“We all feel poorly. Some complains it is for lack of exsh . . . exsh . . . Oh! Hang it! Or blame it on the constant wind wish, dammit! DAMMIT! For a polar wind ish God-dammed hot and getting hotter all the time! I, for my part, blame it on my su . . . sup –”
“Supper!”
“Shhh! Suppurating cheek which ish badly inflamed, and a nasty rat bite I’ve got on the neck, which gets to hurting worse as the days pass. The others – why, they’s bitten too; the Great Babylon, scrub and scour as we do, is infested with rats and it maddens us that if we hears them scuttling all the time, and all of us bit – we never see a one of ’em!
“THAT MONKEY STINKS!” he shouted then for no apparent reason, “THAT MONKEY STINKS TO HELL!” Startled, Charlie Dee tucked his head down under the table. “Speaking of in – fah! – infested – I can see his lice from here! SET HIM DOWN!”
“He’s clean,” I said. “The Cod’s wife gives him a bubble bath each Saturday and rubs him down with lavender water. Totor told me. What happened then?”
“Time . . .” he said, shivering, “time is speeding by unstoppable. Time’s a broom bewitched, straddled by a hag. Have we been given the Devil’s red shoes to dance our lives away? Are we eating the Devil’s pudding?”
“We is!” I shouted, tremendously excited. “We is!”
“SHUT YOUR TRAP!” the sailor barked. “Each day when I awakes I try to think, but the pain in my head is too horrendous, and the hunger in my belly has me stumbling with the other fools to that charmed table.
“STOP TOYING WITH THAT CRITTER, LAD!” he growled savagely. “Set it back down on the floor or stick it in its cage. You want to hear the tale or fuss with animals?”
“But I am listening, Toujours-Là, I am! Charlie Dee’s not doing anything. Please. And then? What happened then? It’s the Ogress! I know it is she! Bel and the Ogress – one and the same!”
“Yeah,” he said. Then, in a low snarl I did not like at all: “Yeah, Slyboots! I could tell you another story. . . .” He lifted his glass to his lips and delved for the last few drops of liquor with his tongue.
“Listen to me, boy,” he hissed. “Listen at the chinks. Listen if you want to know what hides beneath the tides, the shhh . . . swiftly ebbing tides of air you breathe. Prick your ears, my suckling; I want to hear your ear-bones crack! Listen sharply! ARE YOU ALL EARS?”
This tirade ended when Toujours-Là was seized by a painful spasm. When he took up the story again, his voice, thick and rumbling, was hardly recognizable.
“We is all growing weaker. Despite all that sleep and fancy fare we look like starvelings. All my mates is ulcerated at the throat – the punctures are deep and ugly. Did I say we was thirteen at table? Thirteen counting Bel?”
“I don’t recall, Toujours-Là.”
“You recall! Little bugger! Heed me! I am dreaming. . . .” He waited. I was angry and did not ask about his dream. He looked at me intently and, only after a long pause, continued:
“I am dreaming about black widow spiders what eat their mates, you know. Mantises do it, too. In the act. Eat the male’s head clean off in the act. You ever seen that, little bugger? Ever seen the Act?”
“Toujours-Là,” I whispered, my head swarming, “I think I should go home. Rose –”
“THE STORY AIN’T OVER!” He reached down and plucked a bottle from the shadows. “I consider throwing myself into the sea, but Bel, always so good at leeching onto my thoughts says: ‘These waters are swarming with sharks.’ Now, if the thought of drowning is beginning to appeal to me, I have no desire to be eaten alive. It takes all the courage I have left to ask: ‘What waters, ma’am? Where are we?’
“ ‘Where is not your concern,’ she says. ‘I hired you as ship’s carpenter, not as ship’s philosopher. How dare you ask where? There is no where. Nor will there ever be.’ Throwing back her gorgeous head and exposing her long, white throat bound in its pearl bandage, she roars with laughter. Outside the wind swells and echoes her hilarity.
“One morning I awake slick with sweat, a shrill shriek, possibly my own, tearing through my ears. I’ve been wrenched from a vivid nightmare of a winged and whiskered creature crouching heavy on my chest, its barbed proboscis boring into an artery, its thread-like tongue worming into my brain. The pain at my neck is esh . . . excruciating. Near mad, I see the others in a haze, sleeping still as Death, each one bleeding a thin, yellow blood at the neck. Despite my horror and my weakness, I know I must solve the riddle of Bel’s floating Babylon.”
