by Carol Birch
‘We can sleep under hedges,’ she added, ‘and beg. You can be a gyppo and tell fortunes. I know a girl at the Siamese Cat that tells fortunes, it’s dead easy. You look like a gyppo anyway.’
Tim came whistling along the wall. He was a good whistler. First we heard him, then his dirty bare feet appeared over the canopy and he dropped down beside us, frog-fashion, pulling his boots from round his neck and tossing them up the boat. ‘What’s the fun?’ he asked.
‘We had strawberries,’ I said. ‘You missed them, but there’s some beer left.’
Ishbel tossed the bottle and he caught it and took a swig. The sky had that look it has, as if it’s about to settle down for the night.
‘I’m not going to work,’ Ishbel said.
‘Don’t say.’ He smacked his lips and swigged again, wiping the bottle top considerately with a big, grimy palm before handing it on to me. It was as if nothing bad had happened between us. A great flapping of birds’ wings crossed the river.
‘I’m hungry,’ I said, ‘I could eat a horse.’
‘That’s a thought,’ said Ishbel.
‘Any boodle?’ asked Tim.
She shook her head. ‘Spent it.’
‘Ah well,’ he said and took a pipe out of his pocket. We sprawled in the bow, smoking as the evening cooled and dimmed. Ishbel lay on her back with her feet resting on Tim’s knees.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘Should I go?’
‘Up to you.’ He watched coils of smoke stalk and twine in the still air and sang ‘Tobacco’s but an Indian weed’, a song Dan Rymer taught us once when we were roaming about and met him on the Wapping Steps.
Grows green in the morn, cut down at eve …
Ishbel kicked him. ‘Miserable,’ she said.
He laughed and continued and I joined in. We’d sat on the Wapping Steps with Dan. Dan smoked a long white pipe, it stayed in the corner of his mouth while he sang:
The pipe that is so lily white,
Wherein so many take delight;
It’s broken with a touch,
Man’s life is such …
And we’d all joined in the chorus:
Think of this when you smoke tobacco.
We sang it round the yard sometimes with Cobbe, and laughed. But we could never remember all the words, nor could we now, so we gave it up and lay for a long time in comfortable silence, till Ishbel said in a small, sad voice, ‘I’ll have to go back now, I suppose.’
Tim opened his eyes and stroked her foot. They were not identical, but not far off. His chin was longer, her hair a shade darker. She had dimples on both sides, large, flickering, nervous things that flashed on and off. He had none. It must be funny to look at another face and know it’s just like your own. Like looking in a mirror. Sometimes they stared into one another’s faces as if fascinated, and once I’d seen them close their eyes and explore each other’s features with their fingers, hers bloody from biting, his long and graceful, like blind people do. It made them laugh.
We sighed, tossed the empty bottle overboard, slung our shoes round our necks and went in turn along the wall.
Mrs Linver made us have a wash, then gave us some broth, thin and delicious. The old man whittled, the fire crackled. There we were, the three of us sitting at the table messing about and niggling at one another, when their mother came bustling over and offered Ishbel a nip of gin. ‘A drop, lovey,’ she said, ‘takes the edge off.’
‘I’m not going,’ said Ishbel, not looking at her but taking the gin anyway.
‘Now, don’t play stupid.’ Mrs Linver scowled at the rat’s tail hair straggling over Ishbel’s shoulders. ‘Have you taken a comb to this all day?’
‘No.’
‘I can see that. You’d better start getting ready.’
‘Can’t make me. No one can make me.’ Ishbel glanced at me with mischief in her eye and suddenly smiled. You understand, her look said.
Her mother had turned away but swung round. ‘I haven’t got time,’ she snapped. ‘Up. Now.’
‘I’m not going.’ Ishbel knocked back the gin in one and slapped her lips.
‘Don’t be soft,’ said Tim. ‘It’s only work. We all got to work.’
‘I’ll work when I want to,’ she said.
‘If you don’t go down there tonight, they’ll not have you back.’ Her mother took hold of her arm and tried to yank her off the chair, but she just laughed and held onto the table. Only when it began to tilt and wobble, me and Tim hanging onto it, everything falling over and splattering about, only then did she let go and allow her mother to drag her to her feet.
