Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

  ‘That’s nothing,’ Tim said when I saw him. ‘You should have heard my ma. Funny!’ And his long, fluttery fingers flew up around his face. ‘“Oh, not you! Not you too, Tim! No-o-o! No-o-o-o! Oh, Lord God in Heaven! N-o-o-o-o!”’

  We laughed. What’s a boy for if not to break his ma’s heart?

  ‘Let’s go to Meng’s,’ he said.

  Ishbel was in Meng’s with Jane from Spoony’s. That’s what she did. Work all night bringing in the money at Quashies, at the Rose and Crown, at Paddy’s Goose, and in the afternoon go to Meng’s. Drago was long gone, broken up bit by bit over one sweltering June week when the sloppy green weeds smelled like Neptune’s armpit. Meng’s was our Drago now. A Chinaman in a shiny red coat stood at the door. The pictures on the walls were silky and the great mouth of the fireplace glowed yellow. I got next to Ishbel next to the wall, Tim on the other end of the bench sprawling round ginger Jane and chewing on a liquorice twig.

  ‘Oh, here they are,’ drawled Ish sarcastically. ‘Hail, the mighty explorers. These bum boils are leaving me, Jane.’

  ‘I know,’ Jane said, tweaking her tight red curls. ‘It’s all the talk.’

  ‘Three years! What am I supposed to do all that time stuck here all on me tod?’ She put her arm round my neck. Two years since we’d started cuddling, but she never let me kiss her. She was driving me mad.

  Meng wanted to know if we were buying. Tim nodded and paid for us both.

  ‘Three years?’ said Jane. ‘That’s a very long time.’

  ‘Maybe less,’ I tossed in in the interests of truth.

  ‘Well, you couldn’t very well go much further, boys, could you?’ Jane said. ‘Bob says he don’t want to lose you, you know, Jaf.’

  ‘I think it’s mad.’ Ishbel fussed her hair, still hanging onto me. ‘I think Fledge is mad. Must be, the way you never see him, and he wants this and he wants that and he never shows his face, mad bugger, completely insane if you ask me. Probably lives in a castle and never goes out and wears a mask because he’s hideously ugly.’

  ‘No doubt.’ Tim was leaning down towards Jane’s round creamy throat. ‘Who cares? He’s paying.’

  ‘It’s not a real dragon,’ I reminded them.

  ‘How do you know?’ Tim said. ‘No one knows what it is.’

  There was a dragon on the broad mantelpiece, along with a selection of pipes and an owl carved out of wax. I thought of this beast, this old story. Deep in a forest I saw it, great sad red eyes and a crimson tongue, forked like a swallow’s tail and thin as a grass blade, flicking in and out. Sitting there, waiting to be found.

  ‘Dan Rymer thinks there’s something,’ Tim said staunchly.

  ‘Oh, and he knows, does he?’ Ishbel said. ‘He knows everything.’

  ‘He knows a hell of a lot, that’s for sure.’ Tim put back his head and blew a great blue cloud of smoke up at the ceiling, smiling. His hair glowed gold in the firelight. I don’t even know if he really wanted to go. He said he did but you never knew with Tim. ‘Even Jamrach doesn’t know the half of what Dan knows about wild animals,’ he said.

  There are dragons and dragons, of course. It was an eastern dragon we were after. The one on the back of the doorman’s shiny red coat and the one on the mantelpiece were eastern dragons, fierce sort of winged snakes with many coils, huge whiskered heads and enormous, bulging eyes.

  ‘It’s not a real dragon,’ I repeated. ‘It hasn’t got wings.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re going, Jaf,’ Ishbel said. She put her face right in mine so I could taste her spicy breath. I pulled back a little. It was always a now and then thing, and only when she felt like it. That wasn’t fair.

  ‘Glad to be rid of me?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ She put her head on my shoulder and it wasn’t fair. ‘You’re the one with sense. You’ve got to look after him.’

  Tim, sinking into the lap of Spoony Jane, snorted at the idea of me looking after him. I placed my arm about Ishbel’s waist and she let it stay there. ‘It’s only a big crocodile,’ I said. ‘It’s just a crocodile hunt, that’s all.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, smiling, her heavy eyes sleepy, ‘and perhaps it’s not even there.’

