‘She is there,’ said Jack.
I could not remember Heron giving any kind of an order, yet we had, as one, ceased in our efforts of rowing, and were occupied in keeping the whaleboat as steady as we could. I was able once more to turn my head and observe Jack, just in the very moment he drew my American harpoon back over his shoulder and hurled it almost straight down, spear-like, with the line diving after. It slipped into the whale like a needle into leather. I saw a tendril of blood that seemed to spiral upwards into the air and hang there, and, with that, the black flesh was gone. Jack took the second harpoon, pointing it uselessly at the empty waves—and tossed it in to sink.
‘Why did he do that?’ I said, but no one responded. I said, ‘He threw the second harpoon away!’
Heron made a dismissive gesture with his hand, then winced apologetically, and made the same gesture once again, but more politely.
Cook whispered to me, ‘The two irons are fixed to the same line, Mr Fox,’ and I perceived his meaning as the line whispered alive, drawn along by the whale. It whipped, vibrating, back around the loggerhead aft and over the shear, through the chocks and out, humming with friction. The second harpoon would necessarily have been dragged along with this line, and gone over the side in any case, causing us some injury as it clanked by.
Byrne shoved a bailing bucket urgently into my hands. There was smoke rising from the wood where the line thrummed over it, and I leant over the side to scoop seawater and pour it over that point of heat and friction. Steam rose into my face. Delightfully warm.
‘Keep it coming!’ shouted Heron. ‘It will burst into flame if you do not!’
I kept it coming.
‘Watch your fingers,’ said Cook. ‘It’ll chop ’em off.’ And indeed, the line was singing into the water, quick as a switch.
Heron had abandoned his sweep oar and taken the lance. I was suspended between quiet yearnings that we might catch the whale, and also that we might not.
The miracle-whale sounded. The line made chase.
I RESIGN
I reached my ears to the bottom of the sea and heard the great pounding of the whale’s heart, and I shot my eyes down, but it was too dark to see. I thought of the great frilled serpent that lived in the black river now so far behind me, and shuddered with dread of the million unseen creatures now swimming and writhing and eating one another below.
In the isolation of the fog, our efforts seemed to me ponderous and strange. I felt as though I had stepped for a moment outside my body, like slipping quietly outside to take the air in the midst of a hot and lively party. I was in this way removed from my own actions, and watched myself leaning over the side to bring water in the bucket, pouring it over the line on the bow and releasing steam, over and over again. From far away, Heron told me to leave off and return to my oar. Slowly, slowly, my body and spirit were drawn together once again. Lurking provocatively at the edge of consciousness was the notion that together we were chasing a fantasy, and our undertaking was that of children at play. We exchanged glances even as we shouted.
Heron lunged forward to Jack’s place, and it was like he was wading through melting snow. I had thought his eyes blue, but I did not know they were Electric. Jack drifted aft to the sweep oar. Heron’s smart frockcoat caught on the chock, got under the line and was ripped half from his body. He made no sign of having noticed. We heaved on the oars and the whaleboat shot after the line, skimming fast as a dart across the waves. Heron’s lance rattled. The prevailing silence was like a force twining amongst us. For the clatter of the lance, and every creak of an oar, and every pant and gasp of a man, the silence parted, briefly, and closed again. Heron’s voice was muffled: ‘Quickly! Quickly, now, men!’
All at once the tension in the line collapsed, and it slowed and sagged.
‘Heave!’ cried Heron. Then, as if noticing that each of his vocalisations was sucked back into the quiet as it left his mouth, he ceased to speak for a time.
We worked in interdependent harmony, like fingers upon two hands. I rowed hard, my nerves popping. My shoulders were heavy, even as my skin fair rippled with sensation. We would catch the whale, or not, we would tow it in, or not, and the world would continue, going this way or that, until I died, and then it would go on anyway without me.
Somewhere in Norfolk, a fair-haired girl was forgetting me.
The line moved loosely along the boat.
‘We ought to have brought Tam, so that he might learn,’ Jack said. ‘He is an able little hand, and stays out of one’s way. We ought to have brought him for wetting the line.’
‘It would be wasted,’ murmured Pendle. ‘Whaling is a dying trade.’
