Читать книгу Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch - Страница 10

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 is. 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.

‘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 him 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.