by Carol Birch
‘Come on, man,’ Dan urged, ‘they’ll do you good. Just one, here, try.’
‘Let me sleep,’ the poor man said, laying his head against the gunwale, folding his arms and closing his eyes.
It’s funny, the things you say when words are strictly limited. A word was a sacred, precious, much-laden thing.
‘That was lovely fresh water,’ Rainey croaked.
He looked peculiar, all puffed up around the face and neck. I saw Dan get his mouth ready for speech, working his tongue and lips several times before he could get a word out.
‘Mad,’ he said. ‘Glory Lord.’
We’d had a norther for a while and got along at a merry old jog, but then it turned. We’d hardly moved since God knows when, crawling on like a snail on a pavement over the sea, which seemed mysteriously to have emptied itself of all life but ourselves. The birds had gone. I missed their squawking company. Fish too, scarcely one broke the surface.
‘How long?’ asked John Copper. Water.
The captain swallowed audibly. ‘Hour,’ he said.
‘Can’t be!
A nod.
Yan leaned over the gunwale and trailed his hand in the sea. He murmured something and scooped up a little in his palm and dashed it against his lips.
Proctor shook his head. ‘Don’t swallow.’
‘Wait,’ Dan said. ‘Only an hour.’
‘Can’t.’ John followed Yan.
‘But if we don’t swallow …’ Tim said.
‘No.’
Yan and John licked their lips. The gleam of moisture all too much.
‘Drink piss,’ Dan said thickly. ‘Better.’
I’d been thinking about that. Saving it for when I felt bad enough. We’d even had a laugh about it, me and Tim and Skip. But a boat would come before that, or an island with streams. An island, a boat, a vision, an angel, the devil in person, anything at all, please come.
‘Boys, boys, my boys,’ I heard Dan, far away, ‘I am proud of you. What a character I will give you when we get home. Only a little longer now, boys. Hang on.’
But I could no longer believe that this was anything but madness. We were quite out of the world, in a place like a dream, where terrors could harm and nothing was impossible. I turned away so I wouldn’t have to see them with the water in their mouths, a tightening of pain in them as the salt touched ulcers.
‘Nonsense,’ I heard Rainey say. ‘As long as you don’t swallow, a mouthful can do no harm.’
I closed my eyes. Darkness on the face of the deep. I wanted to hear Sam singing. If I tried, I could. His peculiar gnat-like delivery that was sometimes unbearably pure. I got him singing and singing to me in my head, his old hymns: ‘God moves on the water, God moves …’ He sang it over and over and over till it started going funny, tripping along to the rhythm of the waves. God bring a boat, God bring rain, God bring manna, God this, God that. Words words words. In my heart there was only an aching, empty place like a lost tooth, that and the empty sky and sea, and eternity, and a presence that did not reassure.
‘One mouthful then. One only.’
Dan held the cup to my lips.
One mouthful, hold, spit.
Wet mouth, for a second.
Do NOT swallow.
It’s okay, better than piss. Piss came shortly after. It’s hideous, but you can swallow it. It was worse than I expected and it looked so nice too, as if it would be sweet, but no such thing. It tasted the way it smells when it’s been standing a day because someone’s forgotten to empty the jerry. A stern, bitter, unfriendly taste, I thought, though some didn’t seem to mind it at all. Maybe theirs was better than mine. Anyway, it didn’t work, or it did, but not for long. It was a false quenching, like drinking hard liquor: wet, but in the long run thirst-inducing. So I never took to it, though you’d hear different from some, no doubt. Tim’s piss was golden, of course, and he drank it with relish. Honey sweet, no doubt. Dirty brown, gold-haired Tim, with darker gold whiskers encroaching from his ears, and round brown hollows about the eyes. ‘You know what, Jaf?’ he said. ‘I feel as if my mind’s going funny.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yours?’
A nod.
‘Tell Simon to play something.’
‘Simon. Hey, Simon.’
