Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

  So Dag came on our boat and we dipped lower in the water. In the captain’s boat, Yan stretched out like a log. John Copper groaned and held his stomach, groping down his breeches and sticking his scrawny arse over the side to drip dark green goo into the sea.

  Not even worth baling these days, it was so still. Nothing to do but lie and doze. But you keep on waking up, that’s the trouble. There’s always someone somewhere moaning or champing his mouth disgustingly, someone swearing or mumbling, waking from a dream with a cry. Always your own heart yattering on in your ears as if it’ll burst. When evening came Yan refused his bread. Pushed it away. Wouldn’t even drink. Simon tried to pour it in his mouth, but he let it run out. We ate our portions and drank our share, and all the time Yan never moved, though there was some kind of churning in his throat and his eyeballs switched about, eerily visible, as if his eyelids were transparent. After a while this stopped too, and then the captain put his hand over Yan’s face, felt for the pulses in his wrist and neck and found nothing.

  ‘Dead,’ he said.

  It didn’t mean anything. We just lolled there a while with Yan lying dead, then Simon said, ‘So what now?’

  The captain sighed.

  ‘We can use his belt,’ Wilson Pride said. ‘Come in useful.’

  Another long silence.

  ‘The custom of the sea,’ said Simon expressionlessly.

  ‘No.’ That was Gabriel.

  ‘Supposing,’ Tim said, ‘we could—’

  ‘No,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘I don’t mean—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean bait. Bait for sharks, then we could catch—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What sharks?’ said Skip.

  It was true, the waters were empty.

  ‘We could …’

  The captain stirred himself. ‘Let’s prepare him for the sea,’ he said gruffly.

  So Simon and Wilson took his belt for boiling up tomorrow and sewed him up in his clothes like we sewed up Mr Rainey, and we buried him in the sea. We’d miss Yan, but there was no spare water for tears and all of us were blank. None of us had any idea what kind of a service you should say for his oriental soul. No one knew how they did things in his country. So it was just a bit of a mumble from the captain again, and the bowing of heads and the closing of eyes, and I fell half asleep and scarcely noticed as they slid him into the sea. That night when prayers came, it was: ‘Oh Lord, we are ten souls afloat …’ and I nearly laughed. We are twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight souls afloat …

  At some stage this grisly countdown must stop.

  Dag went back over their side so we were five apiece again. John Copper was coming down bad now, he kept getting the runs, and Gabriel wasn’t looking too good. A light breeze blew up two or three days down the line, cheering us all up. Simon took up his fiddle and scratched away for a while, then we all started singing. Not that we really could sing, not that the fiddle could do more than croak these days, but we did our best. It turned into something, a great wake perhaps, a joyful wake. We were bobbing along together on a moonlit ocean and the world was beautiful. Tim and I held hands and sang as we could. Nothing like a song to bind the world together and bring on the best sort of tears. We sang, and Dan growled along with us, and so did Dag, in a voice still surprisingly pure. Gabriel laid his head against the pillow of a sucked leather oar and his eyes stared bright with weeping. We sang ‘Oh, say was you ever in Rio Grande’, and ‘Reuben Ranzo’ and ‘Round The Corner Sally’, and when our voices ran out we hummed on into the darkness of silence. Tim held onto my arm as he slept, gripping so hard it hurt. His mouth fell open and his head tilted back. He made me think of home. Me and him in the yard mucking about, insulting each other. Cold in the early morning, a grumble in the belly. Clumps of hair falling out. No, that’s now. I’m glad Ma can’t see this. She’d hate it, poor old Ma. She’d cry. What could I do about it? It was too big, it filled me up. So I put her away, not too far, not so I couldn’t call her back any time I wanted. I went to Ishbel instead. The last I saw was cloud coming over, directly above, blackness coming over. Drifting black sleep, soft as cloud, warm in my bed boasting at the rain. I opened my eyes in darkness so complete it was like being blind. Some gigantic thing was beating the ocean out there, not far away, a great plunging and cascading and thrashing. Tim’s hand was still on my arm, clutching. A voice chanted ‘please God please God please God please God’ endlessly.

