All content copyright 2006 Annabel Gill. Please do not use in any way without my permission. This is the prologue to the novel I'm currently writing. Whale Watching ARTHUR WOKE with the sun in his face. As he rolled away from the window he opened his eyes and saw Cathy sleeping next to him, face-down, in a small patch of blood. In his just-woken state of mind he couldn't make anything of it at first, and he just stared at the stain beneath her bare shoulder. It was dark, turning brown, and had been smeared across the sheet and her skin during the night. A few drops looked fresher. Arthur came back to himself and sat up. He put a hand on Cathy's back; she was warm and breathing evenly. He let out his breath. He supposed he ought to wake her up. But something held him back. It was as if there was something forbidding in the very way she slept - like she had plunged into it with certainty, and wouldn't take kindly to being drawn back into the world yet. There had been something cool about her the past few days; in such an abstracted mood she would insist wordlessly on her right even to her own private bleeding to death. But that aspect of her personality had never been something Arthur gave much notice to - his modes of contemplation didn't turn in that direction - so finally he reached over and put his hand on her back again. He let it rest there with firm, warm pressure until she began to stir. She let out a small moan and turned her face into the pillow, and he moved his hand up to her head and ran his fingers through her glossy hair. 'Cath.' Finally Cathy turned her face to him and opened her eyes. She stared vaguely at the space past his knee, absorbed into herself like she had woken directly into another dream - and maybe not a good one. She didn't look at him until he said, 'Cathy...you're bleeding.' She sent him a startled glance and then shot upright, grabbing her glasses off the nightstand on the way. Along with more of the bed sheet, the front of her grey undershirt was soaked, and there were smears on her arm. Cathy looked down at herself, heavy-eyed and baneful, resting for a moment within some sealed and private horror. But she didn't seem especially surprised. 'Oh, fuck,' she hissed after a moment. She got up and threw aside the curtain that separated the futon bed from the living room. She turned into the bathroom and slammed the door shut. Arthur stood up on the bed and stared after her. For a half-second he thought to go over and knock on the door, but his overriding instinct was to let her be, so instead he threw the duvet off the bed and pulled off the sheet. When she came out of the bathroom ten minutes later, wrapped in a bathrobe, Arthur - still in his blue pyjama bottoms and white t-shirt - was kneeling on the bare mattress, scrubbing at the stain with a rag, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide on the floor next to him. He stopped and sat up when she came out. She stared at him strangely. 'Are you okay?' he asked. 'What happened?' 'Why are you doing that?' she said, her brow flickering with irritation. 'You just got up, for god's sake.' He looked at the rag in his hand and the bloodstain in the mattress, and then back at her. 'The longer I leave it, the worse the stain will be.' She frowned. 'Jesus, what the hell does that matter?' It was his turn to frown. 'What's going on?' She sighed through her nose and glanced away. 'Nothing.' She went to the bureau and pulled out some clothes; she kept her back to him, taking particular care not to shrug off her bathrobe until she was mostly dressed. He watched, nothing lost on him. 'So what happened?' 'Nothing happened. I tripped outside the club last night and sliced myself on a piece of glass. I'm fine.' She sat down on the edge of the mattress and started pulling on her shoes, and he just watched as she got her coat and went to the door. 'I'm going to get some stuff at the store. I'll be back in a little while.' Still not looking at him, she grabbed her keys and opened the door. But she paused, halfway out, the door already swinging shut behind her. She turned and stood there a moment, halfway obscured. 'Thank you for cleaning that,' she said thickly, before turning away abruptly and going out. The morning light fell around Arthur and sang to him the sudden silence; he stared at the bloodied rag as if it would illuminate as much about this strange wound of a morning. Finally he went back to scrubbing. ARTUR WISNIEWSKI was seven years old when he and his parents boarded a plane bound for Boston, where Artur's father Ivan had a brother. They didn't mean to ever come back to Krakow, though Artur's parents didn't suppose that their rather taciturn son could really understand what that meant. Especially in those terrible days for them, he was like a stranger, his eternal quiet at the centre of a storm something they couldn't grasp. But Artur knew what it meant to leave something forever - perhaps better than they really did. He had spent the past two weeks considering every individual cornerstone he was familiar with from his walks to school, every nook of his flat, all the sacred spots of his short history - the playground site of a secret compact between friends; Dead-Squirrel-With-Its-Eyes-Pecked-Out Corner; the moat in the park, never thoroughly plumbed. He considered them each solemnly, marking them with a silent goodbye, considering what would happen to them without him. Would other children take them over as their own? Would they be neglected, forgotten, lose their meaning? Were they marked by him, somehow, forever - would others look at them and find him in them? There were no answers, only questions; but Artur didn't mind that. It was the space that, as a child, he lived in naturally. By the time the Wisniewskis boarded the plane, Artur had all those things folded up and packed away inside of him, and while he never felt the need to bring them out again, they were still there. His parents in their grief couldn't pay enough attention to comfort him and mutilate his experience, so it rested there wordlessly in his consciousness like a branch at the bottom of a lake. Things would always be so with him. The last moment he would ever truly associate with Krakow had very little to do with that city at all; the association was almost circumstantial. He had just sat down in his seat on the little airplane, and while his mother stood for a moment to lean across the aisle, where his father sat, Artur turned to her empty seat and found a yellow-haired girl of about his age sitting there, looking directly at him. She was gone almost before he'd seen her, and all those things he'd said goodbye to - the trees, the lake, the squirrel, the stones - went after her into the void she'd left. He didn't think very much of it; again it sifted wordlessly to the floor of his brain. But it made an impression on him - she made an impression. If he had ever thought to describe it later, he would have said he felt a sense of calm radiating from her face; a sense of parting familiarity that was enough for him to leave with. Do widzenia, Artur. Goodbye, Krakow. FIFTEEN YEARS later, scrubbing his girlfriend's blood off a mattress, Arthur felt old thoughts like that drifting up from the bottom of the lake, wordlessly, and passing through the front of his brain before settling down again, all the sediment momentarily disturbed. He didn't wonder why one such association would lead to the other right now. His conscious mind moved in linear sequences, occupying itself quite obstinately with whatever task he'd set himself, whether it was studying history, or effectively removing a stain. But other things always moved in the background, and he didn't interfere with them; if they wanted to tell him something, eventually they would. And this time, eventually, they would. But not now. For now he patiently soaked their sheets in the bathtub, and put hydrogen peroxide on to flake off the blood, while a Polish autumn's tree branch or a dead squirrel presented themselves to his mind and his eyes apparently at random. For now he just let them all wash up on the shore. Cathy would be back soon enough.