mp clarke

One day on the seabed there was a winking whale and when I say winking, I mean winking. She just couldn’t stop. All night and all day it went on. A wink here and a wink there; a wink to the left and a wink to the right; a wink up and a wink down; a wink in and a wink out. It was continuous. It didn’t matter where she was or who she was with, she would wink whatever. It was ceaseless. Just in the way that you and I breathe, she would wink. It was part of her make up, her metabolism. She had been born to wink. A natural winker. A winker supreme. A wink in mammal form. A winker to the end of her days. And on this particular day we’re speaking about, that is exactly where she wanted to be. The end of her days. She was desperately unhappy.

              You see she didn’t want to wink. She hated it. She didn’t do it as a come-on sign or as a way of showing she was only joking. It just happened. It was out of her control. Every time the wink came it made her feel ill. Right down to the pit of her stomach. If she could have found any way to stop it she would have done but she had tried absolutely everything she could possibly think of. She’d undergone every type of treatment you could imagine ranging from hypnosis to heat therapy; from massage to meditation; from yoga to yelling; from sewing them up to suffering in silence but nothing had clicked. Whatever she tried still left her with that interminable wink that got her into all sorts of trouble wherever or whoever she was with.

                Her wink hadn’t, on the surface, left her with a lonely life though. Oh no far from it! She had been married one hundred and twenty-eight times up until now and she was only twenty-three. You picture the scenario. She’s out with her friends in a local pub. She’s not at all bad looking and she winks at everybody she sees. You imagine the situation. She had hundreds and hundreds of men after her. And the problem with this is that as well as having this curse of a wink she also had a huge part of her character that couldn’t say ‘no’ to anybody. So more often than not on one of these Friday nights out in the local she would be proposed to by a drunken dab or a drugged-up dolphin and before she knew it she’d have said ‘yes’, been whisked down to the registry office in the morning and been wed. None of them lasted very long though for obvious reasons. By the time the honeymoon was over she’d have winked at well over another five hundred blokes and been proposed to by at least half of them. Out of these she would accept nigh on everyone, there would be punch-ups galore and out of the chaos she would swim off with one of them and the whole thing would start up again. It was a living nightmare.

                 However, it wasn’t just problems with men that made her winking life such a misery. It seemed to spread literally across every aspect of life you could imagine. You picture what a wink can do if it is done at the wrong time in the wrong place! One day for example she was driving to the hospital to go and visit her husband at the time who had been set upon and beaten up by a shoal of sardines she had winked at the night before. She’d had a phone call at home saying he was in a critical state and could she get down there as quickly as possible. As she got onto the road running up to the hospital she was stopped by a traffic tuna for speeding. He was quite an understanding bloke though and when the winking whale explained to him what was happening, he put his ticket book away and waved her on and told her to forget it. Then she winked at him. Oh dear!

               Another time she decided she needed to get somebody to do the cleaning in her house as she was always out and about trying to sort out the problems her winking had caused, and she never got around to doing it herself. You would have thought there couldn’t be much that could go wrong with this wouldn’t you? It was a complete disaster! Not one of the cleaners lasted past the first day. And it always followed the same pattern. They would arrive. They would do the job. They would ask if everything was OK. She would say ‘yes’. Then she winked at them. Oh dear!

                 On another occasion she’d been in hospital recovering from one of the numerous operations she’d had in an attempt to get to the root of the wink. In the bed next to her was a mother with her newly born baby. The mum had been in tears all day because all she had got from the other mothers and from the people who had visited her, was that her baby was a little unusual looking. She’d come to the winking whale for some comfort. What a mistake! She asked her outright whether or not she thought her baby was ugly or not. The winking whale replied “of course not.“ Then she winked at her. Oh dear!

                  And on this particular day I’m telling you about she’d just about had all she could take of this infernal winking and the problems it was causing. It was starting to drive her mad. She wasn’t an overly thick- skinned whale and the insults and threats that were flying her way because of her winking were really starting to get to her. She’d just had to move for the umpteenth time to another town where nobody knew her, on this occasion because of a misplaced wink at a funeral. The whole of the deceased’s family was after her and the only solution for her once again had been to uproot and move to a new place in another town. And that’s where she was sitting on this particular day. In her front room, her head in her fins; feeling depressed, worthless, despondent and decidedly downright miserable; wondering if to end it all might not be at all a bad solution to all this suffering and pain she was feeling. She really had got to that point with it all. She was so sick to death of the constant disruption, turmoil and bad feeling caused by her winking that she was seriously contemplating suicide. At this moment in time it really did seem the only way out. 

                 Luckily for the winking whale The One That Made All This Stuff was currently going through his fairy godmother stage and was really getting into just appearing in front of folk who needed help, armed with wishes and solutions.

“I’ve got the very thing for you.”

The winking whale looked up to see The One That Made All this Stuff standing in the centre of her front room, complete with pink gown, fairy wings and a wand firing out floating stars. She sat there, rooted to the spot, not knowing whether to be terrified or amazed.

“I can’t get rid of your winking just like that. That’s something you’ll have to do if you really want to. But what I can do is help you to use it.”

The winking whale nodded in reverential agreement.

“I’ve got a bit of a problem at the moment with the moon,” The One That Made All This Stuff continued. “It’s not working very well at this point in time, and it needs to go into the garage for its M.O.T.”

The winking whale looked at her visitor a little confused.

“Sorry. Yes, it stands for Moon Overhaul Test. I normally carry one out on her every five or six billion years and she’s just about due for one now.”

The winking whale nodded again.

The One That Made All This Stuff continued on with his idea.

