Morton

"He did not tell me about the hulks. He showed me. Not deliberately — deliberation requires a kind of control that Morton no longer possessed. The hulks came out of him the way water comes out of a cracked vessel: slowly, involuntarily, through the fissures the damage had left."

The first one died on the second day. I did not see it happen — the dying took place in the infirmary, or whatever room the gaol designated as such, and the only evidence of it was the absence at the oakum benches where six men had sat the previous morning and now five remained. Nobody spoke of it. The guards did not announce it. The space on the bench was simply empty, and the emptiness was absorbed into the yard's daily accounting with the same brisk indifference the ledger applied to every other entry: one fewer mouth to feed, one fewer name on the roll, one fewer unit of labour whose output had been, in any case, negligible. The gaol's arithmetic was clean. A man subtracted from the total left no remainder.

The second died on the third night. This one I heard — not the dying itself, which was silent or near enough, but the aftermath: the guards' boots in the corridor at an hour that was not a patrol hour, the scrape of something heavy being dragged across stone, the low exchange of voices that carried the particular flatness of men performing a task they had performed before and would perform again and felt nothing about except the inconvenience. In the morning, the oakum bench held four.

Morton was among them.

He had survived three days, which — by the metric Finch had established — placed him ahead of the prediction the yard had made on the day of his arrival. The wiry prisoner who had smirked at him in the meal line had wagered a bread portion that Morton would not last the week. The wager had been taken, adjusted, and entered into the gaol's informal book with the same dispassion that governed all the yard's transactions. Men bet on survival the way they bet on anything else: as a matter of probability, stripped of sentiment, the odds calculated from observable evidence and past performance. Morton's odds were not good. But he was still drawing breath on the third morning, and the men who had bet against him were watching the calendar with the narrow, calculating attention of gamblers whose stakes had not yet been settled.

I found myself watching Morton. Not from kindness — I had learned, in six weeks, to be suspicious of kindness in myself, to interrogate the impulse the way I would interrogate a ledger entry that did not quite balance. The watching was something else. It was the same compulsion that draws the eye to a wound — the inability to look away from damage, not because the damage is fascinating but because the mind insists on understanding it, on mapping its extent, on knowing precisely how bad the injury is so that the body can calculate the distance between the injury and itself.

Morton was three days into the gaol, and the gaol was already acting upon him, the way it acted upon everything — grinding, wearing, pressing — but the material it was acting upon had already been ground and worn and pressed far beyond anything the gaol's own processes could achieve. The hulks had done their work first. What remained was being finished.

On the third afternoon, the oakum benches were moved into the yard's western corner to catch the last of the day's thin sunlight. The overseer had ordered it — not from compassion but from the practical recognition that men who could not feel their fingers could not pick oakum, and men who could not pick oakum were a deficit on his ledger. The move placed the oakum workers within fifteen feet of my position in the stone yard, and for the first time since Morton's arrival, I was close enough to observe him in detail.

His hands worked the rope. The motion was the same as the other oakum pickers — the pinching, pulling separation of tarred fibres, each strand teased apart and laid flat, the work repetitive and mindless and cruel on healthy hands and unimaginable on hands like Morton's. But it was not his hands that held my attention.

It was his head.

Every few minutes — not at regular intervals, not with any pattern I could discern, but with the irregular frequency of a reflex that operated below the level of conscious control — Morton's head would snap to the left. A small, sharp movement, barely more than a twitch, the chin jerking towards the left shoulder and the eyes following, sweeping the space behind him with a quick, darting focus before returning to the rope in his lap. The motion lasted less than a second. It was over before it had properly begun. And it repeated — again and again, throughout the hour I watched, a tic that was not a tic but something else, something the body had learned in a place where the space behind you was never safe and the only warning of what was coming was the fraction of a second between hearing it and feeling it.

