The North Water (3 page)

After a while, he closes the medicine chest and pushes it back beneath the bunk, where it rests beside the battered tin trunk that he has carried with him all the way from India. Out of habit, automatically, and without looking down, Sumner rattles the trunk's padlock and pats his waistcoat pocket to check he still has the key. Reassured, he stands, leaves the cabin, and makes his way along the narrow companionway and up onto the ship's deck. There is a smell of varnish and wood shavings and pipe smoke. Barrels of beef and bundles of staves are being loaded into the forehold on ropes, someone is hammering nails into the galley roof, there are several men up in the rigging swinging pots of tar. A lurcher scuffles by, then stops abruptly to lick itself. Sumner pauses beside the mizzenmast and scans the quayside. There is no one there he recognizes. The world is enormous, he tells himself, and he is a tiny, unmemorable speck within it, easily lost and forgotten. This thought, which would not normally be pleasing to anyone, pleases him now. His plan is to dissolve, to dissipate, and only afterwards, some time later, to re-form. He walks down the gangplank and finds his way to the chemist's shop on Clifford Street, where he hands over his list. The chemist, who is bald and sallow and missing several teeth, examines the list, then looks up at him.

“That's not right,” he says. “Not for a whaling voyage. It's too much.”

“Baxter's paying for everything. You can send him the bill directly.”

“Has Baxter seen this list?”

Inside the shop, it is gloomy and the brownish air is sulfurous and thick with liniment. The bald man's finger ends are stained a glaring chemical orange and his nails are curved and horny; below his rolled-up shirtsleeves Sumner sees the blue fringes of an old tattoo.

“You think I'd trouble Baxter with shit like that?” Sumner says.

“He'll be troubled when he sees this fucking bill. I know Baxter and he's a tight-fisted cunt.”

“Just fill the order,” Sumner says.

The man shakes his head and rubs his hands across his mottled apron.

“I can't give you all that,” he says, pointing down at the paper on the countertop. “Or that either. If I do, I won't get paid for it. I'll give you the regular allowances of both and that's all.”

Sumner leans forwards. His belly presses up against the burnished countertop.

“I'm just back from the colonies,” he explains, “from Delhi.”

The bald man shrugs at this intelligence, then sticks his forefinger in his right ear and twists it noisily.

“You know I can sell you a nice piece of birch wood for that limp,” he says. “Ivory handle, whale tooth, whichever you prefer.”

Without answering him, Sumner steps away from the counter and commences gazing around the shop as though he suddenly has a good deal of time on his hands and nothing much to fill it with. The sidewalls are crammed with all manner of flasks, bottles, and tantali filled with liquids, unguents, and powders. Behind the counter is a large yellowing mirror reflecting the hairless verso of the bald man's pate. To one side of the mirror is an array of square wooden drawers, each with a nameplate and a single brass knob in its center, and to the other is a row of shelves supporting a tableau of stuffed animals arranged in a series of melodramatic and martial poses. There is a barn owl poised in the act of devouring a field mouse, a badger at perpetual war with a ferret, a Laocoonian gibbon being strangled by a garter snake.

“Did you do all those yourself?” Sumner asks him.

The man waits a moment, then nods.

“I'm the best taxidermist in town,” he says. “You can ask anyone.”

“And what's the biggest beast you've ever stuffed? The very biggest, I mean. Tell me the truth now.”

“I've done a walrus,” the bald man says casually. “I've done a polar bear. They bring them in off the Greenland ships.”

“You've stuffed a polar bear?” Sumner says.

“I have.”

“A fucking
bear
,” Sumner says again, smiling now. “Now that's something I would like to see.”

“I had him standing up on his hindmost legs,” the bald man says, “with his vicious claws raking the frigid air like this.” He reaches his orangey hands up into the air and arranges his face into a frozen growl. “I did it for Firbank, the rich bugger who lives in that big house on Charlotte Street. I believe he still has it in his grand entrance hall, next to his whale tooth hat stand.”

“And would you ever stuff an actual whale?” Sumner asks.

The bald man shakes his head and laughs at the idea.

