The Storm Hag (part 1)
In response to the installation of The Whale on Redcar Beach in May 2022 I’ve created a series of short imagined diary extracts by a child who saw the whale at five, ten and twenty years increments, to chart the impact of seeing the whale and the changing world during that child’s lifetime.
The genre I am writing in is Sci-Folk, a mixture of Sci-Fi and Folktale, that blends imagined futures with folktale myths. This work, The Storm Hag is inspired by tales of the Greco-Roman Furies, who were spirits of vengeance and justice and Celtic Glastaig, green women who acted as protectors over the land and sea.
The protagonist is called Billie, and they would have been ten when they first saw the whale.
Now Billie is 15…
The stranding
24th July 2027
There are no signs that say DON’T GO ON THE BEACH, but the slipways are overgrown with silky moss and the steps are all cracked. There are signs that tell you what to do if you find something dead:
DO NOT TOUCH
There are no signs to say that I’m the weird kid, so when Mia, who has always been the tallest of us, said “Let’s go down the beach,” I was too scared to say no.
I over prepared. I always do. That’s why I don’t get invited to these things. I took the picnic blanket Mum had stashed in the shoe cupboard, energy bars, a flask of hot tea even though it was still 32 degrees at night, the first aid kit, a torch, firelighters, waterproofs. The kind of things you’d bring to the end of the world not a party.
It was still light when we got to the dunes. We crunched over the stones to the beach, the day’s heat still clinging to the ground. There was that smell, like the Science Block, sulphury, it comes from all the things that still wash up here.
Henry brought his dad’s lager, he cracked the first can and threw one to me, I sipped fizzy bitterness, warm and sharp. It made the dusk go slippy. Mia had some cheap wine that bubbled out of her mouth.
—I can taste sand, she said.
I used to love the crunch taste of sand in my teeth.
—Did you come here as a kid? There was a trampoline with the wires up there, on the seafront.
My mum wouldn’t let me go on it.
—Yeah. And the boats, the stink of the lobster pots.
That used to be the smell of summer.
—I climbed in one when I was little, fell off the tractor wheel. Knocked my head, look.
Mia pointed to a faint moon scar.
—And the penguins near the bandstand?
We all had pictures of us with the stone penguins floating somewhere on our parents’ phones, they’d pop up as memories of the beach before.
—And the whale – did your school take you to see the whale?
—Yeah. Miss Turner took us.
—She had a goldfish.
—And that tattoo of a mermaid, it was lush, you could see it when she wore short sleeves.
—Billie, didn’t you go a bit whale mad after that?
I did. They don’t forget anything.
—Yeah, we called you, what was it?
—The Whale Whisperer.
Which sounds nice but it wasn’t. They’d bellow their ugly shouts at me across the dinner queue and only stop if Miss Turner was there. She scared them in a way the other teachers just couldn’t. They were scared she wouldn’t love them.
I had my first crush on Miss Turner’s mermaid and her curling blue tail that wriggled out from under her shirt sleeve.
It was a Monday when we saw the whale, we were supposed to be doing phonics, but Miss Turner told us that something more important had happened. She walked us along the prom, past the cobles, still in their proud paint: Harvester, Flora Jane, The Argonaut and the men scraping the barnacles off the empty pots that should have been full of crabs. We marched past the Amusements, dark and quiet and boarded up. It was fresh, the kind of cold that’s just a story we tell – like the penguins. Mia, of course, was the first to see it. “It’s massive”, she shouted. I couldn’t’ see anything but the tail, the Mia started to run and we were all running to it and Miss Turner said “Stop, I want best behaviour no silliness.” We slowed single file, our feet sinking into the sand and we made a scattered circle around it. Henry said he could see it moving, he pointed and laughed at the strange little curl under its belly “It’s got a willy.” Miss Turner said, “Thanks Henry, we’ve established that the whale is male.”