He was checking. The way a man who has been hit from behind many times checks. The way a body that has been conditioned, through sustained and repeated violence, to maintain surveillance of its own blind spots continues to maintain that surveillance even when the threat has been removed. The hulks were not here. The men who had hit him from behind — whoever they were, however many times they had done it, over however many months — were not here. But Morton's nervous system did not know that. His nervous system was still on the hulk ship, still below decks, still surrounded by men who took what they wanted and announced their taking with a fist or a boot or whatever instrument was nearest, and the twitch — that small, involuntary, endlessly repeating jerk of the head — was the body's refusal to believe that the danger had passed.

I watched it happen eleven times in an hour. I counted because counting was what I did. I counted because the counting kept the horror at a distance — transformed it from a feeling into a figure, from a visceral, sickening recognition into a number I could file alongside the other numbers in the ledger I was keeping. Eleven times. Eleven moments in which Morton's body betrayed the truth that his composure — that quiet, measured composure I had noticed on the first day, the bearing that had distinguished him from the other arrivals — was working to conceal.

There were other things. Smaller, harder to see, requiring proximity and sustained attention to detect. I detected them because I could not stop looking, and I could not stop looking because Morton was the hulks made flesh and the hulks were where I was going and the looking was, in some terrible way, preparation.

He could not tolerate being touched. I saw this at the meal on the third evening, when the man beside him on the bench — a gaol regular, not one of the hulk arrivals, someone reaching past Morton for the bread — brushed Morton's arm with his elbow. The contact was incidental, meaningless, the kind of casual physical collision that occurred a hundred times a day in a space where men were packed close enough to share one another's heat. Morton's reaction was not casual. His whole body flinched — a full, convulsive contraction, the shoulders drawing up, the arms pulling in, the torso curling forward as though absorbing a blow that had not been delivered. The flinch was followed by a moment of absolute stillness — Morton frozen in the contracted posture, his breath held, his eyes fixed on the table's surface with the blind, concentrated intensity of a man who is waiting to discover whether the thing he fears has actually happened or whether his body has lied to him again.

The moment passed. Morton straightened. His hands found the bread. He resumed eating, the right side of his jaw working steadily. The man who had brushed his arm had not noticed, or had noticed and chosen to ignore it, the incident too minor to register in the dining hall's continuous stream of friction and negotiation. But I had seen Morton's face in the instant of the flinch, and what I had seen there was not surprise or irritation or even the rational fear of a man who expects to be struck. It was something older and more complete: the total, involuntary mobilisation of a body that has been taught, through relentless instruction, that any unexpected contact is the prelude to pain.

The hulks had taught him that. Day after day, week after week, month after month, in the darkness below decks where five hundred men were packed into a space built for two hundred and the strong took from the weak and the guards' truncheons fell without warning and the only certainty was that the body would be hurt and the only variable was when. The lesson had been delivered so many times, with such consistency, that Morton's nervous system had internalised it the way a clerk internalises the multiplication tables — completely, permanently, below the level of conscious thought. He would flinch at unexpected contact for the rest of his life. The hulks would live in his reflexes long after his mind had ceased to dream of them.

I thought about this. I thought about it the way I had been trained to think — in terms of systems, of causes and effects, of inputs and outputs. A man enters the hulks. The hulks apply their processes: confinement, labour, starvation, violence, the systematic destruction of everything that makes a human body feel safe in its own skin. The man exits the hulks. The processes have produced their output: a body that cannot be touched without flinching, a head that jerks towards every sound behind it, hands that cannot close properly, a jaw that works on one side only, a frame from which the flesh has been stripped the way bark is stripped from a sapling.

And I was on the same conveyor. The same system that had processed Morton was, even now, processing me — more slowly, with different tools, at an earlier stage in the sequence, but the direction was the same. The gaol was the first station. The hulks were the second. The transport ship was the third. And at the end of the line, on the far side of the world, in a colony whose name I could barely spell, the process would continue — grinding, wearing, pressing — until whatever remained of the man who had once sat at Harrison's desk was either hardened into something the system could use or ground into something it discarded.

Morton was what the system discarded. Morton was what I would become if I was not careful, not shrewd, not lucky. Morton was the sum at the bottom of a column I did not wish to calculate but could not stop calculating, the total written in damaged hands and involuntary flinches and a head that would not stop checking for the blow.

