The Forever Whale

by Sarah Lean

  Jodie’s not going to Furze Island today, but I ask her to take me down to the museum at the quay, to see if there’s anything there about the war. She doesn’t agree straight away, but makes a phone call with her bedroom door shut and then comes out and says, “Fine.” I’m not sure why she’s so moody.

  We call for Linus on the way. I’ve got my video camera and binoculars that I take everywhere with me now.

  “Remember you said you saw a whale on the TV?” I ask, running to keep up with Linus on his scooter. “Did you see the one that’s in the English Channel?”

  “Slow down,” Jodie says, catching us up. “It’s not a race.”

  “Yeah, it was on the news,” Linus says, “but they haven’t said any more about it. I expect it’s gone now.”

  “Do you remember where exactly it was though?”

  “Near Dover I think, you know, where the ferry goes to France. I think people on the ferry saw it.”

  “Maybe Grandad went on that ferry once.”

  Jodie rolls her eyes, “Not that again. It’s two hundred miles away at least. It won’t still be there.”

  “I know that,” I say.

  “I think you’re on a wild goose chase,” she mutters. “You know as well as I do that people with Alzheimer’s put things in the wrong place and forget things. And they say things that don’t mean anything. They get their words wrong.”

  I hold Jodie’s arm, but she looks impatient to keep going. I stop her. Linus scoots on, freewheeling down the rest of Southbrook Hill.

  “I’m looking for the greatest power on earth and all you are is moody. Why do you have to make things sound so hopeless?”

  She sighs and I know she’s trying hard not to be mean. “I don’t want you to do all this and then find out there’s nothing at the end.” Her face softens. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I won’t,” I say. Because I truly believe that nothing to do with Grandad will ever hurt me.

  Jodie’s girlfriend meets her outside the museum and they go and sit on the wall by the quay and I leave the binoculars and camera with them because you’re not allowed to film in there. Linus leaves his scooter with them too and we go inside.

  We go straight to the room with things from the war. In the display cabinets are toys made of tin, tins of food, kitchen things that are exactly the same as at Miss Bennett’s house, bullet shells, ration books and gas masks, bronze and beige, khaki and green. There’s a memorial wall with postcards and letters and photographs of soldiers.

  “Over here,” Linus says, “there’s stuff about Furze Island.”

  There’s a little room to the side. There are photographs of the harbour and island during the war, typewritten captions underneath them. There’s a photo of a sailing boat filled with refugees from Holland, mothers and clinging babies, dirty children, shivering grandmothers, fishermen and their boys, their possessions wrapped in scarves.

  Another photo is of trenches of daffodils and a herd of deer hiding among them. Another of Furze Island shattered and black, trees stunted and broken, the beaches guarded by rolls of barbed wire. There’s another of some cottages left in the charred remains; one of them I recognise as Miss Bennett’s house. But that’s not what’s making my heart race. It’s the name of the photographer. Eva Bennett.

  24.

  “IS SHE SLEEPING BEAUTY OR SOMETHING,” JODIE says, trying to see through the gap in the gate at Miss Bennett’s house, “because she can’t have had any visitors for at least a hundred years.”

  “It might be because they can’t get in,” I say.

  I know I’m not supposed to be at Miss Bennett’s house, but Jodie is on my side and I convince her that nothing can go wrong, that it’s more important for me to find out about the deer and, who knows, it might even lead me to Grandad’s whale. And I’m sure Miss Bennett can help me if I find a way to help her remember, without making her sad. Jodie’s changed her mood, but I think she’s playing along with me, being ultra-cheerful, saying maybe there is something here that would remind Grandad. I think it’s because Adam is with her though.

  I ask Jodie and Adam if they’ll chop back the overgrown bushes around Miss Bennett’s gate.

  “Are you sure she wants us to cut this much?” Jodie says, passing branches to Adam.

  “Not exactly,” I say.

  “Hannah!” Jodie splutters.

