Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

  Simon passed me with tears streaming down his face and took the steering oar, wiping his sleeve roughly across his eyes.

  A whale sees nothing before or behind. It sees two worlds, either side. I don’t know what the whale saw. To me it seemed she was looking at me all the time, that’s what it was like. As if she was curious. I dare say there were wiser whales. Comeragh darted and she was struck. She pitched, turned the front of her head at us in a soundless scream, thrashing her tail three or four times and causing the sea to boil, then fled along the slippery surface of the sea with the harpoon quivering in her side, dragging us after. We jumped and bounced, teeth clashing, bones rattling. No fighting it. When she sounded, I thought we’d go under for sure, but we flew on, the elements screaming in our ears and the whale line singing and vibrating, till she surfaced in front of us, making the sea pitch us high.

  She rolled, open-jawed. Salt stung my eyes. Comeragh rose steady in the bow with the lance. ‘Pull in, pull in’, a voice said, and we hauled hand over hand nearer and nearer to her, Sam leading. Her eye was still bright. It blinked slowly, once. Then the stabbing began. The lance was twice the length of Comeragh but he handled it with such skill that all my fear evaporated. She rolled over, snapping her jaws. She twisted. The sea turned red. He stabbed her again and again, seven, eight, nine times, probing determinedly for the heart which, when found, caused her to spout a dark spume from the blowhole, a fountain of blood that burst up and rained down from on high all over us.

  ‘Back! Back!’ cried Comeragh and Sam, and we took oars and got away and watched her die.

  It was then I truly realised the whale is no more a fish than I am. So much blood. This was not like the fish on the quay, fresh caught, lying flipping and flopping, death on a simmer. This was a fierce, boiling death. She died thrashing blindly in a slick of gore, full of pain and fury, gnashing her jaws, beating her tail, spewing lumps of slime and half-digested fish that fell stinking about us. It was vile. So much strength dies slowly. We watched in awe, wordless. Ten minutes, fifteen, more. As she thrashed, she swam around in an ever dwindling gyre, and I begged her to die.

  How long till she listed? No more than twenty minutes. She heeled at last and lay still, one fin pointing at the sky. So passed Leviathan.

  We pulled in the line, Sam leading. Stronger than he looked, Sam. We were rowing in blood. A foul flotsam, the contents of the whale’s stomach, bobbed around us. My part was to keep the line from tangling, see it safely back into its tub. Tim turned and looked at me. We were the two greenhorns on our boat. We had no way of knowing what we were feeling. We just looked at each other.

  It was getting dark as we towed the whale back to the ship. We were shaky and dumb, but a growing euphoria coloured the horror. First whale of the season, she was ours. We were the boys.

  Not the captain’s boat, not Mr Rainey’s. Ours, Second Mate Comeragh’s. It was bad for Simon though. Back on deck everyone started congratulating him, thinking that as boat steerer he must have been the one to have taken the whale. And he had to tell them how he hadn’t been up to it and Mr Comeragh had had to take over. Me and Tim though, we were laughing now. Dan came and clapped us on the shoulder, very serious. ‘That was good,’ he said. ‘Good. Kept your heads.’ We’d kept our heads. We’d come through. They tied her to starboard with her head facing the stern.

  Knowing I was safe, a certain wildness came over me now. Here I was back on the dear old Lysander with my good fellows, alive. It was getting dark and the fires had already been lit under the try pots. Rainey and Comeragh stood on the cutting stage and set about hooking her near the fin. The windlass was set to and she was peeled like an apple, slowly, turning and turning like a pig on a spit, till the blanket strip, wide as a double bed and long as to the top of a house, hung dripping blood from the rigging. Yan and Gabriel swarmed up and hacked it off, and we dropped it down to Henry Cash and Martin Hannah waiting in the blubber room below. And when another and another and another strip had left her and gone below, she was a monstrosity, a creamy gleaming grub of a thing clinging to the side of our ship in the dark, with her great head still intact, smiling. But they cut it off at last, and we hauled it up with the block and tackle and there it lay on our deck, a terrible thing two men long.

