Jamrach's Menagerie (18 page)

Dragonish people? There was a volcano looming like a living giant across the bay as we drew near Pulau Lomblen, and another watched over us when we talked to the whale men on the far side of the island, where the children left their games and ran past the boats lined up along the curving beach, to see the captain and the mates and Dan sitting in a circle with their loin-clothed fathers. And Tim and me too, honoured assistants of the big hunter. Even the captain was practical y kowtowing to Dan by then, which was why we were on the beach and not sitting down to a good feed in the island’s capital, where there was a Dominican church, and a kind of inn, and you could buy scrimshaw and get drunk and watch the pearl fishers returning in their boats. Sweat ran down my sides. Pretty faces, black eyes, the women, naked-breasted, lingering on the wooden platforms of their little straw-roofed stilt houses. One I wil never forget came down and gave us milk out of a big green coconut shel , a girl of about twelve whose breasts were buds, whose hands were a child’s with smal pink pearls for nails. She stood waiting for the empty shel , holding my eyes for those few moments in calm contemplation. Her hair fel down straight on either side of her face and over her shoulders, thick and wiry to her waist. The wispy brows above her sleepy eyes were delicate smoky plumes, high gabled, upturned. Her nose was large and lovely, her lips overblown. I fel in love with her at once.

Yes, yes, I wil be a whale man here, I thought, take out the boats and bring back glory. Return to her at night. The world is ful of wonder. And smel no more the herb man’s bower on Rosemary Lane and see no more the peeling posters plastered on the wal s outside Paddy’s Goose.

Wonderful that Dan could talk to these people. Only he could, in whatever language it was he used, God knows I heard English and Portuguese, even Latin in that jumble, al mixed in with the native lingo. But they seemed to understand, and flung the talk back and forth and around.

‘Oh Lord,’ said Sam, ‘give us a good day tomorrow.’

We stood with heads bowed, hands together like obedient children.

‘Oh Lord, thank you for good weather.’

‘Amen,’ we mumbled.

Then we had the Lord’s Prayer – ‘… deliver us from evil

…’ – hanging our heads and thinking about cannibals and swamps and monsters awaiting us tomorrow. Bil y had never shut up since we’d left Pulau Lomblen. You’d never get him on shore round these parts in a mil ion years, he said, and Joe Harper agreed. There were tribes on these islands that thought no more of eating a person than they did of a chicken or a fish, they said, and when Tim said Dan knew his stuff and wouldn’t see us wrong, they asked how did
he
know? Did Dan know every single island? Did he? And if there was supposed to be some dragon thing that no one had ever even seen on this particular one, it was going to be a wild island, wasn’t it? One no one knew about. You could have anything on an island like that.

To look into the eyes of a cannibal. I turned away from the thought, but a fear crept in and peered over my shoulder.

‘Was cannibals once,’ Gabriel said, ‘but no more, not hereabouts. Not til you get to the Southern Sea.’

‘Aha!’ said Bil . ‘See! If there was once, then there stil is.

They don’t
change
. It’s in their nature.’

‘Like dogs, you mean,’ said John Copper, ‘can go on nice and sweet for years then suddenly …’ baring his teeth.

‘That’s exactly it,’ said Bil ,

Gabriel, his long legs hanging naked over the edge of his bunk, the brown skin yel ow where he kept scratching his shins. His gaze sliding sideways and his big lower lip hanging loose, pink inside. ‘I saw a terrible thing once that made me think,’ he said. ‘I saw a snake eat a dog. A smal dog, though whether it was a pup or not I couldn’t say. It swal owed the poor thing whole, but it took a long time and the head was the last to go. And the poor thing was crying out at first, but by the end it had given al that up and it was like someone who cries silently.’

We were al quiet. He looked around, big-eyed.

‘You know, when someone is crying but not making any sound. Shaking with it, and its eyes closed tight and its mouth drawn back. That poor dog has stayed with me.’

Another silence.

‘Why didn’t you stop it?’ John Copper sounded angry.

‘John,’ Gabriel said, ‘why do you think? For fear of the snake. It was a monster. And it held the poor dog in its coils to keep it, what could we do?’

‘Where was this?’ asked Tim.

Gabriel thought for a moment. ‘On an island. Not here. Out in the Southern Sea.’