  “You’d want it cut down if it got like this, wouldn’t you?” Which I think is a good argument. I’m about to go through Miss Bennett’s gate. “I won’t say anything if you don’t.”

  Jodie closes her eyes and puts her fingers in her ears because that way she can pretend, if Dad asks, that she didn’t know I went to Miss Bennett’s again.

  I walk through the house. Miss Bennett is in her back garden. The tall brick wall curves at the bottom of her garden, only a few steps away from the edge of the cliff. She stumbles on some of the broken bricks to look out of the gap in the wall.

  “What made the wall fall down?” I ask her.

  She knocks at a loose brick with her stick and it falls away and opens the view even more.

  “Old age,” Miss Bennett says. “Everything old falls down.”

  I collect up the bricks and stack them in a pile and clear away all the fallen rubble so that she can get closer to the cliff edge without tripping over.

  I carry the wicker chairs over so we can sit by the gap in the wall and I watch the sea through Grandad’s binoculars.

  “Have you always lived on Furze Island?” I ask.

  “This has been my family home for quite a few generations.”

  “Have you ever seen a whale in the harbour?”

  She hesitates. “No,” she says. “A whale wouldn’t be able to get in here. I would know if one had.”

  “That’s what Adam said.”

  Is there any point in watching the harbour? I’m curious about the red boats though. They’re back, the divers bobbing like seals in the water. A thick rope net is being lowered by the crane.

  “Have you heard what they’ve found down there?” I say, pointing. “It’s a wreck of something. They said on the news that they think it might be an old boat.” I hand Miss Bennett the binoculars.

  I thought she’d like to see what’s happening, but Miss Bennett looks through the binoculars as if she isn’t interested and leaves them in her lap as I pick up my video camera and switch it on. I focus on the big boat alongside the red ones, and the men waving their arms as the crane lowers the net into the water.

  “Grandad and I used to go out in his boat all the time, but we can’t now because he’s in a care home. He had his boat from when he was a boy.”

  Miss Bennett says, “Most boats were commandeered during the war or camouflaged so they couldn’t be seen during an air raid. My father kept his boat hidden in our boathouse further down the cliff.”

  I notice she can’t help talking about the war. I think about how long ago it was, how she still keeps it alive in her memory.

  “You must remember lots of things from back then, especially if you took photographs. I saw some in the museum.”

  She tilts her head up a little; the creases are deep in her face.

  “You and I have something in common then,” she says. She looks out to sea. “Like you, I took pictures to hold on to the past. War made the future … unreliable.” She shakes her head and stops talking.

  She doesn’t realise that just hearing Grandad talk every day about things I don’t know matters to me. Grandad didn’t really talk of the war because he was just a boy then, but I remember he once told me that he’d heard the deathly drone of German bombers in the sky.

  “Weren’t you afraid?” I’d asked him.

  “I should have been,” he’d said. “I didn’t want to be in the underground shelter, imagining. I had no idea what the war meant, what sacrifice and love were, until I went outside and saw for myself what I felt thundering right through me. Our hearts are tender when we’re young; we only wan
t to fill them. And fill them we did.”

  I just want to hear anything that makes me feel like I did when I was with him, kind of excited and peaceful at the same time. He shared all sorts of things about his life with me, just as I did with him every day after school. But not everything.

  “Please tell me more. I do want to know,” I say to Miss Bennett. “I don’t mind if it’s about the war.” I look through the binoculars again, giving her time to decide. The men in the red boats are leaning over the side, waiting for something to happen. “Maybe what those divers have found in the harbour is something from the war.”

  The wicker chair creaks as Miss Bennett leans forward. Sawdust puffs from tiny dark woodworm holes peppered in the legs of the chair as she cracks her stick on the ground and talks of bullets and bombs. The chair is crumbling and turning to dust like everything in her kitchen.

  “Alzheimer’s is like the war,” I say.

  “Things you can’t see can have a big effect,” she says softly.

