Sarah Lean - The Forever Whale

I’m not sure I exactly understand what he means. I just see something in him and I want to be like him too. Somewhere there in his sun-baked skin is a map of everything that made him who he is.

“Can I come with you on August the eighteenth, Grandad? I want to see what you’ve seen.”

Grandad’s ancient smile fills his cheeks and his eyes and I think of his face as a whole life-full of memories.

“It’s all right here.” His huge hand is over his chest. “The greatest power on earth. Remember, you have to think big, Hannah, and when things are good, think bigger.”

Grandad moved in with us after Grandma died ten years ago. I wasn’t exactly here then, still wriggling and growing into a baby inside my mum, but our home was his before it was mine. Grandad hadn’t liked to live alone and Mum hadn’t wanted him to live alone either. Grandma, who I never met, had done everything for him. She’d pressed his shirts and cooked his tea and put a cushion behind his head when he fell asleep in the chair. Even though he could have done all of these things for himself, she’d thought of him before she did anything.

I’m named after her. She was Hannah Jenkins, I’m Hannah Gray, and in lots of ways I’m like her.

Just then a voice calls across the water. Dad is waiting for us on the slope at Gorbreen slipway. It’s late, he’s saying; he’s telling us to come ashore.

I pull on one oar to steer us in.

Dad steadies Grandad as he climbs out and tells Grandad he should sit in the car, but he stays by the slipway and stares out to the harbour again. Dad and I roll the trailer under the boat. We pull it up the slipway and I leave Dad to hitch it to the car.

I stand beside Grandad and wonder why he’s not getting in the car.

“I think it’s time to put the boat away for the winter, Hannah,” he says.

I know this means we won’t go out rowing again until next spring.

A curlew is singing, and it’s soft and eerie, filling the bay and my ears.

“Grandad, tell me more about the deer,” I say.

Grandad nods and smiles, but he’s looking at the footprints of seabirds pressed in the soft muddy bank. They’ll be washed away when the tide comes in and draws out again.

“Come on, you two,” Dad calls. “Time to go.”

There’s a long moment before we go, when I see into Grandad’s warm eyes and he says, “I have quite a story I’m saving to tell you about the deer.” He says it quietly so only I hear his deep voice through the curlew’s song.

“Remember August the eighteenth,” he says again. “And one day, I hope you’ll go on the journey and see what I saw.”

“READY FOR SOME TOAST, GRANDAD?”

Grandad likes his toast cooked under the gas grill so it’s dark brown with charcoal around the edge.

“I’ve got it,” I say because Grandad is staring blankly at the kitchen cupboards. I’ve already found the bread knife and cut an extra piece of bread as always.

“Watch the toast a minute,” I say and go outside to feed the birds.

Every morning I still try to do what Grandad and I have always done because it’s helping his memory stay alive. We haven’t been out in the boat again for nearly a year, but there are lots of other everyday things that we’ve always shared. Our early mornings are special, even though things are not exactly the same as they used to be.

Grandad has Alzheimer’s disease. One moment he is as he’s always been, wise and knowing and safe. Sometimes his memory fades like a ship disappearing into a sea mist.

Alzheimer’s usually picks on older people, but it’s not fussy about things like how big or bold a person is, or how important they are to their granddaughter. It’s taking all the things Grandad learned, all the things he saw and heard, all the things he loved. Alzheimer’s is a history thief, stealing his past and our future together.

The hedges shiver with excited twittering as I sprinkle the crusts on the lawn and as soon as I step back the sparrows get busy with the crumbs. I turn the earth with the garden fork that Grandad always leaves there. The robin comes and perches on the fork handle and watches the soil for the wriggle of a worm or centipede. Grandad once said that an ounce of brown and red feathers didn’t seem like much, but it’s the robin’s nature to be fierce like a tiger when it protects its territory. He likes the robin most of all.

I water our sunflowers. They’re taller than me, but the heads are still fresh and green. I can remember Grandad and I crouched in our wellies the first time we grew them. He’d shown me some small black and white striped seeds, shaped like miniature rowing boats.

“See this tiny little package?” he’d said, drawing away one of the seeds with his fingertip. “All it needs is water and the sun and in a few short months it will become a giant. And, when it’s a giant, it will have its own tiny seeds and each one can become a giant too.”

“Like it goes on forever?” I’d said.

“Just like that, only in a new plant.”

We’d pressed our seeds into pots of compost and I waited for them to grow. I hadn’t known what to expect and asked him every day when I came back from school where the giants were. Until I saw them for myself.

But even when the leaves turned dark and the stalks were thick with sap and towered over me, I still had to wait for the new seeds to ripen so that we could store them and then, the following spring, press them into the compost to grow once again.

Grandad follows me outside. I notice he doesn’t have his slippers on, but it doesn’t matter because the June summer ground is dry and warm.

I’ve asked Grandad the same question every day for years, even though I know the answer. I ask him again now: “When will the sunflower seeds be ready?” But this is the first morning he doesn’t reply. I say it for him: “When the hearts are golden,” so that one of us remembers.

Grandad nods towards the hard shadow of the fence in the far corner of our garden where a cat is twitching its tail. He struggles to remember the cat’s name.

“It’s Smokey,” I say, even though I’m sure Grandad will remember in a minute.

“Yes, that’s it,” he says. “We can try and keep the birds safe from him, but Smokey can’t help being a dog.”

I know Grandad meant to say cat not dog. Sometimes the Alzheimer’s makes him muddle things up, but I usually know what he means.

Smokey is a clever grey cat, and I’ve seen him catch baby sparrows before. Even though Mrs Simm gives him plenty of food, Smokey will take a bird if he wants to. I think of Smokey like he’s Alzheimer’s disease, creeping in and stealing things that don’t belong to him.

I hiss and Smokey scrabbles over the fence.

Grandad opens the garage door and he’s trying to untie the tarpaulin over his boat.

“Fair and fine today,” he smiles. “Shall we launch at Gorbreen?”

I don’t remind him we haven’t been in the boat since we put it away at the end of last September. I don’t tell him Dad won’t let us go out any more. “I’ll sort the boat out, Grandad. We could go and see the deer again.” And I lead him away, back into the garden.

“Grandad? Remember you were going to tell me a story?” I say. He doesn’t reply. An ocean of nothing washes into his eyes. “A story about the deer? About a journey?”