Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [64]
‘You should have told him,’ Deakin said to Tapley and Charlie. He did not look at Libby. ‘Men on a ship should stick together. Don’t make any difference what kind of ship she is.’
‘We have got a preacher here,’ Libby said. His mood was turning ugly. The joke had misfired and he felt his authority was being undermined. ‘You don’t stick,’ he said. ‘You run.’
Deakin looked at him without expression. Someone had talked, then. ‘Do you think I would run from you?’ he said. ‘You are big, but your bollocks hang by a string, same as anyone else’s.’
‘You shit-sack,’ Libby said. ‘I will spill you out.’
At this threat to his befriender, something mad looked out of Calley’s eyes. ‘No, you won’t,’ he said. With astounding speed and agility, before Libby had so much as registered the threat, he had come from a sitting position on to his haunches, had his left hand planted on the deck to take his weight and his right clenched and drawn back.
Leaning sharply forward, Deakin was in time to catch at his shoulder. ‘They will flog you if you start a fight here,’ he said. He kept his grip, feeling after some moments the muscles of Calley’s arm relax. ‘He is not worth getting a flogging for,’ he said more quietly.
Calley, in the red mist of rage, felt the hand on his shoulder and knew the touch. This was Deakin, who had spoken words of comfort to him and touched him in the darkness of the hulk. ‘Deakin is not a shit-sack,’ he said.
Feelings of loneliness and distress had accompanied Calley since the first day out. Barton had proved a false friend, giving him nothing but abuse and kicks once he was on board. The vision of Africa and the hot lewd women had faded now; it was lame Kate from the taphouse that he mostly thought of at night when he crept to some deserted corner of the deck and rubbed himself for comfort in the dark and whimpered with brief pleasure. Now he smiled as he glanced up, and the traces of his rage shone with pristine glory on the smooth skin below his eyes. ‘Deakin is my friend,’ he said.
NINETEEN
Hag-seed hence!
Fetch us in fuel and be quick
To answer other business: shruggst thou, malice?
If thou neglectest or dost unwillingly what I command
I’ll wrack thee –
‘No, no, Prospero, no, no, egad, pray allow me, I really must interpose.’ The director spoke with customary languidness, but his words were enough to bring the headlong wizard to a halt, though swollen with pent speech and frothing slightly. They were rehearsing in the library, the weather having turned rainy. ‘No, no, you see,’ the director said, ‘you are in too much haste, you absolutely must give Caliban time to do a proper shrug. It serves no purpose to ask him if he is shrugging and menace him with cramps before you have allowed him the time to do it.’
His name was Henry Adams – a well-known one on the London stage, as Charles Wolpert had assured them all. He was a sallow, long-shanked man with fine eyes and bad teeth and a fashionable limpness of manner.
‘It is what I keep telling you, Bulstrode,’ the curate said. ‘It is what I have often complained of. I must be given time to perform my shrugging.’ His face was pale as always in the stress of these rehearsals and his fair, fine-spun hair showed the usual startlement.
‘Why, sir, as to that,’ Adams said, ‘if you will permit me, you are not performing a suitable kind of shrug for a monster, you are drawing yourself too much upright, you are making Caliban too damnable proud.’
‘But, sir, excuse me, that is exactly why I do it in that way,’ the curate said excitedly. ‘I see Caliban as a proud and rebellious character.’
‘There is only one way to see Caliban, reverend sir,’ Adams said without heat, ‘and that is my way, so long as I am directing the play. I want a more abject shrug. Like this.’ He crouched slightly, half turned his body and made a long, writhing motion which seemed to start at his thin knees. ‘A touch more sinuous, my good sir,’ he sighed. ‘Try it once again.’
Standing alone in a corner of the big bay window, Erasmus observed