Call of the Whales (3 page)

4

Turaq to the Rescue

M
y dad said of course I should go – it would be a great experience, he said – just so long as I promised to let Turaq take charge. I had no intention of doing anything else. I knew who the expert was around here.

So the next morning I went to the place behind the schoolhouse where I’d seen the children playing, only half expecting to find him. We hadn’t made a proper arrangement. Nobody’d mentioned time, for example. But there he was, hunkering over his fishing equipment. He smiled at me when he saw me, and he handed me two large fishing nets. He carried a big wooden contraption that was designed for a traditional method of trapping fish.

‘Turaq,’ he said to me.

I shrugged my shoulders, thinking he was saying something in his own language.

‘My name,’ he said carefully. ‘It’s Turaq.’

It was quite a big deal for someone like Turaq to give his name away like that to a complete stranger, though I didn’t understand that at the time. I concentrated on trying to pronounce my own name as clearly as I could, but
he didn’t quite get it.

‘Tyke?’ he tried.

That was pretty close. For a foreigner. Goodness knows what sort of fist I would make of Turaq.

I repeated my name.

‘Tyke,’ he said again.

That would do. I liked it. I smiled, and we set off for the spot at the mouth of the stream where Turaq wanted to set up his trap. We were fishing for arctic char, though I didn’t know that at the time. Turaq told me the local name of the fish, but I couldn’t even pronounce it then, never mind try to remember it twenty years later. It was my dad who told me they were char, and they tasted wonderful, like trout only much, much more so. They swam in the freshwater lakes and they crowded down the fast-flowing meltwater summer streams and spilled joyously out into the frigid waters of the sea, and it wasn’t long before we had trapped several of them. Turaq showed me how to use the net to lift them out of the trap and how to tap them on the head to stun and kill them, so that they didn’t thrash about and leap back into the water. We laid our catch into a light canvas bag that Turaq had brought along for the purpose. There were far too many fish for one family to eat, but Turaq told me his mother would freeze or dry most of them for winter food.

What happened next, I can’t really explain. It wasn’t that we were fooling around. We were just standing about, talking. At least, I was listening, and Turaq was talking in that funny, hesitant way of his. It wasn’t that Turaq didn’t speak much English, though that’s what I thought at the time. Even then, English was the language of the state and of school, and everyone except the old folk spoke it. It was
that he didn’t speak much at all. None of the Inuit people went in for long speeches. They communicated much of the time in some mysterious other way that I couldn’t work out, no matter how hard I watched them at it.

Anyway, we’d finished fishing for the day, and I know I was standing on a rock with my back to the water. Nobody pushed me. It just seemed to happen all by itself. I suppose I must have lost my footing on the slippery rock, though I don’t remember that part, but suddenly I felt myself jerk backwards, my arms outstretched and my legs flailing helplessly. It felt as if I had gone briefly into suspended animation: I could picture myself, like an upside-down spider, all limbs, and then my body just dropped. I knew I was falling, but I couldn’t prevent it. Next thing I knew, I hit the water. It wasn’t deep, but I had been standing right at the point where the racing, meltwater-swollen stream came seething down from the narrow riverbed and shot into the sea, and I was pushed several yards out into the freezing waves by the furious force of the stream.

I will never forget the iciness of that water. It was cold beyond cold, so cold that I experienced it not as cold at all but as pain. Down I sank into inky, salty, freezing pain. And then I blacked out.

When I came to, I was in an agony of cold. I was lying on the tiny scrap of beach where Turaq had been standing, tidying away his fishing gear, moments before. It must have been only moments, but it felt as if weeks had passed since I’d laid my last char, still thrashing weakly, into Turaq’s canvas hold-all.

I opened my eyes and instantly closed them. My eyelids were amazingly heavy and felt caked with salt. When I
managed to prise them painfully open, the sunlight stabbed the surface of my eyeballs. I could feel the earth shuddering with great thudding shakes, as if a huge goods train was chundering along just feet away. I knew there couldn’t be, but I wondered briefly if there had been an earthquake. Perhaps that was what had tossed me off my rock.

Turaq’s voice came to me, and I could feel his thin, stringy arms wound tightly around my torso, as if he was holding me down, like a mad person or someone having a seizure. Cautiously I opened my eyes again, and sure enough he had flung his body diagonally across mine and he was holding my arms tightly to my sides and we were both rattling away like nobody’s business. Gradually, I realised that what was causing the rattling was me. My whole body was shuddering and trembling in a frantic effort to fight off the effects of the cold, and my teeth were chattering so hard, I kept biting my tongue and the pink, fleshy insides of my cheeks. Turaq was breathing warm, fish-flavoured air onto my face and down my neck and throat, into the top of my sopping shirt.

The rattling eventually subsided into a steady tremor, and Turaq rolled off me. He stood up and quickly pulled his sealskin parka up over his head and rammed it over mine. He didn’t bother to try to jam my arms into the sleeves, just pulled it right down over my shoulders and tightened it in to my wet body. Then he yanked my head off the ground and pulled the furry hood around my ears. Warmth immediately settled around my aching head and shoulders, a seal-smelling, oily, fishy sort of warmth.

I became aware of the wet now, as well as the cold, and I wanted to tell Turaq to get my wet clothes off, but
although I could make my mouth open, I couldn’t get my jaw to work enough to allow me to speak.

Suddenly I didn’t care about the pain, the cold, the wet. All I wanted to do was to let my poor numb limbs rest and to sink into sleep, but Turaq wouldn’t give me peace to sleep. He flung his body onto mine again, and started that fishy breathing of his. I turned my nose away from him, and I could hear him give a soft laugh, but then I slipped off back into unconsciousness.

Next time I woke, I was still on the beach. Turaq lay beside me now, but still right up against my body, and though I felt miserably wet and cold, the dreadful numbing pain had eased and I was able to open my eyes and work my jaw.

