The Mermaid's Child (13 page)

We didn't disembark. We watched from the deck as they grounded the boat and walked up the beach. McMichaels had taken just a few of the bigger crewmen with him. There wasn't much to carry, just a few bags of beads and sequins, a couple of rifle caskets swinging from rope handles, a crate of chain and shackles. I remember the smell of the forest, the harsh cry of the birds, the dark figures emerging from the treeline to welcome McMichaels and his men. I remember the numb, broken faces of the slaves as they were herded on board, the clank and scrape of their chains, their awkward stumble down the steps into the dark.

On the long haul for the Western Isles, towards the setting sun, they died daily, and every evening McMichaels sent two of us below to bring out the corpses. I don't know why it was always in the evening. There was, perhaps, a slender vein of compassion in McMichaels, that he would not leave the dead lying there, packed tight as weft among the living, all through the night.

It was always on my watch. It seemed it was always me who was sent below. All day I tried not to think of it, but as the sun sank ahead of us, scattering gold across the water, it became impossible to ignore. I would try, fiercely, to hold the sun still in the sky, to suspend it by sheer force of will, so that the time would never come when McMichaels would call my
name, or his hand descend upon my shoulder and steer me towards the cargo hatch.

Down below, holding up the lantern, I would stare into the shadows, catching only here and there the glassy sheen of eyes, the oil of sweat on skin. The more usual sounds of the ship were muffled beneath the sigh and moan of the captives and the cries of their children. The stench was more overpowering even than the fierce flush of shame that hit me every time. Shit and piss and sweat, and then, like an afterthought, the faint sweet smell of blood. The dead, and sometimes the nearly dead, would be unshackled and hauled out onto the deck, and McMichaels, standing by, would hiss slightly, it could not quite be called a sigh, and scratch another note into his account book.

We had just heaved her over the side. The last one on my watch. Heavy, naked, her belly swollen with pregnancy or disease. The ship had pitched just as I'd let her go: she knocked against the keel as she went down. A shoulder was disarticulated, the head thrown back. The body crashed through the water, resurfaced, and then was pushed away by the wake. The sun had set, leaving a clear sky, a brilliant moon. I leaned over the rail, watching as we left her behind, a stain on the sky-reflecting water. Incriminating, inescapable, that trail of darkly bobbing bodies in our wake.

The bell sounded and I turned towards the stern, watched McMichaels' retreating back as he headed for his cabin. He came back with his Bible, and the watch gathered while he read to us and led prayers. I couldn't listen; I could barely mumble along with the familiar words. Afterwards I went below, climbed into my hammock and turned my face to
the bulwark. The sounds and smells rising up from beneath wrapped themselves around me, leached into my skin, my hair, my blood. I would never be clean again.

We would carry it with us everywhere, through the bright water, to wild untainted places, this darkness cupped in the ship's hold. This cargo of shadows.

What woke me was a shift in balance, a sense of weight.

“You were crying.”

Little more than a breath, soft on my ear. A hand's weight on my arm. The hammock swung, weight shifted, and he was lying there behind me, his body fitting into the contours of my own. So agile. So slight. For a moment I'd thought that it was Joe.

“I knew you were asleep, but you were crying.”

I raised a hand to my face and found that it was wet.

“I wasn't.”

A moment in the darkness: the sense of him warm behind me, the populated space around us, the boards above us and below. The aching hollow inside me. I shifted myself clumsily, turning over to face him. Close up, his eyes caught a speck of light. A hand came up and touched my face, swept away the wetness and brushed back my hair.

“I know,” he whispered, the words low and warm on my skin. “I know. It's all right. I know … don't fret.”

I reached up, touched his cheek. It was smooth as risen dough.

“I'm not—”

“Ssh.”

Somehow, in the darkness, our mouths met. The tenderness of inner lip against inner lip, the catch of a broken tooth.
His hand in my hair, and mine at his throat, pushing back his shirt a little, smoothing round the strong cusp of his shoulder. Utterly alert to the sounds of the ship, the thud of footsteps on the deck above, a barked-out order. Pushed up close against each other in the tight folds of the hammock, his mouth leaving mine, his lips grazing my cheek, jawbone, throat. His teeth pressing gently into the flesh, making me shiver.

