Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [51]
Rainey stood over him kicking and kicking him in a spoilt and furious way. “Get up! Get up, you bastard!” he screamed. “There’s not a thing wrong with you. How dare you leave your post!”
Gabriel ran up with Abel Roper. Proctor appeared.
Skip rolled onto his back. Something about the look of him disturbed them.
“For Christ’s sake,” said Proctor, “give him room.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him,” shouted Rainey, “he’s just trying to get out of work.”
“I don’t think he’s pretending, sir,” said Abel. “Felix, go and ask Wilson for the salts.”
When the salts were applied under his nostrils, Skip sneezed violently and sat up, only to sink back down again immediately.
“What’s wrong with him?” Proctor asked.
“It’s just a funny turn,” replied Abel.
“Ha!” Mr. Rainey barked. “Ha!”
“Put him down below,” Captain Proctor said. “Let him sleep it off, whatever it is. No good him staggering about the deck in his condition. What are you all standing around here for? Doctors, are you? Back to work!”
Skip’s eyes were looking off in two directions as they hauled him across the deck, one arm on the shoulder of Abel, the other on Gabriel. He started to laugh. “Take me on the ferry!” he shouted. “Take me on the ferry!” Then he threw up.
He was fine in a couple of hours.
It was nothing, he insisted, he just passed out. It wasn’t true, of course. Later that night when just a few of us lay in the fo’c’s’le, he told the truth. “There was something following the ship,” he said. “I went to look at it.”
We all leaned forward to hear.
“A bird,” I said. “A cloud. A goney or a cormorant.”
He said it was an eye with wings. An eye with wings, in the sky, following the ship. “Here,” he said, pulled out his pad and pencil and drew it for us.
No one spoke for a few seconds, then Tim laughed. “What colour was it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Skip replied seriously.
“Blue? Brown? A lovely green eye?”
“Horus,” said Gabriel thoughtfully.
“Did it have an eyelid? Could it blink? Did it wink at you?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Horus,” repeated Gabriel. “I believe Horus is an eye.”
“What’s Horus?” asked Skip.
“A god.” Gabriel frowned, considering. “A god of the pharaohs.”
“How d’you know about pharaohs and gods?” I asked him.
“I’ve been around,” he replied.
“Maybe it was my brother, Barnaby,” Skip said.
Tim settled back with his arms behind his head. “More like this pharaoh thing, if you ask me,” he said. “Sounds more likely somehow.”
“But what is Horus doing following you about, son?” Gabriel asked.
Skip said it didn’t surprise him. He’d been visited by gods before.
“Aha,” was Gabriel’s response, and not much more was said. We watched Skip more than ever after that though, all of us, and the voyage continued tranquil as we sailed on through a thick, green sea, in which, at last, islands once more appeared. Long white strands. Palm trees that beckoned like graceful women. Shapes like giants loomed from the mist. Highlands rose above the sea. Cliffs of pink and sage green. The smell of the islands was earthy and spicy, and the sea was clear. You could look down and see bright fish swimming below, fronds of barbarous plants moving like slow music, long ridges of fantastic shapes and colours that thrust and pointed up to the ceiling of their sky, which was the surface of our sea.
We anchored in a harbour somewhere and the white man of those islands came down and spoke with Captain Proctor and Mr. Rainey on the beach. Mr. Comeragh was fluey and didn’t go ashore. A hundred dark slave faces