Jamrach's Menagerie (33 page)

this …’

‘You are indeed.’

‘If there’s any shooting to be done,
I
decide.’

‘Of course. I didn’t mean …’

‘You fools!’ said Gabriel with a depth of scorn. ‘What does it matter?’

No one spoke for a few minutes.

The waves were smal and even, singing like a lul aby, up and down, up and down, lul ul ul ul ul uluuu for ever and ever and …

‘You think I’m a fool!’ the captain gritted out. ‘I am not a fool!’

‘No one thinks you’re a fool,’ said Dan.

Skip screamed, a long horrible madman’s shriek that pierced my head, and the captain yel ed: ‘Shut him up, for God’s sake!’

‘Skip,’ said Dan, ‘come here.’

Then al hel broke loose, terror skipping from one to another, leaping between us, settling and enveloping us al , a suffocating cloud. I heard a whimpering very close to my ear.

Then it was al around and I was in it and of it and fal ing horribly through it, a weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

‘Enough!’ A pistol shot.

Silence.

The captain spoke. ‘We are not animals,’ he wheezed.

‘Not one more sound or the next bul et finds more than empty air.’

A few moments of staggered breathing and snuffling and sighing faded away into nothing.

‘Now,’ the captain said, ‘settle down, everyone, and go to sleep. Mr Rymer, keep that boy under control.’

‘Come here to me, Skip,’ said Dan softly, sounding very tired.

‘Have him,’ Gabriel said sulkily, ‘I can’t sleep for him.’

‘Sleep?’ said Tim. ‘You
sleep
?’

Then we were al laughing again.

Skip trod on me in the darkness.

‘Fuck you,’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ said Skip.

‘You think I’m a fool,’ the captain said tightly. ‘I am stil in command of this enterprise. I must consider the welfare of us al .’

Skip flopped down somewhere. The boat quivered.

‘For God’s sake, sleep,’ said Dan.

The silent length of night with no moon or stars. The sound of Dag’s snoring. Tim’s hand loose in mine, and me thinking about Ma.

‘Ma,’ I said.

‘Yes. Shh,’ said Dan. ‘You’l see your ma again.’

Death was close. Sitting next to me. It hurt, if the others were anything to go by. And if them, why not me? How do you get there? Death, I mean, wherever it was the wild thing dropped you: you, breath-stopped, amazed. Wil I fal there or drift? When would be the moment of knowing? What sound? What sight? The sky, dark or light? The side of the boat? Would I go hard or easy? What grief. More than anything else, what grief to leave the world.

I must have fal en asleep. Ishbel and me, same as ever, walking along the Highway. Everything clear and bright. She wore a white dress like a bal et dancer’s, and was unpainted, as if she’d just got up. Then I was in our old house in Watney Street, our room with the curtain across and old Silky and Mari-Lou snoring on the other side of it. Then back on the sea once more, the lul ul ul ul ul ul of the waves, the sound of Skip snoring. Someone was poking me.

‘We didn’t give him a send-off!’

‘What?’

Tim’s voice. ‘We didn’t give him a send-off!’ His angry claw tight on my arm. It would leave a bruise.

‘What?’

‘It’s wrong! It’s wrong!’

‘Who? What?’

‘Poor Wilson,’ he said. ‘You should always give a man a send-off.’

‘Ah!’

‘That’s us damned!’

Towards dawn someone in the other boat commenced praying in a deep bel y voice: ‘Plea-ea-ease. Plea-ease!

Pleaseplease! Plea-ea-ease oh please. Please please.

Plea-ea-ea-plea-ease! Aaah! Plea-ea-ea-ease!’

‘Shut up!’ Another voice, weary.

Dan gave a long guttural sigh. He put a hand over my ear, a great flap to keep out sound. His bel y was under my other ear going up and down, weird little creakings in it.

‘I cannot do this,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t want to die.’

‘Take no notice,’ he said. ‘Go to sleep.’

When I slept I dreamed of groaning tables and feasts of plenty, and woke adrool to see Dan with his head tilted back, storm-battered face talking to the sky. ‘Wel , wel ,’ he said, a low sing-song, ‘my sore runs in the night and ceases not, indeed it does. Oh indeedy.’ His tongue, swol en and grey like a giant tick, flipped uselessly over his lips. ‘I breathe therefore I am. Thinking doesn’t come into it.’ He sucked a little blood from his arm, a meditative look on his face.

