Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [33]
“This old crock,” said Gabriel, the tall black, the young one muscled like a wrestler. “What was I thinking? Bet she don’t make it as far as the Cape.”
“She’ll do,” said Dan. “She’s old, but she’s been well cared for.”
“Don’t see many like this now.”
“True enough. Soon won’t be any.”
That first supper on deck, all of us from fo’c’s’le sitting next to the tryworks round a huge lump of salt pork that sat like a rock upon a tub they called the kid. We cut strips from the pork with our knives and put them on our plates. The salt in the meat curdled my tongue.
“Proctor’s not in charge,” said Gabriel.
“No. Rainey’s the man,” said a brown-haired Yorkshire boy who’d come down with the ship from Hull. “He’s got the upper hand. Rainey’s the one you want to watch.”
“You think so?” asked the boy Rainey clouted, jiggling his knees. He was a year or two older than me. His name was Edward Skipton, but everyone called him Skip.
“Yes I do.” The Yorkshire boy set his cup down. “I was with him on the Mariolina two years gone. He was second mate then. He knows what he’s about, he does, does Rainey. Proctor’s near green as you.”
“And I’m greener than the rushes,” Skip said quietly.
“Jesus Christ!” Tim was trying to break off a flat piece of hardtack with his teeth and nearly breaking his jaw.
“Rainey’s hard,” said the Yorkshire boy, “but he’s not the worst. This is no bad ship, this is a playground, this is. You’re lucky.”
Gabriel agreed. “Proctor will be glad of Rainey. Proctor’s not cut out for a captain.”
“How do you know?” asked Tim.
Gabriel speared a lump of meat with his knife. He was older than us, fully a man. “I’ve seen a few,” he said, leaning back and pulling out a plug of baccy.
First watch was larboard watch, and that was me. It was a fine night, big white stars and a moon. Everyone up on deck mooching about, Felix Duggan fooling with his broom, Comeragh playing with the dog. The cook, a huge Caribbean with a face that never smiled, standing in the cookhouse doorway smoking a pipe. At first it was all wonderful, heady stuff, this gently rolling ship life, the sticky black water brightly roiling under the ship’s lantern, the tap tap tap of a hammer somewhere, the creaking and the cracking of spars and timbers. Till step by tiny step, a sneaky progress not to be marked or checked till much too late, a disease crept in on me. The peaceful rise and fall of the rail, the stains on the timbers of the deck, the slip-slap-slop of water like the sloshing of the water on the green-slime piles of a Bermondsey wharf. I closed my eyes. In the dark, everything moved, rose and fell and reared and dipped. Life seemed long and strange and difficult. What is it? My forehead, raging hot, burst out in cold sweat. Oh no, not this. I was sick, that’s what it was.
I opened my eyes. No one else looked sick. If I could hang on till midnight, end of my watch. Please not me. Not me. Be strong. Up and down, up and down went the dark blue horizon. We were out in the channel, far out at sea it felt to me, though that’s a laugh when you think how far we had to go. Shit. It was coming. No help for it. I ran to the side of the ship and threw out liquid. Just liquid. Good. That’ll do. But then it came again, bigger, great undigested and undigestible slivers of hardtack that had refused to be chewed, slimy pink worms of pork flesh that stuck between my teeth and made me gag anew.
Skip saw.
“Once it’s up and out it’s all over,” he said as I wobbled back from the rail.
Well, that was a damned lie.
I learned something hard in those first couple of days. Being sick didn’t get you off work.
Comeragh came by. “Easy,” he said. “Let it pass. Every captain was a green boy once, don’t you know.”
It passed, but not for ever. I remember little,