So, the same dream since I was born or before. I told my mother once and she said it was impossible to dream before I was born, and yet I cannot agree with her. It’s like I know. Like I know her, like I know something I always have known but can’t quite remember, and even when I’m awake, at the back of my mind I’m still trying to remember. I have the disturbing notion I have forgotten something vital. I don’t know what or who she is but I know her like I know my memories.
And there are other dreams but this one is the gateway to them all. This one is with me most. This is the dream I dream when life has forsaken me, when my luck has run out. When I feel it’s all over, y’know? Slit-the-wrist days. But I don’t suppose you’ve ever had one of those. You seem so content.
5.
Night Cart
Angelo had grown into a lanky, long-limbed, freckle-faced, peculiar fellow who could polarise opinion. His silver-grey hair served to set him apart further, and led onlookers to fabricate reasons for its colour. For surely it was as unnatural as witchcraft. When he spoke, his arms and hands flew about his face in mad, exaggerated gestures. He needed more space around him than a usual person, yet insisted on standing too close in any engagement, and bent forward in such a way as to tower over and encroach on other people.
His love fortified him. He told himself he was a chosen one, an emperor, a bear; his confidence was his greatest flaw. Often when a person was too polite to step back a pace they would, for their kindness, get a whack on the nose, or at least experience the shower of spittle that sprayed from Angelo’s mouth. He leant forward when he spoke, partly because of his height, and partly because every small thing he had to impart was to him laced with urgency. He was not above holding a sleeve to communicate the exclamation marks in his speech patterns, or putting one of his great flat hands at the nape of the neck to draw the listener’s ear closer.
He was incapable of lying and his honesty was interpreted as arrogant and obnoxious. One never knew what would come from his mouth, and people could not take their fascinated eyes off him. He seemed like a mad giant. And when he laughed it was a hooting snuffle of a guffaw, at once comic and disconcerting, for where laughter is often contagious, Angelo’s had a quelling effect as surely as water to fire. His facial expressions were extreme and contorted, and appeared to be painful. He had no ability to mask or manage his emotions, no idea they showed on his face. What was true was that he held within his being an inexhaustible capacity to love, and this gave him a dash of the surreal that people found difficult to name.
Yet in many ways he behaved like a girl. He would help wherever he saw need. He found a bird fallen from a nest and took it home, where he wrapped it in a sock and kept it down his shirt front, feeding its soundless squawk with bits of bread he’d moistened in his mouth. He took the meagre scraps left over from meals with him to feed stray dogs. An unusual hat in a window would stop him in his tracks and he’d sigh at the beauty of it. He picked flowers, sought out the oldest woman in a crowd and presented them to her gallantly.
Pierre sat hunched over the kitchen table, a ledger of accounts before him. ‘Oh là là,’ he repeated under his breath. He shook his head. ‘Factories,’ he said to Angelo.
There had been no substantial commissions for over a year. Pierre and Angelo attended meetings against the machines and the factories taking over. ‘We are leaving. Get out while you can.’ Men said their farewells and with their scraggly families left London with only a small tote of belongings. Pierre would say, as he carried thread and tools bought cheaply from the departed, ‘More work for us.’ But no real work came their way.
A debt collector took to knocking on the door every day exactly at noon. He was dressed in a well-cut suit and was surprisingly small and very frightening. He spoke with Pierre in the low tone of the powerful and when he left Pierre would sit shaking at the kitchen table as he was at this moment. It got to the point where Pierre could not even bear to open the door. His health deteriorated, he was on the wane. Then without warning he slid from his chair to the floor as if his body were boneless, and never got up.
Angelo bent down and tried to wake Pierre. The old man’s face was fixed in a bizarre way. Angelo could not pinpoint what was odd, except simply that life had left. For a moment he didn’t know what to make of it. He considered crying — screwed up his face and blocked his throat in an imitation of tears. But none came. Then it dawned.
Angelo slowly lay down beside the corpse and felt infinite possibilities opening up to him. He drummed his fingers together in thought. He lay like this for some time and then he said a prayer. ‘Our Father, thank you for taking Pierre. Please look after him. He’s not half bad. And God, can you make it so I find my mermaid soon. Amen.’
