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

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