Bellows was trembling. He was a little bigger than Nathan, but not by much, and he was white, like a potato shoot is white, translucent at the edges, kept so long in the darkness that he appeared to have turned to albinism, bleached of the defences the day builds up against the sun, the skin freed of the wasteful effort required to protect itself. In the legs he was thin, and his arms were those of a boy for whom rough play was unusual. His eyes were deep-set: a bookish sort, more keen on the movement of words on a page than of bodies in streets.
His fingers were long, and his nails neatly trimmed, his lips thin and of a pink of the most colourless sort, differing from the whiteness of his face by a degree but no more. His nose was small and snub, almost like the snout of a piglet, if one was being uncharitable. It was certainly nothing like the oar blade that had cut through the corridors of the Manse.
He was barely breathing, but something shook the skin, a thin and fragile parchment like rice paper. The ventricles and atria of his heart, rattling beneath his ribs, cast their shadow on the surface above.
It was impossible to hate this thing, this child, no matter whom he had been, and hatred was too much for Nathan now. He’d had enough of both love and hatred; they were all too much. With the last of his strength, he turned to his jacket. It was by some mysterious process folded and placed behind him on the boards in the shadow of a tar barrel.
‘Where are you going, Nathan?’ said Dashini.
Her hand was on his shoulder, but it was so faint, so trivial in that moment, that he could ignore it.
Here was Bellows, and the boy was dying.
Bellows, Buleau, Birch. He reached for the book that was in his pocket – the skin and teeth and living voice of Adam.
‘Can I help you, Nat?’
‘No, Prissy.’ The words struggled out of his lips. He would do this.
Hadn’t Bellows been as good as he could to him? A teacher, even if the curriculum was one another had set. Bellows had executed his duties with care, brought Nathan into his confidence on all things, treated him well, for his part.
Nathan took the edge of the book and pulled it towards him. It caught on a nail, pulled loose, perhaps, by the straining of the bulkhead and the constant requirement in the wood that it respond to the movements of the sea, the sea and wood being incompatible things, one relatively unmovable, the other much more so. Nathan had to angle the board of the book’s cover so that it slid over the nail head – it was too much for him to lift it.
Once it was over, he turned his head and there was Bellows, one cheek pressed against the planks, the other filling and emptying like a tiny balloon, or the neck of a croaking toad, and he croaked too – a sound incongruous coming from the lips of a boy, a low, deep and pained grumble of mourning.
Nathan slid the book, the brother, over to Bellows, and leaned in close.
‘I found him,’ Nathan said.