by Craig Cliff
I wished to keep walking, to explore, to take on the world, but I needed food and water. (I felt properly hungry for the first time in days.) Still, I stood amid the grass and rocks and chicketing cicadas for some time, absorbing everything, feeling my strength return with the soft glow of the sunlight on my bare white skin, until I heard a clatter of activity inside the hut. The man burst through the door to find me not ten yards away, in the same white dress and silken slip as yesterday and the day before. With my hand up to my forehead to shield my eyes from the sun I must have resembled the marble statue I had been in the window.
I let my mouth curve into a smile.
‘Hello,’ I said.
The look upon his face! Which was the greater surprise to him: that I had not run away or that I spoke?
‘Do we have any food?’ I asked. ‘I am quite famished.’
He nodded and gestured with his hand for me to come inside.
I sat on the bed while the man started a fire. He took a bag of oats from a potato sack slumped in the corner of the kitchen and poured some into the small pot, added water from a canteen and placed it over the fire.
‘What is your name?’ I asked.
He turned around, held out his hands, one of which gripped a tarnished spoon, and shook his head as if to say, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘But what do I call you?’
He shrugged.
‘Is it that you cannot speak, or you will not speak?’ I asked.
He scratched his head and raised his eyebrows, then opened his mouth and emitted a croaking sound. I could not decipher any words, but I grasped his meaning.
He turned back to the porridge.
‘Well, this might be difficult. I have many questions. Do you write? Perhaps you have some paper and a pen.’
He patted his hand down beside his hip, telling me to be patient.
When the porridge was ready he spooned it into two crockery bowls and came to sit beside me on the bed, though there was space enough for a third person to sit between us. The oats were hot and a little dry, but it was a great relief to have something to eat, and I was able to keep them down.
‘Did Flossie send you?’ I asked.
The man continued to eat in silence, looking intently at his bowl.
‘Are you a friend of Father’s, perhaps?’
He smiled but shook his head.
‘What happened the other night? Why did the curtain not come down at five o’clock? How did you get into the window? Wasn’t the door locked? Where have you brought me?’
He gave a meek look, and I let out a yelp of frustration.
‘You’re no use. No use at all.’
He seemed hurt by this. He took my empty bowl and went to the sink. I lay down on the bed and covered my head with the pillow. When I looked up again he had gone. I got up and inspected the contents of the hut once more. There were a few books lined along a single plank that was braced high on the wall nearest the bed. Beside the fireplace sat a wicker basket with a few splinters of wood at the bottom. I looked inside the sack of provisions sitting on the floor near the door. From the small amounts of tea, sugar and milk powder, I got the impression he had not planned to stay long (though the bag of oats was large enough). Or perhaps he had expected to be alone up here? Next to the front door was a small cabinet which I greedily inspected for writing materials. My first thought was not to recommence my diary but to find some way of communicating with my nameless companion. I found a fountain pen but no paper.
I moved the chair over to the shelf of books and ripped the blank or nearly blank pages from them to compile a stack of papers. I was careful to check each book for inscriptions. Most had a name on the inside cover to indicate ownership. There was a Thomson, a Billick, a K. Herbert and a J. P. Staves, but there were no Coltons or Louisas, no Yours Absolutelys. The books themselves covered a wide variety of topics. There was a book on native plants, an almanac of tides and the passage of the moon dating from the last century, a seafaring novel called The Voyage of the Penobscot, another titled Carmelita: A Romance and a few small books of English verse.
I readied the pen and paper for my companion’s return. I even wrote my first question, ‘What shall I call you?’, in advance, but he had not returned by midday. I went outside to look for him. The small horse was gone, though the cart remained. I went back inside and made another bowl of porridge for lunch.
After eating, I sat down in my companion’s chair and wrote a few more questions, should he ever return, leaving space for him to write his answer. Then I started writing this entry.
I see that I have already chewed through most of my store of pages. The man is yet to return. I hope he comes soon, if only because I do not fancy another bowl of porridge.
What shall I call you?
They call me The Carpenter, though I am more of a carver.
Where are we?
The back country.
Is this your hut?
Yes.
Why did you take me from the window?
I am a fool.
What do you have planned for me?
I have no plans.
Why can’t you speak?
It is a long story.
Can you write it down?
No.
Please?
No.
Why not?
Because it is of little consequence.
Surely not. At the least, it will pass the time.
We do not have enough paper.
Perhaps you could fetch some. I won’t run away. I promise.
Do you have any questions for me?
Are you hungry?
Not that sort of question.
Are you real or have I dreamt you?
You are still here.
I said I would be.
I suppose I should start my story then.
Please do.
The erect-crested penguin.
Part three
1859–1919
The Carpenter’s Tale
‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.’
