by Carol Birch
‘Hard to say. He’s sly.’
‘He’s not asleep,’ said Skip.
‘Oh, of course. You know things.’
Skip ignored him. ‘It’s since we left the island,’ he said. ‘We’ve gone into dragon time.’
I closed my eyes, very sleepy.
‘I mean the time before the dragon and the time after are not the same.’
The funny thing is I knew exactly what he meant. It was true, something had changed, as if we’d sailed into a different air. I’d been groping at it in my mind, thinking it was something only happening in me. His saying it made it real, and that scared me.
That night I dreamed of home. Ishbel and Ma were there, and some of the lads and girls from Spoony’s, ginger Jane and that lot, and we were all going down to the river, and all of it tumbled in with the kind of violent sunset you never saw on the banks of the Thames, a dragon-time sunset of crimson and violet. I was woken by shouting on deck. The sea was rolling. Not time, I thought, and slept again and found out later it was old Skip up to his tricks again. Rainey had found him fast asleep by the dragon’s cage and called him a whoreson and a bastard and kicked him down the fo’c’s’le shaft.
Next morning we were out for open ocean when the weather turned. The air was still heavy and hot and thunder rolled from the west. You could see the squall coming. It’s one of the things I love about the sea, the way you can see weather afar. It’s like looking at the future. Captain Proctor called out, ‘Shorten sails!’ and we jumped to and set about turning her round and about direct. I ran and shielded the dragon’s pen with a hanging. Gabriel was at the helm but the order was tardy and even he couldn’t get us around in time, so we were caught sideways on by the wind and suddenly all was madness and nonsense, the birds and the wind shrieking their devil souls out, and the rigging torn, the sails cracking, the timbers groaning and the huge masts crying mercy. My guts flew into my throat. The deck tilted, we dropped and I rolled, grabbed onto something. Mr Rainey’s voice roared over the screaming as the sea rolled over the leeward rail, icy. We’d gone over fast. We’re sinking, we’re sinking, I thought, this is too low, too low, we’ll never come up again, oh, dear Jesus, God, please – the lee side touched the sea, the weather touched cloudy, fat-cheeked heaven.
I ran about, we ran about, I had no idea what I was doing. I saw Martin Hannah hauling on a rope and thought he looked as if he needed help, so hauled alongside.
Somehow we finally got her up and around. She flew before the storm.
‘Good man yourself, Jaf,’ Martin Hannah said, breathing hard. He was a tall quiet lad I hardly knew, inclined to stoutness, with a faintly threatening air and a slow smile.
‘Good man yourself,’ I replied.
Then the cry: ‘She blows!’
It was ridiculous. Even in this, Proctor’s standing on the quarterdeck shouting his head off: ‘Down from aloft! Haul up the mainsail – Gabriel! Helm down – set topgallants – clear away boats …’
We had to get the spare from over the stern. It was starting to spit rain and the sea was high. But you don’t think, you just do. Soon came the falling rattle of the tackle, the splash of a boat hitting the sea. The flashing of long oars. We plunged and bucked over the sea with aching ears and flayed faces, blind with spray. Tears were blown backwards from our eyes. And we never caught a whale that day, we just lost another boat. So there we were, two down, and the weather frowning like a dragon. While the real dragon pressed flat and mad to the deck with eyes glazed over full of knowledge, drooling a slow spool of greenish slime as hell heaved sick about him.
I knocked shoulders with John Copper.
‘Jesus,’ he said, a wild look in his eyes. ‘Sweet, sweet Jesus, I wish I was back in dear old Hull.’
If I could write I’d make a song. ‘Oh, I wish I was back in …’ Many a sailor song starts that way. ‘Oh, I wish I was back in Ratcliffe Highway, Ratcliffe Highway across the sea …’ I don’t know how I’d say it. My own heart song. There are good old Ratcliffe Highway songs aplenty, but none are mine. So as the wild torrent howled and raged and pined for days and we tied ourselves in our bunks of nights, I tried the song, but it would never come whole.
Oh, I wish I was back in Ratcliffe Highway,
Ratcliffe Highway across the sea,
Where a dancing girl with dada dada
Waits or waits not for me.
I like that: waits or waits not for me.
