Call of the Whales (12 page)

It looked from this angle, the way he stood over the small whale’s body, almost as if Leon was tussling with the narwhal for the tusk. Leon, I thought, Leon means lion.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘The lion and the unicorn are fighting for the crown. The unicorn of the sea, Dad. You always said
the horn belonged to the unicorn of the sea.’

‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘That’s what the narwhal is called. It’s a sort of pet name or nickname. The unicorn of the sea.’

‘So there are no unicorns,’ I whispered.

‘Son, there are no unicorns.’

‘You told Tessa and Tom we were going on a unicorn hunt,’ I said accusingly.

‘Yes, I did. But Tessa and Tom are three years old. That’s the sort of story you tell babies. You pretended you could fly! But you can’t fly, and there are no unicorns.’

But then, there are narwhals. When you think about it, that’s pretty amazing in itself. What on earth does a whale need with a great long tusk like that? It’s too fragile to be any good as a yoke for poking around looking for food, and it’s too awkward to do anything else with. The narwhal is a fantastic enough sort of a creature if fantastic is what you are after. But at the time, it didn’t seem much of a compensation. I didn’t see myself riding a narwhal wearing a cloak spangled with stars. It just wasn’t the same.

22

Whistling to the Aurora

T
wo days later, we flew to Copenhagen in broad arctic daylight, and we arrived in ordinary European night. We had several hours before we could catch our connection to Heathrow and on to Dublin. As the night thickened, the airport went into that curious lulled state you get at night in places that never sleep, like airports and hospitals. The lights are on, but they’re slightly dimmed, in deference to the patients or passengers who are trying to snatch a bit of shuteye, and the non-essential services, like the cafeteria, shut down for a few hours. In that hour before the early shift arrives with mops, and the hiss of the coffee-machine starts up again, the poor demented souls who are waiting endlessly in the wide, tiled, echoing corridors or foyers go into a trance that is not quite sleep and not quite the waking state either, a sort of suspended animation, where the nerves are somehow more alert than normal and ready to spring into panic, even though the other organs of the body seem to slow down as in sleep.

This was the state I was in at about four in the morning, with my rucksack on my knee, when Dad
suddenly nudged me and started calling my name in a loud, urgent whisper.

‘Wake up, wake up! Oh, you’ll never guess, it is so fabulous! Wake up, can’t you!’

I opened my eyes, exposing my eyeballs to the assault of the waking world. Dad was hopping on the spot in front of me, and pointing out the wide, wide glass barrier that served as both wall and window, into the night sky. At the very least, it had to be a unicorn flying across the stars, I thought, to make him so excited.

‘Damn these planes,’ he muttered. It would have been funny if I’d been wider awake, Dad swearing about planes at an airport. ‘They keep interfering. They come in to land and everywhere lights up like a Christmas tree. Oh, there it is again, now, quick, now, before another wretched plane comes, quick, quick, while it’s dark. Just our luck to be at an airport at a time like this.’

‘What am I looking for?’ I asked, my head feeling like a leaden ball on my neck.

‘The lights, the lights!’ Dad practically shouted.

I looked up at the dimmed overhead lights.

‘No, no, the Aurora, the Aurora Borealis, look, look, look, it’s the Northern Lights. I’ve never seen them so far south before. Isn’t it wonderful?’

I screwed up my eyes and looked where his frantic finger was pointing, and sure enough, across the navy tent of the clear night sky outside the enormous expanse of airport glass, I saw a streak of red and a streak of green, followed by a streak of red and a streak of green, as if someone was pulling a huge, airy red and green curtain across the stars.

‘Wow!’ said Dad. ‘Oh wow!’

I could hear tears in his voice. I looked at him, and his eyes were glistening.

‘Just imagine what this looks like in Thule,’ he said.

Thule spread in front of my mind again, the starry autumn night doming the moongleamed icy floor. And as I watched the Northern Lights flit softly over the Copenhagen sky, I could see them also in my mind’s eye wafting eerily across the icy landscape we had just left.

‘A shame we didn’t see it in Thule,’ I said. ‘Would we have seen it if we’d stayed a bit longer, if we were there tonight?’ I added guiltily.