Caught my eye and cracked a v-shaped smile. His brows had dropped and grown fierce and hairy.

‘You know you used to say, Don’t worry, I’ve been in worse than this?’ I said. ‘Wel , you can’t now, can you? Not any more. You haven’t been in worse than this, have you?’

Dan thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s true. But don’t worry.’

Dag was half sitting up, propped against the gunwale, talking in his own language, a constant mumble pierced occasional y by a throaty yel like a boy hailing his dog.

‘Look what’s happening.’ Sharp and cracked, the voice of Simon, rarely heard these days. ‘Oh no!’ He moved backwards.

The captain wrung out a filthy rag. ‘Won’t be long now,’ he murmured.

‘What is it?’

Dag was sweating blood. His jutty face and swol en neck, sun-blackened, oozed a fine rose-tinted dew.

‘Here, Simon.’

The captain handed Simon the rag and he wiped Dag’s face. The rag came away stained.

‘Give him a drink,’ the captain said, ‘wet his lips at least.’

Dag’s blue eyes opened wide.

‘God!’ cried Gabriel. ‘God! He knows! He knows!’

‘Ssh!’

They trickled water on his lips, poured it through his jaws.

His tongue shot out. ‘Mama,’ he croaked. ‘Mama …’ then a torrent of words, another burst of pink sweat on his skin, a sudden horrible awareness in his eyes.

‘It’s al right,’ said Simon, wiping away with the rag, ‘it’l be better soon.’

But Dag knew, and he gripped Simon’s wrist.

‘It’s al right,’ said Simon, ‘lie down now.’

What a day that was, the day of Dag’s dying. He wouldn’t stay down. Up and down like a jack-in-the-box. His voice came and went, sometimes silent for a whole hour at a time and you’d wonder if he’d gone, but no, then you’d hear his awful breath stil scraping at the world like claws trying to hold on. Skip was going barmy too, snivel ing sulkily like a big stupid kid, occasional y shouting about a thing that walked alongside us on the water, a hoofed thing like a goat and a man and a fish al at once. He said it grinned and was stalking us. Stil , we were al mad in our different ways, sitting there helpless, with the sea stil twinkling like eternity everywhere, with never a sail or an island or a rock or a bird even. Mid-afternoon, Dag’s voice went peculiar. Not that we’d understood anything he was saying, but there’d been a human quality at least to it, but now he turned and became like the Minotaur in the myth, bel owing like an ox being dragged to slaughter. He shat himself. Then a terrible thing happened, an image that seared itself indelibly onto my eyes and into whatever I am. He was leaning up against the gunwale and Simon had just finished wiping his face. The captain was dipping the rag in the sea. Dag’s eyes were open, looking out at the world with fixed interest, as if he’d never seen it before. Next second blood gushed out from his nose, then more, a great flood from his eyes, from his mouth, from his ears. As if al the blood of him was leaving through his face.

His head fel down on his chest and he was gone.

Whether it was the blood horror of it I don’t know, but this death disturbed me more than al the others, more than I can say. I saw that sight as you see a demon in your worst nightmare, but I didn’t wake up. I palmed my eyes and pressed them hard, feeling sick. My eyes burned with wanting to cry, but they couldn’t. There was nothing there. No spare. My bones rubbed against one another, against the boards beneath me. There was Tim’s same old hand in mine, but they were poor things now, those hands: brown spindly sticks linked. The palms ticked with nerves.

The captain said, ‘Let’s just get on with it, shal we? We know what we’re doing …’

‘It’s not fair,’ Simon said, ‘why’s it always us has to do it just because it always happens on our boat? One of them should do it for a change.’

Oh God, not me.

‘Next time,’ the captain promised.

Close your eyes but you stil must hear.

‘Dan,’ I said, ‘what’s a good way of doing yourself in?’

‘Shoot yourself,’ he replied immediately.

‘Would you give me the gun if I wanted it?’

He looked at me for a long moment. ‘Would I? I wonder? I don’t know, Jaf.’

I could smel blood, a whiff on the breeze.

Here came the cup and I drank.

