David J. Wingrave's work has appeared in n+1, Guernica, Psychopomp, Esquire, and previously in Carve, where he won the 2017 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. He lives in Brooklyn.
I knew for sure Wilkes was in love the day he told me a dead whale had washed up on Putsborough Sands. Did I think Sarah wanted to check it out?
I didn’t know. I didn’t know! It was summer, and I didn’t know anything. I suggested we cycle over to her house and ask. Wilkes said he didn’t want to get sweaty, he’d just pay for my bus ticket. He was muscular, clean-featured—wholesome, in a way—but top-heavy in skinny jeans, and messy and greasy. I think the package confused people, and to be honest, it was a bit alarming if you didn’t know him.
“Now?” I said. We were playing Smash Bros. at his house.
“If you want,” Wilkes shrugged. The guy had been jiggling his knee for the last hour. I don’t think he even noticed I’d beaten him about thirty times in a row. He looked at the old hoodie I was wearing and asked if I was going to change.
“Why would I?”
“You know,” Wilkes said. “Like, the church thing. Sarah’s, like, nice. You have to watch yourself.”
“Watch my what?”
“Watch your mouth. You’re always swearing.”
The back of his new cream shirt was embroidered with brown filigree. I told him he looked stupid. Wilkes countered that I was a fat-faced fuckass.
. . .
When we got to Brading Road, Sarah’s vicar dad answered the door. He was still in his robes.
“Hello there, Wilkes,” he said. “Might have to disappoint you and your friend. I believe Sarah’s revising.”
But Sarah appeared at the top of the stairs behind him.
“I texted you,” Wilkes said.
“I know,” she replied, and hopped down to tie her Converses. It was simple, the way she moved, like her body had been made specifically for her. When she stood up, a silver fish necklace bounced around her clavicle. Even though her face was roundish and freckled, Sarah looked a bit older than she was, and I felt there was a certain authority about her. She seemed to participate in some secret life, away from me and Wilkes, where she was entrusted with worldly knowledge, and when she hung out it would radiate incomprehensibly from her.
“I heard you’re playing youth county now, Alex,” Sarah’s dad said, stepping away from the door to let his daughter pass.
“Oh right, yeah,” Wilkes said. “Yeah, I quit, actually. Because of A-levels starting in a few months and stuff.”
“It was lovely to see you anyway,” I said to Sarah’s dad, because I wanted the conversation to end.
“Okay,” he replied.
As the three of us walked back to the bus stop, Wilkes told me that Sarah’s dad couldn’t remember my name.
“It’s really funny,” Sarah said. “I’ve told him, like, ten times.”
“Classic Mike,” Wilkes said. “He calls you Lump.”
Sarah promised it wasn’t true.
Wilkes and Sarah had known each other since kindergarten—their families were friends. I’d transferred schools, and had only known them a year, but I considered that well long enough for Sarah’s idiot dad to learn my name.
We sat down on a bench to wait for the bus. Wilkes immediately began to complain about the heat. He tugged at his shirt, which in addition to looking stupid was too small. I realized I was touching my face and tried to stop. Sarah pulled a half-smoked cigarette from her hoodie.
“I love that smell,” Wilkes said.
Sarah ignored him. “What kind of whale is it?”
“You know,” Wilkes said. “A whale. I heard it on the radio.”
“Did it have a nice voice?” She paused to blow smoke from the side of her mouth. “What I mean is, what kind of whale, what type of whale?”
“A dead one.”
“Wilkes, what species?” I asked.
“It’s just a chuffing whale whale, a dead whale!”
“Wait,” Sarah said. “Wilkes, do you not know there are different types of whales?”
“Species,” I said.
The bus arrived and we climbed to the upper deck. Sat at the back were a group of year nines I recognized from school. We took seats at the front. I hoped we’d go unnoticed, but they soon began to whisper. Sarah and Wilkes pretended not to hear. Then one of the kids whistled, and Wilkes lurched around to ask him what the fuck he was staring at. I set my face very neutral and tried to think of something to say. Wilkes looked embarrassed. He apologized to Sarah, who rolled her eyes.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said.
. . .
At Putsborough, a sea fret had rolled in. The air was cold and clammy; as you stepped off the bus it hit you like a flannel. The dune grass sagged in the damp, and although it was low tide, visibility wasn’t more than twenty meters in any direction. I let Wilkes borrow my jumper when he asked. We spread out and began to trail footprints. Gray sand against a white mist, the sand potholed here and there by pools of white water. I could just make out the impressions of my friends either side of me, at a distance, and I felt calm and pretty okay.
