Jamrach's Menagerie (31 page)

‘Dead,’ he said.

It didn’t mean anything. We just lol ed there a while with Yan lying dead, then Simon said, ‘So what now?’

The captain sighed.

‘We can use his belt,’ Wilson Pride said. ‘Come in useful.’

Another long silence.

‘The custom of the sea,’ said Simon expressionlessly.

‘No.’ That was Gabriel.

‘Supposing,’ Tim said, ‘we could—’

‘No,’ said Gabriel.

‘I don’t mean—’

‘No.’

‘I mean bait. Bait for sharks, then we could catch—’

‘No.’

‘What sharks?’ said Skip.

It was true, the waters were empty.

‘We could …’

The captain stirred himself. ‘Let’s prepare him for the sea,’ he said gruffly.

So Simon and Wilson took his belt for boiling up tomorrow and sewed him up in his clothes like we sewed up Mr Rainey, and we buried him in the sea. We’d miss Yan, but there was no spare water for tears and al of us were blank.

None of us had any idea what kind of a service you should say for his oriental soul. No one knew how they did things in his country. So it was just a bit of a mumble from the captain again, and the bowing of heads and the closing of eyes, and I fel half asleep and scarcely noticed as they slid him into the sea. That night when prayers came, it was: ‘Oh Lord, we are ten souls afloat …’ and I nearly laughed. We are twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight souls afloat …

At some stage this grisly countdown must stop.

Dag went back over their side so we were five apiece again.

John Copper was coming down bad now, he kept getting the runs, and Gabriel wasn’t looking too good. A light breeze blew up two or three days down the line, cheering us al up.

Simon took up his fiddle and scratched away for a while, then we al started singing. Not that we real y could sing, not that the fiddle could do more than croak these days, but we did our best. It turned into something, a great wake perhaps, a joyful wake. We were bobbing along together on a moonlit ocean and the world was beautiful. Tim and I held hands and sang as we could. Nothing like a song to bind the world together and bring on the best sort of tears. We sang, and Dan growled along with us, and so did Dag, in a voice stil surprisingly pure. Gabriel laid his head against the pil ow of a sucked leather oar and his eyes stared bright with weeping. We sang ‘Oh, say was you ever in Rio Grande’, and ‘Reuben Ranzo’ and ‘Round The Corner Sal y’, and when our voices ran out we hummed on into the darkness of silence. Tim held onto my arm as he slept, gripping so hard it hurt. His mouth fel open and his head tilted back. He made me think of home. Me and him in the yard mucking about, insulting each other. Cold in the early morning, a grumble in the bel y. Clumps of hair fal ing out. No, that’s now. I’m glad Ma can’t see this. She’d hate it, poor old Ma. She’d cry.

What could I do about it? It was too big, it fil ed me up. So I put her away, not too far, not so I couldn’t cal her back any time I wanted. I went to Ishbel instead. The last I saw was cloud coming over, directly above, blackness coming over.

Drifting black sleep, soft as cloud, warm in my bed boasting at the rain. I opened my eyes in darkness so complete it was like being blind. Some gigantic thing was beating the ocean out there, not far away, a great plunging and cascading and thrashing. Tim’s hand was stil on my arm, clutching. A voice chanted ‘please God please God please God please God’

endlessly.

‘Tim,’ I said, ‘what is it?’

An arm came round me. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Lie stil ,’ Dan said, ‘it’l go by.’

It sounded like mountains crashing into the sea. Not like a whale. Not anything I knew. Some monster come up from the deep, the dark deep underlying, some fearful malicious
thing
. It’s true there are places of horror on the earth, fal s with no end, cracks that open and breathe forth hel . It’s true there are bad spots, sounds of crying above the waves, wild winds yel ing with the voices of drowned souls. The crew of the
Essex
stil sail these seas. I started snivel ing. It was big and near, whatever it was, and the wash from its commotion was slapping the side of the boat.

‘It’s al right,’ Tim said, ‘it’s going away.’

‘Please God please God please God please please …’

Whose voice?

A great sucking of the sea took the creature down. A light flickered far away, the captain’s boat.

‘It’s gone,’ said Dan.

12

After that there was no more sense. What remained was brighter and real er.