‘I’m not going, you stupid woman!’ she shouted right in her mother’s ear.
Mrs Linver winced and rubbed the side of her head.
‘I’m tired!’ Ishbel screamed. ‘I don’t feel like dancing, can’t you get that into your stupid head?’
‘That’s dangerous!’ her mother screamed back. ‘You can make somebody go deaf doing that!’
‘I don’t care!’
That’s when her mother slapped her. I’d seen scores of these scenes, but this one was different. This time Ishbel slapped back. It was quick – a second – and there were her mother’s glasses askew, and her mother’s eyes exposed. We all gasped. Ishbel began to cry and fell on the floor by the old man’s knees. He shifted his benign glance towards the top of her head vaguely, scraping gently away at the scales on the tail of his latest mermaid.
Mrs Linver took off her spectacles. Her mouth was trembling, her eyes pouched and meekly narrowed. She wiped the glasses on her apron with shaky hands, glancing up at us, mournfully blind.
‘Oh, Ma!’ cried Tim, jumping up and running over to give her a hug.
‘You’ll find out one day, you selfish girl,’ Mrs Linver quavered.
Ishbel jumped up, face streaked with tears. ‘I know, I know, I know,’ she said harshly.
‘It’s all right, Ma,’ Tim said. ‘Don’t upset her any more, Ish. It’s all right now, Ma.’
‘Yes yes yes, of course of course of course.’ Ish smiled extravagantly and leapt to her feet. ‘Time for work! Time for bloody work.’ And off she flounced into the inner room.
She was sullen as we walked her to work twenty minutes later. She’d put on too much powder to hide the slap mark on her cheek, and her lips were too red. ‘You never stick up for me,’ she said to Tim.
‘That’s not true.’
‘You always take her side.’
‘What am I supposed to do? I have to go to work. I’m up four in the morning sometimes. So’s Jaf. Everyone has to work.’
‘I’m sick of it,’ she said and kicked a stone. When she looked up again her eyes were shiny.
I put my arms round her. ‘I’ll wait for you and take you home when you’ve finished,’ I said.
‘No need for that.’ Tim pushed against us.
She gave me a hug. ‘Thank you, Jaffy.’ The white grains of her powder got up my nose and made me want to sneeze. She looked like a doll. ‘You’re very noble.’
‘Noble?’ snorted Tim.
I wanted to hold onto her. But I let her go.
He came round her other side and placed himself in front of her, saying nothing. For a long time he just looked into her eyes, his own rough and tender. Something was passing between them, some brother–sister thing I could have no part in. His shoulders were hunched, his lower lip pendant. There was something old in his face. Where it was coming from I couldn’t tell. She softened visibly.
We walked on, the three of us separate. At the Malt Shovel door, she turned to me and said, ‘You might as well run along home now, Jaffy. Thanks ever so.’
‘She’s got to get ready now,’ Tim said.
Ma was out when I got home. I remember I took down Dan Rymer’s telescope and poked it out of the window and looked over Watney Street, closing in on odd details here and there in the thickening dusk: a face, a cat, an artichoke, a shining puddle under the pump.
A long time ago i
t went to the bottom of the sea. Wish I still had it. It was a lovely thing – the patterns in the high-polished mahogany, the lacquering on the brass. On the sunshade, silver engraved with a feather pattern. The telescope I have now is stout and plain, but you can’t fault its clarity. I look at birds, and on certain nights I look at the stars through the mesh over the garden. I got to know the stars well at sea. You can’t rely on the sun and moon – they do funny things sometimes – but you can rely on the stars. When you look at them through a telescope, they start to flutter like little white wings burning in a silver fire. Then, if you focus your lens here below on a bird’s eye, you can see the shine in it, the life. And sometimes a thing comes so close it makes you jump.