‘Drink of this,’ said Dan when it was his turn, raising the cup as if it was a chalice, ‘for this is my blood, shed for thee

…’

We had days of meat, and then days of no meat, and then more days of no meat. A change stirred in the sky. The sun dimmed and a chil came whispering on the air. Clouds piled up on every side, and rain fel in a soft blue-grey shimmer far away in the east. The east: coasts of the Americas. The American sailors have a song that goes: ‘Oh, say was you ever in Rio Grande, those sweet señoritas they sure beats the band …’ Black-haired bosomy girls welcoming weary sailors to soft feather beds. The wind got up. The sky flickered. We took in the sails and the wind spun us round.

Our boats drifted far apart, and the rain came down al at once in a drenching torrent, icy cold, and it was laughable the way from cursing the bloody heat we were suddenly freezing to death and soaking wet. We lay to. It was dark suddenly, and there was baling to do and Gabriel couldn’t.

He’d spread himself out since Skip had gone back to the captain’s boat to even things up, and now could scarcely push himself up from the boards. A great shake had come over him. Every lightning flash revealed him lying in inches of cold water with twitching legs and grinding teeth. We didn’t get to sleep til late next morning when the rain abated, and as soon as I woke I saw him sitting with his eyes closed and a look of concentration on his face. He’d gone a funny olive-green colour.

‘He won’t eat his tack,’ said Tim.

‘Gabe? You’ve got to eat.’

He didn’t react.

He never ate again after that. Hardly a drop of water passed his lips either. The wind calmed from wild to merely boisterous and we drifted on, tossing up and down. He didn’t eat, but he opened his eyes and started cursing God again.

We sang ‘The Blind Man Stood on the Road and Cried’

the night Gabriel died.

The blind man stood on the road and cried, Oh, the blind man stood on the road and cried, Oh, my Lord save me,

The blind man stood on the road and cried …

Round and round like that for ever. Round and round three or four times, the wispy hoary things that were left of our voices. Gabriel was singing too, his eyes closed, serene.

He’d been good to me. For his life on shore and al before, I knew nothing, could remember nothing, whether I’d been told or not. But what a strange depth of knowing of him I had, suddenly in that moment. He stopped singing, opened his eyes and looked right at me with shining eyes. My heart broke. He held out his hand to me and I took it, but he had no grip. His hand was crisp and salted like a kipper.

‘Don’t go, Gabriel,’ I said with tears bursting out.

But he did. He just did, quietly, looking at me like that. He was there, then gone. No more Gabriel behind the glazing brown eyes.

‘Please, Gabe,’ I said.

I’d been light-headed for a long time, but somewhere here the feeling ran away, rushed up to the reaches of the sky. It was another world, brighter than the old, as if new-painted a second ago. Strange magic, spiriting away this one, that one, another, one more, one by one, pul ing them out of their bodies. I got fil ed up, fil ed right up, al of it pouring out of my eyes and down my face. There was some beauty in it too.

My shipmates. Their faces in my mind. Their voices raised in song. Their meat too, beautiful. Organ blood, thin. Clots, wonderful. Sticky, sweet and ful . They were life to me. A bucket of red and brown. I can smel it, just. My nose is salted up. I have meat, my nose is running, the salt stings and I’m crying.

I don’t know what day it was when the captain’s boat went missing. Weeks anyway. Weeks. Weeks, weeks … must’ve been, because Skip had come back to us, gabbling how he had to stay awake al the time for fear they’d cut his throat.

‘They hate me,’ he said.

Over the water, the captain’s face, haggard and sad.

Simon’s, empty, open-mouthed, burned near black.

‘Ah, come on, Skip,’ Tim said, ‘you’l be al right with us.

We’re al jol y boys here. Don’t bring your demons though.’

‘Not
my
demons. Why’s Jaf crying?’

‘Can’t think.’

It was after that, I don’t know how long.

My mind goes. Falters, flickers. Stops. Dream unfurls.

The sea changed and changed. It rained a lot of the time.

Sometimes the wind blew and we were tossed about. My sores had a life of their own, the salt sting hot and white. A rime formed about their heights. Dan talked to his wife.

‘Alice,’ he said, ‘when are you going to cut my hair?’ And:

‘Do you think we should move back to Putney, Al?’

And one morning Captain Proctor’s boat was gone.

The sea was empty. We four looked and looked and said nothing. It had been a very windy night. A great breath had blown them away.