Chapter 1. Scrimshaw.

Bishop Brent once wrote that in death, the spirit of our loved one is merely a passing ship on the horizon. For part of its life, it is with us, in earth, and we see it clearly. And then when its time comes, it slows sails further and further away from us, until it is only a dot on the horizon. And then finally it is gone. Caput. The end. The curtain falls. We no longer see them, we turn off life support machines and we start making arrangements to cremate or bury their body. Except that’s not really “them”. And they aren’t really gone, they are just another ship on another horizon somewhere else. Bishop Brent said this was like the spirit. It never leaves. When we can no longer see it on the horizon, it has simply slipped out of view. It is still there, and if we were to rent a little rowing boat and row out to sea, in the direction of the boat, we would eventually see it again. We may even be able to wave to our loved ones, ask them for help, and maybe even come abroad for a short while. But we must go back to land because that is where we live. Nobody can stay on the ship of another horizon who does not belong there. And the ship must remain upon it’s new horizon. Bishop Brent never wrote that last part, but he was probably getting to it. What he did write was,


“And just at the moment when someone at my side says,


“She is gone”,


There are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout:


“There she comes”


And this is dying. An horizon and just the limit of our sight.


Lift us up, Oh Lord, that we may see further.”


For Frank Whitfield, his ship was nearing the horizon. He wasn’t quite the dot on the horizon quite yet, but he knew it was coming. For the last year or so, he had been battling cancer, and now it had overcome his body and he had been given weeks, rather than months to live.


He had always wondered what death would feel like when it finally came. He’d spent his life communicating with spirits on the other side, and now finally, he was going to cross over himself.


At first it had only been his grandmother; Hosung-Lee. She had visited him shortly after her death when he was just a child, and then more frequently throughout his life, usually at moments of need or when his life was in jeopardy. Frank’s life had been in jeopardy more times than he cared to remember, mostly thanks to his long career at sea as a sailor on board cargo ships. His ships went all around the Baltic, and even as far as five miles inside the arctic circle where he made friends with some passing beluga whales, a narwhal and even seen a moose. He'd even seen a polar bear.


He’d also seen his fair share of nasty storms. He’d been cast overboard on more than one occasion and sustained scar inflicting injuries on ship decks. On more than one of those occasions, he’d seen her face; the face of his grandmother. She watched over him. It was around then that he began to realise he was different.


He was like a phone with an extra wire. The phone would ring from some far off place and all he had to do was pick up the phone, and say “Hello?” and they’d talk back. He’d talk and then they’d talk. Fully formed people would just appear in his head. It was as if the person on the other end could send him a telepathic picture and say, “Hey, this is what I look like, just so you know.”


So he’d talk some more. And they’d tell him things. Good things. Funny things. You will go to Scotland. So he went to Scotland. You will marry a woman at work. So he did. But it won’t work out. And it didn’t. They told him he’d have a child. They said it would be a son, and he would call him Hector and he’d be a footballer. He had a daughter, they named her Catherine and she went to university and wanted to be a scientist. Sometimes, even spirits get it wrong. After all, they are only human. He forgave them.


All his life he had lived with his gift. He never sold it to anyone and never advertised what he could do. He just did it. When his marriage with his first wife fell apart, they divorced and the daughter went to live with her Mum. They’d always been close though; closer than any other Father and Daughter and the closeness remained long after she’d gone to live with the ex wife. As a child she continued to visit every weekend, but as she got older and developed her own life, the visits became less frequent. He turned to alcohol.


The alcohol destroyed his liver. That was where the cancer had won its first victory.


He regretted that now.


But as Catherine had grown up she had become her own person and moved to London to go to university. She was startlingly confident and opinionated. She started calling herself Kate, wore skinny jeans and mascara like a Japanese lady. His grandmother had been the daughter of a Japanese lady, and looking at Kate he saw parts of that in her too. She wasn’t a knockout but she took care of herself. She had a nice natural beauty about her that wasn’t intimidating or over the top. Long brunette hair, his blue eyes, and just a hint of the orient in the way they slope upwards like little almonds. She spent a lot of her time in little cafes with girls the same age as her, sipping lattes, eating pastries and discussing what they were going to do that weekend. She read books and dabbled in philosophy. She had had a string of boyfriends but nothing serious. She was a woman now.


As she had matured, she had began calling on her mobile. She’d phone every day and although they were no longer close to each other physically, as they’d been when she was Daddy’s little girl and he was her hero, they were close in other ways.


They’d speak every day, sometimes even three times a day. She’d send him cards and he’d send her newspaper clippings. Shed visit him in Scotland when she could and they’d always have a drink together.


As he watched her grow, he begin to suspect things. He suspected things that in reality he’s always known deep down, but had never followed up, but now she was an adult, certain things were glaringly obvious.


When she was little, animals swarmed around her. All animals, not just the relatively tame ones like fluffy puppies and small cats with nose tickling whiskers. Wild animals fawned over her and it was as if she had no need for friends. Not traditional ones anyway. Her friends with animals. Cats, dogs, horses, farmyard sheep, little birds, squirrels, everyone just ran around her like a gigantic real-time Disney production. He’d watch her closely. It was almost as if she was in her own world. She’d have full out conversations with the animals. They’d never answer back, but in an odd way they’d look at her.


Next time you see a cat, you go and pick it up. It will look at you but at the same time it’s not looking at you. It’s as if it doesn’t know who or what you are, just that you are holding it and stopping it going wherever it needs to be going. When Catherine picked up a cat, it looked at her differently. It looked her set in the eyes. It knew who she was. It knew what she was. And it knew the things that Frank was only just starting to realise.


He wasn’t the only one in the family who had “the gift”.


As she grew, it became obvious to him, that somehow, he had passed it on. Catherine could sense spirits too. She may not have been outright sensing ghosts around her, but she seemed to have an ability to connect with animals. It was as if the simplicity of the animal’s soul, it’s lack of prejudice, judgement and all out unconditional love, enabled her to pick up a signal which others couldn’t. She fed on the positivity and all around her he saw happy colours like pink and bright sunshine yellow, and glowing beluga white.


But not everyone saw it that way...


Years after he had divorced her Mother, he got a worried call from her. The Mother was baffled by some of her behaviours. She’d come home to find a rabbit running about the house and when she had asked the daughter what was going on, she had simply said, the rabbit was ill. Catherine had brought it indoors and welcomed it in to the house. She would have put a little bib on it and fed it carrot soup with croutons at the table, if the Mother had let her. The rabbit wasn’t a rabbit to her. It was all human. It had feelings.


They’d had calls from the school. Catherine had been talking to the cows at the end of the school playing field. They thought it was odd. Frank thought it was odd that once a week the vicar came to visit the school and all the kids spoke to a gigantic imaginary friend and asked him to forgive innocent dewy eyed children, and yet the school had a problem with his daughter harmlessly talking to animals. Who cares if they were actually talking back? Who was she harming?


And then there was the Sunday School. He was against that idea from the start but Catherine’s Mother was a Christian and wanted her daughter likewise so off she went. She’d get Catherine dressed up in a nice dress, matching nice shoes and brush her hair just right. Frank never understood this so called “God”. Of course, he knew there was life after death, but these people. Wow... they were way off. God didn’t give a crap whether anyone wore their Sunday best or not. The only people who cared in the church what anyone else wore, was them.


Them... Them who seem to infiltrate little children’s lives so much and so needlessly. Let the children be and let them speak to the spirits!


They had got a disgruntled call from the Sunday School one day. Catherine had been upsetting the other children.


“Why, what did she do? There must be a misunderstanding, Catherine wouldn’t deliberately upset someone.”


“She’s been telling the other children that Jesus isn’t real and that God isn’t who we think he is. She’s talking about devils and talking animals. The Sunday School teacher is very worried about her.”


Frank had smirked and promised to deal with it. He never did. He thought it was hilarious.


The Church really irked him sometimes and he really struggled to contain his thoughts towards them and they way they would treat his family, mostly him and his daughter, sometimes. Frank hated to be negative. Negativity was the most powerful emotion in the world. Next to love. Negative could shut down spirituality in an instant. It was like a giant seagull coming along and shitting on your parade.


That phone with the extra wire would be ringing and he’d go to pick it up...


“Hello?”


And then they would talk. Him and the spirit. Was there a message? Who was the message for? Would they know he was coming?


And then out of nowhere, a slither of doubt would creep in. It was a rare occasion that Frank would doubt that he was actually gifted but occasionally society and “the norm” would creep in and suddenly he’d feel like an idiot. And that’s all it took.


The phone with the extra wire would go dead.


Frank would be left hanging.


Spirits don’t deal with negative people.


Negativity is something born out of earthly goods, not something for the afterlife.


But them. Those sneering, smug, hypocritical people at the Church. They had really tried to come between him and his daughter.


She’d once found an injured baby owl with its beak all smashed in. It didn’t stand a chance in the wild, and in true Catherine style made it her pet. Frank knew you shouldn’t keep owls as pets but what was he to do? Catherine loved the owl. The owl loved her. She’d bonded with it on planes that other people think only exist in Dr Dolittle.


One night when they had all been driving back from church, Frank, the Mother, Catherine, and the vicar who seemed to have made a really odd cameo appearance in the car part after the service. Th vicar e turned to Catherine in the back seat and said,


“Do you not think it’s wrong that your Daddy let you keep that owl?”


Catherine was too young to understand. But Frank understood.


He glanced over at this so called man of God in the passenger seat, decked out in his fancy suit and “Sunday Best.”


The negative thoughts ran through his head like a maniac voiced plague.


Who do you think you are? Using something as special as spirituality and religion to preach and lord it over people? Telling them God wants them in their best clothes, and that if my daughter doesn’t believe in God she’ll go to a place where she’ll burn forever. Who do you think you are? I know God, and believe me, if he was the smiting type, he’d bloody well smite you. But he doesn’t smite anyone. Your lot just bloody made that bit up!


