The Peco Incident (23 page)

Below me, Brio was finding it just as easy, and I could see the gap between us increasing. It looked as though she’d be down and swimming off into the night before I touched the
rocks at the bottom. I wouldn’t be able to stop her, and, even if I did catch up, I doubted there was much I could do. Not only was she bigger than me, but she’d shown us before how vicious she could be when cornered. It would be an unequal match, and I would come off second-best. And yet, despite that, I continued climbing down.

It was not until I was halfway and she was touching the bottom that I thought I might have a chance. The smell drifting up from the rocks told me that we were not on our own. There were seals down there, possibly a colony of them. And if there was any one thing I was sure about Brio, it was that she hated seals.

I moved sideways to follow a better route, and also to avoid arriving on top of her. A little cry from below told me she’d seen the seals. I paused to look down. It
was
a seal colony. Not a big one — maybe half a dozen mothers with their pups — but more than enough to freak Brio out.

They were plainly upset by the spotlight disturbing their sleep. Some of them already had their heads in the air, roaring a warning. Brio was flattened against the cliff face.

Now was the time for some payback.

‘Scary, aren’t they?’ I yelled down at her.

‘Shut up!’ she snarled

‘These ones won’t run away, you know. They’ve got pups: they’ll defend them to the death.’

‘I said: shut up!’

I moved down a bit more until I was close enough to the platform to jump if need be.

‘Even if you go in the water, they’ll follow.’ I didn’t know whether that was true, but it seemed like a good thing to say.

This time Brio swore at me. The sound of her voice seemed to upset a mother seal that was nearby. The cow hauled herself towards the woman. Brio hurled a string of swear words at the seal, before sidling along the cliff face towards me. The seal followed, with another two moving forward a little to see what was happening.

‘See! They’re ganging up on you now,’ I said. ‘They’ll all be at you in a moment.’

She shuffled along some more.

‘They give terrible bites, and their mouths are full of disease. They’ll give you rabies.’

More shuffling.

‘That’s their revenge for all the disease you’ve been spreading. You’ll die like all those birds you killed. Your insides will rot and your brain will turn to mush.’

That got a reaction, but not the one I was anticipating. She leapt across the short distance between us, grabbed my leg and pulled. I was down on the rocks before there was any chance to respond.

Then she started kicking me. Not random kicking, but systematic blows, designed to make me move away from the cliff and into the group of seals. The kicks hurt nevertheless, as she didn’t so much care where she hit, so long as they forced me between her and the seals.

And they did. I slithered over the stinky surface, scrambling to get out of range.

‘Now
you
can feel their bites,’ she said. ‘And you can get their disease, and die a horrible death.’ Again she was gloating, and with reason. I’d so enjoyed taunting her that I’d let my guard down — something she would never do.

I could sense the seals moving near me. Their breathing came in hissing snorts against a background of rumbling growls. How long would it be before they attacked?

Then one of them moved until it was right beside me. It was a pup, gazing at me with its cute big eyes. Except those eyes didn’t look so cute stuck right in my face. I felt that even this little fellow could do some damage if he wanted to.

But that was not his intention. He was only being inquisitive, trying to work out what this funny white-faced thing might be. After a moment, he turned away from me and flipper-walked towards Brio.

The little fellow posed no serious threat, and yet Brio responded as if he were a charging bull. She lashed out with her foot. The pup squealed as he was bowled over onto his back. Then he started crying. It was the cry of an infant in pain — a cry that no mum can ignore.

His mother launched herself at Brio, slapping my face with her hind flippers as she rushed by. For a moment, Brio’s eyes opened as wide as the pup’s. Then she started moving backwards, unable to take her eyes off the angry animal. Faster and faster she went, continuing even when the seal had slowed. A foot hit a gap. She staggered, trying to regain her footing. But she had run out of rocks, and lost balance. She toppled backwards into one of the deep pools surrounding the colony.

If it had been anywhere else on the edge of the platform, she would have been all right. Her problem was that, at that particular spot, just a metre from the edge, a small rock stuck up through the kelp forest. It was at exactly the right position to smash into her back as she fell.

She didn’t scream or yell or make any noise. Shock registered on her face before she slipped to the side, off the rock and into the pool. Her wetsuit bubbled as it filled with water. For a time, the floating kelp formed a bed that supported her. But not for long. Soon, she began to sink.

By then I was standing at the edge looking down at her. The seals had retreated until they were no longer in the glow of the spotlight. We had the stage to ourselves. In a play or movie, I would have been the winning hero looking down at the defeated villain wondering how it had come to an end like this. And Brio — the villain — would, in her last seconds of life, be showing signs of remorse for all the hurt and pain she had created for others.

But it wasn’t like that at all. She showed no remorse. Nothing was said. She just lay limply in the water. If she showed any emotion, it was one of surprise.

Even when the water covered her face, there was little change except for a brief gurgling sound. Her eyes remained open, staring up at me.

Suddenly, the anger I’d felt over dinner came back with full force. This wasn’t right. She was going to die without ever knowing what she’d done to Murph and Harriet.

‘No!’ I screamed. ‘No!’

I leapt into the water. Kelp vines wrapped around my arms and legs, but they were no match for my anger. Nothing was going to stop me: I was going to do this no matter what it took. I had to do this for Murph.

Lifting her head out of the water was easy. A spluttering sound came from her open mouth. At least she was breathing again. Apart from that there was little to indicate she was alive. Her arms and legs were as lifeless as those of a rag doll.

