Every August the whales return. They come here to birth the calves which are conceived far,far out to sea.

Now it is their season once more, I hear them in the evening. Their low song, seemingly melancholic and sombre, rolls across the waves to the land.

Sometimes, when I’m fucked up on booze and grass and pills I sing back to them, I holler until my throat cracks and hurts. Then I cry and I cry.

I live in a bungalow that stands alone by the beach, sheltered by the rising rock of the cliffs.

After my accident there was much discussion over my living arrangements, it was thought best for me to relocate to the city where amenities would be more accessible. I was stubborn and refused to leave my home by the sea, even though the sand was almost uncrossable by my wheelchair.

I took for granted many things that I now have lost. I am sick with bitterness sometimes and other times I am broken with despair.

I am slowly learning to appreciate life again but it is like building a tower of cards and too often it collapses.

When my friends come and visit we have a fire on the beach and we get high and I forget that I am unhappy.

We don’t talk about motorbikes though, ever.

Last August I was a different man. I was taller for one thing, I wore shoes. I walked along the shore watching the whales. I remember with such sadness, the hot sand sluicing through my toes.

I used to thrive on danger, the thrill of pushing myself and my existence to the limits. We used to burn along the coast, along the wide open roads, riding crazy-fast.

I turned my last corner and the next thing I knew I was being cut free from the wreckage of my bike and a truck.

The driver of the truck died. I killed them.

I don’t know anything about them, I don’t want to. They never existed, to me.
They, like my legs, are no more and that is that.

The sand outside is a quiet cyan beneath the bright and whole moon, the sea is black but with cutlass flashes of light where the moonlight strikes it. I am sat in my wheelchair on my veranda nursed by a bottle of anti-depressants. They make me feel sad, but not care.

It is cold and late. I am shivering but that is as distant to me now as my pain.

The waves are swollen and break upon the shore with a roar that fades to a hiss, as if the sea is a Chimera - part lion, part snake.

Around the wooden posts and floor, grow flowers, they are dormant in the moonlight glowing a soft blue. Bats occasionally fleck the night.

I see a shooting star burn and fade in a blink.

I wish I were dead.

I used to surf this ocean, I was a blade and a butterfly on these waves. I stood and I commanded the water beneath me.

I can still paddle out on my board, but it seems pointless - paddling out and then paddling back. Mostly I just watch the sea now, watch it slink back and forth.

I have a sand buggy on which I can drive the ten kilometres to the shops. A couple of weeks back I deliberately drove into a grocers display, scattering fruit everywhere, and then claimed that I had lost control of the buggy. People were very understanding, and noone mentioned that I stank of whisky.

My dick is still intact. That wasn’t cut from me. I had a girlfriend before my crash but we weren’t that serious.

‘You understand, we’re not that serious’, she had said to me in hospital.

I have a whore who comes over once a week, rides and then blows me. Sometimes she acts out any fantasies I’ve had during the week. A couple of nights back she was the nurse who had looked after me directly after my crash.

When she asks me what my fantasy is I hear, in my head, my voice saying; “Having my legs again”, but I never say this.

I started to learn Origami. I can make little cranes and frogs, butterflies and boats. It is a meditative pastime, I find my mind travels far away from me when I am making my paper animals.

I read of a young Japanese girl, Sadako Sasiki, who was two years old when the Atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Sadako developed Leukemia ten years after, when she was twelve.

In Japanese folklore there is a legend that if you make a thousand paper cranes, the Gods may grant you your wish.

She made six hundred and forty four, before she died.

I read a lot now, and listen to the radio. There’s a whole world out there.

The worst thing is how I tear myself to pieces living and reliving the past, right up to my accident.

It is as if there is no more time now, I am in limbo and only the past is real.

Behind my eyes I can feel myself whole once more, with all the optimism and arrogance of my youth, strutting and racing my way. But before my eyes, it has all gone from me.

And all the mistakes I ever made, the people I made cry and the chances I never took, they stain my hours and refuse to be forgotten.

I have a winch to which I can be hooked. It has an engine that draws me up the cliffside. At the top is a road which leads to the city.

I can still go out drinking but I cannot dance and there are many places I used to go to which I cannot any more, because of stares and because of stairs.

Some nights I mix the pills and the booze so much I don’t expect to wake up and when I do it is with some disappointment.

There. There’s a whale now, a male calling for his mate. The whole air is shimmering with his call, like wind drawing across an enormous bone flute. And there is his jet, a fountain of water caught by the moonlight.

I can hear him splashing out in the sea, waiting for his mate's response.

Silence passes and he calls again.

Then there is another call on the wind, a different tone. She has found him.

