Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [54]
The dolphins called the breeze called the drumming called the mist. That’s how it felt.
That is how it has felt so many times. As if one thing led to another like notes in a tune.
The wind dropped completely and rain came down in a torrent, sudden as an upturned bucket. Thunder grumbled on the edge of the sky, an old dog growling in its sleep. I came down from the mast. Sheet lightning flashed over the jungle. All the world was grey and heaving, and we battened down and rode it. For three hours or more the rain pounded, but the storm was never overhead. It was on the other side of the long landmass. When the lightning flashed it was beautiful, silver echoes on a world washed out, on mast and spar and binnacle, on the great, thrownout cloth of the sea.
It was evening by the time the rain had progressed from mad to sane. We hove to far out in the bay of what might have been the same island or another. Wilson Pride had made a nice stew of bacon and beans with dumplings, and we ate below because of the rain. I was on larboard watch and it was still raining when I went to bed, but when I opened my eyes in the morning the daylight stealing in through chinks in timber was hot and white. On deck all was sun-leached, not a spot of moisture remaining. Captain Proctor was in conversation with his first mate by the aft companionway. Mr. Rainey seemed bothered about something. You would have thought from his increasingly florid and extreme facial appearance that they were having words, but Captain Proctor was chuckling in an affable and amused way. He said something, and Rainey turned sharply and walked away.
Gabriel said later it was about a whaleboat. We had no spares and Rainey wanted to put in somewhere and get at least one new one as soon as possible. Rainey wanted to go back to Surabaya for one, but the captain said they’d come too far and would go straight on to Pulau Lomblen, where Dan Rymer hoped to find the Lamalera whale man who’d seen a creature walking out of a forest, the one of whom his Surabayan friend had spoken. Comeragh was for going back too, but Dan Rymer had said we could get a boat in Pulau Lomblen.
We couldn’t. There were boats in Pulau Lomblem, but we couldn’t get one. Still, we didn’t know that then, so on we went and were at Pulau Lomblen three days late.
h Lord, please tell Billy Stock to stop frightening the little ones … In my head on waking, that old black man’s voice, Sam. Sam Proffit. Coming back through time, sudden, real, a tic of the brain, time flying by, a blink—clear in my mind as if he stood in the room. Just as he stood in the low fo’c’s’le with his hands together in prayer—then—but then is now—his eyes closed, a small, mischievous grin about his withered lips. A pious old man, the changing light rippling over him, the walls dappled and stippled grey. Oh the beauty of it.
It was dark and I was afloat on something; it could have been the sea or waves of another kind, could have been anything. Thick, black waves of sleep bearing me up. At first I thought it was Drago, our old Drago, and that I was lying at rest on the dry boards and she’d gone sailing off along the Thames making for the sea.
But she broke up a long time ago, Drago. Here’s where I live now. A voice has awoken me again with the sounds of voices on the street. There’s a high singing somewhere near, maybe in the alley that runs between Ratcliffe Highway and Pennington Street, as drunkly beautiful as lost angels. Who is she, this singer, siren of the cliff tops, throwing her silver voice sharp as knives through the thick black? This is where I live now and it does me well. There are smoky rooftops over which I can look, and above them a lovely, northern sky that never burns. I love these rooftops dearly,