May
I was eleven when my mother and I reported a sperm whale washed up on the beach.
It wasn’t the first to take a wrong turn from the Atlantic into the shallow waters of the North Sea – on the hunt for food, probably – and there have been others on shores up and down the country since.
We were walking across the sand playing our third or fourth round of I Spy when I saw something resembling a tarpaulin or a fishing boat, beetle-like with its belly in the air, a flock of gulls above.
My mother said that was strange ; it hadn’t been there the day before when she and my father had been out.
As we came closer, we were able to make out a small flipper, pointing towards the sky, and a softly forked tail.
I don’t know whether it was the vastness of it, but for a moment my body felt rigid with fear.
My mother said we should ring the coastguard, and before she’d finished asking me to do so I was running home to use the landline.
I ran and I ran, up over the dunes and through the marshes, even though I couldn’t feel my legs.
The coastguard came quickly ; before I was back on the beach, my heart hammering, he’d arrived, and a group of men and women who specialised in marine life rescue weren’t far behind.
Soon some other locals and a couple of tourists had gathered.
One of them pointed a camera lens at the whale’s open mouth, which had been closed a few minutes earlier. I narrowed my eyes.
I also begged the coastguard to do something. ‘Listen, it’s still breathing.’ As I said it, I held out my hand to hush the onlookers. ‘Can’t you help it?’
The coastguard said that, sadly, there was nothing to be done. The whale was simply too big and heavy to lift or roll. He turned to the tourists and added, in a whisper that wasn’t meant for my ears, ‘Besides, the process of decay has already begun.’
Decay. I repeated the word, quietly, under my breath. Only then did I notice the smell, like old flower water.
As more people gathered, the whale’s breath quickened.
My own breath quickened in response.
Taking hold of my hand, my mother suggested, ‘Perhaps we can make it more comfortable?’
After consulting the others, the coastguard told us we could try to keep it wet.
Buckets were produced and we scuttled back and forth from the sea, saltwater sloshing against our legs.
What remained we poured over the toppled whale’s grey-blue skin, as rubbery as the wellies on our feet.
For a while, it seemed to help. Its breathing slowed.
But as time went on, like a flat tyre, the twitching body before us gradually began to sink in on itself.
A man in the crowd with a toady face said we ought to let nature take its course.
I turned to him, my own face as angry as a fist, and demanded, ‘How would you like it?’
My mother’s cheeks burned, though I couldn’t tell whether she was cross with him or embarrassed by me.
Half an hour later, the whale was dead, its internal organs collapsed and ground to a halt under its own weight.
It was a young male, we were told. To try to lift our spirits, a kind but misguided woman from the rescue team told us that by removing swatches of muscle and blood, as well as teeth, we could learn more about these mysterious mammals.
The beach was cordoned off for the necropsy, and quietly my mother and I made our way back to the house.
When we arrived, my father asked what was going on – he’d tried to ask me before, after I’d hung up the phone, but I’d told him there wasn’t time.
As my mother explained to him about the whale, the feelings that had been swelling inside me since we first saw it lying there on the shoreline burst, not loudly or violently, but in a way that was soft and quiet.
I think part of the reason I remember that moment so clearly is because it was the first time I’d cried without making a sound.
By the time my parents noticed, I could feel the tears spilling off my cheeks and onto the floor.
My mother held out her arms and told me these things happen.
I’d never witnessed death before.
Noah couldn’t stand the train to Norfolk, which was long and languid and often cancelled at the last minute, so we decided to drive when my mother’s seventieth birthday weekend finally arrived.
The week before I still hadn’t settled on what to give her and, in the end, accepting the fact that she already owned most things she could want or need, I bought her a voucher for a night away at a posh but not stuffy hotel near Bury St Edmunds.
The voucher was for two, so I would suggest we go together.
A mother-daughter outing. Noah smiled when I told him.
I’d never owned a car ; growing up in Norfolk I’d made do borrowing my parents’ and I hadn’t needed one since moving to London.
Noah had a hatchback ; the same one he’d had when we first met.
