Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [75]
We’ve nothing left, us must eat we.
“We pass close by that spot,” said Gabriel.
You couldn’t help but lie awake at night and remember that poor, doomed ship so long ago and all the poor sailors who shipped on-board unknowing. And the other sailors and ships all coming their different ways to the same thing since the first boat ever put out to sea.
I remember a long night of shooting stars, and lying in my hammock, trying out words: “Where a dancing girl with eyes of blue …” No good, no good …
I wish I was back in Ratcliffe Highway,
Ratcliffe Highway across the sea,
Where a dancing girl with …
Wait.
Where a something girl with dancing shoes
Waits or waits not for me.
With blood red shoes and blood red nails
Where a dancing girl with golden curls
Waits or waits not for me.
t was coming to the end of that timeless time after we took on the dragon. A sleepless sleep and a dreamless dream. They’d all been drinking long on deck under the stars. Simon was playing something sweet and sad. I remember a fellow I once heard who played on a little harp on the quay beside the tobacco dock. The music had flowed on and on, always changing like moods. Sometimes it was like walking up and down stairs. Sometimes it pealed with joy. Sometimes it turned your heart to mush. I was drunk on the masthead and was concentrating hard on staying in this bright drunk state before tipping over the edge into sleepy stupidity, unable to make much sense, but keeping my mind sharp by thinking: if each one of those lads down there was a bit of music, what would they be? Making tunes in my head for each one. Some were easy, some were hard. I could get tunes for all but Skip, and with him I couldn’t decide between a whimsy and a lament. Nowhere clearer than the ocean for a good bright state of being, of falling with constant clarity into the vortex inside, of sleeping with eyes wide open and waking on a sudden thump of the heart—I jerked awake to the sound of singing down below. Sometimes it felt as if the stars out there, far from all land, were screaming. Hundreds of miles blaring at your head. So beautiful, that night, waking in the sky with the screaming stars all round my head. I shivered. The others below seemed millions of miles away and I feared that I might fall. I’d never felt like this before and wondered if I was getting sick again, but after a moment my head cleared, and fifteen minutes later the bell rang and I went down.
First thing I saw was John coming to take my place. Second thing I saw was the dragon come striding, fast and hungry, humping high shouldered along the deck behind him with its monstrous, muscled forelegs lifted high and its claws splayed. Its long, stony face was smiling, and the white circles round its eyes made it look quite foul, as if it was staring madly. A pale tongue like a snake darted in and out, a foot or more. At that moment I was back in Ratcliffe Highway, eight years old, and the tiger walking towards me. The same impossibility. Only this time I was scared.
Clack-a-clack went the dragon’s claws. I yelled at John: “For God’s sake, the dragon!” and he looked back and gave an almighty yell, and after that it was all madness.
We ran down larboard. Clack-clack it came after, scrabbling for hold on the boards. Everyone was lounging around, a more peaceful scene there could not have been till we burst through with the beast after us, and all hell broke loose. It ran wild about the deck, and so did we. The ship became a stage full of bobbing marionettes, running and shouting, the starry black sky still roaring. Tim jumped up on the tryworks. Joe and Bill were on the windlass. Four or five vanished sharp down the fo’c’s’le companionway, and the rest of us rushed this way and that in utter confusion. Simon’s fiddle got kicked along the deck. Everyone was drunk, the dragon on freedom. Its claws skidded on the boards and it plunged into the side of the ship, snapped like a turtle, twitched round in a circle and charged furiously into a little knot of men that jumped in all directions. John Copper, Felix,