Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [79]
‘I thowt you’d given God his last chance the day they pressed you on to this here ship,’ Billy Blair said. ‘Lift yor bleddy end a bit, will you? I never seen anyone like you for husbandin’ his strength. What good deed are you talkin’ aboot?’
‘By raisin’ up these hatches we are deliverin’ parcels of light an’ air to the heathen below an’ sweetenin’ their passage. Some of thim fellers, a certain proportion of thim black fellers, will live to cut the sugar because of what we are after doin’ now. Isn’t that right, Mr Barber?’
The carpenter, a morose, squat, long-armed man, said, ‘If talkin’ was rated high, you would be Admiral of the Fleet by this time, Sullivan, instead of a ordinary seaman. We’ll have to take this right off altogether, so I can put a trim on it.’
‘You are wrong anyway,’ Billy said. ‘As bleddy usual. We are just doin’ what we was told to do. If they had said to lower the gratin’s an’ leave the beggars in the dark, we would ha’ done it just the same.’
Sullivan glanced up at the bright sky as if for patience. His hair had grown again after that drastic cropping. It stood up from his head in a thick, black, softly bristling mat. His long-jawed face had darkened with the sun, making the eyes seem more bemused than ever, straying after some vision just lost. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘since it would be a wilful act an’ contrary to practice an’ with no grounds in reason or law, it would be a dastardly bad deed an’ ould Nick would make a note of it.’
At this flagrant illogicality Billy felt the onset of a familiar baffled fury. ‘I dunno how it is,’ he said, doing his best to disguise this while at the same time holding up his end of the grating, ‘but any attempt at conversin’ with you gets a man in a deadlock in no time.’
‘It is you, Billy,’ Sullivan said mildly. ‘I niver arrive in deadlocks with nobody else.’
‘Listen to me, for Christ’s sake.’ Billy shifted on his haunches and spat over the rail. ‘If it is a good deed to raise the gratin’s on these hatches,’ he began slowly and laboriously, ‘what are we doin’ puttin’ the quashees down there in the first place? Them fellers gets light an’ air enough in the forests where they are.’
‘This is commerce we are talkin’ of now,’ Sullivan said. ‘It comes under a different headin’ intirely.’
Billy felt the heat rise to his head. ‘Now just a bleddy minute –’
‘You are both of you iggerant beggars,’ the carpenter said. ‘You ain’t been on a slaver before, have you?’
Sullivan assumed a smile of patent falseness. ‘No, Mr Barber, we have not,’ he said. ‘But we are dyin’ to learn, ain’t we, Billy? I was just sayin’ the other day, I think it was to Dan’l Calley, who you see pickin’ yarn down there this very minute; he might seem slow, Dan’l, but he has an enquiring mind, an’ he was askin’ me somethin’ to do with the trade an’ I says to him, you better ask one of the officers, you better ask Jack Barber, I says, someone who knows the slavin’ business inside an’ out.’
The carpenter looked at him darkly for some moments, then he said, ‘You were both talking as if it is the men that will lie below here, but this grating is the one over the women’s room, not the men’s. We allus puts the men in the forward room, the boys in the middle and the women in the after part.’
‘Now that is somethin’ we niver had the slightest inklin’ of,’ Sullivan said.
Billy Blair sat back on his heels and pushed the red cotton kerchief up over his heated forehead. He looked towards the waist where Calley and McGann were working together. Calley was sitting up against the gangway ladder, pulling out yarns, his big hands picking at the strands with surprising nimbleness, his blunt, seal-like head lowered in absolute concentration. He was naked to the waist, his powerful torso a smooth red-brown. The skinny McGann was working the hand winch to twist the yarns into rope. The doctor was beyond him, taking his walk on the weather side of the deck. Thurso and Barton