Signals of Distress

by Jim Crace

  Aymer found the fish more shocking than the cow. He was used to seeing fish on plates, cooked, gormless, dressed, not tumbling like molten lead, not smelling so. He retreated up the sand. He couldn’t help. He had only one arm. They posted him to stand with Whip next to their handcart, to keep birds off. No tumbril in Robespierre’s Paris could have been as bloody or macabre, or smelled as bad. He turned his back to it and looked along the shore, where turnstones and oyster catchers were picking through the beached and draining kelp. Aymer had seen these seaweeds many times before, and knew their names in Latin: Ascophyllum nodosum, Fucus vesicolosus, Laminaria cloustini. There was a folio in the offices of Smith & Sons, with over fifty specimens pressed, labelled and isolated on smooth sheets of white paper like doilies or like fans. When they were boys, Aymer and Matthias had learned to recognize each species. ‘I suppose that now,’ thought Aymer, ‘there’ll have to be a folio with specimens of Monsieur Leblanc’s common salt.’ He knew the shapes of the weeds, perhaps. But the colours were a shock. The folio seaweeds for all their dry and flattened delicacy were only brown and black. But on the beach the living kelp was as polished and as leathery as a prince’s boot, in mustards, crimsons, purples, tans. In the shallows, where the tide was frowning white round rocks and bars, the deeper kelps and wracks spread darkly on the surface, or danced arabesques in undulating groves of weed, like spirit-women at a ball in heavy satin frocks. Aymer looked beyond the kelp, beyond the figures in the sea, beyond the Belle abandoned in the suds, into the feeble, sombre sky. There was so little daylight left, that winter afternoon.

  ‘We’ll have to go now, Ralph,’ he called.

  They left the Bowes to push their meaty handcart home alone, and set off with the dog, at a pace too fast for Aymer, towards Wherrytown. Miggy – her hands as red as two anemones – called out to them, ‘You’ve got to come again!’ Both men replied, ‘I will!’

  At first, Ralph’s shoes made rodent noises as he walked. But soon the sea drained out of them. His legs and feet were wet and cold.

  ‘We’ve done a decent job today,’ said Aymer. ‘They’ll not want for meat.’

  ‘We have,’ said Ralph, smiling to himself.

  ‘Good women, too. That is, when one considers all the deprivations in their life. The daughter, don’t you think, might make a tolerable wife for a man? She has the country virtues.’ Ralph did not reply.

  The path was level as it skirted round the bay, and soft underfoot. First there were dunes which shielded them from the cold and bloody solitudes of the seashore. Then there were salty flats with skew trees and flood-tide debris, and tracts of open, windblown heath where grasses mocked the sea with mimic waves and clapping stalks matched the distant, wet applause of tumbling pebbles in the tide. But soon they had to scramble over rocks, and Aymer, with one arm in a sling, made clumsy progress. Ralph waited on the headland for his companion to catch up. Someone had set a wooden bench across two rocks and Aymer, when he arrived, sat breathlessly on it, while Whip went rabbiting and Ralph displayed the patience of a sailor by carving ‘R.P.’ in the bench with his clasp knife. Other names were carved in it with dates: Thos. Pearson 1829; C. Stuart, Edinbgh. May ’33; Bartolli, Claudio, ROMA 1831. There were initials, too, with hearts and arrows. Aymer, motionless, was feeling cold and hungry and wearied by the ceaseless noise and wind. The inn was still two hours’ walk away. He’d allow himself a minute more of rest. He tried to make his weariness seem purposeful by identifying, for Ralph, the hornblende and the feldspar which added the white and flesh-red garnish to the granite thereabouts. He grubbed out coloured stones which enamelled the turf at his feet and rubbed them clean between his fingers. He broke free crusts of salt and mustard lichens. He murmured his familiarity with them, by naming them in Latin and in English. Ralph shook his head at his companion’s learning. ‘I don’t know names for those,’ he said. And then, ‘I do know other things …’ Ralph’s was a stranger’s ignorance. Aymer’s was a stranger’s knowledge.

