Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [94]
“Boys, boys, my boys,” I heard Dan, far away, “I am proud of you. What a character I will give you when we get home. Only a little longer now, boys. Hang on.”
But I could no longer believe that this was anything but madness. We were quite out of the world, in a place like a dream, where terrors could harm and nothing was impossible. I turned away so I wouldn’t have to see them with the water in their mouths, a tightening of pain in them as the salt touched ulcers.
“Nonsense,” I heard Rainey say. “As long as you don’t swallow, a mouthful can do no harm.”
I closed my eyes. Darkness on the face of the deep. I wanted to hear Sam singing. If I tried, I could. His peculiar gnat-like delivery that was sometimes unbearably pure. I got him singing and singing to me in my head, his old hymns: “God moves on the water, God moves …” He sang it over and over and over till it started going funny, tripping along to the rhythm of the waves. God bring a boat, God bring rain, God bring manna, God this, God that. Words words words. In my heart there was only an aching, empty place like a lost tooth, that and the empty sky and sea, and eternity, and a presence that did not reassure.”
“One mouthful then. One only.”
Dan held the cup to my lips.
One mouthful, hold, spit.
Wet mouth, for a second.
Do NOT swallow.
It’s okay, better than piss. Piss came shortly after. It’s hideous, but you can swallow it. It was worse than I expected and it looked so nice too, as if it would be sweet, but no such thing. It tasted the way it smells when it’s been standing a day because someone’s forgotten to empty the jerry. A stern, bitter, unfriendly taste, I thought, though some didn’t seem to mind it at all. Maybe theirs was better than mine. Anyway, it didn’t work, or it did, but not for long. It was a false quenching, like drinking hard liquor: wet, but in the long run thirst-inducing. So I never took to it, though you’d hear different from some, no doubt. Tim’s piss was golden, of course, and he drank it with relish. Honey sweet, no doubt. Dirty brown, gold-haired Tim, with darker gold whiskers encroaching from his ears, and round brown hollows about the eyes. “You know what, Jaf?” he said. “I feel as if my mind’s going funny.”
“Yes.”
“Yours?”
A nod.
“Tell Simon to play something.”
“Simon. Hey, Simon.”
Simon sawing away at the fiddle, a merry thing. He was good, Simon. Lovely player. Could make you cry, make you smile. But it was nothing, that poor little fiddle, a voice singing against the great waterfall at the end of the world, where our small boat plunges over and falls for ever. Mr. Rainey’s mouth was yellow all over. And still he would hold the salt water in his mouth because he couldn’t bear not to. “Long as you don’t swallow,” he said. He did it more than the rest of us, more than he should have, that’s why he went down so fast, I think, that and because he caught that terrible cold not long after we set off and it went on to his chest. It scared me to see so hard and big a man, a man I’d been scared of, go down. He couldn’t swallow. His throat was closing over. His face clenched and grew naked in spasms. His feet swelled up like bladders. I went over to sit with him. The movement made me dizzy and for a few seconds grey clouds gathered in front of my eyes, and my heart went mad. I couldn’t talk to him. I didn’t know him at all. A very uneasy man he’d always seemed to me, and that at least was still the same. Tears were trickling from the corners of his eyes and gleaming in the crinkles there.
The wind dropped. Every now and then someone spoke, but I forgot what they said at once. Every now and then I got my portion. I kept feeling my chin to see if I was getting a beard, but nothing. Only the captain still shaved. Rainey was shaggy as an old dog. It made him look handsome and terrible, like an Old Testament prophet with his tormented eyes. Salt was drying us by degrees. Salt fish all of us, salt fish with wide-open, round eyes goggling at the sky. Our faces all had