Jamrach's Menagerie (15 page)

This was a fierce, boiling death. She died thrashing blindly in a slick of gore, ful of pain and fury, gnashing her jaws, beating her tail, spewing lumps of slime and half-digested fish that fel stinking about us. It was vile. So much strength dies slowly. We watched in awe, wordless. Ten minutes, fifteen, more. As she thrashed, she swam around in an ever dwindling gyre, and I begged her to die.

How long til she listed? No more than twenty minutes. She heeled at last and lay stil , one fin pointing at the sky. So passed Leviathan.

We pul ed in the line, Sam leading. Stronger than he looked, Sam. We were rowing in blood. A foul flotsam, the contents of the whale’s stomach, bobbed around us. My part was to keep the line from tangling, see it safely back into its tub. Tim turned and looked at me. We were the two greenhorns on our boat. We had no way of knowing what we were feeling. We just looked at each other.

It was getting dark as we towed the whale back to the ship. We were shaky and dumb, but a growing euphoria coloured the horror. First whale of the season, she was ours.

We
were the boys.

Not the captain’s boat, not Mr Rainey’s. Ours, Second Mate Comeragh’s. It was bad for Simon though. Back on deck everyone started congratulating him, thinking that as boat steerer he must have been the one to have taken the whale. And he had to tel them how he hadn’t been up to it and Mr Comeragh had had to take over. Me and Tim though, we were laughing now. Dan came and clapped us on the shoulder, very serious. ‘That was good,’ he said. ‘Good.

Kept your heads.’ We’d kept our heads. We’d come through.

They tied her to starboard with her head facing the stern.

Knowing I was safe, a certain wildness came over me now. Here I was back on the dear old
Lysander
with my good fel ows, alive. It was getting dark and the fires had already been lit under the try pots. Rainey and Comeragh stood on the cutting stage and set about hooking her near the fin. The windlass was set to and she was peeled like an apple, slowly, turning and turning like a pig on a spit, til the blanket strip, wide as a double bed and long as to the top of a house, hung dripping blood from the rigging. Yan and Gabriel swarmed up and hacked it off, and we dropped it down to Henry Cash and Martin Hannah waiting in the blubber room below. And when another and another and another strip had left her and gone below, she was a monstrosity, a creamy gleaming grub of a thing clinging to the side of our ship in the dark, with her great head stil intact, smiling. But they cut it off at last, and we hauled it up with the block and tackle and there it lay on our deck, a terrible thing two men long.

Dag Aarnasson, who had done al this before, went up on top with a knife and cut a hole in the top big enough for us to dip our buckets in. There was a single moment when everything lurched and a cloud came over my eyes, but I hung onto a rope and gritted my teeth and held on tight til things cleared, and then I made a vow that I would get through this without disgrace, and took up my bucket. If you have never scooped the oil from a sperm whale’s head with a bucket, you wil not appreciate the strength it takes. There are hundreds and hundreds of gal ons of oil in a sperm whale’s head. It is thick and white and the more you scoop, the gloopier and heavier and more spunk-like it gets. It’s like trying to empty a bottomless wel , and it breaks your poor fucking back, which by this time has gone beyond simple pain. And when at last it’s nearly empty, someone has to go down inside the head and get the dregs. Skip did this, impassive, whistling as he worked, while the rest of us set to chopping. Wraiths, we lurched upon the slippery deck. Felix Duggan got sick, ran aside and vomited, stood groaning with his hands on his knees, water drooling from his big pink lower lip. The mates upon the cutting stage worried away at the wormy innards, looking for ambergris, which ladies wear upon their wrists and in the val eys between their breasts.

Piled about the deck were great heaps of hacked flesh that bled and shone and gave off a sweet stink that made my guts clench with a kind of perverted hunger. The try pots boiled and heaved and were skimmed constantly of an evil scum, which rose to the surface and was thrown into the fires beneath to spit and crackle and belch forth a thick black smoke with a charnel house stink. Firelight shone on the boards, awash with oil and blood.