“Malin”—the word was just a shape in the air, noiseless—“don't be afraid.”

“I'm not afraid.”

A moment's scuffling as he tugged at his shirt, then he took my hand, laid it on hot, dry skin. His belly, strong and lean. I ran my fingers up over the ridge of his ribs, brushed my knuckles across his stomach, but he took my hand again and guided it down, underneath his loosened waistband, into the soft furze below. I slid my fingers down further, searching, and found—

“Oh,” I said, almost out loud.

“You,” she breathed into my ear, “didn't fool me for a minute.”

Sweating skin stuck to sweating skin; our necessary silence was like a lid pressed on a pot to boil. Around us, the synchronous sway of row upon row of hammocks. Rhythmic snores, the occasional low and thunderous fart, and once a cough which stopped us dead, listening, electrified like hares. From above, the indistinguishable voices of the watch; faint but constant noises from below. Beyond, the stilled ship: the creak of timbers as they eased themselves, the incessant soothing lap of waves against the hull. I had never been with a woman that way before. She tasted like the sea.

The bell was sounding. I heaved myself over, looked up. John was sliding off her hammock, stood tucking in her shirt. I smiled at her. She half-smiled back.

“Don't say a word,” she said.

I slipped down from my berth. She stood there, tying back her hair, her head turned to one side as if she was absorbed in what she was doing.

“You're young, you're new to this, you can start again,” she said. “But this is all I know. I'd lose everything if they found out. I'd never sail again.”

“I promise,” I said. “I won't tell anyone.”

She nodded, smiled at me, and turned to go. I followed, weaving between seachests and kitbags and waking sailors. John put a foot on a rung and began to climb. I just stood there at the foot of the ladder and watched her, watched the wiry strength of her muscles as they moved. The daylight caught her hair, tinting it gold.

Someone shoved me from behind.

“Get a fucking move on.”

I gripped a rung, scrambled up.

I came up into the sun. John was standing there. I hitched myself up onto the deck.

“Dead calm,” she said.

That night, as our limbs had tangled together, as we'd wrapped ourselves up in each other, the wind had caught its breath and held it, the waves had stilled and settled. The sea was now flat, a sheet of opaque water. Above us, an empty blue sky and the sun as fierce as fever. Not a breath. Not a ripple. Not a sound. I glanced back at John. Two deep, parallel creases had formed between her eyebrows, a precise line was drawn from each nostril to the corners of her lips.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It'll be all right,” she said. “It'll be fine.”

The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. McMichaels was standing on the foredeck. He was watching me.

He wouldn't let us keep the shackles on the bodies, and for want of weight they resurfaced quickly. They hung there in the water motionless. Their eyes shrivelled in the sun; their tongues swelled, forcing their mouths open. The ship stank, we stank, the very sea was rotten with humanity. And every day, there were more of them, their number increasing, I began to think, at an even greater rate than we were throwing the bodies overboard. Every night as I lay with her I tried to think only of her, tried to immerse myself entirely in the scent and taste and textures of her. And every night I could not forget the bodies floating just beside us, their sightless eyes, the silence of their open mouths. The ship's hull was rendered thin, had become just a fine membrane between the living and the dead. The woman with the swollen belly, her shoulder breaking, the crack of her skull against the keel. She and all the others, congregating, gathering round the ship, watching us with sun-parched eyes.

There was nothing to do. That was the worst of it. Just dragging out the bodies, heaving them overboard, watching them watch us from the water.

“You'd think there would be sharks,” I said to John.

She turned her head. She had her knife out, had been chipping away at a bit of something.

“Maybe they don't like it dead—” she said.

I slumped down beside her on the deck, swallowed dryly.

“How far is it, once we got a wind?” I asked. “How long will it take us?”

John looked at me a moment, then snapped her knife shut and slipped whatever it was into her pocket.

“I'll get the men together. We'll go over the rigging again.”