But he said nothing and they drove. Jesus in the passenger seat smiling like a smug git. Frank reigned himself in and banished the negative thoughts. They weren’t worth it. He knew they talked about him at Church.


“And won’t Frank be joining you...?”


“Shouldn’t your husband be here...?”


And the big one, “So does Frank not believe in God?”


He couldn’t prove it, but he was sure the word “Pagan” had come up more than once.


It wasn’t that Catherine Mother was a bad person, they had just clashed. They were different. Frank could see more of him in Catherine than he could of her Mother, and after the divorce, they had barely spoke. But Catherine and him, they had stayed close.


She had funny wiring too, just like him.


But he never said anything. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to scare her, he just wanted it to happen naturally. She had to believe in it first. She had to realise what she could do wasn’t what everyone could do. And then she had to see that the fact she could do it was reason to have faith. And that faith, well... that faith would open doors for her. She would never be alone again. Not when she finally realised what she was and how much power she had in her little finger.


At times the excitement was too much to remain silent abot and he breached the code of conduct. One evening when they were walking in the woods, he watched her staring in to the dark spaces between the trees. She was looking in to the atmosphere with a look of concentration, as if she were watching a million tiny flies all around her.


“When you look in to the atmosphere, do you see little dots? Like atoms almost.”


Atoms, even that. She was ten but he knew she understood what an atom was. He had explained them to her very early on. He needed her to see life is just not matter. Everyone and everything is made up of tiny little things. We not just one mass. We are many things. He asked if she could see the little atom like dots all around her.


She had said she did. She said she saw them easier in the dark, but he knew in time she’d see them everywhere.


One day she’d look in to something as bright as the snow, and see millions of them.


But they were no atoms. Frank knew this.


For all his time as a medium, he was still not completely sure of everything on “the other side”, as he called it. There were rules about knowing everything and one of the main ones was you were not allowed to outright ask what came after life. You just put faith in what was around you and then you knew. But he knew something for sure. There was multiple different layers to after life; multiple planes. They all exist in the same place, a bit like a parallel universe running alongside ours. Like the ship on the horizon, they are with some of us, but not all of us. But believe me, they are there.


These atoms that Catherine and him could see, he was convinced, were particles and pieces of the other universes. And occasionally, out of these other universes would pop familiar faces, like his Grandmother, Hosung-Lee.


And that brings us up to the current day; Frank laying in his hospice bed. Hosung-Lee in the corner. Frank knew his time was coming and he’d known for a while. Before he’d been admitted to the hospice, he’d found the energy to carry out one last final task, and now the fruits of which were nestled in the palm of his hand.


The bone beads had grown warm from his flesh as he stroked them. They made up a necklace. The bone beads had little pictures carved in to them, like the Scrimshaw he had seen during his time at sea. He had taken Catherine to Castle Douglas when she was just a little girl and they had visited a little spiritual store that had beads. She had excitedly picked out beads to make a necklace for him and he had done the same for her. It was not lost on him the way in which a young girl had managed to find beads that looked like Scrimshaw to give to her Daddy, an ex-seaman.


He had worn his with pride for years until the suede twine that ran amongst them broke and he was forced to scoop all the beads up in his big hands and keep them in a little pouch, safe away from harm. Long after she’d gone to live with her Mother, and then gone and started her own life down in London, he’d occasionally been drawn to them. Her energy was all over them. It was like magic.


When the doctor had told him the cancer was terminal, he knew what he had to do.


Now he had taken them out of the pouch and found another bit of twine to lace through them all, tying it in a little knot at the top. They formed something like their original form


When the time was right, he would give it to Catherine. She would be on her way now. She would have this final reminder of her Dad and know that no matter where she was, no matter what happened, they were still connected. She would always have that extra wire and as soon as he could, he’d be picking up that phone and giving her a call.


All his life, he’s lived to see the day his daughter would realise just how unique she was. But things hadn’t worked out that way. At 19 she still didn’t know. And time had run out. When he got to the other side, he would have to make contact. Her life wasn’t going to be easy, that he knew. And he be damned if he was going to let them mold his daughter away from her original form and calling. She had a gift, perhaps even stronger than his.


He stroked the beads again and channelled his thought in to them. Only pure thoughts and bright white colours. He sent love and his blessings and asked the spirits to keep her safe. Never let anything happen to her. He thought the words in his head as strongly as he could.


One day Catherine, I’m going to ring. And you need to pick up that phone. Don’t be scared, just pick it up and just say “Hello.” I’ll be on the other line waiting. Always waiting...

Chapter 2. Let it Snow.

“Can I be gettin’ yae anything fae the cart, hen?”


It was a familiarly Scottish accent, peppered with Scots words. There was what someone from Edinburgh would describe as a bit of a “Morningside twang” to it, but what anyone from England would probably just have describe as just “posh”. English people had an awful habit of believing that all Scottish people sounded like Rab C. Nesbitt. You either sounded like Rab C. Nesbitt, or you were “posh”. Well spoken and Scottish were two concepts which did not marry in the Englishman’s head and so you were always either one or the other. Kate was Englishman’s posh. Kate noted the refreshments cart man was not only Scottish, but probably from Edinburgh, like her.


“Erm, I’ll have a... just a small tea please. Milk and two sugars.”


“Right away, hen. A wee tea, a bit o’ milk and tae sugars.”


Kate had considered the gin and tonic heavily. Anything to dull out what was about to happen. But had chosen to opt for the cup of tea instead. She’d need all her senses for what was about to come. The baggage cartman man went about his tea making duty as the train lurched along its track, Dumfries bound.


She looked out of the window. It had been snowing and everything was covered in white. It was like travelling through a giant cloud. Along the tracks, there was occasional little cottages; the remnants of a Scottish history of crofters and small farmsteads, accessorised with woolly sheep weathering the Scottish weather as a matter principle. In the windows, were flashes of colours. Posters of green, yellow, red, the occasional pink. But there was no blue. There was never any blue during election time in Scotland. Voting Conservative and being Scottish was like being a leper. It was a sin to favour the union over independence. Or so the SNP advocated. Kate grimaced as she became aware of the overwhelming majority of yellow posters. “Vote SNP.”


In some circles; private unionist circles in Scotland, they were called “The Snip”, because it was believed that in going independent, Scotland would “snip” off all its financial aid and subsidising from Westminster. It was probably selfish to still favour the notion of Scotland as the land of milk and honey, but no turkey would ever vote in favour of Christmas either.


It wasn’t that Kate wasn’t proud of her Scottish nationality; she just didn’t feel the need to line her life with tartan. Living in London, she had still only occasionally celebrated Burns Night and the only hint she ever carried as to her Scottish clan connections, was a woollen scarf woven in her families tartan. It hung around her neck like a subtle nod to a romantic history of whiskey, Scottish glass and war. English people sometimes had their coat of arms printed up and framed. She wore hers around her neck when it was cold, or when she came home.


But there had been a great deal less “homecomings” recently. Under the Scottish National Party, Scotland had changed overnight. It had gone from sweet little tea rooms in Scottish villages, with maybe just a hint of tartan and an elderly old lady speaking in a Borderly (Englishman’s posh) accent, serving her homemade scones with cream tea, to not being able to watch Coronation Street without paying a subscription charge for a “non-Scottish” channel. Why? Because it was English. The SNP had turned Scotland in to patriotism on steroids. If it wasn’t born and bred Scots, then it has no place in Scotland. “Our Scotland,” they said. But was it really hers, Kate wondered? Not anymore.


Kate wondered thoughtfully whether or not next time she visited her home country, if the trains would be decked in tartan too and whether “Jamie” (she read his name tag) would be wearing a nice little tartan two piece suit with a matching cap. And whether or not, instead of his speech being peppered with Scots language, he would now be the fully monty; the walking, talking, tartan two piece wearing Scotsman; serving her tea in Gaelic. She hoped not. Kate didn’t speak Gaelic. She only spoke Scots.


“That’ll be a poond fifty.”


Kate handed over the money, as Jamie said his polite thank you and goodbyes and shuffled and squeaked his way off further down the carriage, merry as he went, calling everyone sir and hen. She was glad the price of life in Scotland hadn’t changed. It was one of the reasons she loved coming home from time to time; the cheap as chips lifestyle. She was still just as shocked by London prices now as she was when she moved here five years ago. That and her favourite home cooked meal at her Dads house, haggis, chicken and cheese.


But there would be no more haggis, chicken and cheese. Not after today. And if not today, then tomorrow. Or maybe, at a stretch, the day after that. Sooner or later, the joy boat that was haggis, chicken and cheese, would be coming to an end.


The muscles in her face froze. She was under no illusions as to the serious nature of today, but for the last three months, had largely been on autopilot, and occasionally, little sentimental thoughts like there being no more haggis, chicken and cheese at Dads house, crept in. These are what upset her most. No more Dads house. No more haggis, chicken and cheese. No more Dad. She was not only going to be losing her Dad, but everything that went with him. By the end of today, she would have said goodbye to her Dad for the very last time, as he lay in a hospice bed, beaten by cancer.


He wasn’t just any Dad though. Most daughters grow up thinking their Dad is something pretty special; fixer of everything and the strongest man in the world, but Kate knew there was something extra special about her Dad. It wasn’t his obsession with fitness that set him apart, though as a little girl when she’d seen him stand with the other Dads on sports day, it had appeared that way. Everyone else’s Dads had a beer belly and had a glow of colour around them which just gave Kate the idea they were unhealthy. Kate’s Dad however would stand there with his muscles bulging out of his clothes, his skin bronzed and a mischievous grin on his face. They both knew he was about to tank the other Dads in terms of fitness. Her Dads colour was always blue.


