Call of the Whales Read Online Free

crossly. ‘I felt like a squashed fish.’
    ‘No,’ said Dad, ‘that’s what you do – put warm dry clothes on top to trap the person’s body heat, not let it escape by taking off their wet clothes.’
    ‘Hmm,’ I said. I knew he was right, that I’d been lucky that Turaq knew what to do, but he didn’t need to keep going on about it. I was starting to squirm uncomfortably.
    ‘And the other thing you do,’ Dad said, looking up from his Arctic survival manual, where he had looked up ‘hypothermia’, ‘is you get as close to the person as you can and let your body heat warm them up.’
    ‘Body heat,’ I said. ‘So that’s what he was doing. I thought he was being a bit … cuddly.’
    ‘Cuddly!’ said Dad.
    We both laughed then, at the idea of brave, silent, efficient Turaq acting cuddly. It was just all wrong. He probably wouldn’t even let his mother hug him.
    ‘Well, call it what you like,’ said Dad, ‘but it worked. You really could have died, you know.’
    And he gave my shoulder a quick, affectionate squeeze.
    ‘Dad?’ I said, in a chokey sort of voice.
    ‘Uh-hmm?’
    ‘Mum doesn’t need to hear about this.’
    This was one of our man-stuff phrases. We said it to each other when we planned to keep our adventures to ourselves. Like the time I found Dad asleep on the sofa surrounded by empty beer cans. And the time I got three detentions in a week for … well, it doesn’t really matterwhy, but it was not my proudest moment.
    ‘That’s right,’ said Dad gravely. ‘We wouldn’t want to worry her, would we?’
    Not worrying my mother was a great excuse for not telling her things. She had an artistic temperament, or so she said. This meant, as far as I could see, that she could get away with any sort of bad behaviour herself, but the rest of us had to behave impeccably, in case we brought on an attack of temperament.
    She used to object to my dad taking me off on his expeditions with him. She wanted to keep me at home in our little terraced house in Dublin, but then she’d get offered work – she was an actress – and she’d be scooped off into that other, occasional world of hers, in a whirl of lunch dates and rehearsals and script-readings and voice sessions and studio days with the other ‘talent’ and she’d give up on the battle to keep me at home. I’d be better off with him, she’d suddenly agree, and did I have a snowsuit?
    A snowsuit. She was thinking about the kind of thing small children wore to play in the Phoenix Park in the winter, to go sliding down the slides in, with bright mittens attached for their blue-cold little fingers. You see them all the time in cold weather on the toddlers. Primary colours and zip-fasteners. That was my mother’s idea of what to wear in the Arctic.
    Mum was the real reason I tagged along with Dad to these remote, icy places. She was a wonderful woman and we both adored her. She had a fantastic wardrobe, full of fabulous witches’ shoes with high ankles and pointy toes and wondrous floaty garments in silver and black and champagne and she had the most marvellous bright red hair, but she was not what you might call reliable. In allconscience, my father used to say, you could not leave a child in her care for months on end. She was liable to forget she had me, he said, get up and walk out of the house and meet some friends and go off for a weekend to London and forget to come home to cook my dinner and send me to school. I don’t know if that was really true – if it came to it, she would probably have shouldered the responsibility – but I suppose he couldn’t take the risk. The safest thing, he always said, was to take me with him. That way I might be exposed to all sorts of dangers, but at least I would get fed and there would be a responsible adult around to look out for me most of the time. At least, that was Dad’s theory. I’m not so sure about the responsible adult bit myself. Turaq was only ten or twelve.
    Anyway, when Mum