‘Surely not out here,’ he smiled.

~

The doctor spent the remaining daylight in the galley. I could tell he was focused on cooking something specific, but he came up on deck and sought orders from each of us around sunset. The brothers were content to eat biscuit and pork with lemon juice, a diet I believe they would happily have subsisted upon when ashore. Argyle said he would join them.

My father could not be persuaded to take any food. He was slurring: it made me angry, it made me worried. But no matter the inversion of our relationship as parent and child, I couldn’t very well force-feed him.

Which left the doctor and me. I was resigned to the biscuit and pork when he winked scandalously at me and said he would present me with something different. Again—again!—why was I not quicker in chiding him over these liberties? Back to the galley he went, and within the hour the others were fed and a peculiar smell wafted from the little vent: I couldn’t say it made me hungry, but nor was it repellent.

I stayed on deck, as the evening was clear and warm. Argyle had gone silently below, the only occupant of a lonely world that spun in dark heavens. I would never have imagined a man could find such solitude in such close confines. My father was singing, tunelessly, and the brothers joined in now and then, before returning to their endless routine of insults and scragging.

The doctor returned as the moon was rising in the east. He was carrying a chopping board, and on it—poetically—was the moonbird he’d killed in the afternoon. He had baked it and splayed it open with a cut from neck to crop. Where the innards would have been, he had made a stuffing from biscuit, onion and lemon peel. The bird lay in a nest of chopped potatoes, as if it had landed on its back there and somehow burst open. The board tilted slightly as the doctor bent to sit, and a trickle of juice ran off the meat and onto the deck.

I gave him the Bravo! he was clearly expecting. He seemed pleased.

‘Couldn’t work out how to get all the damn—sorry, all the feathers out of it. Must be an old bird. I scalded it and they wouldn’t come off, so I had to skin it.’ He produced two forks from somewhere in his jacket. ‘Here, let’s see how it tastes before we get too carried away.’

We pulled at the greasy sinews, dark and wreathed in a thin layer of fat. I chewed tentatively and the doctor must have seen the look on my face.

‘What do you say, Miss Grayling?’

‘Something of duck…but the stronger flavour is cod liver oil. Somehow I think it is both fish and fowl.’