Читать книгу Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch - Страница 7

2

The first time I saw Tim Linver he was standing out in our street shouting up at the house.

‘Jaffy Brown’s wanted!’

It was the morning after my great encounter. I was standing in the room of Mari-Lou and Silky, who knew nothing of my adventure, the tops of my toes still burning and my plasters turning dirty and raggy. Mari-Lou, unlaced, fat brown breasts spilling, counted pennies into my palm for the fried fish stall, and a penny for me for going. Mari-Lou wore her hair very black with scarlet roses at the sides. Elaborate crinkles sprouted round her eyes, and a great round belly stuck out in front and carried her forward. ‘Now, Mister Jaffy,’ she instructed, ‘no brown bits. Yah? No brown bits and a nice big pickle, and no you sucking on it.’ Her rouge was faded. The mountain of silk that was Silky was sitting up in bed with her two thin breasts drooping down to her waist. They’d have their fish supper in bed and be snoring deeply in half an hour.

And the cry came: ‘Jaffy Brown’s wanted!’

I went to the window and looked out with the pennies warm in my hand and there he was. Older, bigger than me, different as could be, straight goldy-haired, pretty and girl-like of face. Tim Linver. It was late morning, the street thronged.

‘Who wants him?’ I shouted.

‘Jamrach wants him,’ he said. ‘Come down.’

‘What about our cod, Mister Jaf?’ Mari-Lou’s long red claws dug into my arm.

‘I’m going!’ I cried and bounded down the stairs.

The boy came forward. ‘You him?’ he asked gracelessly.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve got to get you a raspberry puff,’ he said morosely. ‘Jamrach said.’

The raspberry puffs in the windows of the pastry cook’s shop I walked past every day on Back Lane were beyond me. The berries bled juice through their hairs. The furrowed cream was pale gold, the pastry damp with sugar.

The tiger had opened magical doors.

‘I’m running an errand,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get fish.’

‘Well, I’ve got to get you a raspberry puff and take you to Jamrach,’ he said, as if that was far more important. ‘Getting the special grand tour, you are. See all the wild animals?’

Mari-Lou leaned out of the window. ‘Off you go and get that fish, you, Mister Jaf!’

‘What’s it like getting eaten?’ the boy said.

‘Eaten?’

‘You’re eaten,’ he said, ‘so they say.’

‘Do I look it?’

‘It’s all around that you’re eaten,’ he said, ‘eaten up and just your head left on the stones.’

I saw it, my head on the stones. It made me laugh.

‘Just your head,’ he said, ‘and your hands and feet. And some bits of bone, I suppose, gnawed ragged.’

‘Didn’t hurt a bit,’ I said.

Mari-Lou threw a bottle at my head. It missed and smashed in the gutter.

‘Two ticks,’ I said to the boy. ‘Wait.’ And I ran all the way to the fried fish stall and all the way back.

Mrs Regan was just taking up her post on the doorstep and looked disapprovingly at my filthy feet as I shot past her. ‘You’ll get blood poisoning, you will,’ she remarked. I pelted upstairs and shoved the steaming bundle into Mari-Lou’s eager red claws. Mari-Lou and Silky liked their fish drenched till it was soggy. My eyes stang from the vinegar. I’d forgotten the pickle. You’d have thought I’d robbed a cripple. I had to give them back a penny, but I didn’t care. Wild animals were roaming in my head: lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes. I was going to have a raspberry puff and see the animals.

The boy was still there when I reached the street, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders high. ‘Come on,’ he said, and I followed his straight, insolent back down through the crowds between the market stalls till we came out on Back Lane, where he barred me from going with him into the shop with one movement of his arm and not a word. Himself, he went in and requested one raspberry puff to eat now please, Rose, darling, as if he was a man. I did not know then that he was only a year my senior and thought he must be at least eleven.

I could see Rose through the glass, a nice smily girl with flour dusting her eyelashes. Then he strolled out, looked up at the sky, handed me a raspberry puff nestled in a little napkin for me to hold to keep my fingers clean. Not that they were clean in the first place.