  A narrow side path led down from Aymer’s bench, through boulders, to a grassy bowl, and then rose steeply to a tonsured promontory where the granite was too exposed for ferns or lichen or algae. It was a perfect paradise of rocks, much loved, in summer, by watercolourists and lizards. But in the winter, with so much grey about and so little light, the dull pinks of the exposed stone were warm and beckoning. No child could pass it by without first attempting to climb the tumbled pyramid to reach the square mass at its summit. If it was natural masonry, then it had been weathered by a geometric wind and shaped by architectural frosts. This topmost block – the shape and size of a small stone cottage – rested with solid poise on the nipple of a flat but slightly rounded rock. If anyone sat, like Aymer, on the bench and stared for long enough it could seem the block was hovering an inch above the world. It had a tarred cross on its side.

  ‘So that’s the Cradle Rock,’ Aymer said, pointing.

  ‘What is the Cradle Rock?’

  ‘A rock that moves when it is pushed. Let’s go and see. I think we can afford the time.’ Even Aymer couldn’t pass it by.

  They found a way between granite slabs marked by tarred arrows and climbed to the rounded platform where the Cradle Rock rested on its pivot. Reaching it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Aymer couldn’t find footholds. He had to accept the sailor’s hand around his wrist, and then his palm against his bottom. The Rock, they saw, was not a square on every side. Its hidden part was thinner and irregular. Ralph clambered up twelve feet or so and soon was standing on its summit, testing where the balance was. But Cradle Rock was so exactly poised that Ralph’s weight only deadened it. He couldn’t make it move. Both men searched the two sides where they could find safe footholds. At one point, on the southern face, the stone was worn away. The feet and shoulders of a thousand visitors had rubbed it bare.

  ‘Try here,’ Ralph said.

  ‘I’ll need both arms.’ Aymer shook off his sling and threw it to the ground. His shoulder didn’t hurt at all although his arm was a little stiff from its confinement in his coat. The wind picked up the sling and turned it once or twice, then took it on a seagull flight inland.

  They put their backs against the naked stone, wedged their feet and pushed. At first their task seemed hopeless. But on their third and fourth attempts they sensed the softness of the mass. They moved across a foot or two and tried once more. Again the Rock seemed to give a quarter-inch against their backs. They found a rhythm to their exertions, with Ralph, experienced at team-work on the Belle, calling out, ‘And push! Let-her-go. And push! Let-her-go.’ The quarter-inch expanded on each push, and soon the Cradle Rock made grinding sounds as it ascended and declined at its own pace. Ralph and Aymer were redundant now. They stepped back to a safer spot and watched as eighty tons dipped and rose like a child’s cradle, with a displacement at its outer edges of nine or ten inches. Ralph was laughing at the joy of it. And Aymer, too, had seldom felt such unselfish pleasure. With just their backs, and half a dozen curses from the American, and some barks from Whip, they had rocked the grandest boulder on the coast. And left it rocking.

  They were too pleased, at first, to feel the snow. But soon the Cradle Rock, its motion halting imperceptibly, was capped in white. They wanted to stay where they were until the Cradle was at peace. But the snow came driving in too thickly; soft snow, not wet. It fell inertly for a few minutes and then was taken up by a gusty wind. Both men were badly provided against such weather. They had no hats or gloves. Only Aymer’s tarpaulin coat was waterproof.

  They climbed down to the path and left the Cradle Rock to tremble in the snow, unwitnessed. Ralph was too cold to talk. Aymer was too nervous and elated to stay quiet. He asked about the seaman’s family, but couldn’t tell if Ralph had heard. He gave his solo verdict on the Bowes, on ‘rocks that rock’, on emigration, the American ‘language’, slavery, the beneficial properties of sea air, everything except the aching wetness of his knees and calves and boots. He pointed at and named the trees, the r
ocks, the fleeing birds, until there was nothing left to see or name excepting snow. Their path had disappeared. Their legs and faces nagged with cold. Their clothes and hair turned white. They couldn’t see the sea. It boiled with pilchards which would, at least, be safe until the Sabbath ended. On this God-flinching coast it was bad luck to catch or eat a Sunday fish. But then – at midnight – all the boats would put to sea for this godsend of oily flesh. It wouldn’t matter that it snowed. Snow can’t settle on the sea. They’d shoot their nets into the lanes of pilchards and pack their stomachs, lamps and purses with the catch. ‘Meat, money and light, All in one night.’ And what a night, for fishermen! Snow. Pilchards. Floating cows. The flotsam of the Belle. And twenty yards below the Cradle Rock the sea-logged, bloated body of a man. Not the African. He has his first experience of snow. But Nathaniel Rankin, the Bostonian, drowned for almost two days now, and ready for the nets.

