In the first week at the Wendy house she spent the evenings at the taverns drinking and singing with her mates. She staggered back to the Wendy house, sometimes at three in the morning. She found him asleep in his sleeping bag in the kitchen and never woke him up. Instead she crept into her bed, leaving the lights on. However drunk she might be, she never forgot to leave the lights on. In the morning he would patiently warn her of the dangers of walking alone at night. She would only laugh and say: “You are beginning to behave like a husband… which is rather sweet. It would be sweeter if you did other husbandly things too.”
But by the end of the second week she had stopped going to the taverns, and she made a whole fanfare of it. She announced grandly: “I have stopped for your sake… to make you happy.” So, indeed, he should be grateful for such a wonderful gift. Now she spends all her time between the mansion and the Wendy house, and between the Wendy house and the beach.
He has taught her to waltz to the songs of the whales. These are the most exhilarating moments of his life. Sharisha has gone back to the southern seas, but other southern rights are still here, providing the music. Sometimes a humpback visits and adds its thrilling notes. At dawn the Whale Caller wakes Saluni up and together they go to the Voelklip beach. Sometimes, more often of late, it is Saluni who wakes him up, since now she has got into the spirit of things. If the whales happen not to be there that dawn he calls them with his horn and they respond. He gets hold of Saluni and together they float on the sand as if they are riding the clouds, as he used to float, albeit on a rocky surface, during his days at the Church of the Sacred Kelp Horn.
At first Saluni was not too excited about these early morning frolics. But she decided to indulge him, especially after he had deserted her for the whole day and night to be with Sharisha on the eve of her departure.
Saluni had only been staying with him in the Wendy house for about ten days when one night the Whale Caller had a nightmare: Sharisha was being attacked by hordes of killer whales. The deadly oreas were concentrating mostly on the callosities, biting chunks away. The water around her was red. He woke up screaming. He knew at once that Sharisha would be leaving soon. Nightmares were her way of communicating that to him. He rushed to the bedroom and woke Saluni up to tell her of his fears. She was not pleased at all; especially because her head was pounding from a hangover. The previous night she had finished a whole bottle of wine brought from the mansion, while watching the Whale Caller cook his staple of macaroni and cheese. The drinking had continued while they ate the supper and while he washed the plates and pot. He had gone to sleep in the kitchen as usual, leaving her sitting on the bed, pretending to be in some tavern; singing colourful songs and cracking dirty jokes to herself, then rocking the Wendy house with her gruff laughter. To be woken up so early in the morning on account of bad dreams about whales was not something she was ready to entertain.
She shouted: “You and that ugly fish! I hope it goes away… forever! Maybe we’ll have some peace when it’s gone.”
Without another word, the Whale Caller dressed up in his tuxedo, took his horn and left Saluni in bed nursing her precious hangover.
This time he went to his peninsula where he knew the curious could only watch from a distance. He blew his kelp horn, praying that Sharisha had not migrated yet. Her head emerged from the water, only fifty metres away. She rose out of the water and then crashed down with a loud splash. Refreshing droplets sprayed him. She rose again, turned in the air above the water, and then, with her back arched, fell backwards on the water, with a yet louder splash. Seagulls flocked to pick up from the surface of the water pieces of skin that she had shed as she breached. There would be some lice to pick up too, now that she had been infested. Sharisha breached like that repeatedly, increasing the pace as the Whale Caller got more excited.
The rising sun found him sitting on a rock and blowing his kelp horn. Sharisha responded with her own love calls. She rocked in the water in a mating dance. The Whale Caller stood up and rocked on the rocks. He raised his left leg, turned and twisted on one spot, then stamped the foot down. He did the same with the right leg. He repeated this dance in rapid succession for a long time, whilst blowing the sounds of the whining wind. People gathered on the shore and watched. Even those who had regularly watched the Whale Caller at his antics with the whales had never seen anything like this before. He did not seem to tire. He just went on and on raising his legs, spinning his sturdy body in the air, and then stamping his feet on the rocks. Sharisha did not seem to tire either. She was creating a whirlwind on the water by making a complicated combination of rocking, breaching and lobtailing. The rocking part — moving from side to side, and then forwards and backwards — fascinated the onlookers most for they had never seen a whale do anything like that.
By midday Saluni was getting very worried about him. She could hear the horn from the Wendy house. There was a particular timbre of sadness in it that she could not stand. The very thought that he was with Sharisha infuriated her. At first she wanted to go down there and drag him out of his foolish trance. But her pride would not let her do that. Instead she went to the mansion. Even as she was playing and singing with the Bored Twins, picking the tulips that grew like wild flowers among the shrubs, her mind was at the rocky peninsula, wondering what the Whale Caller and Sharisha were up to at that moment. She was confident that when she returned to the Wendy house in the late afternoon, the Whale Caller would be over his madness. He would be waiting for her with a bowl of macaroni and cheese, as he always did.
But Saluni had not reckoned with the power of the whirlwind that Sharisha was generating in the sea, locking the Whale Caller tightly in her embrace. The sun was about to set and the Whale Caller had not returned. Saluni swallowed her pride and went down to the shore. The biggest crowd she had ever seen at his whale-calling events had gathered. People were clapping their hands in accompaniment to the kelp horn. And to Sharisha’s grunts and groans. It reminded Saluni of the charismatic church services that were sometimes held in circus-like tents by visiting superstar pastors. People babbling things whose meaning no one could fathom, then falling on the ground shouting the name of the Lord and foaming at the mouth. When they woke up they were saved and their road to Heaven was guaranteed. Only here the things they were babbling had nothing to do with the Lord. While some were egging the Whale Caller on, others were directing their encouragement to the whale. There were those who were just screaming and whimpering, as if they shared the ecstasy of the man and his whale.
Saluni decided to stop the whole circus once and for all. She tried to walk across the precarious rocks to the tip of the peninsula where the Whale Caller continued his dance oblivious of the world around him.
“Hey, what is she trying to do? She will fall into the water,” said a breathless spectator.
“It’s Saluni the village drunk,” observed another. “She must be zonked as usual.”
“Where do you think you are going, Saluni?” the people asked.
“To stop this whole nonsense,” said Saluni, trying to keep her balance by stretching her arms out and stepping delicately on the sharp rocks.
“She’s gone bonkers,” someone said. “She is going to kill herself in her madness.”
It was obvious that she would not make it, especially in her state of inebriation. She walked back to the shore and stood there in front of everyone. She shouted at the Whale Caller: “Come on, man, stop your rubbish with that fish and come back home!”
But the Whale Caller did not come home that evening. He did not come home that night either. The spectators went to their homes and to their hotels to sleep. Sharisha and the Whale Caller continued their dance unabated. Deep in the night the wails of his horn could be heard, sometimes sounding like a muted cornet and at others like a “last post” bugle, and then picking up again in the fast-paced scatting of a demented jazz singer. In the cool breeze of the night, and with the absence of spectators, the dance became even more frenzied. His horn penetrated deep into every aperture of the whale’s body, as if in search of a soul in the midst of all the blubber.