Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

  I turned sideways and threw up all over the dusty earth floor. A great warm flurry of big dark women flew about me, clucking and soothing and babying. They took me out in the cool night air and held my head. Did I sleep awhile? Did I dream? The scent of roses was strong, I remember, roses or some other flower, something that bloomed at night. The stars were ridiculously bright as if the sky was shouting. I lay like Dan in his gutter, but no little dog came to pee on me. A soft lap cradled me instead, and I turned onto my side and slept. Later there was the room again, and a dance to clapping hands and jangling music, and Dan in there dancing with them, pipe clamped between smiling lips, eyes closed, arms above his head. Later still, a hand led me to a loft, a bed, corn husks in a linen tick that crackled when I moved, the sense of other sleeping bodies warming the low space around me, the dreaming bodies of people and a few cats, from which arose a canopy of somnolence like the faint hum from a wasps’ nest in the eaves.

  It was dawn and I was fast asleep when Dan shook me by the arm. We crept below, through the snoring room where we had caroused last night, past the sleeping snout of a black pig asprawl before the quietly ticking fire, past coiled cats and twitching dogs, and hens breast by swelling breast along a stone shelf.

  We had hogs on deck. Just walking about. Felix Duggan cursed and shooed them as he tried to sweep up. Silver ribbons ran down the cliffs. I looked back, but already the red roofs were out of sight. Seemed stupid to me, setting off just as it was obvious the weather was on the turn. The clouds were thick and massy, bruised here and there. The waves were noisy, buoyant. Not long after we lost sight of land, the fog came down.

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever see a whale?’ I asked Gabriel.

  ‘Not in this, son.’

  We were standing at the cookhouse door to get the smell of pork. Wilson Pride was feeding scraps to the dog.

  ‘I never saw it like this,’ I said. Gabriel laughed. His sea cap was pulled right down over his face. ‘This is nothing,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Hear you were sick bad last night, son.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That island stuff. You have to watch it, son. Look at me. Do I have to get drunk all the time? Not me, son. Look at me. You do like I do, son, and you won’t go far wrong.’

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever see a whale at all? Ever at all, even when the fog goes?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll see a whale all right,’ he replied confidently. ‘You’ll get sick to death of whales before this jaunt’s done; you’ll see a whale and you’ll say, “Ha, so what, whale, ha”.’ He gave an exaggerated shrug.

  ‘How many whales have you killed?’

  He shrugged again, this time more normally. ‘Hundreds.’

  ‘How old are you, Gabriel?’

  ‘Thirty-four. Thirty-five,’ he said.

  ‘Have you ever killed a whale?’ I asked Wilson Pride, who’d gone back to his counter and was pouring water over a block of hardtack so hard it could have cut a diamond.

  ‘Not me,’ he replied. Wilson always went barefoot. His feet were very large and flat, the heels startlingly pink, and he was always washing them. You’d see him soaking them on deck in a bowl of seawater.

  ‘Who told you I was sick?’ I asked Gabriel.

  ‘Tim,’ he said.

  Of course.

  The sea fooled and niggled.

  Tim never got sick. Did I say?

  After the Azores we had rough seas. I never saw the flying fish before this time, these swift, shimmering things that skim the waves, rainbows flying from their backs. And birds who never neared land, nobly spanned, fearful of eye, cruel clawed. In their shrill, crack-voiced thousands, they clouded our ship from the Azores to the Cape Verde Islands, faithful in the rain. As for whales, not a puff to be seen. The winds tried their lungs. Proctor sent Gabriel, our best helmsman, to the wheel. We stowed away the studding sails and top gallants in a torrent, and ran before the wind to the Cape Verdes.

  They were nothing like the Azores. We anchored somewhere all drenched and bleached out, with great mountains of salt rising up against a sky the colour of dishwater. South from there the wind died down, but the rain was endless and we couldn’t get our sails dry. And when the rain stopped, we sailed into a calm that kept us crawling for days, a sleepy ship of sleepy men, a month or more out of London and all of us greenhorns believing ourselves by now to be weathered old hands. We were nearing the Equator and still hadn’t seen a whale, but no one seemed to be worried about that. We met another ship, the Gallopan out of New Bedford, and so embarked upon a gam – a meeting of ships, a bit of fun – and that was my first and best gam, and went on for three or four days till I began to think that we were out here on this ocean for no other reason than to drink rum, eat Wilson Pride’s salty pork dumplings and play cards of an evening.

