Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [47]
My clothes stuck to me. Oil. Oil to make putty and paint and soap, oil to grease and varnish, oil to burn in millions of lamps. I was soaked in a sticky gum of filth and gore, grease, sweat, bile, the puky juices of God’s greatest creature. My hair stuck close to my head, fast glued. Still—who better than me for this? Had I not scoured the Thames sewers for pennies?
“Sleep in your clothes, Jaf,” Dan said when my watch ended.
I thought he was mad.
“If you change for every watch, you’ll be out of gear before we’re a quarter through,” he explained.
So I slept in the reek of myself and the whale, and it wallowed through my sleep and gave me dreams of slaughter in a wild jungle place. When I arose for the next watch, the try pots still bubbled and the decks were still slippy. My clothes had dried upon me and become a second skin, and the bones and organs of the whale floated alongside the ship in a great snapping of sharks and a feasting of seabirds. I stood with Gabriel looking down. Morning had come.
“Take it all in, son,” he said. “Doubt you’ll get the chance again.”
“Why so?”
“The whaling’s done for,” he said, and grinned.
“Why?”
“No call for the oil no more. It’s all this new stuff now. They’ll always need the bone for the ladies’ stays, but they won’t be wanting all this oil no more.”
“What new stuff?”
“Oil under the ground,” he said.
It was three days till we were done. Stores sound, hatches down, decks all scoured and pure.
Onward. Different.
e turned east. It was rough round seas after that, the ocean breathing in and out, in and out, range after range of rolling hills, up and down whose howling slopes we climbed and rolled as the winds wailed and the dark water swelled and heaved. These bloated seas were full of ships. We passed them, distant toy things sighted through a whistling, grey madness, bird blackened (as were we), clouded by crying hordes. Sometimes we drew nigh and saw dark, tattooed faces on their decks. Sometimes we met, and the faces, white eyed and sea stained, became real and took on names. The days mingled. My sea eyes changed, becoming water wise. In two months we took five hundred barrels of oil, and were down a boat and a man. A fellow called George deserted at the Cape. The boat was smashed to splinters in an angry sea while being hoisted up Lysander’s side.
We met a ship which gave us our letters and the newspapers from home. Not all of us got a letter. Bill didn’t, nor did Yan or Felix or Skip, and there was nothing for me either. Tim had one from Ishbel.
I watched him read. First he smiled, but after a moment or two this faded and his eyes scanned backwards and forwards seriously. On the back of the paper I could see the careful horizontal lines of her writing, with the long, deep loops and the slight forward slant, and the long vertical lines with which she’d filled the margins. At the foot of the page was her name, writ larger than the rest, the I of Ishbel a flourish.
Tim turned the page and read the other side. Lines, all indecipherable. But there near the top I saw my name along with his: “Dear Tim and Jaffy.”
“Hmm.” He gave a small down-the-nose laugh, shaking his head, glancing up at me and looking down again. “Sends you her fond regards, Jaf,” he said brightly, turning it again and rereading the beginning.
“Has she seen my ma?”
He didn’t reply.
I crowded him. “Let’s see.”
“Oy!” He flinched the letter away from me.
“It’s for me too,” I said.
“No, it isn’t. It’s a private letter. Look.” He showed me the envelope. “My name. It’s mine.”
“That’s not fair,” I said, “the letter’s got my name on it too.”
“It has not! What are you talking about? You didn’t even see it.”
“Didn’t get a chance, did I?”
“It has not got your name on it, Jaf,” he said, as if to an imbecile. “It’s mine,” and folded it up very small and tucked it away in his clothes. It was like old times, all his little spites. I hated him again, even as the doubts came in. Had I really