‘You wake, Tyke?’ he said hoarsely.

I nodded.

‘Uhh-kay. You stan’ up now.’

Stand up! I couldn’t stand up for a million pounds. I shook my head.

‘You stan’ up now, ’n’ we go home.’

I shook my head again.

He pushed his hands under my back and started to lever me up. I resisted.

‘You don’ stan’ up, you die,’ he said matter-of-factly.

‘I die,’ I said, wearily. It came out as ‘Aye-aye,’ but Turaq understood.

‘Uh-huh, not with me you don’ die,’ he said, and he levered some more, so that I was in a sitting position. Then he hauled me to my feet. I swayed. My body felt about as mobile as a sack of potatoes. I groaned as a wave of nausea washed through me.

Turaq grabbed me around the waist to prevent me
falling over, and then he leant across my body and yanked one of my legs forward by grabbing a fistful of wet trouser-leg. Then the other one. And the first one again. And the other one. This way, he walked me back to the village like a giant wooden doll. Well, not quite all the way. After a while, I got the hang of this walking business, and I was able to move my legs myself, just so long as Turaq kept me upright.

5

Going Visiting

M
y dad said afterwards that Turaq had saved my life.

‘I wouldn’t have drowned,’ I said indignantly. ‘The water was only waist-high.’

‘You can drown in a puddle if you’re weak enough,’ said my dad.

‘I
wasn’t
weak. Turaq
said
he didn’t rescue me from the sea. I managed to pull myself out.’

‘I know that,’ Dad said, ‘but he saved you from death by hypothermia.’

‘Hyper-what?’

‘Thermia, meaning heat, as in a Thermos flask. And it’s hyp
o
, not hyp
er
. Hypothermia. What old people die of in winter.’

‘I’m not old,’ I said stubbornly, ‘and it’s summer.’ I didn’t like to be fussed about. I suppose I felt a bit stupid for falling in the water.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Dad. ‘It’s summer, but this is the Arctic. The sea is only just above freezing point, and
anyone who falls into it can die within an hour unless someone warms them up, especially on a cool day like this.’

‘Well, I wish he’d taken off my wet things first,’ I said 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 matter
why, 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 all
conscience, 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 asked, of course I’d say I had a snowsuit. It would keep her happy, and having asked the question made her feel she was doing the proper mother-stuff. She didn’t really know much about the mother-stuff, but every now and then she’d act like a mother. I mean
act
, not behave; act, like on stage.

I didn’t really have a snowsuit. I wasn’t three, and anyway, there wasn’t usually much snow the places we went to in the summer time – at least, not in those early days. There was lots of snow on the horizon and pack ice to the north. But in the coastal settlements where we went to meet the people, the summer temperatures were mild to cool, but not cold, and the main problem was the mosquitoes.

The first time Dad showed me the tent we were going to take with us, I laughed when I saw that it had a built-in mosquito net. I thought mosquitoes were things you got in hot countries. How wrong can you be? We were eaten alive
by the arctic mosquitoes, who were clearly thrilled to find some nice fresh Irish blood – a lovely change for them from the arctic blood they were used to. We were walking gourmet meals, me and my dad, in the arctic summers. It was the lakes that did it. The tundra is always pocked with lakes and boggy pools in the summer time. You could see that as you come zooming in by plane. It’s because the ice melts and there’s nowhere for all the water to go. Some of it finds its way into streams, but some of it just lodges in hollows and it can’t seep away into the earth, because the subsoil is frozen solid all year round. So the water just sits there and creates a lovely damp environment for the mosquitoes to lay their eggs in.

Anyway, we agreed we wouldn’t tell Mum, so as not to worry her. Dad didn’t worry – or not so’s you’d notice. He understood about risk – that’s the good thing about Dad – and he knew I hadn’t been foolish, just unlucky.

He said we had to go to Turaq’s house, though, to thank him for saving me.

‘
No
,’ I said. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘You have to,’ Dad said. ‘We are guests here, and we have to be very careful to be polite. Anyway, it’s the right thing to do. He saved your life.’

‘Don’t keep
saying
that,’ I muttered, embarrassed. But I combed my hair and brushed the twiggy bits out of my jacket and off we set that evening after dinner. I remembered to take Turaq’s sealskin parka with me. We’d dried it out by hanging it inside-out over the tent ridge. I was glad I’d thought of it. It gave us an excuse to be going to his house. Saying thanks for saving my life was not my idea of a reason to visit someone.

I noticed Dad looking longingly at his tape recorder as
we got ready to go, but I said, ‘No way, Dad! You are
not
going to tape Turaq.’

‘He might have a grandmother,’ said Dad, wistfully.

‘I’m sure he has,’ I said, ‘but she is Turaq’s grandmother, not a “source” for you, not a “subject”.’

I’d picked up a bit of anthropological jargon over the years. I knew that the way of life Dad was interested in was quickly fading and that the old people were the only ones who could tell him about the traditional way of life, but I drew the line at Turaq’s family being used like that, for research purposes. He was my friend. It was different from just any family.

‘You’re right,’ said Dad. ‘It would be rude.’

‘It certainly would be,’ I said sniffily. I didn’t often get a chance to tell an adult off. It’s a nice feeling.

As it turned out, Turaq did have a grandmother. Turaq’s father was away at the caribou hunt, but his mother invited us in. My dad was in heaven. His first invitation into an Inuit home that year.

I liked the inside of Turaq’s house. Nothing matched. Even the two curtains on the living-room window were in different fabrics and of different lengths. It gave the house a lovely topsy-turvy, haphazard, colourful feeling that I liked, like being in a caravan. My mother thought she 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 electric
kettle – 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, though
I 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 was
making it up.