Kate didn’t fully understand why she associated people with colours but she always had. Ill people had a yellowish fading tinge around them. Those who were lazy and unhealthy were very muted. Angry people gave off harsh colours, like angry rusty red and burnt orange. And her Dad, he was blue. Bright, sparkling blue. Sometimes, she had ideas about her own colour. She was white. Like a polar bear, or a beluga, or maybe even an arctic fox. Very bright and sparkling, just like her Dad, but not blue.


But none of these things were what made her Dad different. No, Kate was pretty sure he had something that the majority of other Dads didn’t have. He’d never really said it outsight to her, but growing up, he had hinted at things. He’d made things happen. He’d surrounded her with a giant bubble of protection. He spoke of magic and several planes of heaven. When she told him when she looked in to the dark, she saw sparkles, he’s smiled the biggest grin ever and said he saw them too. He’d told her things and when she’d asked what he had meant, he’s simply said “you’ll understand one day.”

It wasn’t until she’d neared her twenties that the penny dropped. It wasn’t so much one singular shiny penny that dropped, but a giant cascade of pennies, pounds, fifty pencess and little silver five pence pieces. They crashed and hit the ground making jangling sharp noises.


Her Dad was a medium. Not one of the fake ones who sits in at the carnival, but a real and very impressive, medium. And now as Kate looked out the window and saw the dotted cottages turn to bungalows, detached houses and finally town-like dwellings, she realised the time had come. For the last six months, her Dad had been battling cancer and now it was terminal, and days, rather than weeks.


It was time to say goodbye to the man who for her whole life had bridged the gap between life and death, and who was now going to be going off to a place she had no contact with.


Kate looked out the window. She wished she’d ordered that gin and tonic.

It was time to say goodbye.

Chapter 3. Cancer

Rolling nearer and nearer to Dumfries, Kate began to prepare her bags and belongings. The cup of tea she had ordered had tasted awful. It had come in a polystyrene cup and had been stirred by a wooden stick. It tasted bitter, but she sipped at it all the same. The sips became ritualistic; anything to focus her mind and get her from one moment to the next without letting her mind wander too far. She tipped the cup towards her mouth one final time as its resources dwindled, and placed it back on the little table situated between her and the opposing seats. Taking out a mirror from her bag, she scanned her face. The last few months had taken their toll and she could tell her face looked stressed. There were bags under her eyes and she looked thinner than normal. Reaching in to her bag, she pulled out a small cosmetics purse and began applying some under eye concealer to maybe breathe some life back in to her.


This is silly.


Why would her Dad care what she looked like on his deathbed? Would he even know it was her? She realised that although she had visited her Dad a month ago, and kept in contact with him daily up until the phone call to say it the cancer was terminal – where things had taken a turn for the once, she realised she didn’t really know what to expect. She’d been told it was bad, but then what did “bad” really mean? Could he talk? Did he know he was dying? How many pipes would there be? Kate felt her concentration slipping. She pulled herself back in to line, dabbing a bit of foundation across her face to hide the red puffiness of eight hours of lounging on a train.


Foundation had been a constant bane of her life. It occurred to her the market was not set up for Scottish women with pale skin, prone to reddish blotchiness. Even the lightest shades, labelled suggestively as “porcelain” and “ivory”, seemed to bare striking similarities to orange. She had finally found a brand that produced a nice pale finish. She imagined this sort of stuff was big news for gothic young girls the world over. Except she wasn’t a gothic young girl. She was a 19 year old university student on the cusp of graduation, and what may be considered as “deathly pale” by some, was in fact her natural skin tone. As the foundation glided in to place, she finished off her make up with a quick dust of powder. She left out the mascara. Not today.


“We will shortly be arriving in Dumfries. We would ask that all passengers...”


The tanoy signalled their arrival in to the sleepy little town and Kate gathered up her things.


Stepping off the train, she was met by the glowing, almost blinding, glare of the white snow. The glass in the windows of the train must have dulled it slightly and it took a moment for her eyes to relax. Walking over to the taxi rank, she climbed in to the back of a taxi and asked the driver to take her to the hospice.


She saw the taxi drivers face tighten. It’s that word, she thought. “Hospice.” She wondered how many times he had been asked to drive someone to the hospice, and wondered how he must feel, knowing he was partaking in such a sombre and private moment.


“Righty-oh, hen. Have you there in a jiffy.”


Kate looked around her. She was absorbed in this tiny little automotive cocoon of greys and checks. The greys created a sort of depth to the taxi cabin, but the harshness of the materials, made it more of a claustrophobic deep space, than a warm, welcoming one, like a bed, or a big cushy armchair. The intensity of the white snow all around increased its depth. If white could have a shade, Scotland’s snow was neon white. White covers everything.


The grey was broken up by flashes of yellow and orange. Neon warning stickers, asking her to please wear her seatbelt, and not to distract the driver whilst the vehicle was in motion. They made the depth of the grey cocoon taken on the sinister silence and slowness of a funeral march. Warning – inside this grey cocoon, is a young girl about to say goodbye to her Daddy. Please stand back.


The driver drove in silence and Kate was very glad for his respectful manner. All this way on the train and not one person had spoken to her, other than Jamie the refreshment cart man, and she had been left alone with her thoughts. They had been building up. Long stretches of concentrated, resigned silence in her head were stabbed in to oblivion by memories and thoughts that just refused to go away and snapped at her heels. She was worried if she began to talk, she’d cry. Or worse. She might scream.


Loosing Dad was her idea of living hell. Her parents had divorced when was twelve and since then her family life had been fragmented. A Birthday here. A Christmas there. But at least she still had a Dad and a Mum. Soon, it would just be Mum.


She wished that this could be fiction. She wished that all of this pain and misery, in knowing her Dad was to die of cancer within the next few days, and all the plans and ideas for the future, to die with him, could be something she could just brush away. Smooth over with optic white foundation and face up to another time; another time far in the future. But it wasn’t.


Her Dad and her had an unusually close relationship; closer than most Fathers and Daughters. His name was Frank and he was a Yorkshireman. Despite having lived in Scotland for twenty years of his life, his accent was still so thick and littered with ducks, loves and chucks, that it nearly always drew questions of “Now, where are you from with an accent like that? You’re not a Scotsman, that’s for sure...”. He was also a fitness fanatic, and fifty-four, had kept himself in remarkably good shape. He loved to cycle and run, and also dabbled in body building from time to time. He enjoyed a drink. Perhaps too much. He enjoyed a drink so much so that it had been part of his undoing. The doctors had thought he’d beat cancer until it had hit his liver. Then they said there was no hope.


About a year earlier, he had got engaged to his girlfriend and they were going to be marrying next year. Of course, that’ wouldn’t happen now. She’d been good for him. Had given him a bit of stability, and had calmed his drinking. Now he only had a bit of vodka at Christmas times and a glass of wine with special dinners. But it was too late. By the time the cancer had hit the liver, the damage was already long done and there was no more hope.


Just like that, things had shattered in to a million pieces. “No hope.”


From there it had got in to his blood and pumped itself around his body like a vile disgusting disease. He had been so hell bent on beating it. He said he imagined it was his worst enemy at times and treat it accordingly. He was adamant he was going to win. To him, it was just another obstacle, there to be conquered then laughed about.


Kate had struggled to see it that way.


The whole circumstances surrounding his cancer had been like a giant unwanted interruption to her Dads life, and her own. Cancer was the guest nobody wanted at the party; it was most certainly unwelcome. The news that Frank had cancer reached Kate one evening when she was strolling through London with a friend who had come to visit and stay the night. All day she had felt a horrible sense of foreboding. She knew something was wrong. The phone had rung and swivelling on the axel of one sentence, her entire life blew apart with a creak and a thump.


“The good news is, he is out of surgery is fine. The bad news is, they found cancer.”


Cancer...


That word; cancer. It was like a bloody atomic bomb. As she’d listened on the phone, her friend had gauged the very distinct change in her facial expression and waited patiently until she’d hung up.


“My Dad, he’s got....”.


The words wouldn’t come out. Horrible cancer. Vicious cancer. Sick cancer. Deadly cancer. The word cancer nestled in her throat like a giant bubble. The bubble wanted to be a scream, but she wanted it to be the word “cancer.” What came out was “cancer” in very hushed tones full of fright and terror, like a horrible dirty secret.


It made her sick.


Cancer.


The word itself was a disease on society. Sure, there had been developments in science and she was always hearing about people who beat cancer, but there’s also a reason that when someone says cancer, entire rooms fall silent. Cancer is a killer.


At first it had taken Kate a while to get past the idea that cancer meant indefinite death. Most of the time she maintained a deathly silence which everyone said wasn’t normal. But one night she made a hysterical call to him in which she yelled and cried down the phone that she didn’t want him to die, and he had yelled back, “I’m not going to die from cancer. You’ll see! I’ll beat this and I’ll be here forever, Catherine!”


Her Dad persuaded her he was going to beat cancer, then he’d marry his fiancé and they’d buy a little farm somewhere n the borders, with chickens, and Kate was always going to be welcome. The light would always be on for her.


Then things started to get ugly; really ugly. Cancer sprouted an arm and a leg and they started calling it “secondary cancer.” That’s when Kate starting getting the horrible gut feeling in her stomach, that her initial reaction was correct, this was not going to end well. There would be no wedding and no farm with chickens.


Her repulsion at the word cancer returned again. People would ask,


“How’s your Dad getting on?”


“He’s fine.”


“No more cancer?”


“No more cancer.”


It wasn’t denial, it was evasion. What was she meant to say?


“The cancer is secondary and it’s not looking good. How’s your Dad?”


