The North Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

and the houses of the rich. He has no idea which way is north or in what direction the dock now lies, but eventually, somehow, he knows he will sniff his way back there. He has learned to stop thinking at such times and trust his instinct. Why Hull, for instance? Why fucking whaling? It makes no sense, and that is its great genius. The illogic of it, the near idiocy. Cleverness, he thinks, will get you nowhere; it is only the stupid, the brilliantly stupid, who will inherit the earth. Entering the public square, he encounters a legless and tatterdemalion beggar man whistling “Nancy Dawson” and knuckling his way along the darkened pavement. The two men pause to talk.
    â€œWhich way to the Queen’s Dock?” Sumner asks, and the legless beggar points across with his filth-caked fist.
    â€œOver there,” he says. “Which ship?”
    â€œThe Volunteer .”
    The beggar, whose face is riddled with smallpox scars and whose truncated body halts abruptly just below the groin, shakes his head and giggles wheezily.
    â€œIf you chose to ship with Brownlee, you fucked yourself up the arse,” he says. “Right royally.”
    Sumner thinks about this for a moment, then shakes his head.
    â€œBrownlee will do,” he says.
    â€œHe will do if you want things fucked up,” the beggar answers. “He will do if you want to come home fucking penniless or not come home at all. He’ll do for all that, I agree with you there. You heard about the Percival ? You must have heard about the fucking Percival ?”
    The beggar is wearing a grimy and shapeless tam-o’-shanter patchworked from the broken remnants of numerous pieces of older and finer headgear.
    â€œI was in India,” Sumner says.
    â€œAsk anyone around here about the Percival ,” the beggar says. “Just say the word Percival and see what comes back.”
    â€œSo tell me then,” Sumner says.
    The beggar pauses a moment before beginning, as if to better measure the hilarious breadth of Sumner’s naivety.
    â€œCrushed to matchwood by a berg,” he says. “Three years ago now. Its holds were filled up with blubber at the time and they didn’t rescue even one single barrel of it. Not a scrap. Eight men drownded and ten more perished of the cold, and none of those that lived made even sixpunce.”
    â€œSounds like a misfortune. It could happen to anyone.”
    â€œIt happened to Brownlee though, no one else. And a captain that fucking unfortunate doesn’t often get another ship.”
    â€œBaxter must trust him.”
    â€œBaxter’s fucking deep. That’s all I’ll say about fucking Baxter. Deep is what Baxter is.”
    Sumner shrugs and looks up at the moon.
    â€œWhat happened to your legs?” he asks.
    The beggar looks down and frowns as though surprised to find them gone.
    â€œYou ask Captain Brownlee about that one,” he says. “You tell him Ort Caper sent you. You tell him we was counting up my legs together one fine evening and there seemed to be a couple of ’em missing. See what he says about that one.”
    â€œWhy would I ask him that?”
    â€œBecause you wouldn’t hardly believe the truth of it coming from a man like me, you’d likely write it off as the ravings of a loon, but Brownlee knows the bloody truth of it as well as me. You ask him what happened on the Percival . Tell him Ort Caper sends his best regards. See what that does to his digestion.”
    Sumner takes a coin from his pocket and drops it into the beggar’s outstretched hand.
    â€œOrt Caper’s the name,” the beggar shouts after him. “Ask Brownlee what happened to my fucking legs.”
    *   *   *
    Farther on, he begins to smell the Queen’s Dock—its sour, bathetic pong, like meat about to turn. In the gaps between warehouses, between the piled-up planking of timber yards, he can see the tin-cut silhouetted line