by Carol Birch
His head fell down on his chest and he was gone.
Whether it was the blood horror of it I don’t know, but this death disturbed me more than all the others, more than I can say. I saw that sight as you see a demon in your worst nightmare, but I didn’t wake up. I palmed my eyes and pressed them hard, feeling sick. My eyes burned with wanting to cry, but they couldn’t. There was nothing there. No spare. My bones rubbed against one another, against the boards beneath me. There was Tim’s same old hand in mine, but they were poor things now, those hands: brown spindly sticks linked. The palms ticked with nerves.
The captain said, ‘Let’s just get on with it, shall we? We know what we’re doing …’
‘It’s not fair,’ Simon said, ‘why’s it always us has to do it just because it always happens on our boat? One of them should do it for a change.’
Oh God, not me.
‘Next time,’ the captain promised.
Close your eyes but you still must hear.
‘Dan,’ I said, ‘what’s a good way of doing yourself in?’
‘Shoot yourself,’ he replied immediately.
‘Would you give me the gun if I wanted it?’
He looked at me for a long moment. ‘Would I? I wonder? I don’t know, Jaf.’
I could smell blood, a whiff on the breeze.
Here came the cup and I drank.
‘Drink of this,’ said Dan when it was his turn, raising the cup as if it was a chalice, ‘for this is my blood, shed for thee …’
We had days of meat, and then days of no meat, and then more days of no meat. A change stirred in the sky. The sun dimmed and a chill came whispering on the air. Clouds piled up on every side, and rain fell in a soft blue-grey shimmer far away in the east. The east: coasts of the Americas. The American sailors have a song that goes: ‘Oh, say was you ever in Rio Grande, those sweet señoritas they sure beats the band …’ Black-haired bosomy girls welcoming weary sailors to soft feather beds. The wind got up. The sky flickered. We took in the sails and the wind spun us round. Our boats drifted far apart, and the rain came down all at once in a drenching torrent, icy cold, and it was laughable the way from cursing the bloody heat we were suddenly freezing to death and soaking wet. We lay to. It was dark suddenly, and there was baling to do and Gabriel couldn’t. He’d spread himself out since Skip had gone back to the captain’s boat to even things up, and now could scarcely push himself up from the boards. A great shake had come over him. Every lightning flash revealed him lying in inches of cold water with twitching legs and grinding teeth. We didn’t get to sleep till late next morning when the rain abated, and as soon as I woke I saw him sitting with his eyes closed and a look of concentration on his face. He’d gone a funny olive-green colour.
‘He won’t eat his tack,’ said Tim.
‘Gabe? You’ve got to eat.’
He didn’t react.
He never ate again after that. Hardly a drop of water passed his lips either. The wind calmed from wild to merely boisterous and we drifted on, tossing up and down. He didn’t eat, but he opened his eyes and started cursing God again.
We sang ‘The Blind Man Stood on the Road and Cried’ the night Gabriel died.
The blind man stood on the road and cried,
Oh, the blind man stood on the road and cried,
Oh, my Lord save me,
The blind man stood on the road and cried …
Round and round like that for ever. Round and round three or four times, the wispy hoary things that were left of our voices. Gabriel was singing too, his eyes closed, serene. He’d been good to me. For his life on shore and all before, I knew nothing, could remember nothing, whether I’d been told or not. But what a strange depth of knowing of him I had, suddenly in that moment. He stopped singing, opened his eyes and looked right at me with shining eyes. My heart broke. He held out his hand to me and I took it, but he had no grip. His hand was crisp and salted like a kipper.
‘Don’t go, Gabriel,’ I said with tears bursting out.
But he did. He just did, quietly, looking at me like that. He was there, then gone. No more Gabriel behind the glazing brown eyes.
‘Please, Gabe,’ I said.
