Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [36]
‘All right,’ he said, when he could speak. ‘I’m done. Let me sit down.’
‘Scut-head, is it?’ the other said softly. His eyes were shining. With the outer edge of his hand he gave Billy a light, almost casual blow across the bridge of the nose, blinding him with tears. When these cleared he saw that the man on the floor was Sullivan; there was blood in his hair. ‘Give the fiddler a sousing,’ someone said.
Billy did not see this done as he was hauled off now into a smaller room and seated on a stool. The same two men stood beside him. One of them had a badly split lip, he noted with satisfaction. ‘There’s yen blaggard earned his shillin’,’ he said. His right eye was half closed up.
‘Now then, Billy boy,’ the dark-complexioned man said. ‘We have had our little difference. It is a simple enough matter I have to put to you. My name is Haines, you will get to know me well. I am bosun on a fine, new-built ship an’ we finds ourselves needing one or two likely lads. Now you are a likely lad an’ no mistake, a fine little strutter, you are. You owe money here that you cannot pay by any manner of means. Where are you going to get three shillings an’ four pence, darlin’ Billy? You signs for the voyage all fair and square, or the landlord calls the officers an’ lays charges agin you. There is plenty of people to swear you never had no purse when you come in. He will swear debt an’ assault agin you, an’ he will put his heart into it – you have near crippled him.’
Billy spat some blood on to the floor. ‘I’m right sorry to hear that,’ he said. He was caught and he knew it. What Haines was telling him was an old story. ‘I walked in the wrong door, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘That gang o’ thieves shares out my purse, you pays the score here an’ docks it out my wages. What manner o’ ship is she? Where is she bound? You are never a bosun of a navy ship.’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘If she is not a navy ship,’ Billy said slowly, ‘she must be a Guineaman – you wouldn’t get up to this for a ordinary merchant vessel.’
‘Well, my game cock, which is it to be? It will be proved agin you, never doubt it, you will go to prison till it is paid. An’ how long will that take, my bantam? Men have died in prison for the sake of a shillin’. You been in prison before, Billy?’
Billy looked at the bosun’s face. The narrow-set eyes were observing him with close interest. There was not much cruelty in Billy’s nature and it came to him now, with naive surprise, that Haines was getting pleasure from this. Spattered with blood as he was and still half dazed, he had his dignity to think of. He sat up straight on his stool, gripping the sides for balance. ‘Blair is the name,’ he said. ‘It is only my mates call me Billy.’
Not very far away, in Mount Street, Daniel Calley came in from the rain. He had been working since first light, carrying sheep carcasses and crates of fish up from the quayside to the top of the market in Stone Street. He had ninepence in his pocket and he was wet through and hungry. Also, in an obscure way, he was distressed. As usual the bargeman and stallkeepers between them had cheated him and as usual he had not been able to understand how. The shift to symbolic modes of reasoning, the essential transfer from concrete to abstract normally occurring in the course of childhood, had never occurred at all in Calley’s case. He could not work out what was due to him. He puzzled at it as he toiled back and forth but the figures would not lodge in his head. Sometimes he was driven to ask, but he could not understand the glib explanations. He would clench his big fists in misery – not so much at thoughts of the money but at being derided and treated unkindly. A simple sort of joking was the best way with him then; the men who cheated him knew that. Like a child he could be confused