The Hunger

by David Rees

  “And Ty?”

  “His doors of perception never needed to be cleansed. So the popular judgement is that he’s not right in the head.”

  “I wish he was here with us.”

  “I do, too.”

  “Would you like to make love with him?” Michael asked. “Wouldn’t you be jealous?”

  “No. I’d be doing it with you and him together.”

  Anthony began to laugh, but stopped; it hurt. “Blake says somewhere ‘Let the priests of the ravens of dawn no longer, in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor pale religious lechery call that virginity that wishes but acts not. For every thing that lives is holy.’ ”

  “You can only wish where Ty is concerned,” Michael said. He was worried. Discussing Blake or their future in America was avoiding reality — Anthony’s illness, though he did not think it was typhus: the doctors had reassured him a little. But Anthony had visited the O’Learys less than a week before; the last surviving members of that family were dying. If someone infected you, the symptoms soon appeared. A week gone, and you were safe. Nevertheless…

  “Is there more water?”

  “You have drunk every drop.” Michael went to the door. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  No one in the cabins or on the decks would let him have any. People looked at him as if he was mad; they laughed or swore, and told him to go to the Devil. The sailor who had spoken to him the previous night tapped him on the shoulder. “I’m watching you,” he said. “You’re after something. What is it?”

  “Water.”

  “So … your friend with the fever has drunk his share?”

  “Yes. And mine too.”

  “I could give you some.”

  Michael smiled, but he did not relax. This man, he was certain, was not to be trusted. “I would be grateful,” he said.

  “How much do you want?”

  “A ration? Six pints.”

  “Now that’s a lot. Though … it could be done. It would cost you.”

  “I have the money.”

  The sailor laughed. “I don’t want your money. I’ll tell you.” He leaned forward, and whispered in Michael’s ear. Michael drew back, furiously angry; he raised an arm as if to hit the man in the face, but thought better of it. “You’ll come round to the idea,” the sailor said.

  Michael stared after him. The first he’d ever met other than Anthony: so the two of them were not unique. Of course they were not; there had been men he knew of in history, in literature, and Anthony had told him of those he had encountered in London and in India. But they had never seemed quite real to Michael, certainly not as real as himself and his lover, happily marooned on the isolated island of Eagle Lodge. Now he had seen one in the flesh.

  He did not think, as Miranda did, “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in’t!” because to do what had been proposed would be the act of a whore, the use of his body for material gain ― even if that gain was not for his but for Anthony’s benefit. He was, however, surprised to find himself suddenly swept by a huge thrill of sexual desire, quite unlike anything he had ever felt for Anthony: it was much more basic, much more animal.

  I am irredeemably wicked. Then: I am not! Self-loathing is as contemptible as self-satisfaction. He shook his head in disbelief. Water. There was no escaping it; he would have to go down into the hold and ask someone there.

  What he could see was skin and rags, no scrap of room, no inch of the wood of the floor without heads, torsos, arms, thighs. It seethed, was in constant motion like maggots on rotting bacon, and the skin was the sickly yellowish white of candle wax. The smells ― of stale food, bad breath, vomit, clothes and bodies unwashed for months, piss, shit. ― made him retch, was fouler even than the stink of slimy, putrefying potatoes in a blackened field. The babel: clanging tones of argument, whines of pain and suffering, cackles of laughter, squawks of recalcitrant children, shrieks, hoots, groans; all that soft, melodious Irish lilt stirred into a vile cacophony that pierced his ears, dizzied his head.

  His sense of repulsion was almost hatred. No, he would never be an angel like Anthony washing the feet of the destitute; he was a faulty man with virtues and vices that were not outstanding, a snob like his mother. Did he hate them, or hate what had made them like this? He was not sure he could distinguish. What he longed for was never to go down into that hold, never to be of them.

  But he went down.

  And discovered the charity he couldn’t find in the cabins. He begged a little here, a little there, and eventually secured six pints. “Don’t ask us again for God’s sake,” they all told him. “We have not enough as it is. But… for the crust of a loaf we’d spare a few drops.” He returned to the deck, humility in him now, not hatred, but still with an iron determination not to be of them, not to be reduced to that.

  “You’ve been years.” Anthony said. “I’m sorry to be… peevish. But I was imagining you’d gone for ever. I think… I’m delirious.”

  “It wasn’t so easy to get,” Michael answered. He dampened a handkerchief, and wiped Anthony’s face. Then kissed him. “I love you,” he said. “Imagining me gone for ever! The nonsense of it!” Anthony drank a glass of water in seconds, then another. This quietened him; he seemed drained rather than restless.

  “I’m drowsy. I think I’ll try to sleep.”

  “I’ll stay here and watch you.”

  “No, no, you go and cook; you’ve only eaten soup today.”

  A sudden lunge of the ship sent Michael and the glass flying across the cabin, and almost threw Anthony out of bed. The ship slowly corrected itself, then lurched again.

  “A storm?” Michael said.

  “What is it like outside?”

  He opened the door and stared: no reassuring sunset this evening; dull, rushing clouds, black on the horizon. He was pushed to the rail by the movement of the ship. He gazed down at the sea, a cold deep green; it rose and fell alarmingly, sudden yawning hollows, then horse-back hills of water. Spray dashed into his face. Returning to the cabin was like heaving himself up rocks.

