by Louis Bayard
—’Twas the only thing in reach, Tim. Hundred knots off Barbados, we got ourselves snarled up in some rigging. Freakish business, lopped the hand right off us. Ship’s surgeon shook his head, said, Gully, you has your choice. You can waits till we reach land, or you can make do with what’s to hand. Why, sir, we said, you calls that a choice? Give us a lick of rum, fit us out with the nearest implement, and have done with it, we said.
Whatever Gully may have lost in menace, he has made up for in rather astonishing dexterity. I have seen that wrench of his toss an anchor, lower a jib, thread mooring ropes around a pier, even uncork a rather musty bottle of Madeira. And now, under the generative influence of brandy, that same appendage is very deftly turning the winch that lowers the trawling net. One might think his right hand would do just as well for such tasks, but as Gully is always the first to point out—and with great forbearance, considering how often the subject comes up—he has been left-handed from the day he met the midwife.
That idle right hand is now making a slow circling motion in the wind. The mouth has opened into a checkered smile, and through the gaps in his teeth, Gully’s hard, uncannily piercing voice delivers its Delphic pronouncement:
—Make no mistake, Gully and Tim’ll be receiving guests tonight. By God, they will. Set the table, lad, we got us company!
Kind of him to think so. To tell the truth, our partnership has not been notably successful. In three months of sporadic searching, the only bodies we’ve dredged up have been quadrupedal. A pair of hogs—enormous, marbled black and green, swollen with mud—not even the knacker would have taken them. An emaciated goat, staring wildly to each side. And one memorable night, a gelding, so heavy it actually tipped us over. I remember the razor slash of panic as I flew from the boat. My hands scrabbled for purchase and came back with nothing but air and water, and my eyes burned shut, and I might well have sunk like a boulder if the net hadn’t caught me round the wrist. The river that night was so cold I quickly lost all sensation below the chest, and suddenly, I was back in my dream, my old dream. The killing sap was rising through me, paralysing my feet and legs, wrapping me round the waist like a lover, licking my ribs into numbness….
It was Gully who, having righted the boat, thrust out one of the oars and drew me back in. I’d never seen him so put out.
—Why’n’t you tell me you couldn’t bloody swim?
Well, that was a different night—a different river, as Professor Heraclitus would say. Tonight, the job of evacuating London’s bowels has given the water a costive restlessness, and on its grumbling belly, Captain Gully and I rock, scalded by brandy, scorched by wind.
—Little squeezed for money, are we, Tim?
At such moments, Captain Gully unfailingly finds some island on the horizon on which to fasten his gaze. Doesn’t matter, of course, that there’s no island, and no horizon; he’s still staring for all he’s worth.
—That’s norm’lly when we hears from you, is all—when you’re short. Not that we mind. Always glad for a spot of company, ain’t we?
He pours himself another shot, and, without asking, pours me one as well.
—That uncle of yours getting tight with the purse strings again?
—Not exactly.
—Now, now, we’re chums, ain’t we, Tim? Blast him all you like. Defame away.
—No, it’s just that he’s laid down a condition. He wants to see me before he parts with another shilling.
—Well, damme, then! Pay the fellow a visit! What would it cost?
—Very little. Possibly nothing.
—Oh, Lor’, look at you! Pride, is it? Listen to me, lad, pride is all well and good in its place, but it don’t plug up the old bunghole, do it? People like yours truly, Tim, we can’t afford pride, can we? You think yours truly’d be working nights if he had any puh-ride?
We, you, yours truly—it can be wearying, honestly, this confusion of pronouns. I feel at times there must be at least three Captain Gullys, all badgering and quarrelling. The boat fairly founders under their weight.
—Tim, it’s the Yuletide season, now ain’t it? Why, yes, it’s a time for buryin’ them hatchets and beatin’ the…the ploughshares into swords and reflectin’ on Jesus and warn’t he good to get himself all nailed up and—
—No, not yet, Captain.
—How’s that?
—It’s only Advent. He’s just getting round to being born. He hasn’t had time for the rest.
At moments like this, he may perhaps wonder why he bothers using me to man the sculls. He has considerably better luck with the boys he hires off the Hungerford Pier, though they have a disconcerting habit of running off with the corpses’ pocket change—a risk that is significantly reduced in my case.