  6. Evensong

  THE SAILORS from the Belle were bored. The Sabbath was a torment. What could they do all day, except sit round an idling fire and regret their ship had not been grounded off some other town, where there were breweries and brothels, or, at least, the liberty to work on Sundays? After breakfast they’d watched the Tar dimming out at sea. With the backing of a westerly it chased its own steam trail and then it was evaporated by the light. That was the entertainment for the day. They should have volunteered to walk with Ralph Parkiss to check the fortunes of the Belle at Dry Manston. At least there would’ve been flirting on the coast, and some amusement to be had with rocks and cattle. At least there’d have been some noise, if only gulls and wind.

  The captain wouldn’t tolerate their singing or any horseplay in the inn. His mood was murderous. George, the parlourman, whose conversation at its best was cryptic, had brought the news, ‘Your blackie’s gone back home to Africa.’ Someone, he said, had released the bolt on the tackle-room door. All that remained of Otto now was dry blood on the straw. Who should they blame but Aymer Smith, the meddler with the soap, the sugar abolitionist? George said he’d seen the man a little after dawn, down on the quay. He had Whip at his side and was talking to the sailors on the Tar. He hadn’t any trousers on. What should the captain make of that? He whistled through a window for his dog. She didn’t come.

  The captain went down to Aymer’s upstairs room with Mrs Yapp and George. The carriage bag, some clothes and books were on his bed. The man himself had disappeared in the middle of the night, Robert Norris said, embarrassed, evidently, to have slept through breakfast and to be discovered in his barely curtained bed with half a pot of urine at its foot. He and his wife – who looked a touch too flushed and ample for a Sunday – hadn’t seen or heard of Aymer Smith since then.

  ‘What does that mean, do you suppose?’ the captain asked George. ‘Not wearing any trousers? Is this a jest or your invention?’

  ‘It in’t any jest. I’d not invent such indecorum. As barelegged as a seagull, he was.’

  ‘He didn’t even settle his account,’ said Mrs Yapp. ‘Or pack his bags. Too rushed to put his trousers on! Well now …’ She laughed. She couldn’t help it. She put her arm around the captain’s waist. The poor man needed cheering up. But when she saw the temper on his face, she let him go and busied herself with the empty bed. ‘He had clean sheets and hardly dirtied them. Now, there’s a wicked waste … Who wants some soap?’ She took the few remaining bars from Aymer Smith’s belongings and offered them first to Katie Norris (‘We have some, thank you, Mrs Yapp’) and, then, to George (‘Enough! Enough!’). Alice Yapp removed the sheet from the bed, bundled Aymer Smith’s possessions – the soap included, and his books – in his bag and took them to the door. ‘We’ll see if we can fetch a shilling with these to pay his bill,’ she said, and then, by way of explanation for the profit she could make, ‘The man has gone. So’s the dog. So’s the African. And so’s the Tar. We’ve seen the last of them!’ She prodded the Norrises’ piss-pot with her toe. ‘Take care of that,’ she said to George. ‘Before there’s kick and spill.’

  The captain spent the morning at a table in the snug, placated every half an hour or so by a shot of ‘Mrs Yapp’s Fortified Tea’. (It would make her rich when she was in her sixties.) He needed fortifying, Mrs Yapp insisted. He’d been ‘stormed-up about the blackie and the Belle’. A little ‘lively tea’ would settle him and let the anger out and only cost two pennies for a pint. ‘You’re sitting stiff,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so starchy down your back. Better bend than break. There, now.’ She squeezed the tendons in his neck and shoulders until his back relaxed. ‘Anything you need from me, just ring the handbell in the parlour. Or else you’ll find me in my room.’ Was that an invitation to her room? The captain couldn’t tell. She was so brisk and democratic. But her fingers and her tea had done their job. He felt more lively now, though, thanks to Mrs Yapp’s plump generosities, he was stiff and starchy in places other than his neck. He was stormed-up in ways that no man, even agent Howells, could relieve.