We chopped and chopped. Again and again our knives grew blunt and we honed them and set to again, wiping sweat from our dripping brows. Blubber’s tough. We cut and heaved, passed our hunks to Sam and Yan and Dan and Gabriel, who, singing and smiling like women in a kitchen, sliced again like skilful butchers til the strips they cal ed bible leaves appeared, like pages in the flick book I had made for Ishbel five years ago. Al were swal owed in the try pots.

My clothes stuck to me. Oil. Oil to make putty and paint and soap, oil to grease and varnish, oil to burn in mil ions of lamps. I was soaked in a sticky gum of filth and gore, grease, sweat, bile, the puky juices of God’s greatest creature. My hair stuck close to my head, fast glued. Stil –

who better than me for this? Had I not scoured the Thames sewers for pennies?

‘Sleep in your clothes, Jaf,’ Dan said when my watch ended.

I thought he was mad.

‘If you change for every watch, you’l be out of gear before we’re a quarter through,’ he explained.

So I slept in the reek of myself and the whale, and it wal owed through my sleep and gave me dreams of slaughter in a wild jungle place. When I arose for the next watch, the try pots stil bubbled and the decks were stil slippy. My clothes had dried upon me and become a second skin, and the bones and organs of the whale floated alongside the ship in a great snapping of sharks and a feasting of seabirds. I stood with Gabriel looking down.

Morning had come.

‘Take it al in, son,’ he said. ‘Doubt you’l get the chance again.’

‘Why so?’

‘The whaling’s done for,’ he said, and grinned.

‘Why?’

‘No cal for the oil no more. It’s al this new stuff now. They’l always need the bone for the ladies’ stays, but they won’t be wanting al this oil no more.’

‘What new stuff?’

‘Oil under the ground,’ he said.

It was three days til we were done. Stores sound, hatches down, decks al scoured and pure.

Onward. Different.

6

We turned east. It was rough round seas after that, the ocean breathing in and out, in and out, range after range of rol ing hil s, up and down whose howling slopes we climbed and rol ed as the winds wailed and the dark water swel ed and heaved. These bloated seas were ful of ships. We passed them, distant toy things sighted through a whistling grey madness, bird blackened (as were we), clouded by crying hordes. Sometimes we drew nigh and saw dark, tattooed faces on their decks. Sometimes we met, and the faces, white-eyed and sea stained, became real and took on names. The days mingled. My sea eyes changed, becoming water wise. In two months we took five hundred barrels of oil, and were down a boat and a man. A fel ow cal ed George deserted at the Cape. The boat was smashed to splinters in an angry sea while being hoisted up
Lysander
’s side.

We met a ship which gave us our letters and the newspapers from home. Not al of us got a letter. Bil didn’t, nor did Yan or Felix or Skip, and there was nothing for me either. Tim had one from Ishbel.

I watched him read. First he smiled, but after a moment or two this faded and his eyes scanned backwards and forwards seriously. On the back of the paper I could see the careful horizontal lines of her writing, with the long deep loops and the slight forward slant, and the long vertical lines with which she’d fil ed the margins. At the foot of the page was her name, writ larger than the rest, the I of Ishbel a flourish.

Tim turned the page and read the other side. Lines, al indecipherable. But there near the top I saw my name along with his: ‘Dear Tim and Jaffy’.

‘Hmm.’ He gave a smal down-the-nose laugh, shaking his head, glancing up at me and looking down again. ‘Sends you her fond regards, Jaf,’ he said brightly, turning it again and rereading the beginning.

‘Has she seen my ma?’

He didn’t reply.

I crowded him. ‘Let’s see.’

‘Oy!’ He flinched the letter away from me.

‘It’s for me too,’ I said.

‘No, it isn’t. It’s a private letter. Look.’ He showed me the envelope. ‘
My
name. It’s mine.’

‘That’s not fair,’ I said, ‘the letter’s got
my
name on it too.’

‘It has not! What are you talking about? You didn’t even see it.’

‘Didn’t get a chance, did I?’

‘It has not got your name on it, Jaf,’ he said, as if to an imbecile. ‘It’s mine,’ and folded it up very smal and tucked it away in his clothes. It was like old times, al his little spites. I hated him again, even as the doubts came in. Had I real y seen my name? Yes, then again no, then again maybe. I could have kil ed him there and then, throttled him with my bare hands.

