Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [73]
Oh, I wish I was back in Ratcliffe Highway,
Ratcliffe Highway across the sea,
Where a dancing girl with dada dada
Waits or waits not for me.
I like that: waits or waits not for me.
Time passed, and we were all blind and deaf and dumb. The storm—sick. Rolling. Wedged ourselves in bunk with bundles on either side. Smell of bilge water came steaming up from the hold. The bulkheads creaking. Close, stinky air. Heavy rolling sea breaks across the waist. Buckets, pieces of wood, other things roll around the deck. Dangerous. Sea too high for whaling. Till, shocking and sudden, a bright, sweet, clear morning dawned, promising good sailing. It turned into a long day of rainbows and a gentle night of soft, drumming rain. After that, three long, cloudless days of burning brightness saw us to the Japanese ground, but there was nothing for us there. A week, two weeks. The lookouts were silent, though we spoke to other ships that had taken plenty. So we headed out southeast into the Pacific, towards the Equator and the far Offshore Ground.
Somewhere a few days in, darkness fell.
Seven days of darkness, like a biblical plague. In all that time, the sun refused to appear, and the sky glowered close above by daytime, a low, pressing ceiling of dismal black cloud that occasionally gave off a kind of thin, droning thunder from beyond the stars. The sea was high. There was no rain and the heat was intense. Day drears gave way to thick nights. On we hauled for better weather, for the sun, for the next change of the times. The captain and his officers walked about the decks, we spun yarn and sewed old clothes and patched sails and cleaned up, and things were not right. The ocean spoke with a softly threatening voice, there was no horizon and nothing to be seen in any direction but a groaning haze. And every time he could, Skip lay down in front of the dragon and stared at it, and talked with it, and listened to it. Listened to it, that’s what he said.
He was a mad idiot. I now think they should have thrown him in the fo’c’s’le with a kick along the way every time they found him sleeping before the dragon’s cage. It was a soft ship, that was our trouble. A shipmate should not be allowed to sleep on deck as he pleases. What captain would allow it? Ours would. Proctor was grieving for his old Samson, a soft pup in his pocket in the Bay of Biscay twelve years ago. We hardly saw him. Rainey gave Skip a kicking once in a while in a halfhearted way, but nothing disturbed the haze. Once the captain came up in his nightshirt, disturbed by the shouting. “I’ll be glad when that damned animal’s off my ship,” he said, and Dan Rymer, with the grey of the sky on his face and his eyes cold, said he was making a new rule that no one could go near the dragon but me and him, just like it used to be. It seemed so long ago when that was the rule. I couldn’t remember when it had changed, how we’d drifted here; it was like Skip said: time changed. Time simply did not play properly anymore. It was like an earthquake in the landscape in my head, and I no longer knew what I could count on. All voices were muffled and far.
Skip could no longer see the dragon, but it didn’t make any difference; he was still talking to it. He said no words could tell how he and the dragon talked, but talk they did, sometimes all night long. He never shut up, going on in this steady voice. He said the wheel was in spin because the dragon had gone insane. It had gone insane because of the cage. It couldn’t bear the cage, like his grandma’s fish couldn’t bear its bowl, and so had gone mad. It wanted to go home. “That’s why there’s no whales,” he said, sitting drawing bars and cages. “They know it’s on the ship and they won’t come near.”
You know, we’d had a lot of Skip. He must have said a million mad things since we left the Greenland Dock. Why listen to him now? First he got Bill and Felix all fired up, whether he meant to or not.
“It’s like this,” said Felix. “A ship kind of knows things.