Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [41]
‘Able seaman, is he? Fore the mast? Sound in wind and limb, is he? How old is he?’
This hoarse questioning caught her unprepared. She met the gaze of raw-looking blue eyes. They were small in the dark red square of the face and they held no kindness for her. “Bout twenty-five,’ she said. ‘I dunno. He’s been on an’ off ships most of his life. I want three pound.’
‘If we can secure him, and if he has got all his arms and legs attached to him, I will give you two pounds. That is the going rate and that is what we are paying.’
‘Haw, that’s a good ’un, arms an’ legs,’ the other man said.
‘I want three pound.’
The man in the wig sighed harshly. ‘Explain to the woman, Mr Barton,’ he said.
‘My pretty, I am afraid you do not unnerstand the finances of it. To take in hand a able-bodied man what has his full copplement of arms and legs and what doesn’t see eye to eye with you as to the tack he should foller and is inclined to be disputacious, that needs three stout men. Them men has to be found and them men has to be paid and that pay has to come out of the price. That leaves two pound for you, or there’s the door.’
She had not wanted to think about Deakin, but now something resigned about his face came into her mind and she remembered the scars she had felt upon his back. Her resolve did not change but the composure that had sustained her so far began to break at last. She felt tears gathering. She wanted gin so badly now that she could hardly keep her limbs still. ‘Blast yer livers an’ yer eyes,’ she said with a sob. ‘You neither of you worth him pissin’ on. Make it guineas, for God’s sake, give me two guineas for him.’
Having assembled his few possessions and made a bundle of them, Deakin lay down on the pallet in the narrow space against the wall at the far end of the cellar. The damp from the wall came against his face. He heard a catch of breath from the exhausted baby. The children on the bed were silent, perhaps sleeping. He began to think about the next day. He had no money and no plans, no sense even of a likely sequence of events. All his programme was imagined sensation, the silent street he would step out into, dawn coming slowly over the tips and brick kilns and dirty pools on the outskirts, then the open fields, and himself moving through luminous spaces, with the sun rising and the fields filling with light and himself always moving, unimpeded, totally free and yet awaited – he knew the impossible ambition of the escaper to find welcome horizons.
He had not been back for fourteen years. He did not know if his mother was still alive. He wanted now to know – she had pleaded for him as far as her fear allowed. Whether his father was alive or dead he did not care. He had a memory of the place he had started from, as simple and brightly coloured as a child’s picture book, soft green folds of hills, lush grass, red earth, brindled cows grazing knee-deep in buttercups. Embedded in this like a splinter was the stone farmhouse on the coomb-side, the dark little shed where his father locked him up after beatings for tasks neglected or badly performed, though this was a dark mystery as the beatings came regularly in spite of all effort, and pardon did not depend on anything he could do or say but had to be wrought by the darkness of the shed – sometimes an hour or two, sometimes whole nights he had spent in the dark, the pain of his stripes receding to make way for fear.
The shed itself had no place in the picture, no shape or form, only the darkness within it and the plenitude of light he had stepped out into the morning of his escape, that dawn he had found a short bar inside and used it to wrench the door off its hinges. He had never forgotten this violent conquest of the dark, the feel of the metal, the joy and fear of the splintering wood, the revelation of light that cold morning with sheep coughing in the field above and the distant sound of a dog barking. Within half an hour he had been on the upland road and begging lifts to Bristol.
He had run away often since then, but all