He rummaged around in Pierre’s room and found the few books Magdalene had read to him all those years ago. How proud she had been that she could read; she told Angelo that letters were a gift from God, that words were as magic as the centaurs, sphinxes, unicorns and other creatures in the pages.
He continued to poke about and, with a cry of delight, found the whaler’s original drawing of the mermaid. He grabbed the quilt and put it on his own bed, then took out the letter with the seal of the rose, grubby from handling, carefully folded the mermaid drawing and tucked both in his vest. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after you,’ he said. Then he opened the book of legends, by chance, upon a text about mermaids.
Angelo read of recorded sightings and encounters of the maids of the sea, dating from antiquity to recent times. He read reports of a mermaid singing with otherworldly loveliness that overwhelmed mortal listeners. He read of Odysseus and the sirens from which he protected his crew by filling their ears with wax. Odysseus himself chose to hear the sirens’ song while tied to the mast of his ship.
Angelo forgot about the corpse of Pierre and read that in squalls and storms, humans can see mermaids better. In his mind’s eye he saw himself drenched by the sea, reaching out to his mermaid, teetering on the crest of a wave. He stretched out on the bed, drew up the quilt and read and read. He learnt about her beguiling hair, her talismans of mirror and comb, he learnt she was easily enamoured by man. He sat up: The mermaid can exchange her tail for legs only once, when love is the wager, yet is dangerous when moral infatuation and fascination rather than true love of the heart are offered to her. But when the mortal love is sincere, mastery of her elements and pearls beyond price are offered. She is custodian of the treasures of the sea.
He could not stay inside. He had to walk. He emptied the few coins out of Pierre’s leather pouch and set off as if a lightning bolt had struck at his gut and spread its heating charge to his limbs.
He spent all the money on whisky, which he drank as fast as he could, by way of celebration, in a back street. The last thing he remembered was placing a bet on a cockfight: red beating feathers, squawks, men squashed over the rail, brief triumph and fists pummelling his skull.
He woke with a man hauling him to his feet. Angelo, red-eyed and crusty-mouthed, stood swaying and slump-shouldered in the grey morning light. The man dusted him down, straightened Angelo’s clothes and made waving gestures, screwing up his nose at the wafts of unwashed anus and beer.
‘You stink.’ The man smiled, his teeth gapped like a picket fence.
‘Can’t find my mermaid,’ croaked Angelo, his tongue dry.
‘I’m sure there’s thousands more.’
Angelo grunted and pulled away, too weary to speak or fight. He threw a half-hearted punch, missed and stumbled. He wanted to sleep, just sleep.
The man pinched his sleeve and pulled him upright. ‘Oi, you’re Angelo, ain’t you. Remember me? You came looking for me once.’
Angelo gazed down at the young man’s face, as harmless and misshapen as a potato, and let him take him across the road into a tea house. Angelo was tall to the other man’s squat. He remained mute while the man ordered kippers and eggs, and he supped. He tried to remember where he knew the man from; a vague recollection ho
vered in his memory. The details were elusive but there was a sense of affection present.
‘Remember yet? Well, it’ll come. I’ve always liked you and I wondered where you’d got to. I thought we were going to be friends.’ The man grinned and slapped the table.
Suddenly Angelo remembered. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and he meant it.
‘I forgive you,’ said the man seriously, and the simplicity of it made Angelo blush; a bright stain of colour rose up to his widow’s peak, all over his sticky-out ears and down his chest into the mat of ferocious red hair. The man chuckled. His body vibrated with it and the sound rumbled up and out of him, charging the space between them. Angelo chuckled too, and, for no reason except a strange tentative sense of companionship, they laughed heartily together.
‘You’re the wild Angel. What on earth were you doing in this part of London? Fighting your way back to Eden?’ He gestured to Angelo’s swollen mouth and eye. It was the eyes he remembered, for the thatch of strange white hair on the fellow’s head would have been an effective disguise.
‘I’m fighting my way back to Eve,’ said Angelo, his good eye gleaming.
