Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [70]
Ha ha ha. Rainey though, Rainey could strike you quiet with one sour look.
And here he praised me up before all.
Rightly too, rightly so!
Fair man, Mr. Rainey, I thought. Goes to show you never can tell.
“Quite right,” said Dan, throwing an arm about my shoulders. “Jaf’s the one.”
Felix appeared with his cup of gin and he raised it high. “To Jaf,” he said, knocking it back.
“Will you really retire?” I asked. We were back on the fo’c’s’le deck. Simon had gone down and got his fiddle and was tuning up, bright pluckings of the strings.
“Certainly,” Dan replied, merry, loose in his gestures. “All things must pass. I shall end my illustrious career on a pinnacle of glory with this magnificent creature.”
The sun had gone down an hour since, and the sea danced with crazy light.
“It’ll be kind of like death, won’t it?” Skip said.
“What will?”
“Dan giving it all up.”
“Death in life,” said Dan, “life in death. Oh, my comrades!” He’d gone into funny ham-acting mode again.
“When you think about it,” Skip said, “all we ever do is die.”
“What are you talking about, madman?” Tim pushed him. “Why can’t you ever talk sense?”
“The big god told me I didn’t have to make sense,” Skip said. “It doesn’t have to make sense. I don’t have to make sense.”
“Don’t worry,” Tim said, “you never do.”
“How many years since you went to sea?” I asked Dan.
“Forty-three,” he said without hesitation.
I looked at him, wizened of mouth, one eye wandering very slightly, tried to see him as a green boy like us. It wasn’t that hard. He was one of those who more or less stay the same from birth to death.
“It’s like Bingo,” said Skip. “Like his old life on the island and his life now …” Simon struck up a sleepy tune. “… Like me when I was three years old.”
“You talk shit,” said Tim.
“Three years old,” Dan said, sitting down with his back against a barrel and his legs sprawling out in front of him. “Three years old doesn’t last. I want to see my children grow up.”
“All those things are really dead. Me then. It then,” Skip said.
“You’re cracked.”
“He means,” said Dan, lighting up his pipe with a serene air, “that we’re like snakes shedding skin after skin.” He sighed extravagantly at the thought of it, took a deep pull on the tobacco, pursed his lips and coaxed out a few smoke rings.
Much later, reeling home to my bunk, I came up with Gabriel and Simon.
“You seen Skip?” said Gabriel.
“No.”
“He’s sitting with old Bingo.”
“Come see,” said Simon. “What do you make of this?”
He didn’t see the three of us watching. He was sitting cross-legged in front of the dragon’s door talking to it.
“It’s not just the dark, see,” he was saying, “it’s the way it takes your power away. It’s a matter of thought really. Very horrible though.”
He stopped and hummed tunelessly for a few seconds before resuming. “And in you it may be worse,” he said, “there’s more in you than a three-year-old boy, I suppose. I wonder how old you are.”
The dragon’s eyes were open, but it was completely still, lying flat with its great head resting between its clawed hands.
“Come on, Skip,” said Simon kindly, “don’t go barmy again.”
He turned his head. “Don’t think I didn’t know you were there,” he said. “I know everything.”
We took on supplies at the island of Formosa. There was a bird market, three dozen or so small, fat creatures, yellow, green and white, all crammed in one box, worse than at Jamrach’s. I wished I’d bought a cage, a bamboo palace. Two or three in there, I thought, spreading wings, rising through the height of it. I’d put in strong twigs instead of straight perches, with leaves maybe. There’s a thought. West lay China, Yan’s country.
“Which part are you from?” I asked him, me and him on deck one morning patching our clothes, looking towards the coast. “Are we near your home, Yan?”
He shook his head. “Far south of here,” he replied, “Tsamkong.” His black hair was growing long and parted above his brow in two thick waves.
“So we passed it by. Don’t you feel like jumping ship and going home?”
He smiled.