With every phone call to say he had worsened, Kates colour turned from glowing white to angry, violent, red. It was the type of red that trickles out of someone’s head who has just fallen out a seventy storey building and whose head has been cracked open; that deep, seeping, slow moving red that creeps slowly and which entices silence; and then screams. She sat snug in her red terror, sipping constantly on glasses of wine.


And then she got the call. “Terminal cancer” had joined the party now too.


She had been sitting drinking in a pub with a friend when the phone rang. It was her Mother and she’d had a call from Scotland.


Cancer.


Terminal.


Days to live.


Need to go to Scotland.


Tonight.


The conversation came in bits. Kate imagined if this had been a movie about her Dad and her, at this very moment, all the cameras all at once would zoom in on her, and everything would fall deathly quiet, allowing the study of the woman who just found out her Dad is going to die.


The thoughts’ had raced through her head, from then until now but the main one that terrified her was one that she knew she was completely alone in feeling. Everyone felt remorse, everyone felt sad, but Kate... no, she felt something quite different. All her life, there was nobody who had died who her Dad couldn’t reach. He’d reached them all, right in front of her. Some people are adamant that mediums make it up, but Kate knew different. This was real. But who would reach her Dad for her when his time came? No one. She didn’t know any other mediums. She would be alone, spiritually. Completely and entirely, left to fend in a world where she knew spirits existed, but whose deafening silence made her feel she may as well of been alone. They never spoke to her. Only her Dad.


Kate sighed and remembered her Dad. It was strange how she already thought of him in the past tense, as if part of him was already resigning itself for departure and was packing up its bags. She took this as a sign of her mind preparing her. The smile grew as she paid an extra special tribute ot her Dad the medium in her head. It truly was a wonderful thing, that he could speak to ghosts.


It wasn’t something Kate liked to talk about much. You can talk about believing in God all you want and until the cows come home, and people are cool with that. But if you start talking about talking to dead people, well, then that opens a whole new kettle of fish. A bit like when you talk to someone in a Scottish accent. eyes flare, lips purse, people treat you differently.


Her Dad’s cancer had been like a careering runaway train coming at her full speed. She didn’t know when it would hit. But she knew it would, and it would hurt. And al lthese memories and al lthese feelings were only the warning sigsn for a massive earthquake.


“We’re just coming in to the car park now, dear. Do you want me to drop you at the main entrance? Will that be ok?”


“Yes, thank you.”


The driver charged her five pounds; a still fairly standard amount in Scotland for a ten minute journey. As they exchanged notes and change, he gave her a solemn nod and drove off. It’s definitely that word, she thought. “Hospice.” People don’t like to hear that word because it can only mean bad things. She’d encountered a lot of those kinds of words recently. Cancer. Terminal. Dying. Emergency.


Again the thoughts returned. That careering train was coming closer out of the grey fog, whistles blowing, steam billowing, screaming at her.


She trenched her way through the snow until she stood on the path leading to the hospice. The snow here had turned to a horrible grey colour and was sludgy. The edges were melted and crumbling. It had been cleared by many other feet who had previously walked on. Other daughters, perhaps. And then she slowly walked through the automatic doors.

Chapter 4. See you Soon

She sat by his bed. Just him and her. His fiancé had gone to the cafe to give them some time alone. Kate liked her and was eternally grateful for the care she’d given her Dad when she couldn’t.


His skin was not what it once was. He wasn’t what we once was. Gone was the athletic and muscular bronzed man; in his place lay a pale skinned man with piercing blue eyes. His skin had taken on a grey tinge. The doctors said that would happen; it’s what happens when the body prepares for death. Things begins to shut down and one of them is the skin. It stops rejuvenating itself and grows lack lustre and dull. He had lost weight. He was just a shell of who her Dad was, but in his eyes, she could still see him. He was in there. Barely. But he was in there.


His colour was blue. Faint, but definitely still blue. All around her she felt an atmosphere.


“Dad?”


“I can still hear you, petal. You didn’t have to come all this way.”


His voice was laboured and sickly.


“I had to, Dad.”


They sat in silence. She held his hand and felt his bones through it. He squeezed her hand slightly and gestured to his other hand which was clasped in to a fist.


“I saved something for you.”


He began to cough and she helped him take a sip of water from a little cup. Little droplets escaped his mouth and she dabbed them dry with a tissue. She never thought she’d have to help her Dad drink, and yet oddly she felt she knew exactly what to do.


He gestured to his clenched fist and opened it. In his palm lay a string of little white beads with intricate carvings.


Catherine recognised them and slowly took them from his hand.


“Do you remember these? We got them in Castle Douglas when you were a little girl.”


“I remember.”


“I need you to look after them for a while, for me. Will you do that?”


She nodded and slipped them in to her handbag. She remembered that days, and then all the other special days. Her Dad and her had an extra special connection that she just couldn’t explain. It was as if they were the same spirit, shared the same energy and belonged to the exact same life. She’d lost count of the amount of times she’d gone to phone him and he’d be already on the other end of the phone, having tried to phone her at that exact same moment. And all the dreams they had both had. She’d phone and tell him about her weird dreams, only to find out he had the exact same dream. As a young boy he’s fallen off a bike and injured his knee, leaving him with a permanent scar. As a child Kate had done the same and had an identical scar on the exact same knee. They breathed the same air and somehow, over all those hundreds of miles, still existed as if they lived in the same house, as Father and daughter. Miles could never separate them.


And now he was tired and slipping further away to a place she knew she’d never find him. Every time she looked away and looked back, it was as if yet another little something had slipped. She could never tell you medically or by name what parts of him were slipping, but they were; bit by bit, piece by piece. His spirit remained and stared back at her through his glassy eyes; one side of his face paralysed by the strokes. That stare would never leave her. It was the stare of a man sure of himself, who knew the world, who knew how to take care of himself. It was a man who didn’t want to go, but knew he had to. It was cancer.


They had already decided a while ago; when it was months rather than days, and weeks rather than hours, that when the time came, she would visit, say goodbye and go. He didn’t want her missing lessons. It was an odd understanding but it would work for them. All these years, and neither of them wanted a prolonged goodbye.


It was time.


“I’ve got to go back to London, Dad.”


“I know, darlin’.”


“I love you.”


“I love you too. Always. Forever and ever. You know that, don’t you?”


“Yeah, Dad.”


“When I get there, I’ll let you know? I’ll call you.”


He was losing it. A tear bubbled in Kate’s eye. This isn’t what they had planned. He hadn’t wanted her to see him at the very end. This had been his idea, for her to say her goodbye when he was still of sound body and mind. But now, he was talking about calling her. She opted to go along with it. Let her dying Father spend his last days believing they weren’t going to be parted.


“I know, Dad. I’ll see you soon.”


“You too, darlin’.”


And with that she stood up, kissed him on the forehead, and slowly walked out. She followed the hospice corridors as they went past door after door after door. Each room filled with yet another person, perhaps planning a similar goodbye to hers.


It was done.


It was time to go back to London.


He passed at 3:05am the following morning.


Frank Whitfield belonged to another man’s horizon.

Chapter 5. London

Next time it’s dark, take a walk along to Tower Bridge, along the bank of the river Thames in London. Look out across the water at the city and you will see a city glowing with every colour under the sun. It will entice you with its flashing lights, river side bars and late night sounds. It is a city which breathes energy on to anyone who walks across its bridges. Kate liked London, but she loved London at night. Its colours spoke to her.


The Docklands, glowed with blues, yellows and greens; all lit up against the night sky. It was exciting and romantic, romantic like pioneers arriving in London from long journeys abroad, bringing coffee and chocolate to the Londoners. It called for pretty dresses and nights spent in little restaurants sampling delicious foods. It was a cool breeze of the green Thames, which shone midnight blues and purples in the night. Its surface glittered; breathing and living.


London Bridge, was lively and red. Always. Just like Soho and China Town. It called for little kitten heels worn with glowing silk dresses, nipped in at all the right places. And big hair and little clutch purses of gold. Such outfits are made for walking through London Bridge on the arm of a good friend. Cross through the glass tower blocks of business and you will meet the Thames yet again. H. M. S. Belfast waits to greet you, and a million other boats, offering to carry you through the glistening darkness to your unknown destination.


And her favourite, Greenwich, home to the National Maritime Museum and countless little restaurants. It’s colours are so bright and beautiful, it would be a crime to challenge it by wearing any other colour than that which blended in and stood back and allowed the already existing colours to do the talking. It called for black. Black cocktail dresses set against midnight blue skies and the ghostly glowing white of the Navy College building. You look up at the stars and you see navy blue, and a million beluga white stars. Every star, a memory, a kiss, a night. You look to the Observatory, and you may not see it, but you feel it; the million different colours of the galaxy and the kaleidoscope of excitement that is discovery, all around you. You walk across the grass and the ground itself, green in colour, but magic and midnight blue in reflection, tells you, “No, don’t look at me. Look up there, at the stars! Never look down, but up, always up!” You walk to the edge of Greenwich and behold the Thames, and if you look long enough, and hard enough at the water, it appears it is you that moves, and not it.


And there’s something extra there. A million eyes of a million souls lost at sea, stare back at you. They are the souls of those lost at sea, who drawn by the bright lights and the excitement of London city, have travelled back. Just to look and to see. If you close your eyes, and block out everything, else their voices will come to you. You will hear their conversations all around you. You will hear their wonder.


Names, colours, feelings. They are there if you listen. But only if you believe, heart and soul, that this - this right here, inside you - is not just matter and that this is not the end.


This is the world now. Electric, static and always connected. Behold.


