Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

  We watched till there was nothing left. They downed the lot, bones and all, and one by one moved heavily away into the scrub, all apart from one that headed off up the straight side of the cliff face opposite, like a gecko up a pane of glass, climbing quickly and gracefully with its huge curved claws outspread.

  It gave me a fright to see it climb like that. Imagine climbing, chased, slipping, sweating.

  ‘See that,’ Dan said, when we had drawn back from the rocky edge and regrouped. ‘It could climb a tree easy, I’d say.’

  ‘No need to sound so fucking cheerful about it,’ said John Copper. ‘I’m shitting myself here.’

  ‘We all are, John,’ said Dag, and slung an arm about his neck roughly for a second. ‘Aren’t we?’ he appealed to the rest of us.

  I nodded vigorously. Tim said nothing.

  Dan became serious. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I didn’t bring you out here as lizard food. What’s the matter with you all? This is a hunt, it’s no different from going after a whale. You do as you’re told and no one comes to any harm. Look,’ he took out his gun and pointed it at the sky, he smiled, ‘you’re all armed. Any doubt at all and you shoot. No second thoughts. I won’t let any one of you be harmed, so stop whining.’

  ‘But there’s so many of them!’ John wailed.

  ‘So there are,’ said Dan. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Good,’ echoed Dag, and a huge grin spread madly across his face.

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Dan, with emphasis. ‘That is good. I know what to do now. Now I know what to do.’

  Dan killed a boar. We trailed its bloody carcass a mile or more till we came to a place where the trees thickened. Here he set us to making a hide and banging in stakes in a ring, weaving them round with rope lashed fast. The smaller of the Malays, deft as a squirrel, shinned up a tree with another rope in his mouth. At the top he held on with the strength of his legs, tying the rope with his hands before sliding back down to join us, hauling down the sappy branches. They spread like a sheltering fan over the trap. We hacked clear a doorway wide enough for the thing to get in, and Dan set up a rope contraption that went round the doorway and back to the hide. So we watched and waited, taking shifts.

  We waited half a day and the sun went down. We moved from the hide and set up a camp not far away, lit a fire again, but there were no jokes tonight. Dan said we had to keep quiet. We were in no danger, he said. If it comes, it smells the bait and goes for that. We’d hear it if the trap was sprung, believe me. Oh, believe me, he said. No fears, lads. I’ve done this a million times. So we sat around whispering to one another and chewing hardtack and thinking of the others down on the beach gorging on meat, and wondered if they were wondering about us, where we were and if anything terrible had befallen us. My belly was getting sore. When it was my turn to lie down I didn’t sleep, just drifted into a peculiar place in which the island had become a vast ship sailing on through hot darkness, and I twitched and murmured till it was growing light again.

  In the fading dawn, the island birds whistled and chattered and carked in the forest beneath us. Blue Tattoo had gone scouting. The smaller Malay sat cross-legged, picking sleep out of the corners of his eyes with patient zeal. I went out for a pee and saw how dark the sea was on the horizon. Indigo. You could see islands from here. And how still it all was, just for a moment, till I was joined by Tim.

  ‘Shouldn’t come out on your own,’ he said, peeing beside me.

  So the morning rolled on as the day before, waiting, watching, seeing centipedes the size of worms come out of the rough thatch of the hide, thinking of the crawly bodies in the mud like a bunch of maggots at a bit of liver. Nasty things. Muddy things. The dragons of stories were beautiful, flying the sky wonderfully winged, deadly but magnificent. But these – these were massively ugly, with a brutal, careless power more nightmare than fairy tale. Their eyes lacked anything a human could comprehend. More so than a whale, more so than a snake, more so than a frog. That one had looked at me. I was sure it had. It looked at me and it was like being seen by a demon.

