, from the bubbles of air popping on the surface to the swish of a nearby seal fin, what he wants more than anything, what gets him out here at the crack of dawn, even in freezing temperatures and miserably windy conditions that skew the sound results, is the possibility of hearing the song of a whale. He was born the day he first heard the song of a whale, and he has been finding ways to record them ever since. In one moment high and squeaking like the top note of a violin, in the next guttural, echoing, some space between the moan of a cow and the trumpet of an elephant. Sometimes joyous and playful, sometimes mournful and searching. Sometimes with a trill or a creak or a rumble. A question, a call, a love letter.

After these lucky moments—and there have been only a few—he inevitably finds his way to the boxing bag, where he punches his body empty of the white-hot rage he feels at the thought of his mother not being here to experience the sound with him. What he is left with when that is punched out is loneliness.

Which is how he’s feeling on the day he first meets Alex.

He is in the comms building, up at the peak, and he is playing his fiddle over the top of the humpback music he recorded last month. The audio file floats from the shithouse laptop speaker; it’s all he has. He has been trying to compose something that will complement the whale song, that will translate and magnify it, but everything he adds only distracts from it. He is growing frustrated by his ineptitude. A stray G sounds discordant to his ears and he drops the bow, closing his eyes, letting the last notes reach their crescendo and fade out. He needs something more ambient, something to create atmosphere, not battle for the lead.

“That was incredible,” an American voice says.

opens his eyes and sees a young man. He is short, Black, handsome. He wears round glasses, which look to in this moment impossibly cool.

“Sorry, I’ll get out of your way,” says quickly, fumbling to pack up his violin and sound gear.

“Hang on,” the man says, the researcher, for that’s undoubtedly what he is. “Can you play some more?”

“More whale song?”

“Both, like you were just doing.”

shakes his head. “I was just messing around.”

“I loved it,” the man says simply.

And that’s how it starts. A soft unfurling, a discovery. His name is Alex and he has come to study the fur seal population. His older brother Tom is here too, a meteorologist. goes into the field with Alex and learns about the fur seals, about their extraordinary recovery from almost total annihilation. They take Fen with them when they tag the creatures, wrestling with the big bulls, and is glad to see a friendship blossom between Alex and his sister, too. Sometimes takes Alex diving for whale song, and while they don’t catch many whales they do get other interesting sounds that, with Alex’s encouragement, works into his music. For the first time in years he doesn’t feel lonely.

On the day they first kiss, ’s heart does not speed up; instead it seems to slow right down, it beats so hard and so slow that he thinks of the whale heart. Of the humpback, and the enormity of that heart, of its chambers a person can walk through.

Those days are long past. Alex is gone and there is no slow. can’t touch his violin, hasn’t reached for his hydrophone. Now there is only the bag for when he needs calm, and such moments are coming too often.

He felt it as he paced the beach, waiting for his sister and brother to return, wondering if he’d lost them to the Drift. He should have been there, keeping them safe. That she tried something so dangerous without him is terrifying.

After, tells himself over and over that they’re safe, that nothing happened, that there’s no need for this fury in his chest, in his fists, but the swell of it is more powerful than any thought, and not even the photos of Alex are enough to calm him down.

He takes the stairs two at a time. All 219 of them, winding stairs he knows well. He knows where muscles start to burn and where the second burst of energy is needed. He knows the exact step at which to tell himself there aren’t many to go, he’s nearly there, and he knows that stopping to rest at any point is a mistake.

It used to be called an observation deck and maybe that’s a better name; they just call it the light room even though there’s been no working light in it for a long time. Just a bag swinging eerily in the stray tendrils of wind that creep through the windows.

uses teeth to pull on his gloves, and as he sends blow after blow into the boxing bag the pain builds within him until he is throwing everything into his punches, his whole life. He is letting things unravel, he should be holding his family together as he has always done, but they only grow further apart and he hates himself, he is useless, the only thing he can do is punch until he can feel nothing and is nothing.

Dominic never intended on teaching to box. Certainly not the way Dom’s dad and granddad taught him, with bare fists and bloody knuckles and broken ribs and noses and never a single day of rest. Dom even went pro for a few years until he met Claire and gave it up cold turkey, but he always kept a bag hanging, a way to stay fit. He didn’t need the bag, because Dom, unlike , has no temper whatsoever.

would ask him, as a young kid, why he wasn’t allowed to train with him, and Dom would say he didn’t want ’s childhood to be full of hitting things.

Until one day Dom just… changed his mind. He brought up here to where the bag hung, and he made punch until he could barely feel his arms anymore. Until he was liquefied. Calm. realized over time that they only ever came up here when he lost his temper. A broken glass, a kicked door, pages he was meant to read, torn in deepest frustration when he couldn’t. Get to the bag, get it out of the body. And so there came, for , a dawning awareness of a kind of peril within him, one his father had recognized far earlier and sought to subdue.