The Blue Whales
By
Gwen Grant
Copyright 2012 by Gwen Grant
Smashwords Edition
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There were blue whales between me and him. Blue whales in a sea that glittered in the sunlight. But it wasn’t. Sunlight that was just a kind of blazing white with nothing gold in it. There were no prisms or shafts or rays of golden sunshine making everything it touched warm and golden because I looked and didn’t see one.
Not one.
I wanted to see them but you can’t see what’s not there and even if they had been there, I wouldn’t have believed in them.
Whatever had been gold about that sunlight had long since been bleached away and, watching those blue whales, the biggest mammals in the world, I didn’t care.
All I could see was a bare white light, so bare, the whales looked as if they were in an old black and white photo like the ones my Gran keeps in a red plastic album.
The man was a long way away but there was some sort of curve in the sea so that he tipped towards and above me, close enough that I could have seen up his nose if I’d wanted to.
I didn’t want to.
Just as I didn’t want to see those baggy jeans he wears and which he thinks are so cool and the sweatshirt he’s had since the wheel was invented.
But I could see them.
There were words written on the
sweatshirt, so faded, I couldn’t quite see what they said but I
knew what they said.
They said, ‘Save the whale.’
I never used to like whales. He did. He liked them a lot. He was really into whales.
‘You know where you are with whales,’ he always said.‘ You can see where they’re coming from.’
‘Yeah,” I would agree. ‘That’s because they’re so big.’
‘I don’t mean like that,’ he would go on. ‘I mean you know where they’re coming from e-mo-tion-ally, (he didn’t really say it like this – it just felt as if he did), because you know what they’re like. They’re kind, are whales. And loyal. And reliable. And trustworthy.’
It’s a wonder he didn’t put me off whales for life.
Once, I asked him if he’d had a whale when he was a little boy.
‘A toy one, I mean.’
‘Yes, I did,’ he said, beaming. ‘Now, how did you know? Your Granny been telling stories again?’
‘No,’ I sighed. ‘I just guessed.’
‘Did you know that whales play?’ he goes on.
‘What at? Football?’
‘Very funny!’
‘Yes, Dad, I know whales play because thanks to you, there’s nothing I don’t know about whales.’
‘Ah,’ he smiled. ‘You don’t have to thank me. It’s been a pleasure.’
He knew what I meant. He knew I was being sarky but he nearly always pretended he didn’t know. He pretended he took things exactly as you said them.
But I know he didn’t because sometimes, his eyes used to flash fire and I would wait to see if he would lose it.
It was like watching Sumo wrestling.
You could practically hear, ‘So, help me, I’m going to kill him,’ go smack on the ground one minute, and, ‘Give me strength!’ lift its chin of the floor the next.
‘Still,’ my Dad would go tightly on, ‘Can you imagine that, Charley? Whales playing.’
“Yeah! Yeah!”
I would still be trying to rattle his cage but the second he thought about whales playing, he was done for and we had to have a violin break.
Wahwahwahwahwahhhhhhhh!
‘And they look after each other,’ he would go on, practically sobbing. ‘They don’t desert each other. Did you know that, Charley?’
‘Yes!’
‘And when one of them’s wounded, the others rally round.’
Second violin break.
‘No kidding?’
I always wanted to swear at this point but I never dared.
He would ignore me.
“And if one of them is dying, they all stay until that whale is dead.’
This was the bit I really hated. I don’t know about the whales but it always stopped me dead. And, if I’m truthful, which I try not to be, that was the moment I started to like whales. Of course, I wouldn’t show it to him. No way. One drop of encouragement and before you knew where
you were, he’d be sitting on the edge of my bed wanting to share his records and asking if, ‘there’s anything you want to tell me.’
And you can’t hardly answer, ‘Yeah. Push off.’
Can you?
‘Dad!’ I would yell. ‘I know all this!’
My Dad used to tell me bedtime stories about, guess what? Yeah, whales.
He even had a version where the Three Bears were whales who lived on the seabed and Goldilocks was a wicked whaler with oxygen tanks strapped to her back.
