Free How I Killed Margaret Thatcher by Anthony Cartwright

They worked on the roads, labouring, that kind of thing. A couple of them worked on farms out towards Worcester. None of them settled after Quarry End was blown up.
    I lie on the short, tough grass in front of the caravans with my shirt pulled up around my neck so that the grass tickles my body. The grass is strong and prickly from being eaten by the sheep and from the wind blowing in off the sea. I can hear the waves now, crunching up the beach, but I’m looking the other way, at my dad sitting in a deckchair in front of the caravan dipping a biscuit in a cup of tea. The sun is behind our caravans and the big hills are black and solid behind that. In the morning they look like mountains, with the sun behind them, all in shadow, like you would never want to go there, only on an adventure not on your holiday, then in the afternoon they look like hills again, soft and green, with sheep dotted around them and grey cottages here and there. One time we saw a hare run across one of the fields, its long shadow running next to it. A kestrel hung still in the sky, hanging there; watching the hare run.
    My dad looks out to sea. He has a moustache now. My grandad says he looks like Dennis Lillee, the Australian bowler. When he bowls to us on the beach he runs in hard and fast and then sends the ball in a gentle arc so that we might hit it.
    He’s out of the deckchair, springing to his feet, and he’s got his arm round me, pointing, pointing, out at sea.
    Look, can yer see it? A porpoise, look! Jumping out the water, look, theer it goes again! Yer see?
    I nod and pretend I can see it. I look across the grey blanket of the sea. The water looks still and empty to me, but I want to say I’ve seen it. I’m not that sure what a porpoise looks like. I don’t want to disappoint my dad. This feeling fills me and I can’t see anything. He pulls me close to him.
    Yeah, yeah, I can see it, I say and try to follow the line of where he’s pointing. I see it, I say.
    I can’t. I know we are looking at different things.
    When I worked on the ships I used to lift my eyes to the horizon and scan the water, looking for porpoises breaking the surface. I didn’t see any then, either. It was too late, anyway. We saw dolphins a few times, whole families of them. One morning, we were near Madeira, a whale surfaced alongside the ship next to the bar where I was cleaning the glasses. It kept coming and coming, rolling through the water, this grooved, blue-black flesh rolling through the water, blotches of shellfish in tiny clusters on its flank, and it came rolling, rolling, through the water. It blew this explosion of air, hard, from its blowhole, rolling then out of the water, the same air that we breathe that had been inside this whale and down to the depths of the ocean, and the spray made a rainbow on the sea’s surface. I could see Madeira there on the horizon, jutting out of the sea, like another whale emerging. Then the whale’s tail, the fluke, rose up out of the water, black against the shining ocean, and slapped down hard on the surface, not graceful, clumsy even, and the water displaced then swirled in after the whale and it had gone, with the sea moving up and down, up and down; the whale heading down to the depths and the sea becoming slowly still like nothing had ever been there. I thought, Can you see it, Dad? Can you see this? As if it was me holding onto him and looking out across the water. Full fathom five thy father lies, I thought. Those are the pearls. And I carried on looking at the empty sea and shelving the glasses in the freezer so they would keep the beer cold. I thought about my dad’s eyes. A passenger came and ordered his first of the day. He hadn’t seen the whale either.
    They’re not our caravans. They don’t belong to us, that is, but we come to the same ones every year. We have one and my nan and grandad live in the one next to us and Uncle Johnny stays in there