Cetacean

The beach, now a graveyard, stretches far below us against the background of the calm sea. Onlookers swarm around the place with cameras and mobile phones, all pointed at one spot. We’re sitting on the cliff, on the drab flower-patterned blanket you hated so much, with a bag full of beers, having a picnic that must do for a wake. She’s lying on a bed made of sand and brown seaweed and plastic washed ashore.

I’ve barely stayed in touch with T since I moved here. It’s unfair, but I just didn’t want to remember. I know he holds a grudge. I can see it in his eyes, in the hesitant movement of his strong hairy arm as he hands me another bottle, but he doesn’t say a thing. It’ll take a few beers more before he spits it out.

Now we laugh talking about you, about that day you decided to go back to jogging and bought those dreadful pink trainers to match your rain jacket. It rained ceaselessly that month. T scratches his thick beard and places his hand on his bulging black sweatshirt. He looks up at the cloudy sky and says it’s going to rain.

A beachside necropsy supposedly revealed she was pregnant. Slit open, she rests on the sandy beach waiting for a flatbed lorry to take her to a landfill. T says it’s always going to be this way. It’ll never cease, not really. We’ll just have to accept it as a part of our lives, learn to live with it somehow.

She’s a sperm whale. Her grey skin reflects the sky, between towels left by those who thought she could be saved. She died within hours, reduced to what she is now: a rare tourist attraction in this somnolent village. T opens another bottle with his teeth, which always gives me the shivers. Then he resumes talking about a girl he’s started seeing, who’s lovely and whom I’m going to meet when I finally visit him.

They never found your body. Someone happened upon your shoe, the vividly pink trainer, a few miles downstream of our town. But that’s it, as if you disintegrated in the cold running water, dissolved into foam. Dissolving into foam sounds much less dreadful than clutching at water plants, struggling for breath and feeling needles in your lungs.

I like to think you became that river, filling its channel from source to mouth, spreading further out to the bay, to the sea, to the ocean, wrapping the Earth with a thick mantle of water and now sending me this beached whale as a belated goodbye. Or perhaps you transformed into her. Maybe it’s really you down there, heavily pregnant, opened up and covered in barnacles, with one fin broken and buried in the sand.

T gazes at me and smiles. He says he’s missed me. Then he looks away and down at the beach, at the dozens of hands holding flashing phones, dozens of feet treading the sand and avoiding small puddles. He takes a gulp, puts the bottle down and holds out his hand to feel the first drops of rain. The lorry arrives.