Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [114]
“Fuck this, I’m done with it, I’m done with it!” he spat out.
“What are you trying to do?” Dan put a hand on his shoulder. “Stove us in?”
“Better that.” He pulled himself up onto his knees. A great heat was burning on his cheeks and forehead.
“What was yellow?” I asked.
Skip hauled his eyes onto me like heavy sacks. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
“No, you don’t.”
“I know everything.” His eyes changed, made a sideways flip from anger to horror. It wasn’t him looking out from his eyes. “You want me to die,” he said.
“I do not.”
“Sit down,” said Dan, pulling on his shirt.
“You want to kill me.”
“I do not.”
I didn’t. I wanted to smash his face in though for making me remember how I killed Tim.
I killed Tim.
Sounds stupid, but I only realised it at that moment. It was like falling from a great height.
“I killed Tim,” I said, sick to my stomach.
“You didn’t!” Dan tried to sit up but fell back.
I began to moan, a straggly, lowing trail of a thing that meandered along absolutely separate from me like a ribbon proceeding out of my mouth. I shoved my fists in my mouth to stop it. It wasn’t me, it was a thing in my body forcing its way out, I had no control over it. And as it keened on, lost in the slop and slap of waves, something invisible got into the boat with us. I tried to hide behind Dan. Blind, bloody, gut-cramp fear, not to be fought.
“Leave me alone,” sobbed Skip.
Dan struggled himself upright, a wild-looking thing, ragged old death’s-head man of the sea. “To me,” he said.
We three hunched in the bow.
“Don’t think,” Dan said.
The sticky hold of fear. I was a fly trying to lift at least one of its thread-like legs from the syrup.
“Make it stop,” I said.
“Don’t think.”
I looked up and saw Dan’s face wet with tears. Or was it the rain that had just begun, a sweet English drizzle?
“I killed Tim,” I repeated. It seemed important I should acknowledge this as truth eternal, an irreversible fact to be absorbed by the universe. Dan’s eyes closed and the water poured down. I couldn’t say if he was laughing or crying.
“You’ll have a long life, Jaf,” he said. “Don’t waste it on this.”
“Send a ship,” Skip cried, a shrill seagull’s voice that echoed in my ear.
But it wouldn’t make any difference; I had still killed Tim. For ever and ever amen I had killed Tim.
My moan was changing into a stupid childish crying, a miserable, wipe-my-nose and pick-me-up sort of a grizzle. Clouds of grey and black boiled in front of my eyes. I went somewhere strange, somewhere far and lost as a rock on another world, and forgot how I got there or where I’d come from or what name I had or anything at all, apart from a subtle and steady push towards some surface far above. When I got up finally from this and my head cleared, I saw that Dan was praying silently, moving his mouth, leaning his head against the side of the boat, asking God to take care of Alice and the kids. Skip was lying down with his arms round his head. And there was the smidgin of hardtack and the couple of inches of warm water, and the gun, and the invisible fear thing was gone.
“Let’s eat what’s left,” I said.
So we did, breaking the tack into three and passing the cup round, sipping small, long-held mouthfuls. It took about half an hour before it was gone. That’s how long we span it out. Then like old men by the fire after a good dinner, we sat back in contemplative silence. The rain was like silver rods whispering and shimmering, piercing the sea. That was beautiful, soothing. Skip lay back down and said he wasn’t getting up again. He said there was no point. He smiled and closed his eyes, and put his arms back round his head and said he was going to sleep, but was up again immediately. Then down, then up, down, up, with his horrible eyes, down, up, like a dog with worms, standing in the heaving bow screaming he saw a ship, a ship, then, oh God, a low, rumbling laugh because, oh hell, there’s an eye pierced on every spar, all googling and bloody, and they’re turning, every bleeding one, on us. “You want me dead!” he screamed, whether