Just as he spoke, the line slowed again and went slack, swaying with the boat.
‘There! There!’ shouted Heron. ‘Pull!’
He threw his arm back and thrust his lance down into the sea. There was a spurt of blood and he wrested the lance back, screaming laughter, showing his bloodied face. He seemed all eyes then, blue and red. ‘Hot blood, lads!’ His frockcoat was in tatters. ‘Once more!’ he cried. ‘Once more and she’ll be ours!’ The fog was thinning at last and sounds penetrated more sharply. We sped on and, almost all at once, rushed into a cold clear seascape, with waves stretching away, glittering in the sun, towards a crisp horizon. Hair and beards went horizontal.
‘Aha!’ cried Cook, above the wind. ‘Now we’ll have her!’
‘Is there a calf?’ wheezed Pendle. He was red and straining.
‘No, no, no calf,’ said Heron, who was bouncing from foot to foot, scanning the water covetously, the lance poised over his shoulder. ‘Just the lady, just the lady.’
There was a laboured plume, quite close. Heron lunged again. ‘Fuck it! Excuse me. Missed her. Pull hard! To starboard, to starboard!’
Again a hearty stab, and again. ‘I have it!’
The manila line floated in loops and coils. A brief slick of troubled blood beaded and sank. The miracle-whale sounded once more and the manila was tugged slowly down.
‘Steady now,’ said Heron.
The water was grey-green and opaque, which was an appropriate representation of the quality of my Understanding in that moment. Due north, the American’s whaleboat scurried its oars like a brown beetle. I could not discern faces at that distance; the American’s long silhouette was poised at the sweep oar, but the men seated below him could not be distinguished. My Cannibal William O’Riordan was the exception, for his great broccoli of hair was weaving wildly in the wind. There was one other boat about somewhere. Perhaps it was still searching in the fog hanging heavy behind us, south-west, like a curtain over the land. There was a distant shout from the American. With that, the far boat pulled towards us.
‘How shrewd is a whale, do you think, O’Riordan?’ asked Cook.
‘Shrewd enough,’ said the old man.
‘Shrewd is as shrewd does,’ said Pendle. ‘It’s a buggerin’ fish.’
The men directed their remarks with an unnatural attitude, frozen quite still, eyes fixed upon the ocean, glancing nowhere.
‘How does it know to come here—just here, of all the seven seas—year in, year out, with its wee ones, if it ain’t passing wise?’ asked Cook.
‘If it was wise, it wouldn’t come,’ said Byrne.
‘If it were wise,’ said the old man.
‘It is wise,’ said Jack. ‘For it’s not coming in numbers anything near as once it did.’
‘This ain’t Heron’s most beloved subject of talk,’ said Byrne.
‘Heron cannot even hear us,’ said Pendle. ‘He’s elsewhere in his thoughts.’
We all looked back over our shoulders at Heron in the bow. He was motionless; one leg was propped on the larboard bench nearest him. He gripped the lance in his right hand, speckled with blood, and his left shielded his eyes as he scanned the water.
‘Sir,’ said Pendle.
Heron did not move.
‘I resign,’ said Byrne.
‘Watch the fucking water, as eve
ry other soul in this boat but the two of you is doing,’ said Jack. ‘I grow weary of your waggery.’
‘Oh do you, my lad?’ asked Pendle.
Heron stirred at last, though only to tell us to be ready.
‘All eyes on the water, men,’ Heron said, still distracted. ‘We might see her at any moment. She cannot stay below for long, when she is grievous hurt.’
Jack laughed aimlessly to himself.
‘Yes, my friend?’ asked Byrne. ‘Do share the jest. If it ain’t too waggish for us.’
But the conversation had exhausted itself. The men fell silent. We gazed out with our wet little eyes, foolishly, as if they were any match at all for the unplumbed vastness around us. The water bounced us like babes on Mother’s knee. Gulls cried. The American’s whaleboat heaved within easy shouting distance.
‘You’ve pierced the fish?’ cried the American.
‘Aye, we have her,’ responded Heron. ‘She’s stuck well.’
The American signalled that his men were watching.
Cook seemed to think he saw something, perhaps, and half raised an arm, then dropped it again.