Sometimes it makes me cry, hearing these creatures. I have read that they are faithful to one another till death. They will travel across the oceans to be together and they raise their children as a family. They have no wars, no commerce, no atomic bombs. They have one another and the vast realms of the deep.

I don’t suppose I will have children. No woman I’ve met so far has found my self loathing and self pitying personality an adequate compensation for my lost limbs.

It's early days yet. Thats what my parents say, but they grow more and more absent as they provide more and more gadgets for me. The winch, the buggy, the wheelchair were all their gifts. In a few months I may get false limbs. So far I have refused them in sheer disgust.

They are calling together now, she is pregnant with his child. They are nuzzling one another as they sing. I can see their thick, lined backs and their fluked tails and two sprays of water that pass one another and then sink.

The sky is cloudless and a sheer black, there are many stars garlanded around the moon and I feel a strong sense of wonder, I grab my tin of rolling tobacco and grass and put it into the basket of my buggy, which is on the sand by the veranda. I draw my wheelchair alongside it and then crawl up onto the seat. All the controls are situated on the handlebars, especially for me and I put my foot to the metal by pressing a button down and twisting the left handlebar forward.

I skirt swiftly over the sand, to the lip of the sea. There is a long silver decoration of moonlight that casts the whole sea directly before me in light. I drive along the slick sand with the edge of the sea nipping at my thighs.

I can see the whales clearly, one of them rises head upwards out of the water and then crashes back to the sea.

She is birthing.

Her song swells once more, long and low. I ride out onto a pier of rocks where the sea does not reach and make a joint.

There are moments like this, sometimes. I smoke my grass and watch the simple beauty of nature and I feel that I am alright. The sea is turbulent beneath me and the sky is motionless above me but I, I am inbetween. Calm.

In the summer even this secluded beach gains a weight of sunbathers, surfers and general beach heads but now, in Winter, there are only the Whales and I.

We are all mammals, none of us have legs, we are alike in these ways. We are kindred.

As the mother labours and wails and the male sings to her, I will them well from my rock perch.
After half an hour the calf is born. I watch it rise to meet its parents for the first time. I feel some aspect of the relief that they must feel.

The little whale rolls in the water, its first ever moon is wide above it.

The whales start to move on, they are three now, and I rev up and ride along the shore alongside them. Then they are gone from me. Into the other world below.

I ride around the beach for a while, feeling a brightness and elation that makes me laugh aloud. I skid around the dunes and then I return home and go to sleep, without anti-depressants, painkillers or tranquilizers.

In my dreams I am always running...

The morning is bright and clear and I am woken first by the sunlight which has crept through my window to fall on my eyes, I lie awake but with my lids closed, bathing in the warm orange of my eyelids. Then I hear the whale song.

Once in my wheelchair I roll out onto the veranda. There on the beach before me, lies the dry, grey form of a Southern Right Whale calf. It lies on the sand, breathing and occasionally wriggling weakly.

At first I ride down to it on my buggy and check it out. Then I drive back to my bungalow and, with some difficulty, collect sheets from my bedding and return to the whale. I tie the sheets to the back of my buggy so they trail out behind me then I drive along the edge of the sea until the sheets are soaked. Finally I drape the sheets over the stranded whale.

This soothes the poor creature, beached and bleached as it is.

It is too large for me to push into the sea by myself, even using the buggy. I fret.

I could ride to the shops along the beach or try to stop traffic on the road on the cliffs above. It would take at least an hour to get help from further up the beach and, optimistically, half an hour back if I got a lift. Some days no traffic came along the cliff roads.

Also, obstinately I do not want to seek other peoples help. I felt that I should be capable of solving any problem myself. It is this obstinacy which means I do not have a phone.

The whale bucks hopelessly and one of its flippers knocks me from my buggy to land painfully on the wet sand. I lie there, gasping as the sea covers my face and then retires. I see the whales tail flapping desperately by me, it is heavy enough to kill me, and I pull myself up and away from it frantically, dragging myself with my arms. All this happens in a flash of clear images. The thick black of the whales tail and the light blue sky, the white flashes of foam around my eyes and the hard yellow sand.
This twenty foot scramble away from the sea leaves me exhausted and unable to clamber back into my buggy. I lie, parallel to the whale, on the hot sand. Both of us gasping and stranded. The whale makes a lamenting cry.

After a few minutes I am able to mount my buggy once more but once here I am unable to decide what to do. The whale is dying before my eyes.

I swear loudly and impotently.

Why isn’t the world fair? In the dreary mournfulness of drunkeness I have asked myself that question.
I find myself shouting, about the whale and my legs.

“It’s not fair”.

It isn’t fair that hope be born to this world simply to wither and die.

The whale moans and I scream. The seabirds rise from the neighbouring rocks and flit into the air, whooping around us.

