Open The Bilge In The Bucket Sing Me To Sleep

[Darragh Harper]

Eskila was awake, but that did not mean Darragh was free. He wriggled downward to escape her embrace, then finding his toes were cold, wriggled back into it and wrapped his scruffy tail around his legs, his still-unbuttoned pyjama shirt rumpled up to his chest. Pressed against Eskila, he was soothed by her warmth for a time.

Minutes passed, Darragh balancing one discomfort with another. He didn’t feel like facing the cold again, but he needed the loo, and now that Eskila had mentioned it, he wanted waffles too. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten waffles, though he had a memory of them as a kit, when the family had attempted a summer vacation down at Tully Shore. They had been hmphed at a lot, bringing the tumbling chaos of loud young stoatlings onto the beach and disturbing the adults lazing around on wicker chairs and straw mats. Darragh’s mum had worn a yellow sun-dress, they had played chasing and splashing games, and dug a very dangerous series of holes in the sand for unwary beachgoers to fall into.

Darragh remembered the salty old rats strolling between the frilly umbrellas of the Rich and the thatched umbrellas of the Poor, calling out their wares as they pulled their wagons. Sandwiches and sweets, lemonade and strawberry cordial, and…

He spiraled in the memory that wasn’t about waffles after all. Where had he eaten them? Had they gone to somewhere fancy in Tully Shore for breakfast one time? How had they afforded it? How had they not been kicked out?

“I’ve got a couple gilders,” Darragh murmured. “Might be ‘nough for somethin’.”

Those couple of gilders had meant to be for the Sleep Aide that had never come, who Darragh had mostly forgotten about. Bilge food was cheap though. He had grown up making every quarter-gilder count, and what was a waffle but a bit of shaped dough? He could treat them.

Wiggle. Wiggle-wiggle squirm.

Sitting up and patting his pocket (miraculously, the gilders hadn’t fallen out), Darragh’s thoughts were still so far south-east of Bully Harbour that it took him a good few moments of staring through the Paper Totem, before the phrase Paper Totem reached out to boop his nose and nudge him out of his sunny daydreams.

“…Uh…”

Darragh squinted down at the Totem on the floor, then back at Eskila. He curled his tail up around himself, and pinched the tip through the black-tipped tuft.

He wasn’t dreaming.

It was made of something cheap and pulpy, which instantly brought to mind the Smelt. Smelt papers were used as everything from fish-and-chip wrapping to insulation, and usually lasted longer that way, rather than by the value of whatever had been printed on them. The Paper Totem resembled an eerie, bald, earless, muzzle-less head, with a long thin neck and gaping round holes for eyes and mouth. It screamed at Darragh silently, fully in possession of a mouth, but with no voice to be heard from within.

Darragh’s eye was drawn to Eskila’s puffed tail trailing across the bed. Could she have…? While he was sleeping? But why?

The statuette unnerved Darragh. He half-believed the thing was some kind of demon or spirit that had manifested itself out of detritus and come to haunt them. After all, the last statuette that Darragh had encountered had spoken to him, in that way only Darragh seemed to hear. The fact it was just… there in the middle of an otherwise mostly-bare room made it seem as though it was a thinking thing trying to get his attention.

He glanced back at Eskila again. Had she seen it? It wasn’t visible from the bed unless she sat up. He slunk his way to the edge of the bed, and cautiously, daintily stretched a footpaw down until his claws scraped the floorboards.

The Paper Totem sat silent and unimpressed, or at least unchanged in its lidless stare. Another white-furred paw touched the cool floorboards, and Darragh eased himself into a squat. He flexed his fingers, and thought back to that time on Urk, when he had touched the Wolf Idol. The poet had done this once before, and it seemed no coincidence that another mysterious statuette had entered his life, and given him another chance at Sculpture Psychometry…

Darragh’s pawpads alighted on the crown of the paper head.

Hello? Darragh tried in his own head.

There was no answering voice. Darragh had been bracing himself for a scream, and released a nervous breath. He stared into the thing’s black-hole eyes, then reached out with his intuitive sense of the spiritual, the imaginative Inland Empire of his mind. He still wasn’t getting a voice, but he began to sniff in curiosity.

Could he smell watermelon?

 

[Eskila]

Slowly, but surely, Eskila sat up. It was a process, and it didn't quite finish. There was grappling at blankets, at the wall, at the mattress, at her own legs, which simply teetered backwards until her long body was briefly a slightly annoyed U-shape. There was twisting, and push-ups, and finally she'd clawed her way upright and wobbled side-to-side with a vacant stare and a pink tongue-tip clamped between her fangs.

Her tail went: swish-swish-swish.

She regarded the paper totem alongside Darragh. Then she regarded Darragh. He was seeing it, too.

"That's strange," she said. "Usually the thing I see when I fall asleep goes away when I wake up again. Am I still asleep? Is this a waking up in my sleep dream again? No, I only ask that question the second time I wake up."

She rose from the bed and pondered the totem. She picked it up. She turned it over. She stuck her paw into the base of it and her finger-claws popped out of its wide mouth and she made a gull noise at Darragh while opening and closing her paw. Then she put it on the table beside the bed and went to the door, closed it, and started picking up the various pieces of armour and strapping them onto her body.

The paper totem passed from her mind as just something that had happened, but which had no meaning or lasting impression on the rest of the day. Eskila was graced with a certain indifference when it came to some things which she felt she could not explain or control and which she had deemed harmless.

"You can save your gilders," she said. "The Bilge doesn't make good waffles. I know where the best waffles are. It's only nine blocks away, and there's maple syrup and buttercream unless Oreva ate it or fed it to Commander Sandwichbask Chompsy." She caught the confused glance from the stoat. "He's a turtle," she explained, as if that actually did explain it. "I think he's a he, anyway. I told her he shouldn't eat it, but I don't know if I got the paw-signs right and she really likes laughing when he gets a dollop on his head and it looks like a fancy hat. And I like hearing Oreva laugh, because she never gets to hear it herself, and it's the most pure laughter there is. You know when you laugh sometimes and you feel embarrassed so you try not to, or try to make it quiet, or louder? Laughing is like... a social thing, you do it to fit in, but she laughs because things are funny. Even if they could be unhealthy for turtles."

She finished buckling her cuirass on, popped her helmet over her head, slung her shield over her shoulder, and gathered up her bedding and tucked it under an arm. The orange pieces clashed terribly with her purple pyjamas, but her dark fur somehow made it all work. She cut a striking figure, svelte and slightly bent under the weight of it, while still maintaining a semblance of regal poise inherent in all beasts who take their duties seriously.

Then she picked up the paper totem and placed it in the middle of the bed. It felt like that was appropriate to do. It looked sleepy, to her, with its wide eyes and eternal yawn.

Eskila opened the door and stood in the doorway, and once again considered Darragh.

"It's cold outside," she said slowly. "Do you want me to carry you? Do you have boots?"