Actually, I didn’t mind that one.
But I used to pretend to be asleep when he started on the story of how the good ole whales stuck to each other through thick and thin. Mostly thin. By the time he’d finished, I just wanted an orca to come along and rip the injured whale’s tongue out and kill it stone dead. Get it over and done with so that I could come out from under my pillow.
‘That’s what killer whales do, you know,’ my Dad would say.
‘I know,’ I would yell. ‘You’ve told me already.’
But my Dad would just sail on.
‘Of course, killer whales are just doing what comes naturally but what whalers do isn’t natural. That’s why we have to stop the killing. Remember that, Charley.’
‘I don’t want to remember,’ I would sulk.
‘Of course, you do,’ he would say. ‘Whales can’t sign Petitions but we can. We have to look out for them because they can’t look out for themselves. You know that. The biggest mammals in the world, yet likely to be extinct within my lifetime. Or, yours. They’ve no mercy, those whalers. They injure one whale so that the others will come to its help, then they kill them off, too. They can wipe out a whole school of whales in next to no time.’
My Mum used to go ballistic when she heard my Dad telling me these stories.
‘What are you trying to do to him, Matthew?’ she would cry. ‘He’ll grow up all miserable and have no friends and for why? I’ll tell you for why. Because he’ll be thinking about dead whales all the time, that’s why!
‘But you want to know, don’t you?’ my Dad would plead and I would go,
‘No!’
I knew what my Dad was trying to do with these stories. He was trying to turn me into a ‘Save the Whaler’ but I figured one in the family was already one too many.
And I hated the stories.
I hated them because just listening to what my Dad told made me churn up inside. I was only a kid then and every time he told me about the dying whales, I wanted to rush out, hire a boat like at a boating lake, paddle into the Arctic or somewhere and haul the blue whales in.
Keep them safe in our bath, I suppose.
I’m older now but I still feel the same way. I mean, I don’t hate the stories anymore but I still want to paddle out and save the whales.
That’ll be the day.
The only
way I’m going to be able to paddle anywhere is if someone invents a
paddle that works by itself.
Anyway, as I was saying, I could see my Dad because of the curve in the sea and even though he was miles away, I could have touched him.
If I’d leant forward, I could have touched him and that would have been dead easy because his hand was reaching out to me, just as it always was.
But in my dream, I did what I always do.
I turned away from him.
Trouble with my Dad is that he never learns. It’s as if he’s always holding out his hand for the first time and he’s got no idea that you’ll turn away, so then you get this stupid thing where every time he does it, you have to decide to turn away.
It wears you out.
Why don’t parents ever learn?
I mean, sometimes, you might not even want to turn away but you have to. You have to maintain the status quo because nobody else will. The problem with parents is that they always live in the present. They’ve no thought for the future. They don’t see that ground rules have to be put into place. For parents, the future doesn’t exist.
In my dream, I could see my Dad’s face. I didn’t want to but I could. He had the kind of face which looked as if somebody had just drawn it, scribbling in the eyebrows, nose and mouth and sticking in a couple of crosses for the eyes.
My Dad’s eyes always seemed to fizz when he held out his hand to me but he’d drop his head so that no-one could see how he felt when I left him standing there, like a fool, with his hand stretched out and me not taking it.
Now I know what he felt like.
In my dream, I bent my head, too, so that when I held out my hand to Carla and she walked away without touching it, no-one saw anything.
Especially not Carla.
She’s done it once. Because I drooled. I drooled over her hands and there was all spit and blood on her fingers.
But I must have been wrong about nobody being able to see anything because as Carla walked away, my Mum said, ‘Don’t worry, Charley. She’ll be back.’
Carla was my friend. I liked her. I didn’t want her to walk away from me. I wanted her to walk towards me.
She was fun.
And she could run like the wind.
She ran for the school every year. We both did. But I always won. I was always first past the line.
‘That’s because she lets you be first, jackhead,’ my sister, Ann, would jeer. ‘Carla’s a much better runner than you, Charley.’
‘In your dreams,’ I would say.
