Mr Darwin's Shooter Page 8

  Phipps made an action of kissing his hand.

  One day they hooked a great shark and brought it smacking up onto the deck. The boys were ordered to do their worst. They sat on it straddled in a row, singing a shanty, cutting chunks from its flesh while it was still kicking. Most of their days they lived around the mess table, in knots of alliance or in brotherly rivalry, buzzing to get the approval and admiration of the older men, and then spending time imitating those older men in their swagger and being cuffed around the ears for it. They were all on top of each other in the vessel as Covington was with Mrs Hewtson’s sprogs. Was there never any leaving home in this world?

  Because their survey ship zigzagged around and retraced her steps taking chartings, other ships from England passed them and letters from Mrs Hewtson and packets of plumcake wrapped in muslin awaited them at several ports of call. Though Covington was generous in all ways, this cake he kept to himself, nibbling at mouldy portions with his elbows tucked to his sides, his wispy-whiskered chin covered by a hand to hide his actions.

  During their time at Rio he made a good bargain, and bought a dancing master’s fiddle that fitted in the pocket of his seaman’s jacket. They said he would play tunes into heaven—he had the knack. ‘In the book of Revelation the saved are compared to a company of musicians that play upon their trumpets and harps and sing their songs before the throne.’

  It was at Rio that Wingate, Crook and Dell left the ship to join another bound for England. Now in that secret society of prayer in the Bedford style there was just Covington, Joey Middleton, John Phipps and the sailmaker, Mr Harper, who wrestled with his conscience all the time and was a serious devotional man. Then they, too, changed ship, the close bunch of them along with Seamen Door and MacCurdy, taking berths on the survey vessel Adventure, under Captain Phillip Parker King, a colonial-born officer of modest temperament and good navigating skills. They were to make their way farther south.

  King had his son aboard, Phil, who was a midshipman and the same age as Covington—thirteen, now—and so they were like a family of scrappy brothers all in their various cramped messes, boys doing their growing and their bullying and their mauling of each other as they bobbed around muddy river mouths learning to be tars. King was boastful and tricky to play with, being the captain’s son, having a spirit that checked itself when others wanted any game to continue. The point came in their japes when King fell silent and dropped his easiness, lowering his chin and clenching his knuckles white: ‘I say you fellows enough is enough, and I really think we shall lose our goat overboard if we set her loose, and you, Covington, get the bucket off her tail.’

  ‘I didn’t tie it on.’ Nor would he ever, either, knowingly taunt a dumb beast. ‘I didn’t tie it,’ he repeated, levelling his gaze at King.

  ‘Quick now, or it shall get you a flogging.’

  It was King who’d slipped the knot, giggling with excitement, his sallow eyes flicking around the faces of the gathered boys in his haste to get their approval, which he then so snivellingly traded away.

  After Rio it was the wide-mouthed La Plata and Monte Video, where they anchored so often that the ship’s company thought of its waters as an English possession. On still afternoons, drifting across the water, there was always the smell of roasting meats coming from the cookfires of the poor. Sometimes following their afternoon drill the captain gave orders to dance and skylark, and Covington led the whole barefoot crew on his miniature fiddle, standing on a barrel while they jigged and sweated with their hands on their hips and their heels kicked up.

  Brace up the yards and put about

  Cut a fine feather and fly

  Give her a foot, she’ll go like a witch,

  Sail till the seas run dry.

  It was his and Joey’s emblem song and they danced till their toes grew blisters. Covington named his miniature fiddle Polly Pochette and studied sailors’ ditties, and for the entertainment of the officers played ‘A View To A Kill’ and ‘Old Greensleeves’. When he gave out with the ‘Twenty-third Psalm’ it silenced all, both saints and sinners. It made them understand they were on a journey, and it was not all to do with charts and chronometers. There was another way of measuring man and other beacons in the dark.