Once shiny and new, it was now showing signs of age, with sputtering windscreen wipers and several scratches – mostly crooked white lines, like someone had run a key across the black paintwork.
I once jokingly asked him what he’d done to piss off his ex-girlfriend, then when I thought of his first wife and their baby girl, I held my breath. He laughed and said, You.
We didn’t have free parking on our street in London Fields, but an old school friend of Noah’s had a garage nearby and let us keep the car in one of his unused spaces for a nominal fee.
With our bags packed, and a bottle of wine on the kitchen counter for the neighbour who’d volunteered to feed Tom while we were away, we walked ten minutes to get there.
The sun was warm on my face, but not hot, making me long for the oven-like heat only ever on offer abroad.
Outside a greasy spoon that smelled of fried onions, I stopped to take off my jacket in a bid to soak as much vitamin D into my skin as possible.
Driving in London makes me nervous, but it didn’t faze Noah.
He slipped into the driving seat and turned on the radio as he steered his way out onto the street, the news sounding from the tinny speakers.
I pulled up Google Maps on my phone and the well-spoken woman whom we referred to as Moira began to spew out directions.
After we’d heard the latest on Brexit and listened to Trump trying to justify stripping funds from clinics providing abortion services, I suggested some music.
The last words I heard before they were replaced by tunes were lifted from his final presidential debate against Hillary two years earlier : ‘rip the baby out of the womb of the mother’.
Home was the house I’d grown up in, on a quiet and not particularly popular stretch of the north Norfolk coast. It took ten minutes to walk across the marshes to the sea, the ground soft underfoot.
From a narrow, arched window in an awkward corner at the top of the stairs, you could keep an eye on the tide’s ebb and flow.
As a small child, I would clamber onto the white wooden bench my father had installed below that window, press my nose up against the glass, my breath turning white, and wonder at the water being a living thing.
My parents had moved there just after they got married.
Together with a part-time carpenter friend, they had fitted built-in cupboards in the kitchen, which over the course of my life had changed from plain wood to off-white to wine red and, by this point, olive green.
In the garden, my mother had salvaged an old vegetable patch – she was particularly proud of her two-toned courgettes – and planted fresh bulbs in the muddy beds.
Like the creepers she’d trained to twist and turn along the garden wall, the house was tangled up with memories happy and sad.
The previous owner had given birth on the carpeted bathroom floor (unplanned), which prompted my mother to have a planned home birth with me ; luckily the midwife called for an ambulance when I arrived looking like the newest member of the Simpsons family.
My father had his heart attack in the living room ; they’d just finished dinner and were debating which new BBC drama to watch when my mother went to make some tea and the blood stopped pumping to his heart.
After that, her brother, Duncan, who lives in the States and rarely visits, suggested she put the house on the market and find somewhere smaller, more manageable.
She told him she could manage just fine where she was.
To me, she said she’d never believed the business in the wedding vows about ‘till death do us part’.
She was peering into the post box when we arrived.
Despite the crunch of gravel beneath the wheels, she didn’t hear us – or at least if she did, she didn’t turn around.
Noah gently tapped his palm against the middle of the wheel and the car emitted a toot.
She brought one hand to her forehead to shade her eyes and with the other, clasping a bunch of white and brown envelopes, she waved – slowly at first, then wildly when she realised it was us.
‘Darling!’ She opened my door before I had a chance to unbuckle my seatbelt. She’d had her hair done – I could tell from the extra volume – and as she bent down to get a better look at me, I caught the familiar whiff of her locally made lavender perfume. ‘Did you have an OK drive?’
When I leant in to give her a kiss and a hug, she held on for what felt like longer than normal. She let go and I told her that, yes, it was pretty easy. ‘Just the usual traffic around Norwich.’
‘Janey, happy birthday weekend to you.’ Noah was kissing her now, once on each cheek, and she was telling him to hush.
‘I haven’t told the neighbours! Apart from Peggy, of course.’
‘Why not, Mum? It’s your seventieth!’
‘Shh! I don’t want them making a fuss.’