Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [31]
I got away quick, looked for Tim, but couldn’t see him. I stood useless. Someone clipped me on the back of the head and told me to look sharp.
“I don’t know what to do!” I appealed, suddenly outraged. How could anyone expect me to know what to do?
The man was a lanky, skinny thing with a long sensitive nose like an anteater’s and arched brows that gave him a clownish appearance. “Here,” he said, and hauled me to the windlass. Oh God, the bloody windlass. A great horizontal wheel on the deck up near our fo’c’s’le—oh, to be down there with my sea chest—pushing it round alongside a big, hefty blond boy built like an ox. Even he was grunting and straining, swearing doggedly in his own language. I was breaking my fucking back. The long, skinny cove jumped in to help us, straight brown hair, thin as everything else about him, dangling in his eyes. Nothing much on his bones, but he was strong. “Hup, now,” he said, “push!”
Push. Push. Beyond anything you ever thought you could do, push. I was vaguely aware of the others running about, whistles, shouts, laughter, massive creakings and groanings of the ship as we manhandled her, and of a new weightlessness that gave me a falling sensation even though my feet were fixed firmly on the timbers.
The shipload of Portuguese sailors clapped and cheered us on, and there was no more time to look back to the drifting quay, where Ishbel watched with the dozy lightermen and grieving mothers and the wife of Dan Rymer.
We took the watery road out of town. The wharves and taverns drifted by, the sun grew brighter, throwing gold over the warehouses and the tops of the ripples. Sails flapped in the breeze. The captain, a solid, square-chested, square-faced man with a pale, freckled face and thin, ginger eyebrows, came and walked among us with a shaggy brown dog at his heels, half smiling at no one and speaking only to his first mate. I was glad there was a dog on-board. I hadn’t expected that.
Me and Tim stuck with Dan. We had a lot to learn, he said, and set about teaching us the naming of things right away. All we ever knew fell away behind us like arms letting go. The land became green and rose up on both sides, and the marshes swallowed us up. The mournful calling of long-legged birds swooped above the reeds. Seagulls with savage eyes sailed vigorously on the air alongside, keeping us company all the way to North Foreland, where Mr. Rainey sent me up to the masthead.
I’m a good climber and I have no fear of heights; it was the best of all times to go aloft, with the full sea swelling before us and the topgallant sails up to take the wind. First time I’d seen the real sea. Too big when you first see it, of course. A shining you could never have imagined, even though you’ve imagined so much. Up there, full sail on the Lysander, I was riding a living thing. Her bowsprit rose and fell like the motion of a horse’s neck at full canter. The spray roared, and the whaleboats shuddered in their holdings. I looked down and saw Dan Rymer at his ease, speaking with the captain on the quarterdeck. Scrawny Sam, his face a mass of wrinkles, ran along a spar with the ease of a waterfront cat, smiling as he went. The captain’s shaggy brown dog came trotting along the deck and lifted its leg against the mainmast, and I had no notion of time or the future or anything else at all, and was completely and quite terrifyingly happy and knew that I’d done the right thing.
Later, just before the captain gave his speech, me and Tim had a single minute’s peace standing at the rail together looking down at the sea. He put his arm round my shoulders. “This is the life, Jaf,” he said. He’d been like a dog let off the leash all day. It