‘Ma wants me.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s going to be funny with you lot gone.’
I laughed. ‘Wish you were coming?’ I asked.
She pulled a face. ‘Whale ships stink.’
We were awkward. This may be the last time, I thought. I put my arms out and gathered her in close. ‘I hate you both for going,’ she said, suddenly tearful. When I kissed her on the mouth she kissed me back. Long sweet minutes till she pulled back and said she had to go, and took my hand and dragged me outside with my head reeling. I walked her to the back gate. Cobbe was mucking about in the yard. The lioness was gnawing peacefully on a lump of beef, holding onto it with her paws, licking amorously, eating with closed eyes.
‘You’ll look after him, won’t you?’ Ishbel said. ‘He’s not as brave as he makes out, you know.’
‘Neither am I.’
‘Pa won’t shake his hand,’ she said. ‘He cried. Don’t tell him I told you.’
‘’Course not.’
We stood smiling in a slightly demented way.
‘He’s a big baby really,’ she said.
‘So am I,’ I said.
‘How’s your ma?’ she asked.
It might never have happened.
‘She’ll do. She asked Charley to have a word with me about staying and getting into the fish business. “You serious?” I said. “Work on a fish stall or go around the world?”’
She laughed. ‘Oh well,’ tidying her hair, ‘better be on my way,’ and was gone.
Three years and come back a man, come back changed. See the strange places I itch to see. See the sea. Could you ever get sick of the sight of the sea? She said that to me one day when we were standing on the bridge. And she had never even seen it, and I pray she never will.
I went home and looked out of the window at sunset. It was May. The sky was a red eye, the rooftops black. There were islands in the sky. The waves were bobbing. It was the Azores, those beautiful islands. Jaffy Brown is gone. He turned, was turned, a ghost on a god-haunted ocean. My eyes and the indigo horizon are one and the same.
Early in the morning, a straggle of dockers and lightermen on the quay, a bunch of old women and a few mothers, not mine. Ma had gone all distant on me. We’d said our goodbyes. She hated all that, she said. If you’re going to go, just go, and get yourself back as quick as you can, and don’t expect me to like it. Mr Jamrach didn’t want me to go either. When I’d taken my leave of him the night before he’d clapped me on the arm and brought his face close to mine, and stared unwaveringly with watery blue eyes, making me uncomfortable. ‘You look out for yourself, Jaf,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ll not see you on the quay.’ We’d shaken hands very cordially and smiled awkwardly, till someone came to the door wanting birds, allowing me to slip away fast.
Dan Rymer’s wife was standing on the quay, a tall, straight-backed, fair woman with children in her skirts and a baby on her arm. A shipload of Portuguese sailors disembarking for a spree cast eyes on Ishbel, come straight from Paddy’s Goose in her red shoes.
She didn’t cry or make a fuss. Each of us got a peck on the mouth. She hugged Tim for a long time and me for a little less.
‘You’ll bring him back safe, Jaf,’ she said.
I still see her standing there, waving, shielding her eyes from the sun.
When at last I set foot on-board, the terror that churned my guts was all one with a kind of joy. I wanted to look a whale in the eye. The only whale I’d ever seen was on a picture in the seamen’s bethel, the one that swallowed Jonah. It had no face. It was just a great block, a monstrosity with a mouth. But a whale did have eyes, I knew, and I wanted to look into them, as I looked into the eyes of all the animals that came in and out of Jamrach’s yard. Why did I do this? I don’t know. Nothing I ever solved.
We were all of us wild, great thumping fools with thumping hearts running about that first morning, making a pig’s ear of whatever we turned our hands to. We knew nothing, nothing at all, and we didn’t know each other yet either. Eight of us were green, eight out of a score or more of men – men, I say – fourteen our youngest, Felix Duggan, a mouthy kid from Orpington, sixty our oldest, a scrawny black called Sam. Thank God for Dan looking out for us, with us but not with us. Seven years since I met him, but I never knew him till we sailed together. I do now. I know him better than anyone now.
The Lysander was a beauty, ageing, well preserved, small and neat. The captain watched from the quarterdeck as we made fools of ourselves, while the first mate, a florid, thick-featured madman called Mr Rainey, strode about swearing and cursing at us in a deranged manner. Christ Jesus, what have I done? I thought. Am I mad? Oh, Ma. The masts and the yards and the sails, the whole great soaring thing was the web of an insane spider against the sky. Ropes, ropes, a million ropes and every bloody one with its own name, and if you got the wrong one you buggered up the whole thing. How we ever got off I’ve no idea. It was the efforts of those few who knew what they were doing: the old black called Sam, another black by the name of Gabriel, a tall Oriental called Yan, and our Dan. These four got the ship off with the help of a few lads not much older than me and Tim, who’d sailed maybe once or twice before and therefore considered themselves old seadogs. We greenies stumbled and bumbled around getting in everyone’s way. I lost sight of Tim. Lost Dan. At every moment I tried to look as if I was confidently on my way from one important task to the next, wearing a face I hoped gave an impression of eager intelligence. I caught sight of the dockside moving away, the people a blur, heard the sudden sweet hollow chiming of a London clock bidding me a long farewell.
A boy with a round dark head appeared very suddenly in front of me in my confusion. His face was awkward, stoic in its expression, the mouth self-conscious. He looked like I felt, wavering on his feet with no idea of what to do. For a second we locked eyes in dumb mutual understanding. Then he smiled with his mouth still closed and stiff, a peculiarly leisurely smile for the circumstances.
Mr Rainey, a clatter of boots and a horse-like snorting, landed between us from above like a god-thrown thunderbolt. ‘What do you think this is?’ he demanded. ‘A garden party?’ clouted the boy on the head and sent him flying. ‘Cretins,’ he roared, stomping away down the deck, bandy-legged and malevolent. God knows why he didn’t hit me. Too zealous in his progress towards the next target, I suppose, some poor boy above in the rigging: ‘You fucking imbecile!’ he screamed, head back. ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you and all your fucking bastard kin! Get down here!’
I got away quick, looked for Tim, but couldn’t see him. I stood useless. Someone clipped me on the back of the head and told me to look sharp.
‘I don’t know what to do!’ I appealed, suddenly outraged. How could anyone expect me to know what to do?
The man was a lanky, skinny thing with a long sensitive nose like an anteater’s and arched brows that gave him a clownish appearance. ‘Here,’ he said, and hauled me to the windlass. Oh God, the bloody windlass. A great horizontal wheel on the deck up near our fo’c’s’le – oh, to be down there with my sea chest – pushing it round alongside a big hefty blond boy built like an ox. Even he was grunting and straining, swearing doggedly in his own language. I was breaking my fucking back. The long skinny cove jumped in to help us, straight brown hair, thin as everything else about him, dangling in his eyes. Nothing much on his bones, but he was strong. ‘Hup, now,’ he said, ‘push!’
Push. Push. Beyond anything you ever thought you could do, push. I was vaguely aware of the others running about, whistles, shouts, laughter, massive creakings and groanings of the ship as we manhandled her, and of a new