Simon sawing away at the fiddle, a merry thing. He was good, Simon. Lovely player. Could make you cry, make you smile. But it was nothing, that poor little fiddle, a voice singing against the great waterfall at the end of the world, where our small boat plunges over and falls for ever. Mr Rainey’s mouth was yellow all over. And still he would hold the salt water in his mouth because he couldn’t bear not to. ‘Long as you don’t swallow,’ he said. He did it more than the rest of us, more than he should have, that’s why he went down so fast, I think, that and because he caught that terrible cold not long after we set off and it went onto his chest. It scared me to see so hard and big a man, a man I’d been scared of, go down. He couldn’t swallow. His throat was closing over. His face clenched and grew naked in spasms. His feet swelled up like bladders. I went over to sit with him. The movement made me dizzy and for a few seconds grey clouds gathered in front of my eyes, and my heart went mad. I couldn’t talk to him. I didn’t know him at all. A very uneasy man he’d always seemed to me, and that at least was still the same. Tears were trickling from the corners of his eyes and gleaming in the crinkles there.
The wind dropped. Every now and then someone spoke, but I forgot what they said at once. Every now and then I got my portion. I kept feeling my chin to see if I was getting a beard, but nothing. Only the captain still shaved. Rainey was shaggy as an old dog. It made him look handsome and terrible, like an Old Testament prophet with his tormented eyes. Salt was drying us by degrees. Salt fish all of us, salt fish with wide open round eyes goggling at the sky. Our faces all had the same skinned, wild look about them and the bones of our skulls were cutting through. Wet hair curled on our shoulders. Our eyes gleamed. We were hard brown and weathered, knobbled like branches, and our togs were rotting through.
The sails blew out their cheeks. On into sunsets and sunrises. They said we had to be very careful with the water, just in case.
‘It won’t last, will it?’ Simon said in a matter-of-fact way.
‘It will if we’re careful.’
‘It’ll rain soon.’
‘The rain won’t help.’
‘How long to Chile?’ asked Dag.
The captain sighed. ‘Depends on the weather. Perhaps twenty days.’
No one spoke. Twenty days.
‘Don’t fret,’ the captain said, ‘there’s no need to cut the ration yet, but if nothing happens in the next – six – days,’ he hesitated fractionally, as if he was making the decision on the instant, ‘we may have to.’
‘But we couldn’t manage on less,’ John Copper said. Skip put his arms over his head and started moaning.
‘What’s the matter, Skip?’
He just shook his head and moaned on, a sing-song humming as he rocked.
‘Oh, leave him if it makes him feel better. Moan away, Skip, only not too loud.’
‘It’s because I killed the dragon,’ Skip said, looking up at us. ‘That’s why everything happened.’
‘Mad.’
Rainey raised himself up from the bottom of the boat, set his hands upon the gunwale and stared ahead with glaring eyes. It was a blazing hot day and the sun was almost at its zenith.
‘Cover your head, man,’ said Dan, but Rainey silenced him with a stiff gesture.
‘Shh!’
‘What?’
‘Listen!’
Nothing.
‘What is it?’
‘Can’t you hear it?’
‘Can’t hear a thing.’
‘Jaf, can you?’
I shook my head. The shaking of my head set up a humming in my brain.
We were all listening now.
‘Poor thing,’ Rainey said, his eyes filling with tears. ‘Poor thing.’
‘Where?’ said Skip. ‘Where is the poor thing?’
Where else could the poor thing be but there, in the sea? It wasn’t here with us in our little boat. Nor over there, in the captain’s. All there were well enough. What could be crying in the sea or the air?
Tears poured down Mr Rainey’s cheeks. ‘My God, my God, my dear God,’ he said, ‘let this thing pass.’
Mr Rainey was only a man after all. A very strong one up to a point, but he was going down. Dan got him lying down and wiped his face. ‘You’ve been swallowing seawater,’ Dan said. ‘No more now. Here.’ And he gave Mr Rainey his own ration of water there and then, and had only a tiny drop himself left for later. ‘Lay off the seawater, man,’ he said, ‘it’s no good. Kill you, man. Lay off it now and you’ll be fine.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Rainey, his teeth chattering.
‘Now hold together. I mean it. You give up and let go and what happens? You get a boat over the horizon the very next morn.’
