by Carol Birch
One of the girls brought in tea, and I felt myself the centre of attention. I was getting used to that, me being the cannibal boy. All of Dan’s eight children were there, the biggest a slow straw-haired boy of fifteen, the youngest a slobbery tot that chomped on its fist on a big sister’s knee. They gathered, standing and sitting, just staring. I winked at one of them, a small boy, who turned coy and looked away. Dan shooed people about, made me sit in the biggest chair by the fire and sat himself down opposite me. He leaned forward, grinning madly, to strike a match on the side of the fireplace. The dog nosed his knee thoughtfully and was rewarded with a rough scratch on its sable loose-skinned neck. His wife poured the tea.
‘Sugar?’ She stood poised with the spoon.
‘Three please.’
‘Sweets for the sweet.’ She smiled. When she sat, the way she drew her skirts about her, straightened her back and lifted her cup to her lips in one long elegant movement reminded me of dancers I’d seen, girls at Paddy’s Goose and the Empire.
I wanted to say to her: he never stopped talking about you. It was a bit of a joke, him and his Alice. But it was all strange. I couldn’t. Something was awkward. She asked very kindly after my ma and the family and if I’d had time yet to think about what I was going to do next, and I laughed and said I was spoilt for choice. We sat for a while talking of this and that and nothing much, till she got up and herded all the others out before her, saying she was sure we two had things to talk about.
‘Shall I send in more tea?’ she asked from the door.
‘Brandy,’ said Dan.
‘Brandy it is.’
The brandy was good. We sat by the fire, smoking and sipping, serene. I remember little of the conversation.
‘She’s very nice,’ I said, ‘your Alice. She’s lovely.’
He nodded. ‘Fell on my feet, there. God knows how.’
‘You’ve got a lot of books.’
He turned his head and looked at them. ‘Natural history,’ he said.
I got up and had a look. There were the works of Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Lyell and Thomas Huxley, although at that time I wouldn’t have known the names of any of those people apart from Darwin, a great tome of whose had had a permanent place on the bookcase in Mr Jamrach’s office for years. One whole shelf was stuffed with Dan’s own scrapbooks and memos from his travels, and for the rest it was all animals and birds and fish and plants, and books about the sea. I picked out this and that one. Audubon’s The Birds of America. Beautiful pictures.
‘Take it,’ Dan said. ‘Go on.’
It was a wonderful book, the smell, the very feel of it. It rested on my lap for the rest of the visit, my hands smoothing its cover. When I stood on the doorstep taking my leave, the sun, appearing suddenly, shone on the cover.
‘I’m going back to sea,’ I told him.
He nodded. ‘Probably the best thing for now. The sea gives a man time to think.’
I held up the book. ‘I’ll treasure this.’
‘Go on with you,’ he said, and gave me a shove.
I went down to the Victoria Dock and looked around and found a ship bound for Spain, and signed. Ma slapped my face when I told her.
‘How dare you!’ she cried. ‘How dare you do this to me!’
‘Ma,’ I said, tears springing to my eyes, ‘lightning don’t strike twice.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Look, Ma,’ I said, ‘I could get run down by a cab tomorrow. Think about it sensibly.’
‘Don’t you talk to me about sense,’ she said, and for a moment I felt sorry, but it was too late. I had two days.
‘Ma,’ I said, putting my hands on her shoulders, ‘I have to do something. It’s only Spain. The sea gives a man time to think.’
‘Oh,’ she said bitterly, ‘you didn’t get any of that done up there all these months then?’ motioning with her eyes to the ceiling.
But she calmed down as she always did, and I let her bustle around me bringing soup and bread. She didn’t say anything any more about not wanting me to go.
Our Captain calls all hands
We sail tomorrow
Leaving these fair pretty maids
In grief and sorrow.
It’s in vain to weep for me
For I am going
To everlasting joys
And fountains flowing.
Funny how sad that sounds.