Leaning back, Captain Gully sucks the last fumes of incense from his pipe. His left foot beats out a dance jig as the fingertips of his right hand trail absently in the tea-brown water. The symptoms of reverie.
—Yes, my boy, a night such as this…well, it gets a chappy to thinkin’.
—Mm.
—The way we figgers it—and correct us if we’re wrong, Tim, coz Gully ain’t no accountant—
—Mm.
—The way we figgers it, a few more rounds of dredgin’, a few more investments comin’ clear…
—Mm-hm.
—Why, we’ll have saved up all we needs. Majorca bound, that’s what we’ll be.
It was thirty years ago that one of Gully’s ships moored off that remarkable island for a week’s worth of repairs. Thirty years, and in Gully’s mind, it might as well have been yesterday, the memory is so dripping and fresh. In his mind, I think, he’s already back there, dozing away the afternoons in olive groves, scrambling down ravines, climbing hulking stone towers older than man….
—Sun all the bloody day long, Tim. Nary a scrap of fog nor frost. People runnin’ ’bout in their naked God-given feet, Tim. And the women! Gully ain’t never seen such a display of pull-chritude in his livelong days. Holds your eye, they do, holds it so long you’re ablush. Not ashamed to be women, you see. Lor’, did we ever tells you about that gal, plays gee-tar with her ankles? We did? Thousand pardons. Gully’s an old bird, keeps flyin’ back to the same nest….
A fresh wind drives up from the south, but the tide draws us eastward. The water slaps and kisses our boat; the cold air scratches our knuckles. Gully’s wrench traces the outline of a woman’s leg.
—You’ll come, Tim. You’ll see. Changes a man forever.
Sweet old buzzard: can’t bear to conclude a reverie without including me in it. And why not Majorca? I sometimes ask myself. Why not? I’ve never been out of England, rarely even set foot outside of London. A brief rainy sojourn in Brighton, that hardly counts, and when I was still quite young, an expensive week of hydrotherapy at Bath, subsidised by Uncle N. Six glasses of Pump Room water a day, and many hours in the Cross Bath, cooed over by yeasty-thighed matrons. It was fall, and the sun had turned the soft limestone walls to butter, and the water made my skin tingle in a most pleasant fashion, and I remember remarking that this water had first rained down from the skies a thousand years ago and was only now filtering up through the earth’s crust, and how remarkable to think it might be carrying messages from the Romans who had built this place. And that was when the urge to travel first seized me—an urge that has yet to let go of me, though I’ve done nothing, nothing, to indulge it.
Why not Majorca?
—We’ll gets there by Holy Week, Tim. That’s the time. The whole place a-rippin’ and a-rantin’, and such cos-tooms. Colours such as you never knew existed, colours God went ’n’ forgot He made, that’s what they say.
Here is one good thing about reveries: they always leave you a little warmer than they found you. Or perhaps it’s the brandy, perhaps that’s why the palsy is draining from my limbs. I find I can lie back in the boat now, with my legs thrust out, my hands cradling my head, a pose almost as indolent as Gully’s. And even though the fog has sealed off the sky—
not even the moon can break through now—I can imagine a sky in its place. See the stars, even.
And then, all round us, the gush and plash of water are stilled. And in the splinter of silence that ensues, I see Gully’s good hand instinctively wrap itself around the winch, and I start to brace myself, too, but the boat is already bucking, lurching back and rolling me to the side and tossing Gully to his knees. And then it lurches once more, and once more, and each time we’re thrown about the flat bottom of the boat like matches in a phosphorus box, and a vagrant thought forms in my head: an earthquake…in the middle of the water….
Gully is sprawled on his belly now, but his face has the ecstatic smile one associates with martyrs. And as soon as the boat has rocked to a stop, he is up on his feet, shaking his clenched fist and howling to the sky.
—Ohh, we knowed it! We knowed it!
Breathing in short, greedy rasps, he crouches over the winch and then, after a moment of ceremonial silence, sets to cranking. But after about a dozen turns, the resistance on the other end grows so strong it threatens to snap the wrench clean off his arm.
—Well, don’t just a-lay there gogglin’, lad. Give us a hand!
