Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [74]
“Or a demon or a—”
“Yeah, a demon.” Skip set about drawing a demon.
“ ’S like when the sails blow out like cheeks.”
“And it screams.”
And on and on in that dream—seven dark days and nights that had begun to feel eternal. The superstition of sailors is no more than the lone howling of millions of miles between you and dry land and home, making you know you are a thing that can die. Superstition, dark, spiky, high stepping, stalked with cloven foot upon our decks. And when superstition high-steps on a lone sea deck, far and far from every strand, as the old songs say—then, oh then …
Not just when sleeping, not just half asleep on my feet at the masthead, not just tipsy-drifting with a head full of gummy warmth, but always, every conscious second I was beautifully, startlingly afraid, with a fear crisp and invisible as the honed edge of a fine blade.
“Those horrible eyes,” said Gabriel, at the table in the fo’c’s’le, lamp light on his face.
The dragon had been shedding skin round its eyes, which gave it a particularly horrific appearance.
“Like a statue.” Simon Flower fiddling with a string of twine. “Not like a living thing at all.”
“An abomination.” That was Joe Harper.
“I don’t like it,” Yan said. “I don’t like it there with its horrible eyes.”
“The ship knows,” Bill Stock said. “There you have it: the ship knows.”
But now it was no longer just Skip and Bill Stock and Felix Duggan, it was the whole bloody lot of them.
“Evil, fucking, horrible thing.”
“Should fucking boil the fucking thing and eat it.”
And Skip, with his thin, knowing smile, saying, “He wants to go home. He can’t help it. He was living on his island like he’s always done, and then the sky falls down and now he’s being sick in a cage and he’s gone mad and you want to eat him too. You probably should. He’s better off dead. Kinder. Crueller than what we do to the whales, this is.”
“Probably taste revolting,” Tim said. “I wouldn’t touch it.”
“Might be poisonous,” said Bill Stock. “You get poisonous toads, don’t you? Snakes? I mean, took at its tongue. Nasty thing.”
The dragon was bad luck. Some of us believed it as truth, some as a dream nudge, a kick in the brain. Dread joined the darkness and it had those dark, beady eyes surrounded by white circles. I think of Skip now and I’m not sure how true my memories are. It was a long time ago. I remember him as a power in the boat, a round, smiling face with a dark cap of hair, scrawnily meek and narrow eyed, never at full ease, always watchful. But now I think perhaps to others he was nothing, hardly noticed. But he it was that set it off, him and his nasty little pictures of cloven-footed demons, I’m sure: this little tinder of fear, which didn’t fade even when the darkness lifted, and we sailed on and on with never a sight of a whale and the days running into one another. Certain things I remember. The fo’c’s’le, Gabriel saying: “There’s an evil spot out there, they do say.”
Sam smiling. “Don’t frighten the little ones,” he said.
“Everybody knows about it.”
“I don’t,” I said.
Gabriel looked at me. “No? The place where things happen. Where the Essex was lost, and more since. A cursed spot upon the ocean.”
Everyone knows about the Essex, and all the others. It’s legend on the whale ships. It’s something of a joke.
Dan began to sing:
There were three men of Bristol City
Who took a boat and went to sea
And first with beef and captains’ biscuits
And pickled pork they loaded she …
“I knew a man knew Owen Coffin as a lad,” said Gabriel. “Sailed with his father, he did. Said Owen was a nice boy, and a good sailor like his dad.”
There was gorging Jack and guzzling Jimmy,
And the youngest he was Little Billee.
“Poor Owen Coffin drew the short straw and got eaten! He wasn’t as clever as Little Billee.” Some four or five voices joined in, but we were all sleepy and that silly song came out like a lullaby.
Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy,
I am extremely hungaree.
To gorging Jack says guzzling Jimmy,