  At last the calm ended and we were able to go our ways. On the night before we parted company we dined on salt beef and carrots on the Gallopan’s deck, each of us with a thin slice of fresh bread instead of hardtack, just as the captains and mates got all the time. And after a good rich duff of plums and damson jam, Simon got out his fiddle, and one of the Gallopan’s men went down below and came up with a squeeze box that looked as if it had sailed the seven seas at least seven times. Everyone joined in singing all the old songs, Sam Proffit’s glassy voice ringing above all the rest, a thin silver ribbon like the silver ribbons running down the cliffs when we left Faial. It could have been a woman’s voice or an angel’s, and it drove Felix mad. ‘Grates on my bones,’ he used to say when the old man started on his Sunday hymns. Very devout, Sam was. I loved his voice. On first hearing, it was piercing and unpleasant, but it grew on you the way a bird with an irritating call does, becoming sweeter with familiarity.

  There was a big moon that night. Over on the Lysander a bright light burned in the officers’ quarters. There lay our ship, all at peace, the captain’s dog scratching itself happily on the deck. ‘Blood Red Roses’ they were singing. ‘Go down you blood red roses, go down.’ The high strange sound coming out of Sam’s worn black face was a ghostly descant to the rough voices of the others. ‘Go down you blood red roses, go down.’ John Copper had tears in his eyes. One of the Gallopan crew was singing the thread: ‘Growl you may but go you must, for if you don’t your head they’ll bust’, and we were all joining in on the chorus: ‘Go down you blood red roses, go down. Oh’ – this a great tipsy roar – ‘you pinks and posies – go down you blood red roses, go down.’

  No one but me, for I was sitting next to him, noticed when Skip slammed down his tin cup, put his arms round himself and started rocking from side to side.

  ‘What’s up?’

  Ignoring me, he got up, walked to the rail and stood gazing across at our ship. Something peculiar in him made me follow. ‘What’s up, Skip?’ I said. His eyes were wide. That was strange. Skip didn’t have wide eyes. He was staring up at her sails. ‘What?’ I looked up too and saw nothing.

  Then he looked at the black waves washing against Lysander’s side, and his throat clenched loudly.

  ‘You not well, Skip?’

  His lips were drawn back like a dog’s. ‘Can you see them?’ he said.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Snakes.’ He was shivering.

  I stared at the sea, the ordinary sea, and our ship, just as she ever was. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I wondered if I should go and tell someone.

  ‘Of course, you don’t know what I’m talking about.’ He sighed, wearily impatient. His hands were shaking on the rail. It was a beautiful night. The singing was growing melancholy and the lights swung out on the water.

  ‘Don’t go mad on us, Skip,’ I said, ‘for God’s sake.’

  He smiled. ‘It’s all right,’ shaking his head. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s just something.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He laughed, turning his head to look at me. His eyes were still too big.


  ‘Skip,’ I said, ‘are you really seeing things down there?’

  He nodded sadly, returning his gaze to the sea, once more drawing back his lips from his gums in that peculiar dog-like way.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ I told him pointlessly, and we stood for a while, both of us gazing down as if hypnotised.

  ‘Don’t worry. Look at your hands.’ I tried to prise one off the rail. ‘It’s just the sea playing tricks. It’s worse when the moon’s out. Does funny things with your eyes.’

  ‘Snakes from out of the sea,’ he said, but his hands loosened and fell down by his sides.

  ‘Listen, if you’re scared witless by a bit of moon on water,’ I said, ‘what’ll you do when we get to dragon land?’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because that’s real. I’m not scared of what’s real.’

  He turned from the rail and I saw that his eyes were narrow again. ‘They’ve gone,’ he said. ‘Gone back down into the sea.’

  Normal, or as normal as he could ever be.

  ‘But they’re not real,’ I reminded him. ‘You said it yourself.’