It’s the same when you look at the past. Far away the white wings twinkle, nothing can be known. Further in, details: the riggings of great ships that web the darkening sky; rooftops, clear on the inner eye, magnified; and sometimes a pang, up close. Tonight is a late spring night. The carving on a piece of scrimshaw, rough beneath my fingers, reminds me of the feathers engraved on the old telescope I had when I was a boy, and I remember a long-ago night: a wonderful day gone, my heart thrumming softly, coming home and crying, and not knowing why, swooping here and there with my all-seeing eye over rooftops, thinking about Ishbel. She’d be on the stage, grinning wildly, catching coppers in her small, bloody, stubby-fingered hands. She’d sing ‘Little Brown Jug’, ‘The Blind Boy At Play’ and ‘The Heart That Can Feel for Another’, and the drunken sailors would laugh and weep.
PART TWO
4
So much for Jaffy the child. He didn’t last long, did he? What was he? A butterfly thing. A great wave came and took him away. A tiger ate him. Only his head remains, lying on the stones. Let it speak. Let it roll around old Ratcliffe Highway, a hungry ghost, roaring its tale for all who will hear. I know why the sailors sing so beautifully on their boats out in the river, why my raw senses wept when I listened in my Bermondsey cot. I found out when I was fifteen.
Tim was a bigwig now. When Bulter got married and moved away, Jamrach had said he was too clever for the yard and too dreamy to work with animals, so me and Cobbe and a new boy now did all the dirty stuff, and Tim was an office boy and got more money. He wore a collar to work. His mother starched it for him every night. By this time, we were close. He could still be a swine, but he was just one of those the world forgives. Some are. I didn’t speak to him for three weeks once and he couldn’t stand it, came over all noble and upright and faced me like a man, said I was the best friend he’d ever had, the only real one. Life’s short. What can you do?
The day we heard about the dragon, he was in the yard with us, bouncing from foot to foot in the cold. Mr Fledge’s man and Dan Rymer had been in the office all morning, hard in talks about something momentous. They’d sent him out so they could be private.
‘Something’s afoot,’ he kept saying importantly, affecting to know more than he did. There were kiss curls on his forehead, and his eyes were bright. His breath hung on the air. They called him in when Fledge’s man left, and ten minutes later he came running back out.
‘I’m going to sea! With Dan! We’re going to catch a dragon! And we’ll be rich!’
‘There are no dragons,’ Cobbe said.
But Tim babbled on about how Dan knew a man who knew a man, who saw one walking out of a forest on an island east of the Java Sea. How Mr Fledge, who always wanted what no one else had, what no one else had ever had, was now determined to be the first person in the civilised world ever to own a dragon. A ship was leaving in three weeks’ time and Tim would be on it, right-hand man to the big hunter, sailing east and still further east till they’d rounded the globe.
‘He’s gone off his rocker,’ Cobbe said, pointing to the side of his head. ‘That’s what it is.’
I pictured a big flying monster that flaps its wings slowly like a heron, breathes out fire, fights heroes, sits on a hoard of treasure or eats a girl. Very big nostrils, round, the sort you could crawl up like a Bermondsey sewer.
I was the one who was good with animals, everyone knew that. Why wasn’t I going?
‘I don’t think much of your chances,’ I said, ‘not with the fire.’
‘What fire?’
‘They breathe fire.’
‘Don’t be stupid. That’s only in storybooks. Don’t believe me, do you? Come on.’ He was mad, beaming with delight, pulling me along into the office where Dan Rymer and Mr Jamrach were drinking brandy in a thick smog of smoke.
‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Tim said. ‘Tell him.’
He went behind his desk and leaned back horizontally in his chair with his long legs stretched out across the desk and his fingers knotted behind his head.
‘It’s true,’ Jamrach said. ‘Fortunately Mr Fledge has more money than sense.’ He and Dan burst out laughing.
‘A dragon?’
‘A dragon of sorts.’ Dan doodled on a scrap of paper. ‘If it exists. Certainly the natives believe it does. The Ora. There have always been rumours. I talked to a man on Sumba once who said his grandfather had been eaten by one. And there was a whaleman once, an islander. He had a tale. There are lots of tales.’ He showed me what he’d drawn. It looked like a crocodile with long legs.
‘It’s not a dragon if it hasn’t got wings,’ I said, ‘not a real dragon.’
Dan shrugged.
‘We’ll be gone three years,’ said Tim rapturously.
‘Two or three,’ said Dan. ‘Depends.’