I’d been light-headed for a long time, but somewhere here the feeling ran away, rushed up to the reaches of the sky. It was another world, brighter than the old, as if new-painted a second ago. Strange magic, spiriting away this one, that one, another, one more, one by one, pulling them out of their bodies. I got filled up, filled right up, all of it pouring out of my eyes and down my face. There was some beauty in it too. My shipmates. Their faces in my mind. Their voices raised in song. Their meat too, beautiful. Organ blood, thin. Clots, wonderful. Sticky, sweet and full. They were life to me. A bucket of red and brown. I can smell it, just. My nose is salted up. I have meat, my nose is running, the salt stings and I’m crying.
I don’t know what day it was when the captain’s boat went missing. Weeks anyway. Weeks. Weeks, weeks … must’ve been, because Skip had come back to us, gabbling how he had to stay awake all the time for fear they’d cut his throat.
‘They hate me,’ he said.
Over the water, the captain’s face, haggard and sad. Simon’s, empty, open-mouthed, burned near black.
‘Ah, come on, Skip,’ Tim said, ‘you’ll be all right with us. We’re all jolly boys here. Don’t bring your demons though.’
‘Not my demons. Why’s Jaf crying?’
‘Can’t think.’
It was after that, I don’t know how long.
My mind goes. Falters, flickers. Stops. Dream unfurls.
The sea changed and changed. It rained a lot of the time. Sometimes the wind blew and we were tossed about. My sores had a life of their own, the salt sting hot and white. A rime formed about their heights. Dan talked to his wife. ‘Alice,’ he said, ‘when are you going to cut my hair?’ And: ‘Do you think we should move back to Putney, Al?’
And one morning Captain Proctor’s boat was gone.
The sea was empty. We four looked and looked and said nothing. It had been a very windy night. A great breath had blown them away.
The four of us drifting. Singing. Our arms round each other, all jolly boys. Me, Tim, Dan, Skip. If it threatened storm we huddled close together, tenting our backs to shelter our fronts and faces, breathing our combined breath of sour salt bile. We still had some meat, but we had no fire. We had ribs. When we finished the meat we still had some tack and a bit of water now and then. But you can’t sing for ever. Your voice stops. You open your mouth and nothing works. A soft wheezing hiss, fragile as a dewdrop, is all, and no one hears because of the greater salt hiss of the sea. Your voice stops and your brain runs out of the top of your head and you soar very high and see from above the curving rim of the world, blue blue blue, far as the eye can see. One of Ishbel’s old songs runs in your head, the mermaid with a comb and a glass in her hand, her hand, her hand, with a comb and a glass in her hand, and her face appears, a round pale moon, very solemn, and with it the sound of a knife grating against bone or hard sinew or something. I had nothing to do with it, any of it, I was far, far away above the clouds. Her face was the knife cutting. Her face was whatever it was I was in and couldn’t get out of. At the end there would be a straight line stretching both ways for ever, and it would be the end of the sea and the lip of the last waterfall, a fall into white nothing, the foam spray of it rising to meet you long before you could make out anything of the crashing impact below. That’s where we were going, drifting, each one of us soaring high and always returning into our eyes and seeing what was there before us, facing each other. All without speaking, we four joined hands for the plunge.
One day I woke and my tongue was out of my mouth. It had turned into a creature I did not know, lazy and fat, swelling and oozing as it thrust its way out into the light through the slack hole of my mouth. My own tongue made me retch. This brought tears to my eyes, which I gratefully drank. Was then I think I saw Skip’s demon, a cloven-footed grinn
ing thing like a shadow on the sky, looking sideways at me with bright intelligent eyes full of mischief. The sky was dark, a morning of rolling black cloud, a quiver on the sky, the sea moaning. I saw it. I looked at Skip, but he was mad, sitting there grinning like his own demon and frightening me with his glare. His whole face had changed. His eyes stuck out painfully, big goggling balls above the sharp lines of his bones. When I looked back the demon had gone.
I asked for water. That is, I gestured at my mouth and made a noise with my throat, a kind of bark. But Dan said:
‘Not yet.’
