Not Forgetting The Whale by Ironmonger John

Author:Ironmonger, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780297608226
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

20

There’s no flu in Cornwall

At sunset Joe was back at the quayside. There were butterflies inside his head. Or so it felt. His heartbeat was wrong. As if there was too much air inside his lungs, or insufficient lungs for the air. When he was a boy Pappa Mikkel had taught him how to stay calm in a crisis. ‘Give the crisis a score,’ the old man would say. ‘Mark it out of one hundred. Then look at the horizon as if nothing mattered, and ask yourself how much it would score tomorrow. And how much next week. And next year. Will they write about this matter in your obituary? Will anyone die? If not, you can turn to face it once again and recognise it for the impostor that it is.’

Joe tried to look at the horizon. A soft mist had risen from the sea and there was no sharp line to mark where the ocean ended and the sky began, only the amber glow of the western sun. I score this crisis fifty, he thought, and just thinking about it started to calm him; but tomorrow it might score sixty. And next week ninety. And next year one hundred. People would die. And there might be no obituaries to read.

Unless of course he’d got it all wrong. Unless the Reverend Alvin Hocking knew a greater truth – that God would not permit His children to starve. Or Cassie had her conclusions wrong. Again. Sometimes, perhaps, the wisdom of an army might fail to guess the weight of an ox.

Down on the harbour-front by the Pay-and-Display car park, where once his own car had been abandoned, a high-performance car had appeared from behind Jessie Higgs’s shop. It was now creeping along the narrow roadway searching for a space between the boat moorings and the lobster pots and the wet nets. He could hear the grumble of its engine; a Porsche convertible by the look of it. He turned away. Cars like this were trophies of success in the world he’d left behind, but it was rather late in the evening for tourists to be calling. He found himself looking back at the car. It was manoeuvring awkwardly into a space. Who would be driving to St Piran in a car like this? He could feel the butterflies returning. He watched the driver’s door swing open, and the figure of a woman emerged in slow motion, just a leg first, then an arm, then a gradual and difficult rise to a standing position. An older woman then, unused to low seats. Or a younger woman who wasn’t well? There was a gaunt familiarity to the figure. She hunched over the car like a wounded creature, thin, out of place among the lobster traps and moorings in her magnolia suit and hair that bobbed precisely at her shoulders.

Could it be?

Now his heart was rebelling in its cage. Look at the horizon. This scores no more than a twenty. And next year

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