Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

  ‘I came to see the wombat,’ she said, looking down at the furry brown creature.

  Mr Jamrach got up from his desk. ‘Poor thing won’t last,’ he said.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing yet.’ He chuckled and poked it in the stomach.

  ‘I like wombats,’ Ishbel said.

  ‘Doesn’t have luck with his animals.’ Jamrach fiddled with the blinds. ‘Rossetti. The last one ended up stuffed in his hall.’

  ‘Well, this one won’t. Will you, cherub?’ She lifted it up in front of her face as if it was a baby, an amiable round bear of a thing with a very large head and beady black eyes, gave it a kiss and deposited it once more in her lap, where it sat like Buddha, staring out at the world.

  ‘You’ve got a canary on your shoulder,’ I said. My mouth had gone dry

  ‘Just grew there.’ She smiled, rocking the wombat. Her bonnet was shabby. ‘Mr Jamrach,’ she said, ‘could you move this little birdie, please? I don’t want it shitting down my back.’

  Jamrach leaned across the desk and took the bird onto his finger. ‘Nice little batch, this lot,’ he said.

  I went out and filled my sack. I felt a little frantic. I even thought about not going back into the office, just walking out and going home and pretending nothing had happened. But my feet walked right back in and I licked my lips and said, ‘What are you doing these days, Ishbel?’

  ‘Same old thing. Bit of this, bit of that.’

  ‘Ah.’ Dumb.

  ‘So …’ The wombat nuzzled under her arm. ‘How are you, Jaffy? I hear you’ve got yourself a lovely little bird place.’

  ‘It’s coming on,’ I said.

  ‘A haven of tranquillity!’ Jamrach announced floridly.

  ‘Can I have a look at it?’ she asked. ‘Are you going back there?’

  ‘If you want,’ I said. There was a faint, pounding beat inside me: take care, take care, take care.

  ‘Oh good!’ She smiled, jumped up and handed the poor wombat over to Mr Jamrach. We left it to its fate and she walked back to the shop with me. ‘Isn’t this funny?’ she said. ‘You’re taller than me.’

  ‘By a head at least.’

  She put her arm through mine just the way she used to sometimes, just as if we were back all those years ago and nothing had ever happened. Why is she doing this? Does it mean anything? I was walking fast. Every now and then she ran a few steps to keep up with me and the sight of her old scuffed boots when I looked down filled me with such tenderness I could have cried.

  ‘Is it far?’ she asked. ‘I’m supposed to be at work in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Not far. See the yellow sign?’

  Jack flew to my shoulder as soon as I opened the door. She jumped away with a little scream as his fierce black face flapped towards us.

  ‘So this is it,’ I said proudly.

  She laughed. ‘All this is yours, Jaffy. All this!’ And I was guilty all over again for being alive and having all this. But she meant no harm. She flitted about admiring it all, the cages, the parrakeets, the parrots, the Java sparrow, my pictures stuck all over any bit of spare space. ‘This is nice,’ she kept saying, and when we stepped into the yard she clapped her hands. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she cried, running up one of the gravel paths, turning, running back. I’d planted a rockery and the campanula was running everywhere. The linnets were in song.

  ‘What’s it like where you are?’ I asked her.

  ‘Horrible,’ she said. ‘Stinks.’ She was standing next to me by the door. ‘Look at you,’ she said, ‘you with the bird on your shoulder, matches your hair. What a pair you are.’

  ‘Can you bear to see me?’ I hadn’t meant to say it.

  She became very serious, put her hands on my shoulders and stared in my eyes. ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘I don’t know what I think.’

  She went on staring and my eyes started to water. ‘I thank God every day that you survived,’ she said very quickly, then turned away and walked briskly back to the front door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I dashed after her.

  ‘I have to go to work.’ She turned with the door open. The street outside was settling into its evening.

  ‘But you’re coming back?’

  ‘What do you think?’ she said. She was smiling. Then gone.

  At midnight she returned, unpainted, like the girl who ran about the docks with us, like her brother. She never went away again.

  17

  All this was a long time ago.

  Things are very different now. You can buy fruit in a sealed can, and meat from America; and the Highway’s going up in the world. St George’s East they call it nowadays, but people around here still call it the Highway and I daresay always will. They’ve closed down a lot of our familiar haunts, and they’ve cleaned up all from here down to the docks. The bridge of sighs, where people used to chuck themselves over – that’s gone, and Meng’s with the old Chinaman on the door. Spooney’s went years ago. Still a good few of the old dives and dens left though. Not that I’m in them much these days. Too many responsibilities. My fifth decade gathers on the horizon like weather at sea. There is a place on my arm which is eternally bruised. The other night I caught a glimpse of my face in the glass and it pulled me up short. Didn’t look like me. And when I look at the faces of my friends I see that they’re all changing too, as are the streets outside.

  Sometimes, waking, I forget where I am. It’s the sounds that bring me back. There’s an alehouse not far away. When I float through to consciousness its sing-song ding-dong comes to me from afar through the void, like a ship through fog. It reassures me to hear its sentimental din still merrying up the dark reaches of the night no matter how far I’ve sailed in dreams. You’d think after all this time I’d know I was back, wouldn’t you? But sleep still scrambles me. When my head falls down that great gulf it crashes like a bauble into a million fine shards, and all of my beings fly out: the bawling babe, the sewer boy, the yardboy, the boy who went to sea, the boy who came back, the man. Takes a while to get back to this: me, now. Sometimes in that halfway place I don’t know where I’ll be when I emerge. I float in a murmuring womb, helpless, waiting to find out. The mermaids take my hands, kiss my lips. My tiger takes me up in his mouth, comes for me one more time, carries me from here to there, casually drops me. Here a drop, there a drop. Anywhere will do. Carried. That’s me. Carried. Still a babe.

