by Carol Birch
That is how it has felt so many times. As if one thing led to another like notes in a tune.
The wind dropped completely and rain came down in a torrent, sudden as an upturned bucket. Thunder grumbled on the edge of the sky, an old dog growling in its sleep. I came down from the mast. Sheet lightning flashed over the jungle. All the world was grey and heaving, and we battened down and rode it. For three hours or more the rain pounded, but the storm was never overhead. It was on the other side of the long land mass. When the lightning flashed it was beautiful, silver echoes on a world washed out, on mast and spar and binnacle, on the great, thrown-out cloth of the sea.
It was evening by the time the rain had progressed from mad to sane. We hove to far out in the bay of what might have been the same island or another. Wilson Pride had made a nice stew of bacon and beans with dumplings, and we ate below because of the rain. I was on larboard watch and it was still raining when I went to bed, but when I opened my eyes in the morning the daylight stealing in through chinks in timber was hot and white. On deck all was sun-leached, not a spot of moisture remaining. Captain Proctor was in conversation with his first mate by the aft companionway. Mr Rainey seemed bothered about something. You would have thought from his increasingly florid and extreme facial appearance that they were having words, but Captain Proctor was chuckling in an affable and amused way. He said something, and Rainey turned sharply and walked away.
Gabriel said later it was about a whaleboat. We had no spares and Rainey wanted to put in somewhere and get at least one new one as soon as possible. Rainey wanted to go back to Surabaya for one, but the captain said we’d come too far and would go straight on to Pulau Lomblen, where Dan Rymer hoped to find the Lamalera whale man who’d seen a creature walking out of a forest, the one of whom his Surabayan friend had spoken. Comeragh was for going back too, but Dan Rymer had said we could get a boat in Pulau Lomblen.
We couldn’t. There were boats in Pulau Lomblen, but we couldn’t get one. Still, we didn’t know that then, so on we went and were at Pulau Lomblen three days later.
7
Oh Lord, please tell Billy Stock to stop frightening the little ones … In my head on waking, that old black man’s voice, Sam. Sam Proffit. Coming back through time, sudden, real, a tic of the brain, time flying by, a blink – clear in my mind as if he stood in the room. Just as he stood in the low fo’c’s’le with his hands together in prayer – then – but then is now – his eyes closed, a small mischievous grin about his withered lips. A pious old man, the changing light rippling over him, the walls dappled and stippled grey. Oh the beauty of it—
It was dark and I was afloat on something, it could have been the sea or waves of another kind, could have been anything. Thick black waves of sleep bearing me up. At first I thought it was Drago, our old Drago, and that I was lying at rest on the dry boards and she’d gone sailing off along the Thames making for the sea.
But she broke up a long time ago, Drago. Here’s where I live now. A voice has awoken me again with the sounds of voices on the street. There’s a high singing somewhere near, maybe in the alley that runs between Ratcliffe Highway and Pennington Street, as drunkly beautiful as lost angels. Who is she, this singer, siren of the cliff tops, throwing her silver voice sharp as knives through the thick black? This is where I live now and it does me well. There are smoky rooftops over which I can look, and above them a lovely northern sky that never burns. I love these rooftops dearly, so much so I sometimes find my eyes grow moist. London – how I dreamed of thee in the hot places. Flowers and fruit and wine and trees high, thin brown boys diving for pearls, great waves rushing in, and monkeys in the trees, long-limbed and thin of face, the fierce eyes of the big ones, the soft scared ones of their babies hanging on underneath. The blue light settling on the horizon. The colour of the edge of the world is …
… indigo.
It scintillates …
I am sailing like Sinbad on strange eastern seas and a big star is falling down the dark sky, and somewhere close the sirens are singing and here is Sam Proffit saying:
‘Oh Lord, please tell Billy Stock to stop frightening the little ones.’
That raised a snigger because Billy was only my age, and we were nearly the youngest. Only Felix was younger than us. Billy was full of horrible stories about cannibals that sucked people’s brains out while they were still alive.
Sam stands in the low fo’c’s’le, a dappled man, a great singer of hymns and sayer of prayers. And we need our prayers tonight. Tomorrow we land on this new island. This is the one, we all feel it. It’s something to do with the two Malay trackers Dan picked up on Sumba, where we heard the gongs and saw the smoke from a funeral pyre rising over the trees. We went to a village and drank a bitter drink, and there were birds everywhere, bright green flocks that shifted like turning wings against the deep blue sky. I lay back and watched, the brightness hurting my eyes. Birds should be free, I thought. We waited for Dan to come back from wherever he’d gone off to with his enquiries, and he came back with red teeth and two friendly silent men, one who smiled, one who didn’t. The one who smiled had blue symbols tattooed on his forehead. They sleep with us in the fo’c’s’le but we share no language. Their demeanour has grown serious since we left the last island, the ninth or tenth, I don’t know. The islands are wild. It’s what I always wanted, the world, the wild, I’m looking it in the face as hard as I can. I want to walk up the slopes of a volcano and stare down its throat. It would be like staring into animal eyes. A volcano is dragonish. Why should there not also be a dragonish beast in these parts?
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 practically 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 will never forget came down and gave us milk out of a big green coconut shell, a girl of about twelve whose breasts were buds, whose hands were a child’s with small pink pearls for nails. She stood waiting for the empty shell, holding my eyes for those few moments in calm contemplation. Her hair fell 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 fell in love with her at once. Yes, yes, I will be a whale man here, I thought, take out the boats and bring back glory. Return to her at night. The world is full of wonder. And smell no more the herb man’s bower on Rosemary Lane and see no more the peeling posters plastered on the walls 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, all 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. Billy had never shut up since we’d left Pulau Lomblen. You’d never get him on shore round these parts in a million years, he said, and Joe Harper agreed. There w
ere 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 till you get to the Southern Sea.’
‘Aha!’ said Bill. ‘See! If there was once, then there still 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 Bill,
Gabriel, his long legs hanging naked over the edge of his bunk, the brown skin yellow 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 small dog, though whether it was a pup or not I couldn’t say. It swallowed 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 all that up and it was like someone who cries silently.’
We were all 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’ll 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 Billy 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 all had to stay very still and quiet. It was strange. Made us all 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, all of us hanging around the beaches while Dan and Tim and the Malays got all 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 still 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 calling in the night.
We all 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.
All of us felt it, but no one said it. This was the island. Neither big nor small, 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 swallowing its tail, a lullaby 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 swallowed, and I fell 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 still 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 fell 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 full 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, full of horror – oh, the horror, it’s what woke me – a real, whole man desperately trying to swim out but with no chance at all. 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 all 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 all goldy-white, stalking back from the jungle like a dirty sweaty Apollo, buffalo blood under his nails, a head taller 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 all. 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. ‘Silly old Jaf.’ He gave me a small push.
‘Do you ever think of home?’ I asked.
He thought. ‘Of course I do.’
‘You don’t seem to. You never mention it.’
‘Well, 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 all the time.’
‘Like Dan.’
It was true. Dan in his cups, sentimental, cloudy eyed, toasting Alice, recalling 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 follow a trade like this?’
Tim snorted softly. ‘She wouldn’t seem as sweet perhaps if he was with her all the time.’
‘Remember sarsaparilla?’ I said. ‘From the herb man?’
‘Ah! What would I give for a lovely cold cup of sarsaparilla! Remember the smell.’
So clear, a lattice of herbs above the herb man’s stall, 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 till your head gets tipsy and you jaunt down the narrow passage in the dim gaslight, and duck under the chintz into the dancing place all 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.