  Blue Tattoo, our silent scout, came silently beckoning, two hours after sunrise. ‘Dragon,’ he said, the first English word I’d heard him speak. Dan, pulling up his breeches as he emerged from the bushes, nodded once sharply. You’d have thought he was just strolling back from the privy. The rest of us went in twos, having a horror of being disturbed in the middle of a shit by a big scaly head with evil teeth emerging from the undergrowth. It was hard to go, even with Dag keeping watch and saying ‘sure, no dragons’ in a hearty whisper every twenty seconds. Dan was mad though. Maybe you had to be mad to prosper in his line of work. Mad or stupid or in possession of a sixth sense; all three perhaps.

  ‘So, lads,’ he said, calm as can be, ‘this may be the one’, and set off with a worried-looking Tim in tow. I knew Tim was worried not because he showed it but because he’d gone very quiet and was keeping away from everyone as much as possible, apart from Dan, with whom I was vaguely aware he’d been going off into little huddled conferences all night long.

  Stealthy as cats, licking our lips and squaring up bravely, the rest of us followed.

  The hide was cool and green, out of the sun, tamped down flat from the watches. Through the overhanging leaves we saw the dragon edging along the fringe of grassland, then striking across open scrub towards the trees. It was a big beast, mightily draped in skin, a syrupy drool dripping from its closed jaws. It had seen the boar, or at least smelled it. I could hear the buzzing of lively early morning flies from here. The dragon approached steadily, with purpose. There was something of the elephant in the stolid girth of its legs. A few feet away from the trap it stopped, one foot slightly in front of the other. So close. So big. The brows hung over, the small still eyes not dead, but full of a sharp alien consciousness. It looked straight at the hide and us.

  And so, a frozen moment that went on and on, long enough for a million itches to come and go and for the long red crawlers to wrap themselves unimpeded round your cringing shanks like the worms of Thames mud. Long enough for us to note the curved cruelty of the creature’s claws, the slippery roundedness of the snaky tongue, the sheer mass and bulk and power of the thing. It would be like tackling a rhinoceros.

  Half an hour it stood, ineffable. Then everything happened very fast.

  It turned once more to the buzzing meat and nodded slowly once or twice, raising itself high, then charged. Dan let go the trigger, the tree sprang up, the rope pulled tight round the dragon’s belly and it went mad. It was supposed to go all the way in the trap but it had got caught half in and half out of the doorway, and it kicked and bucked and twisted there like a salted slug, snapping dementedly and hammering the earth. A thick purplish-brown clag of half-digested slime spewed from its jaws. They were out the side of the hide, Dan and Tim and the two Malays, but they couldn’t get near. The stakes were cracked and bending, the dragon sliding in its vomit, rolling in it, the four of them stalking it round, keeping back. The tail beat like the flukes of a whale and made thunder, the long sharp claws clenched wildly at anything within reach. It was a killer, and it was furious and terrified.

  It broke free, the rope round its middle trailing a long sliver of wood the size of a broom.

  Dan had been right to choose Tim for the hunt. He was just where he needed to be and he was calm, or at least he seemed calm. Is that bravery? I don’t know if he was brave or just in a trance. He got scared, I knew. Maybe he was now, but if so, he’d put the fear away in some other part of himself that didn’t show. Not to anyone else anyway, but to me because I’d known him so long. Those veiled yet humorous eyes, self-conscious. That set mouth. He had the fear certainly, but he wasn’t going to break. Me, I might have run. I might have jumped the wrong way at the wrong moment. So might he, but it wouldn’t be because his nerve failed. I was proud. Our Tim, Ratcliffe Highway Tim, a golden brave in a hunt. He was all sure movement, manlike. They all were, the Malays lithe and nearly naked, Dan, who was not elegant, b
ut a hard hunched little knot of a man, suddenly graceful and skilled as a dancer, stepping forward with the rope made into a noose and throwing it resolutely at the creature’s head.

