Hamnet(47)

The boy shakes his head. The monkey clings tighter, curling its tail about the boy’s neck.

The man with the scarred, pocked skin bears down, gripping the boy’s arm. He repeats his gestures. Money, he is insisting, money. He points at the monkey, then makes the gesture again.

Again, the boy shakes his head, presses his lips together, puts a protective hand over the purse tied to his belt. He knows what will happen to him if he returns to the ship without food, without ale. He will carry the memory of the midshipman’s lash – given to him twelve times in Malacca and seven times in Galle, ten in Mogadishu – for ever.

‘No,’ says the boy. ‘No.’

The man lets out a stream of angry words, into the boy’s face. The language they speak in this place called Alexandria is jabbing, nicking, like the point of a knife. The man reaches up to seize the monkey, which chatters and then shrieks, a piercing high cry of distress, gripping the boy’s hair, the collar of his shirt, the tiny black nails scoring the skin of his neck.

The boy, almost sobbing now, tries to hold on to his new friend. For a moment, he has him, by the forelimb, the warm fur of the elbow fitted into his palm, but then the man jerks the chain and the monkey falls, screaming, from the boy’s grasp, to the cobbled dock, where it rights itself and then, tugged again, scrambles after the man, whimpering.

Aghast, the boy watches the animal leave, the hunch of its back, the workings of its haunches, trying to keep up with its master. He swipes at his face, at his eyes, his head feeling bare and empty, wishing that he might bring the moment back, that he could have somehow persuaded the man to let him keep it. The monkey belonged to him: surely anyone could see that?

What the boy doesn’t know – can’t know – was that the monkey leaves part of itself behind. In the scuffle, it has shed three of its fleas.

One of these fleas falls, unseen, to the ground, where the boy will unwittingly crush it with the sole of his foot. The second stays for a while in the sandy hair of the boy, making its way to the front of his crown. When he is paying for a flagon of the local brew in the tavern, it will make a leap – an agile, arching spring – from his forehead to the shoulder of the innkeeper.

The third of the monkey’s fleas will remain where it fell, in the fold of the red cloth tied around the boy’s neck, given to him by his sweetheart at home.

Later, when the boy has returned to the ship for the night, having eaten a dinner of some of the spiced nuts and a curious patty of bread, shaped like a pancake, he will pick up his favourite of the ship’s cats, an animal mostly white but with a striped tail, and nuzzle it against his neck. The flea, alert to the presence of a new host, will transfer itself from the boy’s neckerchief, to the thick, milk-white fur of the cat’s neck.

This cat, feeling unwell, and with the feline’s unerring eye for those who dislike it, will take up residence, the next day, in the hammock of the midshipman. When he, that night, comes to his hammock, he will curse at the now-dead animal he finds there, turn it unceremoniously out, kicking it across the room.

Four or five fleas, one of which once belonged to the monkey, will remain where the cat lay. The monkey’s flea is a clever one, intent on its survival and success in the world. It makes its way, by springing and leaping, to the fecund and damp armpit of the sleeping, snoring midshipman, there to gorge itself on rich, alcohol-laced sailor blood.

Three days out, past Damascus and heading for Aleppo, the quartermaster enters the captain’s cabin to report that the midshipman is unwell and confined below. The captain nods, still examining his charts and sextant, and thinks nothing more of it.

The next day, he receives word, as he stands on the upper deck, that the midshipman is raving, foaming at the mouth, his head quite pushed sideways by a tumour in his neck. The captain frowns as the quartermaster speaks these words into his ear, then gives orders for the ship’s physician to visit the man. Oh, the quartermaster then adds, and several of the ship’s cats seem to have expired.

The captain turns his face to regard the quartermaster. The expression on his face is one of distaste, bafflement. Cats, you say? The quartermaster nods, respectfully, eyes cast down. How very peculiar.

The captain thinks for a moment longer, then flicks his fingers towards the sea. Throw ’em overboard.

The deceased cats, three in all, are taken by their striped tails and flung into the Mediterranean. The cabin boy watches, from a hatch in the deck, wiping his eyes with his red scarf.

Shortly afterwards, they dock at Aleppo, where they offload more of the cloves and a portion of the coffee and several score rats, which make a dash for the shore. The ship’s physician knocks on the door of the captain’s cabin, where he is conferring about weather and sails with his second officer.

‘Ah,’ says the captain, ‘how is the man . . . the, well, midshipman?’

The physician scratches under his wig and smothers a belch. ‘Dead, sir.’

The captain frowns, surveying the man, taking in his crooked wig, the potent smell of rum off him. ‘By what cause?’

The physician, a man more suited to setting bones and extracting teeth, looks up, as if the answer might be found on the low, planked ceiling of the cabin. ‘A fever, sir,’ he says, with a drunkard’s decisiveness.

‘A fever?’

‘An Afric fever would be,’ the physician slurs, ‘my opinion. He’s turned all black, you see, in patches, around the limbs and also in other places I will refrain from mentioning here, in this salubrious place, and so it is necessary for me to conclude that he must have taken ill and—’