by Carol Birch
‘Now,’ he says, laying them out. ‘We mark two.’
Smudges he puts on them. They sit there, eight little scraps, us looking at them. Not a sigh of air to move them.
‘Sun goes down soon,’ Skip says with a faint sob.
‘It’s all right, Skip,’ Dan says, looking at him. ‘You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. No one does.’
‘We do,’ he replies, still smiling, reaches down and, one by one, folds each small square into a smaller one, and then a smaller and then a miraculously smaller, so that we all laugh. ‘What shall we put them in?’ he asks.
‘We still don’t have to do this,’ Dan says. We haven’t got any caps left so we’re using the tin cup. He wipes it dry with his fist. Me and Skip put the tiny pellets of folded paper in the cup and then the cup just stands there like the Holy Grail in our midst, and we do it homage.
That moment. Life quivered in it, sharp as a raindrop. Our eyes, all of our eyes, constantly meeting, seeing ourselves reflected back.
‘Are we agreed?’ Tim picked up the cup, covered its top with his palm and shook it about roughly, then stopped. ‘This is wrong,’ he said, ‘this is a cock-up. We should have just put four in. Now they’re all mixed up and we may not get any.’
I was past it, couldn’t understand a word he was saying. ‘Oh, just do it,’ I said.
‘Are we agreed?’
‘Fucking get on with it!’
‘Dan?’
He nods. Yes. All of us nod. Who goes first? It’s so stupid, we haven’t worked it out, no one knows who’s supposed to go first, but then Tim says it doesn’t matter, we’ll all open them together.
‘Like Christmas presents,’ Dan says.
‘Exactly.’
We laugh.
‘Do it by age,’ Dan said. ‘You first, Jaf, then you, Skip, then Tim, then me. No one opens theirs till we’ve all got one. Agreed?’
Nods.
It was Tim. Tim drew the bad lot. The rest of us drew blanks. He just looked at it. ‘It’s me,’ he said, and laughed and yelled and wept all together, throwing the marked scrap of paper down in the centre. ‘Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, lads, it’s me.’
‘You don’t have to do this, Tim,’ Dan cried, ‘you really don’t.’
‘No! No, no, no!’ said Tim. ‘I do, I do.’
‘No, you don’t.’
We said nothing, me and Skip. It unfolded.
‘We agreed,’ Tim said.
Dan was still crying. He kept stopping and starting. ‘We can’t do this,’ he got out. He coughed and went on coughing, and his eyes ran like mad.
‘It’s all right,’ Tim said. ‘All agreed. Next lot. You three.’
‘We can’t do this.’
‘Get on with it, please.’
‘Draw the next one, for God’s sake! We agreed!’
‘Jesus.’ Dan gave a weird frantic kind of a whine and twisted his hands and arms together in a very peculiar way that made him look mad.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ said Tim, picking up the cup and rattling it about and setting it down once more.
‘Here, take one.’ He thrust it under my nose.
I took one. Then Skip. Then Dan.
‘Now open them,’ he said.
It was me.
I shook my head.
Tim started to cry, just a welling of tears and a look in his eyes.
‘Can’t,’ I said.
‘Oh, Jaf,’ he said, ‘you got the worst of it.’ But he was smiling.
‘I can’t take this,’ Dan said. ‘We have to stop now.’
‘No. Do it quick. Now, Jaf.’ Tim tried to push the gun into my hand but I pulled away with a shudder. I felt sick.
‘I don’t care,’ Tim said. ‘I don’t mind anyway. I can’t see any more point in hanging about. Come on.’ I looked deep in his eyes. They were dancing, full of fun, magnified by tears. ‘You got the worst of it, not me. I’d rather go. Honest.’
Me and him and Ish, up and down the Highway. Smell of it. I was all choked up. He put the gun in my hands, gently. I shook my head.
‘Please, Jaf,’ he said. ‘Just do it.’
His eyes.
‘Don’t think about it,’ he says.
‘Can’t do it, Tim.’ My voice all cracked.
