Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [92]
On the third morning the wind dropped and the sea calmed, and we raised the masts again and sailed no more than an hour, before a sound like a gunshot reached us from a great distance. It was on Tim’s watch and he cried out: “It’s them! It’s them!” and all of us rose and stared against the glaring sea.
I saw nothing.
“It is!” exclaimed Gabriel. “I see them.”
Then we all saw the tiny dark stain very far away, west, and Mr. Rainey took out his pistol and fired once into the sky. A faint roar was our reward.
We cheered, hurt our throats.
“Impossible,” Dan said. His hand gripped my shoulder, trembling. Though he smiled like a madman, he looked scared. His watery blue eyes, never blinking, were fixed with something akin to horror on what approached, and it jumped into my head that the boat would reach us and we’d see it was full of dead men still going about their business. Their sores would have run mad, covering every inch of them. Their eyes would be ghastly.
“Mr. Rainey!” the captain hailed us.
We could see their faces now, their good old ordinary faces: Captain Proctor, Wilson Pride, Yan, Simon, Dag and John. All smiling.
Mr. Rainey pulled himself together and called across that we were all fine and dandy over here and in very good spirits.
I was on watch one day when something hit the sail and fell into the boat.
Fish. Another. Another.
There was a scramble.
A whole host of fish. Beautiful things, flashes of silver leaping from the sea and flying like shearwaters, some the size of a finger, some as long as a foot, skimming close to the surface, touching down from time to time, only to take off again. They had bird’s wings at the front behind their heads, and little finny ones vibrating at their tails. A dozen or so landed in our boat—three or four of fair size and lots of tiddlers. We gorged, raw. It was like eating the sea.
“See?” said Dan. “See? Providence,” pulling bones from his teeth.
“Providence!” Gabriel laughed. “Providence can go either way.”
“So it can,” said Dan. “For now it’s with us. Rainey, are you all right?”
“No. I’m bloody not all right. Do I look all right?”
He’d gone all bug-eyed. Since we ate the other hog he’d been getting terrible headaches and spent a lot of time rubbing his forehead and the backs of his ears. Dan was pretty much our skipper now. A month had passed. Heat, sudden, heat by day, cold by night.
“I don’t think I can take much more of this,” Gabriel said dreamily.
“My face feels funny,” I gobbed.
“It’s all right, Jaffo,” Tim said.
“No.”
“It is. It is all right, you know.” He had a curious, stiff smile.
“Yes,” I replied. My tongue stuck to the back of my teeth with a bitter, gummy slime, which gave off a vile stenchy taste as rank as a Bermondsey sewer.
“Ah, landlord,” he mugged, “a flagon of your best!”
“You’ll get your ration soon,” Dan said.
Our mouths would have dripped if they could.
“Do you remember when we caught fish under Tower Bridge, Jaffo?”
“Me, you and Ishbel,” I said.
“Fried in a bit of butter,” Tim said.
“Wonder what Ishbel’s doing now?”
“She’s washing her feet,” he said.
The thought of Ishbel washing her feet filled me with joy.
“Do you think so?”
“Oh yes. She wonders about us.”
“She’d have come if she could.”
“I know.”
Mr. Rainey started sneezing convulsively, over and over again.
“He’s for the chop,” Tim said.
Seemed likely.
“He’ll be the first,” I said.
“Likely.”
I yawned till tears wet the corners of my eyes. Immediately they dried. No clouds.
“Can’t swallow properly,” I said. “I keep trying.”
“Don’t try,” said Dan.
“I want to get off this … this …” Gabriel, a great sigh. “Sick of the whole fucking …”
Rainey fell asleep and started snoring hoarsely.
“He’s had it,” Dan said. “Poor man.”
“Nearly time for the sun to sink,” said Skip.
“Where are the others?”
“There.”
A ghostly, grey boat that dogs us always,