‘On what?’ I asked. He shrugged again.
Mr Fledge owned a whale ship called the Lysander. It had sailed out of Hull and was this moment loading at the old Greenland Dock. They’d join the whaling crew on the voyage and take care of wildlife – should there be any – on the way home. ‘Bring back a dragon,’ Fledge’s man said, ‘and you’ll never have to work again.’
I let Tim crow for a few days then went down to the Greenland Dock. The Lysander was a very old vessel, one of the last of its kind, I should say, and it was looking for crew. I signed. Mr Jamrach knew well he could get another boy for the yard.
‘You need me for the animals,’ I said when I told Dan I was going. ‘I’m better than him.’
He leaned his head back and squinted into the white smoke trickling up his face, and said, ‘Oh well, I suppose you can keep an eye on Tim.’
Poor Ma, though, she was distraught. ‘Oh, I don’t want you to go to sea, Jaffy,’ she said when I told her. ‘I always knew this would happen one day and I always wished it wouldn’t. It’s a horrible life. Much too hard for a lad like you. You can’t turn back when you’re out there, you know.’
She was living in Limehouse those days. She’d taken up with a fish man by the name of Charley Grant, a good enough sort. She was preparing herrings on a board when I told her, slitting their bellies and slapping them down, whacking their spines flat with the blunt of a knife.
‘I know that, Ma. I won’t want to turn back.’ It seemed wrong to show my delight considering the state of her, but it was hard not to. She’d gone red and was fighting to keep in the tears. As for me, my feet were lifting from the ground.
‘Hark at him,’ she said, ‘he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’
Poor old Ma. You’d never take her for a child now. She’d thickened and grown weatherbeaten, and her hair was going grey at the sides. Still walked like a sailor though.
‘I always knew it would come to this,’ she said, with her sore-looking eyes and me feeling bad. I loved my ma. To me, she would ever and always be a warm armpit in the night.
‘What you want then, Ma?’ I said, trying to jolly her along. ‘Eh? What shall I bring you back?’
‘I don’t want anything, you silly sod.’
‘Don’t worry, Ma! It’ll be the making of me. Can’t hang about here all my life, can I? There’s no money here. How you expect me to look after you in your old age if I hang around here all my life? This is a chance of a lifetime, this i
s. Think!’
‘That’s the trouble,’ she said, pushing me aside with a fishy hand and taking off her apron, ‘I’m thinking all the time. Oh damn. Have you eaten?’
‘Had plenty. Look, Ma, just pour me some tea, will you?’
‘Well, it all sounds ridiculous to me,’ she said, going over to the fire.
I laughed. ‘And there’s the beauty of it,’ I said. ‘It is! Be proud! You can tell everyone: my son’s gone off to catch a dragon. Like knights of old.’
‘You said you wasn’t going to be involved in any hunting!’ She turned accusingly, the poker in her hand.
‘I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m only saying. Of course I’m not.’ I laughed again. I felt quite hysterical. ‘That’s Tim, not me. But I’m part of the enterprise.’
How very important that sounded. How I milked it with the girls at Spoony’s and the Malt Shovel. The enterprise! The great enterprise!
‘You’re only fifteen,’ she said, ‘and you know you’re not a big boy.’
‘Don’t I just.’
Oh, didn’t I just. It had its rewards. They loved me like a babe, those big whores, all wanted to take me into their soft, lemony, lavender bosoms. Many a time for sure I sank my face in there between the creamy swells and drank deep like a babe of mother’s milk, and never a penny was I charged for what others paid for. I was a big man now, though. Fare thee well, you London girls. Jaf Brown is off around the world, and when next you see him he’ll have a tale to tell.
‘Oh, Jaffy, I don’t want you to go!’ Ma palmed an eye angrily. ‘I wish you’d—’
‘Please, Ma,’ I said, embarrassed and irritated.
Please don’t spoil it for me, I wanted to say. I don’t want to have to worry about you while I’m out there, do I? Please please, Ma, don’t make it hard.
‘There’s money in it, Ma,’ I said. ‘A lot of money in it. He’s a very rich man.’
‘Oh, sit down,’ she said, ‘have your tea.’ She knew there was nothing she could do.