The Southern Sea was beginning to sound to me like a very bad place.

‘You could have stopped it,’ John persisted, ‘you could have done something.’

Gabriel shook his head. ‘No. There were three of us, you see, and one was our captain, Lovelace, and he told us not to. You didn’t go against Lovelace.’

‘If I ever meet Captain Lovelace,’ said John, ‘I’l kick his face off for him.’

‘How long did it take?’ I asked.

‘Too long.’

‘How long?’

‘Oh, much too long, little Jaf.’

I hated being patronised.

‘Dogs don’t cry,’ said Bil y Stock.

‘Yes, they do,’ said Skip very quickly.

‘Took about five minutes,’ said Gabriel.

‘And you just stood there and watched it?’

‘Yes. Lovelace was very interested to see it. We al had to stay very stil and quiet. It was strange. Made us al feel strange. Stayed with me.’

John Copper started to cry. He was furious. Lay down and thumped his mattress. ‘I hate it,’ he said.

‘Hate what, son?’

‘I don’t know. Just hate it.’

We’d seen so many islands, some no bigger than a rock, others meandering along for miles with mountains rise on rise, and mangroves that seemed to walk on the water’s edge with their rooted limbs raised delicately like a lady’s tea finger. Coconut palms, blue sky, puffy clouds, pale green rocks, bald heights, lush lows, on we sailed. We went ashore on four or five. We took on bananas and big green fruits. The two Malays and Dan would talk their funny pidgin talk and off we’d go a-hunting, al of us hanging around the beaches while Dan and Tim and the Malays got al the fun, heading off with serious intent up some bird-haunted green slash in the land, with the Malays going before, examining the ground as if it bore gold. Hours later they’d emerge from the forest with maybe a wild pig or two, and once, the stil steaming quarters of a buffalo they’d skinned and butchered on the high plain.

But no dragons.

Not a single little tiny dragon even, not a sign, not a footprint on any of those wild sweeps of sand, not a glimpse of a something through the thick clusters of vegetation. No weird, unearthly cal ing in the night.

We al spoke as if the thing didn’t exist. But before I slept, sometimes I’d think about the beast and wonder why it was that I could not get it out of my mind, how it had come to hover over me with scaly wings that grew ever more devilish with every passing day. And suddenly, that night, the night before, I was very afraid. Those Malays, they knew something. They took a boat yesterday morning, and poked about on the shore and in the fringes of the forest for no more than an hour, and when they came back they were changed.

Al of us felt it, but no one said it. This was the island.

Neither big nor smal , rocky green, high mountains of harsh brush jutting the sky above jungle and weeping bays. Its seas were fast and rough, as if it didn’t want to be reached, and it terrified me. The gongs of Sumba played in my head as I lay thinking in the night; they’d been playing in my head ever since we’d left that place, their low droning somnolence sending out into the darkness long sound ribbons that scarcely vibrated but changed constantly in some shimmering way, simple as silk. The music was like a snake swal owing its tail, a lul aby that repeats and repeats, softening and sharpening your senses at the same time, like a drug. My mouth was dry with fear and my throat clenched when I swal owed, and I fel into a gloom so profound it was like a sudden nausea.

I kept thinking about that poor dog getting eaten by a snake while it was stil alive and knew what was happening. I kept seeing its silently crying mouth as it was crushed and ingested, and I thought about the god that could conceive of such an entrance into death, and felt cold and hurt and scared more than I had ever been. And when at last I fel asleep, it was into a terrible nightmare, the kind that wakes you in a pounding-heart sweat and leaves you shaken out and horrified by the contents of your head. There was a big tank ful of blood in a dark attic room, parts of bodies moving about in it, swimming around each other like eels; and there, right in the middle of it was a man’s face, ful of horror – oh, the horror, it’s what woke me – a real, whole man desperately trying to swim out but with no chance at al . An arm came up out of the gore and a spread hand, coated in thick clots, pushed his face down under, and I woke in the creaking fo’c’s’le and wasn’t sure if I’d screamed or not. But no, it seemed I hadn’t.