On the fourth morning, I spoke to him.

Not through a wall. Not in the corridor. In the yard, at the water bucket, during the brief, unsupervised minutes when the oakum workers were permitted to drink and the stone gang was changing shifts and the guards' attention was distributed across the general movement of men rather than focused on any individual.

He was at the bucket when I reached it. His hands — those ruined, weeping, swollen hands — were cupped around the ladle, the effort of holding it visible in the trembling of his forearms. He drank slowly, carefully, the way he ate: consuming everything, wasting nothing, the liquid disappearing into him with the silent, total absorption of dry earth receiving rain.

"Jeffries," I said. I did not offer my hand. I had seen what unexpected contact did to him, and the offering of a handshake — that most ordinary of social gestures, that reflex of a world where men greeted one another as equals and the touching of palm to palm carried no risk — would have been, in this context, an act of cruelty disguised as courtesy.

He looked at me. The assessment I had noticed on the first day was there — the quick, comprehensive sweep of the eyes, reading face and posture and position the way I read a ledger. He was evaluating. The speed of the evaluation, and the depth of it, told me that whatever the hulks had destroyed in Morton, they had not destroyed this: the capacity to see, to judge, to determine within seconds whether a man approaching you at a water bucket was a threat, an opportunity, or irrelevant.

"Morton," he said. His voice was rougher at close quarters — damaged, the vocal cords carrying the same erosion as the rest of him, the sound produced with effort, each word costing more breath than it should. "James Morton."

"William Jeffries. I'm on the stone gang. Six weeks."

He nodded. "I know," he said. "You've been watching me."

The statement was delivered without accusation, without resentment, without any of the emotional charge that such an observation might carry in the world beyond these walls. It was a fact. He had registered it, filed it, and was now presenting it — the way a clerk presents a receipt — as confirmation that the transaction had been noted.

"You're from the hulks," I said. There was no point in approaching the subject obliquely. Morton's eyes did not invite obliqueness. They invited the shortest distance between two points.

"The Captivity," he said. "Portsmouth harbour. Twenty-two months."

Twenty-two months. The number entered me the way Finch's "fourteen months" had entered me on the first day in the stone yard — not as an abstraction but as an experience, the mind attempting to stretch itself across the span of time the number represented and failing, the imagination buckling under the weight of twenty-two months of what Morton's body was testifying to.

"What —" I began, and stopped. The question I had been about to ask — what was it like — died in my throat. I looked at his hands. I looked at the side of his jaw that didn't move. I thought about the head that jerked to the left eleven times an hour and the body that flinched when another man's elbow brushed its arm. The question answered itself.

What was it like. It was like this. It looked like the man standing in front of me. It sounded like the rasp in his voice and the wheeze beneath his breathing. It smelled like the smell that clung to his clothing and would cling, I suspected, long after the clothing was changed, because the smell was not in the fabric but in the skin, in the pores, in the body itself, which had absorbed the hulk's atmosphere so deeply that it had become part of its chemistry.

Morton watched me abandon the question. Something shifted in his expression — not a smile, nothing so generous, but a slight relaxation of the muscles around his eyes, the faintest easing of the guarded tension that held his face in its permanent mask of watchful composure. He had seen me decide not to ask. He had understood why. And the understanding — the recognition that I had read enough from his body to know that the question was unnecessary and the asking of it would be a burden — produced in him something that might, in a man with more reserves, have been gratitude.

"You're waiting for transport," he said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"How long?"

"They haven't said. Weeks. Months. Nobody tells you."

The ghost of something — not a smile, but the memory of one, the muscular echo of an expression the face had once been capable of producing — passed across his features. "No," he said. "They don't."

He set the ladle back in the bucket. The act of releasing it required the same concentrated effort as gripping it had — the fingers uncurling one by one, reluctantly, the joints protesting, the tendons that governed the motion operating at the very limit of their remaining capacity. When his hands were empty, they hung at his sides, and I saw them shake — not the gross, visible tremor of exhaustion but a finer, deeper vibration, the kind that lives in the nerves themselves and does not stop when the body rests because it is not produced by effort but by damage.

