KIRIBATI NIGHTS
by Clio Gray
The captain’s cabin had just been set about with saltpetre burning on a shovel, supposedly to rid it of the mites he swore he saw crawling over the walls at night. That no one else saw them did not much matter, everybody knew it was the rum, and that it took you in different ways, and that his was the least of it. It wasn’t the good old navy-issue rum, mind, none of that to be had after the ship turned privateer years ago. Since then it had been anything they could get their hands on, and this last lot procured by the boson, was the local kind, brewed from coconut milk and palm bark, and anything else that was lying handy on the island beaches, including the tar that the sailors scraped up off the stones to stop up the holes in their boots.
Back home, Higgins,
the boson-turned-blackmarketeer, had pressed out many a batch of cider,
and never once without adding a dead chicken to the mix to give that extra
kick; so how much worse, he’d thought, could this island stuff be?
Quite a lot, they all found out, after Archie, the cook, went mad as a mongoose
and had to be locked up in hold, puking like he was trying to turn himself
inside out. And then the second mate throwing himself off the crows-nest
and breaking both his legs and every last rib in his chest. An arm went
too, torn off by the rigging as he plummeted so spectacularly down to join
the rest of the drunkard crews, and astonishingly enough, two weeks later
saw the man still alive. Not much, mind, but still breathing, which was
more than could be said for several others who had jumped overboard for
no apparent reason, disappearing right down underneath the keel. There’d
been five of these, the boson figured, though couldn’t be sure. He’d
didn’t seem able to tally up as he’d used to do, and wasn’t
alone in that. Playing the dice and cards had become much more vicious pastimes
than they had ever been before, no one agreeing on the spot-count of the
eyes, or which card was really what, men seeing only what they wanted to
see, and not what was really there. The only thing good to be said about
that devil alcohol, thought Higgins, was that it deadened the pain of your
teeth being punched right out of your mouth, or when the man, who only yesterday
had been your friend, had just this morning, bitten the end right off of
your nose.
He knew right enough he’d been the start of it all, had been the one to pick up those two scaggle-pussies in that Chinois port. Good looking girls they’d been, and young, and ready to ride for their passage straight on to Australia. They’d only laid up a couple of days, had goods to trade that they’d pinched from a storm-battered galleon, whose cannon had been ditched for their weight, and were easily overrun. The water and salt had taken their toll, and most stuff, crew included, they’d had to toss over the side and jettison. Still, there’d been a few salvageable bales of cotton and silk, some amber and uncut ivory, so that’s why they’d stopped at that port to swap prizes, take on a bit of fresh meat which still walked and bleated and had all its feet, and some greenery to settle their gums. And those women.
Bad luck things, those women. Every sailor knows it, even one so erratic as Higgins, but he’d snuck them on board anyway, and if they hadn’t known about bad luck then, they knew it now.
‘We know
thins,’ those women had told Higgins, cuddling up to him on the shore-line
as he’d readied his reels of rope, ‘thins tha’ can mak
you rich.’ And so he’d got it out of them bit by bit, word by
word. They could steer him to Bird-Shit Island, solid guano, tons of it
just waiting to shovelled up, packed and sold. Best fertiliser in the southern
hemisphere, that hundred-year old bird-shit, and the sparse-soiled fields
of New South Wales only a month away. And plenty rum, said the girls, next
island over. And well enough, their own booze was almost dry and no ship
runs at all without it, so the boson had told the Second Mate and the Second
Mate had told the First, and the First Mate had told the captain. And he’d
agreed, re-set the compass, splitting a lick because those girls had talked
up a storm, and every last man on board was sure they were about to make
their fortunes with the bird-shit, and everyone had been happy about that.
The captain sat now in his cabin, a cringeling abandoning his duties to concentrate on the mites, saw them scurrying up and down the wooden panels, comforted by the scent of saltpetre that could give him no deliverance from what wasn’t really there. He’d closed the port-hole shutters, saw the candle threatening to gutter every time his ship took a sway through the waves, set the pool of wax going too far up the wick. The log book was in front of him on his wide, cherry-wood desk, but so far he’d yet to take up pen and ink and write. He couldn’t concentrate, was distracted by the stink of semi-pickled fish tipped out onto the decks above him, their barrels re-filled to brimming with the profit-sure guano. He’d made the cabin-boys spend a whole, long day just threading those fish onto lines which he’d ordered hung from the rigging, wanted them dried and still fit for some purpose, couldn’t bear waste. He’d always run a tidy ship, kept his men well fed and watered. Had been on boats where even the weevils starved, and men’s mouths puckered like lamprey suckers with their thirst. Not for him, not since he’d taken his own command. He gazed at the dozens of pots of ink lined up upon his shelves, had always travelled with gallons of the stuff – the captain’s privilege, that extra, hidden source of sweetened water, enough for him to keep his straight above all others in times of emergency; wondered if that emergency might not be now.
