Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [113]
The dark silhouette of a huge head has risen over the side of the boat.
Dan shakes my shoulder and I scream.
“It’s all right, Jaf,” he says, sounding tired. “You can go back to sleep.”
It was light. Dan was lying with his eyes half closed, smoking an invisible cigar. Skip was standing in the bow, gazing earnestly eastward. I couldn’t see Tim, but I knew he was still there. I felt him. I felt him inside me also, as if he’d passed through and through in millions of channels smaller than anything a human sense could catch at. I closed my eyes and held on tight as I could to my bone. And all those worlds began to jangle again, the worlds on worlds, whispering and rustling together like millions of leaves shivering on one of those early autumn nights when the weather’s just on the turn, just catching in your nostrils. “Tobacco’s But an Indian Weed.” Once on the Wapping steps.
Next time I woke it was dark. Skip was asleep and Dan was lying on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the night sky with serious eyes, as if something up there in all those stars might be revealed.
“Dan,” I said.
He didn’t reply. I thought he might be dead, his eyes frozen for ever on the stars.
After a moment he said: “Life made more sense in those days.”
“Dan.”
“What?”
But I’d forgotten what it was I wanted to say, so I put my head back and watched the sky along with him. It was black and very starry. Starry out there is not like in London. There, starry is an observable impossibility, and looking up is a gaze into infinity.
“What is that bone?” Dan asked.
“It’s an arm bone,” I replied.
White, criss-cross, other bones lay gleaming in the belly of the boat. Skip’s arm, outflung, trailed across them.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
Dan began laughing uncontrollably, a tight, smothered creaking that went on and on till the tears rolled down his face. He wiped them off with his fingers and smeared them across the withered hole of his mouth.
“What will it be like for the last one of us?” I asked the sky.
Dan shook his head and sat up, blowing his nose in his hand and flinging it.
My mouth’s been bleeding, my gums are all gone to sponge. I can taste blood in my teeth, sharp and good, and I swallow. My throat rasps. I don’t hurt so bad at the moment. ’Cept for my eyes.
“Soon be morning,” said Dan.
When it came Skip slept on. When we tried to wake him he wouldn’t open his eyes. He hit out at us, shuddering and scowling, mumbling angrily, so we left him. He’ll die soon, I thought. No point in drawing lots again, it’s clear he’s going first. What then? Me and Dan. Who then? Me or him. Alone. Will it be me? What then?
I laughed.
“What?” asked Dan.
“I was just thinking,” I said. “When it’s just you and me.”
After a while he laughed too, and made an attempt at song:
Says Gorging Jack to Guzzling Jimmie
I am extremely hung-a-ree …
I joined in:
To Gorging Jack says Guzzling Jimmy
We’ve nothing left, us must eat we.
You can see why people laugh, can’t you? It tickled us both so much that our sniggering finally woke up Skip, who shot up like a revived corpse, turkey neck and staring eyes. I can’t stand those eyes. What’s in them is hard to look at.
“It was yellow,” he said.
“What was?”
“Look,” said Dan, spreading before us what was left of our supplies, enough to keep a rat alive for a day or so.
“It was yellow …”
“Look at it.”
“… like an eye.”
“Look at it,” Dan said. “That’s it.”
Such a ridiculous amount it set me and Dan off laughing like fools again, which only infuriated Skip. “Throw it over!” he shouted. “Have done with it!” and tried to stand up, but toppled over immediately and fell to feebly punching the side of the boat with red, raw knuckles