"The ship," I said. "The Captivity. Is it —" I searched for the right word, the word that would extract information without demanding a narrative, that would open a door without requiring Morton to walk through it. "Is it what they say?"

Morton looked at me. His eyes — brown, deep-set, carrying the particular hollowed quality of eyes that have receded into a face from which the flesh has withdrawn — held mine for a long moment. In them I saw the assessment conclude, the final calculation performed, the determination made about how much of himself he was willing to spend on this exchange.

"Jeffries," he said. "You're a clerk."

"Was."

"A clerk. You read things. Numbers, words, people." He glanced at my hands — the calloused hands, the stone-yard hands, the hands that still carried the shape of the pickaxe even when they held nothing. "You've been reading this place since the day you arrived. I can see it."

I said nothing. The observation was accurate, and the accuracy of it — the fact that Morton, from his position at the lowest table, on the oakum bench, in the damaged and diminished condition the hulks had left him in, had been reading me as carefully as I had been reading him — produced a sensation I had not expected. Not discomfort, exactly. Recognition. The particular, startling recognition of meeting a mind that works the way yours does, housed in a body that shows you what yours might become.

"Then read me," Morton said. His voice was quiet, steady, carrying none of the self-pity I had heard from other broken men — the ones who told their stories as bids for sympathy, as currency to be traded for kindness or protection or the simple, human comfort of being listened to. Morton was not bidding for sympathy. He was making an offer. A practical, unsentimental offer, extended from one reading man to another: I am the text. The information is here, in my hands and my flinches and my jaw and my skin. Read it. Take what you need. Prepare yourself.

"Everything you need to know about the Captivity," he said, "is standing in front of you."

He turned and walked back towards the oakum benches, his gait careful and slow, his head jerking once — sharply, involuntarily — towards the left as he passed a group of men whose proximity his body had registered as a threat.

I stood at the water bucket and watched him go. The yard's sounds surrounded me — hammers, picks, the overseer's voice, the guards' boots on gravel — but I heard them as though from a great distance, the way you hear the sounds of a room when your attention has been seized by something inside your own mind and the external world has been demoted to background.

Read me. The instruction was not cryptic. It was not a riddle or a challenge or a philosophical proposition. It was the most direct, most honest, most devastating thing anyone had said to me since the foreman had risen in the courtroom and delivered the word that had brought me here. Morton had looked at me and understood what I needed — not comfort, not stories, not the neatly narrated account of a survivor's experience delivered through a wall in the dark. I needed data. I needed evidence. I needed to understand, with the particular, cold, granular clarity that the clerk's mind demanded, what the hulks would do to me. And Morton had offered himself as the primary source.

I returned to my stone. I picked up the pickaxe. The weight was familiar now — the ash shaft, the iron head, the particular balance point where the tool's centre of gravity sat, all of it known, all of it absorbed into the body's working knowledge the way a pen's weight is absorbed by a clerk's hand. I raised it. I brought it down. The stone cracked.

But the stone was not what I was thinking about. I was thinking about twenty-two months. I was thinking about a head that jerks to the left eleven times an hour. I was thinking about hands that cannot close and a jaw that works on one side and a body that flinches when an elbow brushes its arm and a man who had looked at me beside a water bucket and said read me with the flat, undramatic honesty of someone who has passed beyond the need for dignity and arrived at something harder and more useful: the willingness to be understood.

The afternoon wore on. The clouds shifted. The hammers fell.

I did not look at Morton again that day. I did not need to. The reading had been done. The text had been received. And the information it contained — the particular, specific, irrefutable information about what twenty-two months on a prison ship anchored in Portsmouth harbour does to a human body and a human mind — was now lodged inside me, alongside the calluses and the routines and the names I had filed and the systems I had learned and the lies I had told my mother, in the place where the clerk kept the accounts he did not wish to audit but could not bring himself to close.

The bell rang. I set down the pickaxe. I walked towards the gate.