all by one master taught

The cabin spins unsteadily, and he must school his face into an enforced grin. Once in the old city he’d had a fever and every way he turned his head it seemed to swim and spin like a whipped top. He’d struggled on for a week with foul-smelling matter dripping from a boxed ear – staggering like a landsman at sea. To be drunk is much the same. A lusher is worse than useless. A drunk man opens up his purse to anyone, he pukes and stumbles and falls in the gutter, he is rolled and robbed and his boots are stolen off his feet.

Hickey can feel his discipline bleeding away. Underneath his skin he is itching like a trapped animal, itching to make an escape.

Irishmen are great tellers of tales and great drinkers, or so it is said, but in Hickey’s own personal experience poor men of all nations will drink away their wages and go away roaring. Captain Crozier is ruddy-faced, but his hands are steady as he pours out another glass. There is a merry light in his eye, and a shine of spit on his gapped front teeth that lends him a pert look. He is generosity itself, condescending to furnish drink after drink with tales of the wardroom to chase them down with. Rich stuff, for a rating.

Hickey is sweating. He can feel the heat in his face; he must be glowing like a patent stove, and smiling like a fool. All this is happening too fast, it cannot have been so quick as this, it cannot have taken so little to set him back on his heels.

There is a rasp in Crozier’s voice, a queer dryness in the throat. “Do you play chess, Mr. Hickey?”

“I wouldn’t know the first thing about it, sir.”

Crozier slips the glass into his hand across the scarred tabletop. “I’m not practiced in it myself. It’s only a way to pass the time. What then is your game, Mr. Hickey?”

This is a trap – the men must not play at dice and blind-hookey, though they’re allowed their ceremonious games of checkers Hickey smiles. His lips part and uncover his teeth with a sickly wetness. His mouth tastes bitter; his throat is sour. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“How do you occupy yourself?”

Beneath the table, Crozier’s foot has escaped its shoe; it slips up Hickey’s calf past his knee to prod uncertainly at his groin. What manner of stocking does the captain wear, striped or plain? Does he think such a gesture will take him anywhere? All it does is reaffirm to Hickey that he’s dying for a piss.

Hickey presses his back against the chair; his head feels as though it’s swaying on his neck. There must be a way to escape this snare, the creak and settle of the great cabin and the dreary rhythm of Captain Crozier’s conversation, but Crozier wants to see him accept his hospitality and he will press it on him until he is satisfied.

Escape is on his mind, like a sweet dream. His life has been a series of exits; he wants to push away from the table and go on his way, but the time for that has long since passed, Crozier will not let him go without consequences. He wants to find a hole and crawl into it, like a dying dog; he wants a quiet place to be sick.

How has he turned foolish enough to let this happen? This is his own fault, he has nurtured a careful advantage for so many days and nights only to spoil it all by being too conspicuously aloof, too good in his refusals, too polite in his partaking. The man who is Hickey is not a great drinker. He will have a glass of beer, if pressed, but no more, and that is his policy. Drink makes men foolish, and foolish men are good for nothing. Captain Crozier is a foolish man, and a proud one, and he is jealous of his pleasures. He wants to break Hickey down to size, his own size; he wants to make them countrymen.

Crozier rises from his seat and crosses over; turning his head to follow him is enough to make Hickey feel sick. The light has gone out of the cabin, or the lamps have lost their shine.

Hickey calls out, in a too-loud voice:

“It’s getting late, isn’t it? Six bells, I think. I thought I heard six bells.”

He has heard no such thing, nothing but the stifled creaks of wooden ribs squeezed in ice. And how many glasses? Not so many – not so many as to account for the way his eyes smart and itch, or the nausea rising in his guts. He hates the taste of whisky, the smell of it, the look of it.

Crozier’s face has gone from merry to impassive; that vacant fish-mouth is turned and shaped in a shallow gash that could mean anything. His shape is a blot in the vision, with buttons shining in two rows to emphasize his bigness.

“You’re not leaving so soon, are you? I’m sure Mr. Hornby can find some work for you if you’ve had enough of my company.”

Hickey’s hands are shaped into soft fists against the table-top, and they feel strangely boneless; when Crozier takes his hand in his own warm mitt it is no sentimental gesture. He brings it to the fork of his legs beneath his unbuttoned waistcoat and presses it there when Hickey jerks in surprise.

Not surprise, exactly; surprise is what the red-cheeked mick from Limerick would feel, at another man’s pego in his hand. Surprise is certainly what he felt in the end, with a knife in his belly. This is the inevitable end of all advantages, of all special preference Hickey has ever received from the men who own the little worlds of ships and prisons and factories; their generosity is a price paid.

Crozier’s cock is half-hard from his spite, from the pleasure of reminding a lesser man that he is lesser by nature as well as rating. Hickey finds the softest parts in his fist and squeezes.