He lifted his hand at last to write, scratched out a few words, but felt dizzied by the effort, thought he might be going to heave, sent his hand awkwardly to his mouth to stop anything ignoble from escaping, splattered his cheek with his ink.
‘Just like those women,’ he thought as he pulled the mirror towards him and wiped the blue tattoos away, looked past his own reflection and the crackle of the mirror’s glaze, saw instead the Kiribati girls streaked with their patterns and paints.
And their poison,
he thought bitterly; women’s poison, no worse kind on board a ship.
Not to mention their filthy island rum with its stink and the foulness of
its taste that set its hooks right into the back of your throat, dried you
out, made you drink it all the more whether you wanted to or not. He took
a hefty swig of that rum right now, and grimaced, knew that he should stop,
that they all should stop, saw the ever-present flicker of the mites at
the corners of his eyes, and closed them shut.
Up on deck, the boson, Higgins, was shouting out the founding of his No-Nose Club; very exclusive, he was yelling, even while the blood was dripping down his chin, his words slurred by a tongue thickened with rum and insults. He was laughing like a Tasmanian banshee, trying to rip his knife out of its scabbard, managed to gouge his own skin as he started brandishing it in the general direction of the man who had been his friend before he’d become his mutilator. Three other men had joined in at his back, the tips of their noses gone too. He welcomed them all, though threw out a fourth who had lost his nose to syphilis and nothing else. The No-Nosers united, and set themselves apart from the others, could not get enough of their joking, their re-enactments, again and again, of the well-known Nose Amputation trick which boys practiced on every city corner from Brisbane to London, the half-moon cut from their blades and the practiced tip of their thumbs between their fingers. The boson’s crew cackled about doing the trick for real, machetes sharp as marlin spikes, and goats’ blood enough to drench those colony bastards who didn’t know a duck’s arse from an egg, and would be as easy fleeced from their money as pulling the legs of a fly.
Down below, the captain had at last managed to make some scribbles in his log book concerning their present bearings, and the direction of the wind. He also found it in him to jot down the day’s diminishment of his crew: those confined to the hold, or latterly the bilges, and a few, more radically, to the surgeon’s hole. There were others, and of no small number, who had been presumed missing: gone overboard in fights or fancies that they could reach the islands which looked so close, and yet must be twenty miles distant. Some shimmer and trick of the air and the sea, and the blasted tropical heat. He cursed it for its strength and the madness it had caused, had known other crew go similarly, had basked his own ship round the reef like a shark just looking for the same. Could always tell them by their raggedy sails and the way they listed wrong, and the line of dead men piled upon their decks. Never thought it could’ve happened to him, didn’t think it would have without the added extra of bad rum, knew it was happened, but could see no cure. Take the rum away now, and the men would mutiny, and he’d be strung out on the yardarm or hauled beneath the keel, quicker than he could stutter out Jack Tar’s last prayer.
He thought back forty years to happier days, when he’d been on the smugglers plying between France and England. Fine work that had been, good comrades, regular hours, good pay. Nobody believed him now, but their cargo had been only books, and a few dozen bottles of brandy. He could hardly imagine it now, all those books packed up in their hundreds, in their hundreds of crates; French printers churning out the goods far cheaper than their English counterparts, eager to educate those the English would rather keep in their place. Good money that had been, for smugglers and sellers alike, on both sides of the channel.
Captain Reeves was jolted from his past by an almighty thumping on the boards above his head. He dropped his pen, and the candle jumped and fell off the table, spilt wax onto his precious Persian rug which he had carried with him for seventeen years, dropped the cabin into darkness, excepting the glow of his pipe, which still lay as he had left it, in its tray. He swore loudly, and shouted for his second-in-command, who was already out of his next-door cabin and knocking on the captain’s door. Together they got a lamp lit and started along the galley towards the steps that led up onto the outside deck. The noise up there was loud and angry with the stamp and drum of feet, curses flying thick as rooks at dawn, men shouting and growling like dogs put in a pit. The captain knew without a doubt that most of his crew were up there, and in an almighty fizz, and he hoped that at least the watch was still at his post, watching for rock and reef. Behind the noise, the night was calm, no wind, the air heavy with salt and phosphate, the moon wide-faced and blank above them. And blood. There was blood. He knew it; could smell it, could almost taste it.
‘Deal with it, Delaney,’ was all he said, then took himself abruptly back down the few steps he had climbed, and went back to his cabin, locked himself in. He’d had his fill of fighting men and surgeons stitching up their wounds with fish-gut, lopping off fingers crushed into pulp beneath the roll of barrels, men scrabbling at the scatter of broken teeth to add them to their collections, got good money for them back at home.
By God, but he
was sick of this voyage, sick of it all, and vowed it would be his last.
