by Rosie Thomas
‘I see a ship,’ the mate loudly cried out overhead. ‘The Emperor himself!’
Up on the deck, the biggest and broadest of the able seamen had padded his chest with mats, wrapped himself round in a white sheet from the Captain’s cabin and pulled on top of the whole a great dark coat blackened with smoke from the try-pot. He had a wild nest of hair made of frayed yarn decked with seaweed, whiskers of the same, and a cloth mask that covered all but his eyes and nose. In his hand he held a four-pronged harpoon. Against the dimming sky and the limitless horizon he made an alarming sight.
In the meantime the other hands dragged up from below decks the largest of the blubber tubs, a great vessel they filled to the brim with salt water. Over the lip of it, secured at the other end to the summit of the brick furnace where the whale-oil was boiled out of the blubber, a broad plank was fixed. The Captain’s own chair was brought from his cabin and set next to the near end of the plank, and Old Neptune took his seat upon the throne.
In a great roar he demanded that the first of the youngsters be brought up without delay.
In the forecastle the young men had heard the tramping and thumping over their heads, and waited with great trepidation for what would happen next. At the command they hustled forward the boldest of their company and sent him up the steps to the deck, and whatever fate was awaiting him. There were a few long moments before there came some confused shouting and the sound of splashing, and the call for the next victim.
One by one, they put their reluctant heads out into the night air. When it came to William’s turn he had no sooner appeared from the forecastle scuttle and tried to see around him in the blaze of lanterns than he was seized from behind and blindfolded. He caught no more than a second’s glimpse of Old Neptune towering on his throne, but it was enough to send a thrill of fear through him. He was hustled up the ladder and set in front of the sea’s Emperor. William’s common sense told him that all this was no more than a sailors’ prank, but still he could not stop his limbs from trembling.
‘What is your name?’ Neptune roared into his face, sending a great wave of tobacco and rum breaking over the boy, which would have knocked him backwards if he hadn’t been pinned by both arms.
‘William Corder, sir.’
‘And why do you travel through my domain, William?’
The young man hesitated for a long moment, as if debating with himself the best answer to give.
Neptune roared at him, ‘I have a dozen ships to visit tonight.’
‘I… I am hoping to catch a whale, sir.’
Amid a great roar of laughter Neptune said, ‘Aye, you and Captain Gunnell also. I have a piece of advice for you, William, before we make a sailor of you. If you want to see Nantucket again don’t look backwards when you can look forwards and don’t you look forwards in the whaleboat or Mr Plant will have your two ears for bait. Do you hear me? Open your mouth wide in answer.’
William opened his mouth as wide as it would go to say Yes, sir, but at once a filthy brush covered with tar and soap was crammed between his teeth. All over his face the vile paste was slapped on until he was gagging with it, then invisible hands pretended to shave his soft skin with a rusty knife.
‘There’s no beard on the boy, not a whisker,’ cried a voice he recognised as the first mate’s.
‘Can you swim, William?’ Neptune roared at him. ‘It might be better for you if you can answer yes.’
William remembered the shouts and splashing he had heard from the victims who had preceded him, and knew that he was going to be thrown overboard. He could not swim a stroke, and the green water would close over his head and he would sink like a stone. ‘No,’ he screamed, his voice rising to a shriek of terror.
But a bucket of water was thrown full in his face, so that his scream became a gasp, and he was lifted off his feet by what seemed a dozen men and pitched backwards into the water. As his heels flew over his head he heard the crew sing out, ‘Man overboard!’
William was kicking out for his life even before he hit the water in the blubber tub. He wrenched off the blindfold and looked up through the froth as he sank to see the grinning faces of his shipmates encircling the tub. He was choking and retching as he rose to the surface, and no more than two floundering strokes carried him to the side. Rough hands seized and hoisted him out, and a mocking attempt was made to strip him of his soaking shirt and trousers.
But the threat of having his tender naked flesh revealed was much greater to William than the fear of death by drowning. His fright was seemingly forgotten as he rounded on his tormentors and spat at them like a wildcat. ‘You have done enough. Take your hands off me at once.’
One or two of them were jeeringly ready to take the matter further, but Captain Gunnell called out from his place at the front of the little crowd, ‘Leave the lad alone now. He has shown spirit enough and there are more of them waiting below.’
At once, attention turned to the next youngster who was hustled up the forecastle ladder. William saw that those who had preceded him in the cruel ritual were awaiting the show as eagerly as any of the other hands, but he did not choose to take his place alongside them as Neptune began his roaring again. Instead he turned his back on the fun and leaned over the taffrail to gaze out over the wide black sea. Not one of the men saw that his face was wet with tears as well as tub-water.
May frowned. She could hear the endless sea beyond her window and wished that she could shut out the sound. The whaling story seemed to bring it closer and to amplify the threat in its lazy whisper. She opened the diary yet again.