I was hot. This filthy heat going on and on. God, I was shaking. Nothing had scared me this much since I got stuck in the dark in Jamrach’s shop when Tim locked me in. There he lay across from me, breathing the sweet sleep of unconcern. Bastard, doing that to me. A two-edged blade, our Tim. You should have seen him since he’d been going off al cocky with Dan and the Malays, coming back with feathers stuck behind his ears and a band round his head.

Beautiful, he was. Brown as a native with his eyes bright baby blue and clear, and his hair al goldy-white, stalking back from the jungle like a dirty sweaty Apol o, buffalo blood under his nails, a head tal er now than Dan, sage old simian by whose side he walked. Doesn’t say much.

Why should he be sleeping so sweetly there and me awake? He needed his sleep of course, with what he had to do.

‘Tim,’ I whispered.

‘What?’ he replied at once. He wasn’t asleep.

‘Are you awake?’

‘No.’

‘I had a horrible dream.’

‘Never mind, Jaf,’ he said, ‘it’s only a dream. Only in your head.’

I thought about this for a moment. It gave me an invaded feeling. ‘How did something like that get in my head?’ I asked, as if it was an earwig that had crawled into my ear.

‘Like what?’

We were whispering so as not to wake the others snoring softly around us.

‘I don’t think I want to talk about it just now,’ I replied after a moment. ‘In the night and al . Tomorrow maybe.’

‘Suit yourself.’ He yawned mightily.

‘
Some
dreams …’ I said after another moment.

‘I know.’

We drifted separately.

‘I’m scared, Tim,’ I said.

A pause. He knew I didn’t mean just the dream.

‘So am I,’ he said, and reached out and squeezed my shoulder briefly. ‘Sil y old Jaf.’ He gave me a smal push.

‘Do you ever think of home?’ I asked.

He thought. ‘Of course I do.’

‘You don’t seem to. You never mention it.’

‘Wel , neither do you.’

‘S’pose not.’

A longer pause, then, ‘Everyone thinks of home,’ he said,

‘but it doesn’t do to be rambling on about it al the time.’

‘Like Dan.’

It was true. Dan in his cups, sentimental, cloudy eyed, toasting Alice, recal ing the first smiles of his last born.

‘True. But that’s Dan.’

‘If he’s so wild about home and hearth,’ I wondered, ‘why’s he fol ow a trade like this?’

Tim snorted softly. ‘She wouldn’t seem as sweet perhaps if he was with her al the time.’

‘Remember sarsaparil a?’ I said. ‘From the herb man?’

‘Ah! What would I give for a lovely cold cup of sarsaparil a!

Remember the smel .’

So clear, a lattice of herbs above the herb man’s stal , rosemary, camomile, milky feverfew.

‘Saturday night at Spoony’s,’ Tim said.

Push through a swing door into clouds of smoke and laughter, cut some hard and smoke it with a bottle of wine til your head gets tipsy and you jaunt down the narrow passage in the dim gaslight, and duck under the chintz into the dancing place al a-thunder with feet. Girls with ruby lips and bouncing bubs, merchant sailors, caps awry. The piper with his wild elbows, steel heels a-flying. A gold watch hangs askew above the mantel.

‘Yeah,’ said Tim, ‘home sweet home. You stil scared?’

‘Yes.’

‘S’al right,’ he said. ‘Here, give us your hand.’

I held mine out and he took it. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘when I go home I’l be the man of the family.’

After that there was no more talking. I thought about Ishbel and her mother in that house together, and wondered how they were managing. She’d hate it. Her mother drove her mad. I suppose they wouldn’t miss the old man so much, those mermaids never brought in much, but they’d be glad when Tim was back. I could see her, sitting by the fire gnawing moodily at her terrible nails. What was she doing?

Someone would have her, good-looking girl like that. Out she’d be, with some beau, some sailor. I wouldn’t think about it.

Tim’s hand slid out of mine when he fel asleep. As for me, I got not a wink til the seventh bel and by that time it was hardly worth it.

We rowed in through house-high rocks covered in barbarous plants like halted green explosions. A river ran down from a high forested ravine, skirting one edge of a sheltered beach, horseshoe-shaped, fringed with creamy-blossomed trees and split about the other edge by a long spur of dark pink rock. Beyond, upland and inland, tier on tier, slender shock-headed palms leaned elegantly one way, as if about to pul themselves up from the earth and set off on some sweeping migration. On either side of the bay, tal crags rose up.