Mr. Timothy: A Novel (7 page)

Buffalo gals, won't you come out tonight
?
Come out tonight
?
Come out tonight
?

Chapter 5

SHOVING OFF WITH HIS ONE GOOD HAND, Captain Gully wobbles and weaves in the trough of the boat. One foot lurches forwards, an arm rears back, but soon enough, he has found his equipoise, and his tiny figure, squarer than usual in a dreadnought pilot coat, rises and drops so serenely it seems to have absorbed the river's rhythm straight into its sinews. His eyelids fold down, he takes a single long drag from his pipe, and as he pushes the smoke back through his lips, his nostrils widen to receive the latest intelligence.

--Someone's out there, Tim. We can
smell
it.

Another draught of night air. He screws the stem of the pipe into his ear canal.

--We're never wrong, you know. Not when the bones get a-gnawin'.

Now is the time, perhaps, to compliment him on his intuition, but the only gnawing I feel is in my hands. I've been rowing half an hour straight, through blankets of brown fog, past invisible wharves, under drooling, frost-stained bridges, rowing north and south and east depending on how the river crooks, rowing with the tide, against the tide (one is hard pressed sometimes to tell the difference), in full view and beyond the reach of gaslight, rowing where the only illumination is the moon. Rowing all the way to Gravesend, for all I know--isn't there a lick of salt water in the air?--but more likely Wapping, yes, very likely Wapping, if those are the old stairs I see up to the left. Difficult to say. The fog throws one back into a geography of the mind. From reading my maps, I could say that the Docks lie just to the north. I could say there are hundreds of ships laying by, thousands of slumbering sailors, goods and wares from every continent. But for now, all I can say for sure is that it's me and the captain and the amber light of a lantern. And the water, always the water, slurring and lapping against the keel.

And perhaps because we are so functionally alone, Captain Gully has chosen this moment to turn voluble.

--Off to starboard, Tim! It's bloody Rotherhithe, ain't it? Can you believe the luck? Just yesterday, the papers was saying as how a stoker in Jamaica Road had gone missing, an' here we are, Tim: bloody Rotherhithe! We find this sod, it'll fetch us five and six just from the inquest money, never mind the pockets.

So absorbed am I in my work that I tend to forget about the medium-sized trawling net that drags beneath us. Not for the customary aquatic harvests, no. Captain Gully and I are fishers of men, and I get half the take.

--It's enough rowing, lad. Reckon the tide'll take it for now.

The oars drop from my hands and rattle in their locks, and as I loosen my shoulders, a cramp seizes me round the small of the back. I have to bend forward again, all the way over, just to unclench, and the unplanned movement stirs new protests in new regions. Every muscle in my body is husbanding its own tenacious flame, but on a night such as this, any warmth is welcome. Bitter chill it is, as the poet says: slashing lines of sleet, stinging pellets of frozen rain. A scarifying wind from the southeast, and the moon winking in and out of view in the blackness, and no other light save for a small fire in another boat fifty yards off. A purlman's boat, I'd wager, carrying malt kegs to some famished pub in Limehouse. As it wafts downriver, it bleeds into the fog, until there's nothing left but a single levitating light.

--Cold, Tim?

--Just a bit, Captain.

--Let's us have a nip, then.

I think this must be why I row so hard. So that I may have the satisfaction of seeing Captain Gully take the box-end wrench that has replaced his left hand, twist it round the cap of a metal flask, and then, clamping on to the flask as gingerly as a Belgravia hostess, pour a jigger of brandy into a small pewter cup. I never tire of it. I remember asking him once--this would have been when we first met--why he'd been rigged out with a wrench instead of a proper hook.

--'Twas the only thing in reach, Tim. Hundred knots off Barbados, we got ourselves snarled up in some rigging. Freakish business, lopped the hand right off us. Ship's surgeon shook his head, said, Gully, you has your choice. You can waits till we reach land, or you can make do with what's to hand. Why, sir, we said, you calls that a choice? Give us a lick of rum, fit us out with the nearest implement, and have done with it, we said.

