Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [115]
We took hold of him and tried to hold him from thrashing too hard. He screamed and screamed, twitching all over his shoulders and arms, froth at the corners of his mouth.
“Nothing to worry about, Skip,” Dan said, “nothing at all.”
He calmed down a little and we laid him down with a bunch of rags under his head.
“There, see, you’re all right,” we said to him.
He called for water. Called for a candle, though it was light. He called for Polly-dog and his ma and pa. Three hours he chattered but made no sense, and he never again opened his eyes, though he said he saw tall things with horns approaching, smiling, on the restless sea. Late in the afternoon he died with his head on Dan’s knees, bravely rambling till the very end, which came as a terrible convulsion that shook the boat as if we’d landed a shark.
I remember you a strange, misty morning man in the yard, early life, early morning, Mr. Jamrach standing in the light from his office door, and you there with a whiff of the ocean about you, the wild places that called. You sang “Tobacco Is But an Indian Weed” on the Wapping Steps. Where else could I go after that? Look at us now. Dan’s my mirror: scooped hollows in his face, eyes like pits. I look like that too. Skin shrinks. Lips turn black, teeth stick out.
“Need to shorten sail,” he said. “You do that while I get on with this.”
I did. I looked out over the rippling babble of waves and heard, as I had heard before, for Tim, for Gabriel, the cleft and slurp and rasp of the knife. For Skip.
Smash. Hatchet.
Dog’s lick. Marrow.
Close eyes, suck.
Close eyes, suck.
I saw the thing Skip saw. It came striding and stalking with hoofed front legs on the sea, a creature of jovial, reptilian cast, with the long, curled tail of a fish following proudly in its wake. When it got alongside the boat and a ship’s length off, its eyes swivelled in its head and fixed me, its lip curling delicately to reveal the long, pointed teeth of a cannibal. Then again I saw spectral ships, and fingers of smoke that crept along the gunwale. I saw a tree dripping living colours that ran with kittenish joy into and out of one another all along its elegant branches, faces that flashed a million changes, questing eyes, water-dappled ceilings, a great lost city in ruins of pink and gold. I soared above the earth on vast bat wings, mighty and proud. But I went too high, couldn’t stop myself. As if I was a balloon and someone cut my string, I went up and up and up, sucked at hideous speed, till there was nothing of me left but a thought that I was still me, whatever that was, and any second now would come the fall, inescapable. These terrible dream falls, always at the howling, rushing point of no return I have woken safe: in bed, in Drago’s belly, under a table at Spoony’s with a whore cradling my head. Always, the world has returned. Good old world. This time it would not. All lost, Ma’s warm armpit, songbirds, moon over London Bridge, a small gold head in the crowd, the smell of sarsaparilla, all of it, and everything in a great surge of longing, a love I had been born to feel, and which was also required of me and the purpose of my life.
And then I fell.
Voices.
Corncrake groan of a rigging. Soft flapping of sails at peace. Sea green, delicate little bones, white and creamy ones wrapped in my arms. We love our bones. We’ll never part with them.
A great shadow falls. Faces look down at us.
It was the passenger steamer Quinteros sailing between Callao and Valparaiso that picked us up. We were not far from the Chilean coast. I can’t remember how I got up on deck. I remember a sense of weary wonder, strange fear, a voice in my head crying out again and again as if it was angry with me. I remember a blurry gaggle of staring faces that moved gently as if some great hand was shaking them up and down. I remember a smell like frying onions, and