“Why?”

She was on her hunkers, about to straighten. She stopped, a hand to the deck.

“You've got to do something,” she said.

Underneath our feet the rope swung slightly, shifting with the rhythm of our movement. The sun pressed down on us, headachy, mesmeric. Not a breath, not a whisper of a wind. Out along the yards, to my left, someone was chanting a faint, half-hearted song, “… 
he was young, but he was daily … growing …
” and then the rope bounced beneath my feet. My stomach lurched. I gripped tighter to the yard, turned my head. A man gone. He'd fallen backwards: his mouth was open, arms and legs flung wide, fingers rippling like anemones, his cry fading as he fell. No chance to grab the rigging, to catch at a fold of sailcloth. His hair blew back around his face. He hit the deck. Silence. His body settled into death. Down below, figures moved towards him, hunkered down. My head swam; darkness began to curl in around my vision.

“Malin.”

A hand on my arm, gripping round the muscle. I blinked. Her face was near mine, deeply lined.

“Stay sharp,” she said. “Stay clear.”

She led us down from the ropewalks in silence, kept me always just behind her, just above. I felt giddy, sick, for the
first time in ages terrified by the distance between me and the deck, by the precariousness of each foothold, each grip. As we descended, she would glance back up at me, touch my ankle, guide my shaking foot down towards the next hold. Finally we reached the deck and my knees gave way beneath me. John caught me under my arms and held me up. A moment's darkness and the smell of her skin as I was pressed against her.

“Can you stand?”

“Yes.”

And she pushed me away so that I stood swaying, blinking in the sun. A crowd had gathered round the fallen man.

“Who is it?” someone asked.

“Hannigan,” said John. “It's Hannigan.”

He at least was granted the dignity of rotting in private. We weighted his body with ballast, wrapped it in sailcloth, dropped it overboard. We stood and watched. The body slid beneath the surface, gave off a volley of bubbles, then sank slowly until it was obscured by depth and murk. All around, the rotting corpses of the slaves still hung in the water, like uneasy distant cousins at this makeshift funeral. Here and there, their lips had peeled back, exposing teeth and desiccating gum.

McMichaels turned away from the rail, hissed his not-quite sigh. He was about to go past me, but stopped mid-stride. He shifted his weight onto his back foot, looked at me.

“Reed,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Come with me.”

He walked away.

He couldn't blame me for this. However much he wanted
me to slip up, I couldn't see how he could make this my fault. I glanced at John, but she didn't meet my eye. I followed McMichaels to his office.

The room was tight and airless. The Bible lay shut on the desk; another book I hadn't seen before was splayed open beside it. I caught a glimpse of an engraving, grey lines and shapes and patterns on the page, but could not make out the picture. McMichaels scraped back his chair and sat down. He placed a hand on the Bible, but he was looking at the other book. He kept his eyes on the picture as he pulled open a desk drawer, drew the Bible towards him, and slid it into the drawer. Then he looked up at me. His eyes narrowed.

“Right,” he said, pushing the drawer shut. “What's going on?” He couldn't punish me for something I hadn't done, I told myself. And I'd had nothing to do with Hannigan's death.

“Sir?”

“A calm sea. No wind. John Doyle, captain of the foretop, one of my most experienced sailors, decides to lead the men aloft, and one of them ends up dead. What do you make of that?”

“Nothing, sir.”

A pause. He watched me, waiting.

“It was an accident,” I said.

“Do you think I'm stupid?”

“No.”

“Do you think I don't know you're laughing behind my back?”

“I'm not laughing,” I said, feeling my face begin to burn. “It was an accident.”

“Before I signed you John Doyle was an exemplary crewman. And now—now I am just about this far away from having
him dance on nothing, and hanging you alongside him for good measure.” He held up his hand, thumb and forefinger held half an inch apart. “This far.”

“Because Hannigan lost his grip? Because he was careless?”

McMichaels' fist hit the desk. I jumped. The pen rattled in its holder, ink slopped in the inkwell. His face flushed suddenly red, he spoke through gritted teeth.