  Tim slept in the round lap of Spoony Jane. White dress, white shoes, Jane herself smiling as she hummed a little tune I knew from Ishbel, who sang it years ago on the balmy corner of Baroda Street by the herb man’s stall. The sky raining, dark spatters on the stones, the women beaming at the little thing, blue-jacket sailors, her mother standing by with huge-bosomed mermaids in her basket. Painted Ishbel singing ‘The Mermaid’, combing her hair with an imaginary comb while admiring herself in an imaginary glass. And when she sang ‘Three times round went our gallant ship, three times round went she …’, about in a circle she would dance three times and finish by falling down in a graceful heap of skirts on the pavement, arms aloft waving like seaweed.

  … and she sank to the bottom of the sea,

  the sea, the sea

  and she sank to the bottom of the sea.

  *

  Their birthdays fell on the first of August, his and hers.

  For her tenth I gave her a shell. She graced it with a look.

  For her eleventh I gave her a flick book. She laughed once or twice, playing with it under the rain-drummed canvas.

  For her twelfth I didn’t bother and vowed I wouldn’t bother again.

  For her thirteenth I gave her an orange.

  For her fourteenth I gave her a mouse with particoloured markings. She called it Jester and it ran about in her apron.

  For her fifteenth I gave her a gold ring I stole from a drunken sailor in the Spoony.

  Jester died.

  For her sixteenth I gave her a special and very beautiful rat. She loved that rat. She called him Fauntleroy. When she walked down the street Fauntleroy would peep from her hood. He was snow white with bright pink eyes and he liked music. Fauntleroy was with her when she came to say goodbye.

  Lord Lovell he stands in his chamber door

  Combing his milk white steed

  And by there has come Lady Nancy Belle

  To wish her lover good speed.

  Oh, I’m sailing away, my own true love,

  Strange places for to see …

  For the life of me I can’t remember the next line.

  I’ve seen strange places and they have seen me. They have watched me with a calm appraising eye …

  Two days before we sailed I was standing in the silent bird room, a place that drew me back again and again, and I got a feeling of being watched.

  ‘Just came to say goodbye, Jaf,’ she said.

  ‘Aren’t you coming to see us off?’

  ‘Oh, I will,’ she said, ‘but they’ll all be there then, won’t they?’

  I fell on my knees and kissed her strong stumpy hands and bitten nails and wept and told her I loved her. No, I didn’t.

  I said, ‘Oh,’ and that was all.

  ‘I’ve only got a minute,’ she said.

  ‘Work?’

  ‘Ma wants me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s going to be funny with you lot gone.’

  I laughed. ‘Wish you were coming?’ I asked.

  She pulled a face. ‘Whale ships stink.’

  We were awkward. This may be the last time, I thought. I put my arms out and gathered her in close. ‘I hate you both for going,’ she said, suddenly tearful. When I kissed her on the mouth she kissed me back. Long sweet minutes till she pulled back and said she had to go, and took my hand and dragged me outside with my head reeling. I walked her to the back gate. Cobbe was mucking about in the yard. The lioness was gnawing peacefully on a lump of beef, holding onto it with her paws, licking amorously, eating with closed eyes.

  ‘You’ll look after him, won’t you?’ Ishbel said. ‘He’s not as brave as he makes out, you know.’

  ‘Neither am I.’

  ‘Pa won’t shake his hand,’ she said. ‘He cried. Don’t tell h
im I told you.’

  ‘’Course not.’

  We stood smiling in a slightly demented way.

  ‘He’s a big baby really,’ she said.

  ‘So am I,’ I said.

  ‘How’s your ma?’ she asked.

  It might never have happened.

  ‘She’ll do. She asked Charley to have a word with me about staying and getting into the fish business. “You serious?” I said. “Work on a fish stall or go around the world?”’

  She laughed. ‘Oh well,’ tidying her hair, ‘better be on my way,’ and was gone.

  Three years and come back a man, come back changed. See the strange places I itch to see. See the sea. Could you ever get sick of the sight of the sea? She said that to me one day when we were standing on the bridge. And she had never even seen it, and I pray she never will.

  I went home and looked out of the window at sunset. It was May. The sky was a red eye, the rooftops black. There were islands in the sky. The waves were bobbing. It was the Azores, those beautiful islands. Jaffy Brown is gone. He turned, was turned, a ghost on a god-haunted ocean. My eyes and the indigo horizon are one and the same.