‘Is that something?’ he asked O’Riordan.
‘Aye, perhaps.’
‘There—see?’
We were all squinting.
‘I see nothing, Cook,’ said Byrne.
‘There,’ Cook insisted, standing, pointing.
‘Bloody well sit down, man,’ said Heron. ‘You’re rocking the boat.’
‘’Tis nothing,’ said Woolley.
Cook sat, unsatisfied. After a moment’s pause, he said, ‘It’s her.’
‘No, it ain’t—’
‘Look! Only look! O’Riordan saw it!’
‘O’Riordan said perhaps,’ said Jack.
We strained, tense.
‘There!’
I followed his finger. A blank patch of waves. Then, out of nowhere, apparently: the curving back, hanging suspended and still.
‘Larboard! Pull to larboard!’ Heron bellowed, but we were already pulling on our oars.
Jack leant on the sweep oar as we heaved and the craft swung and flew. The American pursued. The difficulty had gone out of our endeavour for me; my shoulders no longer throbbed with pain, but instead felt like powerful coils. Jack laughed again, in the icy spray and wind. My thoughts were swept cleanly out of my head. In that wildness, I felt I would be content at that pursuit all day, sighting the whale and flying after it, and me sitting amongst good honest men—or good enough, honest enough—and my troubles smaller because farther away back on that distant shore I could not even see.
The whale seemed a great slug. It was moving, crawling through the water away from us, but continued along the surface. The distance between the whaleboat and the whale shrank fast. Such a spirit of joy I felt that I hoped the creature would dive, and we would be compelled to fly in another direction.
The boat spun too close to the great black back and was bumped hard. Jack and Heron staggered, all laughed.
‘She’s got spirit in her yet!’ shouted Byrne.
Heron lanced the waves wildly. The creature had gone.
The American’s boat pulled close.
‘She cannot truly sound, not hurt as she is,’ Heron assured us or himself. ‘She is about.’
In his own whaleboat, we heard the American shout for William O’Riordan to ship his oar and take his place forward with the harpoons. ‘If we see her, we shall pierce her,’ he called to Heron.
‘Aye, good,’ called Heron. ‘Put some distance between us, man. Let us cover a greater area. Pull north.’
The boat receded.
‘We shall have her before them,’ murmured Heron. ‘She’s close, she’s hurt, and she’s ours.’
Indeed, the whale rolled her side above the water not even half a cable-length away south-west, which was aft, back where the air was thicker and where somewhere in the fog there was land and the station. I perceived that no other man than I had yet seen her. I remained silent and watched her labour a time and sink.
The great tail came up and then the others saw her, first Woolley, then all. She could not stay down, it seemed; her sleek head bobbed up and the plume sputtered.
‘Hard about, Jackie!’ shouted Heron. ‘What are you standing there for? Hard!’
Jack gave a silent and mighty pull on the sweep oar and we rowed, swinging the boat hard to larboard and shooting off anew.
The whale writhed, sank and rose. At Heron’s command, we heaved and held on the oars. The boat sidled up to the whale and bumped her, and she bumped us. The American’s boat appeared once more, and we heard his growing cries.
‘There ain’t a call for another iron,’ said Byrne. ‘Stockworth ought to come forward with the lance.’ I gathered Stockworth was the American’s name. ‘Mr Heron!’ called Byrne. ‘The lines will grow tangled if we introduce another harpoon!’ Heron did not hear, or else chose to ignore him. ‘Death throes!’ he cried. ‘This is it, men. Here it is.’
Cook excitedly uttered some nonsense about calling for the priest.
‘Silence now,’ said Heron, steadying the lance.
The whale presented her harpooned flesh; the instrument was indeed hooked well, and the line looped and trailed about her in the troubled waves. Even then, at the moment of crisis, Jack and I exchanged a quick glance, to indicate the sentiment, Well, fancy that. It is a good harpoon, after all. I observed its handle jutting out, swinging first above and then below the water, and felt the phantom shape of it in my palm. My fingers clenched on the oar.
The American with his whaleboat was close, then, and I imagined I could hear the hard breathing of William O’Riordan, who took aim, tense and certain.