I was a crazy fucker in school, I used to set fire to my jeans to win money. I was always fighting the other boys and kiss chasing the girls. I once let a poisonous snake loose in the teachers lounge.

I never cared much for the whole thing, the order and the authority. I was always more interested in the world outside and how I could have the most fun in it.

Up until the age of eighteen I managed to live that way but now, nineteen and broken, I can not.

I decide to winch myself up to the road on the off chance of stopping some traffic. I spend some time and effort painting a sheet with an arrow and the words ‘stranded whale, help!’ and then attach it to the base of the roadsign that warns of tight corners.

This took more effort and concentration than I expected and I am panting and sweating as I hook myself into the harness of the winch from my buggy. I am tired and clumsy and fiddle with the straps with increasing irritation.

I feel defeated and sink into submission, I am exhausted.

The whale is going to die. So fucking what.

Fuck it.

More birds are gathering on the rocks and cliffs, in anticipation of the feast to come.

I wriggle from the harness, which is tight and irritating around my limbs. My only plan is to draw my blinds and to drink myself to sleep.

I start to drive the buggy away when I find that my arm was still caught in one of the harness straps, the winch draws out behind me and then yanks at me. I hear the metal above squeak with the strain and my shoulder stings with the wrench, but I laugh.

This winch, my umbilical link to the road, to the world I once belonged to. There is the answer.

With a renewed vigour I tie the harness to the back of my buggy and then I speed away from the cliffs towards the sea. The first two times the sudden stop throws me from the buggy and so it is a protracted process, but the third time the winch breaks free from the metal brace that had held it to the top of the cliff and falls down to the beach with a flickering slither.

I then hook the engine and generator to the back of my buggy and drive them down to the shore and then onto the rocky pier which juts out into the water. This is relatively easy as they are mounted on a wheeled trailer.

I take the harness of the winch and drive to the whale.

It’s brown eye watches me as I take the sheets from around it’s thick body and tie them together, two of them in a large loop. I know that I can not tie them around its tail without risking death, but I know how to make a basic lassoo and I am banking on this in order to complete my mission.

I am thankful for the strength of my arms, the soaking lassoo is painfully heavy to draw back in after a failed throw and heavier still to cast back out.

Time passes and I see that this idea is not going to work. Furthermore, I have ruined my best chance of saving the whale, there is no way for me to reach the road now.

I have a strange tightness in my throat, like I used to get when my father would beat me as a child. He would stare down at me, waiting for me to cry and I would fight furiously against the hot tears welling behind my eyes. He would continue to hit me until I cried and then he would say that he hoped I had learned my lesson.

I am not religious, but now, now I feel that there is a God, I feel that he is looking down on me, waiting for me to cry, drawing back his omniscient hand.

Our father who art in Heaven...

My final throw is fuelled with defeat and bitterness, the loop landing on the shallow water behind the whale, a wave catches it. Then the loop sinks and opens and then drifts around the whale’s tail and, astonished, I throw the buggy into reverse so the loop will tighten.

The whale is too weak to thrash in protest but wriggles in weak defiance.

I drive back to the winch with my heart racing and slowly winch the whale from the beach and into the water. The generator smokes and complains but it perseveres.

The enormous animal is slowly pulled from the hot dry sand into the water, further and further until it is feeling waves crash over it, then it is covered by them.

Once back in the water it is too weak to swim and is still caught by the winch. I now have to release the whale from the lassoo. Again, the problem is the whale itself, which could crush me or snap my spine with an unfortunate movement if I get too close.

I sit helpless in my buggy while I try to work out what to do, the whale groans and blows water into the air.

I drive back to my home and find a knife and a canoe oar. I tie the knife to the end of the oar with rope and then I use this to cut the whale free from a safe distance.

The whale swims, slowly at first but then with gathering speed into the rich and deep ocean, far away.
I watch it leave and I feel, over and above the blisters and welts that cover my body, a surge of well-being.

Whatever else, however useless I am to this world, however much my misery wishes me dead, whatever else, today I saved the life of another creature. Nobody helped, I received no recognition or reward. My actions were even to my own detriment, I have cut myself off from the road above and ruined the winch in the process. I am stranded.

But I am freed too. The whale has cut me free from my hatred. I had hated myself because of what I once was, but today I am proud of what I am.

I gave another the one thing that I can never have.

I gave another a second chance. I gave another freedom.

Fuck the winch. Fuck the road. Fuck it all. It’s all meaningless to me.

It was just me and the world, and I won.

I made the world fair.

The sun is setting and from a distance the sound of whales can be heard.

Three voices, together.

I expect that one August in the future, I shall become an unspoken Godfather.

I shall wait for this, here on this simple beach, where I feel whole.