And in my dream, the blue whales vanished and in their place were footballers playing on a muddy pitch.
My legs hurt.
That’s what I most aware of. That even in my dream my legs hurt. As if someone was rolling over them, backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards, and even when I cried out, ‘Stop! Stop!’ they kept right on.
I’d started out liking that dream. Being with the blue whales and everything because I’d wanted to swim.
I’d wanted to flip my legs in and out in the blue water, just as they did.
And I’d wanted to play before it was too late for me to play even though I knew it was already too late.
Yet, I didn’t to be with the whales half as much as I wanted to be with the footballers.
I knew all the players on that pitch.
They were my pals.
I couldn’t quite remember their names but I knew their faces. They were all there.
Mr. Simpson, our teacher, was there.
I like Mr. Simpson.
He came one night when I was lying in the dark. Not the dark like when you haven’t got a light on but the real dark.
The dark inside your head.
He sat on the chair next to the bed and he said, ‘You don’t need to answer, Charley. You don’t even need to think about it but it’s my understanding that you like whales.’
He was psychic.
Either that or the whales were splashing about on the wall and he could see them.
‘I recollect,’ Mr. Simpson goes on, ‘that I saw you with your Dad in town last week, getting people to sign that Petition to stop whale hunting. Now, then, am I right?’
He was right.
I ducked under the table when I saw him coming but he must have seen me.
‘Morning, Charley,’ he shouted, without once looking down. ‘Keep up the good work.’
I felt like a whale the night Mr. Simpson came. Like the one I’d see on Telly. The one that was dying, stranded on the sand, gasping and dying.
‘This is a real giant of a whale,’ the man on the telly said. ‘The biggest one I’ve ever seen.’
It was the biggest one I’d ever seen, as well.
If the biggest mammal on earth can be swept out of the sea like a bit of rubbish and dumped on the sand, what hope is there for me?
I look like a dying whale so maybe I’ll be classed as a bit of rubbish to be cleared away, as well.
I wasn’t sure about the whale bit but I did feel like rubbish. Rubbish that had been swept out of a bad dream and dumped into an even worse one, one that had a hospital and a bed and a Doctor in it and nurses who fed you and wiped your bum and helped you pee.
He was still there, I noticed.
He was like that at school, was Mr. Simpson.
One minute, the corridor would be empty, the next, he’d be standing over you, saying, ‘Office! Now!’
He was speaking and I could see the words coming out of his mouth with phosphorescence round them, so that a sort of luminous fire hung over each letter.
I wasn’t surprised.
I read somewhere that plankton glows and as whales eat plankton, I devoured Mr. Simpson’s words.
‘Your place in the team will be kept open for you, Charley,’ Mr. Simpson glowed. ‘So, don’t worry about that. You’re the best Goalie we’ve ever had. We lost the last match. Believe me, we’ll all be glad when you get back. Especially if you’re back before we play Ransome Street school.’
I wanted to ask if Carla was glad, as well.
But I didn’t.
You can’t ask Mr. Simpson that.
Instead, I tried to say, ‘Thanks,’ but all that came out of my mouth was a breath of phosphorescence which hung between us.
Then, I forgot Mr. Simpson because in my dream, I could see my Dad again and with the earth curving, I could see he was watching the match.
He was standing on the edge of the world and he was watching a football match.
I wasn’t watching the match.
I was watching the players.
They were kicking up mud and running through pools of filthy water, the water splashing up their legs. Their faces gleamed with sweat and rain all mingling together and I wanted that.
I couldn’t feel my body.
I couldn’t even feel a finger.
I wanted to be with them.
I wanted to BE them.
I wanted the rain to make me so wet, my hair would be plastered against my head and I would look like everybody else and no-one would be able to pick me out as being different.
No-one would be able to say, ‘Look at him.’
I wanted to kick the ball, pick it up and throw it, feeling the muscles in my shoulders and arms and legs moving because I had made them move. Not jumping and jerking by themselves.
And I wanted to feel hot and cold and, most of all, I wanted to feel like a blue whale, big and fast.