“The whale can't be stuffed,” he says. “Apart from the size, which makes it impossible, they putrefy too quick. And besides, what would any sane man want with a stuffed bloody whale anyway?”

Sumner nods and smiles again. The bald man chuckles at the thought.

“I've done lots of pike,” he continues vainly. “I've done otters aplenty. Someone brought me a platy-puss once.”

“What do you say we change the names?” Sumner says. “On the bill? Call it absinthe. Call it calomel if you want to.”

“We already have calomel on the list.”

“Absinthe then, let's call it absinthe.”

“We could call it blue vitriol,” the man suggests. “Some surgeons take a good amount of that stuff.”

“Call it blue vitriol then, and call the other absinthe.”

The man nods once and does a rapid calculation in his head.

“A bottle of absinthe,” he says, “and three ounces of vitriol will about cover it.” He turns around and starts opening up drawers and picking flasks off the shelves. Sumner leans against the countertop and watches him at his work—weighing, sifting, grinding, stoppering.

“Have you ever shipped out yourself?” Sumner asks him. “For the whaling?”

The chemist shakes his head without looking up from his work.

“The Greenland trade is a dangerous one,” he says. “I prefer to stay at home, where it's warm and dry and the risk of violent death is much reduced.”

“You are a sensible fellow, then.”

“I am cautious, that's all. I've seen a thing or two.”

“You're a fortunate man, I would say,” Sumner answers, gazing round the grimy shop again. “Fortunate to have so much to lose.”

The man glances up to check if he is being mocked, but Sumner's expression is all sincerity.

“It is not so much,” he says, “compared to some.”

“It is something.”

The chemist nods, secures the package with a length of twine, and pushes it across the counter.

“The
Volunteer
is a good old bark,” he says. “It knows its way around the ice fields.”

“And what of Brownlee? I hear he's unlucky.”

“Baxter trusts him.”

“Indeed,” Sumner says, picking up the package, tucking it under one arm, then leaning down to sign the receipt. “And what do we think of Mr. Baxter?”

“We think he's rich,” the chemist answers, “and round these parts a man don't generally get rich by being stupid.”

Sumner smiles and curtly nods farewell.

“Amen to that,” he says.

*   *   *

It has started to rain, and above the residual smell of horse dung and butchery there is a fresh and clement tang to the air. Instead of returning to the
Volunteer
, Sumner turns to the left and finds a tavern instead. He asks for rum and takes his glass into a scruffy side room with a fireless grate and an unpleasing view into the adjoining courtyard. There is no one else sitting in there. He unties the chemist's package, takes out one of the bottles, and dispenses half of it into his glass. The dark rum darkens further. Sumner inhales, closes his eyes, and downs the concoction in one long gulp.

Perhaps he is free, he thinks, as he sits there and waits for the drug to have its effect. Perhaps that is the best way to understand his present state. After all that has beset him: betrayal, humiliation, poverty, disgrace; the death of his parents from typhus; the death of William Harper from the drink; the many efforts misdirected or abandoned; the many chances lost and plans gone awry. After all of that, all of it, he is still alive at least. The worst has happened—hasn't it?—yet he is still intact, still warm, still breathing. He is nothing now, admittedly (a surgeon on a Yorkshire whaling ship—what kind of reward is that for his long labors?), but to be nothing is also, looked at from a different angle, to be anything at all. Is that not the case? Not lost then, but at liberty?
Free?
And this fear he currently feels, this feeling of perpetual uncertainty, that must be—he decides—just a surprising symptom of his current unbounded state.

Sumner feels a moment of great relief at this conclusion, so clear and sensible, so easily and quickly reached, but then almost immediately, almost before he has a chance to enjoy the new sensation, it strikes him that it is a very empty kind of freedom he is enjoying—it is the freedom of a vagrant or a beast. If he is free, in his current condition, then this wooden table in front of him is also free, and so is this empty glass. And what does
free
even mean? Such words are paper-thin, they crumble and tear under the slightest pressure. Only actions count, he thinks for the ten-thousandth time, only events. All the rest is vapor, fog. He takes another drink and licks his lips. It is a grave mistake to think too much, he reminds himself, a grave mistake. Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission; it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage.

