Jamrach's Menagerie (16 page)

‘No,’ said Dan.

‘Isn’t it funny,’ Skip said, turning to me, ‘the way a thing can be two different things at the same time?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Like wanting to do something and not wanting to do it at the same time,’ he said, ‘like when my brother Barnaby drowned and I went and looked at him on the kitchen table and it was happy and sad al at the same time. Or like when you’re kil ing a whale and you feel like you
are
the whale.’

He showed me his sketch. It was his idea of a dragon, a tragic and majestic old thing.

I could understand why Dan wouldn’t take Skip along. Too unpredictable.
I
wasn’t though. I was good with animals, everyone said so. I had a feel for them and no real fear, only a respect for their powers that gave me a healthy caution.

Why should Tim be hunter’s mate and me only a dogsbody?

I got Dan on his own later and asked him outright: why him and not me?

He blew smoke thoughtful y out of the corner of his mouth and said, ‘One. Because I promised him. Two. Because he’s the best man for the job.’

‘
Tim
?’

‘Him for the hunt,’ he said, ‘you to take care of the creature once it’s caught.’

Seas have natures, like people. Since we left the Crozets behind, the change had seeped its way into everything. We were blown stil , but the wind was less chil ing, batting us along like a cat with a bal of wool. First there were islands here and there, reassuring blots of land upon the vastness of the ocean. Then there were none. The change was a somnolence thrown over us after the islands vanished. Now I saw the earth curve and felt as dizzy as a poor gnat on the brim of a drain. The sea changed colour, became a thirsty blue. But I sensed something more, something I had no words for, something that scared me witless. An enormity.

As if something was hidden here, something under the sea, something under everything.

I tried to tel Tim.

‘Just my luck’, he said, ‘to get stuck out here with a lot of lunatics. Christ help us come ful moon.’

Now that we were drawing nearer to its homelands, the idea of the dragon was beginning to sink in. Joe Harper and Sam Proffit were working on the cage for it on the deck.

Comeragh stood watching. ‘Make damn sure it’s strong,’ he said, shaking out his handkerchief and laughing at the idea of the thing getting out and taking a strol along the deck.

‘Down into the fo’c’s’le!’ he cried with nasal delight, blowing his nose loudly.

‘Aft in the captain’s cabin,’ smiled Sam.

Joe thumped the sturdy timber with his fist. ‘You could put an elephant in that,’ he said confidently.

‘Or a tiger.’ That was me. The cage was much like the one my tiger had escaped from.

Tim piped up. ‘Jaf was taken by a tiger once,’ and everyone looked at me. ‘Tel ’em, Jaf,’ he said. ‘Go on, tel ’em about the tiger.’

So I had to tel the story again about how I met Jamrach.

Or rather Tim told it.

‘Great big Bengal tiger! Head this big! And this little squirt here two foot tal walks straight up to it like it’s a little pussy cat and gives it a pat on the nose—’

‘Not a pat,’ I said, ‘a stroke. It was a stroke. I wanted to see what it felt like.’

The three of them were looking at me, Sam and Joe and Comeragh, impressed. Mr Jamrach came out of that story very wel , but it was me that was the hero, I knew that by now.

Jamrach had bravely wrenched apart the beast’s jaws, that was true – though as I remember it being spoken of at the time, it was more like he got behind it and grabbed its throat and that made it open its mouth and cough me out. How should I know? I saw none of it. I remember being in the tiger’s mouth though, oh yes, I stil remember. That’s why I was the hero. Not many had been in a tiger’s mouth. Not a one of them that didn’t in some way envy me that.

‘Now there’s a story to tel your grandchildren,’ Mr Comeragh said, smiling. He had a terrible cold and his top lip was red and peeling.

Of course, the story was al over the place an hour later, and I had to tel it again and again so many times over the next couple of days that it recurred in me like a great wave, the very deep memory of it in my flesh and bones. I was cock of the fo’c’s’le for a while, which made a welcome change. It didn’t last, of course, but for a sweet day or two mine was the story circulating in the smoke as we lay on our backs on our bunks and in our hammocks, the smel of mildew, smoke rising under the low, oak ceiling, a cloudy room, dim by half lantern.