  A whole two seasons passed in that walnut shell, manoeuvring around weedy river-mouths and making their survey with particular care. ‘There was nothing prouder afloat nor on the land neither,’ it was said. The Adventure was the world for them. If a bird sat on their rail or swayed in the wake with its wide wingspan hardly moving for an hour, then it was a special creature blest of an understanding of where the peak of life was. If they saw the same bird in another place, on the shore, say, or on another ship, it was nothing—just a bunch of croaking feathers. Phipps’s pilgrims grew past his influence but were still attached to him—more than he realised but less than he desired. Each officer, each rating, each boy—they looked on each other in the way they looked at the bird, and there was an aura of belonging about them. Even those who came up for a flogging felt that. They knew that for thieving a shoe or cracking a mate’s head ashore they would get prison or life transportation; whereas on the ship a flaying of the corporeal body was all they got.

  Covington learned his Spanish on a seawall by the muddy La Plata. He played ball ashore, using a dusty bladder. But mostly the box of planks that was their ship was all the room he needed. When the boys heard the bosun’s whistle and came dashing back to the dockside, and saw their ship anchored out in the bay with all her sails furled like bleached cigars, they were glad in the way of someone in love.

  Their superior pal Midshipman King was born at Parramatta and came to England as a child. He lazed on the booms and told tales sillier than any topmast spinning. He told of Australia and the great hunts that were held there, horses leaping fallen logs and chasing kangaroos that were swifter than any deer. Covington heard about the stubborn wombat, with its baby the size of a pink fingertip clinging to the fur, and the ant-eater so covered in spikes that if you wanted to nurse one you would have to wear armour. King told of the duck-billed platypus that was fur-covered, had poisonous talons, and laid eggs in the banks of streams. It was part of the Adventure’s commission to collect samples of natural history, and King disappeared sometimes, in the company of his father, bringing back buckets of shells and the carcasses of animals which they bade Covington skin, which he did willingly enough, as his father had shown him.

  The boys wrestled and played cat’s cradles. They were adept at knucklebones on a heaving quarterdeck. They confided their dreams. Covington thought King’s dreams were fine—he wanted nothing more than his father had—though if Covington had wanted just what his father had, then he would wallow in nothing but blood and be condemned forever to goat-slaughtering in their ark. He wanted better, and one day the chance came. With Volunteer Musters, who was eleven years old and had lately joined their ship, King, and Joey Middleton making a fourth, Covington was chosen for grammar and penmanship lessons together in the poop cabin, under King’s Pa.

  Covington, being the best schooled of all the ordinary boys—amazing the captain with his flourishing y’s and curvaceous p’s—now had a dream that he might be selected from the ranks and be made a midshipman one day too. He was in no wise duller than Phil King except in mathematics. So was he vain?

  John Phipps narrowed his eyes on Covington when he came spilling from the schoolroom, excused other duties for a swot. Here was the lad he fancied sometimes to be mistaken for his son, in the lunacy of his desires—a son to go round anywhere in the world with him. And so he thought: May he never lose his soul to advancement.

  Covington approached his childhood’s end when they shipped south from Monte Video in the southern spring. Farther and farther from home, and then Phipps, once so easy with his lads, started to fret that he would lose this one altogether. Covington’s voice breaking was like gravel and he had reddish-gold scruffy hair sprouting from his underarms and crotch. He was heading up for a fight w
ith his mentor, and Phipps cursed that he knew it from the start, from the day Covington had tugged himself with unmistakeable wantonness in the green canal water and called, I caught a fish, it’s a big ’un, look, see?

  It emerged that John Phipps, with his special mission in Christ as expressed through his young male charges, was a calm controlled man only to a point. For he was made for anger like anyone else blocked from their wants. He wished, instead of the cheery laugh he’d given that time when he first clapped eyes on Covington, that he’d leapt in the water and given the naked boy a hiding.

  Meantime Covington’s cheerfulness could be heard booming through thick timbers, even over the roar of the sea. And Phipps said: ‘Hold you there still, who is that?’— as if he didn’t know him.

  Another time he said: ‘A fool is someone that having the liberty to keep what he has, loses it anyway.’

  To which Door replied, with a wink at MacCurdy: ‘Then you must be a big fool, John Phipps, because you dream of nothing else with your hands on your cods, and toss yourself overboard every night.’

