Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [112]
We had no fire. Some things we had raw straight away, pink heart meat, other soft things. Go easy, go easy, we said. No fools us. We all had something to suck on from time to time, sensible. Meat hung drying, long ribbons adorning our tattered sails. Meat spread salting. I kept looking round for Tim. I could still feel him in the boat with us. My mouth was wet once more. When I licked my lips my tongue did not cling like a grub. The cup had gone round three or four times: sip carefully, sip like a bee. Blood. What’s this I feel? What is it? Not sadness, not sickness—
“He’s given us a few days more,” Dan said.
Having eaten, we three were now, to some extent, serene. We lay rocked upon the bosom of the deep, alive yet, alive, alive-o. We three? We four.
“Feels like he’s still here,” I said.
“He is,” said Skip. “There!” and nodded towards the stern of the boat.
But I couldn’t see him. Not fair, I thought, if he was here it would be me he’d show himself to, not him. Didn’t show himself, but I felt him there all the same. It got dark and we just lay.
What is it I feel? Not sadness, not sickness. What I feel is a kind of lightness, a perverse sense of well-being. This is the funny thing: Tim and me, I feel we are closer than we’ve ever been. You go through a thing like that with someone—it’s not like he’s gone away, not like that at all.
I dream, I suppose. It’s a soft pink dawn full of cloudy billows and murmuring distance. Peaceful. I have no pain, it’s all fine, a lovely day. I can’t remember how I came to be here. These my companions and I have been floating this many a year. All about us there is laughter on the sea. There are strange things out there, things it is forbidden to look on lest they turn you to stone. But when I fall asleep and see John Copper’s head floating by the boat, face up, it’s not stone but jelly I turn to, and I wake up.
nd of a long, wild watch, those two sleeping fitfully and me alone in the world, watching endlessness, falling in and out of it. Tags of flesh tied on the spars, a-flicker on the breeze, a thick smell like the tanning factory down the road. I have a bone. My tongue has turned into the long, grey, scooping tongue of a dog and will not cease until it has scoured out as far as it can reach every last life-giving suck of the honeycombed heart of the bone. It occurs to me that all the world’s the same substance: a man’s bowels are like the London sewers. Skip’s red legs, swollen like sausages. Dag swelled up like that. I hug my bone. Its creamy smell tickles my nose. Why is Skip alive and Tim dead? He should have gone, not Tim. He’s on the way out anyhow. Only have to look at him.
I woke him up.
“Your watch,” I told him, and lay down.
As for sleep, I don’t know that I ever did anymore. There were other worlds, for sure: hosts and hosts of them overlaying one another like troubled veils, ripples in a wild place. Where they existed I’ve no idea, but these dreams were nothing like the dreams of ordinary sleep. Soon as I closed my eyes they foundered against one another like the waves beneath. I could see through my forehead. Tim was in the boat still, sitting where he always did. Tim died: words, words, words. Now and then I sucked my sweet bone, the good smell, hugging and holding. My sores curdled.
I am a brother to dragons and a companion of owls. The bone lies across my chest and beats like a heart. The bone and me will go on. When I want to cry because I am afraid, I put the hard, shiny knob at the end of the bone in my mouth and suck with closed eyes, and swoon away into sleep again and stay there for