Call of the Whales

Call of the Whales

‘An adventure with attitude’
THE IRISH TIMES

‘A captivating coming-of-age tale with a
distinctive narrative voice’
THE IRISH INDEPENDENT

‘Parkinson’s reputation as one of Ireland’s most talented storytellers for the young can only be enhanced by this powerful, yet wistful work, which will illuminate the imaginative lives of its readers, no matter what the age’ BOOKS IRELAND

I have taken liberties with my research material, transposing stories and names and words from one part of the Arctic to another, for the sake of the fiction, but I have tried to be as accurate as I can without overloading the novel with detail. I hope I have managed to respect the spirit of the Arctic and that Arctic experts will forgive a certain amount of fictional licence.

I believe that it is the right of peoples of all cultures to tell their own stories in their own way. This doesn't mean that outsiders may not sometimes, with respect, tell other people's stories too, but it is of course much trickier to do that well. For this reason, I have deliberately told this story of Arctic life from the point of view of an Irish narrator. And that is all this novel is meant to be: an outsider's perspective on a rich and fascinating way of life in a place of great beauty.

I would like to acknowledge a detailed account of present-day Inupiat whaling by the Danish television journalist Adrian Redmond; several documents by the anthropologist Norman Chance; some fabulous photographs and a most interesting account of his time spent at Thule airbase in the far north of Greenland by Larry Rodrigues; and some terrific material on the official Greenland government tourism Internet site, www.greenland-guide.gl.

The story of Sedna is retold here from a version I read on the site www.cancom.net/~sedna (accessible through about.com). The polar bear story is adapted from one of Norman Chance's articles.

I am grateful for the support of the Irish Writers' Centre and Dublin Corporation Arts Office, where I held a joint residency during the time this book was being written, and of An Chomhairle Ealaíon/The Arts Council who part-funded the residency.

T
he song of the whale is like a call to the north. I hear it in my sleep. Eerie and sonorous, it pervades my dreams, so that I am drawn down into the deep, where huge sea beasts roll slowly in the inky-cold seas, wailing for their lovers over acres of waters.

I wake, gasping for air, from these whaley dreams, but even though I wake, I cannot seem to shake off the dream. All day the whales are with me, as I work my way through my city schedule – breakfast, train, work, lunch, work, drink, train, dinner, TV, bed – swishing their powerful tails, diving uproariously to the seabed, drifting in the depths and then slowly, slowly, like the air leaking out of a tyre, ballooning up and up and up to crash onto the surface once again and exhale their fabulous fountainy breath.

They are with me always, the whales, and yet they aren’t, not the way they were when I was a child. But what can you do? You grow up, things change, you settle into your own particular you-shaped groove in the great economic machine that is modern life. You do your best to live up to the ideals you had as a youngster, but you can’t linger for ever in that blue-lit, dreamy childhood world of the arctic north. It’s not practicable. It doesn’t pay the rent. And it’s not your world. It belongs to other peoples. If there are rents to be eked out of that icy waste, it is for those people to do it, those tough and hardy, broad-faced,
wide-eyed, dark-haired people whose bloodlines go back and back and back into the lost and snowy worlds of the arctic past.

It was meeting Henry last month that started it all. Geneva is not my favourite city, I have to say, but it’s where a lot of these international conferences get held, because it is neutral territory. I’d slipped out of a plenary session to get a cup of tea. They don’t make proper tea on the Continent, so I try to stick to the coffee. But there comes a point when you just have to have tea, even if it’s lukewarm, served without milk and has a stout little teabag in it, anchored to the cup-handle by a string and a paper tag.

There was no one else in the canteen – they were all still at the meeting – so I was able to explain to the Swiss attendant how I wanted my tea made. ‘
Boil
the water,’ I pleaded. He looked at me as if I was mad, but I added, ‘I’m Irish,’ and he nodded, as if that explained everything – which it did.

Then I heard the laugh, coming from somewhere behind me. My body did a little on-the-spot leap, as it does when I am startled. I spun around. I’d thought there was no one else in the canteen, but I could see now that there was a large black leather sofa with high sides facing the window. Slumped in one corner of the sofa, so that he was almost hidden from view, was a man dressed entirely in black and with hair so black it matched his black T-shirt and his black jacket and the black leather of the sofa.

‘Irish!’ he spluttered, shaking his head. ‘The Irish and their tea!’

What do you know about the Irish? I wanted to ask, noticing his wide, dark-eyed, delicately boned,
oriental-looking face, scrunched up now with laughter. He looked like people I’d known years ago, people I’d met in the Arctic. I could see he was enjoying the joke so much – what joke? I thought – that I couldn’t bring myself to snap at him. I just smiled and waved vaguely and went to sit down at a table where I wouldn’t have to look at this laughing man in black.

I’d just settled in my chair, resolutely facing the wall, with my back to the window, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. Not my friend again, surely. It wasn’t like an Inuk or an Inupiaq to interrupt a person who clearly wanted to be left alone. They are a polite and silent people. But then I heard my name, or rather my old nickname, a name I hadn’t heard for years, not since I was a boy.

‘Tyke?’

My real name, Taig, is not easy to pronounce unless you’re Irish. They’d always called me Tyke in the Arctic, and I’d got to like it. I had a campaign going for a while to get my family to use it, but they never really got the hang of it. It was strange to hear it now, all these years later, in this place.

I turned. At first I didn’t recognise him. I thought he was someone else, another childhood friend. It had been almost twenty years since I’d seen him, after all. People change a lot in twenty years, especially if they were only eleven or twelve when you knew them before.

‘Henry!’

Recognition came in a flood and I leapt to my feet. We stood staring at each other, delighted, but not sure how to act, too embarrassed to hug. Eventually, I slapped him on the upper arm, and he slapped me on the shoulder.

It turned out we were both attending the same international conference on whaling. I was there as an environmental activist, to make sure the big commercial whaling nations didn’t get away with their plans to strip the oceans of as many sea-mammals as they could kill. Henry was there to plead the case of subsistence whaling, the lifeline of the small arctic communities, environmentally sustainable and essential to the culture of his people. To outsiders, it might look as if we were on different sides of this debate (he pro-whaling and I anti-whaling), but actually we were on the same side against the big boys with their huge killing ships and their money-driven lust for death.

It was wonderful to meet Henry again after all these years. We’d lost touch since we’d known each other as boys. I’d lost touch with everyone from those days, with some of the best friends I ever had – though it is only now that I realise it.

Henry had been to Ireland on a visit, he told me. He’d gone there, half-hoping to find me, but he didn’t know my surname, so he couldn’t look me up. We didn’t want that to happen again, so we exchanged phone numbers and email addresses.

Henry works as a journalist now, in Anchorage, covering Inupiat affairs. It was hard to believe that the spindly, jokey boy I’d known all those years ago was now a respected writer and opinion-maker. I’m sure he found it just as difficult to believe that I am a college lecturer. I teach history, and I have long vacations that allow me sometimes to pursue my other main interest – protecting the world’s whales.

We rejoined the conference after I’d finished my tea,
and we met again for a beer that evening. Next day the conference was over, and with renewed promises to keep in touch, we both flew out of Geneva.

It’s since meeting Henry again that the dreams have started. I’ve never lost the interest in whales I acquired as a boy, but it was only when I met Henry that I felt again the excitement I’d known in my youth when I used to visit the wide arctic wastes. It was Henry who reminded me of why it was that I took the interest that I did and it was meeting Henry that stirred up the memories which now invade my sleep and arouse in me an unrealisable longing for childhood adventure.