  “Like a disease that you can only see under a microscope,” I say. “And small things do too. Like the tiny tablets people take to make them better. Only there’s nothing like that we can give Grandad.”

  Miss Bennett’s soft powdery cheeks relax.

  “When I showed Grandad my film, he seemed to remember something when he saw the recording of your house and Fern,” I say. “But he said we were going to find a whale.”

  Miss Bennett looks surprised and then suddenly we both laugh, because we’re both picturing a whale. And it’s the biggest creature in the world and all the small things just seem tiny and insignificant, just for a moment.

  “What’s your grandad’s name?”

  “Arthur Jenkins,” I say. “He lived around Hambourne all his life, but he’s younger than you. Did you know him?”

  She thinks for a minute, and I think she might be hoping she can help me. She hesitates, taking a long time to say, “No … no, I don’t think so. Apart from a few years during the war, I’ve always lived here.”

  Then she says, “Wait here,” and goes back inside for a minute. I watch the divers through the video camera. The ropes strain as the crane hoists something from the seabed.

  Miss Bennett returns. She says it’s not what she was looking for, but shows me an old photograph of Furze Island taken from the quay. The morning sun is low and the shadows are long. The island is complete, with trees, the quay and the stone cottages, and written along the bottom is the date, May 24th 1942.

  Miss Bennett squints at me. Is she trying to work out something?

  “Refugees from Holland were given temporary sanctuary on the island, but we were all evacuated to the mainland that day. War took away our shared memories, and those of the refugees who’d lost their homes and families. I wanted something we could keep, before it was all destroyed.”

  I think of Grandad then, as if he’s a refugee, lost in a world where he hardly knows who we were or where he was. But I see Miss Bennett is feeling easier now. She sits down and continues.

  “Not long after that, a film crew came down from London and spent some time rigging Furze Island with explosives. They made a decoy, to fool German bombers into thinking the island was the main harbour. Navigation systems weren’t entirely accurate in those days, so the explosions and fires were supposed to draw the bombs away to protect the harbour and the people who lived there. But the wildlife wasn’t accounted for.”

  She sighs and her breath is like the tide. “The island was on fire and the deer swam away.”

  She looks tired with sadness, shrunken by a terrible memory, but my eyes keep switching to the harbour. Yellow balloons pop up from under the water, alongside the lifting crane. The water parts as a long black back breaks the surface.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Bennett,” I gasp, “but I have to go! I need to see Grandad.”

  25.

  “IT’S NOT REGULAR VISITING HOURS, HE’S JUST had his lunch,” the receptionist at East Harbour Care Home says. “Did you come on your own?”

  I caught the ferry and a bus on my own, but right now it really doesn’t seem important. I know I’ll be in trouble with everyone when I get home, but they’ll understand when I tell them that I’ve found the journey Grandad wanted to take me on. I imagine how happy they’ll be that I’ve found the whale that Grandad remembered. Only it isn’t a whale!

  “My parents are busy working and my sister is busy and Miss Bennett was talking about the war today and how a decoy fooled German bombers.” I’m talking too much when I just want her to let me see Grandad. “It’s really important. I saw something in the harbour and Grandad said we were going to find a whale, but I think he said the wrong word.”

  “Is that so?” the receptionist says.

  “Yes, but that’s because he’s got Alzheimer’s! I couldn’t wait for my parents to finish work and bring me. Normally Grandad and I spend the summer holidays together, except he’s here instead.”

  The receptionist’s eyebrows rise further and further up her forehead as she listens. But she’s not moving quickly enough for me.

  “If I don’t tell him today then it might be too late,” I say. “I need to find something out before the eighteenth of August.”

  “I see,” she says. “Sounds urgent.”

  “Exactly,” I say, leaning across the reception counter. “Some people in my family don’t seem to have much hope for Grandad’s memory, but I do.”

  She smiles. I have to sit and wait for lunch to be cleared she tells me, but I can’t sit still. I go back and stand by the reception until the lady looks up at me.