We came upon it suddenly. A young humpback whale. Dead, on its side, eyes closed. Nothing obviously wrong apart from the fact that it lay on the beach. On its back, the skin was coal-blue; on its belly, chalk-yellow. Its flippers were thrown in different directions, like a lone sleeper in a big bed. The long curve of its mouth, which in pictures make humpbacks look haughty, like they’re unimpressed even by the ocean, just made this one seem miserable. I’d never seen anything so obviously affected by gravity.
“Frick,” Wilkes said. “I thought it would be much bigger.”
“It’s quite fucking big,” Sarah said.
She was right—the whale was about the size of a dinghy. If the weather had been better, it would have cast a picnic shadow.
“It’s just a baby,” I offered. They both ignored me. As we stood fidgeting, I noticed the air didn’t smell as I’d expected—not of decay, and not entirely unpleasant either, but rich, almost savory.
A Jack Russell scrabbled out of the mist, followed by a tall woman in a yellow mackintosh and wellington boots. Wilkes began to kick at the sand. The dog began to yip hysterically. Sarah drew up her hood and checked her watch.
“Aren’t whales supposed to be, like, the biggest things ever?” Wilkes asked.
“Yeah, but not every whale,” Sarah said. “The biggest ones are the biggest ones.”
I could tell Wilkes was more than just disappointed. He was angry. In the whale’s presence I felt dopey, but he squirmed and kept looking at Sarah. Stillness wasn’t doing it for him. He’d needed the whale to be massive, colossal, overwhelming. Something to dwarf the incongruous emotion that had beached itself within him.
We circled the carcass a few times and said hello to the mackintosh woman. She said it was very sad, and we agreed, but wandered off when she began to rant about “the Japanese.” Her dog had not stopped yipping, and the sea fret had thickened.
. . .
That same evening—I heard later—the whale was exploded by persons unknown, with the help of a large quantity of fireworks.
I decided to have the operation. So I guess this must have been toward the end of July. In any case, the day of the whale was the last time we hung out as a trio. Whenever I tried to organize something together, Wilkes felt ill, or Sarah had work at the leisure center, or Wilkes had some training day, or Sarah felt ill. It was annoying and boring. In September, surgeons removed the large benign tumor that had squatted on my cheek my whole life, and threw it away.
They both visited me, separately, in the hospital. It was then that Sarah told me Wilkes had asked her out, but that she’d turned him down.
“Can you imagine anything more ridiculous?” she said. “I asked God about it. I think Wilkes got confused, because we’ve been friends for so long but it was becoming obvious we’ve got nothing in common.”
I mumbled something and tried to rearrange myself against the pillows. The painkillers were spacing me out. I kept finding myself horizontal without remembering how I got there. Sarah took my elbow and helped me up.
“How does it feel now?” she said.
I didn’t really know.
“It must feel like something,” she said. “It’s your face. Does it feel, like, lighter? Sorry. But, you know? You know that feeling when you take off a really heavy backpack?”
I realized I could tell her I loved her and then later, blame it on the drugs.
“Do I want to do math or chemistry next year?” I asked.
“Chemistry,” Sarah said. “A-levels require a strategy, don’t be a masochist. Plus, chemistry’s OCR, which is pretty much the slackest exam board going. Math’s probably more interesting but, like, do you care?”
I didn’t know. “Did Wilkes decide what he’s taking?”
Sarah began to laugh, and then stopped when she saw I wasn’t joking. “Oh…” she said. “I sort of doubt Wilkes is going to stay in school.”
I was surprised, and then, alone later that night on the ward, upset. We’d often talked about sixth form, even university. His results really hadn’t been that bad. At around four a.m., still awake, I went to the bathroom to look at myself. I believe I wanted to feel guiltier than I did, wanted to see myself as vain, as having abandoned something unique and inherent to myself, almost an old friend. Or whatever. I had asked for something and it had been delivered. I wanted consequences. I wanted gravity. But when, hands on the sink, I stared into the mirror, I could barely see any difference at all, and felt neither guilt nor pride. Something mechanical had happened, and like a special effect it didn’t really make that much of a lasting impression.
I say this. But I don’t think I’ve ever had better mornings than those I spent in the hospital that week. Just as I woke up I’d remember all over again, and I’d get a lift, a sort of warm expansion into the future.
When I quizzed Wilkes, he denied everything. “Why, exactly, would I want to date Sarah?”
“Because you like her?”
“Nah,” he said. “Nah, nah, nah. She’s like my sister. Nope.”
Summer was ending, and I didn’t know anything. A nurse arrived to change my bandage. Wilkes asked if he should leave. I shrugged, so he sat back down. As the nurse unwound and dabbed, Wilkes told me about a girl he had met last weekend, a netball player called Mim. Love was not a strong enough word, he sighed. Okay, they hadn’t spoken yet, but he was in the process of composing a long letter, which described in great detail his true feelings, and which he would present to her the following week, on her birthday.
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