The cabin boy – a young lad from a Manx family – looks at the monkey and the monkey looks at the boy. The animal puts its head on one side, eyes bead-bright, and chatters softly, a slight judder of sound, its voice light and fluting. It reminds the boy of an instrument his uncle plays at gatherings on the Isle of Man, and for a moment he is back at his sister’s churching, at his cousin’s wedding, back in the safety of his kitchen at home, where his mother would be gutting a fish, telling him to mind his boots, to wipe his shirt front, to eat up now. Where his uncle would be playing his flute and everyone speaking the language he had grown up with, and no one would be yelling at him or kicking him or telling him what to do, and later on there might be dancing and singing.
Tears prick the eyes of the cabin boy and the monkey, still regarding him, with a sentient and understanding gaze, reaches out its hand.
The fingers on the monkey’s hand are familiar and strange, to the boy, all at once. Black and shiny, like boot leather, with nails like apple pips. Its palm, though, is striated, just like the boy’s and there passes between them, there, under the palm trees that line the wharf, the confluence of sympathy that can flow between human and beast. The boy feels the golden chain, as if it is around his own neck; the monkey sees the boy’s sadness, his longing for his home, the bruises on his legs, the blisters and calluses on his fingers, the peeling skin on his shoulders from the relentless scorch of months in the ocean sun.
The boy holds out his hand to the monkey and the monkey takes it. Its grip is surprisingly strong: it speaks of urgency, of maltreatment, of need, of craving for kind company. The monkey climbs up the boy’s arm, using all four of its feet, across his shoulders and up on to his head, where it sits, paws buried in the boy’s hair.
Laughing, the boy puts up a hand to be sure of what is happening. Yes, there is a monkey sitting on his head. He feels himself fill with numerous, warring urges: to run about the dockside, shouting to his crewmates, Look at me, look; to tell his little sister this, to say, You’ll never guess what happened to me, a monkey sat on my head; to keep the monkey for himself, to dart away, to jerk the chain from the man’s hand and sprint up the gangplank and disappear into the ship; and to cradle this creature in his arms, for ever, never let it go.
The man is getting to his feet, gesturing at the boy. He has skin that is pocked and scarred, a mouthful of blackened teeth, an eye that doesn’t quite match its pair, in either direction or colour. He is rubbing the fingers of his hand together, in the universal language that means: money.
The boy shakes his head. The monkey clings tighter, curling its tail about the boy’s neck.
The man with the scarred, pocked skin bears down, gripping the boy’s arm. He repeats his gestures. Money, he is insisting, money. He points at the monkey, then makes the gesture again.
Again, the boy shakes his head, presses his lips together, puts a protective hand over the purse tied to his belt. He knows what will happen to him if he returns to the ship without food, without ale. He will carry the memory of the midshipman’s lash – given to him twelve times in Malacca and seven times in Galle, ten in Mogadishu – for ever.
‘No,’ says the boy. ‘No.’
The man lets out a stream of angry words, into the boy’s face. The language they speak in this place called Alexandria is jabbing, nicking, like the point of a knife. The man reaches up to seize the monkey, which chatters and then shrieks, a piercing high cry of distress, gripping the boy’s hair, the collar of his shirt, the tiny black nails scoring the skin of his neck.
The boy, almost sobbing now, tries to hold on to his new friend. For a moment, he has him, by the forelimb, the warm fur of the elbow fitted into his palm, but then the man jerks the chain and the monkey falls, screaming, from the boy’s grasp, to the cobbled dock, where it rights itself and then, tugged again, scrambles after the man, whimpering.
Aghast, the boy watches the animal leave, the hunch of its back, the workings of its haunches, trying to keep up with its master. He swipes at his face, at his eyes, his head feeling bare and empty, wishing that he might bring the moment back, that he could have somehow persuaded the man to let him keep it. The monkey belonged to him: surely anyone could see that?
What the boy doesn’t know – can’t know – was that the monkey leaves part of itself behind. In the scuffle, it has shed three of its fleas.
One of these fleas falls, unseen, to the ground, where the boy will unwittingly crush it with the sole of his foot. The second stays for a while in the sandy hair of the boy, making its way to the front of his crown. When he is paying for a flagon of the local brew in the tavern, it will make a leap – an agile, arching spring – from his forehead to the shoulder of the innkeeper.