  “There’s a bucket in one of the trunks, the large one over there,” Anthony said. “I think I’m going to vomit. I don’t understand; I sailed to India in a worse sea than this, and I wasn’t sick once.”

  “And all you’ve eaten is soup! There is nothing to bring up!” He found the bucket and put it beside the bed.

  “You must cook your dinner,” said Anthony. “Do it now before the storm makes it impossible.”

  Cooking was so difficult that many people had decided not to bother, which at least meant Michael could get near the stove. It was not easy to keep the pan steady on the iron bars, however, and several times the lurching was so fierce he was almost flung into the flames. He chewed his meal half-cooked, and ate his vegetables raw. He felt unwell himself, but it wasn’t fever, just sea-sickness. The best thing to do, he decided, was to be still, so he went back to the cabin and climbed into bed. Anthony was asleep. Michael lay awake for hours, listening to the deluge of rain that was now lashing the ship. Fragile, helpless specks humans were, he thought; he and Anthony now just as fragile and helpless as the stinking crowds in the hold. His stomach churned.

  THE storm lasted two days. No damage was done; no lives were lost. But for forty-eight hours Michael felt he had absolutely no control over his fate, nor any trust in those to whom he had, temporarily, surrendered that control, the captain and the crew. The ship was a frail, defenceless thing, a shell containing a few hundred terrified men, women and children who were just statistics, a list of the dead to readers of newspapers next month. It shook, veered, yawed, without sense, without pattern; impossible to know if it would lift, slide sideways, plunge ― or split apart. Being thrust up an endless mountain of water was the least nerve-wracking kind of motion, the inevitable drop down the other side the worst.

  The rain was torrential. Everything on the ship was wet, every person chilled to the bone. The one dry place
was in bed. Cooking was out of the question, nor did he want to cook: he was too sea-sick. He ate a few dusty oatmeal cakes. His only ventures out of the cabin were to the latrines, and to find water for Anthony. On the first evening, a woman in the hold gave him some ― a brackish liquid it turned out to be ― but on the second nobody would give him or sell him any, or even exchange it for food.

  Anthony’s condition was worse. The vomiting was frequent now though he had swallowed nothing but water, and the fever was acute: he was delirious most of the time, imagining, as far as Michael could judge from what he was saying, that he was in India drinking in the officers’ mess, or dodging bullets in some fracas in Afghanistan. Occasionally his limbs twitched violently, or he would leap out of bed and try to rush onto the deck: Michael had great difficulty in holding him, for, ill though he was, he was sometimes possessed by an almost demonic energy. They did not sleep together now; Michael spent the nights on one of the trunks, wrapped in a blanket.

  The doctors still refused to give an opinion on what the sickness was, or when Anthony would recover. To Michael’s often asked question of “Is it typhus?” they said, wearily, that they could not tell yet.

  No one would let him have any water on that second evening because a number of people had become ill, mostly in the hold, and every drop was therefore precious. “Ship fever,” Dr Moylan called it, and when Michael asked how it differed from the black or the yellow varieties, the answer was vague in the extreme, as if the doctor didn’t really know. There were too many cases now, he said, to move into the steerage; they would have to suffer where they were. He shrugged his shoulders, as if it was quite beyond his abilities.

  “But they will infect many people who are not sick at all!” Michael protested.

  “What can I do? Nothing!”

  Michael climbed out of the hold, his water cask still empty. The storm had abated, and though the deck slid and slithered underfoot, it was more or less possible to move about the ship. People were beginning to emerge into the fresh air, to dry their clothes or cook an evening meal. A thin, pallid sun was trying to push through the grey banks of cloud. “Water,” Anthony kept whispering. “Water! If you love me, water!” His lips were parched; his eyes blazed. His skin was as wet as if he had been swimming. What can I do, Michael said to himself, echoing Dr Moylan, but he did not add “nothing.” He could try stealing. Or go to the sailor? He was tempted. He hesitated a long time before he came to a decision: no.

  But the sailor came to him.

  “Still looking for water?” Michael did not reply. “Your cask is empty.” Silence. “If you meet me at the lifeboats in a quarter of an hour, I’ll fill it for you.” He grinned at the play on words, but it was lost on Michael.

  Again he had the feeling that his destiny had been snatched from his hands. But it’s not true! I have free will; there is no predestination of good and evil. His feet walked leadenly to the lifeboats; his mind ordered them to turn back. Then: it is for Anthony’s sake; for my lover. Thirst is harrowing him beyond endurance.

  “Where is the water?”

  “Afterwards.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You can call me Jack.” The sailor did nothing for a while, then, when nobody was near enough to see, he took Michael into one of the boats, laid him down and ripped his clothes off. Michael willed himself not to be stirred, but he was overwhelmed with sexual excitement, with desire for this huge brute of a man. this gorilla. It was his first experience of sex without love. He shrank inside himself, shut his head off completely, indignantly refusing to kiss or to be kissed. But those great paws of hands fingering him all over, the teeth biting his nipples, the cock fucking him: the sensation thrilled him beyond anything he had ever dreamed of. Orgasm was an explosion of light.