What followed was a tantrum of the soul, within and completely silent. It’s not fair, I cried. It’s not fair! I didn’t do anything bad!
At last I got a little water, enough to wet my fat tongue. Dan trickled it on my lips from a cup. ‘Come on, Jaf,’ he said, ‘buck up, boy.’
Water. For a little while we could speak.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Tim said.
‘I want to go home.’ Skip hugged his sides.
Home. Hope Ma’s all right. She should be, Charley Grant’s a good sort. Home, Ma, Ishbel, never get back, never go home, never again. A burning place in my chest. Something to hold against the terror, a blanket. I’m alive, burning brightly with a head full of everything that ever was, our Bermondsey home, the Highway, the tiger, the birds, the smell of lemon sherbet.
The night returned, darker than most.
In the morning we drank again, and ate a scrap. Dan showed us what was left of the food: a square of hardtack about the size of a matchbox. We laughed at it. ‘This is ridiculous,’ said Tim, in a tone of mild exasperation. ‘Enough’s enough. Look at us.’
‘Oh, boys,’ said Dan, ‘we’re still breathing.’
We four joined hands. Skip’s face still had that gawk-eyed look on it, his tongue stuck between his teeth. Dan was a hunched brown leathery thing, shiny like a polished idol in Jamrach’s shop. God knows what I looked like, and Tim was a bony brown elf with wide blue eyes and white hair falling down around his face. Smiling. ‘This is no good,’ he said, ‘it can’t go on. No more.’
Dan said, ‘Something will happen.’
‘Don’t, please don’t tell me.’ Skip with his eyes on stalks.
Don’t bulge at me like that, I would have said if I could. His hand in mine was spiky, returning to bone.
‘Help me,’ he said.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Dan.
‘Help me.’
‘Skip, it’s—’
‘Help me help me help me …’
His bones go crunch and I look down at his hand crunching mine, our bones together.
The sea threw us up high. The sky was muddy but white at the edges. I was cold. I saw a fire in my mind, a fire somewhere blazing in a brown fug, a house, warm.
‘Hold,’ Dan said. ‘Hold tight, boys.’
‘Please,’ begged Skip.
‘Draw lots,’ said Tim.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know.’
‘No.’
‘You know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s how it’s done.’
‘No, no.’
‘Only way. You know.’
‘No.’
‘It’s sense.’
Skip on one side of me, Tim the other. Skip grips like a madman.
‘What’s happening?’ he whispered.
‘Nothing,’ said Dan. ‘Hold fast now.’
Tim laughed. ‘It has a name,’ he said.
‘You mean lots,’ Skip said. ‘Straws.’
‘We have to do something.’
‘Not yet.’
‘The way it is at sea,’ said Tim. ‘You know. It’s how it’s always been done.’
‘Where do you think they are?’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘Simon. The captain.’
No answer.
‘I think there may still be a ship.’ Dan wouldn’t give up.
‘Too late for some,’ I think I said. Thought it anyhow.
‘It could bear down on us in a second.’ He raised his grieving eyes.
‘Or not,’ said Tim, and grinned. His teeth were bleeding and his eyes were full of tears. ‘Let’s do it. Before we all go mad. We’re dead anyway if we don’t.’
Skip’s teeth chattered loudly in my ear. ‘Oh shit,’ he moaned in a terrible deep voice that sounded nothing like him.
‘Each of us equal—’
‘Oh, God,’ said Dan.
‘… lots …’
‘There’ll never be a ship,’ said Skip bleakly, ‘never.’
‘I can’t stand this any more,’ I said. ‘I’m with Tim.’
‘Wait!’ Dan cried out. ‘One more day.’
‘What’s the point?’ Tim sort of laughed, his voice high.
‘One more day.’
‘Why have you got the gun? Ain’t we equal?’
