Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [100]
“I’m dizzy,” I said.
He went on sucking his knee, and I started drooling as well as crying.
“Dan,” Skip said, “Jaf’s not well, he shouldn’t be on watch.”
Blood. Taste. That’s a good thing to do. Better than leather. A tiny filling. If I pull at the raw bits in this elbow crack, I can make it bleed, and the hurt’s nothing. But that’s hard to get to. If this one here on the back of my wrist gets bigger. I don’t care about the salt and sting and lurch of fear, all I want is food, there never was anything else, nothing else at all.
“It’s all right, Jaf,” Dan said.
“Let him lie down.” Tim’s voice.
I fell asleep. When I woke up it was cooler and I felt well enough to sit up. The two boats were together, absolutely still. I heard voices.
“What’s he saying?”
“Fucked if I know.”
“Doesn’t even sound like English.”
“Portuguese?”
“Obrigado, obrigado, três senhora, tres, por favor …”
In Horta, on the beach, the old beggar women holding out their hands.
“He’s gone,” said the captain.
John Copper.
Dan put his face in his hand. The sun glimmered red on the water. We bobbed listlessly. Here we are—how many?—surely not—how many?—close your eyes and here we all are back again, Billy Stock and Joe Harper and Henry Cash and all, and nothing ever happened, it didn’t, you can go back there, it’s a strain and it takes every stretch you’ve got, but it surely is real and you can go back there.
“What now?” asked Dag, his eyes all a-goggle in the weird, jutting thing his face had become. But no one answered and no one knew.
The captain and Wilson Pride butchered him. I saw nothing of it. They rowed a little way away, and I lay with my head below the level of the gunwale and heard the sounds of severing and hacking, the trickle of liquid, the smothered grunts of effort.
Tim’s breath, stale and rich, came on my eyes. “It’s all right, Jaf,” he said, “it’s all right, he’s not there anymore, he’s nowhere near, he’s all right.”
Behind me I heard the breathing of Gabriel, catching, halting.
I opened my eyes. Tim’s face. Smiling. He spoke. Egg white stretched between his lips. “Not long now,” he said.
Running water.
My mouth burning and prickling, my throat closing.
“I can’t,” said Gabriel harshly.
“You can,” said Dan.
They came near, we were rocked by their approach. Skip sniffed and gulped.
“They lit a fire,” murmured Dan.
“It’s all right, Jaf.” Tim smiling.
It was going dark. Good to have smoke in the nostrils, and a small dancing light.
He held the cup to my lip. “A sip,” he said.
Thickening blood, rich.
I drank and lay back with my eyes wide open, looking up at the sudden night sky. A hot cooking smell of meat rose upon the air and an exquisite pain burst under my tongue. The stars were low. When I lived in Bermondsey I used often to be hungry. I would walk along bank side to Southwark to smell the hot dinners roasting in the ovens of the Anchor. It’s a kind of eating, standing in the street drawing in a thickening smell of juices. The river slapping bank side in Southwark, sweet grey Southwark across another sea, across a continent, across the distance between me and the blaring stars.
“It’s just meat,” Dan said to Gabriel, but Gabriel shook his head. He was humming very low and deep in his throat, staring with huge eyes straight ahead. But he had to eat in the end. Who could not? He was a big man, but he’d turned into a stick. When he did eat, it was with fury and concentration and heavy breathing. Dan passed me a thick slice of charred meat, tender as thin jelly in the middle, running with pink juices. I sucked and my mouth overflowed. I was dripping, drooling, long trails pouring down the front of me as if I was a baby.
“Need a bib,” I said, and we laughed. All of us dripping and drooling, our stomachs cawing and churning.
We ate our fill and the captain ordered an extra ration of water for each man. He said there was more meat for tomorrow, they were stowing it in the boxes our tack had been in and