The next step in my father’s plan was not as fiendish, but also nowhere near as clever. A veritable marketplace of cadavers at his disposal and an ocean in his eye and in his heart, he set forth to fashion a vessel that might carry him home. No one has ever mistaken Nigel Millington for a seaman, and they certainly would not have then. Estimating his sweet England to be but a three night’s voyage from the seas of Australasia, he was convinced a primitive raft would carry him rightly were it treated to favorable currents. And what better to make a primitive raft from than primitives? In his younger days, he had seen his fair share of gangrenous bodies bob in the Thames like crabapples in a pond. Even once, he had witnessed a child pickpocket piloting the corpse of a bloated drunkard in a vain attempt to reach the South Bank while an angry mob of his victims hurled rancid cabbages at him. The urchin never made the shore, but that was inconsequential in my father’s mind. He had proved a body makes a worthy boat, and had the boy a baker’s dozen of Aboriginals to do what with, he might have been tipping a pint at the Elephant and Castle as we speak.
In homage to the deceased child, my father tied the bodies of the natives together using the stringy tendons of the kangaroo and adhesive drawn from a felled gum tree. The work was neither easy nor appealing, but toiling through the night, into the day, and on into the next night, he eventually constructed something that resembled a sea-craft. Granted, it was festering and infested with flies, but it took to water. With the dawn light beckoning him, he set the raft to sea, climbed aboard, and gave hearty shout of “Ho! You’re not rid of me yet, Victoria, you dusty hag!”
By the setting of the sun, he had traveled further than one might have estimated. Any sight of land had escaped him by mid-day. The ocean, the sky, these were his only companions. To occupy his idle mind, he composed himself a shanty, a rousing tune that was to see him through his voyage:
O the ocean, she’s a saucy wench
With a frothy lip and a thrusting hip
And a wench may have an awful stench
But, dear Lord, I’ll always risk a dip
Poetry? Hardly, though it is the closest my father ever came. A prophecy? Now this can be left to debate. For he did not have the chance to compose a second verse. A dip in the ocean was a fate closer to him than he could have imagined.