  ‘Tim,’ I said, ‘what is it?’

  An arm came round me. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Lie still,’ Dan said, ‘it’ll go by.’

  It sounded like mountains crashing into the sea. Not like a whale. Not anything I knew. Some monster come up from the deep, the dark deep underlying, some fearful malicious thing. It’s true there are places of horror on the earth, falls with no end, cracks that open and breathe forth hell. It’s true there are bad spots, sounds of crying above the waves, wild winds yelling with the voices of drowned souls. The crew of the Essex still sail these seas. I started snivelling. It was big and near, whatever it was, and the wash from its commotion was slapping the side of the boat.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Tim said, ‘it’s going away.’

  ‘Please God please God please God please please …’

  Whose voice?

  A great sucking of the sea took the creature down. A light flickered far away, the captain’s boat.

  ‘It’s gone,’ said Dan.

  12

  After that there was no more sense. What remained was brighter and realler.

  The sea changed constantly. I could focus and unfocus at will, soften it here, sharpen it there, make it slide and swoop and shift. For days I drifted like this. Once I heard, faintly, a girl’s voice singing far away. The sky? The sea? I don’t know. It was sad and soft, and you couldn’t hear it and not cry. Who she was I don’t know. Love lost. Impossibly gone. I could have slipped over the side, swum to her, if I’d not been a weakling. She sang through the sound of the sea and the wind all morning, fell silent at noon. After which a shark, wonderful, came swimming between the boats, out of reach. Two sharks! Sharp black fins, cutting the sea in lines. Food. Us to them, them to us. We should have kept Yan for bait. It wouldn’t mean anything to him now, would it? I saw Yan’s face as I last saw him, the wide-parted lips, the look of a shrunken head beginning, because of the way his lips had retreated from his long teeth. His gums were white, like bone. The black fins accompanied us, stirring the sea all day, circling, approaching, retreating. Wilson Pride was getting sick now, and Dag. Poor old John was the worst though, pulling himself up, talking nonsense, falling down again.

  He’ll be next.

  Gabriel gave me a prod. My watch. Dragged. Dizzy. Stood on Skip’s foot. ‘Fuck you to hell!’ he snarled.

  ‘Fuck you too!’

  He kicked out with his bare foot but missed.

  My watch.

  I forgot why I was there. My eyes were very old by now, slitted, able to look into the brightness. I felt like a fly on a ceiling. As if I was upside down and the sky was under and the sea was up, and there was no difference between the two, and no beginning or end to each. I wasn’t troubled, not then, not really, though I was starting to quiver, the small hairs pricking up all over my arms and the back of my neck. I couldn’t say I was troubled, no such thing, too much for that, what was coming was bigger, for there was something invisible rising, resounding like the feeling in the air before lightning, bigger than the sea and sky and covering everything. There was a small, thin sound in the air, a living tone that came closer, moved palpably in my head, then flew far up and diffused, as if a crowd of children babbled beyond the sky.

  ‘But true,’ said Skip, ‘there is something out there. You can hear it too.’

  His breath stank.

  Hearing isn’t quite the right word.

  But, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can.’ I was feeling faint. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  He smiled mysteri
ously.

  ‘You don’t know any more than I know,’ I said.

  ‘Did I say I did?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought you did.’

  ‘I do know some things.’

  He crouched by me, hugging his legs. His breeches were ragged and ripped and both his knees poked through, sharp and bony. As he spoke he picked cruelly at a hanging scab on the right one, sucking in breath through his teeth with a hiss. ‘It’s wild,’ he said. ‘Very, very wild, Jaf, very, very wild indeed.’

  The sound was a hum now, changing, scarcely, slightly, all the time. Blood burst up out of Skip’s knee, a shiny red bubble. He licked it.

  ‘And very, very old.’

  More blood came, a sticky ooze. It smelled like liver, like kidneys sliced ready for the pan.

  ‘Old like millions and millions of years, and it walks on the tips of its hooves.’

  My dream, the dragon walking on tiptoe on the sea.

  ‘If it comes,’ he said, ‘try not to look. Some things you shouldn’t see.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ I said.

  He looked at me very closely. I started to cry because I was too scared and couldn’t think anything straight through any more. He sucked his knee.