There he stood with his hands in his pockets and watched me eat the raspberry puff. The first bite was so bitterly sweet the corners of my mouth ached. So beautiful, a film of tears stung my eyes. Then the pain dispersed and there was only delight. I had never tasted raspberry. Never tasted cream. The second bite was greedy and gorging, stopping my mouth up. He had eyes like a statue. Never moved. He’d probably never had a raspberry puff himself. He was better dressed then me, shoes and all, but still, I bet he never ate a raspberry puff in his life.

‘Want a bit?’ I said.

He shook his head sharply and made that banning motion with his arm again, smiling a little, proudly.

The smell hit me first, a good thrilling smell, stronger than cheese. Then the noise. We came in from the street to a lobby where coats were hung, and boxes and great sacks stored, and a green parrot leaned over me and peered into my face. It looked as if it knew something funny.

‘She speaks,’ said the boy. ‘Go on, Flo, say: “Five pounds, darlin’.”’

Flo cocked her head sharply, shifting her gaze to him in a sympathetic way but saying nothing.

‘Five pounds, darlin’! Go on, you stupid bird.’

She blinked. He made a quick sound of disgust and led me to an open door from which a smog of dark smoke was visibly spreading into the hall.

‘Here he is, Mr Jamrach. He’s had his creamy doodah.’

I followed him in. The great, red-faced Jamrach came down through the murk with a smile and cried: ‘Ha! Jaffy Brown!’ He punched me gently on the shoulder. ‘Did you have a good supper last night?’ He bent down with his face so close I could count the red veins in the whites of his eyes. The air was heavy, lush and rotting, filled with traces of bowels and blood and piss and hair, and something overall I could not name, which I suppose was wildness.

‘Mutton stew,’ I said. ‘It was lovely.’

‘Excellent!’

Mr Jamrach stood up and rubbed his palms together. He wore a business suit that made him look stout, and his hair was parted in the middle and slicked down with oil.

‘Bulter,’ he said to a pale young man scowling and picking his nails behind a very untidy desk, ‘get Charlie out.’

Bulter stood, long and thin, flounced round the desk and stopped before a large cage. A wonderful, outrageous bird perched attentively, watching the dim room as if it was the most wonderful show. The bird was all colours, and its beak was bigger than its body.

‘Come out, Charlie, you stupid bird,’ Bulter said, lifting the latch.

Charlie danced with delight. Didn’t he crawl as gentle as a sleepy kitten into Bulter’s arms and nestle up against his breast with that hard monster beak and the downturned head bashful? Bulter stroked the black feathers on top of the bird’s head. ‘Daft he is,’ he said, turned and placed Charlie in my arms. Charlie raised his head and looked into my face.

‘He’s a toucan,’ Tim said.

‘Got the touch, you have,’ Bulter said to me. ‘He likes you.’

‘Likes everyone,’ Tim said.

Charlie was a sane and willing bird. So was Flo, the parrot in the lobby. The birds that came after were not.

Mr Jamrach led me through the lobby and into the menagerie. The first room was a parrot room, a fearsome screaming place of mad round eyes, crimson breasts that beat against bars, wings that flapped against their neighbours, blood red, royal blue, gypsy yellow, grass green. The birds were crammed along perches. Macaws hung upside down here and there, batting their white eyes, and small green parrots flittered above our heads in drifts. A host of cockatoos looked down from on high over the shrill madness, high crested, creamy breasted. The screeching was like laughter in hell.

‘This is how they like it,’ Jamrach said.

My eyes watered. My ears hurt.

‘They flock.’

‘They’re crying out for parrots,’ Tim Linver said sagely, bobbing alongside with a loose and cocky gait.

‘Who is?’

‘People is.’

I turned my head. Small ones, pretty things, blue, red, green, yellow, in rows behind the wire, good as gold and quiet.

‘My parakeets,’ said Jamrach. ‘Lovely birds.’

‘In and out in no time, this lot.’ Tim rocked back on his heels, speaking like a man, as if the entire operation belonged to him.