The head of Skip’s bunk lay up against the head of mine.

‘What was it like real y?’ he wanted to know. ‘Can you remember? You know, can you
really
remember? When you were in its mouth.’

‘Oh, I remember.’

It comes back in my dreams again and again. In different ways. Now I’m a sensible lad, wouldn’t go anywhere near a tiger’s mouth, but then it was just a great glory. I
could
never and
would
never be there again.

‘I can’t describe it,’ I said.

He was quiet for a while, then said ruminatively, ‘I wonder if it was like that for my dog, Pol .’

‘If
what
was like that for your dog, Pol ?’

‘When she was kil ed,’ he said. ‘She was kil ed by a bloody great mad bloodhound down on the foreshore down by the reach. It was after someone and she got in the way and it grabbed her by the head, whole head in its mouth, huge great mouth it had, al slobbery, and it grabbed her by the whole head like that and threw her over its shoulder and

– crack! – neck broken. Gone.’

‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘That sounds much worse than what happened to me.’

I relit my pipe, took a smoke and passed it back over my head to him. ‘Stil ,’ I said, ‘I don’t suppose she’d have suffered much. Wel , not for long anyway.’

I heard him popping his lips as he tried to blow smoke rings. ‘I used to say: here, Pol y-dog! Here!’ he said, holding smoke in his throat.

This got us onto the subject of Jamrach’s and how I worked there in the yard, and al the beasts that came and went over the years. It was the mention of the silent bird room that got him. I told him how they sat there unmoving in those tiny boxes, songbirds with locked throats, and he said that was al wrong. He said he hated to see a bird in a cage.

‘It’s something to do with the wings,’ he said, ‘it’s when they can’t open them up.’

We smoked silently and I thought about how that room had saddened me as a child, but I had grown used to it over the years as it became an everyday thing. It was just how the world was.

‘They’re not kept like that for ever,’ I said. ‘They’re sold on.’

Skip said he remembered a fish that his grandmother had. He said he was terrified of his grandmother; she was very old and ugly and she had horrible brown leather skin in big wrinkles and wore thick round eyeglasses with a patch over one lens and the other so thick it made her eye look as big and swimmy as a fat fish, and it stared at you in a peculiar way that made you think she was a witch. And she had this poor fish, a big goldfish with a swishy tail that she kept in a little glass globe like the kind they cupped on your skin for a boil. It lived in this in a few inches of water, just enough so it could turn its body round and round in one continuous loop forever. And that’s what it did. He said it was horrible. Something in the glass magnified the fish, just as the eyeglass magnified his grandmother’s eye, and when you went in her nasty poky little room you’d see the swirling goldfish thing like a shiny eye, and
her
eye too, and it was as if both of them were her eyes watching you.

Next day Skip turned strange again. We’d taken a whale, and it was while we were in the middle of it al , when the try pots were blowing out smoke and the firelight making demons of us and leaping and dancing on the blood that dripped down onto the deck from the stripped blubber. Skip was by me on the windlass and he suddenly let go so that it juddered and jerked and knocked me back. Just let it go and walked away as if someone had cal ed him.

‘What the fuck do you think you are doing, Mr Skipton!’

Rainey roared.

Skip seemed not to hear.

Rainey took a step as if it was a deep breath, threw back his head and marched after Skip with his nostrils flaring like sails. Martin Hannah jumped in beside me and took Skip’s place and we pushed like hel , heads up, watching. Skip walked up the steps and onto the quarterdeck, looking straight ahead of him, stepping firmly, running the last couple of paces. He stood dead stil looking up at the evening sky for a moment before laying himself down delicately upon the deck, curling up his knees and hugging himself with his arms, tucking his head in and giving a little judder of the shoulders as if of pleasure at turning into a cosy bed for the night.

Rainey stood over him kicking and kicking him in a spoilt and furious way. ‘Get up! Get up, you bastard!’ he screamed. ‘There’s not a thing wrong with you. How dare you leave your post!’

Gabriel ran up with Abel Roper. Proctor appeared.

