Jamrach's Menagerie (23 page)

‘I mean the time before the dragon and the time after are not the same.’

The funny thing is I knew exactly what he meant. It was true, something
h a d
changed, as if we’d sailed into a different air. I’d been groping at it in my mind, thinking it was something only happening in me. His saying it made it real, and that scared me.

That night I dreamed of home. Ishbel and Ma were there, and some of the lads and girls from Spoony’s, ginger Jane and that lot, and we were al going down to the river, and al of it tumbled in with the kind of violent sunset you never saw on the banks of the Thames, a dragon-time sunset of crimson and violet. I was woken by shouting on deck. The sea was rol ing. Not time, I thought, and slept again and found out later it was old Skip up to his tricks again. Rainey had found him fast asleep by the dragon’s cage and cal ed him a whoreson and a bastard and kicked him down the fo’c’s’le shaft.

Next morning we were out for open ocean when the weather turned. The air was stil heavy and hot and thunder rol ed from the west. You could see the squal coming. It’s one of the things I love about the sea, the way you can see weather afar. It’s like looking at the future. Captain Proctor cal ed out, ‘Shorten sails!’ and we jumped to and set about turning her round and about direct. I ran and shielded the dragon’s pen with a hanging. Gabriel was at the helm but the order was tardy and even he couldn’t get us around in time, so we were caught sideways on by the wind and suddenly al was madness and nonsense, the birds and the wind shrieking their devil souls out, and the rigging torn, the sails cracking, the timbers groaning and the huge masts crying mercy. My guts flew into my throat. The deck tilted, we dropped and I rol ed, grabbed onto something. Mr Rainey’s voice roared over the screaming as the sea rol ed over the leeward rail, icy. We’d gone over fast. We’re sinking, we’re sinking, I thought, this is too low, too low, we’l never come up again, oh, dear Jesus, God, please – the lee side touched the sea, the weather touched cloudy, fat-cheeked heaven.

I ran about, we ran about, I had no idea what I was doing. I saw Martin Hannah hauling on a rope and thought he looked as if he needed help, so hauled alongside.

Somehow we final y got her up and around. She flew before the storm.

‘Good man yourself, Jaf,’ Martin Hannah said, breathing hard. He was a tal quiet lad I hardly knew, inclined to stoutness, with a faintly threatening air and a slow smile.

‘Good man yourself,’ I replied.

Then the cry: ‘She blows!’

It was ridiculous. Even in this, Proctor’s standing on the quarterdeck shouting his head off: ‘Down from aloft! Haul up the mainsail – Gabriel! Helm down – set topgal ants – clear away boats …’

We had to get the spare from over the stern. It was starting to spit rain and the sea was high. But you don’t think, you just do. Soon came the fal ing rattle of the tackle, the splash of a boat hitting the sea. The flashing of long oars. We plunged and bucked over the sea with aching ears and flayed faces, blind with spray. Tears were blown backwards from our eyes. And we never caught a whale that day, we just lost another boat. So there we were, two down, and the weather frowning like a dragon. While the real dragon pressed flat and mad to the deck with eyes glazed over ful of knowledge, drooling a slow spool of greenish slime as hel heaved sick about him.

I knocked shoulders with John Copper.

‘Jesus,’ he said, a wild look in his eyes. ‘Sweet, sweet Jesus, I wish I was back in dear old Hul .’

If I could write I’d make a song. ‘Oh, I wish I was back in

…’ Many a sailor song starts that way. ‘Oh, I wish I was back in Ratcliffe Highway, Ratcliffe Highway across the sea …’ I don’t know how I’d say it. My own heart song. There are good old Ratcliffe Highway songs aplenty, but none are mine. So as the wild torrent howled and raged and pined for days and we tied ourselves in our bunks of nights, I tried the song, but it would never come whole.

Oh, I wish I was back in Ratcliffe Highway, Ratcliffe Highway across the sea,

Where a dancing girl with dada dada

Waits or waits not for me.

I like that: waits or waits not for me.

Time passed, and we were al blind and deaf and dumb.

The storm – sick. Rol ing. Wedged ourselves in our bunks with bundles on either side. Smel of bilge water came steaming up from the hold. The bulkheads creaking. Close, stinky air. Heavy rol ing sea breaking across the waist.