  ‘You see how the bee lieth still all winter,’ sneered Phipps, ‘and bestirs her only when she can have profit and pleasure.’

  ‘I remember what I wuz at Covington’s age,’ said MacCurdy, ‘and am no different now.’

  ‘What wuz you, shipmate?’ asked Door.

  ‘Full of fuck and half starved.’

  When they turned around they saw that Phipps was gone out of their hearing, leaving his tin basin upended on the barrel where he sat.

  Every day the weather became a few degrees colder. After three weeks they came through misty passages around Cape Horn and there was snow on the decks. They hove to in dark narrow places, crags to each side of them and wild seas streaming past. The ship hardly rocked at all, but was held in a clammy, nerve-racking stillness. Covington’s cheerfulness was a beacon in that weird southern light— even as word came that one of the survey captains, Pringle Stokes of their sister ship, the Beagle, had gone mad and stiffed himself in the wild nowheres. He had used a gun on himself and command of his brig was given to the aristocrat, FitzRoy.

  In Tierra del Fuego, land of fire and sleet, Covington showed off and went bare-chested in the blistering cold, bellowing like a bull-calf every chance he got, sending other crew members into fits and encouraging obscene speculation. Meantime John Phipps’s thoughts burst like red hot boils.

  Phipps said Covington was mad, but the rest knew it was not that, but was only a boy’s build-up of juices turning him round.

  Phipps felt personally accused all the same. ‘Come to our prayers,’ he whispered, and got all the boys together. Covington attended full sweet and dropped to his knees, being so good-willed about everything—yet Phipps while mouthing his worship could see Covington’s eyes flicking around with humour, picking holes in the coats of the godly. Phipps threatened him with hellfire but the instinct of self-preservation was not in the boy at all.

  ‘I doubt that God hates me and you said so yourself, that God loves me for who I am.’

  ‘All praise to you for remembering so conveniently,’ said Phipps. ‘Anything can be argued from the scriptures if self-will be a guide.’

  ‘I am not arguing from scriptures, I am arguing from you.’

  Phipps blamed Covington for associating with carnal, loose, and wanton shipmates—the same pair he had got his boys messing with. But he now said that Door and MacCurdy had deceived him with friendship. The two big men, in reply, told Phipps he was a vain fool, and on the first Sunday of the month they arranged to be moved to another mess.

  ‘Will you go with them?’ Phipps asked Covington.

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘To have your laughs.’

  ‘I will have my laughs wherever. Jesus was a boy, and so he must have grown to be a man in the same way I have—’

  ‘What is that way?’

  ‘Shall I tell you?’

  ‘I am asking.’

  ‘You will condemn me for saying.’

  ‘I promise you I shan’t.’

  ‘With his prong sticking up in the morning.’

  ‘Blasphemer.’

  ‘This is so like you, John.’

  ‘It is your aim to wound me.’

  ‘You never said there was anything wrong in me before. Nay, you praised me, and said I had no feeling for sin, and so I wasn’t a sinner at all. But now you say I am, for the same reason.’

  ‘It is what you do next that overshadows you,’ said Phipps.

  Covington smacked his own head. ‘You are trying to drive me mad.’

  There came the day on their survey of those coasts when they saw women of Patagonia swimming for shellfish in a wild surf, emerging dangled with kelp. Covington saw a young maid among them, tender to be observed, nakedly diving. She had black hair capped wetly. They were on a shore party when the lads bawled, ‘Take ’em while they’re hot,’ and Covington it was who won wagers by wading in and grabbing hold of one.

  The lads hooted: ‘Covington is on his way to Hairyfordshire to play at lift-leg,’ and then they bawled: ‘He owes the bull shilling’—money paid out for drinking after being seen with a woman the first time.

  He had her in his grip for a second. She was like holding a slippery fish. Her eyes were brown and shone with water droplets. Very wide in the forehead and curious about him too. She did not smile, because smiling was not their way: but she enjoyed his play, he believed, even in her savage fear. Then she was gone, running along the shore, leaping oyster beds and jumping into one of their canoes that always had fires burning in them.