‘William O’Riordan is a very able harpooner,’ said Jack. ‘Abler, perhaps, than I myself.’ A sudden and visible jolt of competition gripped Jack. ‘Mr Heron!’ he called. ‘You must prevent O’Riordan from harpooning the fish!’
‘Aye,’ said Pendle. ‘It will become a fine mess. Bring Stockworth forward with the lance.’
I did not care about a fine mess. I willed the whale to sink once more into invisibility.
In the far boat, William O’Riordan flung the harpoon sharp and sure towards the whale’s side, but the whale indeed vanished below, and the harpoon sliced into empty water. ‘Ha!’ cried Jack. Hand over hand, O’Riordan pulled the harpoon back. He shook salt water from the cold iron.
There was a mighty shock to the whaleboat and Jack’s knees failed. He buckled and was flung from his feet. My own oar was wrenched from my fingers by the same great force, and I found myself cradling the prostrate Jack. Someone’s fingers were pulling at my shirt. I looked about wildly.
‘Where is she?’ shouted the American from afar. ‘Hold steady, we’ll find her!’
Woolley and Heron were rolling about in the bilge, somehow. An enormous spout showered us and there was a second great crash. Jack’s hands scrabbled uselessly to gain a hold. He gripped my flesh for a moment—soft muscle—a wet shoulder. I caught a glimpse of the elder O’Riordan’s bare feet, of Pendle’s head. Wood splintered, and next I was in a tangle of flesh and cloth in the ice-cold sea.
It had never been a dream at all.
NO ONE WILL GIVE ME A STRAIGHT ANSWER IN THIS PLACE
We have quantified time by dividing it up into the convenience of hours and minutes and seconds, but we do not know—or at least we do not generally know—perhaps Mr Newton knew—anything at all about its innate qualities. How is it that a moment is finished almost as soon as it begins when spent in the company of a loved one, but the same span stretches and drags when we are in pain or peril? This is a phenomenon so woven into the fabric of our days that I had never before thought to question it, although when I form it into words, it does seem something the Scientists must have pondered.
There was a man clutching and scrabbling at me, pulling me down, and a great pressure was building inside my chest. I saw a flash of the man’s face distorted in animal frenzy,
and it seemed a dreadful oil painting I could examine at my leisure. It was the amiable Cook. His eyes were bulging and red, and his mouth, so close to me, an enormous cavern jutting with sharp white rocks. His hair speared from his head this way and that. I was thrashing my legs in the wildest of gavottes, preoccupied with a dread of the whale rising beneath me and swallowing me, and the need to rise myself, and the desperate need to breathe. Yet Cook wished to wrestle with me! His ghastly face was suspended before me, growing huger and huger until I could see my own scream reflected in his pupils. Outwardly, it must have been seconds, but inwardly, this moment extended into infinity.
My fur overcoat was a further hindrance, and I slipped my arms from its capacious sleeves. Cook had it in great fistfuls, which caused a strange scene indeed: when I let it go, he took it, and it was very much like he was my servant, helping me from it, and would swim away and hang it somewhere discreet. He wrestled with it a moment, and then seemed to become aware I was not in it, and let it go.
Our heads burst above the surface. I attempted to shout at him to be still and calm, but I could only gasp in a ragged breath as he clasped me urgently once more. We plunged under once again, and as Cook was dragging me down, I was dragging him up—he had me by the hair, and I had him by the rope he wore as a belt—and therefore we moved neither up nor down, which is in accordance with some Physical Law or other. I thought, very clearly, that if I lived, I should buy a book of the works of Mr Newton and understand them once and for all. I would scour his Indices for mention of words like Suspension, and Time, and perhaps Prisms, and master the physical world in which I was then struggling to live.
In that state of Scientific suspension, Cook had become some beast frantically casting about in an alien medium for something, some gift of purchase, some intuition of direction. Now it seemed to me that he was spinning and spinning in place, but still somehow holding me with an unshakeable firmness. My breath, which I had been holding once again, jumped like a living thing from my lips, and a great stream of silver bubbles spiralled before my eyes. They seemed faceted like jewels, and I saw long-familiar faces in each of a million surfaces.
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