Hauling her up onto the rocks was always going to be difficult, considering the difference in our sizes. Matters weren’t helped by the slime on the rocks, the clinging kelp, or her unresponsive body. Nonetheless, soon we were both lying on the edge of the platform. While I puffed noisily from the exertion, there was just the faintest of gurgles as her chest moved in and out.

By then my anger was spent and I began to think sensibly again. I’d saved her from the water, but that was as far as I could go. I knew nothing about first aid other than to lay her on her side to drain the water. I certainly couldn’t get her up the cliff. That would have to be left to others.

I looked up and saw that there were now several torches moving on the slope. It looked like the rescue teams were already on their way. All I had to do was find a more comfortable spot and wait.

I found it back against the cliff. Thousands of years of sea erosion had formed small, rounded depressions, which were almost like armchairs carved into the rock. I dragged Brio across and propped her up in one of them. At a glance you
would have thought she was having a quiet rest. I took another space almost directly opposite her.

In our prehistoric lounge, we were sheltered from the main glare of the spotlight. The lighting was almost intimate — perfect for telling a story. So that’s what I did. I told her the story of Murph, Harriet and me.

I went right back to the beginning, to when I was just a kid who was scared of this skinny old man who always looked grumpy and made huge cigarettes that caused him to cough and splutter so much. I told her about the bike crash and how I met Harriet for the first time, and eventually came to know Murph as a person. Finally, I told her about the events of the past two weeks, ending up with the deaths of Harriet and Murph.

All the time I was talking I watched her face, looking for some sort of reaction. I saw none. Not until the very end after I’d told her that Murph had died.

She opened her mouth to say something. She formed two words, but no sound would come. Then she began to cry. Streams of tears poured down her cheeks, and for a moment I thought I was witnessing true remorse.

That was until I worked out what she’d being trying to say. It was: ‘Who cares?’ And I’m sure that if her larynx had worked, I would have heard her little-girl voice. And then I knew that the tears were not for Murph at all. The words ‘who cares’ summed it all up. Everyone cared except for her. She was crying for herself, not for Murph or Harriet. Everything she’d done right from the start had been all about her. Why would I expect her tears to be any different?

T
he rescue of Nick and Brio took many hours. Nick had to be lifted up to the colony, and Brio stretchered off the rocks by boat. It would have been a lot quicker if there had not been a major argument between the medical team and Cathy. Dad told me about it later.

Apparently there was a long-standing agreement that helicopters would not fly over Taiaroa Head. Apart from the stress caused to the birds, there was a high probability of collisions between animal and machine. However, on that night the paramedic team wanted to bend the rule and use the rescue helicopter to extract Brio, saying that time was important for the well-being of their patient.

The Albatross Centre staff said no, and that’s when things got a little ugly. The paramedics accused them of putting the
welfare of birds ahead of people’s lives; that they were treating the albatross as more important than humans.

Cathy Andrews jumped in, to say that some humans
were
of lesser importance than the birds.

‘That woman has shown no respect for any of the birds on the peninsula,’ she said. ‘Why should we make them suffer more just so she can have a speedy rescue?’

‘They’re going to suffer anyway!’ responded the leader of the team. ‘Those albatrosses are already as good as dead, aren’t they?’

According to Dad, Cathy then became very still. She glared at the paramedic, and quietly said, ‘No! They are not going to die. I will do everything within my power to keep them alive, which begins now by making sure no helicopter flies anywhere near them tonight.’

And with that, the argument ended.

Fortunately, a team had already got Nick onto a stretcher, and it was not long before he was in an ambulance on his way to Dunedin Hospital.

Brio was not so lucky, which meant neither was I, because I had to wait down there with her. At first I did think of climbing back up the cliff and leaving her by herself. But something deep within me wouldn’t let it happen. So I stayed.

After Murph’s story, we waited in silence. Not that she seemed to have any choice about that. On a couple of occasions she tried to make a sound, without success. However, she did manage to start moving her fingers, then her hands, and by the time the medical team arrived, she could move her arms a little.

The sky was beginning to lighten by then, and I welcomed them and the new dawn with relief. Unfortunately, that feeling of relief did not last long. Straight away the leader started picking on me. Later, Dad explained that it was just the backlash from the argument over the helicopter, but at the time the comments hurt.

‘She should not have been moved,’ said the leader, glaring at me. ‘Don’t you know anything about first aid?’

‘She was drowning: I had to move her or she would have died.’

‘You should have just kept her head out of the water,’ he said. ‘By lifting her out and then dragging her over the rocks, you’ve probably added to her injuries.’

‘I thought I was doing the right thing,’ I defended myself.

‘Well, you weren’t!’

All of this happened well away from where Brio was being strapped to a stretcher. She might not have been able to hear what was being said, but she could see. When the leader had finished, I looked over and saw her staring at me with a gloating smirk on her face. I shook my head in disbelief. There she was, lying on a stretcher, probably crippled for life, and yet she still was acting as though she had won. And the sad fact was that if any albatross died, there’d be little doubt that she had.

The battle to save the big birds began soon after I’d been rescued, although I didn’t know about it until later as I spent
most of the day sleeping. When I finally emerged just after three, Colin Saxton and a policeman were interviewing Dad in the lounge. I scarcely had a chance to get some food before it was my turn. They took me through the events of the night without providing anything back in return. So it wasn’t until Cathy arrived for dinner that I caught up with what had been happening.