Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch Page A

no whales in these seas,’ said the Yorkshire boy who’d sailed with Rainey before. John Copper. I was getting their names by now.
    ‘Who says?’ said Cash.
    ‘See?’ Felix wiped his nose angrily. ‘What’s the point of looking for whales that aren’t there?’
    ‘I suppose the captain wil be judge of that,’ Cash said, smiling smoothly and walking away.
    ‘Off to lick Rainey’s arsehole,’ muttered John Copper.
    ‘He better watch his head if I’m sick up there.’ Felix spat viciously on the deck, and with laboured movements commenced the climb up the mast for his two hours.
    ‘There’s no whales in these seas,’ John Copper repeated.
    ‘Who says? Who says? Proctor? He don’t know. There’s no whales in these seas.’
    Nor were there, not that we saw, not til after Cape Verde.
    And by then I was in love with a sailor’s life. There were times some nights when I knew that at last I’d reached that place towards which I’d been drawn from the womb. The fo’c’s’le was another womb, and I wouldn’t have been anywhere else, not up in steerage where Dan was, even though he got to eat his dinner up near the cookhouse. Too close to the captain and the mates, steerage, you’d have to watch yourself. We had the best of it in fo’c’s’le. We had Sam’s eerie singing, and a Cape Cod boy cal ed Simon Flower who played the fiddle. The talk went round and round, and the smoke would mix in clouds and threads above our heads; and in those clouds and threads I saw blue worlds, misty uplands, an ever-changing landscape, until early one morning fourteen days from home there came the cry of Land Ho from Gabriel on watch aloft, and they appeared on the horizon, real as the timbers beneath my feet.
    Great blue mountains, layers and layers of purple and grey and lilac and rose in the sky. I ran for my old telescope, Dan Rymer’s telescope. They were beautiful, the Azores. The weather was soft and sweet and warm. We anchored off Horta on Faial Island. I saw white buildings and the steeple of a church and the great cone of a mountain stark against the clear sky, fluffy white clouds massed around its base. I’d never seen a mountain before, and this one was a volcano.
    Gabriel pointed. ‘Pico Alto’, he said. He’d been before. But it was not here on this island, it was over the sea, though it looked so close it might have gobbled us al up in its hot bel y. I said something about how peculiar it was that people went on living so close to such things, al the time knowing they could suddenly explode and drown them al in ash and fire, and he laughed and nudged me with his elbow. ‘And the world goes on,’ he said.
    A great grey crag rose up behind the town. I have come to foreign parts, I said to myself. To where the strange tongues begin, the unknown ways, where mountains spew smoke and fire and even the earth underfoot is of a different substance.
    We would buy vegetables and hogs for oil, the captain said. First light tomorrow we’d leave. We left Yan and our cook, Wilson Pride, and a couple more on-board and rowed ashore after breakfast in the whaleboats. I’d never rowed in my life before and my shoulders ached like hel by the time we reached the crowded harbour, rol ed our barrels up the beach and tapped them, and gathered round to wait for Proctor to sort things out with whoever it was he had to sort things out with.
    We waited an hour. People came down, barefoot women with dark eyes and black hair, shouting to one another in loud rasping voices, old men, crones in shawls, high-pitched children mobbing us in shril sing-song. They brought potatoes and onions, beans and figs and apples, wild-eyed fowl complaining in wooden cages. I could make out nothing of their speech, a hoarse-throated mixture of English and Portuguese, but John Copper had some of the language.
    ‘ Não ainda ,’ he told them, good-natured, ‘ logo , logo ’, and I made up my mind to listen hard wherever I went and try to pick up