Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [110]
“We must all agree,” said Dan.
We four. We look about us, into each other’s eyes, which are amazed and dancing. Skip’s eyes are bleeding, or his tears are infected with blood, one or the other.
It’s like the songs, the stories.
“Eight bits of paper,” Tim says. “Put marks on two.”
“Two?”
“Has to be,” he says, “second for who does the shooting. That’s how it’s done.”
“Jesus Christ!” I whisper.
“We must all agree,” Dan repeats.
“One goes,” Tim says, “or we can all die.”
Skip smears his bloody tears. He is smiling as he takes what’s left of his sketchbook from his breeches pocket. “Use this,” he says. It is the last page, Horta, from inland, a whispery grey scene of rooftops, the flowers of Faial; I remember the lovely stew in the tavern and a girl sitting on some stairs. He gives the picture to Dan. It’s not large, only four or five inches square, but big enough. Dan folds it very neatly and precisely and tears it into eight small squares.
“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,”