With the wipe of one hand, his beard turned from orange to dark brown.
“Jesus!” groaned Alec Moore, as the Lady Craig kangarooed its way across the Southern Ocean. To say Moore lacked sea legs would be an understatement. From the moment the Lady Craig left Southampton, his tummy was upset. By the time the ship reached Cape Town, upset had turned to outright revolt. What luck then that he’d run into a South African stevedore who had a surefire cure for sea sickness.
“Oranges, brah!” exclaimed young Johannes Du Toit. “Just eat nothing but oranges.”
“And they’ll settle my stomach?” Moore replied with more than a little scepticism.
“No, not really,” came the unexpected reply. “But they taste the same coming up as they do going down.”
He was a wise boy, Hansie Du Toit. He also had a sack of oranges to hand which became Alec Moore’s for a handful of rand.
From a full sack, Alec was now down to his last half-dozen fruit. Fortunately for him, the Lady Craig looked set to arrive in Georgia within the day The reason for this had less to do with good luck than with a wind that sent the clipper rocketing across the water at a speed unimaginable to most everyone else who’d ever boarded a sea-worthy vessel.
Only those who plied their trade in these freezing waters might understand the runaway horse that the Lady Craig had become.
“Exciting, eh?!” bellowed a crewman as the ship reared over one especially large wave. Alec Moore tried to think of something witty by way of a reply but was simply too ill to entertain any notion of conversation. He could, however, revisit the contents of his bowels, and this is what he did, the orange liquid almost fizzing as it passed over his lips.
“Not much more of this,” he said by way of a personal pep talk. After all, how many times could a grown man vomit over a 24-hour period with nothing but a few off oranges in his system?
Then, as he reached for his handkerchief, his hand brushed the letter and he remembered why he was where he was. Only now did the discomfort slightly subside. Very important work lay in Alec Moore’s future.
Very important work, and another two dozen vomits, give or take a pip.