‘No, probably not. It’s almost too far north to get a good view in Thule,’ Dad said. ‘They rarely appear there.’

Just then we heard a whistling sound, eerie and sudden. It was repeated and repeated, high-pitched and urgent. It seemed to be coming from near by, inside the airport building. I turned my head, to see who it was that was whistling. Everyone was half-asleep, half-aroused by the whistling. Everyone except the squat orange-clad figure of an early-morning cleaner wielding a huge industrial floor-cleaning machine. The cleaner stood like us at the sheet of window and stared out into the night sky, his cleaning machine abandoned, his hands pressed flat against the glass. He whistled again, and then he turned a cheerful face to us. A cheerful Inuit face.

Dad said: ‘Must be a Greenlander. Lots of Greenlanders work in Copenhagen.’

He waved over at the cleaner. ‘Whistling at the Aurora?’ he called.

The man grinned and made a thumbs-up gesture, to show he understood. He nodded and smiled and waved his thumb a bit more, jerking it in the direction of the lights
outside the window, and then he turned and started pushing his cleaning machine. He was pushing it in our direction.

‘The children of the Arctic whistle when they see the Aurora Borealis,’ Dad said. ‘They believe if they whistle, they can make the lights come down to earth, they can prolong the lights. They only appear at night, of course, and when you think what night means up there in the high north, anything that lights the night is well worth cultivating.’

By now the cleaner had reached us, and we could see that he was quite old.

‘Whistle,’ he said.

We smiled at him.

‘In the Arctic,’ Dad said to me, ‘the people believe that the Northern Lights are torches that the spirits of the dead light to guide the souls of people who have just died up into heaven. Isn’t that right?’ he added, to the cleaner.

The old man nodded. ‘Stars,’ he said, pointing out at the sky.

‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘The souls can get into heaven through little holes in the dome of the sky. The little holes are the stars, where the light shines through from heaven.’

‘Stars,’ said the cleaner again. ‘Lights. Whistle.’

‘I think he wants us to whistle, Dad,’ I said. ‘Let’s whistle to the Aurora.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Dad said, looking around at the other passengers slumped in the airport chairs, their chins on their chests.

But I whistled anyway, softly, so as not to wake the snoozing people. My cleaner friend whistled too.

‘I have to be able to tell Tessa and Tom I whistled,’ I explained.

‘Tessa and Tom,’ said Dad, vaguely, as if he’d only just remembered he had other children.

Then he said: ‘How long do you think before they’ll be ready to come to the Arctic, Tyke?’

He’d never called me by my arctic nickname before. I knew then what I’d only vaguely thought before. I knew then for sure that he knew that this was my last trip.

‘Oh, pretty soon, Dad,’ I said. ‘Pretty soon. And twins will go down a treat, don’t you think?’

‘I think,’ Dad said, and he laughed.

The cleaner laughed too, and trundled on by with his machine.

T
essa and Tom are grown up now too, of course. Tessa works in television, making wildlife programmes, and Tom is a veterinarian, specialising in sea mammals. As you can guess, they both took many trips to the Arctic with Dad when they were children, mainly in the summer time, which is probably why neither of them has ever seen the Aurora Borealis.

I really do mean to keep in touch with Henry this time. Meeting him in Geneva spread my whole arctic past in front of me again, a past I don’t often revisit, but a past I couldn’t shake off even if I wanted to. Things have changed beyond recognition now in the Arctic, except maybe in Thule, and I was privileged, as a boy – though I didn’t know it at the time – to get even glimpses of a way of life that is now only preserved in small remote pockets and by the efforts of people like my friend Henry.

They say you shouldn’t go back, you should never try to revisit your childhood, but I think I will. I can’t resist it. I’ve tried, but I can’t. I can’t resist it because the 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 …

SIOBHÁN PARKINSON
is one of Ireland’s most highly acclaimed writers of books for children. She has won numerous awards and her books have been translated into several languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Danish. Siobhán lives in Dublin with her husband Roger, a woodturner, and their son Matthew, Siobhán’s personal literary critic.

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