Sometimes, in the dead of night, worried whales creep up the Thames too. Their expressions blank with worry, their heads bulging with a thousand concerns and thoughts. If they had hands, they would stroke them nervously. You won’t always see them. But they see you. They know you and can feel your footprint . They know when you time has begun, and they know when the clock strikes midnight for the last time and you breathe your last breath. They hear you breathing; a million little breaths all around the banks of the Thames. They feel the vibrations from our music, the sonar from our army bases, and the pollution of our lives; in their water, in their lungs, like a bitter tasting sweet. They come to warn the thousands of lost souls to leave. The ones in the water of the Thames, the ones in the sky above, and the ones lost; walking through our streets; their conversations blocked out by endless static electricity. They search in vain for someone with that extra wire, but there are too many wires now.


Leave. This is not for us anymore. Come to the sea.


Sometimes a whale will become trapped and we will all crowd around. We will remark on its playful nature and its song.


“Oh isn’t it’s song eeryie?”


“There’s something so human about their eyes.”


And all the while they will call out in clicks and whistles.


I need someone who can hear me.


A thousand sympathetic souls, living and dead look on. And somewhere out there, in the vast ocean, the ultimate souls of all cry. They swim through the sea, surrounded by our loved ones. They absorb all our pain and hurt in death and turn it in to the purest colour of all. White. Beluga white. They are the guardian of our souls. Where once only the souls of the dead at sea dwelled, now is the resting place of millions. On entering the after life, the soul cannot cope with our modern world of sonar and endless wi-fi channels. The piercing noises, to high for us humans to hear, deafen out their messages. They try in vain to contact sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and friends, but can’t get through. The line is engaged. Our channels are closed. And so they leave for the sea. The only place quiet enough for them to send a message home. And amongst them, watching over them, the creature that takes all their hurt and makes it love, takes all their nasty earthly words and makes them in to song, and occasionally, oh so occasionally, will surface to look dead set in the eye of a human...


That ringing in your ears.... that’s no static electricity but the voice of a million souls trying to say hello. When you put your head under the water in the sea and your ears become blocked. That's not pressure, thats our voices; million of them, urging you to listen. Listen. Will you? Please.


And then slips below the surface and is gone, its words echoing for the few who can still hear him...


I am the Beluga... sing with me.

Chapter 6. Voices

Kate sat herself down on the banks of the river Thames on a little wooden bench, and looked out across the water. It wasn’t the same endless body of water she’d looked out across, out across to American, down at Lands End in Cornwall, but it would have to do. At twenty five, she felt embarrassed that her life was still like this; out of control and lurched from insanely happy moments, to moments of pure terror.


She’s had another one of her panic attacks and was going to have to take one of her tablets.


She’d been harmlessly browsing through some market stalls near City Hall – sampling Japanese foods and sweets, and what had started as a happy day just pottering about, had very quickly turned in to a nightmare. She’d turned around and been met by crowds of people, all pushing and shoving each other. She’d tried to say excuse me but nobody had heard her and she’d been blocked in. One of them, a big broad shouldered man was talking frantically on his phone and she’d repeatedly said “excuse me” but he hadn’t budged. He was too engrossed in his blackberry to care about the petite sized woman frantically worrying in front of him. In the end she’d had to push her way through and had had to leave the market, panicked by the chaos and commotion. In the frenzy, she’d forgotten to inform her girlfriend she was leaving, but knew now that it had happened so many times before that Camilla would naturally follow her out, knowing exactly what had happened.


Now Kate sat on the banks of the River Thames. Camilla had gone in to a small coffee shop behind them to get her a cup of tea to sip to calm her down, and so she waited. She watched the river Thames go by and tried to find calm in it. London probably wasn’t the best place for a claustrophobic woman to live, but there was so many other things that she loved about it that she couldn’t bare to leave. She enjoyed the parks where she could just sit quietly, feeding the pigeons and squirrels. She also loved London at night, and although all her future dreams of family and chickens in the garden nearly always involved her and Camilla living in the countryside somewhere, they still weren’t ready to leave London just yet. They still felt like city dwellers and lapped up London’s life of outdoor food markets, open top red buses and boat rides down the Thames. There was so much they both wanted to see outside of London though. Kate wanted to see the Northern Lights; spurred on by memories of distant bedtime stories her Dad had told her of the time he saw the Northern Lights from his boat, five miles in to the arctic circle, with narwhals and belugas bobbing up and down in the sea around him. Always when she thought of this story she pictured her Dad like a little boy gazing up at the Northern Lights and everything around him like a magical shaken snow globe. She wanted that experience too. But it was not for now. Now was for London, their pretty flat in Southwark and for panic attacks. The Northern Lights would have to wait.


“Ok, drink this cup of tea and just try to calm down. Do you need me to get your meds out of your bag?”


Camilla was back with the tea. Kate slipped it in to her hands and began to sip, always watching the water.


“Was it the crowds again?”


“Yeah. I felt claustrophobic. The meds are in the little zip pocket inside my handbag.”


“I know. Just drink your tea and then we can go home and you can read a book or we’ll sit and do something together, whatever you want. Maybe there will be a good film on the TV tonight or something.”


Camilla rummaged then produced a little silver foil of tablets. Betablockers. They cut out adrenaline in a matter of minutes and had been prescribed to Kate by her doctor. She was to take one whenever she panicked. It stopped the panic dead. Kate took the silver foil from her and popped one of the pills in to her hand, and then in to her mouth, washed down with a sip of tea.


“Ok, but can we stay here for a little while?”


“Yes, ok.”


Kate fed her arm through Camilla’s arm and snuggled in tight against her on the banks of the river Thames. She really wished her Dad had been around to meet her. She knew that her Dad never had a problem with her being gay and she was glad she had found the time to tell him before he had passed on, but she wished that he had been able to meet Camilla. At least then Camilla might understand part of Kate’s connection with water. Just watching the Thames had a calming effect on her. Her Dad’s ashes had been scattered at sea and in a romantic way she sometimes liked to think they were now part of the giant puddle of water available on earth and that someday, maybe some of his ashes may find their way in to the Thames. There was a morbidity to the thought, but also a comfort in knowing her Dad was now the ocean and that the ocean, and it’s rivers and raindrops was everywhere.


Kate could go whole weeks without thinking of her Dad. It had been near on five years now since his death and although she was by no means over his death, she had rebuilt her life. She had moved on, got herself a good strong life in London, found a partner and was now attempting to write academic texts on natural science, but which unfortunately nobody seemed interested in. To Kate, the natural history of the size of whales and how it had been impacted by whaling was fascinating, but it seemed others didn’t agree. She could go months thinking about this, and her flat that she shared with Camilla, and how to go about living her life, but then the silence would always be shattered by a panic attack. They were becoming more and more frequent and with every instance, she found herself thinking of her Dad.


Sometimes she thought she heard him or saw him out the corner of her eye when she panicked, but then doesn’t everyone think they see dead loved ones occasionally? The world is full of stories of people who have lost loved ones, and then one winter they saw a little robin, and there’s something about its face that compels them to be convinced that it is none other than their dead uncle Tony, come back as a robin to say hello. You go search for it on the internet. It’s usually on the same website as the person who saw the Virgin Mary in their toast.


They slowly began to head back in to the city, in the direction of their Southwark Flat. They had reached a point in their relationship where they now had everything planned out. The idea was they would stay in this little London flat – with its floor to ceiling glass windows and balcony overlooking the bright lights of the city – for a good few years, they’d get married whilst living here, maybe get a dog whilst living here, and then when the time came for one of them to become pregnant and have a baby, they would become country mice and scuttle off to a little cottage somewhere more rural, where they’d have chickens and a vegetable patch. Floor to ceiling glass windows were not child friendly at all.


They pushed open the door to their flat and were greeted by a pile of mail. Kate pilled them in to her hands and went and sat on the sofa, sorting them in to piles of “Kate’s mail” and “Camilla’s mail.” Occasionally the piles blurred in to “our mail” which included clothes catalogues, occasional cards from well wishing relatives and friends, and pizza delivery flyers. Kate noticed she had an official white enveloped letter and she opened it curiously.


“Dear Miss Whitman,


After reading your article as submitted for our journal, we regret to inform you that on this occasion we will not...”


The letter went on.


It was the same letter she had received countless times before; such and such journal was very sorry to inform her that her article about the natural history of whaling, would not be getting published. They always wished her well though and hoped she would continue to read their publication.


The letter went in the bin.


“Rejection!” she shouted through to Camilla who was pottering in the kitchen. “I thought people liked whales?”


“Oh I’m sure some people do, darling.”


“I like whales.”


“I know you do.”


Kate slipped her feet out of her little black moccasin shoes and pulled her feet up on to the bright red sofa. She loved this sofa. This sofa had been home to many excited book readings, evenings watching David Attenborough documentaries, and her favourite piece of furniture n the flat. It wasn’t child friendly either and she didn’t know what she’d do with it when the time came to get a child friendly sofa which pulled out in to sleepover bed, and which had easy washable surfaces. But this, this sofa was lovely for the right now. The flat wasn’t massive but it was a comfortable size. The main selling point had been the large windows, if you can call them that. They were more like a solid wall of glass. The sofa sat perpendicular to the wall of glass, facing a rectangular coffee table which housed magazines, recent newspapers and the odd holiday brochures for trips they planned to make, but as yet had not. Svalbard... Mexico... Paris...


She reached across to the coffee table and thumbed through a copy of National Geographic. One day, she wanted to open it up and read something by her. Anything, by her! It didn’t even have to be about the sodding whales. As she flicked, an article on scrimshaw caught her eye and she stopped to look at it.


The article discussed the artwork as depicted on the whale bone scrimshaws and was accompanied by a photograph of a man holding a scrimshaw up to the light, with the sea in the background. His face was weathered and bronzed. Clearly a man of the sea, thought Kate. The background looked like it could be part of an old whaling town, maybe Nantucket, or somewhere near Norway?


Looking down at the picture, she began to feel dizzy.


“Bloody betablockers”, she mumbled.


“Did you say something?”, called Camilla from the kitchen?