Whatever Gully may have lost in menace, he has made up for in rather astonishing dexterity. I have seen that wrench of his toss an anchor, lower a jib, thread mooring ropes around a pier, even uncork a rather musty bottle of Madeira. And now, under the generative influence of brandy, that same appendage is very deftly turning the winch that lowers the trawling net. One might think his right hand would do just as well for such tasks, but as Gully is always the first to point out--and with great forbearance, considering how often the subject comes up-- he has been left-handed from the day he met the midwife.

That idle right hand is now making a slow circling motion in the wind. The mouth has opened into a checkered smile, and through the gaps in his teeth, Gully's hard, uncannily piercing voice delivers its Delphic pronouncement:

--Make no mistake, Gully and Tim'll be receiving guests tonight. By God, they will. Set the table, lad, we got us company!

Kind of him to think so. To tell the truth, our partnership has not been notably successful. In three months of sporadic searching, the only bodies we've dredged up have been quadrupedal. A pair of hogs--enormous, marbled black and green, swollen with mud--not even the knacker would have taken them. An emaciated goat, staring wildly to each side. And one memorable night, a gelding, so heavy it actually tipped us over. I remember the razor slash of panic as I flew from the boat. My hands scrabbled for purchase and came back with nothing but air and water, and my eyes burned shut, and I might well have sunk like a boulder if the net hadn't caught me round the wrist. The river that night was so cold I quickly lost all sensation below the chest, and suddenly, I was back in my dream, my old dream. The killing sap was rising through me, paralysing my feet and legs, wrapping me round the waist like a lover, licking my ribs into numbness....

It was Gully who, having righted the boat, thrust out one of the oars and drew me back in. I'd never seen him so put out.

--Why'n't you tell me you couldn't bloody swim?

Well, that was a different night--a different river, as Professor Heraclitus would say. Tonight, the job of evacuating London's bowels has given the water a costive restlessness, and on its grumbling belly, Captain Gully and I rock, scalded by brandy, scorched by wind.

--Little squeezed for money, are we, Tim?

At such moments, Captain Gully unfailingly finds some island on the horizon on which to fasten his gaze. Doesn't matter, of course, that there's no island, and no horizon; he's still staring for all he's worth.

--That's norm'lly when we hears from you, is all--when you're short. Not that we mind. Always glad for a spot of company, ain't we?

He pours himself another shot, and, without asking, pours me one as well.

--That uncle of yours getting tight with the purse strings again?

--Not exactly.

--Now, now, we're chums, ain't we, Tim? Blast him all you like. Defame away.

--No, it's just that he's laid down a condition. He wants to
see
me before he parts with another shilling.

--Well, damme, then! Pay the fellow a visit! What would it cost?

--Very little. Possibly nothing.

--Oh, Lor', look at you! Pride, is it? Listen to me, lad, pride is all well and good in its place, but it don't plug up the old bunghole, do it? People like yours truly, Tim, we can't afford pride, can we? You think yours truly'd be working nights if he had any puh-ride?

We, you, yours truly
--it can be wearying, honestly, this confusion of pronouns. I feel at times there must be at least three Captain Gullys, all badgering and quarrelling. The boat fairly founders under their weight.

--Tim, it's the Yuletide season, now ain't it? Why, yes, it's a time for buryin' them hatchets and beatin' the...the ploughshares into swords and reflectin' on Jesus and warn't he good to get himself all nailed up and--

--No, not yet, Captain.

--How's that? --It's only Advent. He's just getting round to being born. He hasn't had time for the rest.

At moments like this, he may perhaps wonder why he bothers using me to man the sculls. He has considerably better luck with the boys he hires off the Hungerford Pier, though they have a disconcerting habit of running off with the corpses' pocket change--a risk that is significantly reduced in my case.

Leaning back, Captain Gully sucks the last fumes of incense from his pipe. His left foot beats out a dance jig as the fingertips of his right hand trail absently in the tea-brown water. The symptoms of reverie.

--Yes, my boy, a night such as this...well, it gets a chappy to thinkin'.

--Mm.

--The way we figgers it--and correct us if we're wrong, Tim, coz Gully ain't no accountant--

--Mm.

--The way we figgers it, a few more rounds of dredgin', a few more investments comin' clear...

--Mm-hm.