Doone always wrote the date in full at the beginning of each entry. The last one was for 15 August but it ran to only a handful of numbers, scrawled with such heat that an impression of the digits clearly showed on the blank page beneath. Almost all the later entries were in code, except for the dates and a tantalising handful of words and phrases – mirror, photograph, dinghy – out of which May could piece together nothing significant. She was tired of staring at the code as if the intensity of her concentration alone could dissolve the mystery.
The plain-written page that held her attention was dated 13 June, not long before the Bennisons left Chicago for their summer vacation. The curve of Doone’s mounting excitement about the impending departure for Maine had been almost unbroken, but now it dipped into a chasm of despair.
Talked with Mom, back from the clinic early for once. Says she and Dad have been thinking about maybe going up to the coast a bit later, say a week, because Dad has some work to finish off and she ‘could always use a bit more time’.
What did I think?
Think. As if it’s anything to do with thinking, like whether to have relish or extra fries. It’s like I’ve made a little tower of stones balanced on top of each other, dragging them to their place and building up hopes and dreams all the year, then my parents knock it down and scatter the stones with a flick of their feet and don’t even see what they’re doing.
I need so much to be there in the places where I remember him, even if he won’t be there yet himself. I have got everything fixed on this, it’s what I’ve kept going on all these months and it’s so fragile that Mom can just change it, going hmmm? over the pasta as if nothing matters except her work and Dad’s.
There’s no defence and no control anywhere in my life.
I’m so scared.
I’ve got to be there, on the beach and the bay, closer to the memories and the promise of him arriving. A week longer to wait is longer than I can bear to imagine. There isn’t anything else I care about.
And as soon as I write that I think, God, what kind of a person am I?
And I know the answer to it is that I’m dumb, and a kid, and an ugly, fat-bottomed one at that – and perhaps it’s actually because nothing matters or means anything at all to me that I’ve fixed on this thing as a meaningful structure in my life. Probably that’s what Dad would say about it, only with a whole lot more jargon.
How pathetic of me
, and how pathetic to hope for anything more, that he might want me for any reason at all, even though I love him so much I’d be glad to die for him.
And yet, and yet. I remember what I remember.
I didn’t say anything to Mom. I ran out of the kitchen and went to my room and lay under the covers, and in the end she came to look for me. She saw my face and I saw the dawn of fright in hers. And that made me feel really strong for a minute.
She asked me, ‘Are you okay?’
It’s a funny question, as meaningless as just about everything else. If your parents are a paediatrician and a shrink, what room is there for you not to be okay?
Then she said, ‘Honey, we’ll go up to the beach as planned if it means so much to you. Is there some reason why you so badly want to get away from here? Do you want to talk to me about something?’
I told her there was nothing. Nothing nothing nothing, like it’s my signature.
Nothing except him.
Who is he? May asked herself for the hundredth time when she finished reading.
It must have been someone up here at the beach; someone who had been here the year before as well as last year. A regular summer visitor, not a year-rounder, because Doone wrote about waiting for him to arrive. Was he from one of the five houses, or Pittsharbor, or further afield? Doone had written about the beach and the bay as if that was where he belonged, so surely that indicated here, the beach itself?
It was clear to May that he could only be Lucas, even though Doone never wrote his name. There were no other possibilities except Joel and Kevin, and how could either of them inspire such intensity of feeling?
The year before last something had happened between Lucas and Doone – I remember what I remember – and it had been enough for Doone to make it the structure of her life. Pathetic, Doone had judged her attachment to be and the judgement had extended to herself as well, but she had still acknowledged it to be the centre of her life. She had believed her love to be strong enough to die for and it was true that it had brought her moments of ecstasy as well as despair.
And she did die.
Was that because of Lucas or had something else intervened?
The Beach is particularly resistant to rational explanation. Aaron Fennymore’s dry words again, somehow more alarming for their very lack of colour.
May studied her bitten fingernails and the ragged cushions of flesh surrounding them. They looked like a stranger’s hands.
Was it possible, might she have to love Lucas just because Doone had done so before her? Was this helpless longing for a tattooed arm and dirty beige-blond hair inherited from a drowned girl? Is it me or her? Which of us is which? And the one on the island – who is she?
Suddenly May hurled the diary away from her. It landed face down with the pages splayed. Her hands flew up to cover her ears and she rocked in the old armchair.
There was a difference, a big one – Doone had had her mother to confide in, even though she was angry with her for her absences. Doone’s mother had come up to her room, hadn’t she, and put her arms round her troubled daughter and tried to make her talk?
An angry sob cranked itself out of May’s chest.
She knew how people could just die, like they could just go shopping or on vacation.
When she thought about her own mother in the earlier times the memories were dressed in colours: the clothes Alison wore, brilliant slabs of saffron or mint or cerise like exuberant abstracts out of one of her art books, and spiked with the scent that clung to her, and the sound of talk and laughter.