The sea changed constantly. I could focus and unfocus at wil , soften it here, sharpen it there, make it slide and swoop and shift. For days I drifted like this. Once I heard, faintly, a girl’s voice singing far away. The sky? The sea? I don’t know. It was sad and soft, and you couldn’t hear it and not cry. Who she was I don’t know. Love lost. Impossibly gone. I could have slipped over the side, swum to her, if I’d not been a weakling. She sang through the sound of the sea and the wind al morning, fel silent at noon. After which a shark, wonderful, came swimming between the boats, out of reach.

Two sharks! Sharp black fins, cutting the sea in lines. Food.

Us to them, them to us. We should have kept Yan for bait. It wouldn’t mean anything to him now, would it? I saw Yan’s face as I last saw him, the wide-parted lips, the look of a shrunken head beginning, because of the way his lips had retreated from his long teeth. His gums were white, like bone. The black fins accompanied us, stirring the sea al day, circling, approaching, retreating. Wilson Pride was getting sick now, and Dag. Poor old John was the worst though, pul ing himself up, talking nonsense, fal ing down again.

He’ll be next.

Gabriel gave me a prod. My watch. Dragged. Dizzy.

Stood on Skip’s foot. ‘Fuck you to hel !’ he snarled.

‘Fuck you too!’

He kicked out with his bare foot but missed.

My watch.

I forgot why I was there. My eyes were very old by now, slitted, able to look into the brightness. I felt like a fly on a ceiling. As if I was upside down and the sky was under and the sea was up, and there was no difference between the two, and no beginning or end to each. I wasn’t troubled, not then, not real y, though I was starting to quiver, the smal hairs pricking up al over my arms and the back of my neck. I couldn’t say I was troubled, no such thing, too much for that, what was coming was bigger, for there
wa s
something invisible rising, resounding like the feeling in the air before lightning, bigger than the sea and sky and covering everything. There was a smal , thin sound in the air, a living tone that came closer, moved palpably in my head, then flew far up and diffused, as if a crowd of children babbled beyond the sky.

‘But true,’ said Skip, ‘there is something out there. You can hear it too.’

His breath stank.

Hearing isn’t quite the right word.

But, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can.’ I was feeling faint. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

He smiled mysteriously.

‘You don’t know any more than I know,’ I said.

‘Did I say I did?’

‘I don’t know. I thought you did.’

‘I do know some things.’

He crouched by me, hugging his legs. His breeches were ragged and ripped and both his knees poked through, sharp and bony. As he spoke he picked cruel y at a hanging scab on the right one, sucking in breath through his teeth with a hiss. ‘It’s wild,’ he said. ‘Very, very wild, Jaf, very, very wild indeed.’

The sound was a hum now, changing, scarcely, slightly, al the time. Blood burst up out of Skip’s knee, a shiny red bubble. He licked it.

‘And very, very old.’

More blood came, a sticky ooze. It smel ed like liver, like kidneys sliced ready for the pan.

‘Old like mil ions and mil ions of years, and it walks on the tips of its hooves.’

My dream, the dragon walking on tiptoe on the sea.

‘If it comes,’ he said, ‘try not to look. Some things you shouldn’t see.’

‘I’m scared,’ I said.

He looked at me very closely. I started to cry because I was too scared and couldn’t think anything straight through any more. He sucked his knee.

‘I’m dizzy,’ I said.

He went on sucking his knee, and I started drooling as wel as crying.

‘Dan,’ Skip said, ‘Jaf’s not wel , he shouldn’t be on watch.’

Blood. Taste. That’s a good thing to do. Better than leather. A tiny fil ing. If I pul at the raw bits in this elbow crack, I can make it bleed, and the hurt’s nothing. But that’s hard to get to. If this one here on the back of my wrist gets bigger. I don’t care about the salt and sting and lurch of fear, al I want is food, there never was anything else, nothing else at al .

‘It’s al right, Jaf,’ Dan said.

‘Let him lie down.’ Tim’s voice.

I fel asleep. When I woke up it was cooler and I felt wel enough to sit up. The two boats were together, absolutely stil . I heard voices.

‘What’s he saying?’

‘Fucked if I know.’

‘Doesn’t even sound like English.’

‘Portuguese?’

