Jamrach's Menagerie (17 page)

Proctor cal ed us al once more upon the quarterdeck and said there were Malay pirates with spears in these seas, murderers, savages. ‘Now,’ he said in the big captain voice he kept for these occasions, ‘we are truly far from our homes. These are dangerous seas.’ He glared at us as if it was somehow our fault. ‘Dangerous seas.’

‘I’m scared,’ whispered Tim in my ear.

Proctor said our normal course from here would take us straight up through the China seas. Good whale seas, the China seas. Good whaling, good sailing, al the way to the Japanese grounds. ‘However,’ he continued, ‘as was explained to you al when you made your marks, we are also bound to fulfil a certain commitment to our ship’s owner, Mr Malachi Fledge of Bristol.’

I was amazed. I’d never heard Fledge cal ed anything but Fledge before.

‘Mr Rymer. Would you say a word?’

Dan shambled forward. ‘You al know,’ he said gruffly, ‘I’m charged with finding and taking alive an animal that may or may not live on some of the islands to the east of here. You know al about this.’ He paused. ‘I never knew anyone who saw this creature but I met a man in Surabaya, who told me he’d spoken to a Lamalera whale man, who’d seen something come out of a forest on an island out from Borneo.’

A showman at heart, Dan looked down and fiddled with his pipe.

‘And there were remains,’ he said softly. ‘Two fishermen.

Kil ed by something, and eaten.’ He looked up. ‘In any case, Mr Fledge has heard these things too.’

‘These remains,’ Mr Comeragh said in a thick voice,

‘where were they found?’ His nose was so big you couldn’t help but imagine he must have twice as much snot as normal people because of the size of that conk.

‘On Rinca Island, Mr Comeragh,’ Dan said, looking at him.

‘On a beach. Rinca Island is not far from here, as you know.’

Comeragh raised his eyebrows and nodded.

‘So that’s where we go?’ Mr Rainey asked.

‘Not necessarily, Mr Rainey. Pulau Lomblen is where the man who saw it lived. We start there. To sniff the air. Then to

– wherever seems wise.’

‘We can get a boat at Pulau Lomblen,’ the Captain remarked.

‘You signed up as whale men,’ Dan went on, ‘not dragon hunters. Apart from me and my two boys, none of you wil have anything to do with the animal. If the creature exists Tim and I wil find it and drive it down to the shore, where the cage wil be waiting.’ He looked at me. ‘Jaffy wil make sure the creature goes in the cage and see that the door’s made firm as soon as it’s in.’

This was the first I’d heard of it.

‘That sounds easy,’ whispered Tim down my neck.

A big smile broke out on my face.

‘None of you wil approach the creature,’ Dan continued, very serious. A terrible urge to laugh was stealing over me.

‘You wil be equipped with drums.’

‘Drums?’ whispered Tim. I snorted.

‘And torches,’ said Dan. ‘You form lines and as soon as the creature appears you scream and shout and jump up and down, and bang whatever you can and wave your torches on al sides and drive the creature towards the cage.

Tim and I wil be right behind, driving it down the beach. You wil close in on either side til it has nowhere to go but the cage, and if at any moment there appears to be any serious danger to any man, I shoot and kil . Understood?’

There was a solemn nodding and a murmur.

‘I wil not risk a man,’ Dan said.

Captain Proctor stepped forward, smiling. ‘I think we wil need some training for this,’ he said gamely.

‘Of course.’ Dan grinned. ‘Though you’re whale men, remember. If you can hunt a whale you can hunt anything.’

‘Huh,’ said Skip.

‘What if it breathes fire?’ a voice piped up.

It was Felix Duggan, his wide eyes looking truly scared.

Everyone laughed.

‘I don’t think it wil breathe fire,’ Dan said, ‘I truly don’t. But if it does, I tel you what we do.’ He looked very serious then burst out laughing. ‘We run like hel !’

Everyone else laughed too.

‘Don’t worry,’ Dan said, ‘you’l hear us coming, pants on fire. In the boats and back to ship.’

‘What if it flies?’

That was John Copper.