  “Have you got any books here?” I ask. “Because I want to show Grandad a picture from the war.”

  Eventually she takes me to a bookcase in the television room and I find what I’m looking for. Then the receptionist leads me to Grandad’s room and tells me I have just fifteen minutes before she’ll be back to collect me.

  Grandad is sitting in a chair by the window; the net curtain rolls and I see him enjoying the softness of the breeze on his face.

  I hesitate. It isn’t like all those times I’ve come home from school, eager to talk to him, eager to hear him. But I hate thinking of him in any other way. I just have to imagine it is still him in there, somewhere.

  “Grandad, it’s me, Hannah. Did they do your toast nice this morning?” I say. “I miss you being at home and so do the birds, and Smokey isn’t scared of me like he is of you. He’s taking more of them, I know he is, but I don’t know how to stop him.”

  I kneel by Grandad’s feet and hold both his hands. I know he feels my touch. For just a moment his eyes catch mine.

  “Grandad, it’s Hannah. I miss you.”

  And then I tell him about the divers and the wreck they’ve found and play him my film on the small video camera screen. We watch the red boats and the crane hoist and we hear Miss Bennett talk of the war.

  “Something was sunk and now they’ve brought it up to the surface. I think it might be one of these.”

  More than anything I want to believe Grandad will remember.

  For a moment I’d thought that the sandbank in the harbour was a whale. I think of those German bombers being fooled by what they saw. Nobody knew anything about a whale. Grandad had never travelled and it was impossible for one to come into the harbour. So I guess that Grandad might have made a mistake too.

  I open the book to a picture spread across two pages, a grainy black and white drawing. I put it on his lap and point.

  “Look, Grandad.”

  Grandad’s eyes slowly find the picture. A smile quivers in the corner of his mouth, but his eyes roam away.

  “Grandad, see this book?” His eyes turn down again. “It’s a picture from the war. Do you remember when you were a boy and saw a submarine?”

  His lips tremble, but I know he isn’t really looking.

  “Hannah,” he smiles, “is it time for breakfast?” But I don’t know whether he means Grandma Hannah or me.

&
nbsp; “You’ve had breakfast and lunch, Grandad. Please look at the book.”

  Instead he stares towards the window. I hold up the book, put it in front of him so he has to look.

  “Grandad, what happened with the submarine? Was it a submarine you wanted us to find again? Grandad, was the journey to do with the deer and the war and a submarine?”

  You can’t tell any more who Grandad used to be. He could have been a bank robber or a prime minister, an elephant farmer or a brain surgeon. He was a boy during the war and then a boatbuilder and then my grandad. But he doesn’t recognise me and I hardly recognise him.

  “I think it was a submarine you wanted to tell me about, Grandad, not a whale.”

  No matter how many times I say it, he doesn’t remember.

  “Is war the greatest power on earth? Is it the sea?”

  I see in his eyes that he knows I’m expecting an answer. But we both know he can’t find one to give me.

  Mum and Dad are late home so Jodie covers for me. Luckily one of her friends saw me get on the ferry, but she tells me never to come back on my own again; she doesn’t care how important I think it is because she’s the one who’ll be in trouble. I don’t tell her what happened, I just say that I needed to see Grandad and that makes her stop going on at me.

  Smokey sits on the fence and lords himself over our territory, high up and safely away from the hosepipe. I feed the sparrows and watch while they busy themselves, but there’s a lot less of them than before. I throw a handful of seeds at Smokey and he hisses and springs away.

  26.

  THE SUN HAS BAKED THE GROUND HARD AND the air is warm and lazy and smells of coconut. Holiday aeroplanes hum high in the sky, but it all makes me feel heavy and as though I’m somewhere unfamiliar.

  Fern is in the grey kitchen eating the leaves and grass that Miss Bennett has left on her table. I move slowly and she lets me come quite close before she walks away from me, through the house, and I follow her to where Miss Bennett is in the cool of the sitting room. She has taken all her photographs down and is dusting them.