The second room was quieter. Hundreds of birds, like sparrows but done out in all the colours of the rainbow, in long boxes. A wall of bluebirds, breasts the colour of rose sherbet. The air, fluty with song, like early morning.

‘Six shillings a pair,’ Tim said.

The third and last bird room was completely silent. All the way up to the ceiling, tiny wooden cages piled on top of one another, in each one a bird just the right size to fill the space, all of them mute and still. More than anything I’d seen, this room bothered me. I wondered if Mr Jamrach would let me have one. I could tame it and it would fly free in our room and sing.

Out into the dazzling yard. Bulter from the office was there with another man, sweeping up outside a pen. A camel chewed behind the bars. A camel has to chew like it has to breathe. I know that now. Then, I might as well have stepped into a picture book. The animals were the stuff of fairy tales, the black bear with the white bib, the sideways-looking eye of the baby elephant, the head of the giraffe, immense, coming down at me from the sky to wet me with the heat of its flexing nostrils. I grew light of mind from the gorgeous stench. A wilderness steamed in the air all about me. And then I saw my tiger in his cage, with a lion on one side and some dog things on the other. The lion was a majestic and dreadful cat with the stern, sad face of a scholar and wild billowing hair. He looked me in the eye for a whole moment before turning away in total indifference. A thick, pink tongue licked out, carressing his nostrils. The hair stood up on the backs of the dog things. My tiger paced, rippling, thick tail striking the air. Little black fishes swam on his back. Scimitars, blades, dashes, black on gold, black on white. Heavy-headed, lower jaw hanging slack, backwards and forwards, steady:

three paces and a half – turn—

three paces and a half – turn—

three paces and a half—

‘See!’ said Jamrach. ‘This is the bad boy. He knows he’s been a bad boy, he is shamed, see.’

‘Has he got a name?’

‘Not yet. He hasn’t found his buyer yet.’

‘Who buys a tiger?’ I asked.

‘Zoos,’ Tim said.

‘London Zoo,’ I said. I’d never been there.

Tim and Jamrach laughed as if I’d said something funny.

‘Not just zoos,’ Jamrach said, ‘people who collect.’

‘How much for my tiger?’ I asked.

‘He is a full-grown Bengal tiger,’ Mr Jamrach said. ‘Two hundred pounds at least.’

Tim babbled: ‘Two hundred for a tiger, three hundred an elephant, seventy for a lion. You can pay three hundred for some lions though. Get the right one. An orang-utan, now that’s three twenty.’

We went up a ladder to a place where there was a beast like a pie, a great lizard mad and grinning, and monkeys, many monkeys, a stew of human nature, a bone pile of it, a wall, a dream of small faces. Baby things. No, ancient, impossibly old things. But they were beyond old and young. The babies clung fast beneath sheltering bellies. The mothers, stoic above, endured.

‘And here …’ Jamrach, with some showmanship, whipped the lid off a low round basket. Snakes, thick, green and brown, muscled, lay faintly flexing upon one another like ropes coiled high on the quay. ‘Snappy things, these,’ Jamrach said, putting back the lid and tying a rope round it.

We passed by a huge cat with pointed ears and eyes like jewels that miaowed like a kitten at us. Furry things ran here and there about our feet, pretty things I never could have imagined. He said they came from Peru, whatever far place that was. And right at the end in the darkest place, sitting down with his knuckles turned in, was an ape who looked at me with eyes like a man’s.

That was all I ever wanted. To stay among the animals for ever and ever and look into their eyes whenever I felt like it. So when, back in the smoky office with the pale clerk Bulter lolling behind his desk once more drinking cocoa, Mr Jamrach offered me a job, I could only cry, ‘Oh yes!’ like a fool and make everybody laugh.

‘Very small, isn’t he?’ Tim Linver said. ‘You sure he’s up to it, Mr Jamrach?’

‘Well, Jaffy?’ Mr Jamrach asked jovially. ‘Are you up to it?’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘I work hard. You don’t know yet.’

And I could. We’d be fine now, Ma and me. She was on shifts at the sugar bakers, the place with the big chimney, and I was starting as pot boy at the Spoony Sailor that very night. With all that and this new job, we could pay our rent up front.

