Call of the Whales Read Online Free Page B

was dead unconventional, being an actress, but she liked her curtains to match and she was for ever ‘picking up’ the green in a picture with a scrap of matching green in the carpet or the little red stripe along the rug with a sofa-cushion in the exact same shade. It was what she liked to do, but I always thought it made our house feel stuffy.
    Turaq’s mother made us coffee, using a proper electrickettle – not very Inuit that, I could see Dad thinking – and offered us chewy meat to eat with it. I’d never had coffee with meat before; actually, I’d never had coffee. The combination tasted strange, but I suppose it was sort of … interesting. Dad said later it was jerky, which is a sort of dried meat. It was like gnawing leather, but tasty leather. Dad thought it might have been caribou or moose. The coffee was dreadful. I’ve always been more of a tea-man, myself.
    Anyway, we said we had come to say thank you to Turaq. At least Dad did. I nearly died – again. Turaq smiled and bowed stiffly and his mother looked pleased. His grandmother smiled too.
    Then Dad got all flowery. ‘I don’t know how we can ever thank you properly, Turaq. There is nothing we can do to repay you for your ki…’
    I glared at him. You didn’t talk to a ten-year-old about their kindness. That was too grown-up a concept. It sounded soppy to kids. I could never understand how adults could forget that sort of thing about being a child.
    ‘For your … help,’ Dad finished, glancing at me.
    Turaq just nodded and smiled again.
    Then his grandmother made a little speech. She leant forward and said to my dad: ‘You don’t need to repay Turaq. What you do is, when you see someone in trouble, you help them. That’s how you repay a kindness. By helping the next person. And then they can help another person. And so it goes. That is the Inuit way.’
    ‘A very wise old lady,’ my dad said to me afterwards.
    Load of philosophical old codswallop, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I could see he was delighted with what Turaq’s grandma had said. She was right, of course, thoughI didn’t realise it at the time.
    ‘That’s the Inuit way,’ Dad said to himself.
    ‘Aren’t you going to write it down in your notebook?’ I teased him, snuggling into my deliciously warm sealskin parka. Turaq had refused to take it back. He said he had another one, and that I needed this one more than he did. I had reason to be glad of it, for many an arctic summer afterwards. I still have it somewhere, though of course it doesn’t fit me now.
    ‘Write what down?’ Dad asked.
    ‘What Turaq’s grandma said. About the Inuit way.’
    He laughed. And he didn’t write it down. I couldn’t work him out. But that’s anthropologists for you. You never know what they’re going to find interesting.
    Shortly after that visit to Turaq’s house we left and I never met him again. I never really got used to that – the way I would be just making a friend and then suddenly it would be the end of August and we’d have to go back to dreary, grey old Dublin and back to school and to other kids talking about their holidays in Courtown or Llandudno or trips to Old Trafford or stays in the Gaeltacht. It all seemed a bit … well, ordinary to me. But of course I couldn’t say that. I’d say, ‘Oh, Canada’ or something very general like that when they asked me where I’d been.
    ‘Ah yeah, Canada,’ they’d say. ‘Great. You’re dead lucky. Rory has an uncle in Toronto.’
    ‘Yeah, Toronto,’ I’d say, secretly scratching my mosquito bites through the wool of my school jumper, and I’d nod as if I’d been there.
    I never mentioned arctic char or midnight sun or hypothermia or names like Turaq. They’d think I wasmaking it up.

6
Dreaming of Whales
    M y dad got a book about bowhead whales out of the library and we studied it together during that next winter. My mother had gone all dreamy and distant – I mean, even dreamier than usual. She took no notice