--Why, we'll have saved up all we needs. Majorca bound, that's what we'll be.

It was thirty years ago that one of Gully's ships moored off that remarkable island for a week's worth of repairs. Thirty
years
, and in Gully's mind, it might as well have been yesterday, the memory is so dripping and fresh. In his mind, I think, he's already back there, dozing away the afternoons in olive groves, scrambling down ravines, climbing hulking stone towers older than man....

--Sun all the bloody day long, Tim. Nary a scrap of fog nor frost. People runnin' 'bout in their naked God-given
feet
, Tim. And the women! Gully ain't never seen such a display of pull-chritude in his livelong days. Holds your eye, they do, holds it so long you're ablush. Not ashamed to be
women
, you see. Lor', did we ever tells you about that gal, plays gee-tar with her ankles? We did? Thousand pardons. Gully's an old bird, keeps flyin' back to the same nest....

A fresh wind drives up from the south, but the tide draws us eastward. The water slaps and kisses our boat; the cold air scratches our knuckles. Gully's wrench traces the outline of a woman's leg.

--You'll come, Tim. You'll see. Changes a man forever.

Sweet old buzzard: can't bear to conclude a reverie without including me in it. And why not Majorca? I sometimes ask myself. Why not? I've never been out of England, rarely even set foot outside of London. A brief rainy sojourn in Brighton, that hardly counts, and when I was still quite young, an expensive week of hydrotherapy at Bath, subsidised by Uncle N. Six glasses of Pump Room water a day, and many hours in the Cross Bath, cooed over by yeastythighed matrons. It was fall, and the sun had turned the soft limestone walls to butter, and the water made my skin tingle in a most pleasant fashion, and I remember remarking that this water had first rained down from the skies a thousand years ago and was only now filtering up through the earth's crust, and how remarkable to think it might be carrying messages from the Romans who had built this place. And that was when the urge to travel first seized me--an urge that has yet to let go of me, though I've done nothing,
nothing
, to indulge it.

Why not Majorca?

--We'll gets there by Holy Week, Tim. That's the time. The whole place a-rippin' and arantin', and such cos
tooms
. Colours such as you never knew existed, colours God went 'n' forgot He made, that's what they say.

Here is one good thing about reveries: they always leave you a little warmer than they found you. Or perhaps it's the brandy, perhaps that's why the palsy is draining from my limbs. I find I can lie back in the boat now, with my legs thrust out, my hands cradling my head, a pose almost as indolent as Gully's. And even though the fog has sealed off the sky--not even the moon can break through now--I can imagine a sky in its place. See the stars, even.

And then, all round us, the gush and plash of water are stilled. And in the splinter of silence that ensues, I see Gully's good hand instinctively wrap itself around the winch, and I start to brace myself, too, but the boat is already bucking, lurching back and rolling me to the side and tossing Gully to his knees. And then it lurches once more, and once more, and each time we're thrown about the flat bottom of the boat like matches in a phosphorus box, and a vagrant thought forms in my head:
an earthquake
...
in the middle of the water
....

Gully is sprawled on his belly now, but his face has the ecstatic smile one associates with martyrs. And as soon as the boat has rocked to a stop, he is up on his feet, shaking his clenched fist and howling to the sky.

--Ohh, we knowed it! We
knowed
it!

Breathing in short, greedy rasps, he crouches over the winch and then, after a moment of ceremonial silence, sets to cranking. But after about a dozen turns, the resistance on the other end grows so strong it threatens to snap the wrench clean off his arm.

--Well, don't just a-lay there gogglin', lad. Give us a hand!

Even with two of us cranking, it's heavy going. The boat is listing sharply to port, and we have to throw our bodies all the way to starboard just to keep it from tipping. I grit my teeth against the burn in my shoulders, and the winch groans and screeches and drives needles into my blistered fingers, and I think it must be a giant we're hauling to the surface.

When I look over the edge of the boat, I can see, rising through the brown water, the first inklings of net, no longer limp but taut with intent. And as the winch draws it higher and higher, I understand why it has cost us so much labour: stones. Stones and river sediment and dead fish, packed together in a great black bale, dense and loamy and dripping something like whale oil.