  Early in the morning, a straggle of dockers and lightermen on the quay, a bunch of old women and a few mothers, not mine. Ma had gone all distant on me. We’d said our goodbyes. She hated all that, she said. If you’re going to go, just go, and get yourself back as quick as you can, and don’t expect me to like it. Mr Jamrach didn’t want me to go either. When I’d taken my leave of him the night before he’d clapped me on the arm and brought his face close to mine, and stared unwaveringly with watery blue eyes, making me uncomfortable. ‘You look out for yourself, Jaf,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ll not see you on the quay.’ We’d shaken hands very cordially and smiled awkwardly, till someone came to the door wanting birds, allowing me to slip away fast.

  Dan Rymer’s wife was standing on the quay, a tall, straight-backed, fair woman with children in her skirts and a baby on her arm. A shipload of Portuguese sailors disembarking for a spree cast eyes on Ishbel, come straight from Paddy’s Goose in her red shoes.

  She didn’t cry or make a fuss. Each of us got a peck on the mouth. She hugged Tim for a long time and me for a little less.

  ‘You’ll bring him back safe, Jaf,’ she said.

  I still see her standing there, waving, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  5

  When at last I set foot on-board, the terror that churned my guts was all one with a kind of joy. I wanted to look a whale in the eye. The only whale I’d ever seen was on a picture in the seamen’s bethel, the one that swallowed Jonah. It had no face. It was just a great block, a monstrosity with a mouth. But a whale did have eyes, I knew, and I wanted to look into them, as I looked into the eyes of all the animals that came in and out of Jamrach’s yard. Why did I do this? I don’t know. Nothing I ever solved.

  We were all of us wild, great thumping fools with thumping hearts running about that first morning, making a pig’s ear of whatever we turned our hands to. We knew nothing, nothing at all, and we didn’t know each other yet either. Eight of us were green, eight out of a score or more of men – men, I say – fourteen our youngest, Felix Duggan, a mouthy kid from Orpington, sixty our oldest, a scrawny black called Sam. Thank God for Dan looking out for us, with us but not with us. Seven years since I met him, but I never knew him till we sailed together. I do now. I know him better than anyone now.

  The Lysander was a beauty, ageing, well preserved, small and neat. The captain watched from the quarterdeck as we made fools of ourselves, while the first mate, a florid, thick-featured madman called Mr Rainey, strode about swearing and cursing at us in a deranged manner. Christ Jesus, what have I done? I thought. Am I mad? Oh, Ma. The masts and the yards and the sails, the whole great soaring thing was the web of an insane spider against the sky. Ropes, ropes, a million ropes and every bloody one with its own name, and if you got the wrong one you buggered up the whole thing. How we ever got off I’ve no idea. It was the efforts of those few who knew what they were doing: the old black called Sam, another black by the name of Gabriel, a tall Oriental called Yan, and our Dan. These four got the ship off with the help of a few lads not much older than me and Tim, who’d sailed maybe once or twice before and therefore considered themselves old seadogs. We greenies stumbled and bumbled around getting in everyone’s way. I lost sight of Tim. Lost Dan. At every moment I tried to look as if I was confidently on my way from one important task to the next, wearing a face I hoped gave an impression of eager intelligence. I caught sight of the dockside moving away, the people a blur, heard the sudden sweet hollow chiming of a London clock bidding me a long farewell.

  A boy with a round dark head appeared very suddenly in front of me in my confusion. His face was awkward, stoic in its expression, the mouth self-conscious. He looked like I felt, wavering on his feet with no idea of what to do. For a second we locked eyes in dumb mutual understanding. Then he smiled with his mouth still closed and stiff, a peculiarly leisurely smile for the circumstances.

  Mr Rainey, a clatter of boots and a horse-like snorting, landed between us from above like a god-thrown thunderbolt. ‘What do you think this is?’ he demanded. ‘A garden party?’ clouted the boy on the head and sent him flying. ‘Cretins,’ he roared, stomping away down the deck, bandy-legged and malevolent. God knows why he didn’t hit me. Too zealous in his progress towards the next target, I suppose, some poor boy above in the rigging: ‘You fucking imbecile!’ he screamed, head back. ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you and all your fucking bastard kin! Get down here!’