  Dag Aarnasson, who had done all this before, went up on top with a knife and cut a hole in the top big enough for us to dip our buckets in. There was a single moment when everything lurched and a cloud came over my eyes, but I hung onto a rope and gritted my teeth and held on tight till things cleared, and then I made a vow that I would get through this without disgrace, and took up my bucket. If you have never scooped the oil from a sperm whale’s head with a bucket, you will not appreciate the strength it takes. There are hundreds and hundreds of gallons of oil in a sperm whale’s head. It is thick and white and the more you scoop, the gloopier and heavier and more spunk-like it gets. It’s like trying to empty a bottomless well, and it breaks your poor fucking back, which by this time has gone beyond simple pain. And when at last it’s nearly empty, someone has to go down inside the head and get the dregs. Skip did this, impassive, whistling as he worked, while the rest of us set to chopping. Wraiths, we lurched upon the slippery deck. Felix Duggan got sick, ran aside and vomited, stood groaning with his hands on his knees, water drooling from his big pink lower lip. The mates upon the cutting stage worried away at the wormy innards, looking for ambergris, which ladies wear upon their wrists and in the valleys between their breasts. Piled about the deck were great heaps of hacked flesh that bled and shone and gave off a sweet stink that made my guts clench with a kind of perverted hunger. The try pots boiled and heaved and were skimmed constantly of an evil scum, which rose to the surface and was thrown into the fires beneath to spit and crackle and belch forth a thick black smoke with a charnel house stink. Firelight shone on the boards, awash with oil and blood.

  We chopped and chopped. Again and again our knives grew blunt and we honed them and set to again, wiping sweat from our dripping brows. Blubber’s tough. We cut and heaved, passed our hunks to Sam and Yan and Dan and Gabriel, who, singing and smiling like women in a kitchen, sliced again like skilful butchers till the strips they called bible leaves appeared, like pages in the flick book I had made for Ishbel five years ago. All were swallowed in the try pots.

  My clothes stuck to me. Oil. Oil to make putty and paint and soap, oil to grease and varnish, oil to burn in millions of lamps. I was soaked in a sticky gum of filth and gore, grease, sweat, bile, the puky juices of God’s greatest creature. My hair stuck close to my head, fast glued. Still – who better than me for this? Had I not scoured the Thames sewers for pennies?

  ‘Sleep in your clothes, Jaf,’ Dan said when my watch ended.

  I thought he was mad.

  ‘If you change for every watch, you’ll be out of gear before we’re a quarter through,’ he explained.

  So I slept in the reek of myself and the whale, and it wallowed through my sleep and gave me dreams of slaughter in a wild jungle place. When I arose for the next watch, the try pots still bubbled and the decks were still slippy. My clothes had dried upon me and become a second skin, and the bones and organs of the whale floated alongside the ship in a great snapping of sharks and a feasting of seabirds. I stood with Gabriel looking down. Morning had come.

  ‘Take it all in, son,’ he said. ‘Doubt you’ll get the chance again.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘The whaling’s done for,’ he said, and grinned.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No call for the oil no more. It’s all this new stuff now. They’ll always need the bone for the ladies’ stays, but they won’t be wanting all this oil no more.’

  ‘What new stuff?’

  ‘Oil under the ground,’ he said.

  It was three days till we were done. Stores sound, hatches down, decks all scoured and pure.

  Onward. Different.

  6

  We turned east. It was rough round seas after that, the oc
ean breathing in and out, in and out, range after range of rolling hills, up and down whose howling slopes we climbed and rolled as the winds wailed and the dark water swelled and heaved. These bloated seas were full of ships. We passed them, distant toy things sighted through a whistling grey madness, bird blackened (as were we), clouded by crying hordes. Sometimes we drew nigh and saw dark, tattooed faces on their decks. Sometimes we met, and the faces, white-eyed and sea stained, became real and took on names. The days mingled. My sea eyes changed, becoming water wise. In two months we took five hundred barrels of oil, and were down a boat and a man. A fellow called George deserted at the Cape. The boat was smashed to splinters in an angry sea while being hoisted up Lysander’s side.

  We met a ship which gave us our letters and the newspapers from home. Not all of us got a letter. Bill didn’t, nor did Yan or Felix or Skip, and there was nothing for me either. Tim had one from Ishbel.