  The captain had arranged for Walter Howells to visit him that afternoon. That’s why – he needed no excuse – he hadn’t gone with seaman Parkiss to Dry Manston to check on the Belle himself. For the first time in seven years of captaincy he would have to pass a full day without seeing the ship under his command. ‘No choice, no choice,’ he said aloud to himself, and tried to concentrate on his letters and his log. He did his best to calculate the dollar-damage that the storm had done. How would he pay for the repairs? What would they cost? He made a list of urgent tasks: the rounding up of cattle, the purchase of timber and rigging, the disciplining of his men who, given time and liberty, would turn feral. He wrote the names of Whip and Otto at the bottom of his list. And then the name of Aymer Smith. The three of them would be, by now, miles down coast and nothing he could do would get them back. Otto would cost a hundred dollars to replace at A. K. Ellis, the Negro Broker and Auctioneer in Wilmington. More trouble and expense! What kind of man would steal an African in such a blatant way? What kind of man would steal a little bitch like Whip?

  ‘A bloody fool, that’s who!’ was Walter Howells’s opinion when he arrived for their meeting in the late afternoon. ‘I have the man’s address. You send a bill for the slave and the dog to Hector Smith & Sons. And if he doesn’t pay, then send him something to remember you by.’

  ‘Like what, Mr Howells?’

  ‘Like someone to torch the factory. Why not?’ Why not, indeed? Now that the Smiths had no need of Walter Howells’s kelp, their place could burn for all the difference it would make to him. ‘I’d gladly torch the place myself, and him inside of it. It’s little more than common theft, to take a man, no matter all this Wilberforcey bosh.’

  ‘To steal a dog is worse,’ said Comstock, ‘because a dog cannot express itself. I’d like to get my hands around the fellow’s throat.’

  ‘Don’t take no risks yourself that you can pay for and forget about.’ Walter Howells leaned forward in his seat, and topped the captain’s drink. He pointed at the list on the table. ‘I’ll take care of all of that, if we can settle on a price and you can provide a promissory note,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the Sabbath on its way, and then tomorrow morning I’ll have them cattle rounded up. The tide is on the up. We’ll see if we can tug your ship free of the bar and put her into Wherrytown. I’ll fix up all the timber that you need, and I’ve the carpenters.’ He worked down the list with a stubby finger, until he reached the last name at the bottom. ‘And as for him. Well, now, you keep your own hands clean. I’ll see he gets a beating. There’s fellows that I know will gladly break a bone or two and only charge a sovereign. I’ll write a letter to a man I have up east. He’s in my debt and has a decent fist. He’ll sort out Aymer Smith. He’ll finish him! We’ll leave the fellow black and blue. He’ll wish he’d never come to Wherrytown. I’ll write that letter straight away, and pay the sovereign out of my own pocket to show my good intentions. What do you say? Shall we play duets?’ He put his hand in Captain Comstock’s. ‘We’re partn
ers, then?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I think we are.’

  ‘And if there’s any, what should we call ’em … ? candle-ends … ? left over when the job is done, then share and share alike is what I say, and mum’s the word.’

  Captain Comstock was too far from home to understand the half of what he heard. But this he knew for certain. No trouble and expense would be too much to get the Belle afloat again and sailing home, away from snow and joyless Wherrytown where bad luck seemed to be as common and as unrelenting as the gulls. It didn’t strike him as anything but fitting, as he now looked out beyond his saviour Howells into the lane, that dusk and snow were coming down in a chilling, felting duet of their own, while a horn warned shipping of the fog.

  ‘There’s snow and fog in these parts, Mr Howells?’

  ‘Not fog. That’s Preacher Phipps’s chapel horn. It’s evensong, and time for me to get along.’

  ‘You’re going to evensong, then?’

  ‘No, Captain Comstock, I am not. I have no business with the chapel. I’m not the prayerful kind.’

  ‘My men might benefit from getting out of doors, and singing hymns. We’ll let the Wherrytowners see our faces.’ The captain hoped a hymn or two would calm him down before his rage at Aymer Smith transferred to someone innocent. And, then, perhaps a Sabbath night with Mrs Yapp – plump and attentive in her bed – would draw the venom out of him if evensong did not.