Dan says: ‘No. No, no, no, no, no, boys, no. Please listen.’ Bent and impossibly aged by the sea, he leans forward, pulling us all in. Skip’s just there, wide eyed, scabby, watching. ‘I’ll take it. I’ll take your lot, Tim. Then you two draw for who does it.’
‘We agreed,’ said Tim.
‘Boys, I can’t have you do this. I wouldn’t live with myself.’
‘Look, this ain’t easy for anyone,’ Tim said. ‘Let’s just fucking get on with it.’
He lumbered up, breaking the circle and drawing me after him with one bony bird of prey claw embedded in my shoulder. Dan crying, Skip staring, me with the gun and Tim to the other end of the boat, the mild grey horizon going up and down.
‘This is just me and you now. Tim, I can’t do this.’
Tim pulled me close then, and we hugged. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s happening, that’s all. We drew fair and square.’
‘Aren’t you scared?’
‘I’m always scared. I’m fucking terrified if you must know. Best if we do it quick. We all agreed and we got to stick by it.’
We separate, awkward. A warm breeze blows in my face from the south. The gun is in my right hand, my left in his.
‘All square between me and you, Jaf?’ he says.
‘’Course.’
‘You take care, Jaf. If you get back, say – I don’t know, tell them not to worry, you know …’
‘This is mad.’
‘Mad.’ He laughs.
‘Are you sure, Tim?’
‘No blame, Jaf,’ he says. ‘I’d do the same for you. You’re my best friend. You know what to do?’
Of course I do. All of us do. He lays down with his head on a coil of rope, curls up and closes his eyes as if he is going to have a sleep. Nothing and everything is real. I cock the trigger and put the gun next to his right temple, not quite touching.
‘Tell me when you’re ready,’ I say.
‘When you are.’
I shot.
I had to look, make sure he didn’t suffer. His eyes clenched as the pistol discharged. Nothing else moved. The red running all over his head, down his face and neck. Nothing else moving. Side of his head sticky and flat.
We got on well for a few days. There was a steady breeze to bear us on, a steady rolling sea, constant as a pulse. Always in my mind the sights I could never forget, never unsee. Still now, and as long as I live, always there. Dan told me not to look, but it had gone too far for that to matter.
My ears sing. His hands shake as he cuts off Tim’s head, lets it fall, holds the body so as to pour the spouting blood straight into the bucket Skip holds. It’s still Tim’s body, arms out straight, shiny, hairless chest, graceful filthy feet. His head I can’t see any more for the bulk of Dan. Then, still and headless he lies, bleeding into the boards. Dan gives a great sigh, turns aside and drops something over. I can’t help it, I run see, but there’s nothing, it’s sunk like a stone.
They cut off what was left of his clothes. It wasn’t him any more. Dan worked dispassionately, mouth a straight line, fallen cheeks ghastly under pebbly eyes. It was a lot for one man to do. We helped, me and Skip. No one spoke. We helped with the cutting up, that was hard, there were things like moles and scabs and small hairs on the skin that showed it was him. I felt my head begin to swim and Dan sent me away. I sat and hugged myself, watching the rise and fall of the waves and thinking how peculiar it would be if a ship now hove into view. If it did, I thought, that would prove that God was bad. To do a thing like that. I had lost all sense of what time it was or what day or anything at all. I was very tired and yearned for sleep as I had never yearned for anything, with all my body. I think in fact I did sleep. When I wok
e up it was all over, there was just meat, and a bucket of stuff and some things in a bag made of his old raggedy shirt. We gave it as nice a send-off as we could. It was light and floated along beside us for a while before going under.
We had no fire. Some things we had raw straight away, pink heart meat, other soft things. Go easy, go easy, we said. No fools us. We all had something to suck on from time to time, sensible. Meat hung drying, long ribbons adorning our tattered sails. Meat spread salting. I kept looking round for Tim. I could still feel him in the boat with us. My mouth was wet once more. When I licked my lips my tongue did not cling like a grub. The cup had gone round three or four times: sip carefully, sip like a bee. Blood. What’s this I feel? What is it? Not sadness, not sickness—
‘He’s given us a few days more,’ Dan said.
Having eaten, we three were now, to some extent, serene. We lay rocked upon the bosom of the deep, alive yet, alive-alive-o. We three? We four.