Then began my ramblings again, and there were adventures and girls and good friends and I got myself a concertina and learned to play ‘Santy Anno’. The whaling was all washed up and I was through with it anyway. It was traders and clippers for me from now on, no more of these long voyages. I shipped to Spain and Holland and the Baltic shores, and once to Alexandria, and was home fairly regular. Once or twice I saw Ish and we were civil but strange with one another. Once I saw her with the fiancé, a good-looking sort, taller than me. I hated seeing her. Sent me home and back to bed with my head under the pillow and an aching mind. And I was well on the way to being one of those salty types who can’t abide the land for more than it takes for him to spend his cash, only I discovered a liking for learning.
16
There are turnings and twistings, a tangle of wool that needs sorting out and winding into a ball, but I ain’t doing it. It’s broth, all sorts thrown in and floating, the things that don’t fit, lost things, offshoots. In and out we roll, waves of time and impression, rolling forever on the shore, waves and waves becoming ripples and ripples, smaller and fainter till sleep comes.
Sometimes we walk along by the old places. It’s changed, the Highway, like a face changes, till you see the face beneath the face beneath the face.
There’s a song, you probably know it:
Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bosun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain’s gig.
God knows how many verses it’s got. I once heard a man sing the whole thing on stage at the Empire and you should have seen the audience falling about. Funny, isn’t it? You’d bring the house down if you got up onstage and made an act of that, someone once told me. Probably true.
’T’was on the shores that round our coast
From Deal to Ramsgate span,
That I found alone on a piece of stone
An elderly naval man.
Of course, you know his story. You find a naval man with a story on just about every other stone around here. They’ve seen a lot, these people of Ratcliffe Highway. They don’t mind me.
One of my shore runs I met Mrs Linver coming out of the stale bread shop, practically knocked her over in fact. A funny old woman she’d become with those wild staring eyes and her frizzy hair gone thin and tarnished.
‘Oh, Jaffy,’ she said, ‘you never come and see me!’
So much time had passed. Her greeting surprised me.
‘I’m not home much,’ I said, shifting awkwardly. Actually I was very glad to see her. God knows why. She was just like the old days, that’s why.
‘Well, you could make the effort now and then,’ she said, ‘it’s not hard.’
‘I don’t know, Mrs Linver,’ I said, ‘I thought you might not want to see me.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ She shifted her basket to the other arm grumpily. ‘You’ve got to get over that,’ and stomped off.
My God, that brought a tear to me. I ran after her. ‘How are you, Mrs Linver?’ I said. ‘Can I carry that for you?’
‘Too late now,’ she grumbled, but I persisted and walked her home to Fournier Street, and went in and built up the fire for her and made tea, and sat and drank it with her for a while. I felt curiously fond of her, painfully grateful that she could bear to be with me.
‘She never comes to see me either,’ she said. ‘Always the same, ain’t it?’
‘I don’t suppose she gets much time,’ I said.
‘She does, she just don’t come. Too busy
getting her beauty sleep. She’s gone back to the singing.’
‘Has she? Where at?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. The Goose, I think.’
‘Still engaged, is she?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, preening as if it was her own beau she was talking about. ‘He’s a lighterman, he is. Very steady.’
I didn’t mean to but I went to Paddy’s Goose. My feet just took me, and there she was sitting at a crowded table, soft and tipsy, in tears, giggling. I hadn’t seen her since that time, so stiff and awkward, when she kissed me in the hall. I walked straight over and pushed in next to her.
‘Saw your ma,’ I said.
She turned to me smiling, her face shiny, sleepy eyed. ‘It’s Jaffy,’ she said, leaning on my shoulder and putting a knuckle in her mouth, ‘my dear old Jaffy.’ The way she slumped, the peculiar fixed stare. Drunk off her silly head. Now I was here I didn’t know what to do.
‘I’m away tomorrow, early,’ I said.
‘Lord,’ she said, her head rolling back, ‘isn’t that always the way?’
I put my arm round her. ‘Where’s your Frank?’ I asked her.
A crowd jostled our shoulders, making the curls on the back of her head bob.
