Free Ventriloquists by David Mathew

help?’
    Boy? Did he call me boy?
    ‘Grab that rope, the gods damn you!’
    Rope? Connors wondered slowly. Why would I want to grab a rope?
    Thought processes moved with a dazed insistence. Getting there in the end. Progress hampered by barricades of logic. This couldn’t be happening.
    Snapping out of a corner of his fugue, Connors twisted his body on the bare wooden boards on which he’d slept, in order to look over his shoulder.
    Activity. Men in motion, pulling ropes and shouting, an arch of silver-blue water crashing down on their heads. The movement of the floor.
    ‘ Get up, boy, for the last time I’ll say it! ’
    And Connors struggled to his feet. He was taller than his interlocutor, who was four or so decades older and whose face was scarred and lined and made Connors think of a walnut.
    ‘ If you don’t pull your weight, I will personally throw you overboard!’
    You and whose army, Connors thought about retorting; but the question did not need an answer. The man’s own army, was the answer: or at least his crew. This man was the captain.
    ‘I’m on a boat,’ Connors whispered – and immediately he was thrown to one side: a swell had caught the vessel and punched it hard.
    Only by clutching hold of a rope did he manage to stay on his feet. The deck was saturated, filthy with gunmetal spume; the sky over head (he noticed for the first time) was crimson and blue.
    I’m on a boat; and the oxygen he could breathe was in short supply, drenched and salty. The air stank of ozone, sweat and manure. And he was on a boat.
    How did I get here?
    Connors was on a boat on the sea. Violently unpredictable was the motion, the vigour and the energy of the waves, which allowed Connors to add to his list of deductions.
    He was on a large boat (or is it ship?) on the sea, in the middle of a storm that had rendered the hour of the day impossible to discern. Perhaps it was too light to be night-time… although night-time was the last time that (he believed) he could remember.
    The boat (or ship) was being lobbed, port to starboard. Juggled.
    Connors’s brain protested: This doesn’t make sense.
    The old seadog shuffled his way back to Connors, skating the frothing wooden boards for part of the journey with the professionalism of one who has ridden many a tempest. Maybe one who had even enjoyed the rides, if the smile beneath his white beard was anything to go by.
    ‘This is where the largan’s buried, boy! Just below our boots, on the ocean floor!’
    ‘The what?’ Connors shouted back.
    The seadog provided an expression that suggested that the question was among the top two or three most stupid questions ever posed.
    `‘The largan ,’ the seadog repeated. ‘The reason why we’re in this skirmish!’
    Connors felt abruptly and acutely more conscious of his ignorance.
    I must be dreaming. It’s just a dream…
    ‘Are you dreaming, boy?’ the seadog demanded at the top of his voice (perhaps not the captain after all, Connors considered). ‘Or are you gonna grab a rope and tug – tug like it’s between you and the Devil! For who falls in the Pit, boy!’
    Then the seadog slapped Connors across his chops.
    Connors jumped. The slap, and the cold wet air that nursed it, lent a sting disproportionately sharp to any that he might have considered possible within the gluey confines of a dream. It was almost as though he could feel the colour red that he was sure his left cheek must have turned.
    The sting was bad. But accepting reality was worse.
    Just at this moment the boat lurched sideways and downwards; it had slid down the slope of a sudden colossal wave… and now everything was shifting – towards the starboard side.
    Connors could not hold onto his rope. With a stomach-tugging drop, he was at the barrier within the space of a few seconds – the barrier that separated him from the water. The impact – chest on wood – was more than enough to wind him, and air left his body with the force of a bullet from a