Signals of Distress
Read Signals of Distress Online
Authors: Jim Crace
Praise for
S
IGNALS OF
D
ISTRESS
‘An authenticity of tone and time is one of the hallmarks of Jim Crace’s wonderful
Signals of Distress …
this is unmistakably a
Crace novel, fresh, vibrant and unpredictable to the end’
H
UGH
M
AC
D
ONALD
,
Herald
‘Witty, descriptive, sharply observed, economic and, above all, authentic ... It is the characters who give this novel such life ... [a] marvellous
demonstration of traditional story-telling at its finest’
E
ILEEN
B
ATTERSBY
,
Irish Times
‘The novel, restless as a rip-tide, carries its shoal of definitive characters in clear view; they are quite the most memorable, momentous, and
affecting Crace has created’
T
OM
A
DAIR
,
Scotland on Sunday
‘Crace is a writer of remarkable descriptive powers … His characters spring to vivid life. The principal requisite of a first-rate novelist is
the ability to create an imaginary microcosm as convincing in every particular as the real world. This is what Crace triumphantly does’
F
RANCIS
K
ING
,
Daily Telegraph
‘Crace weaves a progressive magic into this mythic plot with masterful detail, luminous prose and haunting characterization’
Boston Daily Globe
‘Crace is a genius at making round and really human characters, and his characters make his novel superb’
Newsday
‘Grim and gripping …Jim Crace enters into his period with a depth of understanding that extends to his crude and motley gang of
characters’
D
AVID
H
UGHES
,
Mail on Sunday
‘Visual plenitude and period precision are the hallmarks of this quietly brilliant writer’
D
AVID
P
ROFUMO
,
Daily Telegraph
Books of the Year
J
IM
C
RACE
is the author of
Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine
(winner of the 1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize),
Being Dead
(winner of the 2001 National Book Critics’ Circle Award),
The Devil’s Larder,
Six,
and
The Pesthouse.
His novels have been translated into twenty-six languages. In 1999 Jim Crace was elected to the Royal Society of Literature.
A
LSO BY
J
IM
C
RACE
Continent
The Gift of Stones
Arcadia
Quarantine
Being Dead
The Devil’s Larder
Six
The Pesthouse
SIGNALS OF
DISTRESS
PICADOR
First published 1994 by Viking
First published in paperback 1995 by Penguin Books
This edition first published 2008 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2008 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-330-47380-4 in Adobe Reader format
ISBN 978-0-330-47379-8 in Adobe Digital Editions format
ISBN 978-0-330-47381-1 in Mobipocket format
Copyright © Jim Crace 1994
The right of Jim Crace to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic,
digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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This stranger’s footprints are engrav’d in frost,
But soon forgot.
The sun bedazzles. They are lost.
And he has not
Impress’d his passage on this spot
That rime’s emboss’d,
Or left enduring signs
That he has cross’d
Our Parish lines.
A
BRAHAM
H
OWPER
,
Hoc Genus Omne,
xvii
Contents
Belle
and the
Tar
B
OTH MEN
were
en voyage
and sleeping in their berths. Hard winds swept in and put their ships ashore.
The coastal steampacket,
Ha’porth of Tar
, on which Aymer Smith had his cabin, had lifted before the wind that night as if it meant to leave the water and find a firmer passage in
the clouds. It arrived at dawn off Wherrytown, hastened by the storm on its short journey along the Channel. Ten in the morning was its scheduled time of arrival. Dawn was too early for the harbour
lightermen to be at work. No one with any sense was up and out in such a wind. The night was wild and cold. A few miles down the coast from Wherrytown, the Cradle Rock, which normally would take
the efforts of two strong men before it began to seesaw on its pivot stone, teetered, fluctuated, rocked from just the muscle of the gale.
The
Tar
shipped heavy seas as it came into harbour. There was no choice but for the five-man crew to still its paddles and shut its fires. Its passage in the wind was more temperamental
– and less pontificating – than its progress under steam. The
Tar
was thrown against the harbour boom, and then against the channel buoys which marked the vessel’s road.
The wind pushed north. The tide tugged south. The
Tar
was only fifty yards from shore. Two sailors had to land a line by rowboat and secure the ship to capstans on the quay. And then they
had to coax the
Tar
to dock. Aymer lay awake. He wasn’t any use on deck. His shoulder hurt from where he’d fallen from his bunk. The muscles in his throat and stomach ached from
vomiting. His breath was foul. His temper, too. He should have travelled overland with the company carts, he decided. He should have stayed at home instead of meddling abroad. Yet now his ship had
found a haven, he sought a haven, too, in sleep, roped to the granite of the quay. His dream was kelp and some young country wife, ensnared and going down, with Aymer drowning in the girl, the girl
sucked under by the weed, the weed pitchforked like hay on tines of sea and wind.
