The Whale at the End of the World

by John Ironmonger

‘I’m not much of a whisky drinker really.’ ‘Then you have a great deal more to learn than I feared.’

‘How much food is there on supermarket shelves?’ Kaufmann asked. ‘How much fuel is there in petrol station forecourts? A lot less than you’d think. Businesses don’t carry ruinous levels of stock. Not any more. It doesn’t make financial sense. We walk into a supermarket and we see all the aisles groaning with food, and we imagine, somehow, that it could feed a city for a year, but we’re so wrong. They stock much less than most of us care to imagine. Most big petrol forecourts need nightly deliveries. They have twenty-four hours of fuel in their store tanks – not allowing for any panic buying. And most supermarkets operate “just-in-time” ordering. It’s all worked out by computer. The new stock arrives just as the old stock runs out, and every night they have to replenish most of their inventory. How long would it be, do you think, until enough people had missed three square meals?’

‘The best recipe for true love is plenty of time spent in close proximity; plus a little jeopardy to face together.’

When he was a boy Pappa Mikkel had taught him how to stay calm in a crisis. ‘Give the crisis a score,’ the old man would say. ‘Mark it out of one hundred. Then look at the horizon as if nothing mattered, and ask yourself how much it would score tomorrow. And how much next week. And next year. Will they write about this matter in your obituary? Will anyone die? If not, you can turn to face it once again and recognise it for the impostor that it is.’

In the face of death an hour of sleep seemed like the loss of an hour of life.