I just wanted to be where the other lads were.
And I managed it. In my dream I managed it. I got onto the pitch and my foot slammed down on the grass. My boot skidded on the mud and I felt the water, that cold muddy water splash up my legs and I closed my eyes and for that one second, that one ‘beat in time,’ that Miss Chandler, who teaches music, is always telling us about, that second was the best time of my life.
The very best time, a tine so great, you know you’re living two lives for the price of one.
That water, cold on my legs and the mud on my socks and my boots all slippery and my hair wet with rain and the rain running down my face. That was the best time of my life because even in my dream I knew I was never going to be able to do that again.
Perhaps that’s why the football pitch suddenly turned back into the sea. Because of how I felt.
I felt sick.
Sick with pain and fear.
When the football pitch turned into the sea, the lads I’d been playing with turned into blue whales who swam away, leaving me on my own and I wasn’t part of anything any more.
I was just me.
Just me watching the whales blowing water into the sky and it was like watching fireworks, like seeing a bonfire and free fireworks, and not being able to reach them.
But the blue whales hadn’t gone. They hadn’t left me. They came surging out of the ocean like rockets, standing straight in the air, their great curved tails slapping on the surface of the sea so that water cascaded and danced on top of the waves.
And I wondered why water could dance and I couldn’t even move. Couldn’t even bend a finger. Water doesn’t need to move. Water can just be. Water can just be in a cup or a pond or a lake or the sea and it’s all the same to the water but it’s different with people.
People need to move.
People don’t need to sit still for ever.
But I couldn’t move. I had to sit still. Lie still. Be still.
A whale came speeding towards me and I thought, ‘That whale’s come back for me, so it is like my Dad said. Whales are different. They are loyal and trustworthy. Yadda, yadda, yadda.’
But it wasn’t like that.
And it wasn’t a blue whale, either.
It was a killer whale who picked me up and threw me in the air and I came down, 'SPLAT’ on his back, like a cartoon.
SPLAT! I went.
SPLAT!
And my face split open, my legs buckled under me and the whale roared.
BAAAAAAAAAH!
Over and over and over I went on the whale’s back.
Then I saw my Dad. I saw him hold out his hand and, honest, I tried to reach it but I couldn’t.
The orca put his snout close to my lips, trying to force my mouth open
but I knew that if I opened my mouth, he would tear out my tongue. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even open my mouth. All I could do was think.
‘Dad,’ I thought.
But I couldn’t see my Dad and I thought he’d gone and he’d gone because of all the times I wouldn’t take his hand. But this time I had wanted to take it. I had.
Well, wanting wasn’t going to do me any good. It was too late for me to ever take my Dad’s hand again.
The orca bit into my lips and I knew I was going to die. I couldn’t live. I was too badly hurt. The orca would have me.
But then I saw my dad, swooping down the curve of the world, gliding between columns of tall water.
He was too late.
And Carla was too late, as well.
Carla, who came out of the ocean like a mountain, weed and fish and crustaceans tumbling off her, scattering over the waves.
Carla, who had turned away from me because I was drooling.
My Dad snatched me from the orca and tucked me under his fin, right next to Carla.
‘Hey, Charley,’ Carla said. ‘Listen, I’m going to win the next race if you’re not there to stop me. Hey! I’m going to win the next race even if you are there because you won’t be able to stop me.’
‘She lets you win.’
That was Ann.
‘Carla’s back, Charley. She never went away. She stayed with you.
Don’t you remember?’ My Mum.
All I remembered was drooling spit and blood onto Carla’s hand.
“She stayed until she was sent away.’ My Mum again.
My Dad.
‘Do you remember everything I told you, Charley?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘How whales never desert their wounded?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now, do you believe me?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
His breath was on my face and there was rain on my cheeks and a cool wind blowing over me.
‘Open your eyes,’ he said.
I opened my eyes.
And there was my Dad, wearing the same old sweatshirt with the same old ‘Save the Whale’ written on it.
And guess what?
He was holding my hand.
And his fin felt just the same as it had when I was little. Warm and bony and safe.