Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [107]
“Don’t go, Gabriel,” I said with tears bursting out.
But he did. He just did, quietly, looking at me like that. He was there, then gone. No more Gabriel behind the glazing brown eyes.
“Please, Gabe,” I said.
I’d been light-headed for a long time, but somewhere here the feeling ran away, rushed up to the reaches of the sky. It was another world, brighter than the old, as if new painted a second ago. Strange magic, spiriting away this one, that one, another, one more, one by one, pulling them out of their bodies. I got filled up, filled right up, all of it pouring out of my eyes and down my face. There was some beauty in it too. My shipmates. Their faces in my mind. Their voices raised in song. Their meat too, beautiful. Organ blood, thin. Clots, wonderful. Sticky, sweet and full. They were life to me. A bucket of red and brown. I can smell it, just. My nose is salted up. I have meat, my nose is running, the salt stings and I’m crying.
I don’t know what day it was when the captain’s boat went missing. Weeks anyway. Weeks. Weeks, weeks … must’ve been, because Skip had come back to us, gabbling how he had to stay awake all the time for fear they’d cut his throat.
“They hate me,” he said.
Over the water, the captain’s face, haggard and sad. Simon’s, empty, open mouthed, burned near black.
“Ah, come on, Skip,” Tim said, “you’ll be all right with us. We’re all jolly boys here. Don’t bring your demons though.”
“Not my demons. Why’s Jaf crying?”
“Can’t think.”
It was after that, I don’t know how long.
My mind goes. Falters, flickers. Stops. Dream unfurls.
The sea changed and changed. It rained a lot of the time. Sometimes the wind blew and we were tossed about. My sores had a life of their own, the salt sting hot and white. A rime formed about their heights. Dan talked to his wife. “Alice,” he said, “when are you going to cut my hair?” And: “Do you think we should move back to Putney, Al?”
And one morning Captain Proctor’s boat was gone.
The sea was empty. We four looked and looked and said nothing. It had been a very windy night. A great breath had blown them away.
The four of us drifting. Singing. Our arms round each other, all jolly boys. Me, Tim, Dan, Skip. If it threatened storm we huddled close together, tenting our backs to shelter our fronts and faces, breathing our combined breath of sour salt bile. We still had some meat, but we had no fire. We had ribs. When we finished the meat we still had some tack and a bit of water now and then. But you can’t sing for ever. Your voice stops. You open your mouth and nothing works. A soft, wheezing hiss, fragile as a dewdrop, is all, and no one hears because of the greater salt hiss of the sea. Your voice stops and your brain runs out of the top of your head, and you soar very high and see from above the curving rim of the world, blue, blue, blue, far as the eye can see. One of Ishbel’s old songs runs in your head, the mermaid with a comb and a glass in her hand, her hand, her hand, with a comb and a glass in her hand, and her face appears, a round, pale moon, very solemn, and with it the sound of a knife grating against bone or hard sinew or something. I had nothing to do with it, any of it, I was far, far away above the clouds. Her face was the knife cutting. Her face was whatever it was I was in and couldn’t get out of. At the end there would be a straight line stretching both ways for ever, and it would be the end of the sea and the lip of the last waterfall, a fall into white nothing, the foam spray of it rising to meet you