She poured me tea. Her forearms were skinny under three-quarter length sleeves, and as she held the pot over our cups, I tried not to look at the scars that marked them. Puncture marks and ragged slashes, they were livid and in various stages of healing. One wound looked as if it had barely stopped seeping, but Granny didn’t mention them so I didn’t either. Part of that was politeness, part of it was disturbance, and part of it was that I felt she was showing them off and I didn’t want to indulge her. Instead, I sipped the tea that was too weak and too lemony.
She smirked at me over the edge of her teacup, and I suspected that my refusal to look was indulgence enough.
“You disagree with what she did,” said Granny. “The Sea Witch.”
“It’s not a matter of disagreement,” I said. “I understand there was no help for it. Marjorie wasn’t well. She wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“You’re calling her Marjorie out of spite,” said Granny. “You never called her that while she was alive. You were too kind for that. I’m glad you don’t feel the need to display that kindness any longer.” She placed her teacup back on the saucer with a brittle clink. “Good. I was hoping you weren’t a milksop.”
I drank more of the revolting tea, if only to have an excuse not to answer. I didn’t consider myself a pushover, but it didn’t seem wise to admit it. Bragging of that sort encouraged people to experiment with how much pushing a person could withstand. Besides, that limited praise had given me an inkling as to Granny’s reason for speaking to me in the first place.
“This is a recruiting pitch.” Of all the ridiculous things — I could see George’s face, the disgust and the skepticism. No one needed to be recruited for anything connected with Grief. It came or it didn’t, and working with it too closely, looking at it too closely … there were some who considered that invitation. “I already have a job.”
Granny shrugged and poured herself more tea. The scars stretched like thick red webbing over her arm as she placed the teapot once more between us.
“You’ve kept your joy in the world,” said Granny, stirring the sugar into her cup. “Those revolting jellyfish. I suppose someone has to love them.”
There was no response I could give to that either. Climate has done for some species, and done better for others. I wished there was a correspondence to Grief but there wasn’t. The man who gave the keynote address at a conference I attended two years ago was as involved in jellyfish as I am — his papers were required reading — but that didn’t stop his Grief, and he’d hung himself five months after the symptoms first appeared, tears streaming from his eyes and as far from ocean as he could get, or so his mourning husband had claimed in the obituary. Whatever the dead man had Grieved for, it hadn’t been jellyfish. The loss was something that no saltwater could soften.
Granny leaned forward. “How much could you love if the world were different?” she said. “Can you take that level of joy in something other than jellyfish?”
“I don’t see why not.” It was a flippant response, though, so I stopped to consider. “It’s difficult to say. The world isn’t different. If the jellyfish were all destroyed, the oceans would be an emptier place. They’d be a shadow of a marvel for me, I think. It would feel as if something had gone out of my heart. I’d hope I could find something to replace it, but who knows. It doesn’t seem to work that way for others.”
“The Sea Witch thought it might work that way for you,” said Granny. “She said you had a facility for replacement.”
“Doesn’t sound very complimentary, that.”
“I didn’t say it meant to be. Truthful, though. Her perceptions were very much unclouded. She had a gift, you see. The sanest of them all. She could see what was needed. She could see she didn’t have it. I think she was sorriest for that in the end … That her Grief was so purely internal. Rubbish and plastic, the ghosts of organisms that hadn’t died. She’d have been better focusing on the really dead.”
As far as I was concerned, the Sea Witch focused on nothing but the dead, on an ecosystem that could never recover. The last thing it made her was better off. The loss of the Reef was sickening, and I’d vomited up that anger and depression, and perhaps that purging had kept me from a greater sense of loss, and one more ultimately futile. Acknowledgement of the dead was never the problem.
Granny stirred more sugar into her tea, and the spoon squealed along the side of her china cup. “What if she could have brought it back?” she said.
The kittens, the pups … I didn’t know what to call them.
“Joeys,” said Granny, but the word didn’t make a difference. There were still ghosts in my lap. Small, nuzzling ghosts. I could see the faint pattern of stripes that started behind their shoulders and followed the spine over their rumps, the tail that seemed too long for their bodies, the round-eared, triangular face that reminded me of weasels. Miniature versions of the creatures that adorned Granny’s walls in photograph and video.
“I didn’t realize you’d been successful.” This should have been all over the news — the resurrection of an extinct species. I’d been focused elsewhere, but how had I missed this?
“No one does,” said Granny. “Let’s just say this is a private project. And it’s going to stay that way. We’ve spent many years trying to bring back the thylacines,” said Granny. “Piecing together the DNA, failing again and again.”
I didn’t know why