Sumner leans his head back against the whitewashed wall and peers vaguely in the direction of the doorway opposite. He can see the landlord over yonder, behind the bar, hear the clink of pewter and the clatter of a trapdoor closing. He feels, rising inside his chest, another warm swell of clarity and ease. It is the body, he thinks, not the mind. It is the blood, the chemistry that counts. In a few more minutes he is feeling much better about himself and about the world. Captain Brownlee, he thinks, is a fine man, and Baxter is fine also, in his way. They are dutiful men both of them. They believe in act and consequence, capture and reward, in the simple geometry of cause and effect. And who is to say they are wrong? He looks down at his empty glass and wonders about the wisdom of requesting another. Standing shouldn't be a problem, he thinks, but
talking
? His tongue feels flat and foreign, he's not sure, if he tried to speak, what might actually come out—what language exactly? what noises? The landlord, as if sensing his dilemma, glances in his direction and Sumner hails him with the empty glass.

“Right you are,” the landlord says.

Sumner smiles at the simple elegance of this exchange—the need sensed, the satisfaction offered. The landlord enters the side room with a half-full bottle of rum and tops him up. Sumner nods in thanks, and all is well.

It is dark outside now, and the rain has ceased. The courtyard glows yellow with a vague, gaseous light. There are women's voices in the next room laughing loudly. How long have I been sitting here? Sumner wonders suddenly. An hour? Two? He finishes his drink, reties the chemist's package, and stands up. The room seems much smaller than when he first came in. There is still no fire in the grate, but someone has placed an oil lamp on a stool near the door. He walks carefully into the next room, peers around for a moment, tips his hat to the ladies, and regains the street.

The night sky is crammed with stars—the grand zodiacal sprawl and in between the densely speckled glow of unnameable others.
The starry sky above me and the moral law within
. He remembers, as he walks, the dissection hall in Belfast, watching that foul old blasphemer Slattery slice happily into a cadaver. “No sign of this chap's immortal soul as yet, young gentlemen,” he would joke, as he delved and tugged, pulling out intestines like a conjurer pulls flags, “nor of his exquisite reasoning faculties, but I'll keep on looking.” He recalls the jars of sectioned brains, floating helplessly, pointlessly, like pickled cauliflowers, their spongy hemispheres emptied entirely of thought or desire. The redundancy of flesh, he thinks, the helplessness of meat, how can we conjure spirit from a bone? Yet this street looks lovely despite all that: the way the dampened bricks glow reddish in the moonlight, the echoing clack of leather boot heels on stone, the curve and stretch of broadcloth across a man's back, of flannel across a woman's hips. The whirl and caw of the gulls, the creak of cartwheels, laughter, cursing, all of it, the crude harmonics of the night, coming together, like a primitive symphony. After opium, this is what he likes best: these smells, sounds, and visions, the crush and clamor of their temporary beauty. Everywhere a sudden alertness that the ordinary world lacks, a sudden thrust and vigor.

He wanders through squares and alleyways, past courtyard hovels and the houses of the rich. He has no idea which way is north or in what direction the dock now lies, but eventually, somehow, he knows he will sniff his way back there. He has learned to stop thinking at such times and trust his instinct. Why Hull, for instance? Why fucking whaling? It makes no sense, and that is its great genius. The illogic of it, the near idiocy. Cleverness, he thinks, will get you nowhere; it is only the stupid, the brilliantly stupid, who will inherit the earth. Entering the public square, he encounters a legless and tatterdemalion beggar man whistling “Nancy Dawson” and knuckling his way along the darkened pavement. The two men pause to talk.

“Which way to the Queen's Dock?” Sumner asks, and the legless beggar points across with his filth-caked fist.

“Over there,” he says. “Which ship?”

“The
Volunteer
.”

The beggar, whose face is riddled with smallpox scars and whose truncated body halts abruptly just below the groin, shakes his head and giggles wheezily.

“If you chose to ship with Brownlee, you fucked yourself up the arse,” he says. “Right royally.”