  It missed and he dragged it back and had it recoiled and rethrown in a second. It missed again, and again. The dragon frothed, convulsing, voiding itself from both ends and soaking the ground with sudden spurting shoots of piss. He got it with the fifth throw. The rope dropped magically over its head during an upward thrust, pure luck or genius I’ll never know. Dan was sweating and red in the face. He stepped back, throwing the end of the rope to Tim and immediately swinging another coil down from his shoulder and getting ready to throw again. Tim hauled off and tied his end to a tree, his lips moving as if he was singing or praying and his eyes glazed.

  The whole thing took only a few minutes, I suppose. We came from the hide when Dan called us, when the monster, still furiously kicking and heaving, was secured to the trees by three strong ropes, one at each end and one in the middle. Nine or ten foot long, that thing was, and stinking to high heaven. I sometimes think my life has been overfull of stench. The creature was caked in its own shit and piss and vomit, and the carcass of the boar was beginning to stink too. The air of this place was now thick and hot with a smell that made me think of Bermondsey pure sellers, their hallways full of buckets of compacting dog shit for the tanner’s gate. It was the kind of smell that makes walls cringe and plants curl and die.

  They cut the stake away. All of us helped now. My heart was hammering like mad, my cheeks were burning and I felt funny, as if I was coming down with a fever. Our faces were wild and tight and surprised, and we laughed at one another amazedly. Dan quieted us. The Malays were laughing too, and a sense of suppressed carnival seized us. Dag, the strong one, hacked down a young tree to which we tied the creature – I could not call it a dragon seeing it like this, not a dragon, it never was – swaddling it very securely like a terrible mad baby so it couldn’t struggle too much and damage itself. All of us got covered in its filth. It was a giant reptile with a dreadful head all coated with its own slime. It struggled all the time, a frantic pounding panic it could do nothing to control. It was possessed. If it got loose it would rip us all limb from limb.

  It took all of us to carry it. We’d been out for two days, but for part of that time we’d backtracked. It took us a day to reach the ship, going downhill all the way. The animal struggled nearly all the way, only falling quiet from exhaustion from time to time just long enough to get the strength back to kick a leg, twitch a few muscles, clatter its jaws, jerk like a landed fish, flop and gape and shudder.

  Dan walked alongside me and told me how me and him were going to put the dragon in the cage. We had to go in quick while it was in a daze, he said, and take the ropes off the head and tail. The one round its middle would stay for the time being.

  ‘Here’s what I think, Jaf,’ he said. ‘I think we put him in head first, then I go in and take his head while you get the tail. Think you can do that?’

  ‘Have a go,’ I said.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘the tail’s no less dangerous than the head, fact it’s probably worse, it’s got a life of its own and no intelligence. Think of it like a big pulse that might throb at any second. All the power’s in the tail. Get in and out fast and be ready for anything. Don’t take chances.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  That tail in an enclosed space, I was thinking. But Dan would be in there first holding its head (the teeth, the jaws that snap) and everyone would be standing by. And I was the one who was good with animals. I felt like laughing. Dan said we weren’t too far from the shore now, though God knows how he knew. The dragon was giving up, just hanging there with no more than the odd kick now and then. It was starting to get dark, but there was a big moon, thank God; and thank God no other beasts came near, no scorpions ran, no snakes hissed and bit unseen in the grass. It was dark when we arrived. The Malays went ahead with flares and we followed them out from the tree line and saw a moonlit bay, faces in the flickering light madly grinning and staring, everyone running to greet us, all lit up orange against the black. A big fire burned down by the sea.

  Captain Proctor came running, his face fat and pink and eager.

  ‘My God!’ he was crying over and over. ‘My God!’

  Samson ran after him, but stopped short and put his head down when he saw the dragon and began to bark. Proctor grabbed his collar, muzzling him with one hand. ‘I’ll tie this one,’ he said breathlessly, hauling him away.