Then there came the reversal of all that, the dissolving of Alison into silence and darkness. She had gone so suddenly there had been no chance for anyone to make ready for the loss of her. There had been no packing, no goodbyes and all the tears had to be spent uselessly afterwards. She had left her clothes hanging in the closets, lurid ghosts of her, which still seemed ready to stir with her movements.
Alison’s disappearance out of May’s life seemed such a terrible and random assault that it had put every remaining corner of her world under threat. All the warmth and certainty drained away, leaving a place of yawning shadows and whispers she couldn’t hear.
May remembered the uneasiness that seeped through the apartment, filling the rooms like poison gas. She wondered who was guilty and what it was they were guilty of so that Alison had had to die, then she pinched down on the thought to press it into oblivion. Questions simmered in her head, about the time before her mother’s death and voices behind closed doors and murmured telephone conversations and Ivy’s mute, accusing face, but they were never spoken aloud. When Alison was gone there was no one to answer anything.
Maybe her father had never been very good at looking after people or answering their needs and she had never really noticed the deficiency because Alison had always been there. He made the right movements and gestures, and after the first weeks he found a housekeeper to take care of them all, but he did everything mechanically and painfully, as if he was too disabled by his own grief to attend to May’s. She tried to spare him by keeping still and quiet.
Ivy had been the strongest, but she turned her strength into icy withdrawal. She spent her time with her friends, and would hardly speak to her father and sister at all.
For months May had been afraid every day that Ivy and John would die too and leave her behind. One day she couldn’t keep the fear of it locked inside herself any longer. John was just leaving the apartment, in his business suit with a file of papers under his arm, and May clung to him and howled that she was sure he would be run over or murdered on the way.
He was in a hurry. He needed to get to a meeting and to win a contract; the business wasn’t doing well. ‘Nothing will happen to me, baby, I promise. I’ll be back at six o’clock, just like always.’
And he had handed her over to Carmen the housekeeper, murmuring that May seemed a little spooked and needed some extra attention. Carmen did her best, but May pushed her away. She lay on her bed, waiting and shrinking from the inevitability of the phone, the knock that would bring the news. What had once been safe was now precarious.
A few days later she cut up her mother’s clothes.
Dr Metz had been through all this with her. It was normal, she had told her. It was fine and natural for May to feel what she felt.
‘If it’s fine,’ May had snarled once, ‘why does it feel so bad?’
Dr Metz had smiled at her. ‘We can talk about it next time.’
If I had been Doone, I would have told my mother I loved Lucas. I’d tell Alison now, if she were here. May didn’t know whether she had spoken out loud or not, and the realisation made her feel that she might not even have her solid self to rely on any longer.
Restlessly, searching for an escape from her thoughts, she turned back to the story of the whaler ship.
It was the afternoon of the third day after the crossing of the Line ceremony when the exultant cry came at last from the look-out at the masthead. ‘There she blows!’
Captain Gunnell sprang to attention at once, and the rest of the watch on deck and William Corder with them.
‘Where away?’ the Captain howled.
‘Four points on the lee bow, sir.’
‘How far off?’
‘Two miles.’
‘Sperm whale?’
‘Yes, sir. A large school. There she blows again.’
‘Call all hands. Haul back the main yard and stand by to lower.’
The men from the watch below decks swarmed out of their places and joined the rest in the scurry to the boats. This urgency was like none of their practice games and even William felt the thrill of the chase in prospect, as the bow boat hit the water and he sprang over the rail and landed in his accustomed place. There was great rivalry between the boats to be the first under way and the fastest over the water, and William bent to his heavy oar with great alacrity as the mate sang out, ‘Give way, my lads, give way. A long steady stroke and we’ll have ’em.’
William’s boat was caught at right angles to him, dead on the eye as whalemen called it, because the sperm whale has the best field of vision at that angle. As Matthias howled at his men to row round to bring them head to head, the remaining boats scattered in pursuit of the other whales now blowing all around them.
Heggy Burris, the boat steerer, stood up with his first iron grasped in his hand, ready to send it into the whale’s body once the head had slid past. At exactly the right instant he braced his foot against a cleat and set his thigh in a half-circle cut for the purpose in a gunwale plank, bent his body back in an arc and drove the iron through the air and into the whale’s flank. It buried itself deep and an instant later the second iron followed it home.
Pain bent the creature almost double as he flung himself away from them. He thrashed his mighty flukes and sent a column of water high into the air before he sounded. The line ran out so fast as he dived that smoke rose from it and the headsman hollered at William to douse it with water from his canvas bucket. The line had half run out before the whale rose once again and in agony beat the water with his flukes and tail, so that it churned and rocked the little boat like an eggshell. William could not make himself look to see, but he heard the whale’s jaws snapping like cannon fire seemingly inches from his own head.