Skylarking by Kate Mildenhall

fingers.
    I could not have looked away had I wanted to. The air around the whale appeared to quiver slightly and then a plume of spray burst from the top of the whale’s head, and Harriet leaped away. McPhail’s arm shot out to grab her waist and they stumbled back together.
    Harriet turned to him then, still gripped in his arm, and she tipped her head back and laughed, and McPhail smiled at her, a great splitting of his face, so that it was as if I were seeing that expression for the first time, as if I were seeing the boy McPhail. There were his teeth, the foreign curve of his cheek. And then, as sudden as it had come, the moment ended, and they moved apart from one another.
    Harriet looked at me triumphantly before noticing her father’s alert, steady gaze.
    â€˜Watch out!’ Father called as a high wave curled up, and we all scattered.
    By the time Blackwell and his ragged crew arrived from Bennett’s River with their saws and hammers and ropes, the tide was sloshing all the way in around the whale’s head and, every time a wave surged in, she raised her great tail and brought it down with a heavy splash.
    Harriet returned to my side and, although I tried to be distant, eventually we huddled together on a rock, quietly cheering and clapping our hands together as the water rose higher and the whale became more active.
    Out in the bay, the calf emerged from the waves every so often.
    â€˜Poor thing,’ said Harriet. ‘How awful it would be. Knowing its mother is stuck here and there’s not a thing it can do to help.’ She stretched her legs out in front of her, revealing her little black boots and stockings, and she tilted her ankles so her feet swung from side to side. ‘I wouldn’t know what to do at all if I had to get on without Mother. Though I suppose one day I must. But I really can’t bear to think of it at all. Can you?’
    Harriet had been spared the intimacy I’d already had with grief and loss. No doubt it was hard for her mother to have endured the loss of a baby and the certainty that she would never have another besides Harriet. But that could not be as difficult as having a child, raising him and losing him, as my mother had done, and as all our family had done with her in our own ways.
    â€˜No, I do not like to think of it either,’ I said as I stood and shielded my eyes.
    The men were gathering closer to the whale, and there were raised voices.
    â€˜Come,’ I said to Harriet and motioned with my hand for her to follow.
    Blackwell was standing next to my father and gesturing at the whale.
    â€˜We wait any longer and she’ll move off – we’ll lose any chance,’ Blackwell said.
    The men gathered behind him murmured in agreement.
    Father looked troubled. I knew it pained him to see the great whale stuck against the rocks, so undignified. He was a light keeper: it was his duty to see the citizens of the sea safely past the cape, and the imminent destruction of the whale seemed to be against every tenet of his profession. But there was no ignoring the truth of what Blackwell said. Father would be denying the other men income, a windfall really, if he continued to hold back the group gathered there.
    But hold them back he did – that was the truth of it. No matter that he had no real position of authority over them, my father presided over the cape and his word was as good as rule. But there was a brittleness to the air around Father and Blackwell, as though Blackwell might at any moment determine that Father had no right at all to tell him what he could and could not do.
    I glanced at McPhail to see whether he might support my father, but he did not seem to care one way or another if the whale lived or died. He was a fisherman. He baited and hooked and took his catch, the same as the others. If the bounty of the sea was going to throw itself up on the shores, who was he to refuse it?
    The whale used the next set of