Time passed, and we were all blind and deaf and dumb. The storm – sick. Rolling. Wedged ourselves in our bunks with bundles on either side. Smell of bilge water came steaming up from the hold. The bulkheads creaking. Close, stinky air. Heavy rolling sea breaking across the waist. Buckets, pieces of wood, other things rolling around the deck. Dangerous. Sea too high for whaling. Till, shocking and sudden, a bright, sweet, clear morning dawned, promising good sailing. It turned into a long day of rainbows and a gentle night of soft drumming rain. After that, three long cloudless days of burning brightness saw us to the Japanese ground, but there was nothing for us there. A week, two weeks. The lookouts were silent, though we spoke to other ships that had taken plenty. So we headed out southeast into the Pacific, towards the Equator and the far Offshore Ground.
Somewhere a few days in, darkness fell.
Seven days of darkness, like a biblical plague. In all that time the sun refused to appear, and the sky glowered close above by daytime, a low, pressing ceiling of dismal black cloud that occasionally gave off a kind of thin droning thunder from beyond the stars. The sea was high. There was no rain and the heat was intense. Day drears gave way to thick nights. On we hauled for better weather, for the sun, for the next change of the times. The captain and his officers walked about the decks, we spun yarn and sewed old clothes and patched sails and cleaned up, and things were not right. The ocean spoke with a softly threatening voice, there was no horizon and nothing to be seen in any direction but a groaning haze. And every time he could, Skip lay down in front of the dragon and stared at it, and talked with it, and listened to it. Listened to it, that’s what he said.
He was a mad idiot. I now think they should have thrown him in the fo’c’s’le with a kick along the way every time they found him sleeping before the dragon’s cage. It was a soft ship, that was our trouble. A shipmate should not be allowed to sleep on deck as he pleases. What captain would allow it? Ours would. Proctor was grieving for his old Samson, a soft pup in his pocket in the Bay of Biscay twelve years ago. We hardly saw him. Rainey gave Skip a kicking once in a while in a half-hearted way, but nothing disturbed the haze. Once the captain came up in his nightshirt, disturbed by the shouting. ‘I’ll be glad when that damned animal’s off my ship,’ he said, and Dan Rymer, with the grey of the sky on his face and his eyes cold, said he was making a new rule that no one could go near the dragon but me and him, just like it used to be. It seemed so long ago when that was the rule. I couldn’t remember when it had changed, how we’d drifted here, it was like Skip said: time changed. Time simply did not play properly any more. It was like an earthquake in the landscape in my head, and I no longer knew what I could count on. All voices were muffled and far.
Skip could no longer see the dragon, but it didn’t make any difference; he was still talking to it. He said no words could tell how he and the dragon talked but talk they did, sometimes all night long. He never shut up, going on in this steady voice. He said the wheel was in spin because the dragon had gone insane. It had gone insane because of the cage. It couldn’t bear the cage, like his grandma’s fish couldn’t bear its bowl, and so had gone mad. It wanted to go home. ‘That’s why there’s no whales,’ he said, sitting drawing bars and cages. ‘They know it’s on the ship and they won’t come near.’
You know, we’d had a lot of Skip. He must have said a million mad things since we left the Greenland Dock. Why listen to him now? First he got Bill and Felix all fired up, whether he meant to or not.
‘It’s like this,’ said Felix, ‘a ship kind of know
s things. It’s like it’s alive, like it knows when it’s got bad luck on board. Like, say, a murderer.’
‘Or a demon or a—’
‘Yeah, a demon.’ Skip set about drawing a demon.
‘S’like when the sails blow out like cheeks.’
‘And it screams.’
And on and on in that dream – seven dark days and nights that had begun to feel eternal. The superstition of sailors is no more than the lone howling of millions of miles between you and dry land and home, making you know you are a thing that can die. Superstition, dark, spiky, high-stepping, stalked with cloven foot upon our decks. And when superstition high-steps on a lone sea deck, far and far from every strand, as the old songs say – then, oh then …
Not just when sleeping, not just half asleep on my feet at the masthead, not just tipsy-drifting with a head full of gummy warmth, but always, every conscious second I was beautifully, startlingly afraid, with a fear crisp and invisible as the honed edge of a fine blade.
‘Those horrible eyes,’ said Gabriel, at the table in the fo’c’s’le, lamplight on his face.
The dragon had been shedding skin round its eyes, which gave it a particularly horrific appearance.
‘Like a statue,’ Simon Flower fiddling with a string of twine. ‘Not like a living thing at all.’