  Getting the dragon in the cage was easy. It was exhausted. Gabriel, open-mouthed, wide-eyed and very serious, lifted the bars high and we pushed the thing in. It was my turn now. Me and Dan. We went in to remove the ropes. Dan took the head, I the tail. I didn’t think. I seized it, loosed the knot and slid the rope smoothly, pulled it away and was out of the cage, Dan after me a second later. Gabriel dropped the bars, Yan and Simon shot the bolts.

  A deep, roaring cheer went up. The dragon shot all of its limbs out at once as if stabbed, raised its head blindly and went wild again, a renewed frenzy so punishing and despairing that it struck us all dumb. If you could have seen that monster flickering in the firelight, beating itself senseless against the sides of its cage. I prayed to God Joe Harper’s work held good. But the cage was solid, timber and steel, and the dragon was weaker by now of course. Even so, it continued a good half an hour with its writhing and lashing and hissing, till at last it fell into an agonised drooling stasis, slit-eyed, flat on its belly with four fat stumpy legs and long tail spreadeagled. Twenty cruel talons flexed and clenched with a rapid unconscious innocence, like the hands of a baby screaming with colic.

  8

  It was my time now. Tim’s part was done. I was the boy who was good with animals. I was to accompany the dragon at all times now. It was me stayed with it rowing back in the boat, me stayed with it when they hauled it over the side, me loosed it from the cage into its pen under the fo’c’s’le head. It was me and Dan hosed it clean as we could, gentle as we could. The hogs started going mad at the smell of it, and Wilson and Gabriel had to shift them away aft. And when we’d cleaned the poor dragon we hosed ourselves clean, and threw our filthy clothes over the side as a bad lot and got fresh ones. To be clean and dry and safe on-board Lysander. To sleep tonight in my bunk. The smoky old fo’c’s’le my home. I was dreaming on my feet, awake and talking as you do when really you know you are asleep. You begin to think you’re in one of those dreams where you think you’re awake, and then you’re not sure, and then it all starts to go funny and you know you must be dreaming, but you’re dreaming in a dream, and suddenly it’s all layers going in and in and in, like the rings round an old tree stump or striations in an elaborate rock, and you get scared. Then you wake up. But sometimes I wonder whether I ever really did wake up again. These dreams are so real and true, I don’t suppose it much matters one way or the other. You could say I got lost in the rock striations.

  The pen was the size of a small room and had a pool about six foot square in one corner, drainable from the deck, and a trapdoor to put food through. It was sheltered from the weather, with straw and greens and sand, and even a rock or two to make the creature feel at home. No one should go near it but me and him till it was settled, Dan said, shooing everyone away.

  ‘Give it peace,’ he said. ‘Pity the poor thing.’

  Wilson made a great feast of best salt beef and sweet potatoes, and we ate and drank till stuffed and told our tale a hundred times. However we told it, something was missing. How say? The awe, as if I’d come to the edge of a big hole in the earth and peered in and seen something wild and unspeakable looking back. Tim wore a constant diffident smile and joked about the whole thing, and the laughter of relief, slightly mad, billowed in gales about the deck. They must have heard us on the island, all those strange creatures, and the lonely beast must have heard us in his pen. I thought of him in his misery. I would restore him to life and health if I could, and bring home to
England a thing of wild splendour that would do me proud.

  That night I slept dreamlessly, waking bright and sparkling from a crystal spring, renewed.

  It was with some cockiness that I performed my ministrations to the wretched thing that first morning under the gaze of dozens of eyes. No more slaving for me. No more swabbing and scrubbing, hard sand in my cuts. My new responsibilities gave me a leg up the pecking order. Already I was the one they were consulting on questions of dragonology. As if I knew. They were mad to see it, but I’d only let them near one at a time and not too close, not wanting to upset it again now it had quieted down. It had gone into a corner of the pen and was lying flat with its eyes closed, breathing hardly at all. When Dan went in it didn’t move. We had sticks but we didn’t need them. I thought it was dying. Actually it was gathering strength.