‘One day when I was still a little boy, still playing with toy guns, he brought home for me two presents to choose between. One was a western cowboy suit, like those worn in the films, splendid in black and silver, with a sombrero, with a leather waistcoat, with great flapping leather trousers with silver bosses, with a cartridge belt and two shining pistols in black and silver holsters.
‘The other was a microscope and a box of scientific equipment and materials — slides, test tubes, beakers, retorts, graduates, chemicals, a book of experiments. “Choose,” he told me.
‘I wanted the black-and-silver leather, the sombrero, the shining pistols. I chose the microscope and the test tubes. Are you looking at your watch, Doctor Lion? The sky is dark, but it is almost daytime now.’
Jachin-Boaz walked towards the lion. The lion backed away, growling. Jachin-Boaz shouted, ‘I TOLD YOU OF SOMETHING THAT I WANTED ONCE. ARE YOU BORED, LION? ONCE I CLEARLY WANTED SOMETHING, NOT A VERY BIG THING. IS YOUR TIME TOO VALUABLE FOR YOU TO LISTEN ANY LONGER?’
The lion had turned his back on Jachin-Boaz, and now walked off the bridge, down the steps, and was out of sight behind the parapet of the embankment.
Jachin-Boaz followed. When he got to the embankment there was no lion. Only the rain, the pavement and the street wet and glistening, the hiss of tyres on the road.
‘YOU WEREN’T LISTENING!’ shouted Jachin-Boaz to the empty air, the rain. ‘THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I WANTED SOMETHING AND I KNEW WHAT IT WAS. I WANTED A BLACK-AND-SILVER COWBOY SUIT WITH TWO PISTOLS.’
‘Cheer up, mate,’ said the police constable with whom Jachin-Boaz collided while going down the steps. ‘Perhaps Father Christmas’ll bring you one. You’ve plenty of time till December.’
18
Boaz-Jachin walked on the quayside in the darkness beyond the lights of the cafés. Above the harbour were the honeycombed lights of the big new hotel, and behind it the coloured lights and smoky flames of the oil refinery. Sometimes the wind brought dance music down from the hotel. The jukebox music from the cafés had darkness all around it, like the red and yellow bulbs strung outside. Boaz-Jachin did not want to go into the cafés. He did not want to play his guitar again for money just yet.
He walked out on to a pier between boats tied up on either side, creaking at their mooring lines while the water of the harbour slapped at their sides. Some showed lights, some were dark. Across the water at the harbour mouth the light on the mole turned and flashed. Boaz-Jachin smelled fish and sour wine, the salt-wood smell of boats, the harbour-water quietly slapping piles and planking.
He smelled petrol, oranges, and orange-crate wood, and thought of the lorry driver. The smell was coming from a boat with lights in the wheelhouse and cabin skylight. The boat was broad-beamed and big-bellied and painted blue, with a stumpy mast forward, the sail loosely furled on a short boom. Automobile tyres hung along its sides. The high bow curved back on itself with certain classical pretensions, was ornamented with two blind bulging wooden eyes, and sported an archaic anchor. A blue dinghy was tied up astern.
I’m the real thing, said the backward-curving bow, the wooden eyes, the archaic anchor: brown-faced men squinting into the morning fog, women in black waiting. Maybe the sea and I will kill you.
Boaz-Jachin walked along the pier the length of the boat, read the name on the stern: Swallow. The home port, where the oranges were going, was where he wanted to go. There he could find another boat to take him farther or he could travel overland in the direction of the city where he expected to find his father.
He sat down on the string-piece, took out his guitar, and played The Orange Grove without singing the words, thinking of the desert in the song that was far from the sea, the sparse green of the grass at the farm of the Benjamin family.
A man came out of the Swallow’s wheelhouse and leaned against it, his face mostly in shadow. He wore a wrinkled dark suit, a wrinkled white shirt with no tie, and pointed dark shoes. He looked like a rumpled waiter.
‘Nice,’ said the man. ‘A nice song. Sounds good, music like that coming over the water.’
‘Thank you,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘I see you looking at the boat,’ said the man. ‘She’s a sweet one, this one, eh? Catches the eye. Swallow, her name is. Over the waves like a bird. Comes from the other side. Here they don’t build them like this.’
Boaz-Jachin nodded. He knew nothing about boats, but this one looked slow, burdensome, heavy. ‘Do you sail her or has she got an engine?’ he said.
‘Engine,’ said the man. ‘The sail is just to keep her steady. She used to be rigged for sail when my father was alive. Not now. Too much fucking trouble. This way I get there, I get back, I have a good time ashore, no trouble. I come over with wine and cheese, I go back with oranges, melons, whatever. You’re on your way somewhere, right? You’re going somewhere. Where are you going?’
‘Where you’re taking the oranges,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘You’re hanging around looking for a boat. You’re hoping maybe you can work your way across,’ said the trader. When the light at the harbour mouth flashed and turned one side of his face was lit up. He had a big smile, large teeth, looked desperate.
‘I had a feeling when I saw you,’ said the trader. ‘Sometimes it’s like that — you see a person, get a feeling. I’ll make a bet with you: I’ll bet you’ve never been on a boat before, you don’t know how to steer, you can’t cook, and if I told you to cast off the mooring lines you wouldn’t know which rope to put your hand to.’
‘That’s right,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘That’s what I thought,’ said the trader. Again a big smile. ‘It’s all right. You’re in luck anyhow, because my cousin isn’t coming back with me this trip. You can help me take her over. I’ll show you how to steer, and all you have to do is keep awake.’
‘All right,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘Thank you.’
‘We’ll go out in the morning,’ said the trader. ‘You can sleep on board.’
The bunks were below, next to the galley, and smelled of petrol, salt wood, tobacco smoke, and old frying. Boaz-Jachin took a blanket and lay down on deck, watching the stars, large and bright, rocking above him. Between him and the stars the beam of the harbour light swept as it turned. He fell asleep thinking of Lila and the night they had slept on the roof of her house.
In the morning he was awakened by the sun on his face. There was a professional-looking seagull perching on the mast. It looked down at Boaz-Jachin with a contemptuous yellow eye that said, I’m ready for business and you’re still asleep. Other gulls were flying over the harbour with creaking cries, screaming over the garbage behind the cafés, perching on masts and piles.
The trader treated Boaz-Jachin to coffee and rolls at one of the cafés. Then he took on fuel, cleared his cargo at the harbourmaster’s shack, hoisted the steadying sail and started the engine. Towing her dinghy astern the Swallow puttered past freighters and tankers from whose galleys came the clink of cups and the smell of coffee. Here and there men in shorts or pyjamas leaned on railings looking down, standing in the morning shadows that moved slowly in the sunlight on the metal decks. This is life, thought Boaz-Jachin. This is being out in the world.
They cleared the harbour mouth, passed the old stone mole with its lighthouse now standing sleepy like an owl in strong sunlight, and went out past the channel markers, heading into a fresh wind from the west and a slight chop outside. The sunlight danced in glints and sparkles on the green water. The gull, still on the masthead, expressed with his eye that it was a late start but never mind.