Ian McGuire - The North Water

Joseph reluctantly does as he is asked.

Sumner unbuttons the boy’s jacket and shirt, and tugs up his flannel vest. The abdomen, he notes, is not distended and there is no sign of discoloration or swelling.

“Does this hurt?” Sumner asks. “Or this?”

Joseph shakes his head.

“So where is the pain?”

“Everywhere.”

Sumner sighs.

“If it is not here or here or here,” he says, prodding the boy’s belly impatiently with his fingertips, “then how can it be everywhere, Joseph?”

Joseph doesn’t answer. Sumner sniffs suspiciously.

“Any vomiting?” he asks. “Any diarrhea?”

Joseph shakes his head.

There is a dank, fecal odor arising from the boy’s scrawny midsection which suggests that he is lying. Sumner wonders if he is touched in the head or merely more stupid than average.

“Do you know what diarrhea means?” he asks.

“The flux,” Joseph says.

“Remove your trousers, please.”

Joseph gets to his feet, unlaces and removes his boots, then unbuckles his belt and shrugs off his gray worsted trousers. The unpleasant odor increases in strength. Outside the cabin, Black shouts and Brownlee coughs enormously. The boy’s knee-length drawers, Sumner immediately notes, are stained and stiffened at the breech with blots of blood and shit.

Piles, for God’s sake, Sumner thinks. The boy clearly doesn’t know the difference between his stomach and his arsehole.

“Take those off too,” he says, pointing, “and be sure not to touch anything else with them as you do so.”

Joseph reluctantly pulls off his reeking drawers. His shanks are slight, almost muscleless; there is a faint black arc of hair around the otherwise pale purity of his cock and balls. Sumner instructs him to turn around and put his elbows on the bunk. He would normally be too young to develop piles, but Sumner assumes that the crude shipboard diet of salt junk and biscuits has done for him.

“I will give you some ointment,” he says, “and a pill. You will feel better soon enough.”

Sumner parts the boy’s arse cheeks and glances in for confirmation. He stares for a few seconds, stands back, then looks again.

“What is this?” he says.

Joseph doesn’t move or speak. He is shivering intermittently as if the cabin (which is warm) is bitterly cold. After a minute’s thought, Sumner steps out into the gangway and calls up to the cook for a bowl of warm water and a rag. When they arrive, he washes between the boys cheeks and applies a mixture of camphor and lard to his lesions. The sphincter is distorted and torn in places. There are signs of ulceration.

He dries the boy with a towel and gives him a pair of clean undergarments from his own cabinet. He washes his hands with what remains of the water.

“Put your things back on now, Joseph,” he says.

The boy dresses slowly, making sure as he does so not to catch the surgeon’s eye. Sumner goes to his medicine cabinet, selects a bottle labeled No. 44 and shakes out a small blue pill.

“Swallow this now,” he says. “Then come back tomorrow and I will give you another one.”

Joseph scowls at the taste, then swallows it with a gulp. Sumner looks at him carefully — his sunken cheeks, his narrow, twiny neck, his hazy and faraway eyes.

“Who did this to you?” he asks.

“No one.”

“Who did this to you, Joseph?” he asks again.

“No one did it to me.”

Sumner nods twice, then scratches his cheekbone hard.

“You may go now,” he says. “And I’ll see you tomorrow for the other blue pill.”

After the boy leaves, Sumner goes back out into the empty mess cabin, opens the iron stove, and pushes the stained underwear far back onto the banked and glowing coals. He watches it catch, then closes the stove and returns to his stateroom. He pours a dose of laudanum but doesn’t drink it. Instead he takes down his copy of The Iliad from the shelf above the desk and tries to read. The ship jolts upwards; the timbers grate and whimper. He feels, despite himself, a tightening in his throat and a warm, liquid accumulation in his chest like the beginnings of a sob. He waits a minute longer, then closes the book and goes back out into the mess room. Cavendish is standing by the stove smoking a pipe.

“Where is Brownlee?” Sumner asks him.

Cavendish nods sideways towards the captain’s cabin.

“Snoozing, most likely,” he says.

Sumner knocks anyway. After a pause, Brownlee calls for him to enter.

The captain is bent over the logbook, a pen in his hand. His waistcoat is unbuttoned and his gray hair is standing upright. He looks up at Sumner and beckons him inside. Sumner takes a seat and waits while Brownlee scratches out a final few words, then carefully blots his work.

“Little enough to report, I expect,” Sumner says.

Brownlee nods.

“When we reach the North Water, we’ll sight more whales,” he says. “You can be sure of that. And we’ll kill a few of ’em too, if I have anything to say about it.”

“The North Water is the place to be.”

“These days it is. Twenty years ago, the waters about here were full of whales too, but they’ve all moved north now — away from the harpoon. Who can blame them? The whale is a sagacious creature. They know they are safest where there is most ice, and where it is most perilous for us to follow them. Steam is the future, of course. With a powerful enough steamship we could hunt them to the ends of the earth.”

Sumner nods. He has heard Brownlee’s theories on whaling already. The captain believes the farther north you sail the more whales there will be, and he has come to the logical conclusion, based on this fact, that at the top of the world there must exist a great ice-free ocean, a place not yet penetrated by man, where the right whales swim unhindered in numberless multitudes. The captain, Sumner strongly suspects, is something of an optimist.

“Joseph Hannah came to see me today complaining of a foul stomach.”

“Joseph Hannah, the cabin boy?”

Sumner nods.

“When I examined him, I discovered he had been sodomized.”

Brownlee stiffens briefly at this intelligence, then rubs his nose and frowns.

“He told you this himself?”

“It was evident from the examination.”

“You’re sure?”

“The damage was extensive, and there are signs of venereal disease.”

“And who, pray, is responsible for this abomination?”

“The boy will not say. He is frightened, I imagine. He may also be a little simple-minded.”

“Oh, he is stupid enough,” Brownlee says sourly. “That’s for sure. I know his father and his uncle both, and they are fucking imbeciles also.”

Brownlee’s frown deepens, and he purses his lips.

“And you are sure that this happened on board this ship. That the injuries are recent?”

“Without a doubt. The lesions are quite fresh.”

“The boy is a great fool then,” Brownlee says. “Why did he not cry out or complain if this was being done to him against his will?”

“Perhaps you could ask him yourself?” Sumner suggests. “He won’t speak to me, but if you order him to name the culprit it’s possible he’ll feel obliged to do so.”

Brownlee nods curtly, then opens the cabin door and calls to Cavendish, who is still standing by the stove smoking, to have the boy brought aft from the forecastle.

“What’s the little shit done now?” Cavendish asks.

“Just bring him to me,” Brownlee says.

They drink a glass of brandy while they wait. When the boy arrives, he looks pale with terror, and Cavendish is grinning.

“You have nothing to be frightened about, Joseph,” Sumner says. “The captain wants to ask you a few questions, that’s all.”