Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [55]
… indigo.
It scintillates …
I am sailing like Sinbad on strange, eastern seas and a big star is falling down the dark sky, and somewhere close the sirens are singing and here is Sam Proffit saying:
“Oh Lord, please tell Billy Stock to stop frightening the little ones.”
That raised a snigger because Billy was only my age, and we were nearly the youngest. Only Felix was younger than us. Billy was full of horrible stories about cannibals that sucked people’s brains out while they were still alive.
Sam stands in the low fo’c’s’le, a dappled man, a great singer of hymns and sayer of prayers. And we need our prayers tonight. Tomorrow we land on this new island. This is the one, we all feel it. It’s something to do with the two Malay trackers Dan picked up on Sumba, where we heard the gongs and saw the smoke from a funeral pyre rising over the trees. We went to a village and drank a bitter drink, and there were birds everywhere, bright green flocks that shifted like turning wings against the deep blue sky. I lay back and watched, the brightness hurting my eyes. Birds should be free, I thought. We waited for Dan to come back from wherever he’d gone off to with his enquiries, and he came back with red teeth and two friendly, silent men, one who smiled, one who didn’t. The one who smiled had blue symbols tattooed on his forehead. They sleep with us in the fo’c’s’le but we share no language. Their demeanour has grown serious since we left the last island, the ninth or tenth, I don’t know. The islands are wild. It’s what I always wanted, the world, the wild, I’m looking it in the face as hard as I can. I want to walk up the slopes of a volcano and stare down its throat. It would be like staring into animal eyes. A volcano is dragonish. Why should there not also be a dragonish beast in these parts?
Dragonish people? There was a volcano looming like a living giant across the bay as we drew near Pulau Lomblen, and another watched over us when we talked to the whale men on the far side of the island, where the children left their games and ran past the boats lined up along the curving beach, to see the captain and the mates and Dan sitting in a circle with their loin-clothed fathers. And Tim and me too, honoured assistants of the big hunter. Even the captain was practically kowtowing to Dan by then, which was why we were on the beach and not sitting down to a good feed in the island’s capital, where there was a Dominican church, and a kind of inn, and you could buy scrimshaw and get drunk and watch the pearl fishers returning in their boats. Sweat ran down my sides. Pretty faces, black eyes, the women, naked breasted, lingering on the wooden platforms of their little straw-roofed stilt houses. One I will never forget came down and gave us milk out of a big, green coconut shell, a girl of about twelve whose breasts were buds, whose hands were a child’s with small pink pearls for nails. She stood waiting for the empty shell, holding my eyes for those few moments in calm contemplation. Her hair fell down straight on either side of her face and over her shoulders, thick and wiry to her waist. The wispy brows above her sleepy eyes were delicate, smoky plumes, high gabled, upturned. Her nose was large and lovely, her lips overblown. I fell in love with her at once. Yes, yes, I will be a whale man here, I thought, take out the boats and bring back glory. Return to her at night. The world is full of wonder. And smell no more the herb man’s bower on Rosemary Lane and see no more the peeling posters plastered on the walls outside Paddy’s Goose.
Wonderful that Dan could talk to these people. Only he could, in whatever language