‘Somewhere around.’ She glanced vaguely about. ‘My lovely, lovely Jaffy,’ she said. The kiss she gave me was hot and heavy, blunt and heedless as a child’s. ‘Don’t worry, Jaf, he won’t mind if I kiss you,’ she said, crying all the time, pulling away and wiping her cheeks with her palms.
‘Why are you crying?’
‘Me?’ She laughed. ‘I’m not crying. I’m doing very nicely, darling. Packed my job in,’ she said, ‘Couldn’t stand it. Fool’s game, I can make more down here. Look, sweetheart, watch me,’ and she grabbed and drained her drink straight down, a practised passage, then jumped up and joined the dancers. The fiddler, a less skilful man than Simon Flower, played a waltz. What a show that girl was, smiling her way throught the bright smoky room. I wasn’t sober. How much I remember is true I don’t know, but it seemed to me she never actually took her eyes off me while she danced, even when the fiancé came and put his arm round her waist. But I waited and she never came back to our table. In the end I lost her in the crowd, and went home half hating her.
I steered clear of her after that. She was too unsettling. I went back to sea, and at night in the fo’c’s’le by candlelight I’d look at my Audubon birds. Somewhere I picked up a drawing book like the one Skip used to have, and whenever she came creeping in my head I set to copying the pictures as carefully as I could. It cleared my head, dropped a curtain between me and my ceaseless bloody mind. I didn’t know if my drawings were any good. I liked them. I went mad raiding Dan Rymer’s bookcases when I was home, grabbing any book with pictures of birds in it. Mr Jamrach gave me Cage and Chamber Birds by J.M. Bechstein. My drawings multiplied: lark, linnet, lovebird, woodcock. I loved the detail. Siskin, nightingale, goldfinch, waxbill. Still she wouldn’t go away. I’d draw every known bird in the world. Avadavat, turtle dove, chaffinch, bullfinch. It would be something to do and it would take care of time and give me some pleasure. I’d do all the different varieties of all the different birds. I’d have to learn to paint. It could take the rest of my days.
In the silent bird room at Jamrach’s I sat and drew. The birds on my pages were free. I gave them backgrounds: lakes reflecting castles, cauliflower forests, mountains like volcanoes. I’d seen the bamboo houses of songbirds on Flores and the Sumban coast, a cage like a doll’s house in Patagonia and one like a diamond in Alexandria. I’d seen a cage of ivory, one of glass. Temples and palaces, barrels and bells, hexagons, octagons, domes.
Jamrach’s cages were prisons. I imagined those poor feathery scraps inside, flying wild in my pencil’s dove-grey depths, and remembered the man with the milky eye crafting his bamboo palaces, patiently tapping in the little wooden pegs. Poor things, I thought, you’re here now and there’s no going back. I’ll make you some nice houses. And I drew cages with tops you could lift off, and ones you could open by a door in the side. Space. Lofts for roosting. You could have a ladder between, they’d like ladders.
Then I thought: why can’t you have a shop where all the birds fly about? Like an aviary? An inside garden, with a pergola, and plants that grow indoors, and a glass roof. Like rich people have, only it would be a shop and people could come in and buy a bird. You could make a wild. You could have rocks and streams and rivers and fish and birds and even a few small animals, voles and dormice and such, all living free. Waterfalls and pools. Trees.
People would pay to come in and wander in Eden for half an hour. Everlasting joys and fountains flowing. Bowers for sitting. A treetop walk. Green and yellow parrakeets flitting here and there.
‘You’d never make money like that,’ Jamrach said when I showed him my sketches of the wild.
A cartload of canaries had just come in from Norwich, spangles and lizards. The boys were stowing them, stacking up the waxbills a level or two higher to make room.
‘Nice cages though,’ he said, turning the pages. ‘You could sell those.’
A little laudanum suits me. Now and then. A little absinthe with sugar. It brings a little dream sense now and then. Dreams are not real, but have a very weighty seeming, and spawn feelings, and change the way things look the next day. So, for instance, as I was rapt in the soft shading on a siskin’s throat, suddenly I saw Skip’s face, and knew I’d dreamt him last night and this was why I woke so strange and frail this morning.