Tim came over and bumped me roughly with his shoulder. ‘Know what that means, Lascar?’ he said. ‘Clearing up dung in the yard.’

Well, no one could be better suited for that than me, and I told them so, and that made them laugh even more. Mr Jamrach, sitting sideways at his desk, leaned over and folded back the white paper cover from a box next to his feet. Very carefully and with the utmost respect, he lifted out a snake, one greater than all the others I’d yet seen. If it had stretched itself out straight and stood itself on the tip of its tail, I suppose it would have been taller than me. Its body was triangular, covered in dry, yellowish scales. Its long face moved towards me from his hands. I stood three feet or so away, and it stretched itself out like a bridge between me and him, straight as a stick, as if it was a hand pointing at me. A quick forked tongue, red as the devil, darted from it a foot from my nose.

‘S-s-s-o,’ said Jamrach in a snake voice, ‘you are joining us, Master Jaffy?’

I put my hand out to touch, but he drew the snake in sharply. ‘No touching!’ he said seriously. ‘No touching unless I say so. You do what you’re told, yes?’

I nodded vigorously.

‘Good boy,’ he said, coiling the snake back into its box.

‘Will I be in charge of him, Mr Jamrach?’ asked Tim anxiously. ‘See,’ he said to me, ‘I know about everything. Don’t I, Mr Jamrach?’

Jamrach laughed. ‘Oh, indeed you do, Tim,’ he said.

‘See,’ said Tim, ‘so you have to do what I tell you.’

Jamrach told me to come back tomorrow at seven when they were expecting a consignment of Tasmanian devils and yet more marmosets. He rolled his eyes at the thought of marmosets.

That night I went to work at the Spoony Sailor. It was a good old place and they were nice to me. The landlord was a man called Bob Barry, a regular mine host, tough as nails and rumpled as year-old sheets. He played the piano, head thrown back, voice like tar banging out some dirty old ditty. Two men in clogs danced a hornpipe on a stage, and the waiter got up and did comic songs dressed as a woman. I ran about with beer all night and cleaned up the pots and mopped the tables. The ladies pinched my cheeks, a big French whore gave me bread and bacon, everything was jolly. When everyone was up on the floor dancing the polka, the pounding sound of all the feet was like a great sea crashing down.

The women in the Spoony Sailor were whorier than the ones in the Malt Shovel, but not as whory as those in Paddy’s Goose, though the Goose girls were by far the swishest and the prettiest. I knew a girl there who wouldn’t be called a whore, said she was a courtesan. Terrible women, some of them, I suppose, but they were always nice to me. I’ve seen them rob a sailor blind in less than ten minutes then kick him out bewildered on the street. Then again, I don’t know if I ever saw a sailor who wasn’t pretty much down on his knees begging for it anyway. The women slapped them about, but the sailors kept coming. I watched them reel about like stags, and remembered how beautiful their singing could be in the night, out over the Thames, heard from my cot in Bermondsey. Sailors from every farthest reach of the world, all the strange tongues blending and throbbing, and our own English tongue which rang as good as any.

I always knew I’d be a sailor. In my cradle, playing with my toes, I knew it. What else could there ever have been? The sailors had made my blood move before I was born, I now believe. As my mother stood one night upon the shit-smelling Bermondsey shore with me in her belly, the sailors had sung out there across the great river, and their siren song had come to the shell-pink enormity that was my listening ear newly formed in the amniotic fluid.

Or so I believe.

The air was woolly in the Spoony. The floor was slippery with the saliva gobbed out all over the floor. And yet, look up into the rafters and see the smoke curling there so elegant, while two golden girls painted like dolls sing high over a pair of keening violins. Could there be much better than this?

The place was still wild when I knocked off at midnight and went home to Ma. The streets were full and roaring. There was money in my pocket. I bought a great lump of brown sugar and sucked it all the way home. Ma was still out, so I asked Mari-Lou to make sure she told her to call me at half past six sharp for my new job, then went to bed and closed my eyes, determined to sleep. But there was so much noise out on the street, and so much singing going on somewhere in the house, that all I could do was doze and dream, all about a big black sea pushing up against the window.