“Did you? Did you, Toujours-Là?”
“No! Her griffins have kept their secrets, and if it was they what steered her, or Satan’s own shadow – neither you nor I will ever know!” He circled his tumbler’s rim with his thumb. “I penetrate to the heart of her; I explore the hull’s baleful maze. So tortured by fear and pain, I have to stop each step to hold my aching head in both my hands and weep. I find nothing! Nothing in the main hold. Nothing in steerage. Nothing in the afterhold, or the captain’s store. She carries no cargo but these empty iron coffins and I am sorely baffled that with no ballast in a gale, which by the second doubles in velocity, the Babylon doesn’t rise into the air.
“I come at last to the galley – there is nothing there – not an onion, nor an apple pip; nothing but a sinking feeling and, Heaven help me, a mangy cur, scaled and patchy, outlandishly filthy and seemingly exuding a noxious green sss . . . smoke. He’s sleeping in the centre of a chalk circle I’ve retraced myself. He opens one rheumy eye and, curling back a purple lip, shows a set of teeth I know I have no use for. When I see his shadow rising on the wall, I leap for a ladder and, pushing through the scuttle, find myself looking up into my captain’s cabin.”
I must have squeezed the chimp too tightly in my arms then, for he squirmed and, pulling away from my embrace, sprawled across the table and knocked over the sailor’s glass. Toujours-Là gave Charlie Dee a slap which sent him sliding to the floor. He stood whimpering and stealing angry looks from behind his fists. Stunned, I mopped up the absinthe with my handkerchief.
“I see,” he continued, pouring out another, “I see – hanging from the rafters in the dim glow of that evil ch . . . chamber, hanging heavy and sodden from its feet, its wet muzzle glistening in the darkling air, an abomination – the creature of my dream. She is the offspring of a mantis and a bat, her teeth like prongs, her furry belly pendulous and swollen. Had she been a creature of the sea, no matter how hi . . . hi . . . hideous, I would not have been so afraid; it is the wedding of insect and mammal in the middle of the ocean what strikes me as particularly hidsh . . . hidsh . . . horrible. A bead of fresh blood ish hanging from her snout and this thing, this frenzy escaped from some lunatic’s reverie is” – Toujours-Là hesitated and, squinting at me, I think gleefully – “is wearing a pearl choker. And the blood she is drooling, child, is my own.” For emphasis, Toujours-Là jabbed at the air before my face with his pipe. Charlie Dee reached out and struck his thumb down its incandescent bowl. Grunting surprise and pain, he knocked the pipe to the floor where it shattered.
Toujours-Là leapt from his chair and swept the chimp up by the ankles. He raised him high and sent him fracturing, head first, against the wall. With a sickening thud, Charlie Dee collapsed in a heap, spitting blood.
Having scrambled to my feet, I fought for breath. Upstairs, the Cod lifted himself out of his tub.
“WHAT’S GOING ON?” he shouted. “WHAT’S GOING ON DOWN THERE?” The Cod’s wife pushed him back into the suds and pounded downstairs. Charlie Dee lay knotted in spasms. With a trembling hand, Toujours-Là polished off his glass.
When the Cod’s wife screamed, I ran. I ran as fast as I could away from Toujours-Là and the Ghost Port Bar. But the Ghost Port Bar and Toujours-Là have always followed me.
After the murder of Charlie Dee, Toujours-Là disappeared.
“Good rubbish,” said Rose. “May he never be seen again!” Two slow days passed before I returned to the Ghost with Totor for the monkey’s fu
neral.
CHAPTER
7
The chimp’s cadaver lies on the polished surface of the bar flanked by glasses of rum. The Cod’s wife hovers over it, her red eyes fortified with mascara. Her grief is genuine but, as is mine, abating. Ignoring the rum I reach for a waffle.
Upstairs the Cod lies liquefied with rage. He had no special affection for Charlie; it is his wife’s infidelity which has submerged him in gall and vinegar. He believes the universe has signalled him out for contempt, and in the monkey’s murder perceives the monotonous bane of cosmic mockery.