8 November 1890
I was lashed partway up the mizzenmast when the noonday sky grew dark. I had been up there for four days. I was weak. My eyelids were heavy as sodden sails and I had long since given up trying to keep them furled, but the changing light was enough to rouse me now. I heard the crackle of the unseen spanker as it was sucked in a new direction by the shifting wind, and the loud report when the sail was flicked to its fullest stretch. With great effort I lifted my head to observe the sails above me shiver and slap against the sheets and spars. The constant chill at this height and in these latitudes became a polar assault. The movement of my pendulum grew more erratic, more violent. A rash of white crests spread across the sea. The sailors on the deck below moved like bees about a flowering honeysuckle, walking in strange arcs, pausing over winches and davits, scuttling up ratlines and down hatches. I wished to spit upon them but my mouth was parched. If not for the occasional cloudburst I would have been reduced to a husk already.
Four days. Four entire days. Long enough to contemplate death, to reconcile it and to welcome its arrival. My rope burns had surpassed burns. Images of flame meeting flesh were fitting only for those first few days. Now my ankles, shins, wrists, elbows, upper arms and neck had been gnawed by rodents, attacked by cutlasses, my flesh opened and raw for the blotting bluebottles that had arrived that morning, lured up the timbers to the mizzen top by my fresh decay, my fetching stench. Now these flies struggled to hold fast to my prickled skin in the wind that came rushing from the south.
I spied Ruskin, Boag and the apprentices of their watch clambering up the mainmast to stow the sails so that the ship might weather the coming storm. As they climbed, sailors below hauled on the lines, raising the sails and permitting me my first glimpse of the storm off the windward side of the bow, thick and dark as charcoal. It was less a storm than the entrance to a massive cave, a black insatiable mouth.
And so it en
ds, I thought.
I wished now that I could lose consciousness once more, but the mizzen top jerked without rhythm, dashing my head against the mast and running the ropes across fresh skin. The world was too alive for me to drift back to sleep, eternal sleep. My last breath would not slip unnoticed from slack lips as I dreamt of the looping flight of the albatross. No, more than likely my last breath would be thwarted by the icy water. It would be a desperate gulp—salty, unforgiving and full of fear.
The storm was soon upon us. When would the mizzen sails be hoisted? Would anyone dare to climb my mast or would Sepsey fell it like a lumberjack and be done with me?
Off the starboard side I observed with delight that the water really did look as if it were boiling, as it was always described in the accounts of shipwrecks I’d read as a child. So too the wind howled, the decks groaned and waves worked themselves into mountains.
I felt a hand press upon my bare foot but could not see past the coil of ropes that encased me. The hand became a shoulder pressing into my shins and then the figure came up to my face.
‘Young Tim,’ I managed to say with a measure of equanimity.
The youth cast his eyes down, grabbed for the shrouds that led further up the mast and pulled himself onward.
‘I’d cut you down,’ Tim said, one bare foot resting on my shoulder, ‘but you’re safer tied up for the minute.’
It was probably true. If I were cut free I wouldn’t have the strength to stand, let alone climb down to the deck in this gale. I would fall to the boards like a bag of sand. A corpse. I recalled my brief fancy four days ago: that Sepsey had climbed to the yards in his drunken frenzy and fallen to the deck.
‘Perhaps on the way back,’ I said, but Tim was already edging along the footline that ran beneath the topgallant yard.
Swenson was the next to drag himself up to the mizzen top. Rather than bring his face level with mine, he edged around the side of the mast, making a point of grinding the sole of his boot into my bare toes.
‘What do we have here then?’ Swenson asked, as if he had an audience. I couldn’t see him, but his voice was equal to the squall. ‘A strange couple, if ever I seen one. You will beg my pardon, madam, won’t you?’
The wind dropped for a moment as if waiting for a reply.
Oh, that Vengeance could strike this fiend.
But all was silent around the mizzen top. Swenson’s face appeared before me, the skin of his cheeks finely bristled as the stem of a briar rose. ‘She’s a quiet one, i’n’she?’
From the main top I heard Dhalla’s cry of ‘Land ho!’
Swenson swung away once more, but I could see no land.
‘Land ho!’ Tim confirmed from the tip of the topgallant yard. Jarrell and Burton had joined him on the yard—they must have passed while Swenson had been holding court—and they had managed to bundle their half of the sail. Tim was struggling to fasten the farthest gasket, which would hold the sail in place. Somehow he managed to extend his right arm to the north. I followed the line until I struck a row of sheer black cliffs. In that moment the ship must have been broadsided by a large wave as the world was tipped to one side. I smelled the ocean once more, as if I’d been on land these past four days. I heard Swenson groan behind me as he struggled to keep his grip. The ship’s tilt was finally checked by the cargo in the hold and the mast was whipped back towards vertical but all too quickly for young Tim, out there on the thin footrope they called the Flemish Horse. He lost his grip and entered the white water without a ripple.
‘Canny bastard,’ I said.
Jarrell and Burton clung to the yard as children cling to their mothers’ legs when they are to be left with relatives. Each had lost hold of their portion of sail and were being whipped and jostled by the lively canvas. They clung for dear life, however cheap it was down there in the Southern Ocean.