Buckets, pieces of wood, other things rol ing around the deck. Dangerous. Sea too high for whaling. Til , shocking and sudden, a bright, sweet, clear morning dawned, promising good sailing. It turned into a long day of rainbows and a gentle night of soft drumming rain. After that, three long cloudless days of burning brightness saw us to the Japanese ground, but there was nothing for us there. A week, two weeks. The lookouts were silent, though we spoke to other ships that had taken plenty. So we headed out southeast into the Pacific, towards the Equator and the far Offshore Ground.

Somewhere a few days in, darkness fel .

Seven days of darkness, like a biblical plague. In al that time the sun refused to appear, and the sky glowered close above by daytime, a low, pressing ceiling of dismal black cloud that occasional y gave off a kind of thin droning thunder from beyond the stars. The sea was high. There was no rain and the heat was intense. Day drears gave way to thick nights. On we hauled for better weather, for the sun, for the next change of the times. The captain and his officers walked about the decks, we spun yarn and sewed old clothes and patched sails and cleaned up, and things were not right. The ocean spoke with a softly threatening voice, there was no horizon and nothing to be seen in any direction but a groaning haze. And every time he could, Skip lay down in front of the dragon and stared at it, and talked with it, and listened to it. Listened to it, that’s what he said.

He was a mad idiot. I now think they should have thrown him in the fo’c’s’le with a kick along the way every time they found him sleeping before the dragon’s cage. It was a soft ship, that was our trouble. A shipmate should not be al owed to sleep on deck as he pleases. What captain would al ow it?
Ours
would. Proctor was grieving for his old Samson, a soft pup in his pocket in the Bay of Biscay twelve years ago.

We hardly saw him. Rainey gave Skip a kicking once in a while in a half-hearted way, but nothing disturbed the haze.

Once the captain came up in his nightshirt, disturbed by the shouting. ‘I’l be glad when that damned animal’s off my ship,’ he said, and Dan Rymer, with the grey of the sky on his face and his eyes cold, said he was making a new rule that no one could go near the dragon but me and him, just like it used to be. It seemed so long ago when that was the rule. I couldn’t remember when it had changed, how we’d drifted here, it was like Skip said: time changed. Time simply did not play properly any more. It was like an earthquake in the landscape in my head, and I no longer knew what I could count on. Al voices were muffled and far.

Skip could no longer see the dragon, but it didn’t make any difference; he was stil talking to it. He said no words could tel how he and the dragon talked but talk they did, sometimes al night long. He never shut up, going on in this steady voice. He said the wheel was in spin because the dragon had gone insane. It had gone insane because of the cage. It couldn’t bear the cage, like his grandma’s fish couldn’t bear its bowl, and so had gone mad. It wanted to go home. ‘That’s why there’s no whales,’ he said, sitting drawing bars and cages. ‘They know it’s on the ship and they won’t come near.’

You know, we’d had a lot of Skip. He must have said a mil ion mad things since we left the Greenland Dock. Why listen to him now? First he got Bil and Felix al fired up, whether he meant to or not.

‘It’s like this,’ said Felix, ‘a ship kind of knows things. It’s like it’s alive, like it knows when it’s got bad luck on board.

Like, say, a murderer.’

‘Or a demon or a—’

‘Yeah, a demon.’ Skip set about drawing a demon.

‘S’like when the sails blow out like cheeks.’

‘And it screams.’

And on and on in that dream – seven dark days and nights that had begun to feel eternal. The superstition of sailors is no more than the lone howling of mil ions of miles between you and dry land and home, making you know you are a thing that can die. Superstition, dark, spiky, high-stepping, stalked with cloven foot upon our decks. And when superstition high-steps on a lone sea deck, far and far from every strand, as the old songs say – then, oh then …

Not just when sleeping, not just half asleep on my feet at the masthead, not just tipsy-drifting with a head ful of gummy warmth, but always, every conscious second I was beautiful y, startlingly afraid, with a fear crisp and invisible as the honed edge of a fine blade.

‘Those horrible eyes,’ said Gabriel, at the table in the fo’c’s’le, lamplight on his face.

The dragon had been shedding skin round its eyes, which gave it a particularly horrific appearance.

‘Like a statue,’ Simon Flower fiddling with a string of twine. ‘Not like a living thing at al .’