Dan put his head in his hands. The horizon soared high and dropped away. Soared high. Nothing happened for ages, just Skip’s eyes getting bulgier and more terrible. ‘There are demons,’ he said, clutching me harder. I wrenched my hand from his and hit out at him. Tim put his arms round me, both his arms. He was a lot bigger than me and I got a funny feeling I can’t explain, almost as if he was my mother or something. I didn’t want to get tearful now, it would be too hard, so I put it away in the back of me.
‘God send a ship,’ Dan said.
Which was stupid because, one way and another, enough praying had gone on in that boat to sanctify all the holy places of the earth and it had long since become plain that God didn’t answer. Not so’s the average idiot could understand anyway. You could cry ‘save me, save me’ all you liked but it wasn’t going to make any difference to what was going to happen. But we did anyway. Cried ‘save me, save me’ all in our own ways, with or without words, as you do, all morning and all afternoon, looking for a coast, a golden clime, till I felt my mind going again, and Dan took the gun out and laid it between us in the middle of our circle.
‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘You can shoot me if you like.’
All this time our mouths were steadily clagging up again. It was hours since our last drink. They frothed and gibbered revoltingly, gumming together, pulling apart with great effort to slobber forth the words. We were hideous. A light rain was coming on, silver and grey and very beautiful. Wonderfully cool on my forehead.
‘There’s rules,’ Tim said seriously.
‘Rules!’ Dan threw back his head and laughed like his old drunk self.
‘It has hooves,’ said Skip.
Dan laughed harder. You’d have thought he was sitting in the gods at the Empire.
‘Anyway, you’ve got a family and all that,’ said Tim, and that stopped him laughing and had him suddenly all dissolved in tears like a big rock toppling. He hung his head and wept softly, mouth distorted in a monkey grin.
‘Equal shares,’ said Tim.
Dan wiped his nose on his sleeve, put his face down further till his shaggy head was resting on his knees, wrapped his arms tight round himself and shook hard, and that was it again for a while, as if we could only proceed in quick bursts and long vacancies. The sting brought me out of it. It had been constant and vile for a long time but for some reason in the past hour had reached the pitch of madness, specially in the cracks of my elbows, where it raged and groaned and made me yearn for claws to tear it with.
‘Drink,’ I whispered.
The rain had stopped. My tongue would go again soon. Puff itself up like a bladder and demand air.
‘Yes, drink.’ Tim touched Dan’s arm. ‘Have to.’
Dan raised his head and looked at us with something like humour. ‘Of course,’ he whispered.
‘Equal shares,’ said Tim, reaching for the old tin cup.
Things would happen. I’d lie here and watch. If I once closed my eyes I could sleep for years and years like Rip Van Winkle and return into some other place. When the water came my way I received it as a sacrament. I ke
pt my eyes wide open. What a bright beautiful sounding world we were in, humming and shushing all around us, bobbing us here and there, cat’s paws spinning us; what a weird violet sky. There was blood in the water from someone’s mouth. Dan was still crying, and it was catching. It was the cool water on my tongue tipped me over, it was so lovely. Next thing we were all crying, but not in a bad way. It was good crying, refreshing and scouring. After we drank we put hand in trembling hand and made a circle again.
‘We must all agree,’ said Dan.
We four. We look about us, into each others’ eyes, which are amazed and dancing. Skip’s eyes are bleeding, or his tears are infected with blood, one or the other.
It’s like the songs, the stories.
‘Eight bits of paper,’ Tim says. ‘Put marks on two.’
‘Two?’
‘Has to be,’ he says, ‘second for who does the shooting. That’s how it’s done.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ I whisper.
‘We must all agree,’ Dan repeats.
‘One goes,’ Tim says, ‘or we can all die.’
Skip smears his bloody tears. He is smiling as he takes what’s left of his sketchbook from his breeches pocket. ‘Use this,’ he says. It is the last page, Horta, from inland, a whispery grey scene of rooftops, the flowers of Faial; I remember the lovely stew in the tavern and a girl sitting on some stairs. He gives the picture to Dan. It’s not large, only four or five inches square, but big enough. Dan folds it very neatly and precisely and tears it into eight small squares.