‘An abomination.’ That was Joe Harper.
‘I don’t like it,’ Yan said. ‘I don’t like it there with its horrible eyes.’
‘The ship knows,’ Bill Stock said. ‘There you have it: the ship knows.’
But now it was no longer just Skip and Bill Stock and Felix Duggan, it was the whole bloody lot of them.
‘Evil, fucking horrible thing.’
‘Should fucking boil the fucking thing and eat it.’
And Skip, with his thin knowing smile, saying, ‘He wants to go home. He can’t help it. He was living on his island like he’s always done, and then the sky falls down and now he’s being sick in a cage and he’s gone mad and you want to eat him too. You probably should. He’s better off dead. Kinder. Crueller than what we do to the whales, this is.’
‘Probably taste revolting,’ Tim said. ‘I wouldn’t touch it.’
‘Might be poisonous,’ said Bill Stock. ‘You get poisonous toads, don’t you? Snakes? I mean, look at its tongue. Nasty thing.’
The dragon was bad luck. Some of us believed it as truth, some as a dream nudge, a kick in the brain. Dread joined the darkness and it had those dark beady eyes surrounded by white circles. I think of Skip now and I’m not sure how true my memories are. It was a long time ago. I remember him as a power in the boat, a round smiling face with a dark cap of hair, scrawnily meek and narrow eyed, never at full ease, always watchful. But now I think perhaps to others he was nothing, hardly noticed. But he it was that set it off, him and his nasty little pictures of cloven-footed demons, I’m sure: this little tinder of fear, which didn’t fade even when the darkness lifted, and we sailed on and on with never a sight of a whale and the days running into one another. Certain things I remember. The fo’c’s’le, Gabriel saying: ‘There’s an evil spot out there, they do say.’
Sam smiling. ‘Don’t frighten the little ones,’ he said.
‘Everybody knows about it.’
‘I don’t,’ I said.
Gabriel looked at me. ‘No? The place where things happen. Where the Essex was lost, and more since. A cursed spot upon the ocean.’
Everyone knows about the Essex, and all the others. It’s legend on the whale ships. It’s something of a joke.
Dan began to sing:
There were three men of Bristol City
Who took a boat and went to sea
And first with beef and captains’ biscuits
And pickled pork they loaded she …
‘I knew a man knew Owen Coffin as a lad,’ said Gabriel. ‘Sailed with his father, he did. Said Owen was a nice boy, and a good sailor like his dad.’
There was gorging Jack and guzzling Jimmy,
And the youngest he was Little Billee.
Poor Owen Coffin drew the short straw and got eaten. He wasn’t as clever as Little Billee. Some four or five voices joined in, but we were all sleepy and that silly song came out like a lullaby.
Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy,
I am extremely hungaree.
To gorging Jack says guzzling Jimmy,
We’ve nothing left, us must eat we.
‘We pass close by that spot,’ said Gabriel.
You couldn’t help but lie awake at night and remember that poor doomed ship so long ago and all the poor sailors who shipped on-board unknowing. And the other sailors and ships all coming their different ways to the same thing since the first boat ever put out to sea.
I remember a long night of shooting stars, and lying in my hammock, trying out words: ‘Where a dancing girl with eyes of blue …’ No good, no good …
I wish I was back in Ratcliffe Highway,
Ratcliffe Highway across the sea,
Where a dancing girl with …
Wait.
Where a something girl with dancing shoes
Waits or waits not for me.
With bloodred shoes and bloodred nails
Where a dancing girl with golden curls
Waits or waits not for me.
9
It was coming to the end of that timeless time after we took on the dragon. A sleepless sleep and a dreamless dream. They’d all been drinking long on deck under the stars. Simon was playing something sweet and sad. I remember a fellow I once heard who played on a little harp on the quay beside the tobacco dock. The music had flowed on and on, always changing like moods. Sometimes it was like walking up and down stairs. Sometimes it pealed with joy. Sometimes it turned your heart to mush. I was drunk on the masthead and was concentrating hard on staying in this bright drunk state before tipping over the edge into sleepy stupidity, unable to make much sense, but keeping my mind sharp by thinking: if each one of those lads down there was a bit of music, what would they be? Making tunes in my head for each one. Some were easy, some were hard. I could get tunes for all but Skip, and with him I couldn’t decide between a whimsy and a lament. Nowhere clearer than the ocean for a good bright state of being, of falling with constant clarity into the vortex inside, of sleeping with eyes wide open and waking on a sudden thump of the heart – I jerked awake to the sound of singing down below. Sometimes it felt as if the stars out there, far from all land, were screaming. Hundreds of miles blaring at your head. So beautiful, that night, waking in the sky with the screaming stars all round my head. I shivered. The others below seemed millions of miles away and I feared that I might fall. I’d never felt like this before and wondered if I was getting sick again, but after a moment my head cleared, and fifteen minutes later the bell rang and I went down.