“Er, just that my head is starting to spin a bit. Think I’m still a bit shaken from earlier. Maybe shouldn’t have had that betablocker on an empty stomach too, I feel queasy.”


“Just take some deep breaths. Do you want some water?”


Water. Oh no. That was the problem. It was the water that was making her feel unwell. She looked down at it intently. Was she hallucinating? It was if someone had a shot a video and slowed it right down, to mere milliseconds of movement, and then they had somehow got this barely moving film clip in to the National Geographic magazine. She could see the water of the sea, rippling slightly; the suns reflection bouncing of it in a ray of colour. Oh god, it was the face as well. The smile, was it smirking slightly? Were the corner of this man’s smile moving?


She felt sick. But it wasn’t just the picture of the sea, it was the feeling of the sea. She put her hands down on the bright red sofa to steady herself. She could have sworn she felt as though she was swaying. Side to side, side to side, as if on a boat. She felt her tummy go as it would if she were in a car going over a hill too quickly.


Suddenly she became aware of Camilla standing in the doorway.


“You don’t look well. Maybe you should lie down?”


“Yeah... oh God... my head...”


She felt her gag reflex go. Straight away Camilla was helping her up and the seconds that followed turned to a blur. She was on the sofa. The sea was moving. The man was smiling. She was being lead to the bathroom. She was being sick. She was lying on the bathroom floor shattered with Camilla stroking her face. She was being helped up and in to the bedroom. The nice comfy bedroom with the white sheets and ceiling to floor glass window overlooking London. She was laying on her back. She was aware of voices.


“I think you need to just lie down, baby. It’s not been your day today. I think that panic attack shook you up and then you had a reaction to your meds for some reason. Maybe just rest. Go to sleep. I’ll check on you later. Nite nite, now.”


Hello? Can you hear me?


Can you hear any of us?


I’m not sure she can hear you.


We didn’t mean to startle you, Catherine...


“Yeah I can still hear you.”


“No darling, I’m saying go to sleep. You’re delirious. Shut your eyes and sleep for a bit.”


Sorry, we’ll come back at a better time for you. Goodbye, Catherine.


Bye darlin’.


“What?”


“Nite nite, sleep.”


Kate let the delirium take over and her heavy lids fell shut. She didn’t understand what was going on but decided to take Camilla’s advice and just sleep.

Chapter 7. Beluga talks

Kate sat herself down on the banks of the river Thames on a little wooden bench, and looked out across the water. It wasn’t the same endless body of water she’d looked out across, out across to American, down at Lands End in Cornwall, but it would have to do. At twenty five, she felt embarrassed that her life was still like this; out of control and lurched from insanely happy moments, to moments of pure terror.


She’s had another one of her panic attacks and was going to have to take one of her tablets.


She’d been harmlessly browsing through some market stalls near City Hall – sampling Japanese foods and sweets, and what had started as a happy day just pottering about, had very quickly turned in to a nightmare. She’d turned around and been met by crowds of people, all pushing and shoving each other. She’d tried to say excuse me but nobody had heard her and she’d been blocked in. One of them, a big broad shouldered man was talking frantically on his phone and she’d repeatedly said “excuse me” but he hadn’t budged. He was too engrossed in his blackberry to care about the petite sized woman frantically worrying in front of him. In the end she’d had to push her way through and had had to leave the market, panicked by the chaos and commotion. In the frenzy, she’d forgotten to inform her girlfriend she was leaving, but knew now that it had happened so many times before that Camilla would naturally follow her out, knowing exactly what had happened.


Now Kate sat on the banks of the River Thames. Camilla had gone in to a small coffee shop behind them to get her a cup of tea to sip to calm her down, and so she waited. She watched the river Thames go by and tried to find calm in it. London probably wasn’t the best place for a claustrophobic woman to live, but there was so many other things that she loved about it that she couldn’t bare to leave. She enjoyed the parks where she could just sit quietly, feeding the pigeons and squirrels. She also loved London at night, and although all her future dreams of family and chickens in the garden nearly always involved her and Camilla living in the countryside somewhere, they still weren’t ready to leave London just yet. They still felt like city dwellers and lapped up London’s life of outdoor food markets, open top red buses and boat rides down the Thames. There was so much they both wanted to see outside of London though. Kate wanted to see the Northern Lights; spurred on by memories of distant bedtime stories her Dad had told her of the time he saw the Northern Lights from his boat, five miles in to the arctic circle, with narwhals and belugas bobbing up and down in the sea around him. Always when she thought of this story she pictured her Dad like a little boy gazing up at the Northern Lights and everything around him like a magical shaken snow globe. She wanted that experience too. But it was not for now. Now was for London, their pretty flat in Southwark and for panic attacks. The Northern Lights would have to wait.


“Ok, drink this cup of tea and just try to calm down. Do you need me to get your meds out of your bag?”


Camilla was back with the tea. Kate slipped it in to her hands and began to sip, always watching the water.


“Was it the crowds again?”


“Yeah. I felt claustrophobic. The meds are in the little zip pocket inside my handbag.”


“I know. Just drink your tea and then we can go home and you can read a book or we’ll sit and do something together, whatever you want. Maybe there will be a good film on the TV tonight or something.”


Camilla rummaged then produced a little silver foil of tablets. Betablockers. They cut out adrenaline in a matter of minutes and had been prescribed to Kate by her doctor. She was to take one whenever she panicked. It stopped the panic dead. Kate took the silver foil from her and popped one of the pills in to her hand, and then in to her mouth, washed down with a sip of tea.


“Ok, but can we stay here for a little while?”


“Yes, ok.”


Kate fed her arm through Camilla’s arm and snuggled in tight against her on the banks of the river Thames. She really wished her Dad had been around to meet her. She knew that her Dad never had a problem with her being gay and she was glad she had found the time to tell him before he had passed on, but she wished that he had been able to meet Camilla. At least then Camilla might understand part of Kate’s connection with water. Just watching the Thames had a calming effect on her. Her Dad’s ashes had been scattered at sea and in a romantic way she sometimes liked to think they were now part of the giant puddle of water available on earth and that someday, maybe some of his ashes may find their way in to the Thames. There was a morbidity to the thought, but also a comfort in knowing her Dad was now the ocean and that the ocean, and it’s rivers and raindrops was everywhere.


Kate could go whole weeks without thinking of her Dad. It had been near on five years now since his death and although she was by no means over his death, she had rebuilt her life. She had moved on, got herself a good strong life in London, found a partner and was now attempting to write academic texts on natural science, but which unfortunately nobody seemed interested in. To Kate, the natural history of the size of whales and how it had been impacted by whaling was fascinating, but it seemed others didn’t agree. She could go months thinking about this, and her flat that she shared with Camilla, and how to go about living her life, but then the silence would always be shattered by a panic attack. They were becoming more and more frequent and with every instance, she found herself thinking of her Dad.


Sometimes she thought she heard him or saw him out the corner of her eye when she panicked, but then doesn’t everyone think they see dead loved ones occasionally? The world is full of stories of people who have lost loved ones, and then one winter they saw a little robin, and there’s something about its face that compels them to be convinced that it is none other than their dead uncle Tony, come back as a robin to say hello. You go search for it on the internet. It’s usually on the same website as the person who saw the Virgin Mary in their toast.


They slowly began to head back in to the city, in the direction of their Southwark Flat. They had reached a point in their relationship where they now had everything planned out. The idea was they would stay in this little London flat – with its floor to ceiling glass windows and balcony overlooking the bright lights of the city – for a good few years, they’d get married whilst living here, maybe get a dog whilst living here, and then when the time came for one of them to become pregnant and have a baby, they would become country mice and scuttle off to a little cottage somewhere more rural, where they’d have chickens and a vegetable patch. Floor to ceiling glass windows were not child friendly at all.


They pushed open the door to their flat and were greeted by a pile of mail. Kate pilled them in to her hands and went and sat on the sofa, sorting them in to piles of “Kate’s mail” and “Camilla’s mail.” Occasionally the piles blurred in to “our mail” which included clothes catalogues, occasional cards from well wishing relatives and friends, and pizza delivery flyers. Kate noticed she had an official white enveloped letter and she opened it curiously.


“Dear Miss Whitman,


After reading your article as submitted for our journal, we regret to inform you that on this occasion we will not...”


The letter went on.


It was the same letter she had received countless times before; such and such journal was very sorry to inform her that her article about the natural history of whaling, would not be getting published. They always wished her well though and hoped she would continue to read their publication.


The letter went in the bin.


“Rejection!” she shouted through to Camilla who was pottering in the kitchen. “I thought people liked whales?”


“Oh I’m sure some people do, darling.”


“I like whales.”


“I know you do.”


Kate slipped her feet out of her little black moccasin shoes and pulled her feet up on to the bright red sofa. She loved this sofa. This sofa had been home to many excited book readings, evenings watching David Attenborough documentaries, and her favourite piece of furniture n the flat. It wasn’t child friendly either and she didn’t know what she’d do with it when the time came to get a child friendly sofa which pulled out in to sleepover bed, and which had easy washable surfaces. But this, this sofa was lovely for the right now. The flat wasn’t massive but it was a comfortable size. The main selling point had been the large windows, if you can call them that. They were more like a solid wall of glass. The sofa sat perpendicular to the wall of glass, facing a rectangular coffee table which housed magazines, recent newspapers and the odd holiday brochures for trips they planned to make, but as yet had not. Svalbard... Mexico... Paris...


She reached across to the coffee table and thumbed through a copy of National Geographic. One day, she wanted to open it up and read something by her. Anything, by her! It didn’t even have to be about the sodding whales. As she flicked, an article on scrimshaw caught her eye and she stopped to look at it.


The article discussed the artwork as depicted on the whale bone scrimshaws and was accompanied by a photograph of a man holding a scrimshaw up to the light, with the sea in the background. His face was weathered and bronzed. Clearly a man of the sea, thought Kate. The background looked like it could be part of an old whaling town, maybe Nantucket, or somewhere near Norway?


