A Drop in the Ocean. Jenni Ogden
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.
“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