We al saw it, the mighty flying dragon, vast scaly wings, streams of fire blasting al to waste before it, scorching the earth. Flying after our ship. An eye in the sky.

‘There are no credible reports that it flies,’ said Dan.

It.

Dan said: ‘We give it two weeks. Then on with the whaling with or without the beast. No one is obliged to take part in this. Anyone who real y wishes to can stay with the ship.’

‘Fairly spoken, Mr Rymer,’ said the Captain. ‘I for one look forward to the experience. If we do succeed it wil be a great thing, a great thing indeed.’

‘Chances are we won’t find anything,’ said Dan wryly.

‘Chances are we’l poke about on a few islands and come back with nothing but a pol parrot.’

Captain Proctor chuckled. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘to business.’

Business meant the Straits. We sailed on among the islands, and passed many smal boats, any one of which could have been a pirate craft for al I knew. None were. How could you ever tel ? The others, Gabriel and Sam and Yan and even John Copper just seemed to know. ‘That,’ they’d say, ‘that’s just a sampan.’ As if it was obvious. As far as I was concerned, those faces looking up, they could have al been Yan’s dad. I wouldn’t know the difference between a pirate and Yan’s dad. Then a great ship of the line loomed on the horizon, and a high mountain appeared on our larboard side. The ship passed us at a great distance, heading for the open ocean. Land closed in. The sea was fast and there were sandbanks, but we made no poor moves, and by late afternoon had passed the narrowest part of the passage and taken the eastern channel where an island divided the opening sea.

We emerged into an inner sea of islands, some no more than just rocks. The sun was setting. A thick forest of cloud lay motionless on the horizon, here and there throwing up foamy explosions of wild cumulus. Long ripples moved over the sea, and the orange rays of the sun radiated behind the clouds in the likeness of a flower spreading its petals. Then it sank, and al was red, dark blood red, and the sea black.

We awoke to a long blue coastline. For a long time we had only good sailing, and a kind of peace settled over the ship. I felt we had reached those storied places, the siren realms where mermaids sing and lotus-eaters gorge, where Sinbad the Sailor paces the deck and dreams of crystal streams and rubied caverns. I thought of islands that come and go, are found and not found again. Days and days went by, and I fel into a long delight. We took a whale now and then. For a while burnt flesh and boiling oil was thick about us, but we sailed on, out of the stench and into the wine-sweet air, a good draught of which was like apples and spices and flowers. A pod of dolphins joined us off an island of white sand and coconut palms, rode our bow wave joyful y for a mile or two, shiny backs breaching the air. They left us and took with them the time of stil ness. After them the breezes got up in a jol y, whistling kind of way, and the waves began to rise against a mountainous region to starboard, breaking hugely over miles of shimmering strand that edged a dense green jungle, whence came, faintly but definitely carried on the occasional stil nesses between gusts, the sound of drumming. Slow, thoughtful in tone, like a single voice exploring its range, the drumming was al of a one with everything else. I was afraid of the drumming – the voice of a jungle through a growing thinness in the air, announcing mist.

The dolphins cal ed the breeze cal ed the drumming cal ed the mist. That’s how it felt.

That is how it has felt so many times. As if one thing led to another like notes in a tune.

The wind dropped completely and rain came down in a torrent, sudden as an upturned bucket. Thunder grumbled on the edge of the sky, an old dog growling in its sleep. I came down from the mast. Sheet lightning flashed over the jungle.

Al the world was grey and heaving, and we battened down and rode it. For three hours or more the rain pounded, but the storm was never overhead. It was on the other side of the long land mass. When the lightning flashed it was beautiful, silver echoes on a world washed out, on mast and spar and binnacle, on the great, thrown-out cloth of the sea.

It was evening by the time the rain had progressed from mad to sane. We hove to far out in the bay of what might have been the same island or another. Wilson Pride had made a nice stew of bacon and beans with dumplings, and we ate below because of the rain. I was on larboard watch and it was stil raining when I went to bed, but when I opened my eyes in the morning the daylight stealing in through chinks in timber was hot and white. On deck al was sun-leached, not a spot of moisture remaining. Captain Proctor was in conversation with his first mate by the aft companionway. Mr Rainey seemed bothered about something. You would have thought from his increasingly florid and extreme facial appearance that they were having words, but Captain Proctor was chuckling in an affable and amused way. He said something, and Rainey turned sharply and walked away.