  ‘I’m dizzy,’ I said.

  He went on sucking his knee, and I started drooling as well as crying.

  ‘Dan,’ Skip said, ‘Jaf’s not well, he shouldn’t be on watch.’

  Blood. Taste. That’s a good thing to do. Better than leather. A tiny filling. If I pull at the raw bits in this elbow crack, I can make it bleed, and the hurt’s nothing. But that’s hard to get to. If this one here on the back of my wrist gets bigger. I don’t care about the salt and sting and lurch of fear, all I want is food, there never was anything else, nothing else at all.

  ‘It’s all right, Jaf,’ Dan said.

  ‘Let him lie down.’ Tim’s voice.

  I fell asleep. When I woke up it was cooler and I felt well enough to sit up. The two boats were together, absolutely still. I heard voices.

  ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘Fucked if I know.’

  ‘Doesn’t even sound like English.’

  ‘Portuguese?’

  ‘Obrigado, obrigado, três senhora, tres, por favor …’

  In Horta, on the beach, the old beggar women holding out their hands.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said the captain.

  John Copper.

  Dan put his face in his hand. The sun glimmered red on the water. We bobbed listlessly. Here we are – how many? – surely not – how many? – close your eyes and here we all are back again, Billy Stock and Joe Harper and Henry Cash and all, and nothing ever happened, it didn’t, you can go back there, it’s a strain and it takes every stretch you’ve got, but it surely is real and you can go back there.

  ‘What now?’ asked Dag, his eyes all a-goggle in the weird, jutting thing his face had become. But no one answered and no one knew.

  The captain and Wilson Pride butchered him. I saw nothing of it. They rowed a little way away, and I lay with my head below the level of the gunwale and heard the sounds of severing and hacking, the trickle of liquid, the smothered grunts of effort.

  Tim’s breath, stale and rich, came on my eyes. ‘It’s all right, Jaf,’ he said, ‘it’s all right, he’s not there any more, he’s nowhere near, he’s all right.’

  Behind me I heard the breathing of Gabriel, catching, halting.

  I opened my eyes. Tim’s face. Smiling. He spoke. Egg-white stretched between his lips. ‘Not long now,’ he said.

  Running water.

  My mouth burning and prickling, my throat closing.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Gabriel harshly.

  ‘You can,’ said Dan.

  They came near, we were rocked by their approach. Skip sniffed and gulped.

  ‘They lit a fire,’ murmured Dan.

  ‘It’s all right, Jaf.’ Tim smiling.

  It was going dark. Good to have smoke in the nostrils, and a small dancing light.

  He held the cup to my lip. ‘A sip,’ he said.

  Thickening blood, rich.

  I drank and lay back with my eyes wide open, looking up at the sudden night sky. A hot cooking smell of meat rose upon the air and an exquisite pain burst under my tongue. The stars were low. When I lived in Bermondsey I used often to be hungry. I would walk along bankside to Southwark to smell the hot dinners roasting in the ovens of the Anchor. It’s a kind of eating, standing in the street drawing in a thickening smell of juices. The river slapping bankside in Southwark, sweet grey Southwark across another sea, across a continent, across the distance between me and the blaring stars.

  ‘It’s just meat,’ Dan said to Gabriel, but Gabriel shook his head. He was humming very low and deep in his throat, staring with huge eyes straight ahead. But he had to eat in the end. Who could not? He was a big man, but he’d turned into a stick. When he did eat, it was with fury and concentration and heavy breathing. Dan passed me a thick slice of charred meat, tender as thin jelly in the middle, running with pink juices. I sucked and my mouth overflowed. I was dripping, drooling, long trails pouring down the front of me as if I was a baby.

  ‘Need a bib,’ I said, and we laughed. All of us dripping and drooling, our stomachs cawing and churning.

  We ate our fill and the captain ordered an extra ration of water for each man. He said there was more meat for tomorrow, they were stowing it in the boxes our tack had been in and it should do well enough for a little while. And then the lights were gone and we all lay down. I kept seeing John Copper’s face.

