Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [63]
Unaware that he was under discussion, Libby was enjoying a joke of his own, of the kind he liked best, bringing present ridicule and future misfortune for the victim. He and a man named Tapley and the boy Charlie had been set to binding a length of the ship’s cable upwards from the anchor ring to protect it from chafing. Each had taken up a section and was winding old rope-strands firmly and closely about it. Calley, sent forward to join them, had come upon a length of hawser lying there waiting to be spliced. In his eagerness to do his work well and correctly he did not notice the two-inch difference in circumference and set to work at once, head lowered in utmost concentration.
Charlie seemed about to point out the mistake but Libby stopped him with a quick gesture. Tapley he merely winked at. He waited until Calley was well into the work, then he said, ‘Gettin’ on well, ain’t he?’ and grinned at Tapley and the boy, both of whom he knew, with the bully’s infallible instinct, to be afraid of him. ‘They will make a sailor of yer yet, Dan’l.’
Calley smiled without looking up. His mouth hung open a little and his blunt pink tongue protruded slightly in the unremitting attention he was giving his task. A dribble of saliva had escaped its soft crease of containment at the corner of his mouth and made a silver thread like a snail’s track on his chin. There was a bright shine of snot on the short slope of his upper lip. Everything exuded by Calley had a magical shine and purity about it, the beads of his sweat were like small pearls. Without saying a word to anyone he had been filling with the pride of achievement. He tied the strands round and round as he had seen the others do, in his big, calloused hands, keeping the tarred threads of the yarn tight and close together, making sure not to cross them or leave any gaps, the thick hemp rope lying warm and heavy across his thighs.
‘Yer’ll not only be the best man aboard at jerkin’ off,’ Libby said, ‘yer’ll be the best at servin’ a cable. Have yer seen him?’ he said to Charlie. ‘Every night he goes out to the heads an’ jerks hisself off, reggler as clockwork. Yer too busy doin’ it yerself to take notice, ain’t yer? I’m talkin’ to yer.’
The boy turned his sun-freckled, undernourished face towards Libby. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s right.’
‘Too busy juicin’ yerself, ain’t yer?’
‘That’s right.’
Libby stared at him for some moments. The frozen lids of his blind eye hung a little open, showing an ambivalent gleam. ‘Pity to waste it,’ he said.
‘Waste what?’ Deakin had approached soundlessly on bare feet. ‘Give us a bit of cable,’ he said, making to get between Calley and Tapley. ‘Haines sent me to give a hand. What the jig do you think you are doing there?’ he said to Calley.
‘Dan’l is servin’ cable an’ he is doin’ well, we are proud of him.’ Libby gave his droll wink, the dead eye briefly doing duty for the living one. ‘Now don’t you go spoilin’ his concentration, that wouldn’t be right.’
Deakin said quietly, ‘Dan’l, look up a minute, will you? Don’t you see, you are working on a loose piece of hawser, not on the anchor cable. You are wasting your time and if someone comes and catches you at it you will get in trouble. Who told you to bind it there?’
‘One o’ them.’ Calley pointed at the others. ‘They said do it here.’
‘Stab me if we told the half-wit anythin’ at all,’ Libby said. ‘Why are you interferin’?’
‘You will have to unpick it,’ Deakin said. ‘Then you come further down here and I’ll show you how to do the worming on the cable and then the binding.’
‘I don’t want to unpick it,’ Calley said. ‘I done it right.’
‘You have done it right as far as the work goes, but you have done it on the wrong rope. That piece doesn’t need chafing gear on it.’
Calley looked down at the rope in his lap then up at the grinning Libby. Some sort of suspicion