‘
Obrigado, obrigado, três senhora, tres, por favor …
’

In Horta, on the beach, the old beggar women holding out their hands.

‘He’s gone,’ said the captain.

John Copper.

Dan put his face in his hand. The sun glimmered red on the water. We bobbed listlessly. Here we are – how many? –

surely not – how many? – close your eyes and here we al are back again, Bil y Stock and Joe Harper and Henry Cash and al , and nothing ever happened, it didn’t, you can go back there, it’s a strain and it takes every stretch you’ve got, but it surely is real and you can go back there.

‘What now?’ asked Dag, his eyes al a-goggle in the weird, jutting thing his face had become. But no one answered and no one knew.

The captain and Wilson Pride butchered him. I saw nothing of it. They rowed a little way away, and I lay with my head below the level of the gunwale and heard the sounds of severing and hacking, the trickle of liquid, the smothered grunts of effort.

Tim’s breath, stale and rich, came on my eyes. ‘It’s al right, Jaf,’ he said, ‘it’s al right, he’s not there any more, he’s nowhere near, he’s al right.’

Behind me I heard the breathing of Gabriel, catching, halting.

I opened my eyes. Tim’s face. Smiling. He spoke. Egg-white stretched between his lips. ‘Not long now,’ he said.

Running water.

My mouth burning and prickling, my throat closing.

‘I
can’t
,’ said Gabriel harshly.

‘You can,’ said Dan.

They came near, we were rocked by their approach. Skip sniffed and gulped.

‘They lit a fire,’ murmured Dan.

‘It’s al right, Jaf.’ Tim smiling.

It was going dark. Good to have smoke in the nostrils, and a smal dancing light.

He held the cup to my lip. ‘A sip,’ he said.

Thickening blood, rich.

I drank and lay back with my eyes wide open, looking up at the sudden night sky. A hot cooking smel of meat rose upon the air and an exquisite pain burst under my tongue.

The stars were low. When I lived in Bermondsey I used often to be hungry. I would walk along bankside to Southwark to smel the hot dinners roasting in the ovens of the Anchor. It’s a kind of eating, standing in the street drawing in a thickening smel of juices. The river slapping bankside in Southwark, sweet grey Southwark across another sea, across a continent, across the distance between me and the blaring stars.

‘It’s just meat,’ Dan said to Gabriel, but Gabriel shook his head. He was humming very low and deep in his throat, staring with huge eyes straight ahead. But he had to eat in the end. Who could not? He was a big man, but he’d turned into a stick. When he did eat, it was with fury and concentration and heavy breathing. Dan passed me a thick slice of charred meat, tender as thin jel y in the middle, running with pink juices. I sucked and my mouth overflowed. I was dripping, drooling, long trails pouring down the front of me as if I was a baby.

‘Need a bib,’ I said, and we laughed. Al of us dripping and drooling, our stomachs cawing and churning.

We ate our fil and the captain ordered an extra ration of water for each man. He said there was more meat for tomorrow, they were stowing it in the boxes our tack had been in and it should do wel enough for a little while. And then the lights were gone and we al lay down. I kept seeing John Copper’s face.

Having eaten wel , we slept wel , a boatload of us snoring away, and in the morning I woke with his face stil in my eyes and a snake in my bel y, coiling. Bile in my throat. Stil hungry as ever.

‘Here,’ said Dan, ‘drink.’

The sun was already high. Simon was lighting a fire with a few bits of thin stick and some tightly coiled strips of rag.

Had to cook what was left fast, he said, or it’d go off. Some already had. The captain was hovering over a pail of offal that was turning green.

‘What do you think?’ he said.

‘Chuck it over,’ said Simon.

Over it went.

‘How long can you keep that going?’ The captain nodded at the fire.

Simon made a wry face. ‘Ten minutes. Longer but …’

‘Hm?’

‘Depends how many days.’

Wilson was feeling seedy and was lying down with a cold rag on his head, his dark brown face shiny with sweat. Dag, sitting up groggily in the stern of the boat, picked constantly at his swol en eyelids. His face was as gawkily skul -like as ever, but his legs and arms had turned into fat pink hams, and were spotted here and there with angry red boils. I had boils too, big flaming things that raged – one behind my knee, one inside my thigh and the worst one on the back of my neck.