Even with two of us cranking, it’s heavy going. The boat is listing sharply to port, and we have to throw our bodies all the way to starboard just to keep it from tipping. I grit my teeth against the burn in my shoulders, and the winch groans and screeches and drives needles into my blistered fingers, and I think it must be a giant we’re hauling to the surface.
When I look over the edge of the boat, I can see, rising through the brown water, the first inklings of net, no longer limp but taut with intent. And as the winch draws it higher and higher, I understand why it has cost us so much labour: stones. Stones and river sediment and dead fish, packed together in a great black bale, dense and loamy and dripping something like whale oil.
Dragging the river bottom. That’s all we’ve been doing.
I understand now that I’ve been ready to give up, ready from the moment we began pulling. I’ve been waiting only for Gully’s signal, but his eyes are still glazed with avarice, and his wrench is rotating for all it’s worth, and I don’t have the will or reason to stop on my own, so we keep cranking. And then, after another minute, Gully does stop, quite suddenly, but only to shout in my ear:
—Grapplin’ iron!
I grope for it in the darkness—a cold, scabbed hook resting on a coil of rope. Heavy brute: I have to rest it on my shoulder before I can swing it, and it takes me three swings before the hook catches in the maze of the net. And just as it does, our cargo pulls away, pulls so hard it’s all I can do not to be dragged over the side.
—Hold ’im, Tim! Hold ’im!
By now, at least two or three gallons of water have swamped the boat, and the line between us and the river has dissolved. My toes swim inside my boots, and the boots themselves gasp and swell with water, and the heels of the boots slide by slow, aching degrees along the planks below.
—Shit, it’s too much mud, Tim. Shake it out! Shake it out!
But our haul is too heavy to be shaken; I can barely keep it from sinking. With a cry of muffled rage, Gully flings himself towards the net. His wrench pierces it like a lance, and the shock of the contact makes me flinch and stagger backwards, but when my eyes spring open again, I see Gully, stretched like a footbridge between the boat and the cargo, plunging his good hand into the net’s cavity and scooping out great fistfuls of streaming black mud. There’s nothing anchoring him to the boat but those two mite-sized feet of his, and my stomach clenches when I imagine him dropping into the water, dropping face-first and then sinking like marble, and me unable to follow, and I’m just about to let go the grappling iron and rush to his aid when I hear Gully snarling over his shoulder.
—Lever him up, lad!
Acting purely on instinct now, I lower the iron until it’s lying athwart Gully’s bench, and with that fulcrum in place, I throw all my weight to the far end. The handle creaks with the strain, and the boat lists back to port and swallows another couple of gallons of water, and the water ices my hot, chapped hands, gnarls and welds them so completely to the pick I don’t think I could let loose now if I tried.
And after perhaps half a minute, our great bundle, with an almost human groan, climbs above the surface. And with it rises a measure of hope, for with each new second, the bale sheds weight, coughing up shards of fish, plumes of half-solid water. And there! Projecting from it like a buttress: mad Gully. Still anchored by his feet, still clawing his way to the prize. The mud has smeared his face, soaked him all the way to his shoulders, but he can’t be deterred, keeps pumping his arms into and out of the cavity like a furious midwife, sending up storm clouds of rock and sediment and grease.
And just then a lathe of wind catches the shrunken bundle and swings it sharply to the bow. And Gully swings with it. Torn from his perch, kicking like a spider, the great dredger disappears into the fog and then, with a roar, reemerges on the other side.
—Captain! Are you—
But I cannot finish the question. My fist, you see, is crammed in my mouth to keep me from laughing, for Gully resembles nothing so much as an outraged crustacean: his upper limbs pinioned in the net, his bandy legs adangle, his red mouth sluicing out streams of oaths.
—I’m sorry, Captain, I can’t hear you.
It’s only when he stops to draw breath that I notice that his right arm is curled around something, some knob or appendage, rendered nearly amorphous by its silt coating. I realise now what Gully’s been yelling.
—A foot! God damn you, a foot!