  I watched him read. First he smiled, but after a moment or two this faded and his eyes scanned backwards and forwards seriously. On the back of the paper I could see the careful horizontal lines of her writing, with the long deep loops and the slight forward slant, and the long vertical lines with which she’d filled the margins. At the foot of the page was her name, writ larger than the rest, the I of Ishbel a flourish.

  Tim turned the page and read the other side. Lines, all indecipherable. But there near the top I saw my name along with his: ‘Dear Tim and Jaffy’.

  ‘Hmm.’ He gave a small down-the-nose laugh, shaking his head, glancing up at me and looking down again. ‘Sends you her fond regards, Jaf,’ he said brightly, turning it again and rereading the beginning.

  ‘Has she seen my ma?’

  He didn’t reply.

  I crowded him. ‘Let’s see.’

  ‘Oy!’ He flinched the letter away from me.

  ‘It’s for me too,’ I said.

  ‘No, it isn’t. It’s a private letter. Look.’ He showed me the envelope. ‘My name. It’s mine.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I said, ‘the letter’s got my name on it too.’

  ‘It has not! What are you talking about? You didn’t even see it.’

  ‘Didn’t get a chance, did I?’

  ‘It has not got your name on it, Jaf,’ he said, as if to an imbecile. ‘It’s mine,’ and folded it up very small and tucked it away in his clothes. It was like old times, all his little spites. I hated him again, even as the doubts came in. Had I really seen my name? Yes, then again no, then again maybe. I could have killed him there and then, throttled him with my bare hands.

  ‘You’re a rotten friend, Tim. Did you know that?’ I said. ‘What a rotten friend you are.’ With horror I felt tears rising.

  He smiled in a strange bland way. ‘The old man’s gone,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The old man. Pa. He’s dead.’

  I didn’t know what to say. For all the notice Tim had ever taken of his dad, he might as well have been the coal scuttle.

  ‘Oh,’ I said coldly, clamping my teeth with the urge to stick my thumbs in his throat. ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘Death,’ he said lightly, ‘that’s what he died of, death, Jaffy, old boy.’

  ‘My name was on it,’ I said, ‘at the top. She wrote for both of us.’

  ‘No, Jaf.’ He looked at me sadly. ‘She didn’t. I’m sorry, you really are mistaken. She sends her fond regards. At the end, she sends you her fond regards. I told you.’

  I wished Ma could write. I missed Ma. I missed Ishbel. Suddenly I had to turn away because of tears in my eyes. Bastard. I’d kick him overboard.

  ‘No more bloody mermaids,’ Tim murmured.

  ‘I saw my name,’ I said.

  Tim turned his head on one side and raised his shoulders, frowning indulgently. Would I lie to you? the look said. Perplexed that I could doubt him.

  I walked away and stood at the rail. My chest hurt. Who cares? And anyway why couldn’t she write me my own letter? I ironed out the pain till nothing existed but the foam-flecked decks and the dim dappled fo’c’s’le that creaked and groaned through the days and nights. Why was I here in this cramped mad moving world? There was no time alone any more. No time, no space, no dreaming place but sleep. George did the right thing jumping ship at the Cape. I missed the sound of the market and the smell of Meng’s and the ring of the bell on Jamrach’s door, and the smell of straw and dung in the yard and the ring of cobbles beneath my feet. I had a place there. Here I was a dogsbody. Foam flew in my face. The world was too big. I turned and saw Dag standing as still as he could as the world rose and fell around him, his creamy-yellow hair plastered flat to his large head. He was trying not to gally a huge white bird that had alighted on the rail and clung mad-faced there, opening and closing its curved beak and spreading out its wings. Why so angry?

  Foam fell like snow. A wave exploded upon our bow, shattering like glass, soaking us up as far as the cookhouse, and when I could see again the bird had gone.

  ‘What is this thing then?’ Skip said.

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘This thing. This dragon thing.’

  ‘No one knows.’

  Supper was over and we were having a smoke on deck. Skip was doodling idly in his drawing book. ‘This thing,’ he repeated, ‘this dragon thing, what is it?’

