The Whale on the Beach

The paper sent Imogen to Saltby on a Thursday, to write four hundred words about the village festival. She was a journalist. She had asked her boss to let her write about politics. He had told her to write about people. "People are politics," he said, "only smaller." So she got a vegetable competition and a dance.

She had a small room above the shop. At breakfast on Friday the only other guests were a family on holiday: a mother, a father, and a boy who ate his egg very slowly and watched everything.

"What is there to do in Saltby?" Imogen asked him.

The boy thought about it. "There is a beach," he said. "There is a shop. Dad says the festival is very good. Dad has not been to the festival."

"Ben," said his mother.

"That is what he said," said Ben.

The storm arrived that night and took the festival with it. The vegetable competition flew into a field, and the flags flew into the sea. Imogen lay in her bed and listened to the rain hit the window like stones. At midnight she wrote one line on her phone: Nothing happens here.

In the morning the wind had gone. She walked down to photograph the damage, because a broken festival is still a picture. Ben was already at the top of the beach with his father. Neither of them was looking at the damage.

There was a whale on the sand.

It lay high up the beach, dark and still and far too big to be real. The sea had left it there in the night, and now the water was a long way off. Then it breathed, one great wet breath that Imogen felt through her boots.

"It is alive," said Ben. "It is breathing. Dad wants to push it."

His father was walking round the whale, looking at it the way some men look at a car that will not start. "If we all push together," he said, "we can get it to the water in ten minutes."

"No," said a woman behind them.

She was from the village, with a phone at her ear, and she had made the right call. "They say not to push it," she said. "And nobody pulls its tail. Keep it wet, keep it calm, and wait for the sea."

"How long?" asked Ben's father.

"Eight hours," said the woman. "Or so."

Ben's father looked at the sea, a long way down the sand, like a man who has been asked to watch paint dry for a living.

The village arrived in ones and twos, and then all at once. The mayor arrived in his festival suit. Gareth the farmer arrived with his dog and a face like bad weather. The mayor and Gareth had not spoken for ten years, because of a fence.

They carried blankets and towels from the houses, wet them in the sea and laid them across the whale's back. They carried water up the sand in cooking pots, in flower pots, in the cups from the village hall. When the sun appeared, which felt cruel, they held the festival flags over the whale to keep the sun off its back.

Imogen did what journalists do. She asked people how they felt, and wrote the answers on her phone.

The mayor felt that it was a great day for Saltby, and he told her so for some time. "The festival does look rather dead," he added. A woman from the shop felt that it was very sad, and also that the shop was open. Gareth said, "Wet," and walked past her with two pots of water.

Then she asked Ben.

"What is happening?"

"The whale is on the sand," said Ben. "Everybody is carrying water. The mayor is talking. Gareth is not. Dad has not fixed anything."

Imogen wrote that on her phone too. Then, because she felt a bit stupid with a phone on a beach full of pots and towels, she put it in her pocket and helped them carry water.

Ben's father did not enjoy the afternoon. He wanted to dig a river to the sea. He wanted to build something out of the fence. He had three plans, and he explained each of them to Ben's mother, who made him carry another pot of water each time. But he did carry the water, up and down the sand, all afternoon, and he never touched the whale.

The mayor and Gareth stood side by side for hours, passing wet towels along the line, and never said a word about the fence or anything else.

The whale breathed every few minutes, a huge slow sound like a door opening, and the whole beach breathed with it. Imogen watched its eye. It was watching them too, and it was patient, and it did not seem to understand what had happened any better than they did.

The sea turned in the evening.

The water reached the tail first. Imogen saw the whale feel it and move for the first time in hours, one long slow push against the sand. Nobody could lift a whale. The sea could. It climbed the beach without hurry, wave by wave, and took the weight from it.

When the water was deep enough, the whale turned itself, heavy as a house, gentle as a hand closing. For a moment it floated in the low water as if it was thinking. Then the tail lifted once, black against the grey evening, and it was gone.

Nobody cheered. There was a long breath, all along the beach, and then everybody carried the wet towels home in the dark, very quietly.

Imogen wrote until three in the morning and sent the paper two thousand words. They were the best words she had ever written. Her boss phoned her at nine.

"Four hundred," he said.

She cut it to a thousand. He phoned again. She cut it to six hundred and lost the eye, and the door, and the hand closing. He phoned again.

"Who is Ben?" he said.

"A boy on holiday. Why?"

"Because he is the only person in two thousand words who tells me what happened," said her boss. "Send me what he said. Just that, and the photograph."

The paper printed it on Monday, on the front page, under a picture of the whale: the mayor talking, Gareth not, and Dad, who had not fixed anything. Imogen's name was at the bottom, very small. Ben's father bought six copies.

On Tuesday her boss phoned once more.

"The boy," he said. "Is he free next week? I need somebody for politics."