  ‘So?’ And he just walked away as if nothing had happened.

  I told Gabriel about this and he said, ‘There’s a word for it, Jaf. Mad. You meet a lot of mad people at sea, particularly on a whale ship. Long as he can do his job.’

  ‘True, but what if it happens while he’s out in a whaleboat? What if he’s supposed to be pulling along with everyone else and he sees something that isn’t there and starts watching that instead? I wouldn’t want to be in a boat with him. Do you think he’s all right?’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if they laid off all the mad sailors there’d be no one left to man the ships.’

  But later he gave me a nudge and said, ‘Keep an eye on him though.’

  I told Dan about it too, and he said much the same.

  So, there we were keeping an eye on Skip as we crossed the Equator. I was thinking of Ishbel. I was thinking of Ma. I was thinking how when I got home, I’d never be able to tell them, never be able to describe all this, the way it felt, the miles and miles of empty sea and never a sail and never a sight of a whale or anything, and all of us rubbing along together like we did, with the timbers groaning and the smells of oak and pine and the murkier smell of men. How to explain how safe and good the fo’c’s’le? Home with the hatch down. That’s how peaceful it was when at last, six weeks after leaving home, we encountered our first whales.

  It was Tim sighted them. God caused the great glory of the deep to appear for Tim – who else? – and Tim seized his moment joyfully.

  ‘There she blo-o-ows!’

  Loud and clear. His voice broke a little, but what matter? We were so thoroughly prepared, we all knew exactly what to do, yet for a moment or two we greenies froze.

  ‘Where away?’ Rainey cried, and Comeragh called all hands.

  ‘Right ahead – a school of sperms.’

  ‘Haul up the mainsail and spankers – helm down – back – clear away boats – lower away!’

  Sam and Gabriel and Dan and Yan set about the boats calmly. Captain Proctor came up and stood on the quarterdeck with his telescope to his eye, and the dog sat at his side, wagging its tail.

  ‘Flukes!’ yelled Tim.

  We ran to the rail. I saw nothing, only the sea and the endless horizon. Bill, my friend of the sick bucket, was on one side of me and on the other was Dag Aarnasson, a big strong boy with white-yellow hair. He must have had better eyes than me. ‘I see it!’ he cried.

  Then Bill started jumping up and down and pointing. ‘There! There!’

  I couldn’t see anything.

  A cheer went up.

  ‘Keep it down, you fools!’ Proctor roared in a voice we’d never heard before, a real captain’s voice full of command that must have been kept in reserve all this time for just such an occasion as this. We jumped to. Ours was the waist boat. The line was already in and Simon stood sharpening his harpoon. Far above, Tim leaned out over empty air.

  ‘She breaches!’

  ‘A shoal of sperm,’ Captain Proctor called out sharply, ‘twenty at least.’

  We ploughed on. Rainey walked about the deck sticking his big nose in everywhere and swearing all the time as if there were no other words would do it. Henry Cash always seemed to be striding about everywhere too, always looking as if he was in control of some very important situation.

  ‘White water!’ cried Tim.

  A mile from the shoal we hove to. A ghostly feather appeared, far, far out on the sea, just for a second, and my heart was beating very very fast. Tim, down from his eyrie, ran over to me, out of breath. ‘This is it.’ He could hardly get it out. ‘This is it, this is it, Jaf,’ he said and gripped my hand hard. My mouth had gone dry.

  Dan pushed in between. ‘Let’s go and catch a big fish,’ he said.

  We set the whaleboat down as gently as a baby on the waves, with Comeragh in the stern and Simon in the bow, then we slid down the falls each to his place, me and Tim and Dan and Sam. The boat bobbed lightly like a feather. I looked up and saw the ship keepers, Wilson Pride’s wide, black face impassive, sulky Joe Harper, Abel Roper slouching to the helm as if a burden was on his wiry shoulders. Joe and Abel were jealous. They’d have loved to have been going out with us. I’d not have swapped with either, but at that moment there was a great longing for the solid deck beneath my feet and a safe height from which to look down. The boat was nothing, an old matchbox waiting to be capsized by a black island of whale flesh, turned to matchwood floating on the water by the careless flick of a massive tail. Show fear? Not a bit. I looked over my shoulder at Simon sitting in the bow. If I was scared, he must be terrified. It was his first time with the harpoon. He’d been practising. Take aim. Throw. Take aim. Throw. If he arsed it up and made the creature angry – ha, well. He didn’t look scared though. He was inspecting the tip of his harpoon with a frown, his cheeks very flushed.