  ‘The Ora,’ I told him, because that’s what Dan Rymer sometimes called it. I called Dan over. ‘He wants to know about the Ora,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Dan, lounging against the mast. ‘I met a man who met a man who met a man who met a man who … That’s the kind of a thing it is. There are stories. It’s a big, fierce thing, of course. And there are islands the natives stay away from.’ He’d been speaking very seriously, but here broke into a grin. His teeth were yellowing at the tops, his forehead scored by three or four very deep lines. ‘Listen to me, me boys, and I’ll tell ye tales to curdle your blood,’ he crowed, rubbing his hands together and licking his lips.

  ‘Can I come with you when you go after it?’ Skip asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I said so.’

  God knows why he was taking Tim. I would have been better. Any day. ‘What if it’s really a dragon?’ Tim said one night as we lay smoking in our bunks. ‘A real dragon, you know. Breathing fire. Wings. All that? Jesus!’ He said it so everyone could hear.

  ‘What d’you want to come for anyway?’ Dan asked Skip. ‘Eager to die?’

  Skip shrugged amiably. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

  Dan sat down with us and lit his pipe. ‘Of course you don’t,’ he said.

  ‘If I can go after a whale,’ Skip said, shading away steadily with his pencil, ‘I can go after anything.’

  ‘Not so.’

  ‘Yes so. It’s not fishing, you know. I know all about fish.’

  ‘No,’ said Dan.

  ‘Isn’t it funny,’ Skip said, turning to me, ‘the way a thing can be two different things at the same time?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like wanting to do something and not wanting to do it at the same time,’ he said, ‘like when my brother Barnaby drowned and I went and looked at him on the kitchen table and it was happy and sad all at the same time. Or like when you’re killing a whale and you feel like you are the whale.’

  He showed me his sketch. It was his idea of a dragon, a tragic and majestic old thing.

  I could understand why Dan wouldn’t take Skip along. Too unpredictable. I wasn’t though. I was good with animals, everyone said so. I had a feel for them and no real fear, only a respect for their powers that gave me a healthy caution. Why should Tim be hunter’s mate and me only a dogsbody? I got Dan on his own later and asked him outright: why him and not me?

  He blew smoke thoughtfully out of the corner of his mouth and said, ‘One. Because I promised him. Two. Because he’s the best man for the job.’

  ‘Tim?’

  ‘Hi
m for the hunt,’ he said, ‘you to take care of the creature once it’s caught.’

  Seas have natures, like people. Since we left the Crozets behind, the change had seeped its way into everything. We were blown still, but the wind was less chilling, batting us along like a cat with a ball of wool. First there were islands here and there, reassuring blots of land upon the vastness of the ocean. Then there were none. The change was a somnolence thrown over us after the islands vanished. Now I saw the earth curve and felt as dizzy as a poor gnat on the brim of a drain. The sea changed colour, became a thirsty blue. But I sensed something more, something I had no words for, something that scared me witless. An enormity. As if something was hidden here, something under the sea, something under everything.

  I tried to tell Tim.

  ‘Just my luck’, he said, ‘to get stuck out here with a lot of lunatics. Christ help us come full moon.’

  Now that we were drawing nearer to its homelands, the idea of the dragon was beginning to sink in. Joe Harper and Sam Proffit were working on the cage for it on the deck. Comeragh stood watching. ‘Make damn sure it’s strong,’ he said, shaking out his handkerchief and laughing at the idea of the thing getting out and taking a stroll along the deck. ‘Down into the fo’c’s’le!’ he cried with nasal delight, blowing his nose loudly.

  ‘Aft in the captain’s cabin,’ smiled Sam.

  Joe thumped the sturdy timber with his fist. ‘You could put an elephant in that,’ he said confidently.

  ‘Or a tiger.’ That was me. The cage was much like the one my tiger had escaped from.

  Tim piped up. ‘Jaf was taken by a tiger once,’ and everyone looked at me. ‘Tell’em, Jaf,’ he said. ‘Go on, tell’em about the tiger.’

  So I had to tell the story again about how I met Jamrach. Or rather Tim told it.

  ‘Great big Bengal tiger! Head this big! And this little squirt here two foot tall walks straight up to it like it’s a little pussy cat and gives it a pat on the nose—’