In the Mouth of the Whale Read Free Page A

summer, involving throwing little shells into the air and catching them on the back of the hand while chanting nonsense rhymes, but the Child believed that she had grown beyond those childish things. She was no longer a child nor yet an adult, but something else. A changeling, perhaps, like one of the lonely creatures in her ama’s stories. Living amongst people, disguised as one of them, but watchful and apart.
    One night, she was walking along the water’s edge when she noticed a flurry of activity a little way ahead. A small group of children shouting and pointing at something in the river; two men running towards them, splashing into the shallows. The Child walked towards them over sugary sand still warm from the day’s sun. More adults were coming down the beach. Then a woman screamed and ran towards the two men, stooping between them and lifting up the wet and naked body of a little boy. She staggered out of the water and sat down hard, pressing the body to herself, shaking it, kissing its face, looking around at people who would not meet her gaze, asking the dear Lord Jesus Christ the same question over and again. Why? Why had this happened? Why why why?
    The Child knew the boy from the market, where he helped his father sell watermelons, but she did not know his name until the woman began to say it, calling to him over and again in a cracked and sobbing incantation, rocking his body, stroking wet hair back from his face. Two small girls were crying, hugging each other, convulsed by huge shivers. One man said that the boy had got out of his depth in the river. Other people talked in low voices. No one dared disturb the terrible eloquence of the woman’s grief. The Child stood amongst the crowd, watching everything.
    At last, one of the priests, Father Caetano, came along the twilight beach in his black soutane. Two paramedics from the hospital followed him, hauling their gear. They prised the drowned boy from his mother and worked on him for some time; at last they looked at each other across his body and one of them shook his head. The boy’s mother shrieked, pushed away a woman who tried to comfort her, was caught and held tight by another. Father Caetano knelt, recited the Prayer for the Dead, and took out a small vial of oil and with his thumb drew a cross on the boy’s forehead. Then the paramedics lifted the body on to their stretcher and covered it with a blanket and put their equipment on its chest and carried it up the beach, followed by Father Caetano and the boy’s mother and a ragged tail of onlookers.
    The Child lingered at the river’s edge after everyone else had gone. Watching the dark water slide past, head cocked as if listening for something.
    Late that night, Maria returned from the hospital and looked in on her daughter and found the bed empty. She checked the other rooms in the bungalow and went outside and woke Ama Paulinho. The two women went to the shed where the Child kept her menagerie, and then they searched the rest of the compound. The private gate was locked; the watchman at the public gate at the front of the hospital apologised and said that he had not seen the doctor’s daughter. With the help of two night nurses, Maria and Ama Paulinho searched the wards and surgical rooms, the kitchens and storerooms, the offices and the pathology lab, the pharmacy and the out-patient clinic. They found the Child at last in the mortuary, asleep on a chair near the rack of refrigerated drawers where those who had died in the hospital or in accidental or suspicious circumstances were stored before being autopsied.
    The Child said that she’d wanted to keep the dead boy company, and despite close questioning by her mother would say nothing else. She never told anyone the real reason why she’d kept watch over the body: that she had believed the boy might have been seduced by the River Folk, that his death by drowning had been the first stage in his transformation. In her mind’s eye, she’d