‘And where do you think she is but Eden, eh?’
‘So where’s Eden, then?’ said Angelo, his face mutinous, sensing ridicule.
The man took no notice of the threat. He cocked his head to the side. ‘Well, it ain’t here, is it? But it’s bound to be in the Antipodes, and, what’s more, I’ve got you a ticket. We need another man, you must come.’ With a flourish he withdrew a notice from his pocket and pushed it across the table. It read:
SOUTH SEAS WHALING CREW NEEDED FOR THE UNICORN
DESTINATION ANTIPODES
NO EXEPRIENCE NECESSARY
MUST BE STRONG AND SINGLE
Was this a path of destiny? Angelo’s attention snagged on the words South Seas. South Seas! ‘When does she leave?’
‘Two days.’
‘I have to bury a man first.’
And so the two young men, barely out of boyhood, loaded Pierre onto the night cart and followed it to the cemetery, where they helped dig the hole to save on the cost. When all the dirt was in place Angelo spent a moment, made the sign of the cross — backwards, for he knew no better — and made his way to the house, which already seemed no longer relevant.
He took with him the whaler’s drawing and letter. From the loom shop he selected the best of the tools and needles and a few reels of thread. With Davy waiting respectfully outside, Angelo lay down on Pierre and Magdalene’s bed. He lay in the centre with his arms outstretched, like Jesus on the cross, and said a prayer for the only mother and father he had known. And he acknowledged to himself that he was alone.
As they boarded the whaling vessel Davy said, ‘Do you believe in mermaids?’
Angelo was silent for a second, then he said in a level voice, ‘Swear on your mother’s life you won’t tell a soul about my mermaid.’
‘I’m an orphan, remember, and you are and all.’ Davy flung his arm around Angelo.
‘Swear!’
‘I swear not to tell anyone about your mermaid. Not a soul.’ Davy let his arm fall.
6.
Jacob’s River, New Zealand
The bronze-clad brigantine, the Unicorn, was mighty. With her sails at full mast and the trade winds behind her, she plunged through the sea like a bucking animal. Captain Angus ruled a crew of the most lawless men ever conceived. A stew of misfits: villains, traitors, murderers, poachers and rustlers, highwaymen and failed pirates, wife-abandoners, orphans, runaway boys, escaped convicts, circus freaks, mercenaries, thieves, rogues, bootleggers, blackbirders and vagabonds. Each man was on the Unicorn for a different reason, and all had a sense of displacement and loss about them like exiles.
Angelo endured the first week of the sea journey to the new world of New Zealand by being sodden drunk on a substance the colour of muddy water but made of all things inferior. Under the influence of the crude drink and the sickening sway of the ship as it crested and fell, he was as useless as a baby on laudanum. He trembled and quivered on deck with the harsh sea air, his jaw clenched spasmodically, he sweated horridly, his eyes rolled backwards, he vomited so often all that came out was curdled spit.
On those black nights when even the Eastern Star was opaque, Angelo lolled on his back-curling hammock, feeling he were in the bowels of a monster. Inches from his nose, the ceiling of the cabin suffocated him. The creaking ship, with its mysterious gurgles and frightening oscillations, shunted him this way and that so that even lying down his muscles were tense. His mind turned to the hope, the conviction, that out in the wide sea he just might find his mermaid.
He saw her waiting. He clutched his breast pocket with the drawing and the letter like a medal of St Christopher and by journey’s end they were losing their ink, yet indelible in his memory. He saw her in his mind, swimming in the sea blissfully, innocently naked, with him, her hair scarlet and silken spread around them, swirling in the currents. He’d have her smile for him, she’d hold his hand and laugh a tinkling laugh and they’d frolic in the waters of his delusion. Then he’d vice her in his embrace.
Sometimes he’d drift off to sleep and when he next looked she had vanished, and he could not break the surface of the ocean for it was sealed over, an impenetrable skin of glass. And he’d mewl in his seasickness, writhing under the stiff grey blanket, host to the bodily emollients of countless sailors before him: sweat, piss, tears, shit and salty spunk. Through the boards of the ship the fishy tang of the sea seeped in.