‘Feels like he’s still here,’ I said.
‘He is,’ said Skip. ‘There!’ and nodded towards the stern of the boat.
But I couldn’t see him. Not fair, I thought, if he was here it would be me he’d show himself to, not him. Didn’t show himself, but I felt him there all the same. It got dark and we just lay.
What is it I feel? Not sadness, not sickness. What I feel is a kind of lightness, a perverse sense of well-being. This is the funny thing: Tim and me, I feel we are closer than we’ve ever been. You go through a thing like that with someone – it’s not like he’s gone away, not like that at all.
I dream, I suppose. It’s a soft pink dawn full of cloudy billows and murmuring distance. Peaceful. I have no pain, it’s all fine, a lovely day. I can’t remember how I came to be here. These my companions and I have been floating this many a year. All about us there is laughter on the sea. There are strange things out there, things it is forbidden to look on lest they turn you to stone. But when I fall asleep and see John Copper’s head floating by the boat, face up, it’s not stone but jelly I turn to, and I wake up.
14
End of a long wild watch, those two sleeping fitfully and me alone in the world, watching endlessness, falling in and out of it. Tags of flesh tied on the spars, a-flicker on the breeze, a thick smell like the tanning factory down the road. I have a bone. My tongue has turned into the long grey scooping tongue of a dog and will not cease until it has scoured out as far as it can reach every last life-giving suck of the honeycombed heart of the bone. It occurs to me that all the world’s the same substance: a man’s bowels are like the London sewers. Skip’s red legs, swollen like sausages. Dag swelled up like that. I hug my bone. Its creamy smell tickles my nose. Why is Skip alive and Tim dead? He should have gone, not Tim. He’s on the way out anyhow. Only have to look at him.
I woke him up.
‘Your watch,’ I told him, and lay down.
As for sleep, I don’t know that I ever did any more. There were other worlds, for sure: hosts and hosts of them overlaying one another like troubled veils, ripples in a wild place. Where they existed I’ve no idea, but these dreams were nothing like the dreams of ordinary sleep. Soon as I closed my eyes they foundered against one another like the waves beneath. I could see through my forehead. Tim was in the boat still, sitting where he always did. Tim died: words words words. Now and then I sucked my sweet bone, the good smell, hugging and holding. My sores curdled.
I am a brother to dragons and a companion of owls. The bone lies across my chest and beats like a heart. The bone and I will go on. When I want to cry because I am afraid, I put the hard, shiny knob at the end of the bone in my mouth and suck with closed eyes and swoon away into sleep again and stay there for a long sweet time till it falls out on the pillow. I scream and it comes back. I’m in my cot in Bermondsey. The dark river washes against the pilings. Ma’s there. Big Ben strikes ten. The tiger, the sun in glory, softly steps on kitten feet and turns his golden eyes on me, regards me as the sea does: I’ll eat you by and by, no hurry. Don’t take it personally.
The dark silhouette of a huge head has risen over the side of the boat.
Dan shakes my shoulder and I scream.
‘It’s all right, Jaf,’ he says, sounding tired. ‘You can go back to sleep.’
It was light. Dan was lying with his eyes half closed, smoking an invisible cigar. Skip was standing in the bow, gazing earnestly eastward. I couldn’t see Tim, but I knew he was still there. I felt him. I felt him inside me also, as if he’d passed through and through in millions of channels smaller than anything a human sense could catch at. I closed my eyes and held on tight as I could to my bone. And all those worlds began to jangle again, the worlds on worlds, whispering and rustling together like millions of leaves shivering on one of those early autumn nights when the weather’s just on the turn, just catching in your nostrils. ‘Tobacco’s But An Indian Weed’. Once on the Wapping steps.
Next time I woke it was dark. Skip was asleep and Dan was lying on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the night sky with serious eyes, as if something up there in all those stars might be revealed.
‘Dan,’ I said.
He didn’t reply. I thought he might be dead, his eyes frozen for ever on the stars.
After a moment he said: ‘Life made more sense in those days.’
‘Dan.’
‘What?’