“Well. I’ve handled the fact that there won’t be any light up there at night by asking all the world’s fireflies to hover up there for a few weeks. I’ve also solved the gravity problem; in quite a nifty way if I might say so myself.”

The One That Made All This Stuff looked slightly absurd as he spun on the spot firing trails of sparkling stars around the room. By now the winking whale had just started to get her tongue back.

“What’s the problem with gravity then?”

The One That Made All This Stuff raised his eyes to the ceiling.

“Didn’t you do science at school? The moon’s instrumental in creating the force of gravity that keeps everything anchored down on the ground here.”

A huge smirk appeared on The One That Made All This Stuff’s face.

“I’ve had a word with Charon. That’s Pluto’s moon,” he added quickly, seeing the perplexed look on the winking whale’s face. “And she’s agreed to lend me some of her gravity for a few weeks in return for a few days off next millennium. So that’s tied all that up quite nicely. But...”

The One That Made All This Stuff came over and sat on the arm of the chair the winking whale was sitting in and put his arm on her fin.

“I need your help for the other problem I have.”

The winking whale said nothing but just nodded her head a little nervously. 

“And I think that by you helping me with it you can at the same time help yourself with this bloody winking problem that’s bothering you all the time.”

The winking whale still said nothing, but this time looked up at The One That Made All This Stuff, her eyes hopeful and eager.

“As you know the moon controls the tides. So, without the moon there we won’t have any tides. The water will stay in all the time and there won’t be any beaches, and do you know what’ll happen then?”

The winking whale shook her head.

“I’ll have every bloody head of Tourism from every bloody place on the coast from all over the world on the phone, day in and day out, moaning that nobody wants to come to their seaside resort because the beach has gone. Can you see the problem I’ve got?”

The winking whale nodded understandingly.

“So, this is where you come in with your winking. I’ve worked it all out. If you, for a couple of weeks, because that’s all the moon will need for her repairs, could go out and live on The Middle Mudbank in the centre of all the oceans of the world and just wink continually; that will solve the problem. Your winking ,without you knowing it, has ,over the years, amassed a huge power and, as I say, I’ve calculated that if you keep it going constantly day and night, it will have sufficient oomph, from The Middle Mudbank, to keep the tides going and therefore spare me the earache of all those moaning seaside bosses  phoning me up every blooming minute of the day complaining. Good idea, eh?

The One That Made All This Stuff forward rolled off the arm of the chair, star jumped across the room and neatly landed in the armchair across the other side, giggling and chuckling to himself like a mad monkey.

The winking whale still looked bemused.

“But how will that help me with my winking problem? I don’t see how that fits into all this.”

The One That Made All This Stuff smiled softly to himself.

“Look! Think it through carefully. The main problem with your winking isn’t the winking itself, is it? It’s the way it upsets everybody else. Or let’s put it in a different way. It’s the way it’s misunderstood by everybody else. But....”

The One That Made All This Stuff once again came over and sat on the arm of the winking whale’s chair.

“What if everybody down here knew you? What if you became famous across the length and breadth of the seabed? You wouldn’t have any problems with people misinterpreting your winking then, would you?”

The winking whale shook her head slowly. She was just starting to get the idea of what he was on about.

“I see what you mean. If I did this job for you for a couple of weeks; by the end of it everybody would know who I am, my winking would be out in the open and... “

“Exactly!” interrupted The One That Made All This Stuff, leaping up from the chair again and running around the room like a madman. He stopped suddenly by the front door, fixed the winking whale with a most peculiar cheesy look, took one deep breath and fired out a huge sentence in one long hit that flew across the room like an arrow.

“Well then my dear what do you reckon I need to know today or else I’m going to have to go elsewhere it’s a simple choice really isn’t it? do the job and never have any more problems with your winking or continue to suffer day to day indignities and problems until the end of your life and all that entails it’s obviously completely up to you but I know what I’d do what do you reckon then?”

                  The two weeks on The Middle Mudbank just flew past for the winking whale. The ocean’s tides ebbed and flowed as normal, with only one hiccup on the third day when she got a dolphin stuck in her eye, but that was soon sorted out and before she knew it, it was day fifteen and there was the moon back in the sky, as fresh and as bright as ever. The word of what had been happening on The Middle Mudbank meantime had shot around the seabed so quickly that by the end of the second week her name was on everybody’s lips. She was a celebrity. There were winking whale T shirts, winking whale computer games, winking whale pasta shapes, winking whale T.V quiz shows. Winking whale everything you could think of. She was a hero. She was at that moment in time the most famous person on the whole of the seabed. Everybody knew her. Everybody would recognise her. Everybody would know that she winked and why she winked and no longer would her life be the miserable state of affairs that it had been for as far back as she could remember.

                 That is if one unfortunate thing hadn’t happened. Because she had been winking so much, so continually for three hundred and thirty-six hours, she had worn both her eyelids away and could therefore no longer wink. So that when she went back to where she lived, although the place was full of folk eagerly awaiting her return to pat her on the back and buy her a drink or whatever, not one of them recognised her as the winking whale. Now this on the surface appeared to be what she’d always wanted. Not to wink. To get rid of that infernal irritating God-forsaken habit and at long last it had happened! She no longer could wink. She couldn’t care less that she’d missed out on all the fame, the money and everything else that went with it. She was just so desperately happy that she couldn’t do it anymore. It’s funny though isn’t it how some people never seem to get any luck? Because she didn’t have any eyelids left, she became known as the weirdly staring whale instead. And don’t people who stare at you get on your bloody nerves?