Gabriel said later it was about a whaleboat. We had no spares and Rainey wanted to put in somewhere and get at least one new one as soon as possible. Rainey wanted to go back to Surabaya for one, but the captain said we’d come too far and would go straight on to Pulau Lomblen, where Dan Rymer hoped to find the Lamalera whale man who’d seen a creature walking out of a forest, the one of whom his Surabayan friend had spoken. Comeragh was for going back too, but Dan Rymer had said we could get a boat in Pulau Lomblen.

We couldn’t. There were boats in Pulau Lomblen, but
we
couldn’t get one. Stil , we didn’t know that then, so on we went and were at Pulau Lomblen three days later.

7

Oh Lord, please tell Billy Stock to stop frightening the little
ones …
In my head on waking, that old black man’s voice, Sam. Sam Proffit. Coming back through time, sudden, real, a tic of the brain, time flying by, a blink – clear in my mind as if he stood in the room. Just as he stood in the low fo’c’s’le with his hands together in prayer – then – but then is now –

his eyes closed, a smal mischievous grin about his withered lips. A pious old man, the changing light rippling over him, the wal s dappled and stippled grey. Oh the beauty of it—

It was dark and I was afloat on something, it could have been the sea or waves of another kind, could have been anything. Thick black waves of sleep bearing me up. At first I thought it was
Drago
, our old
Drago
, and that I was lying at rest on the dry boards and she’d gone sailing off along the Thames making for the sea.

But she broke up a long time ago,
Drago
.
Here’
s where I live now. A voice has awoken me again with the sounds of voices on the street. There’s a high singing somewhere near, maybe in the al ey that runs between Ratcliffe Highway and Pennington Street, as drunkly beautiful as lost angels.

Who is she, this singer, siren of the cliff tops, throwing her silver voice sharp as knives through the thick black? This is where I live now and it does me wel . There are smoky rooftops over which I can look, and above them a lovely northern sky that never burns. I love these rooftops dearly, so much so I sometimes find my eyes grow moist. London –

how I dreamed of thee in the hot places. Flowers and fruit and wine and trees high, thin brown boys diving for pearls, great waves rushing in, and monkeys in the trees, long-limbed and thin of face, the fierce eyes of the big ones, the soft scared ones of their babies hanging on underneath. The blue light settling on the horizon. The colour of the edge of the world is …

… indigo.

It scintil ates …

I am sailing like Sinbad on strange eastern seas and a big star is fal ing down the dark sky, and somewhere close the sirens are singing and here is Sam Proffit saying:

‘Oh Lord, please tel Bil y Stock to stop frightening the little ones.’

That raised a snigger because Bil y was only my age, and we were nearly the youngest. Only Felix was younger than us. Bil y was ful of horrible stories about cannibals that sucked people’s brains out while they were stil alive.

Sam stands in the low fo’c’s’le, a dappled man, a great singer of hymns and sayer of prayers. And we need our prayers tonight. Tomorrow we land on this new island. This is the one, we al feel it. It’s something to do with the two Malay trackers Dan picked up on Sumba, where we heard the gongs and saw the smoke from a funeral pyre rising over the trees. We went to a vil age and drank a bitter drink, and there were birds everywhere, bright green flocks that shifted like turning wings against the deep blue sky. I lay back and watched, the brightness hurting my eyes. Birds should be free, I thought. We waited for Dan to come back from wherever he’d gone off to with his enquiries, and he came back with red teeth and two friendly silent men, one who smiled, one who didn’t. The one who smiled had blue symbols tattooed on his forehead. They sleep with us in the fo’c’s’le but we share no language. Their demeanour has grown serious since we left the last island, the ninth or tenth, I don’t know. The islands are wild. It’s what I always wanted, the world, the wild, I’m looking it in the face as hard as I can. I want to walk up the slopes of a volcano and stare down its throat. It would be like staring into animal eyes. A volcano is dragonish. Why should there not also be a dragonish beast in these parts?