Naomi Foyle
J-2 and Aunt Mary
On the radio they are talking about orcas and the menopause.
Among mammals, it transpires, female humans and orcas are evolutionary rebels,
sharing a rare mid-life rejection of reproductive duties, and understanding why
a centenarian orca matriarch enjoys six pregnancy-free decades
might help solve the puzzle of the dissent of women.
Hypotheses arrive on sound waves from the Salish Sea:
the help J-2 gives her daughters and their calves–warning of danger
with a lob-tailing water-slap, leading the pod to scarce shoals in lean years–
eliminates the need to produce her own new offspring; she also catches fish
for her sons, mummy’s boys who only live until thirty and will die early if she does,
but whose children will be raised in other pods by other grandmothers, ensuring
maximum mitochondrial DNA distribution for minimal maternal effort.
As usual the scientists boil the bones down to biological cost-benefit,
fixed gender roles, intergenerational conflict, a selfish genetic imperative–
leaving the mysteries of life intact. Oh, I grant there’s some truth
to ‘the grandmother hypothesis’: after all, my beloved Aunt,
your own behaviour is decidedly orca-like. How can I forget the way,
when you found me stranded, you sheltered me in the channel of your kindness,
fed me the salmon of wisdom from the pond at Tharston,
until the pod shone again around us in abundant waters.
But thinking, Mary, of your widowed pursuit of family history, how you defied
dyslexia to decipher the spidery Latin of parish records, the mossy gravestone
in Ashwellthorpe that refutes the Huguenot claim on our name; recalling
your red binders full of Norfolk matrons, housemaids, butchers, bachelors, rectors,
Essex coopers, Yorkshire china dealers, Scottish embroiderers, Suffolk sailors,
Baghdadi carpet sellers, Welsh in-laws, Australian nurses, Afro-Caribbean-,
Indian- and Irish-Chinese-Canadian nieces and nephews, continents of cousins,
baptisms, burials, marriages, spinsters, out-of-wedlock babes, all annotated
and remembered each year to a three-hundred-plus Christmas card list…
I can’t help but wonder if, as J-2 plunges through the vast green light
of Desolation Sound and Discovery Passage, she can still hear the echoes
of her grandmother’s whistles and clicks, the whines of calves, her own long-past
grunts and moans: if the whole wild cold ocean teems with orca songlines–
a host of spectral descants the queen of the sea calls home.