Matilda kept saying “It’s not real”, because her Mum had seen it on the back of a truck and posted it on Facebook. Mia said it was dead and everyone looked at me to confirm because my Granny had just died. Death was dead flies on windowsills. Best-man-dead in the playground. I didn’t know any more than them what dead was, not really. So far it was just Mum squeezing her eyes shut and telling people she was okay. She said Granny had gone to the land beyond the waves, which is so very Mum, and I only sort of believed her but here was the whale, and there were the waves and maybe here is where the dead come, it is now.
There were people in white, like nurses, but balancing on the whale’s back, they had sprays and tubes and things that were sharp that punctured. The whale was the same newborn colour as me in the pictures Mum kept from the hospital. I’ve been that blue. Mia was the first to cry, then the cry passed between us, and we couldn’t help it even though we were ten and trying so hard to be big. And Miss Turner just let us cry, cross-legged and quiet, she didn’t keep asking us questions like the teacher from the other school did. He stood there with a clipboard and kept listing whale facts at his kids, talking over the tender blue of it.
Fact – Sperm whales are the largest of the toothed whales and the males can weigh up to 50 tons.
Fact – Sperm whales can dive to depths of up more than 3000ft.
I hated facts like these. I hated that they told us nothing. That they cover up for us knowing nothing. So what if it weighs up to 50 tons or dives 3000ft. Does it know it’s so big compared to the ocean? Does it feel like a tiny child floating in its mother’s belly? Where is 3000ft under the ocean? It doesn’t help us feel how deep the earth is.
Fact – Sperm whales produce clicks to detect prey and communicate with one another.
But what is it they need to say? That was when I decided I’d become a whale translator. Even if it wasn’t a job. I read about whales. How they sing through vibrations, clicks and whistles. I tried that at school whilst Miss Turner was teaching us phonics. Instead of sh and ch and oo and ee I was learning clk and tkk and tut and chk. I’d sit in the back of the car and try to speak whale and it made Dad go mental because he was always getting headaches. I’d put my mouth under the water in the bath and click and feel the vibrations on my skin. I learned all about whales, about their journeys, about their bodies, I learned that humans used whale oil to make light. I saw pictures. I learned what flensing meant and couldn’t unlearn it.
—Hey Billie, do you still speak whale?
—Are there any whales out there now?
I tried to make a sound. Realised they were taking the mick and tried to cover it by sipping from my can and dug my fingers into the cool sand.
And just listened for the laughing to stop.
Listening can be a lot like falling if you let it. I heard them laugh and then under that there were our sounds – breathing, soft glugging, the sound of our bodies on sand. Then as I fell further – the distant cars on the top prom, the beach sounds, wind through the dry grass, then the shush slap of the waves coiling and collapsing. These are not all the voices. There are the ghost sounds of the cricket rasp, the fairy language of Shearwaters. Fulmars, Gannets, those who used to sleep on the water, their click clack gone. They read the signs – the brown scum in the water, the knots of deep dead things that said, stay away.
Now, there is a sound of something wet, scuffling, not dead.
I was running to it and they came too, wrapped up in the run with me, the same way we passed the cry between us. Knee deep in the water, our hands slipping off it. Was it something we needed to help land or push back out. It was almost too big for us to hold. The tide was coming in. Don’t touch. Don’t touch. We had stickers from school. Our hands could read the fear. The fear of us. It’s fear. Our fear. Our fingers. We did not know how to be the water that held it up. We were learning, with it slipping.
It spoke, in soft clicks. Mia held up her phone and the light splayed across the water to show the round wet risings, that weren’t waves. There were more, twenty, thirty, beaching on the ebbing tide.
Yes, I tell them, yes, I speak whale, it is a language that floods under sound, that can be learned through the muscle slap of fin and the ruin of shallow water.
It says:
There is a new song in the ocean, the long song, that hunts us in blasts of sound, and we dive but it follows. There is nowhere this song can’t reach, even inside us chasing our hearts. So we have stopped singing and give in to the land pull.
There is nothing we can do. We can feel it in through their skin. We touch. But they are already dead. This is new, this hurt. This anger. What happens if we touch this anger.
There is a new song in the ocean. Under the long song. A woman with bones as big as thunder, rising, dragging wrecks and driftnets, the heavy metals star her hair and seismic cracks stick in her teeth.
