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A Novel
by Ian McGuire
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The Shetlander nods to the barman, and the barman, with a grand show of reluctance, pours out another drink. The man takes his sea boots off the bar, picks up the drink, and walks over to a bench by the fire. After a few minutes, he lies down, pulls his knees up to his chest, and falls asleep. When he wakes up again, the Shetlander is sitting at a table in the corner talking to a whore. She is dark-haired and fat and has a mottled face and greenish teeth. The man recognizes her but cannot now recall the name. Betty? he wonders. Hatty? Esther?
The Shetlander calls over to a black boy who is crouching in the doorway, gives him a coin, and instructs him to bring back a plate of mussels from the fishmongers on Bourne Street. The boy is nine or ten years old, slender with large dark eyes and pale brown skin. The man pulls himself upright on the bench and fills his pipe with his last crumbles of tobacco. He lights his pipe and looks about. He has woken up renewed and ready. He can feel his muscles lying loose beneath his skin, his heart tensing and relaxing inside his chest. The Shetlander tries to kiss the woman and is rebuffed with an avaricious squeal. Hester, the man remembers. The woman's name is Hester and she has a windowless room on James Square with an iron bedstead, a jug and basin, and an India-rubber bulb for washing out the jism. He stands up and walks over to where the two of them are sitting.
"Buy me one more drink," he says.
The Shetlander squints at him briefly, then shakes his head and turns back to Hester.
"Just one more drink and that'll be the last you hear of it."
The Shetlander ignores him, but the man doesn't move. His patience is of the dull and shameless kind. He feels his heart swell, then shrink; he smells the usual tavern stench—farts and pipe smoke and spilled ale. Hester looks up at him and giggles. Her teeth are more gray than green; her tongue is the color of a pig's liver. The Shetlander takes his blubber-knife out of his belt and places it on the table. He stands up.
"I'd sooner cut ye fucking balls off for ye than buy ye another drink," he says.
The Shetlander is lanky and loose-limbed. His hair and beard are dank with seal grease and he reeks of the forecastle. The man begins to understand now what he must do—to sense the nature of his current urges and the shape of their accomplishment. Hester giggles again. The Shetlander picks up the knife and lays its cold blade against the man's cheekbone.
"I could cut ye fucking nose off too and feed it to the fucking porkers out back."
He laughs at this idea, and Hester laughs with him.
The man looks untroubled. This is not yet the moment he is waiting for. This is only a dull but necessary interlude, a pause. The barman picks up a wooden club and creaks up the hinge of the bar.
"You," he says, pointing at him, "are a skiving cunt, and a damned liar, and I want you gone."
The man looks at the clock on the wall. It is just past noon. He has sixteen hours to do whatever it is he must do. To satisfy himself again. The ache he feels is his body speaking its needs, talking to him—sometimes a whisper, sometimes a mumble, sometimes a shriek. It never goes silent; if it ever goes silent then he will know that he is finally dead, that some other fucker has finally killed him, and that will be that.
He steps suddenly towards the Shetlander to let him know he is not afraid, then steps away again. He turns towards the barman and lifts his chin.
"You can stick that shillelagh up your fucking arse," he says.
The barman points him to the door. As the man is leaving, the boy arrives with a tin plate of mussels, steaming and fragrant. They look at each other for a moment, and the man feels a new pulse of certainty.
He walks back down Sykes Street. He does not think of the Volunteer, now lying at dock, which he has spent the past week laboring to trim and pack, nor of the bloody six-month voyage to come. He thinks only of this present moment—Grotto Square, the Turkish Baths, the auction house, the ropery, the cobbles beneath his feet, the agnostic Yorkshire sky. He is not by nature impatient or fidgety; he will wait when waiting is required. He finds a wall and sits down upon it; when he is hungry he sucks a stone. The hours pass. People walking by remark him but do not attempt to speak. Soon it will be time. He watches as the shadows lengthen, as it rains briefly, then ceases raining, as the clouds shudder across the dampened sky. It is almost dusk when he sees them at last. Hester is singing a ballad; the Shetlander has a grog bottle in one hand and is conducting her clumsily with the other. He watches them turn into Hodgson's Square. He waits a moment, then scuttles round the corner onto Caroline Street. It is not yet nighttime, but it is dark enough, he decides. The windows in the Tabernacle are glowing; there is a smell of coal dust and giblets in the air. He reaches Fiche's Alley before them and slides inside. The courtyard is empty except for a line of grimy laundry and the high, ammoniacal scent of horse piss. He stands against a darkened doorway with a half brick gripped in his fist. When Hester and the Shetlander come into the courtyard, he waits for a moment to be sure, then steps forwards and smashes the half brick hard into the back of the Shetlander's head.
Excerpted from The North Water by Ian McGuire. Copyright © 2016 by Ian McGuire. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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