But I’d forgotten what it was I wanted to say so I put my head back and watched the sky along with him. It was black and very starry. Starry out there is not like in London. There, starry is an observable impossibility, and looking up is a gaze into infinity.
‘What is that bone?’ Dan asked.
‘It’s an arm bone,’ I replied.
White, criss-cross, other bones lay gleaming in the belly of the boat. Skip’s arm, outflung, trailed across them.
‘What do we do now?’ I asked.
Dan began laughing uncontrollably, a tight, smothered creaking that went on and on till the tears rolled down his face. He wiped them off with his fingers and smeared them across the withered hole of his mouth.
‘What will it be like for the last one of us?’ I asked the sky.
Dan shook his head and sat up, blowing his nose in his hand and flinging it.
My mouth’s been bleeding, my gums are all gone to sponge. I can taste blood in my teeth, sharp and good, and I swallow. My throat rasps. I don’t hurt so bad at the moment. ’Cept for my eyes.
‘Soon be morning,’ said Dan.
When it came, Skip slept on. When we tried to wake him he wouldn’t open his eyes. He hit out at us, shuddering and scowling, mumbling angrily, so we left him. He’ll die soon, I thought. No point in drawing lots again, it’s clear he’s going first. What then? Me and Dan. Who then? Me or him. Alone. Will it be me? What then?
I laughed.
‘What?’ asked Dan.
‘I was just thinking,’ I said. ‘When it’s just you and me.’
After a while he laughed too, and made an attempt at song:
Says Gorging Jack to Guzzling Jimmie
I am extremely hung-a-ree …
I joined in:
To Gorging Jack says Guzzling Jimmy
We’ve nothing left, us must eat we.
You can see why people laugh, can’t you? It tickled us both so much that our sniggering finally woke up Skip, who shot up like a revived corpse, turkey neck and staring eyes. I can’t stand those eyes. What’s in them is hard to look at.
‘It was yellow,’ he said.
‘What was?’
‘Look,’ said Dan, spreading before us what was left of our supplies, enough to keep a rat alive for a day or so.
‘It was yellow …’
‘Look at it.’
‘… like an eye.’
‘Look at it,’ Dan said. ‘That’s it.’
Such a ridiculous amount it set me and Dan off laughing like fools again, which only infuriated Skip. ‘Throw it over!’ he shouted. ‘Have done with it!
’ and tried to stand up, but toppled over immediately and fell to feebly punching the side of the boat with red raw knuckles that left smears.
‘Fuck this, I’m done with it, I’m done with it!’ he spat out.
‘What are you trying to do?’ Dan put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Stove us in?’
‘Better that.’ He pulled himself up onto his knees. A great heat was burning on his cheeks and forehead.
‘What was yellow?’ I asked.
Skip hauled his eyes onto me like heavy sacks. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.
‘No, you don’t.’
‘I know everything.’ His eyes changed, made a sideways flip from anger to horror. It wasn’t him looking out from his eyes. ‘You want me to die,’ he said.
‘I do not.’
‘Sit down,’ said Dan, pulling on his shirt.
‘You want to kill me.’
‘I do not.’
I didn’t. I wanted to smash his face in though for making me remember how I killed Tim.
I killed Tim.
Sounds stupid but I only realised it at that moment. It was like falling from a great height.
‘I killed Tim,’ I said, sick to my stomach.
‘You didn’t!’ Dan tried to sit up but fell back.
I began to moan, a straggly lowing trail of a thing that meandered along absolutely separate from me like a ribbon proceeding out of my mouth. I shoved my fists in my mouth to stop it. It wasn’t me, it was a thing in my body forcing its way out, I had no control over it. And as it keened on, lost in the slop and slap of waves, something invisible got into the boat with us. I tried to hide behind Dan. Blind bloody gut-cramp fear, not to be fought.
‘Leave me alone,’ sobbed Skip.
Dan struggled himself upright, a wild-looking thing, ragged old death’s-head man of the sea. ‘To me,’ he said.
We three hunched in the bow.
‘Don’t think,’ Dan said.
The sticky hold of fear. I was a fly trying to lift at least one of its thread-like legs from the syrup.
‘Make it stop,’ I said.