  The captain’s and Rainey’s crews floated nearby. There were voices, laughter. Comeragh was the only one of us in our boat could see where we were going. I was next to him, facing him. He smiled at me. ‘We’re going to pull like fucking hell, lads,’ he said, and his long fingers closed round the steering oar. ‘We’ll beat those bastards.’

  And the race began. Because that’s what it was, a race to win. We pulled, we pulled like fucking hell towards an unseen quarry. Comeragh stared over our heads with flaring nostrils, never blinking, calling which way to pull. We flew. I saw another boat from the corner of my eye, the captain’s bulky form astern, the blond head of Dag like a beacon, the crew bent-backed, straining. A mile or more and my shoulders burned. Jesus. Comeragh laughed. ‘Get ready,’ he said, and made a sign for silence. I looked up. His eyes were fixed on something beyond. He had a way of calling a whisper, loud enough for us all to hear, but not loud enough to gally the whales. He leaned forward at the steering oar and called us to pull two, pull three in his whisper command, eyes still fixed on what we could not see. My back and shoulders were on fire. When at last he called ‘avast’ and we rested, I was drenched and all a-tremble and my palms were scorched.

  I blinked sweat from my eyes. My nose streamed. Lysander, three great masts and white sails, my home, was far away.

  ‘Simon,’ said Comeragh.

  And then I looked.

  A whale. Black, gleaming in the sun. Block-shaped head out of the water, high as a cliff. Too close.

  ‘There she is, a beauty,’ Comeragh said.

  I sensed the other boats, other whales further away, the sea churning and living, but all I saw was our whale. Her ridged tail, a lovely shimmering thing like a moth, flourished, slapped down and went under. She was gone. The sea heaved, the wash lifted us high.

  Simon stood up with his harpoon. One leg was bent and his knee was shaking.

  ‘Any minute, any second,’ Comeragh murmured, ‘she’ll be up and – here, here, here, where are you, my love?
Up you come now for Daddy – get steady, Simon, she’ll take you by surprise, she will, she’s a little teaser she is, she’s a little – where are you, darling? It’s a lovely day, come up and talk to me, don’t be shy, come up and—’

  She exploded through the surface in a cascade of silver, further away, thank God. She was the length of two of our boats.

  Simon relaxed slightly. ‘Pull two,’ said Comeragh, and we slid along the water, creeping like a beetle towards an elephant. Down she went again, sudden as before. We crept. She resurfaced, further away. This seemed to please Comeragh, whose eyes had been worried, but who now smiled. ‘I have you, madam,’ he said, and we followed.

  I lost sense of time. We went far from the boats, but there were other whales, playing like kittens about us. We ran with them, rainbows of spray on the air, always following the same whale, which sounded and breached, sounded and breached, drawing us on for miles. God knows how Comeragh always knew just where she’d breach. Our aching backs had turned to water and no longer mattered by the time we closed on her. She was tired too, sitting on the water, a small sad shining eye watching us, interested. What a peculiar place for an eye, I thought, right down on the side like that. What kind of a face is that? Like an elephant’s eye, the elephants in Jamrach’s yard. Good old elephants! Her white mouth opened on sharp little teeth all along the lower jaw.

  Simon stood with harpoon poised, leg braced against the cleat, broad shoulders knotted. She spouted a thick mist-cloud of stench that covered my face, stinging my eyes. I closed them.

  ‘Now!’ said Comeragh.

  Opened them.

  Simon froze, a ridiculous small thing trembling before the blunt black head. The harpoon shivered and flew and fell short. Sam pulled it in immediately, the veins thick and knotted on the backs of his hands, and Comeragh cursed. ‘Take the oar, baby,’ he said to Simon, moving forward with an agility that scarcely moved the boat, ‘get back there.’