“I’ve been thinking, Nini,” Totor takes me aside to discuss this man to man, “how being close relations to chimpanzees and other apes like gorillas and orangs, how all of us here – you, me, the Cod’s wife, the Marquis – could be standing around in our fur and like baboons, sporting scarlet behinds, or – like other monkeys I’ve seen in pictures – elegant manes. While Charlie here could be stretched out in his skin as hairless as a nun’s elbow. I’ve heard that old orangs are often bald, Nini, and that’s what got me thinking.”
“He was just a baby!” the Cod’s wife laments, “not much more than four. Come all the way from the Congo, poor fellow, in a cage. It was Bottlenose gave him to me –”
“Bottlenose had a sixth sense,” says Gilles, a man with bristling eyebrows and a moustache to match, “and a nose like a –”
“Diving rod!” cries his brother, Gillesbis. The twins carry their bones in their pockets – that is to say, their dominoes – and as they finger these unceasingly, their conversation is punctuated by the sound of small, ivory bricks in collision.
“He could smell sardines in the air,” says Gilles. “Said they smelled sweet and –”
“Stale!”
“O his dear little face!” the Cod’s wife sighs, fiddling with Charlie’s hem. “I always thought his face was like an upside-down ace of clubs.” And because this confuses everyone, the Marquis pulls out his stub of turquoise pencil and makes a little drawing beside Charlie’s feet so we see what the Cod’s wife means:
“Bottlenose said: ‘Sardines smell of –’ ”
“Beer!”
“Charlie smells of lavender,” I cry. “He’s dead but he smells like a garden!” The festiveness of the wake has given me wings. I only wish she’d dressed the corpse in trousers and not a human baby’s baptismal gown.
“I’ll tell you something else. Bottlenose could see where the fish was swimming, even in the –”
“Dark!”
“Said they left a –”
“Shining!”
“Why?” The Cod’s wife dries her eyes with the back of her hand. “What made Toujours-Là behave so crazy?”
“Everybody goes crazy sooner or later,” says Gilles. “Just look at –”
“Bottlenose!”
“Totor,” I ask, “just who is this Bottlenose?”
“Well Bottlenose, Nini, was a treasure-seeker, and, I guess, a little cracked –”
“He had a nose for fishes,” says Gilles, “and so he thought he had a nose for –”
“Riches!”
“Once Bottlenose shipped with a freighter to Africa –”
“Took a steamer up the Congo –”
“He was crazy for adventure –”
“Farted higher than his arse!”
“Bottlenose,” Totor cuts in, “told about how every night on the river he was kept awake till dawn by the gibberish of river spirits. The more he listened, the more convinced he was they was talking about a treasure –”
“He had this obsession. Should have been smelling –”
“Fish!”
“Not the fumes of –”
“Fancy!”
“Hell, Nini, those regions are full of everything but the kitchen sink, and it is a sure thing what Bottlenose took for ghosts was the lovesick cries of crocodiles. Maybe he was hearing the bottom of his boat scraping the backs of fishes; I hear the Congo’s got some prehistoric varieties with scales like soldered armour.”
“Bottlenose listened and listened,” says Gilles. “He thought he heard the spirits saying: Tusks and pearls. . . . Tusks, tusks and pearls. . . .”
“Weren’t it skulls? Skulls and pearls?” asks Gillesbis. “He had this sixth sense, like Gilles says. Maybe he heard something.”
“Aah. Bottlenose was always blowing his own trumpet,” says Gilles. “Hearing things. Smelling things. Bottlenose and Jeanne d’Arc – both crazier than –”
“Bedbugs!”
“He was always a brooder –”
“Hatching castles in the sky!”
“He heard Tusks!” says Totor. “And sometimes he heard Skulls! And oftentimes he heard Tons. Tons of pearls. And Scads. Scads of Tusks. We are talking ivory, Nini. Worth its weight in gold!”
“He dreamed of a skull –”
“Filled to the brim –”
“With pearls!”
“So Bottlenose went cir –”
“Cum –”
“Ambulating!” says Gilles, “while we stay here, fishing. And not for compliments, neither!”
“No, Sir!”