Clear as day, he was. First time I ever saw him, first day out on the ship. Mr Rainey clouted him on the head. I was scared of Mr Rainey. The story begins again its endless repetition. Then, dreamlike, I was at Jamrach’s smoking a cigar and idly sketching Charlie the toucan and Mr Jamrach was telling me business was good. Mr Fledge gave up on the dragon idea. Said he fancied a polar bear now. ‘Fancy a jaunt to the Arctic, Jaf?’ Jamrach asked, and we both laughed. Rossetti the artist wanted an elephant, Jamrach said, to clean his windows, but couldn’t stretch to the price. He settled for owls instead, owls and a laughing jackass, a marmot, a wombat. And that was the day he told me about this place that Albert had been using as a warehouse but didn’t need any more, and said he’d help me with the deposit.
I had money put by, I was able.
So I came here, and went to sea no more. But the sea never left me. It called and moaned and dreamed in me day and night, beat like a heart at the back of everything, even when I slept, even as I created my wilderness. I had two storeys with a ladder connecting, and a yard out the back. I lived upstairs and had my workshop below. I discovered an aptitude. First thing I made was a round cage on eight legs, five feet tall and domed, with a carved eagle on the top, and a zigzag trellis. I put in twigs and perches and mirrors, blue-patterned china feeding bowls that slid in and out, a pull-out tray at the bottom. Ten green linnets moved in and seemed content. I tamed a jackdaw. That’s easy enough. Guess what I called him? Jack. He took to sitting on my shoulder picking at my ear while I worked. I made cage after cage after cage, all kinds, bells and squares and lanterns, none too small, and soon enough I was getting a trade.
I sold the cages in the front of the shop and worked in the back. I made a cage that was completely spherical, and another like a huge pumpkin. I made a loft for turtle doves, an aviary for larks and goldfinches, and the whole yard I covered with wire work and laid with turf and planted with shrubs.
I became another sort of recluse.
I read Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication and Haeckel’s Natural History of Creation. I continued with my birds of the world. In the evenings the doves sighed in the loft. At some point I heard that Ishbel was fancy-free again and living towards Aldgate, but our paths hadn’t crossed in a long time. She was far away, part of a life that was gone. I’ll go and see her, I thought, but I did nothing, kept making plans and finding ways out of them. She’ll come if she wants to, I thought. Me and my birds, we’d found a
kind of peace. I was scared. I’d see her and all the old pain I’d tamped down would rise up. I’d look at her face and see her brother, and the great fact of what I’d done, the unthinkable, would fall between us. We were grown-ups now, different people. It was all too hard, too dangerous. My thinking consisted only of a toiling moil of impressions and didn’t stretch to making decisions. My brain hurt. Anyway, I couldn’t stop working on my wilderness. If I stopped something terrible would happen. I carried rocks, chopped eggs for the nightingales, mixed pea meal and moss seed, treacle and hog’s lard to make paste for the skylarks. My heart hurt, and at night I’d look up at the sky and remember the stars at sea and ask: am I forgiven?
You should hear my nightingales. Here in the seedy depths of a Ratcliffe Highway night, they carol like angels. There are no words for that high sweetness. They carol to me that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well (Jaffy Brown, see, became quite well-read), yet I know the tiger’s mouth awaits. Come what may, whatever we may say, the tiger’s mouth awaits. Every little second is the last chance to savour the time that remains. How I swam here to this rock I’ll never know. A canary lands before me on a cherry branch, a jonquil, pure deep yellow.
She had a spangled-back canary on her shoulder next time I saw her, I remember. It was at Jamrach’s, funnily enough, because she never went there. I’d gone to pick up some flax seed and some rape, and there she was sitting in the office with a canary on her shoulder and a wombat on her knee. She was all made up as if she was on her way to work and she looked at me and smiled. ‘Hello, Jaffy,’ she said, and something lifted like a veil.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked her, cheerful as I could sound.