Skip rol ed onto his back. Something about the look of him disturbed them.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Proctor, ‘give him room.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ shouted Rainey, ‘he’s just trying to get out of work.’

‘I don’t think he’s pretending, sir,’ said Abel. ‘Felix, go and ask Wilson for the salts.’

When the salts were applied under his nostrils, Skip sneezed violently and sat up, only to sink back down again immediately.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Proctor asked.

‘It’s just a funny turn,’ replied Abel.

‘Ha!’ Mr Rainey barked. ‘Ha!’

‘Put him down below,’ Captain Proctor said. ‘Let him sleep it off, whatever it is. No good him staggering about the deck in this condition. What are you al standing around here for? Doctors, are you? Back to work!’

Skip’s eyes were looking off in two directions as they hauled him across the deck, one arm on the shoulder of Abel, the other on Gabriel. He started to laugh. ‘Take me on the ferry!’ he shouted. ‘Take me on the ferry!’ Then he threw up.

He was fine in a couple of hours.

It was nothing, he insisted, he just passed out. It wasn’t true, of course. Later that night when just a few of us lay in the fo’c’s’le, he told the truth. ‘There was something fol owing the ship,’ he said. ‘I went to look at it.’

We al leaned forward to hear.

‘A bird,’ I said. ‘A cloud. A goney or a cormorant.’

He said it was an eye with wings. An eye with wings, in the sky, fol owing the ship. ‘Here,’ he said, pul ed out his pad and pencil and drew it for us.

No one spoke for a few seconds, then Tim laughed. ‘What colour was it?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Skip replied seriously.

‘Blue? Brown? A lovely green eye?’

‘Horus,’ said Gabriel thoughtful y.

‘Did it have an eyelid? Could it blink? Did it wink at you?’

‘Nothing like that.’

‘Horus,’ repeated Gabriel. ‘I believe Horus is an eye.’

‘What’s Horus?’ asked Skip.

‘A god.’ Gabriel frowned, considering. ‘A god of the pharoahs.’

‘How d’
you
know about pharoahs and gods?’ I asked him.

‘I’ve been around,’ he replied.

‘Maybe it was my brother, Barnaby,’ Skip said.

Tim settled back with his arms behind his head. ‘More like this pharoah thing, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘Sounds more likely somehow.’

‘But what is Horus doing fol owing you about, son?’

Gabriel asked.

Skip said it didn’t surprise him. He’d been visited by gods before.

‘A
ha
,’ was Gabriel’s response, and not much more was said. We watched Skip more than ever after that though, al of us, and the voyage continued tranquil as we sailed on through a thick green sea, in which, at last, islands once more appeared. Long white strands. Palm trees that beckoned like graceful women. Shapes like giants loomed from the mist. Highlands rose above the sea. Cliffs of pink and sage green. The smel of the islands was earthy and spicy, and the sea was clear. You could look down and see bright fish swimming below, fronds of barbarous plants moving like slow music, long ridges of fantastic shapes and colours that thrust and pointed up to the ceiling of their sky, which was the surface of our sea.

We anchored in a harbour somewhere and the white man of those islands came down and spoke with Captain Proctor and Mr Rainey on the beach. Mr Comeragh was fluey and didn’t go ashore. A hundred dark slave faces watched us from the forest fringes at the top of the beach. When Captain Proctor returned, he said there was sickness on the island and we would not be going ashore. Abel Roper, Martin Hannah and Joe Harper went down and loaded fresh water and coconuts, and we went on our way.

A day passed, two, three. Those seas turned me in and deeper in on myself, so little speech any of us seemed to have at that time. Islands came, islands went, suns rose and set, the ocean flowed on, and the sense of immensity returned in me, uncomfortable, an apprehension of something far beneath, beyond my grasp.

We reached a long shadow on the horizon, very far. Lowlying cloud, soft grey. Doves and ladies gloves and goose breasts.

‘Land,’ said Gabriel, leaning sharp sideways from the helm.

It came up like a soft rol of dustbal , kitten fur. Cloud wal .

Land.

Long land. Miles and miles and miles of land, this way and that, long long miles of green jungle and a scattering of islands.