Davy never once believed Angelo wouldn’t make it, even though other sailors had bet coins, tobacco and tools that he would be chucked off before the Unicorn reached Jacob’s River. One of the crew, Jake, whose blackened gums hosted only two (rotten) teeth, tormented the delirious Angelo. Whispered, ‘Die, die, die,’ in his ear.
Jake was a blackballed pirate who hated for hate’s sake. A small man with a mean streak in a fatless body tightly coiled with muscles like a circus contortionist. His body was bald of hair, as if he had come from a pod, and his fingernails were stubs he’d gnawed down to the quick, the surrounding skin raw and jagged. He had tattoos on his arms of snakes writhing in skulls and naked maidens trussed and gagged. He liked to wipe the sweat under his armpits and smell it, and had a following of men who feared him.
The captain of the Unicorn knew the calibre of his men only too well. There was nothing Angus had not seen. He had crewed whaling vessels since the age of twelve and he could see into men’s minds. He could tell if a man had sealegs, and could see Angelo did not, and into the bargain he couldn’t handle his drink.
On the seventh day of sailing the captain hailed Davy and said, ‘That mate of yours has got to go. We’ll be dumping him at the next port.’
‘No, he’ll be all right, Captain.’
‘We dump him — or would you rather he walked the plank? That might be more fun, eh?’
As he spoke, a sailor high up in the mast cried out as he toppled from his perch. He grabbed the great flapping sail to save himself but his weight dragged on the canvas, ripping it a fair distance before he lurched to a stop, dangling way out over the whitecaps of the vast ocean. All the sailors looked up, stunned. They gasped, waiting spellbound for the sail to rip further and the man to plunge to his death.
Only Angelo moved. In his quick way he climbed the lower shaft of the mast with his long arms and legs. Angus watched as Angelo climbed fearlessly up, moving out from the centre mast as if on the branch of a great tree, sat down and, to the gasps of the men, swung backwards from his bent knees. He yanked on the sail, gathering it in his hands, and in so doing winched the sailor up, grabbed him by the forearm and swung him onto the bar. A cheer went up in the crowd.
Davy beamed at the captain, both question and answer in his eyes.
Angus said, ‘You’re to keep him off the grog or it’ll be you who walks the plank.’
‘Aye, Captain.’
The burst of heroism went to Angel
o’s head. He felt invincible. His earlier melancholy now turned to mania and he sought out jobs to do, never still for a moment. The first of the tasks he set himself was to mend the rip in the sail. The captain had feared they would have to sail with one less, and with a treacherous cape coming up he was heavy with it.
Angelo had the sail down just far enough to reach the full tear. He wielded the heavy iron needle deftly and the stitches were as fine as Angus had ever seen. In six hours, just before dusk, the sail was back up and billowing with a strong wind.
Captain Angus had sad eyes. Eyes that looked out from a leathery face and saw only desolation and yet, since the torn sail incident, every time he saw Angelo he felt oddly heartened. Angelo seemed good — good in the way only simpletons are, and yet with the smallest hint of the majestic, like the unlikely beauty of a peasant’s daughter.
He noticed the artistically slender hands, the erect, haughty carriage. The way Angelo seemed to have supreme confidence in himself, in his purpose, his reason for being. Angus sensed it and he recognised it as rare and yet the old captain was certain that Angelo was moony in the head. He watched him lurch from one group of men to another, from one topic to another. Saw the way he irritated people and could not read their displeasure.
Anchored in the inlet of Jacob’s River, near the southernmost point of two islands, were nearly fifty ships, each with a crew of a hundred men, all there for the whales. Longboats with square rivets of bronze; barques with prows curling upwards like a genie’s shoe, some painted jet black, others in varnished hues. Some had been despatched by whaling companies, others were rogue operators, and still others belonged to kings and queens who did not expect them back for three or more years.
The ships sailed the trade winds and served as junkboats, trading in whatever was on offer. They were whalers and botanists, spice merchants, and blackbirders not above tossing out barrels of whale oil to set shackles and chains and trade in nut-brown slaves for the mines in Queensland. Anything could happen; anything went.
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