  As he returned to the cabin, his cask now full (Jack had stolen the water from the ship’s supplies), Michael found he was shaking. Not with guilt, remorse, or disgust: just the shock of total animal arousal and satisfaction. What can I say of myself; what kind of a man am I? But the questions flew out of his head when he opened the cabin door. Dr Coffey was feeling Anthony’s pulse. He drew the blankets back, baring the skin to below the hips. There were red blotches on the stomach and the chest. The face was swollen, purple in colour, the eyes now puffy. The doctor said “Typhus.”

  “No!” Michael screamed. “No! No, no, no! NO!!” His legs folded, and he sank down to the floor.

  THEY slept a drugged sleep that night, Anthony heavily sedated, but Michael with a smaller dose, just enough to calm him. The hour before he slept his thoughts were clear and his body not tense. The implications of what kind of a man he was now seemed entirely different: could he survive at all? Was there existence after Anthony? Typhus was death. But himself alone was unimaginable; it had never, since he met Anthony, occurred to him as a possibility. Anthony-and-Michael had been the sole point and purpose. Whatever reason could there be for going on? The direction the ship was pursuing was of no consequence now; America, or back to Galway, Greenland, the South Pole: it didn’t matter. It was just a ludicrous, long, long fools’ errand.

  Ironically, it answered the problems of what had happened in the lifeboat. Michael Tangney as a sentient, thinking being, a mature, sane, balanced human able to make choices, was not involved; merely some bit of Michael Tangney, animal, a part of himself as unnecessary as bits of the body from our antediluvian ancestors are unnecessary left-overs. If he needed to do it again to obtain water, he would; if he wanted to gratify an urge, he would. It was of the utmost insignificance. Everything significant was here in this room: this wonder of a man, whose like he would never see again, nearing a stupid, meaningless, very painful death.

  I don’t think I can continue, he said to himself. Do I have to? Nothing is important any longer. There are no priorities ― except to alleviate his suffering, do everything that is required, be with him to the end.

  Five days passed, all more or less exactly alike. The ship ploughed on in seas neither rough nor calm; it rained, and the sun shone or did not shine. The fever patients in the hold grew in number, and the smell from below decks contaminated the whole ship. Michael was aware of it, but took little notice. He earned his extra water at nightfall and took little notice of that, either; the usual sensations tingled him and orgasm followed. There was none of the previous excitement; he was merely enduring a function, one of the day’s tasks, like going to the latrines.

  People nursing a loved one in the terminal stages of illness sometimes experience a sense of detachment that causes a mountain of guilt, but which they cannot avoid: this man or woman is no longer central to their lives, is not a person now; he or she is too hideously changed. Is unrecognizable. Perhaps it is an inbuilt mechanism to help us cope with grief or loss, in a way the start of coming to terms with inevitable truth. So it was for Michael.

  This Anthony was unrecognizable. The face became so swollen and so dark ― the colour deepened from purple to bluish black, like ink ― that it wasn’t Anthony’s face at all. The stench of the disease was utterly revolting. Michael thought of Anthony sweating after some bout of physical exercise, the very faint but pleasing odour that was his skin and no one else’s, his smell just after making love; but be couldn’t join these memories to this putrefying stink that was all the world’s foetid hovels, prison cells and ships’ holds concentrated together in this one little room. The voice, too, was altered beyond imagining: the male resonance that shouted or laughed, or just rose and fell in the duets of their conversations was a cracked, jangling gruffness. “Water!” was all it could croak.

  There were no lengthy emotional scenes, no memorable last words. Anthony for most of the time was so intent on dealing with pain that he could not communicate at all, but there were a few lucid moments, and in one of them he asked Michael to read aloud. The choice of book ― the Bible ― came as a surprise and the book of the Bible equally so ― not a homily to comfort a man at the point of death, but a love song, the Song of Solom
on. “ ‘By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. The watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said, saw ye whom my soul loveth? It was but a little I passed from them, and I found him whom my soul loveth: I found him, and would not let him go.’ ”

  “My life’s story,” Anthony said. He searched for Michael’s hand and gripped it. Michael sat there, tears streaming down his face.

  On the fifth evening, when he returned from his duties in the lifeboat, his water cask full to overflowing, he found that Anthony was dead.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  _____________________________________

  WE therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body (when the sea shall give up her dead) and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.”

  “It was always glorious,” Michael whispered. “Never vile.”

  It was a Protestant burial, there being ― remarkably ― no Roman Catholic priest on board. Not that Michael was concerned. But the relatives of the six others who shared the same funeral obsequies felt it keenly. The deaths, from typhus, had occurred in the hold.

  The long fool’s errand continued ― how could it be otherwise? ― in calm seas and warm sunlight. Michael withdrew into himself, nursing his grief. As nothing mattered it didn’t matter what he did, though he found he was choosing one course of action rather than another: to eat, walk round the ship, or stay in bed and mope. He angrily repelled Jack’s advances, much to the sailor’s bewilderment. “There is room for me in your cabin now,” Jack said.