Come closer me fellow for the chill of the winter makes tired work of telling a tale and I’ve been at rambling since the first blossom be bloomed—or should I say, so as long as the unspeakables be left unmentioned.
The name’s Andy, Andy deHands, and it appears that we’re due to be acquainted, such are the manners of two stowaways who should meet at an hour so dreary. For it’s a long way to the headland and its dreary port beyond, and within our own slithering existence we have found here a moment of relative respite. So be still, be calm. Sit comfortably within these leaking surrounds and lend an ear to my ramble. Save for the edges, it be as true as a glass eye may still be blinked, or at least as true as one may still look forward.
We begin at sea.
In a forlorn harbour without merriment or hope, I had set myself for a term of ten long years as a wickey: the paraffin-mad few who earn their spoil tending to a lighthouse by an illuminated coastline of a miserable sea. Salt-bitten and taciturn a man becomes in those lonely spires, and as each day passed, I prayed for a wind that would knock its fire into the ocean. Barnacled and becalmed I became, so to the bottle I fell and the only discovery found amongst that stagnate seafoam and porter was a poor excuse for an eyeglass at its bottom.
A glass canoe may be good for sculling, but it makes a poor excuse for a sailboat, and as each ship crept beyond that distant sundown, I pictured myself on their deck, lost in a place where the sky and sea are joined. A hull such as this.
Let me tell you of the man who kept me in that place.
Knocker McArdle was a brawler. In heart and mind, the dockmaster of Rathney harbour was said to have beaten together an empire with nothing but the knuckles of his own right hand and the broken nose of anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in its crossfire.
A quiet king he was, and a leader they had become to the abandoned muckrakers of that harbour who fought for scraps of a wallet unfit for moths let alone for a gentleman’s pocket. To live in Rathney was to owe Knocker and until my debts were levelled, I knew that the lighthouse was a prison where I should remain lest my coil become unwound.
So I gets myself to thinking in that candle-dim illumination of an empty glass, that McArdle needed to be knocked and that I needed to find a ship long enough at sea to escape the repercussions.
A vagrant I am, but a cut-throat I am not. A deed so vile is usually swiftly returned so I prefer to let circumstances take on action to its own accord, although circumstance can be an interesting bow when drawn in times that are lowly.
There’s a spirit, not heard of in heaven or spoken of in tale, that all bartenders secret away in a cupboard below their bar. Clear and pale, that spirit has been known by many names and, by the collection of its sins, it has caused more havoc to a man’s constitution than an axe when thrown into a beehive.
Better for clearing the sink and killing the fish than it be for drinking, so I asked for two glasses and the bartender shook my hand farewell.
There we sat, opposing sides of a table quiet, as not even the airy gulls dared make a sound.
The bottle was uncorked.
A mist, vapour from beyond the pale, crept from my glass as the spirit was poured. Tendril dark, each candle stood taller on its wick as the spirit explored the tavern. Alcohol more potent than that of lantern oil sat in front of me, it sat it front of Knocker. A challenge had been made.
Fire, the heat of a noon sun washed over my face as I raised the glass and Knocker raised his. Eye to watering eye we stared at each other for a moment as the paint on the ceiling above us began to tarnish.
We paused. We drank.
Hellfire now, the spirit became gale and inferno took to the bar like flame upon coal. I blacked out, in two seconds the veil of nothingness was draped over me and a blur was all I could recollect as I returned. Knocker was shaken. The towering man who had never been known to bend was now eccentrically conscious, his eyes rolling around almost freely as his mumbles took on a countenance that could be mistaken for biblical tongues, were they not so punctuated with profanity.
He began to drool, his eyebrows fell onto the table along with the rest of his face. Knocking over the bottle and falling to the floor with the limbless grace of a dead man, McArdle lay still on the floor and I alighted from my station as a wickey.
Expectorate. I spat that unholy spirt onto the floor, having held myself from swallowing the draft and clumsily I did then run from the bar before any could know of my treachery.
There’s no honour in victory, young traveller, I would poke the eye of me very own grandmother were she not just as likely to have poked out mine first. With no dockmaster and McArdle’s books following him to his grave, just a name I had become, and no contract could hold me to that harbour no more.
So, here we are. Two honest folk in the bilge of a ship and two honest folk unknown to the crew above.
What say we have a drink?
J. McCray
2024
Sunday Short Stories 