O
TTO, TOO,
was not much use on deck. His berth, at orlop level on the
Belle of Wilmington
, was not secured. But Otto was. He was the ship’s
goat by night, its galley donkey during day. His ankle was held by a light chain, six feet in length and fastened to a timber rib. Shipmaster Comstock considered it a safety chain. Men far from
home are boldened by the dark, he said. His African might settle scores at night, if he were left untethered. He might do damage to himself or to the
Belle
or to the crew or to the galley
rations and the grog. He might cause mischief amongst the cargo of four hundred cattle which Shipmaster Comstock had taken aboard in Montreal and whose quarters he meant to fill on the return with
emigrants to Canada, if he survived the storm. Wherrytown, the first port of call, could only be a few miles down the coast.
Without a porthole or any light, Otto experienced a partial storm. It wasn’t wet for him. He couldn’t see the waves slap up against the timber. Or feel the wind. His cabin was a
tombola. What wasn’t fixed – the stool, the water jug, the palliasse, the black man’s boots, the bed – fell across the cabin. Otto fell as well. The chain cut into his
ankle. But then he caught hold of the chain and pulled himself tight up against the timbers of the
Belle
so that, indeed, the chain did become a safety chain. He made a buffer from the
palliasse so that the cabin’s sliding furniture, the unsecured wooden pallet where he slept, would not cause too much bruising to his legs. The cattle – on the orlop level, too –
were not so fortunate. They tumbled without benefit of chains. Some were concussed. Some broke their legs. They were too blind and winded to make much noise, except a tuneless carpentry as hoof and
horn hit wood. Three cows at least had heart attacks. Another choked on its swallowed tongue. The bulkhead separating Otto from twenty of the cows could not withstand the buffeting of so much beef.
It splintered. Then it fell apart. Two animals broke through the boards into Otto’s berth and slid across the planking on their sides. They had no time to find their feet. The
Belle
made reckless angles in the gale. One cow fell against the palliasse and kicked to right itself. A hoof struck Otto on the ear. His head bounced off the wood. He fell six feet and swung like a
carcass on a butcher’s chain. The sea returned him to his berth, then dropped him on the chain with every ridge and trough of water. His swollen face and ear took splinters from the deck. The
anklet etched new wounds. He was unconscious. He didn’t feel the pain.
T
HE CAPTAIN
did his best, according to the book. The foresail on the
Belle
was lowered, the mainsail double reefed. But still the wind at its
stern hurried the boat bitingly forward towards the darkness of the shore. The fore and mizzen topmasts, with spars and rigging too, fell away into the sea. Part of the bulwarks went. And then the
mainsail, taking off into the night like some great canvas albatross. Everything was swept off deck by long black hills of water, thirty, forty feet in height. The hands on board – at least
those six of seventeen who weren’t sick, and who had managed to hold on by their eyelids to the masts and rigging of the
Belle
– now waited for the lull following every set of
seven waves and sent the anchors down. But the anchors slipped. The
Belle
heeled landwards. It went in two hundred yards, found some upright purchase on a sandy bar, and stuck. The crew,
excepting Otto, took to what rigging had survived. They flew their signals of distress, though it would not take a flag when it was light to signify to those on land that the
Belle
was
almost lost. Comstock fired the ship’s double-barrelled cannon. He prayed the wind would take the sound into the bedrooms on the coast and that the people thereabouts had sympathy – and
rescue boats.
Nobody came that night. But it wasn’t long before the waves and wind abated, and a teasing, ruddy dawn thinned and thickened through the mist. The
Belle
was eighty yards offshore.
The sea was still ill-tempered. Between the sandbar and a beach, however, the water was calmer. They checked the
Belle
’s four longboats. Two were lost and two were smashed. Would
someone swim ashore? There were no volunteers. They were too tired, and fearful. The tide had turned and out-haul waves were rocking the
Belle
from the landward side. No human swimmer could
achieve the shore in seas like that. But Captain Comstock put the ship’s bitch, Whip, in the water with an ensign tied on to her collar, the red on white of I Need Help. They wouldn’t
let her climb back on board. At last, with the good sense and resignation of a dog, Whip headed for the beach. The cattle that had survived the night were not far behind. Comstock opened up the
orlop hatches and drove them into the sea. He feared their frenzied restlessness would further destabilize the
Belle
. Many didn’t make the shore. The ones with broken limbs or those
too deeply shocked did not survive the swim. Others had no compass sense and headed off for Quebec. But three hundred cattle – maybe more – got to land that day and set to work on
sampling the salty foliage of the backshore as if there’d never been a storm.