Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [43]
Raising himself on one elbow, Billy peered through the dark, made out a man sitting upright where the boat narrowed at the bows.
‘Wha’s that?’
‘The name is Deakin. I been pressed here, same as you.’
‘Pass him the bottle,’ Billy said, in a tone of resignation. ‘Was that you snufflin’ just now?’
‘No, there’s another feller here alongside of me.’
As if this were a signal, the whimpering began again. Deakin hesitated a moment, then reached out and touched the shoulder of the man lying near him pressed against the boat’s side. ‘Hold your noise,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Dan’l Calley.’ The voice came choked with mucus and tears. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’
‘Be jabers,’ Sullivan said in a tone of affected surprise. ‘You up there!’ he called out. ‘There’s a man here says he doesn’t want to stay. I think he should see the capting.’
A different voice answered this time, harsher, more violent than the first. ‘Damn you, stow your gab. There’s no more rum. You get a bucket of bilge-water if you don’t keep quiet.’
Deakin kept his hand on the man’s shoulder a few moments longer. The choked voice had touched something in him. He had heard men cry for pain before; and he had stood at the guns, on decks strewn with bodies and running with blood, and wept with exhaustion; but he had never heard a grown man whimper with misery like this. Now, in his despair, it was as if he heard his own tears of the past, heard his own voice in the dark nights of long ago and found a comforter. ‘Keep your spirits up, Dan’l,’ he said. ‘Be a man. There’s nothing to do but wait for the morning.’
‘Aye,’ Billy said, ‘a man has to look on the bright side. I got a few drams an’ a plate o’ meat pies before that screw took off wi’ my purse. I wish I could of fucked her an’ all,’ he added wistfully.
‘You will lose more than that again,’ Sullivan said. ‘Whativer they have give the landlord for us comes out of our wages, mebbe two guineas apiece.’
‘God will find out that fat buggeranto of a landlord. An’ in case not I will find him out when I get back an’ I will slit him up the nose. Here, lads, let’s have the bottle back this end.’
‘Don’t you be mentioning God to me. I stopped believin’ in him years ago, but now I am goin’ to give him up for good. He has shipped me on a slaver only for tryin’ to stand up for a shipmate.’
‘Aye, that’s right.’ Gloom descended on Billy. ‘Took for the Africa trade,’ he said bitterly. ‘An’ looka that, there’s nowt left in the bottle. Them fellers down there have supped it all up.’
After a long silence, during which Billy thought Sullivan had fallen asleep, the mournful voice came out of the darkness. ‘I hope me fiddle is all right. If they have broke it, I will have the law of them, sure as me name’s Michael Sullivan.’
‘Law of them, you daft bumbo? They have threw you down here, they are goin’ to send you chasin’ quashees up an’ down all the pox-ridden rivers on the Guinea Coast, an’ you talk about gettin’ the law of them for the sake of your bleddy fiddle.’
‘I see well that you know nothin’ at all about the law,’ Sullivan said. ‘Me fiddle is property. It comes under a different headin’.’
Sitting above in the ramshackle shelter they had built aft of the hatchway, with Cavana asleep beside him, Hughes heard the voices below and the silence that surrounded the voices and both sound and silence were of the same quality to him and had the same degree of meaning. The sky was clearing now, after the rain, and the wind was veering south-west and freshening – he could hear the strengthening slap of the wash against the buoy to which the hulk was moored. While the wind stayed in that quarter they would not clear the river.
He sat hunched against the chill, his cloak over his shoulders. He did not like the proximity of Cavana, breathing heavily beside him. But there was no other shelter on the hulk. Human beings too close constricted him to the point of violence sometimes – on board ship he never slept below except in the worst of weathers.