‘An abomination.’ That was Joe Harper.

‘I don’t like it,’ Yan said. ‘I don’t like it there with its horrible eyes.’

‘The ship knows,’ Bil Stock said. ‘There you have it: the ship knows.’

But now it was no longer just Skip and Bil Stock and Felix Duggan, it was the whole bloody lot of them.

‘Evil, fucking horrible thing.’

‘Should fucking boil the fucking thing and eat it.’

And Skip, with his thin knowing smile, saying, ‘He wants to go home. He can’t help it. He was living on his island like he’s always done, and then the sky fal s down and now he’s being sick in a cage and he’s gone mad and you want to eat him too. You probably should. He’s better off dead. Kinder.

Cruel er than what we do to the whales, this is.’

‘Probably taste revolting,’ Tim said. ‘
I
wouldn’t touch it.’

‘Might be poisonous,’ said Bil Stock. ‘You get poisonous toads, don’t you? Snakes? I mean, look at its tongue. Nasty thing.’

The dragon was bad luck. Some of us believed it as truth, some as a dream nudge, a kick in the brain. Dread joined the darkness and it had those dark beady eyes surrounded by white circles. I think of Skip now and I’m not sure how true my memories are. It was a long time ago. I remember him as a power in the boat, a round smiling face with a dark cap of hair, scrawnily meek and narrow eyed, never at ful ease, always watchful. But now I think perhaps to others he was nothing, hardly noticed. But he it was that set it off, him and his nasty little pictures of cloven-footed demons, I’m sure: this little tinder of fear, which didn’t fade even when the darkness lifted, and we sailed on and on with never a sight of a whale and the days running into one another. Certain things I remember. The fo’c’s’le, Gabriel saying: ‘There’s an evil spot out there, they do say.’

Sam smiling. ‘Don’t frighten the little ones,’ he said.

‘Everybody knows about it.’

‘I don’t,’ I said.

Gabriel looked at me. ‘No? The place where things happen. Where the
Essex
was lost, and more since. A cursed spot upon the ocean.’

Everyone knows about the
Essex
, and al the others. It’s legend on the whale ships. It’s something of a joke.

Dan began to sing:

There were three men of Bristol City

Who took a boat and went to sea

And first with beef and captains’ biscuits And pickled pork they loaded she …

‘I knew a man knew Owen Coffin as a lad,’ said Gabriel.

‘Sailed with his father, he did. Said Owen was a nice boy, and a good sailor like his dad.’

There was gorging Jack and guzzling Jimmy, And the youngest he was Little Billee.

Poor Owen Coffin drew the short straw and got eaten. He wasn’t as clever as Little Bil ee. Some four or five voices joined in, but we were al sleepy and that sil y song came out like a lul aby.

Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy,

I am extremely hungaree.

To gorging Jack says guzzling Jimmy,

We’ve nothing left, us must eat we.

‘We pass close by that spot,’ said Gabriel.

You couldn’t help but lie awake at night and remember that poor doomed ship so long ago and al the poor sailors who shipped on-board unknowing. And the other sailors and ships al coming their different ways to the same thing since the first boat ever put out to sea.

I remember a long night of shooting stars, and lying in my hammock, trying out words: ‘Where a dancing girl with eyes of blue …’ No good, no good …

I wish I was back in Ratcliffe Highway,

Ratcliffe Highway across the sea,

Where a dancing girl with …

Wait.

Where a
something
girl with dancing shoes Waits or waits not for me.

With bloodred shoes and bloodred nails

Where a dancing girl with golden curls

Waits or waits not for me.

9

It was coming to the end of that timeless time after we took on the dragon. A sleepless sleep and a dreamless dream.

They’d al been drinking long on deck under the stars. Simon was playing something sweet and sad. I remember a fel ow I once heard who played on a little harp on the quay beside the tobacco dock. The music had flowed on and on, always changing like moods. Sometimes it was like walking up and down stairs. Sometimes it pealed with joy. Sometimes it turned your heart to mush. I was drunk on the masthead and was concentrating hard on staying in this bright drunk state before tipping over the edge into sleepy stupidity, unable to make much sense, but keeping my mind sharp by thinking: if each one of those lads down there was a bit of music, what would they be? Making tunes in my head for each one.