And Swenson? I turned my head as far as I could manage in both directions as the mast continued to sway, but saw no sign of him. Down below men from all directions were converging on the quarter deck, presumably to the bag of sand that had been Swenson.
The basalt cliffs loomed ever larger as the rain began to sluice down from its heavenly trough. I could feel the ship wearing to starboard when a lurch of angry wind rushed unimpeded through the bare rigging of the ship’s first two masts and met full on the mizzen royal and the partially furled topgallant sail. The very top of this third mast snapped as if it were a twig, its swift retreat only slowed by the forestay that ran to the main top, which strained a moment before bursting loose. The recoil of the stay must have caught the topgallant yard as it passed and undone the gasket, undone Tim’s final act, and let the sail unfurl completely. I felt the ship rear back, the bow lifting into the air as if climbing a massive wave. I was tilted back, my shoulders pressed hard against the mast. The sky fell open before me. The black magic of the storm clouds seemed close enough to touch, if only my arms were free. Far from fear, I felt enticed, though I had no choice but to resist the siren’s call of the storm.
Jarrell and Burton had managed to make it off the yard and descend the mast without a word to me. I heard the whishing sound of the remaining forestays as they were cut free by the men on deck. The mizzenmast began to shudder in the search for the point of least resistance. I could hear the creaking of the timber over the wind and rain that pummelled me and the topgallant sail.
And then my mast snapped once more, somewhere below the mizzen top this time, and I was lifted free of the infernal ship, the remaining lines giving way like cobwebs, and my giant crucifix splashed down into the waves.
Here was the salty water, the final bath. The cold shot down my spine. My raw wrists and ankles screamed with pain. I found myself holding my breath in the calm underwater world and gasping for air whenever I breached the surface and returned to this other wild, roaring world. The mast must have landed with its yards square to the water. It seemed a wonder they had not snapped. Perhaps they had and it was only a matter of one or two waves before the great log rolled over and I was pitched into the water for good, but for now I found myself lying with my nose to the sky and being dunked into the water less and less. I thought about my companion, lashed to the other side of the mast. The side that did not see the surface.
Oh, to trade places with her.
A mass of canvas was washed over me, covering me like a bed sheet. The topsail and its spars must have come away with this section of mast. The sail was pulled back as the mast swung slowly to leeward. I managed to lift my head and catch one last glimpse of the ship as it tottered near the horizon before I closed my eyes and lowered my head to the mast. The wind was not as fierce down at this level. The length of mast to which I was attached must have been at least forty feet long and further stabilised by the yards, canvas and rope that stretched from it.
I felt myself being lulled back to sleep, despite the noise and the biting cold. Sleep, eternal sleep . . .
Why did you start there?
It is how stories like mine tend to start. In the middle of things.
But you survived, you must have. Why were you tied to the mast? How did you get to Marumaru?
As I said, it’s a long story.
Beginnings
My name is Gabriel Doig. I was born into a family of ships’ carvers on the banks of the River Clyde in Scotland. I grew up at the feet of my father and grandfather in a shower of sawdust and wood shavings as they made their figureheads: bold ladies in flowing dresses bound for the grandest barques and the fastest clippers. My mother, Agnes, would often pose as a model in the early stages of a new carving, but she preferred to pass her time in the wee office that fronted Dalrymple Street, the main thoroughfare between the custom house and the shipyards. Her chief task was keeping the books, but she was seldom alone. Shopkeepers, fishermen, Evening Times paper boys, women with the finest parasols or the tattiest tartan shawls across their hunched shoulders—they all found time as they went about their business to stop in and say a word to my moth
er. She knew everything that was happening along the docks although she never seemed to step beyond the threshold.
The four of us lived above the workshop. The living quarters were cramped, but it was handy being only a flight of stairs from your work. From the upstairs window you could see the bare masts in the graving dock and beyond these the off-white sails of world trade coming and going. I was an only child raised in a world of adults. When I was a wean my family called me precocious. As I grew older the terms they preferred to use were: brash, bull-headed and contermaucious. I was a handful, all right. I can’t count the times I told my father I was running away, that his figureheads and trailboards and whetstones and invoices could go hang.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
My grandfather, Robert Doig, had been lured down from his croft in the 1830s by the promise of steady wages and the extravagances of kippers, salted salmon and apples. He was one of seven novice carvers apprenticed on the Jupiter and he quickly worked his way up to carving the figureheads for a dozen merchant sloops and brigantines. When my father, Duncan, was old enough he joined the firm of Doig & Son, doubling its workforce. At the time, the banks of the River Clyde were home to dozens of shipbuilders who catered for the best shipping lines in Britain and a good many European firms. Clydeside ships were taking coal, coke, textiles, tempered glass and settlers to strange corners of the Earth and bringing back to the motherland tea, cotton, flax, gum, gold, wool, stuffed birds, shrunken heads and tales of wonder.