Snatching up the iron, I fling it one more time at the net and drag the bundle and its human barnacle back to stern. And Gully, once he’s clear of the water, loosens his grip and, with a short, satisfied grunt, drops into the boat. The impact triggers only the slightest bend in his knees, and as he once again rears up to his full five feet, he looks unaccountably large, as though transfigured by Nike.
—D’you see that, Tim? Now was that a bleedin’ horse’s foot, I ask you? By God, it bloody well warn’t.
No, indeed. But as Gully and I open the net’s cavity, my eyes keep flicking back to that protruding appendage—that strange bare peninsula, extending from its still-dark continent—and the more I study it, the more clearly I see something that Gully has, in all his excitement, missed.
I see how tiny it is.
A human foot, no question, but too small, surely, for a stoker from Jamaica Road. And when I try to imagine who could own such a foot, my mind stops me from venturing any further.
Gully, though, soldiers on.
—Who’s to say, Tim? Sod may’ve been carrying two weeks’ wages in his pockets. On his way to the pub, like. Oh, we’ll shake him head t’ foot, Tim. Such a Christmas it’ll be! And with luck like this, why, we’ll be in bloody bleedin’ Majorca by Holy Week, can you doubt it?
And just then, our cargo, stripped of its swaddling mud, plunges into the boat with the muffled, otherworldly force of a meteorite. The boat lowers to accommodate the new weight, and Gully and I, acting on the same sacerdotal impulse, remove our caps and sink to our knees. In lieu of prayers, the captain begins muttering instructions.
—Don’t pass over the shoes now. Amazing how many on ’em keeps bank-notes next to their feets. And mind, if there’s a watch, you leave it be. Just the sort of thing they trace, ain’t it? And no breakin’ the fingers, the coroners can’t abide it. If he’s got hisself a ring on, Gully has a special grease, slicks it right off.
I don’t think he’s even addressing me in particular. I think it must be the litany he goes through each time.
—And don’t be goin’ and gettin’ any of them screw-pulls. You think the police’d have any? Gorr, they’d be doin’ the same as us, and it’d be them gettin’ rich ’stead of us, is the only difference.
And now, through its vestments of mud, our haul begins to assert some of its original identity. The crook of a knee, the sw
oop of a buttock, an arm bent at the elbow—all of these point synecdochically to a larger whole, a life once lived. Funny how long one can carry on before fronting such a basic fact. Even Captain Gully seems daunted by it: his voice has dropped to an awestruck whisper.
—My, but he’s a little un, ain’t he?
Like the boy pharaohs, I want to say. The ones Mr. McReady used to show me in the British Museum. Except that instead of being fitted out for the afterworld, this one has his knees drawn up to his chest and one arm flung behind his head and a torso so contorted it seems locked in eternal recoil.
And something else: a pair of hands, curled into the form of talons.
I don’t remark the transition. All I can say is that one moment I’m crouched next to Gully, and the next I’m sprawled headlong in the boat, grubbing through the mud, wiping the dead face clear. In the dim nimbus of Gully’s lantern, I see two distended eyeballs, bleached grey and jellied over. Then a pair of water-bruised lips. And as my hands smear away the clay remnants, the bladders of the cheeks emerge from a field of purple-blue skin, skin of an ancient pallor, like the frontispiece of a medieval romance.
—Bollocks!
I turn and find Gully straddling the torso, gesturing bitterly at something I can’t quite make out—a bare leg, perhaps? a telltale declivity? I can guess his import even before he declares himself.
—A bloody girl, ain’t it?
Sore disappointed is our captain, and I should be the last to blame him. Someone of such a young and female persuasion—from such a low aquatic vicinity—how likely is she to be carrying coin or valuables? Tuppence at best, for butter and potatoes (her mother still wondering, weeks later, where she’s made off to). No, it’s a fair waste of good net, as far as Gully is concerned. Small wonder the fire has gone out of him.
—Dunno, dunno…maybe got a, a bag tied round her, like. Got a, got a change purse, p’raps…. Could be lots of places for secretin’….
But his heart’s not in it. He’s written her off, hasn’t he? Whereas to me she has become steadily more engrossing. Holding the lantern just above her head, I examine with great interest the short, blunt object that is her nose: a speckled mushroom cap, frozen in the act of tipping upwards. Nothing like the dark, aquiline version I saw on the Embankment yesterday.