Beluga by A. B. Lord. (little readers txt) 📕

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.