The Sea Inside

their fellow creatures. I imagine other subjects that have passed through this room – from a giant leatherback turtle splayed over the tiles, to other exotic animals from the modern menagerie next door: elephants, antelopes, apes.
    The high-pitched squeal of machinery stops, and Rob calls me back in. He has cut off the back of the creature’s skull. There’s a burning smell in the air, familiar from the dentist’s chair. White flecks of sawn bone are strewn over the red tissue. Rob eases away the section of cranium and digs around inside with his scalpel, as though working on a giant oyster. With a plop, the loosened brain falls out into his hands. It fills his cupped palms like a wobbly, incarnadined blancmange. Jiggling it in his fingers, Rob points out the cranial lobes and the cerebellum. What information did this organ process in the final few minutes of its owner’s existence? Earlier in the dissection, we’d seen the porpoise’s overdeveloped adrenal glands, bigger in proportion because of all the stress the animal had suffered in its life.
    It is now that Rob reveals the reason for this animal’s death; a conclusion he suspected all along, and which its blood-flooded brain confirms. The porpoise was murdered by its own cousins, the bottlenose dolphins of Cardigan Bay, the latest in a long line of such fatalities, no fewer than three hundred known incidents in the past twenty years, perhaps indicating many more.
    I imagine that attack. Some testosterone-fuelled young dolphin decided to play with its fellow cetacean’s life, treating its body like a rugby ball, tossing it high in the air with a flick of its powerful hard beak, then repeatedly butting it till the porpoise’s ribs snapped and its liver split. I hope that it lost consciousness before the gulls descended to peck out its eyes. Later, I speak to a researcher from the scene of the crime. She tells me she has often found dead porpoises on the beach that look similarly unscathed, until, with a depression of the foot, you realise every rib has been broken. The phenomenon may be a recent one, or it may not. Perhaps the dolphins’ ever-present smiles have kept us from this shocking discovery: that they could be such cold-hearted killers. Mostly young adult males are to blame, and attacks happen around periods of mating – indicating that the porpoises may be the victims of male aggression over access rights to fertile females.
    Adult males may mistake the porpoises for infant dolphins whose existence challenges their genetic legacy. Whatever the reason, the evidence is clear: dolphins are not the benevolent mammals we’d like them to be; those beaming faces hide the minds of assassins. A few months later, I’d visit Spey Bay in the Highlands of Scotland, home of another resident pod of bottlenose dolphins; they too have been implicated in offences against their cousins. As they swim under the boat, out of the misty North Sea, I realise that they are huge creatures, up to twelve feet long, almost black, with white bellies that flash as they leap. It’s easy to imagine their power; or why one local man tells me that when he goes fishing up to his thighs in the bay and sees those dark fins coming nearer, he quickly orders his dog out of the water, for fear – rational or not – that they might turn and go for it.
    As I stand in the dissection room, looking at this carcase laid out for my edification, I feel a sense of privilege to have been granted such an access to its inner secrets. Its anatomy is so close to ours; every excised organ is a reminder that what is contained within the mammal’s blubbery coat is also held together by my bag of skin and frame of bones. As it is taken apart, so am I, all my bones and organs and skin and guts. I’m looking at myself.
    Outside, the macaws are calling loudly from their cages. I cycle off into the dusk, the smell of porpoise in my hair.

The azure sea

These whales are reported to have their
lairs … their own territories and apportioned
dwelling-places, and remain there without
trespassing on their neighbours’ preserves.
They do not rove aimlessly to and fro seeking
changes of abode, but love their own home
as if it were their native country, and find it
gratifying to linger there.

S T A MBROSE ,
Hexameron



F rom my plane window, the islands seem to rise up as if newly erupted from the sea. It’s four years to the day since I last came here. I know that because the same festival is in