Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [80]
‘Aye, that’s right. You can get up to a hundred in there, if you stow ’em spoon-fashion, arse by tit.’
‘Bigob, a hundred black fannies,’ Billy said.
The weasel-faced Tapley, passing with a bucket of hot pitch, heard this and paused, grinning. ‘He thinks he’s goin’ ter creep down when no one is lookin’ an’ shag hisself silly,’ he said.
‘You shag off yourself with that bucket,’ Barber said severely, jerking his thumb. He did not like anyone much, but Tapley less than most. ‘Nah,’ he said to Billy, ‘you have to get them on their own if you want anything. On the deck maybe, or get one down in the room while they are exercising up here. No good going below, ’cept with a whip. They get into states, they get shrieking wild sometimes, specially when the weather is bad. They would have you down and chew your bollocks off.’
‘Persuasion is best in any case,’ Sullivan said. ‘I know women, they are sensitive. A little bit of kindness goes a long way with women.’
Paris, turning at the end of his twenty paces, had observed Tapley’s brief pause with the bucket and his unpleasing smile. A distasteful fellow, Tapley. What was it? He seemed to have no nature of his own. In moral terms a rudimentary worm indeed, eyeless in the dark. Many of the men on board he had felt to be stricken in some way, made brutal or heedless by the circumstances of their lives; he had sensed some loss, something visited on them, feelings cauterized. But Tapley was without this emanation of a hurt or dispossessed creature: he writhed complete, his evils effortless. Or so, Paris thought, it seems to me. And what, after all, gives me the right to judge? And if indeed I have the right, what persuades me I can see the truth of another human being, and one with whom I have exchanged almost no words? Nothing persuades me in reason, and yet I know. Once again he was swept, desolated almost, by the lonely certainty of his perceptions.
He paused at the rail, looking eastward towards the invisible coast of Africa. Sight of land, when it came, would reduce them, set them once again on the margin of existence. Here, ringed round with the ocean horizons, one felt at the centre of the world. The land, so much longed for, signifying the end of exile, would make them mere loiterers again. It came to him now that this paradox lay at the heart of all desire, as true for himself, standing perplexed at the rail, as for every other man on board, whatever Africa represented to him.
Not that all points of the horizon appeared equally far away, even to the casual and naked eye. He knew, he had seen in this succession of days, how there is always a point more distant in seeming than all others. Depending on the position of the sun and the distribution of light in the sky and the bulk and drift of cloud, one part of the rim will always be notched with remoteness.
Is this a notion of infinity? Paris wondered rather wildly, glancing round for it now, holding to the rail, feeling his body move with the sway of the ship. Can such a notion derive from sense impression merely? So Locke would have it, with his denial of innate ideas. But the consolations of philosophy were limited, he found, aboard this ship. Locke defined pleasure as the reward of the just. What then should one call the emotion that lightened Libby’s face or brought a glint to the eyes of Haines, the boatswain?
He could hear the rattle of the winch from amidships. A smell of hot pitch lay over the ship. Simmonds was shouting orders for the fairweather sails to be hoisted. Paris found his remoter point and fixed his eyes upon it. The sun, concealed in cloud and low in the sky, made shafts and corridors and vaults to give infinity a baroque ornamentation, but it was there; random impurities swam in the depths and were dissolved.