  I got away quick, looked for Tim, but couldn’t see him. I stood useless. Someone clipped me on the back of the head and told me to look sharp.

  ‘I don’t know what to do!’ I appealed, suddenly outraged. How could anyone expect me to know what to do?

  The man was a lanky, skinny thing with a long sensitive nose like an anteater’s and arched brows that gave him a clownish appearance. ‘Here,’ he said, and hauled me to the windlass. Oh God, the bloody windlass. A great horizontal wheel on the deck up near our fo’c’s’le – oh, to be down there with my sea chest – pushing it round alongside a big hefty blond boy built like an ox. Even he was grunting and straining, swearing doggedly in his own language. I was breaking my fucking back. The long skinny cove jumped in to help us, straight brown hair, thin as everything else about him, dangling in his eyes. Nothing much on his bones, but he was strong. ‘Hup, now,’ he said, ‘push!’

  Push. Push. Beyond anything you ever thought you could do, push. I was vaguely aware of the others running about, whistles, shouts, laughter, massive creakings and groanings of the ship as we manhandled her, and of a new weightlessness that gave me a falling sensation even though my feet were fixed firmly on the timbers.

  The shipload of Portuguese sailors clapped and cheered us on, and there was no more time to look back to the drifting quay, where Ishbel watched with the dozy lightermen and grieving mothers and the wife of Dan Rymer.

  We took the watery road out of town. The wharves and taverns drifted by, the sun grew brighter, throwing gold over the warehouses and the tops of the ripples. Sails flapped in the breeze. The captain, a solid, square-chested, square-faced man with a pale freckled face and thin ginger eyebrows, came and walked among us with a shaggy brown dog at his heels, half smiling at no one and speaking only to his first mate. I was glad there was a dog on-board. I hadn’t expected that.

  Me and Tim stuck with Dan. We had a lot to learn, he said, and set about teaching us the naming of things right away. All we ever knew fell away behind us like arms letting go. The land became green and rose up on both sides, and the marshes swallowed us up. The mournful calling of long-legged birds swooped above the reeds. Seagulls with savage eyes sailed vigorously on the air alongside, keeping us company all the way to North Foreland, where Mr Rainey sent me up to the masthead.

  I’m a good climber and I have no fear of heights; it was the best of all times to go aloft, w
ith the full sea swelling before us and the topgallant sails up to take the wind. First time I’d seen the real sea. Too big when you first see it, of course. A shining you could never have imagined, even though you’ve imagined so much. Up there, full sail on the Lysander, I was riding a living thing. Her bowsprit rose and fell like the motion of a horse’s neck at full canter. The spray roared, and the whaleboats shuddered in their holdings. I looked down and saw Dan Rymer at his ease, speaking with the captain on the quarterdeck. Scrawny Sam, his face a mass of wrinkles, ran along a spar with the ease of a waterfront cat, smiling as he went. The captain’s shaggy brown dog came trotting along the deck and lifted its leg against the mainmast, and I had no notion of time or the future or anything else at all, and was completely and quite terrifyingly happy and knew that I’d done the right thing.

  Later, just before the captain gave his speech, me and Tim had a single minute’s peace standing at the rail together looking down at the sea. He put his arm round my shoulders. ‘This is the life, Jaf,’ he said. He’d been like a dog let off the leash all day. It was being outside he’d missed, not the animals. He was trembling faintly, whether it was because he was cold or nervous, I don’t know. It’s a strange thing when you first go off into the unknown. You want it and you’re scared. Tim would never admit he was scared. Never. He was, though, any fool could see that.

  ‘This is the life,’ I said.

  That was the whole of our conversation, then the captain called us up on the quarterdeck for the choosing of the watches and the whaleboat crews.

  We had three whaleboats, not counting the spares. I didn’t want to be on Rainey’s. We had Captain Proctor’s and Rainey’s and Comeragh’s – the second mate that is – who turned out to be the tall thin one with the big nose who’d clipped me on the back of the head and told me to look sharp. He and Rainey both had a good six inches on Captain Proctor, who, though stout and strong, was not tall. They stood respectfully, two tall, dark vases flanking a pale round pot, Rainey with his hands clasping some papers behind his back and his feet apart, Comeragh seeming to be smiling all the time. But it was just the way his face was.