She looked at the picture again. The boy didn’t know how the film men could change things, how they could change young men into old, and back again, legs into ivory stumps, rubbish bins into barrels, how they could paint a cliff in, or take one away.
It was her. She had been there.
The grandchildren came with the summer, sent for sun and fresh sea air. Yet they spent their days staring at screens, and flicked their thumbs up and down. They said you could find the whole world in a phone.
Still, if she asked, they would take her to the harbour. There was colour, now. Blue, red, yellow painted houses. An ice-cream van. Rainbow sun-shades.
‘Much better,’ people said.
The film people had taken the colour away – what little there was back then. They didn’t want it. Not here. They wanted drab stone, moulding wood, grimed window-panes. Cobbles. They could magic all these, as they had done with the cliff, and the signs. But it had been many years before the colour came, following the tourists, who had finally discovered the town, along with their ice-creams and crab sandwiches and boat-trips. Yes, they did that now, sleek, fast boats, out into the bay, bird-watching, dolphin-spotting, paying good money. ‘No sightings guaranteed…’ When they came back, she would hear their wonder. ‘I saw a fin!’ ‘It jumped out of the water!’ ‘They followed us for ages!’ A whale, sometimes, a small affair, and yet they made such a fuss.
What was so special about this, she asked herself? Dark curves, that could hardly be glimpsed, except through a glass. Camouflaged by the black troughs of the sea, except for those showy jumps.
Her whale moved on top of the water.
It was white, and huge.
‘I’ve seen a whale,’ she wanted to say, the words coming close to her mouth.
‘I’ve seen a whale,’ she said. ‘Here, just here, and then…’
The children, or children’s children, hurried her away.
On her good days, they would take her to the cliffs, where the farm had been.
‘I was born here, it was my home,’ she would tell them, waving towards the buildings behind her. Holiday cottages, now, ‘sought after, in sight of the sea.’ Yes, it was what she woke up to, every day. It was part of her. They had said the same about the story; the sea was part of it, too. The sea meant something, like those other things that were supposed to mean something.
This place, high up, looking both ways, was one of her favourites. The water did everything here, on different days, at different times. And it was where she had seen the whale disappear.
‘I ran, as soon as the mooring broke free. I knew which way it would go; I knew the currents. They – the film people – followed only the marked tracks, and stumbled at each outcrop. Have I told you this before?’
She followed the beast along the coast, running from cove to cove, over the cliff tops.
‘My pink hair-slide broke free and skittered down the cliff. I couldn’t see above the height of the gorse, but I knew where I was going – home. I was the one who got here first. I was the one to see the whale rounding the corner. I was the one to see it disappear, with the famous actor tied to the side.’
They always shuffled glances then, in time with their feet; their thumbs would start that fidgeting again, and they would say, ‘No, no!’ ‘It wasn’t like that at all.’ ‘Look, it says here…’
They showed her things she didn’t want to see – a picture of a white cylinder, with wires and cogs behind, a man pulling levers inside.
‘Look!’ They were fond of that word. And she lowered her eyes to whatever was on the little screen. But she saw nothing, she didn’t have to see, unless she wanted to.
They told her things she didn’t want to hear.
There was no whole whale. Just bits – a tail, a head, sections that they moved around on a barge, putting them in the water when needed. Or… there were three models, but none of them whole…
Sixty feet, eighty-five feet, one whale, three. No whales, parts of whales, a model in a tank, a picture on a studio wall. Rubber, steel.
‘An internal engine to pump the spouting water!’
‘Dye in the latex skin, so that it could “bleed”!’
‘A publicity stunt, Nain! Just imagine the press coverage such a story would get. “Hollywood star nearly drowns, swept out to sea on the back of a whale!”’
‘A myth,’ another announced. ‘Built from half-truths, a muddle of events. Look, a section broke free; the actor nearly drowned being dunked in a tank in the studio. Then they all said different things. The coastguard sailed to the rescue! The RAF was called! But none of it happened! The camera guy says this… the director says that… Gregory Peck something else entirely! But they all seem to settle on “No whale!”’
‘No,’ she said. ‘They must have forgotten. They had so much to do. They moved on quickly.’
They moved on to another film, another story. It became nothing to them.
The children leave with the summer. She is glad.
Soon, everything they’ve said is gone again. All the ‘looks’ bundled away, along with their forgotten names. And the whale drifts out of the harbour, great, white, whole, with the famous actor trapped in a web of twine. She runs along the cliff, her pink slide falls, and there it is again.
Soon, she sees the sea every day, just as in her childhood, in this place they’ve put her in, calling it ‘home’. Home again, sea again.
And there are new people who listen to her story, and say ‘How interesting!’ Or, ‘Good!’ no matter how many times she tells it. She cannot see the film any more – her eyes are too dim. Besides, none of the other ‘residents’ want to watch it. But the nice girls will read to her from the book, if she asks, when they have the time.
It is the ending she wants to hear. How Ahab raises his hand from the flank of the whale, beckoning his crew to carry on with the kill.
‘I saw it,’ she tells them. ‘I saw the whale disappear into the mist, with the famous actor tied to its side. He waved at me, so I said, “Goodbye.”’
‘No,’ the girl who is reading to her that day tells her, a girl who pays attention to the words on the page. ‘Ahab gets pulled into the water. It’s the Parsee who is caught on the whale. And he doesn’t wave. They changed it for the film. They changed the whole ending. It’s what they do, for dramatic effect.’
After the girl has gone, she puts the book in the bin.
And the whale turns towards the open sea, and the man raises his hand to her.
‘Goodbye.’
DAVID ROSE
GREETINGS FROM THE FAT MAN IN POSTCARDS
This could be, if Bognor had a cathedral, a tale of two cities, twin poles in the life of Wilson Thomas.
– I’m going as far as Guildford. Any good to you?
The shortest distance between two points, there being no motorway, is a meander, in this case the A285, A283 and A3100. It is on these procrastinating curves that Wilson Thomas has come to rely for his mental health, his life.
– You can put that nightie on the back seat.
There is another, identical, locked in the boot.
– Little gift for my wife. Well, I say my wife. Always take them something when I go home. Was it a holiday in Bognor, or business? Personally I live there. Not easy to own up to. I mean, what does anyone know about Bognor except George the whatsit’s dying words? Bugger Bognor. (Map of Britain. Bognor marked in red. Caption: Welcome to Bognor, Backdoor of Britain.) Its only claim to fame. Almost Joycean. Irishman goes for a job on a building site. Foreman asks him, sort of proficiency test, ‘What’s the difference between a joist and a girder?’ Quick as a flash on a frosty night he comes back, ‘One wrote Ulysses, the other wrote Faust.’ Not a literary man, then? Visit the pier? (Two explorers silhouetted in a tent. Night time. Caption: ‘Where’s my pith helmet?’) Met my wife on the pier. Donald McGill exhibition. Working visit for me. Professional card-man. I like to say that. Shades of green shades, sleazy glamour. Actually more prosaic. Belle Vue Cards. I rep for them. Plus a little creative work. My wife helps me with that. Amateur cartoonist.