A storm came from the southwest and we were back at the baling, except Rainey, who remained at the useless place where the steering oar had been before some rough sea took it, weeping stoically and staring out at – what? A flash of lightning. The sky growling. If he dies, I thought, we can have his portion. He turned away from the sea, his tears unanswered. He lay in the bottom of the boat, talking to himself. Sometimes he laughed joyfully, sometimes cried like a newborn and called on his ma. Horrible to see that big man in that state. ‘Maria!’ he called. ‘Maria, Maria,’ he groaned.
‘His wife,’ said Gabriel.
‘Yes, yes, we all think on our wives,’ said Dan. ‘Are you a married man?’
Gabriel nodded.
In the evening, just before dark, Mr Rainey sat up and wiped his eyes and licked his gummy lips with his slow gummy tongue. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘here we are.’
‘So we are,’ said Gabriel.
Tim put his hand in mine. ‘The sky,’ he said, looking up.
It was that second before dark. It glimmered.
‘Where are you from, Mr Rainey?’ Skip asked.
Rainey looked at him and thought for a moment, then smiled slowly. ‘Norwich,’ he said.
Said Tim:
The man in the moon came down too soon,
And found his way to Norwich.
He went down south and burnt his mouth
From eating cold pease porridge.
‘Do you all eat porridge in Norwich?’ asked Skip.
Mr Rainey laughed and tears came out of his eyes, trickling through the dirt on his face. ‘No more than they all eat jelly in Delhi,’ he said.
We all burst out laughing. The others in the captain’s boat must have thought we were having a rare old time. But in the middle of us all laughing came the sudden throwing backwards of Mr Rainey against the gunwale, as if a giant invisible hand slapped him there. Then he went mad, banging and flapping about horribly with his head twisting and thrashing enough to break his neck, and his mouth open and his tongue rushing out and in, and his eyes squelched shut, and his feet kicking and his arms flailing. He was so broken by it, it made me sick. I couldn’t stand to see him like that, and yet he was there in front of me cracking himself to death, and with every smack of his head against the boards, I closed my eyes like you do at hammer cracks.
Dan and Tim went to him, but could get no hold.
His eyes rolled up and up and up, blue-white and bulging. Then the whites stopped flickering and he fell still and was dead.
11
Inever saw anyone die till I saw Billy Stock die. Animals, many. Never a person, never a person I knew, a Billy Stock or a Mr Rainey.
The boats came together. We sewed Mr Rainey up in his clothes, me and Gabriel and Skip, not a word between us. The last glimpse of his face: open-lipped, frowning, the shadow of the shroud half upon it. Blue skin. Gabriel closed the cloth over it and sewed it up with his bone needle. The captain said the prayer. Dan and Tim slipped him over the side.
‘Oh Lord, we are eleven souls afloat …’
Me and Tim and Dan and Skip and Gabe on our boat. Six over there: the Captain, John Copper, Wilson Pride, Dag, Simon, Yan.
Dan said to us, ‘You know, he was at the seawater all the time. On the quiet. That’s what did for him. Don’t you do that, boys. We’ll raise a good glass in Valparaiso.’
We were at our daily ration. A cup of water. A lump of hardtack. I tried to spin it out. I wasn’t hungry like I was at the beginning, this was different. The cramps had gone, but something remained like a ghost, like I suppose it feels when they’ve cut your leg off but you still feel it there stuck to you, itching and twitching and aching and doing all the other things a limb does. I scraped tiny bits off my hard biscuit and sucked them from my fingers. I was very good. Very sensible, I thought, not like Skip, who got through his in about five minutes and then, like a dog, watched me eat mine. Tim was quick with his too. He’d follow it up with an hour or two’s nibbling and sucking peacefully and steadily on the leather of his oar.
‘What’s it like?’ I said. ‘That?’
‘Nice.’