  The captain hailed the canoes back, and got a few of their men up on the deck. He bade Covington be clerk and write down some of their tick-tock sounding words: he got the ones for duckling, feather, fish and a small fly, before the subjects lost interest. The surgeon measured their limbs. These natives, he declared, were built like whales or dolphins, all smoothness with rings of fat on their abdomens. The surgeon made comparisons with the muscles of sailors. He turned to Covington and said, ‘See, the ship’s boy is built like a smith or a porter, the form and size of each muscle may be traced in action,’ and asked Covington to lift a block and tackle, traced a pencil down his arms, and then asked one of the natives to copy him, and the fellow, with a laugh, hurled the block and tackle overboard. The crew milled around with all the excitement of a fairground show of freaks and the natives all dived overboard.

  Covington stepped back, and turned—finding himself faced with John Phipps, who let out a stream of invective, and said she was the very breathing devil. Phipps checked that no-one was looking and then he slammed Covington across the shoulders, holding him face-in against the side of the poop cabin, his nose somewhat crushed, and told him to leave well alone.

  Shivering sick for the sight again, Covington tasted rebellion and blood from cutting his lip when Phipps pushed him so hard. Who was she that rose in a vision with blurred eyes dripping with diamonds, and stopped his heart? Previously it had been the young man leaping the stile. Now it was a maid who dwelled inside his head and fired his thoughts. It was part of his pride in his struggle with John Phipps to keep in his mind what was best in his mind. Thereafter Covington believed a maid would rise from the water some time, as it were riding in a seashell in wild-born finery and savage guile, and join his dream of what it meant to be alive. He bedecked her with beauty in imagination. He was fourteen years of age now, and as good as any man. He crouched over her and she stared up at him and asked him his will. Meantime the officers all came out and stood on the quarterdeck as the natives cursed the ship and the canoes made a pass, this time with shouted invective and plain threats—and the officers primed the guns but said it would be shocking to fire on such poor miserable creatures, as they might otherwise have done. Then they sailed away.

  The next time their mess sat in a circle, with Phipps giving them their catechism as they mended their clothes, Covington was present among them, as innocent as if nothing
had ever happened, and Phipps asked if he was back in their fold.

  ‘You see where I am,’ he said. ‘In my place, on my barrel, with my spoon and my bowl.’ They held each other’s gaze, and Phipps was the first to break it.

  Meantime the lads kept at it: ‘Covington is randy as a dog, a proper Spunk Tub,’ and teased him with tales of shoregoing delight.

  They landed at the island of St Helena on their homeward voyage. Door and MacCurdy, who were heartily sick of their righteous friend, got Covington three steps ahead of John Phipps’s fury at what was going to happen next.

  Away past Napoleon’s Tomb they bribed a black sweetheart to take the boy for an amble upon the hills, with instructions to give him his ro-ho-ho if she would be so kind. She had broad hips, short legs, a hooked nose and hooded eyes. It was the eyes that caught Syms Covington, looking out like cats’ eyes from a cave. Her laugh was low and rough as combed honey. Her name was Hickory and she was promised in marriage to an old man. Meantime she had her freedom, and it came to the forefront of the boy’s mind that what was freely owned was freely done, and if not, then wasn’t it said that doing it with a black woman counted for less? They peeled and ate sticks of sugar cane, which she jerked in a frank rude sign, and she drank from a spring, putting her rump in the air, giving him a look at her. She giggled and rolled her eyes, making him laugh. She showed him a secret pathway back to the town, with a knoll of prickly grass where they sat together. She startled him, pulling at his clothes. ‘Now we play hunt the dummy,’ he thought to himself. Out flipped his Nimrod from his trousers, and she took it in her fingers, trilling ‘Olay’. She favoured him, then, in such a surprising movimiento that he forthwith spilled his milk.

  It made John Phipps surly seeing Covington return whistling to the longboat, tossing his pigtail around that ‘the foul maid Hickory’ had loosened in her play.