He’d get them to the Australian coast and in where he was able, sell
off the bird-shit to the highest bidder, and then he’d be off with
any crew that cared to make the journey, back to Bristol.
Delaney was back, banging on his door so the captain had to let him in.
‘She’s dead, Sir,’ said the first mate, his face the colour of cobnuts freshly peeled. The captain was shocked, hadn’t been expecting this. Delaney went on to tell him what had passed, that the boson had been entertaining the crew with his tricks. He’d made a false nose out of millet paste and stuck it on the syphilitic, sliced it off with his knife, the syphilitic screaming in pretended pain, while everyone else rolled about laughing. ‘The show’s not over yet!’ the boson had assured his audience, called out for a volunteer, dragged one of the giggling Kiribati girls towards him and re-performed his trick again, though this time without the millet.
‘He was madder than a hen in a thunderstorm,’ Delaney went on, told his captain that the boson had started to chase the bleeding girl, who was screaming like a rat on fire, all about the deck; that he’d been going on and on about setting chickens into cider and lashing all about her with his knife; how it’d taken five men to restrain him, two of them now badly slashed; how the girl, needless to say, had bled all over the boards and was dead before the surgeon got to her after stitching up the men.
The captain sighed. He’d feared it would come to this and he had his answer ready.
‘Get them tied together, and throw them overboard.’
Delaney stood with his hands at his side, unmoving, apart from the faintest tic in his left eyelid. He wasn’t sure he understood. He looked at his captain, who looked right back at him with such a weariness, the moon might have rolled down out of the sky and settled on his shoulders.
‘Higgins, and the girls.’ The captain elaborated.
The tic in Delaney’s eyelid grew a little stronger as he managed his reply.
‘All of them, sir?’
“All of them, Delaney. Knock the live one on the head first if you must, but get it done. The sharks will do what sharks will do, and within the week we’ll be in port, and can all go home.”
For a few moments more, Delaney stood there gazing at the wooden table, the open log book, thought he caught a glimpse of his captain’s mites, and the slight shift to his world they must have made. And then he saluted sharply, set off for the sail-store, took up a mallet and some rope. He held them limply for a few moments, trying to figure which size of rope he should use, and how he should go about it, use which knots. He dropped one coil of rope and picked up another, slung it slowly over his shoulder, tucked the mallet into his belt. On his way out, he saw the axes on their nails, and picked one out. A week was too long a time too wait, he knew it, even if his captain didn’t, and he wasted no more time. Went straight down to the store rooms, which was as deserted as he had hoped, everyone still up on board, discussing the boson and the Kiribati girl, and how there could be so much blood in such a tiny package.
Delaney went like a demon at those rum barrels, gashed cracks in every last one of them, from stern to base, watched the dark liquid seep and soak into the tired tar of the planking, slipping away through the empty-eyed knot-holes down to the bilges below. He steadied himself, hefted the axe in his hand in case he was caught on the outways, found with relief that his way was clear to the surgeon’s. Higgins had been tied down to the amputation table and a rag stuffed in his mouth to stop the noise; both Kiribati girls were there too, the living one laying out the dead, washing her face, combing her hair. The surgeon looked up as Delaney entered, nodded, as if he already knew his intent. It took a few hefts of the mallet to subdue Higgins, only one to send the live girl sprawling to the floor. It took longer to get them tied and dragged up singly to the aft-deck, and yet longer to tie them in a bunch and heave them over. The surgeon never said a word, did not help, but did not try to intervene. He knew a ship was its whole world when it was floating, and each world had its own laws. He followed Delaney out on deck when he’d his last load tied and dragged, and together they stood and watched as the Kiribati girls and the boson sank like graces into the phosphorescence of the sea, saw the cut of sharks already nosing out from the reef.
‘Come on,’ said the surgeon, and led Delaney down, made him sit, gave him a cloth to wash the blood from off his hands. He took a jar down from his cupboard, took out the stopper, removed a set of severed fingers, and poured himself and Higgins a drink.
‘Well,’ said the surgeon, knocking his glass back in one, ‘could be worse.’
Delaney nodded, thought that probably it would be. Told him what he had done to the rum down in the stores.
‘Well, well,’ said the surgeon, and topped up Delaney’s glass. ‘You might be needing that axe.’
‘Aye, right,’ was all Delaney said, picked up the mallet, put it on the empty amputation table between them, tidying up loose ends.
‘I’d rather a clean blow, if it comes to it,’ he said.
The surgeon nodded. ‘Just in case,’ he said.
‘Just in case,’ Delaney repeated.
And together they waited for the whistle of dog watch done, and the next, to morning call.
‘That’s me, then,’ said Delaney, rising stiffly, heading for the door, axe in hand.
‘Salut,’ the doctor murmured, raised his glass at Delaney’s back, heard the whistle same as did Delaney, knew too what it meant, and that it was Ration Time.