  Having eaten well, we slept well, a boatload of us snoring away, and in the morning I woke with his face still in my eyes and a snake in my belly, coiling. Bile in my throat. Still hungry as ever.

  ‘Here,’ said Dan, ‘drink.’

  The sun was already high. Simon was lighting a fire with a few bits of thin stick and some tightly coiled strips of rag. Had to cook what was left fast, he said, or it’d go off. Some already had. The captain was hovering over a pail of offal that was turning green.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  ‘Chuck it over,’ said Simon.

  Over it went.

  ‘How long can you keep that going?’ The captain nodded at the fire.

  Simon made a wry face. ‘Ten minutes. Longer but …’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Depends how many days.’

  Wilson was feeling seedy and was lying down with a cold rag on his head, his dark brown face shiny with sweat. Dag, sitting up groggily in the stern of the boat, picked constantly at his swollen eyelids. His face was as gawkily skull-like as ever, but his legs and arms had turned into fat pink hams, and were spotted here and there with angry red boils. I had boils too, big flaming things that raged – one behind my knee, one inside my thigh and the worst one on the back of my neck.

  ‘You know, it’s funny,’ said Tim, ‘I feel hungrier than ever now.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the way of it,’ said Dan. ‘Don’t fret, we’ve plenty for a good ten days.’

  We got a strip of meat for breakfast, along with our tack. I made mine last a long time. Dan hummed a tune, lolling back against the prow, arms slung across the wood. When I caught his eye he winked. ‘All’s well, Jaf,’ he said. ‘All’s fine and dandy.’

  Sometimes still the captain and Dan would put their heads together and conference, as if there was anything to be done, but very little was going on any more in the way of navigation. Skip grinned and mumbled, sometimes laughed in a weary way. Tim cursed and swore. Gabriel muttered prayers, a wistful, rhythmic humming in my ears. Simon simply wasn’t there. His body was, of course, but he never played his fiddle any more and hardly spoke or bothered to move unless he had to. He hardly looked up to see when a shark stalked us for a time, or when a crack of thunder sounded in the west, or when silent lightning clamoured in an empty sky. Dag chewed his nails though there was nothing left of them. I thought of Ish
bel’s awful hands. Poor Ishbel. What hunger she must have had to eat herself like that. Very painful it must have been. I saw her clear then, and another huge kick of home got me, the Highway, the Docks, me and she and Tim, street Arabs running about.

  ‘Do you remember?’ I asked Tim.

  ‘Of course,’ he said as if he could read my mind. Then he leaned forward and grinned and ruffled my hair. ‘Little Lascar, is it?’ he said.

  Heat pressed down, making it hard to think.

  ‘Hear that?’ said Skip.

  ‘What is it?’

  Gabriel laughed shortly. ‘Now we’re all mad,’ he said, and went back to praying.

  ‘Listen.’

  It wasn’t really a sound. More the vibration in your ears when a thousand miles of emptiness presses on them. More a sense of the elements putting us in our place.

  ‘Look out there,’ said Dan. He put his arms round me and Tim. ‘My boys,’ he said, and tears ran from the brown corners of his small sad eyes. ‘My boys, I’ll take you home safe. One way or another. Didn’t I promise old Jamrach I’d bring his boys safe home?’

  Something’s happening. The sea is changing. Strangeness, like twilight or weather, falls upon the earth.

  ‘Children,’ Dan Rymer said, tears in the wrinkles of his face.

  ‘How old are you, Dan?’ I asked.

  He grinned. ‘Sixty-two,’ he said, ‘last time I looked.’

  ‘You’re very old,’ Tim said.

  Dan laughed. ‘The old man of the sea!’

  The sea didn’t care. We were nothing.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Dag.

  ‘Shh!’ The captain covered his eyes.

  ‘Hold hands, boys.’ Dan said. ‘We face this thing together.’ He was wings, we huddled under. I heard sound above the clouds, one voice or many, impossible to tell: a human, animal thing, many-stringed, childlike, wild as a crying baby. Nothing wilder than that.

  ‘Hold hands,’ he said.

  Tim grabbed my hand. His face in mine, wild-eyed, smiling. ‘Jaffy,’ he said, ‘old Jaf.’