  I’m often dreamy. When I dream I feel the sea under me, and sometimes I think I hear it too, sounding away behind the distant music of the Highway. It never goes away. It’s what I always loved about this place, though I wasn’t aware of it when I first came. Stand in Ratcliffe Highway and you’d swear there was salt on the air.

  Night sounds steal into the garden where I sit watching the smoke from my pipe rise up to the stars. The nightingale sings. I close my eyes and trace with my fingers the outline of a parrot carved into a piece of scrimshaw lying on the palm of my left hand. It was a gift.

  Rossetti and Darwin died two years since. At that time too there was another passing, unremarked, my good friend Dan Rymer, nearest thing I ever had to a father, who died of a swelling on the brain at the age of seventy-six. Still, a good age. His widow still lives in Bow. She’s remarried and still has the youngest two of her children with her. She was twenty years his junior. Mr Jamrach long since retired and Albert’s got the old business, but these days it’s me the real bird-fanciers come to, people from the Friendly and the Hand in Hand. Our shop’s on the right-hand side as you go towards Limehouse. You can buy a parrakeet or a pair of lovebirds and a decent cage to put them in. Or you can walk through the shop and pay your penny to go and sit as long as you like in the bird garden, by the fountain, or the statue of Pan who plays his pipes all day to the chaffinch and the bullfinch, the golden carp in the pool, the honeysuckled pergola.

  Her ma likes to go in there with her knitting. Her ma lives with us now. Peace and quiet, she says, th
ough you can still hear the sounds of the Highway. It’s a good old place, the place where late of night I go with my pipe, look up at the stars and roll away on billowy waves, hear the ocean’s roar, and the sky all thunder, feel the swell, hear the voices of the demons of the deep howling into it all. One way or another I suppose you could say that voyage was the making of me. I’d have been a yardboy. Is that what it was all for? To make of me the man I am now? Is God mad? Is that it? Stuck between a mad God and merciless nature? What a game.

  I don’t fit the world of everyday things, the people going about their daily routines, bed on time, up on time, dinner on time. I don’t want to be a part of it. Sometimes I long for a monk’s cell, a hole in the rock, a bower in the woods, so my mind can flood all directions like water, the sea.

  Time to gaze. On waves. Rise and fall, the breathing of the world.

  This hurly-burly palls. Ishbel, of course, has to live with it. I’ve told her most things over the years, even about the dragon. ‘Poor thing,’ she says softly, meaning me and the dragon both. She’ll never understand, but how could she? Understanding doesn’t matter, it’s the constancy that counts, so: I must go back to sea, she won’t let me go back to sea. We argue about that.

  ‘You’d manage.’ I say. ‘It wouldn’t be for long. David could help out.’ But she won’t hear of it.

  ‘Sorry, Jaf,’ she says, ‘me and Ma can’t take it no more.’

  So I go out in the garden. I’ll never go back to sea. My eyes are closed. The children have been in bed for ages. I take from my pocket a piece of scrimshaw with the likeness of a parrot carved on it, turn it over and over between my fingers. Walrus. Dan too had his solitudes, these unaccompanied places. What I’ve seen and done and weathered is eternal, as much a part of me as my blood and bones. I saw skies of angels, heard laughter from the deep. The nightingale sobs. I rub the place on my arm where Tim used to hold onto me on the boat. Still aches. He comes to me sometimes. How could he not? He isn’t angry. He’s my friend. We are still in this together.

  I open my eyes and see upon the violet-blue sky, moonbow, peerless, singing in the east. Very far away still on my journey, very far away and more beautiful than you could ever imagine.

  Acknowledgements

  This is a work of fiction that borrows from history. The only character in the book who actually existed is Jamrach himself, all the rest are made up.

  There are two true stories:

  Firstly, a Bengal tiger escaped while being delivered to Jamrach’s menagerie near Ratcliffe Highway. An eight-year-old boy who walked up and patted it on the nose was knocked down and carried away in its mouth, but escaped unhurt after Jamrach jumped on the tiger’s back.

  Secondly, after the sinking of the whaleship Essex in the early nineteenth century, a sixteen-year-old boy called Charles Ramsdell shot his childhood friend, Owen Coffin, after the drawing of lots. Owen Coffin insisted on the lot being honoured. Charles Ramsdell survived, went back to sea and lived to a ripe old age.

  There are several survivor accounts of the Essex voyage, all of which can be found in The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale by Thomas Nickerson, Owen Chase and others. The classic book on the Essex is Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea.

  Many thanks to the Civitella Ranieri Foundation who gave me six wonderful writing weeks in Umbria, also to The Authors’ Foundation for their generosity in awarding me a grant. Thanks to Nina and Dave Bleasdale and to Frances and Tim Whittaker, who gave me quiet places to work. Thanks to Richard Butler for his invaluable technical help, and also to Martin and Joe, Emily Atherton, Mic Cheetham, Simon Kavanagh, Francis Bickmore and all at Canongate who have given their help and support.

  Also by Carol Birch

  Scapegallows

  The Naming of Eliza Quinn

  Turn Again Home

  Come Back Paddy Riley

  Little Sister

  Songs of the West

  Life in the Palace

  Copyright

  This digital edition first published by Canongate Books in 2011

  Copyright © Carol Birch, 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.meetatthegate.com

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 041 5

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire