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By Root 891 0

just the decks alive, the sea calm and shifting, the rolling wallow of our passage through the waves and the strange sea light that seemed to sing. Half asleep, I gazed upon the rails rising impossibly, falling impossibly, nothing ever still. I was glad again I was on Comeragh’s watch. Sure, he’d clipped me, but not too hard. It passed as all things must, till midnight freed me and I staggered queasily down into the fo’c’s’le and into my bunk. I stumbled in the dark and knocked against someone who groaned. My mattress was spiky. The darkness rocked me like a mother. The timbers creaked. The smell, thick, oily, bloody and juicy, a smell of smoke and bodies, salt and tar. I cried for my ma. I slept with both eyes closed and every sense awake. My dreams were full of lost baby creatures that whimpered and sucked upon bottles. Soft-fingered, they lay on their backs, helpless, surrendered, hurt by an enormity of loss beyond their understanding. How did I know this? I did not. Inside my head was a swelling and a writhing. Every now and then I awoke, sinking and rising. Ishbel came. Sang, Come to me my darling, come to me, dear. She stroked my head against her breast and opened her bodice to me, and when morning came, I hung over my bunk and moaned. The moan was answered by another. I looked up and saw a young black boy leaning over the side of his bunk, throwing up into a wooden bucket held by Chinese Yan, who squatted by his side, rumple-haired and near naked. The foul sweetness of vomit thickened the air. The ship lurched. Someone somewhere retched, something splashed, someone groaned. I opened my throat and a hacking sound came out, a sound like a dog choking on a bone. Yan turned his head, muttering softly in his own strange choppy language, and with one swift movement deposited the bucket under my face. I looked down into the lumpy rejects of the black boy’s stomach, closed my eyes and pitched up my guts.

Well, would you not just know it? Tim, in all his golden glory, never was sick. No, never, never in any storm, never in any lasting swell. And there was me and seven or eight more that day weeping, drooling, flung inside out and purged like evil from a perfect world.

The open hatchway shed lurid daylight on us from above. Kill me now. I can’t get up. Ma, come, put your cool, sweet hand on my head and croon and say: Poor little Jaf, stay in bed and try and sleep again. My mattress stank. And there with his grinning clown face was Mr. Comeragh, crying, “Up! Up now, boys! No more of this.”

Yan left me and the black boy sharing the bucket.

“Look sharp, Jaf,” said Comeragh cheerfully. “Come on, Bill.”

How we got on deck I’ll never know, but we did somehow. There was no mercy, none at all: you worked and you threw up in the bilges and you worked, and that was that. Felix Duggan, cabin boy, a whey-faced kid of fourteen with big soft lips, was first to the masthead that terrible morning. His mouth was open, his lower lip hung sickly. Ach, I thought, ach, take me home, take me home and never let me see the sea again. Could you ever get sick of the sight of the sea? she’d said, standing beside me on Tower Bridge. Oh yes, dear Ishbel. Yes, I could.

“This is stupid.” Felix scowled and kicked his toes against the mainmast, blinking tears from his eyes. “Why me? Why not you?” he appealed to Henry Cash, a watchful, supercilious sort who’d earned his sea spurs some years ago and made sure everyone knew, though how he did this I’ll never know because he hardly ever talked to anyone. “You’re not sick. He’s not sick,” pointing at Tim. “Why me?”

“Search me,” said Henry Cash, cool as mint. “Go and ask Rainey, I dare you.”

“There’s no whales in these seas,” said the Yorkshire boy who’d sailed with Rainey before. John Copper. I was getting their names by now.

“Who says?” said Cash.

“See?” Felix wiped his nose angrily. “What’s the point of looking for whales that aren’t there?”

“I suppose the captain will be judge of that,” Cash said, smiling smoothly and walking away.

“Off to lick Rainey’s arsehole,” muttered John Copper.

“He better