‘You’re a rotten friend, Tim. Did you know that?’ I said.

‘What a rotten friend you are.’ With horror I felt tears rising.

He smiled in a strange bland way. ‘The old man’s gone,’

he said.

‘What?’

‘The old man. Pa. He’s dead.’

I didn’t know what to say. For al the notice Tim had ever taken of his dad, he might as wel have been the coal scuttle.

‘Oh,’ I said coldly, clamping my teeth with the urge to stick my thumbs in his throat. ‘What did he die of?’

‘Death,’ he said lightly, ‘that’s what he died of, death, Jaffy, old boy.’

‘My name was on it,’ I said, ‘at the top. She wrote for both of us.’

‘No, Jaf.’ He looked at me sadly. ‘She didn’t. I’m sorry, you real y are mistaken. She sends her fond regards. At the end, she sends you her fond regards. I told you.’

I wished Ma could write. I missed Ma. I missed Ishbel.

Suddenly I had to turn away because of tears in my eyes.

Bastard. I’d kick him overboard.

‘No more bloody mermaids,’ Tim murmured.

‘I saw my name,’ I said.

Tim turned his head on one side and raised his shoulders, frowning indulgently. Would I lie to you? the look said.

Perplexed that I could doubt him.

I walked away and stood at the rail. My chest hurt. Who cares? And anyway why couldn’t she write me my own letter? I ironed out the pain til nothing existed but the foam-flecked decks and the dim dappled fo’c’s’le that creaked and groaned through the days and nights. Why was I here in this cramped mad moving world? There was no time alone any more. No time, no space, no dreaming place but sleep.

George did the right thing jumping ship at the Cape. I missed the sound of the market and the smel of Meng’s and the ring of the bel on Jamrach’s door, and the smel of straw and dung in the yard and the ring of cobbles beneath my feet. I had a place there. Here I was a dogsbody. Foam flew in my face. The world was too big. I turned and saw Dag standing as stil as he could as the world rose and fel around him, his creamy-yel ow hair plastered flat to his large head.

He was trying not to gal y a huge white bird that had alighted on the rail and clung mad-faced there, opening and closing its curved beak and spreading out its wings. Why so angry?

Foam fel like snow. A wave exploded upon our bow, shattering like glass, soaking us up as far as the cookhouse, and when I could see again the bird had gone.

‘What is this thing then?’ Skip said.

‘What thing?’

‘This thing. This dragon thing.’

‘No one knows.’

Supper was over and we were having a smoke on deck.

Skip was doodling idly in his drawing book. ‘This thing,’ he repeated, ‘this dragon thing, what is it?’

‘The Ora,’ I told him, because that’s what Dan Rymer sometimes cal ed it. I cal ed Dan over. ‘He wants to know about the Ora,’ I said.

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Dan, lounging against the mast. ‘I met a man who met a man who met a man who met a man who … That’s the kind of a thing it is. There are stories. It’s a big, fierce thing, of course. And there are islands the natives stay away from.’ He’d been speaking very seriously, but here broke into a grin. His teeth were yel owing at the tops, his forehead scored by three or four very deep lines. ‘Listen to me, me boys, and I’l tel ye tales to curdle your blood,’ he crowed, rubbing his hands together and licking his lips.

‘Can I come with you when you go after it?’ Skip asked.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I said so.’

God knows why he was taking Tim. I would have been better. Any day. ‘What if it’s real y a dragon?’ Tim said one night as we lay smoking in our bunks. ‘A real dragon, you know. Breathing fire. Wings. Al that? Jesus!’ He said it so everyone could hear.

‘What d’you want to come for anyway?’ Dan asked Skip.

‘Eager to die?’

Skip shrugged amiably. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

Dan sat down with us and lit his pipe. ‘Of course you don’t,’ he said.

‘If I can go after a whale,’ Skip said, shading away steadily with his pencil, ‘I can go after anything.’

‘Not so.’

‘Yes so. It’s not fishing, you know. I know al about fish.’