First thing I saw was John coming to take my place. Second thing I saw was the dragon come striding, fast and hungry, humping high shouldered along the deck behind him with its monstrous muscled forelegs lifted high and its claws splayed. Its long stony face was smiling, and the white circles round its eyes made it look quite foul, as if it was staring madly. A pale tongue like a snake darted in and out, a foot or more. At that moment I was back in Ratcliffe Highway, eight years old, and the tiger walking towards me. The same impossibility. Only this time I was scared.
Clack-a-clack went the dragon’s claws. I yelled at John: ‘For God’s sake, the dragon!’ and he looked back and gave an almighty yell, and after that it was all madness.
We ran down larboard. Clack-clack it came after, scrabbling for hold on the boards. Everyone was lounging around, a more peaceful scene there could not have been till we burst through with the beast after us, and all hell broke loose. It ran wild about the deck, and so did we. The ship became a stage full of bobbing marionettes, running and shouting, the starry black sky still roaring. Tim jumped up on the tryworks. Joe and Bill were on the windlass. Four or five vanished sharp down the fo’c’sle c
ompanionway, and the rest of us rushed this way and that in utter confusion. Simon’s fiddle got kicked along the deck. Everyone was drunk, the dragon on freedom. Its claws skidded on the boards and it plunged into the side of the ship, snapped like a turtle, twitched round in a circle and charged furiously into a little knot of men that jumped in all directions. John Copper, Felix, Henry Cash, Yan. Yan shouted in a deep throaty fear-voice. Mr Rainey bellowed somewhere like the wind. Skip appeared from behind the windlass, wild-eyed. Mr Comeragh grabbed my shoulder. ‘Up, boy, Jaf,’ he said. ‘Drive it with me, come.’
Dan Rymer, drunk to hell, grinning like old Father Christmas, stood on a barrel with his arms outspread as if conducting a band, his cap awry and his dirty curls wet, shouting: ‘To me! To me! This way!’
I stuck by Comeragh. Comeragh was a good sane man.
‘That way, Jaf!’ cried Comeragh.
I had no idea what I was doing. Comeragh’s long legs flashed along the opposite deck.
The dragon came fast my way and I nearly brained myself banging into Billy Stock, both of us trying to flee. I heard Tim’s voice calling plaintively, ‘Jaf! Jaf!’ and Skip sobbing. I have no idea what really happened, we were all just running about shouting, and the clack-clack of sliding claws was everywhere. Next thing I knew I was running after Comeragh and there was the cage with the door wide open, and Skip’s sketchbook lying splayed, some of the pages bent. Comeragh said, ‘You stay here, Jaf, get on top ready to close the door when we get him in,’ and I jumped on top of the cage. Everything suddenly came clear into focus. I couldn’t see past the windlass, I didn’t know what was going on, all the shouting and yelling and crashing. I was all a-shiver with my teeth rattling and there was a serious small voice in my head saying, This is bad, this is all very, very bad and you’re not ready. And I was alone, miraculously. Then suddenly the dragon appeared in front of me, its muddy head raised up, dark-holed with flat nostrils and ear holes and those beady black eyes full of guile, pink-ringed. There was something about them that brought my guts up to my throat. Its tongue flicked, then it opened its cavernous mouth and closed it again, got up on its hind legs and put its great clawed hands on top of the cage. It could reach me. Its arms were like thick old trees that had been growing for ever. Long yellow flick of a tongue, and an immensely wrinkled throat as wide as a washboard. It looked deep into my eyes and it was not like meeting the eyes of a dog or a cat, or even a tiger. There was nothing there that I could fathom, no mercy, no malice. It was a cold soul I looked into. It would kill me, tear me with teeth. None of it would matter. I would matter no more than a green shoot that pushes through the earth and is cropped by a passing sheep.