Looking down at the picture, she began to feel dizzy.


“Bloody betablockers”, she mumbled.


“Did you say something?”, called Camilla from the kitchen?


“Er, just that my head is starting to spin a bit. Think I’m still a bit shaken from earlier. Maybe shouldn’t have had that betablocker on an empty stomach too, I feel queasy.”


“Just take some deep breaths. Do you want some water?”


Water. Oh no. That was the problem. It was the water that was making her feel unwell. She looked down at it intently. Was she hallucinating? It was if someone had a shot a video and slowed it right down, to mere milliseconds of movement, and then they had somehow got this barely moving film clip in to the National Geographic magazine. She could see the water of the sea, rippling slightly; the suns reflection bouncing of it in a ray of colour. Oh god, it was the face as well. The smile, was it smirking slightly? Were the corner of this man’s smile moving?


She felt sick. But it wasn’t just the picture of the sea, it was the feeling of the sea. She put her hands down on the bright red sofa to steady herself. She could have sworn she felt as though she was swaying. Side to side, side to side, as if on a boat. She felt her tummy go as it would if she were in a car going over a hill too quickly.


Suddenly she became aware of Camilla standing in the doorway.


“You don’t look well. Maybe you should lie down?”


“Yeah... oh God... my head...”


She felt her gag reflex go. Straight away Camilla was helping her up and the seconds that followed turned to a blur. She was on the sofa. The sea was moving. The man was smiling. She was being lead to the bathroom. She was being sick. She was lying on the bathroom floor shattered with Camilla stroking her face. She was being helped up and in to the bedroom. The nice comfy bedroom with the white sheets and ceiling to floor glass window overlooking London. She was laying on her back. She was aware of voices.


“I think you need to just lie down, baby. It’s not been your day today. I think that panic attack shook you up and then you had a reaction to your meds for some reason. Maybe just rest. Go to sleep. I’ll check on you later. Nite nite, now.”


Hello? Can you hear me?


Can you hear any of us?


I’m not sure she can hear you.


We didn’t mean to startle you, Catherine...


“Yeah I can still hear you.”


“No darling, I’m saying go to sleep. You’re delirious. Shut your eyes and sleep for a bit.”


Sorry, we’ll come back at a better time for you. Goodbye, Catherine.


Bye darlin’.


“What?”


“Nite nite, sleep.”


Kate let the delirium take over and her heavy lids fell shut. She didn’t understand what was going on but decided to take Camilla’s advice and just sleep.

Chapter 8. Lucky enough to see the Northern Lights.

His gigantic hand engulfed hers, weathered and rough from his times at sea, as they walked along the short promenade.


“There’s something I want to show you, Catherine. Something very special.”


She was a little girl again.


Maybe four or five, and tiny. She wore her little navy duffle coat and black patent shoes. Her Dad, her hero, the strongest man in the world and the most magical person she had ever known, was leading her along the banks of the Forth in Edinburgh. It was winter and the rain lashed at them both.


They reached the railing that over looked the murky forth. The railings were dark grey and blue, mottled with rust and the assault of continuous sea water, smashing against them in harsher storms.


He picked her up and pointed out to sea.


“Do you see him, darling?”


She followed her Dads finger out to sea. Nothing. All she could see was endless greys, and blue; the horizon blurring sea and sky. But then... what was that? Something was in the water.


“Look! There he is!”


She saw him. A white lump rising in the water, then sliding back in, like a giant white eel. His back arched as he went down, then moments later he came back up. He floated on his side, showing her his fins.


She looked at her Dad astonished.


“What’s that, Daddy?”


“That’s a whale, sweetheart. When your old here Dad here went out to sea, he saw loads of them. I wanted you to see one too.”


“Please tell me about the sea again.”


“Oh I went everywhere in the Baltics. I was five miles inside the arctic circle once, and I saw them all; all those arctic animals. I saw belugas and narwhals and even a moose. Yeah, I saw everything. The arctic is the most peaceful place on earth. There’s nobody else there. That’s where I saw the Northern Lights.”


“The Northern Lights?”


“They are big sheets of electricity that run through the night sky, Catherine. They are blues, and pinks and blues. Very few people ever get to see them, but I was very lucky. I’m a very lucky person, darlin’. Maybe one day you will be very lucky too.”


She watched. The white whale continued to bob. Occasionally she saw his big bulbous face and his endearing smile. He looked as though he was deep in thought.


“He shouldn’t really be here. He got lost. He’s a Beluga and he belongs in much colder waters than these here Scottish ones. He’ll find his way back home though, don’t you worry. Never you worry, my girl. We’ll all be ok in the end. ”


Kate went to look up at her Dad, confused by his words, but he was gone.


Then the mood changed.


Where was her Dad? She was standing on the promenade on her own now. She looked around frantically, then caught sight of the ground around her. Gone was they greys of the concrete, and in its places blankets of snow, all pure white and sparkling around her. The rain had stopped too. Now snowflakes came instead, to join in bed with the blankets of snow.


She looked down at her feet and saw her little girls black patent shoes were gone. In their place, brown velvet heeled shoes with little almond shaped toes. They had a beautiful block heel of bright sunshine yellow to them. She saw them standing in the snow as little specs of snow rested on them, darkening the velvet from chocolate to a dark, eternal dark brown. Then she looked at her arms. They were bare. Her coat was gone. Instead she wore a beautiful evening dress of darkest navy blue, with a thin gold ribbon running horizontally around it in big swooshing and swirling circles, all the way down to the hem, where her black mesh petticoat poked out.


If she had thought of the most beautiful dress in the world, it would still have only come second to this.


Petticoats. Petticoats were for women, not little girls. And then she beheld her true form in its entirety, standing in the white snow. She had become a woman standing in this very spot, transformed by the magic in the snow. Her skin had lost its puppy fat and in its place, toned porcelain coloured skin, covering her everywhere. She felt the cold on her skin around her shoulders and collar bone, which were bare.


She looked out to the sea, in the depths of the snow storm, and then she saw it.


A boat.


A small Fishermans boat, nothing fancy. And on the starboard, a man. Her Dad. He was far away, but she could see him and she knew he was smiling. She saw it so clearly in her head. He was waving. In the trail of the boat, an unmistakable bobbing of a white creature, following him out of the Forth, out to sea.


And then, the booming. It came up from the ocean floor of every ocean to have ever existed, like a deep sonar which didn’t ring through her ears but vibrated through her very body and spirit.


Music and song came to her from the depths of the sea.


I see trees of green...


Red roses too...


I see them bloom,


For me and for you...


And I think to myself...


What a wonderful world.


The sea was singing for her.


Her Dad continued to wave from the starboard as his boat floated towards the horizon.


And then, without her mouth even opening, she spoke. It came from her like a giant travelling light, reaching her Dad. His blue aura lit up brightly as he received her message.


Where are you going, Dad?


Oh just over the horizon, petal. I’m here, just over the horizon... I belong at sea, love.


Everywhere went white, not with snow, but with love. All around her the world glowed so brightly, she lost sights of her Dad, of the boat, of the sea and the Beluga whale, of her own feet standing in the blizzards of the snow – it all disappeared in to a white so pure, she had to close her eyes against its brightness.


Kate stirred in her bed then slowly opened her eyes. And just like that the dream was over. She lay in complete silence absorbing her dream, the way you dream something so real, it affects you for days afterwards, and you tell anyone who will listen, about the very real dream you had. She glanced over at the alarm clock on the side of the room. 3:05am. She’d been asleep for most of the night and even some of the morning. To her other side, she sensed Camilla; she’d obviously come to bed too.


Sliding her feet out of her bed and on to cold laminate floor, Kate sat up and slipped out of bed. She padded through to the living room and put on a light. She sat mesmerised on the sofa. She felt she could cry. But that would be silly, it was only a dream.


She remembered the events of the previous night and how she’d felt as though she was hallucinating looking at pictures of the sea in an article about Scrimshaw in National Geographic magazine. She really wasn’t well. She needed a holiday.


Svalbard, Catherine. It is time to go to Svalbard...


She reached in to the coffee table and pulled out the first holiday brochure she could find.


“Svalbard – natura dominatur”, it read. Kate had read about Svalbard in the past and knew natura dominatur roughly translated as “the power of nature.” A big white polar bear lay on its back gazing back at her, inviting her. Its expression said, come see me, and my friends. The front cover sparkled in its shiny gloss, the snow enticing her with its depth.


She reclined back on the giant red sofa and began to read the brochure. First thing when Camilla was awake, they would book a trip to Svalbard. She needed a break from London.


Frank sat beside her on the sofa, smiling. A tear ran down his face. It was finally time.

Chapter 9. Wonderful World

In the time it took Kate to go back to bed, sleep for a few hours, then wake up again, her mind had been doing some serious pondering. She had dreamed dreams of polar bears, little snow huts and warm tea. She could see it all in her head, but Svalbard was a long way off. It was the Arctic. Did they even have electricity there?


They must have electricity, thought Kate.


She wanted to go to Svalbard. If not for the break, then just to see the Northern Lights her Dad had once seen. Ever since his death, in the back of her head Kate had constructed a list of things that her Father had done that she too wanted to one day; and seeing the Northern Lights was one of them.


Despite all the developments in technology, still few people could say they had been to the Arctic Circle. But her Dad had gone, and she wanted to join him too, on that smallest of all small lists. Her and Camilla could go up there, stay in a nice little hut. They’d go for snow dog sledge rides, and maybe one of those night time arctic safaris she’d seen in the brochure. And then they’d go out to sea on a boat and she’d finally be so far out that she would see the curve of the earth, and then she’d look up and in the eternal darkness of the arctic, see the Northern Lights, sparkling with electricity over head. Then someone would shout “polar bear!” and they’d all look over to a cluster of ice and see a white fluffy bear padding about, eyeing them nervously, and they’d think themselves all very lucky to see a polar bear, an animal that one day could be extinct.