“Me and my twin brother here, we ain’t –”
“Dreamers!”
“We ain’t poets!”
“We ain’t pre –”
“Sumptuous!”
“We,” the brothers say together, “is fishermen!”
“You’re forgetting,” says Totor, “just how good Bottlenose was. He’s earned the right to a little wanderlust – he was the best man on the coast!”
“The first fish of the season was always his! ‘See how the water’s thick and oily,’ he’d say. ‘Here’s our fish!’ ”
“And they was!”
“He’d point these things out to us –”
“The oily water –”
“How it would get all nubbly.”
“How the puffins –”
“Was behaving.”
“But when he got back from Africa –”
“He was always dreaming.”
“And drinking with you know who –”
“Who we ain’t mentioning his name.”
“Toujours-Là,” I whisper, thinking how somehow, sooner or later the old demon worms his way into the best stories.
“Shh! Yes! He’s the one we ain’t mentioning!”
“Now, one night,” Totor continues, “Bottlenose had a dream as clear as that picture hanging in the frame.” We all look with misgiving at a sepia photograph behind the bar of the Cod and his wife standing in front of the Ghost looking younger and deadly serious. “He sees the skull carved of ivory and the pearls. And all in a solid gold box deep in the mud of the banks of the river Congo.”
“So he buys himself a sea . . . a scatch –”
“A diving suit –”
“With a helmet screwed to the top like a upsy-down fishy bowl –”
“He tries it on.”
“He looks ree-diculous!”
“He sets off for La Rochelle the next morning –”
“Where there’s a cargo bound for Banana –”
“Lashed to his folly like Odysseus –”
“To his mast!” Suddenly the Marquis is at the piano hammering the keys and the twin brothers, their eyebrows hopping, are singing in booming baritones:
“And Bottlenose sailed for Banana
with a skull full of pearls for a prize,
but the treasures of our dreams, son,
are the scales of butterflies.
And he’ll risk his life for a gold box
that is swimming in his head;
and the only skull he’ll ever find
is the one he’ll find once he’s dead.”
“Is he dead?” I ask Totor. “Is Bottlenose dead?”
“Must be!” cries Gilles. “That diving suit was –”
A scramble!”
“It was –”
“Asymmetrical!”
“We can’t bury him in
the cemetery,” the Cod’s wife breaks in, “though, dammit, I paid for the plot – hook, line, and sinker – and got the family members laid away there as it is. I explained all this to the curé. Said my mother won’t mind sharing her patch of sod with Charlie Dee; quite the contrary. Grandpa neither. Well – they’re much too far gone to mind anything –”
“And being in Heaven –” says Gilles.
“Feeling charitable,” says Gillesbis.
“And if in Hell –”
“Too occupied –”
“Begging for mercy –”
“To care!”
“Every one of them loved animals. It’s not as though he’d take up room. I said to the curé: ‘He’ll keep the baby company.’ The curé said: ‘Charlie’s no Christian.’ I said: ‘Baptize him.’ But he refused. So I said: ‘Then bless him, damn you! You bless the ocean, you bless the fish; you can damn well bless Charlie Dee!’ ”
“I’m blessing him,” says the Marquis, “now!” He dips his finger into his rum and solemnly sprinkles Charlie’s phiz.
“If we had a little boat,” I cry, inspired, “we could put him out to sea and let him float away like Tristram and Zoé! Like Rose told me –”
“Like Iseult.” Totor corrects me.
“What Tristram loved!”
“The baby’s cradle! Tina’s tiny cradle!” The Cod’s wife runs upstairs.
“What baby?” I ask.
“Hers – what died, son, years ago.”
“Totor?”
“Yes?”
“Charlie Dee’s wearing that baby’s dress?”
“Most likely. That baby of hers wasn’t around near long enough to grow into it. Say, Nini – you had a good idea there!” He gives my arm a squeeze. “See how pleased she is!” I look up to see the Cod’s wife thumping downstairs with the cradle. It is a vulgar object, heavy and thick, and it looks more than anything like a dough-trough painted white. I see at once that the thing is too short; indeed, once the chimp is laid inside his feet stick out over the end. The Cod’s wife solves this problem by draping Charlie’s feet with a lace antimacassar.
The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) Page 6