It made the time pass a little softer. My eyes roamed, looking for food. Wood? How about that? Wood was all around. Wood. I’ll mention it to Dan, I thought. It’s possible. Leather now, we’re not so badly off. Still a few boots around, Proctor’s and Dan’s, and belts. And now the sea-soaked stuff was gone and it was nice dry tack, and there was still plenty of water. For now. What else? More barnacles. Must go under and look. But I was scared of going over. I felt weak, not sure I could get back in. Could be anything under there. I closed my eyes and saw scallops fat as puffballs, white and orange, already out of their shells, clinging all over the bottom of the boat, blowing there like flowers under the sea, sweet as the sticky Chinese fruit we ate in … where was it? Meat. The stew my ma cooked out of fat mutton and onions and barley, the grease that floated on top of the pan, quivering as it simmered. Fried fish, steaming layers of eyeball-white flesh. Mashed turnip with the butter melting in it. Bacon frying, singing in the pan, bacon and a fried egg, round orange dome, jelly, the rashers just beginning to burn. Barley soup, goose with gravy, liver and onions, wine, beer, gin, pig’s feet, tripe, toast and dripping. Mrs Linver’s milk pudding with a rich brown crust on top. Cream on my tongue. Raspberries, ruby, dusted, crushing their seeds between my teeth. Juices spurting. There in the street outside the pastry cook’s shop on Back Lane again—
‘It’s my fault,’ Skip said.
He said this so many times it became true. Yes, we thought. If he hadn’t let the dragon free. So many dead and it’s all your fault. Not that we were angry with him. No point. It was God everyone was angry at. The thunder and lightning. The stupid waves. We rode a monster.
‘Will you shut up with that?’ Tim said listlessly.
‘Sorry,’ said Skip.
It went on and on, a day and a day and another day, until the day Captain Proctor said we had to cut the rations again. Wilson Pride laughed. I never saw him really laugh but that once; a rich giggling laugh that just about cracked his face open, and got us all going as if it was a great joke, this cutting of the rations. Captain Proctor sacrificed his leather belt. Precious little to make a fire with. Wilson took a couple of leaves of Skip’s sketchbook to help the flames along, and he boiled up the belt in one of the buckets and kept it bubbling there with a little water, very careful, very careful with the water now. It smelled like the tanning factory. Bermondsey on the ocean. He said we shouldn’t eat the belt itself, but doled out the water it was cooked in, dark and roasty and bitter, the fire of a hot drink down the startled gullet. That and my portion and it was, all told, not a bad night that followed. I slept cosy. The good, hot drink stayed in my stomach, a wonderful hum of ease as I drifted in dreams of bright wanderings in strange worlds that spun on and on and in and out of each other, hundreds and hundreds of them.
I woke in the night and heard Dan talking to Yan. The boats were hooked together. Th
ey lolled each in their respective sterns, quietly conversing.
‘Like fire,’ said Yan.
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Here.’
‘How are your ankles?’
‘Terrible.’
‘No better then?’
‘Look.’
Dan shifted. A moment’s silence then, ‘Jesus,’ he said.
‘You see?’ said Yan.
‘We could do with Abel. He had a way with that sort of thing.’
‘What day is it?’
‘Day forty-seven.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘Weather’s on the turn.’
‘God, let it rain.’
It did, but not till next nightfall, and we filled the buckets and drank. First sip, sip, then more, at last a time to drink.
‘That’s enough,’ Dan said.
His hand on mine, gentle, decayed.
‘There, see?’ he said. ‘Something always comes along.’
In the morning we awoke to the slow whining of the fiddle. Scrape, scrape, the sound was losing sweetness yet oddly lovely, the voice going hoarse. Something was getting at the fiddle. The salt I suppose, just like it got at everything else.
‘Ach!’ said Simon. ‘No good.’
Dan shook me. ‘Up, Jaf,’ he said.
I felt light, as if I might drift up into the sky.
‘Up, Jaf.’
He pulled my cover off. I couldn’t see a thing. Blind in the full sun full in my eyes.
‘Steady.’ Dan’s hand.
I knocked against Tim.
‘Watch what you’re doing!’ he snapped.
I retched. Nothing came. Things cleared.
‘Come on, Jaf,’ Gabe said, ‘take your oar.’
A huge yawn shook me. I dragged myself up. Skip was sitting next to me crying, his moon face gone beyond recall. He was the colour of liver. His skin clung to his skull, though his eyes were still bright.
‘All right, Skip?’ I said to him.
He nodded.
Yan was in a bad way.
‘You’re five and we’re six,’ the captain said. ‘Take one more, will you? This man has to lie down, we need more room.’