Something was definitely drawing her there, she could feel it. She didn’t have to try hard to imagine her holiday there; a constant playlist of clips of arctic adventures ran through her head, pivoted around the image of the welcoming polar bear. It was the same polar from the cover of the Svalbard brochure, big and fluffy and welcoming. Images were constantly being fed in to her brain out of seemingly nowhere, and all the time, this strong niggling feeling that despite it been freezing cold and the last inhabitable stop on the way to the Arctic Circle, she wanted to go.


But in spite of the romance of it all, Kate knew running off to Svalbard without little preparation, financial or practical, was out of the question. She would shelf the idea for now, but not too far to the back of her mind that she wouldn’t be able to find it again. No, she’d tell Camilla about it as soon as she could and together they’ make a plan. Then one day, hopefully within the next year, they would go and see about that polar bear and those northern lights.


Kate once again got out of bed, pulled on some clothes and went through to the living room. She picked up the Svalbard brochure and walked over to her little writing desk towards the back of the room, and plopped it down. Reaching in to the drawer of the desk, she pulled out a post it and quickly scribbled “holiday” and stuck it down on the front cover making it look like the polar bear was wearing a neon yellow dress.


They would go someday soon.


But with Svalbard now shelved, there was still a looming problem. Kate’s panic attacks had been getting worse and she could feel her personality and behaviour changing with them. Svalbard would give her something to look forward to but it would be a good few months in to the future. She had problems that needed solving now. She’d become reclusive. Not so much like a hermit, with matted hair and dirty clothes, but the type of recluse who doesn’t want to be at the centre of parties with hoards of people, and who doesn’t like to talk on the phone for so long. She’d boarded herself away in this glass walled flat and only emerged to go to other relaxing quiet places, like St James Park, or the Victoria and Albert, or a little boutique in Knightsbridge where she knew she wouldn’t be disturbed. Never Oxford Circus. If she wasn’t in a calm and quiet space, she felt as though the humming of the world around her was a rude person yelling over someone else. She couldn’t escape the feeling they were interrupting someone and she wanted to turn around and tell them all to “shut up”, so she could listen, but whenever she did manage to find silence, she could never hear whoever was trying to talk.


She leaned against the stiff red arm of the sofa.


So many nights, she just spent sitting here. Days too. In an odd sort of way, being this high up in a metropolitan flat was like an escape. London, the people and all the noise, was down there, and she, Kate who likes peace and quiet and her beta blockers is all the way up here. She was hiding. It wasn’t about not wanting to go outside, it was more an avoidance of the noise of the big city. She could never explain it but ever since her great escape, it was as if the world hummed around her. Not a quiet soothing sort of humming, but a full blown humming and vibrating like that which resonates from inside a wasps hive. And like the wasp hive, it made her feel uncomfortable. There was too much noise and a horrible sense of foreboding. She worried constantly about the events of the future, about people falling ill and about people dying. She felt she could look at someone who has upset and just feel their stress. It was catching.


She stood up again, drawn to stand by the glass and look down. The beehive hummed below her. Across the street an almost identical block of flats stood. Inside the living room of one, she could see a woman watching tv. The tv lit up in all the colours of the rainbow, but all of them a decoy and entirely faux. The woman was absorbed in to it, and the room all around her lit up viciously, reflecting the angry glare of the television screen. The colours grabbed at the women’s furniture greedily, and it was as if it the tv was growing in presence. Kate was glad she couldn’t hear it. She watched the woman reach down and pick up what looked like some sort of mobile phone and begin clicking away on it frantically. It was 10am in the morning. Who the hell was she texting at 10am with such ferocity? The flat opposite seemed to glow with technology and it gate Kate a headache. The colours, glowing like giant preservatives and e numbers spoke to her. They gave her a headache and hinted at a life encroached upon by the low IQ of daytime tv shows. Staring at it, she was conscious of hearing a strong ringing in her ear, the type that world go with a migraine. She stepped back from the glass.


She’d read in a magazine once that the presence of so much technology in our lives was creating invisible energy which was damaging to the human mind. She believed that. She imagined it like neon purple and blue claws, constantly trying to grab people at every given opportunity; dragging them in to their blackberries and their facebook accounts, and although she tried, even she wasn’t free of technology. She had a blackberry which even she had to admit was useful living in such a large city as London. It could tell her exactly where she was, where she was going, what time the tube would come, which tube she’d have to get, whether or not it was going to rain. It could even call her a taxi if she needed one. It slept by her bed, feeding her with its daily, hourly, minutely information, like some sort of minute life support machine. She wished she could turn it off, but in an odd way if she were to turn this connection to the outside world odd, it would be like disconnecting the wire that connected her to everyone else and the world down there in the city.


Kate turned pressed her forehead against the glass wall. It was cold and gave her clarity. The cold calmed her nerves. She wished the woman across the road would buy blinds. She loved London so much, but sometimes it felt the only place she could truly escape, and block it all out was in this flat.


Her blackberry bleeped from through in the bedroom. It’s battery was going flat. In her hasty arrival in bed last night after the hallucinations an the feeling of sea sickness, Camilla must have forgot to hook it up for her to the charger. That was usually something Kate did. Its bleeps reminded her she hadn’t completely managed to escape the modern world.


If she were to go downstairs and outside, the hive would hit her with full ferocity. Sometimes on an evening sitting on the sofa, it would invade her peripheral vision. Neon purple, electric blue and acid green fingers, shattered in to oblivion by total black outs. Then she’d turn and see the woman across from them; her tv in full predator mode, sucking her in. The colours were vile, fake and not at all real.


When her and Camilla had moved in they had made a conscious effort to make the flat minimal. Neither of them liked clutter and Kate had lived in the city long enough to realise that all this technology, with its E number pumped colours gave her a headache. When they had got the tv, Kate had made sure it could go inside a little acrylic finish cabinet on the wall, so that she didn’t have to look at its ugly grey eye all the time, like some sort of demented digital Cyclops, staring at her from the wall.


Kate walked to the kitchen and popped the kettle on. Waiting, she switched the radio on, keen to hear the mornings news. The signal screeches and hissed at her, and she began twisting the knob trying to find the right channel – something must have knocked it. Different voices, pieces of music and broken sentences crackled at her, like disjointed and broken fragments. Occasionally, something sounded interesting and she paused for a few moments, then dismissed it and moved on to the next valid frequency. The forgotten beginnings and ending of entirely separate phrases morphed together forming random words. She listened as she went, listening in to snippets of the world around her.


Something about an electrical surge somewhere deep in the North Sea...


Something about a whale stuck in the Thames. She’d have to go see that later, if it was still about.


Ca-the-rine. Catherine, is that you?


She stopped twisting the knob suddenly and the hairs on her arm stood on end. She felt the world fall silent in astonished hush around her and in that split second, if she’d walked in to her window and looked down upon the city, she would have seen them all. Spirits, everywhere – following the citizens about. She would have seen the long dangly poisonous arms of electricity and technology snatching at people’s minds. And it would have all been revealed to her, but she didn’t and it wasn’t, because in a split second, just as quickly as it had happened, the hush ended and rationality returned to her mind. She heard car horns outside, and the hum of the city went back to normal. The hairs lay down again.


She growled at the radio.


“Silly thing.”


She twisted the knob again.


Nothing. Just bits of music and sentences.


“Thought I heard the kettle. Morning, darling.”


Camilla kissed Kate’s ears and hugged her from behind.


“Er yeah, morning. Do you want coffee?”


“Please, what’s wrong with the radio?”


“The frequency has been knocked. I can’t find BBC2. I’m getting all sorts of stuff coming through, I think I even just picked up some sort of telephone or taxi frequency.”


“Well you’re on MW, silly.”


“MW?”


“Yeah, it’s not the frequency that’s missing – you have it on an altogether different band. You need FM for our radio stations, babe.”


Camilla flicked a little button on the radio and pushed the knob backwards slightly. The vocals of Louis Armstrong spluttered to life, crooning “Wonder World.”


“See, fixed it.” Said Camilla, pouring the hot water.


I see friends shaking hands....


Saying how do you do...


They’re really saying, “I love you”.


“That song... “


Kate eyed the radio suspiciously. She knew she wouldn’t have switched the band. Tuning knobs can be knocked accidently, but switches? The song gave her tingles like someone running their fingers through her hair. She felt she wanted to say something, but didn’t know what. The room was quiet except for Louis Armstrong’s vocals, and yet the feeling of wanting to tell everyone to “pipe down” and stop interrupting, crept in to her head. She felt this song was something marvellous but confusing, all at once and stared blankly and completely entrapped at the radio. This was the song from her dream, she could have sworn it. And yet now it sounded different. It sounded gurgled and like a million tiny voices all at once and as if someone was playing another track in the background.


What? You don’t like Louis Armstrong anymore?” noted Camilla, seeing her expression.


“No, it’s just... never mind. But were you playing this last night? After I’d gone to bed, I mean?”


“Nope, don’t think so. I just watched a film in the living room then came to bed and you were fast asleep.”


“Right.”


“Everything ok?”


“Yeah, I just had some really weird dreams last night.”


“Well ok, if you’re sure you’re fine...”


Camilla picked the radio up and started towards the living room.


“You’ll bring the tea and coffee, wont you?”


“Sure”, said Kate. “Can we go for a walk today? Think I need some air. Also, I think we need to talk?”


“About?”, yellowed Camilla.


“Holiday...”


Camilla made an approving noise from the living room as Kate picked up the tea and coffee and began to go through herself.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 07.12.2011

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