‘Last boy we had got bitten by a boa,’ Tim said. ‘Died. Foul it was, you should of seen.’

First words he spoke to me in the early morning yard. Dark and cold, fog catching the throat.

He ruffled the jet black curls that made me look like a Lascar, and poked me. ‘What’s this? What’s this? Little Lascar, are we? Little Lascar, is it?’ Ma said my dad was a Maltese or a Greek, she wasn’t sure which, but anyway not a Lascar. You could never tell with her though; she said different things at different times. Tim was smiling, a sudden dazzle of big square teeth. We were waiting by the pen. Bulter, who served as keeper as well as clerk, was lounging by the gate with Cobbe, a brawny great square of a man who swept the yard and all the pens.

‘These devils,’ Tim said, ‘these devils have got a rotten temper.’

‘What are they like?’ I asked again, but he wouldn’t tell me. They’ve got great big mouths, he’d say, or: They stink; but what kind of a thing they were he wasn’t telling. He enjoyed his superior knowledge, holding it from me like a dog with a bone. A marmoset was a little monkey, that I knew. I wasn’t scared of a little monkey. I’d made up my mind not to be scared of any of these things, but it did help if you knew what you were up against. A devil? A devil from Tasmania, wherever that was. I pictured a thin red demon with horns and a tail, a whole cartload of them, walking on two legs with big mouths and foul tempers.

‘What do they eat?’ I asked.

‘Fingers,’ he came back, quick as a flash. ‘Nothing else.’

‘Ha ha,’ I replied, and blew on my own.

‘Cold?’ said Tim. ‘You got to be tough in this line.’

I laughed. I was tough. Tougher than him probably. Catch him getting shit in his golden locks. He grinned. My teeth were chattering. His were still. He vibrated slightly with the effort of not being cold. Our breath came in clouds.

‘You just watch me,’ he said. ‘You won’t go far wrong if you do.’

The gate creaked open and there was Jamrach with the cart come up from the dock, and the devils in a crate on the back. The cart came just close enough for Bulter and Cobbe to unload straight into the yard from its back. I heard the devils before I saw them. As soon as they felt the crate move, those creatures set up a terrible screeching and moaning like the hordes of the damned. A howling of monkeys began in the loft in sympathy. But when I saw them, they were just little dogs. Poor, ugly little black dogs with screaming mouths and red gums. They stank rotten.

There wasn’t much for me to do. I stood looking on while Tim went into the pen with Bulter and Cobbe. Cobbe opened the crates. Bulter, with an air of graceful disdain, tipped those poor things out. There were six of them altogether, and they all set about sneezing as if they’d landed in a giant pot of pepper. Tim herded them down the far end where they turned, stretching out their mouths as if they’d break them at the corners. Their eyes were tiny and piggy and scared. All the big cats and dogs were howling and roaring now.

‘Jaffy,’ Mr Jamrach said, ‘take the lantern and take the marmosets up to the loft and wait for Tim. Don’t touch anything till he comes.’ And he showed me two tiny monkeys with white tufty ears and large round eyes staring up at me through a grid.

‘Hello,’ I said, squatting down to look at them, all huddled up in the corner of a box with their arms round each other.

Tim sniggered at me through the wire of the devils’ pen. ‘They’re not babies,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘Don’t you forget.’ He hoisted a bucket. ‘Don’t touch anything till I get there.’

I carried the box up the ramp, smelling the meaty breath of the lion to the right of me. It was too dark to see him, and darker still in the loft. The lantern’s light swung about, here and there it caught the shine of an eye. There were tortoises all over the floor, I had to pick my way. The apes were muttering. I waited by the marmoset cage, setting down the box. They shrank into one another. Tim appeared soon, whistling jauntily up the ladder, hauling himself up with jerky grace.

‘Jamrach says you can put them in with the others,’ he said, striding towards me with a big bunch of keys. ‘I’m to watch you and make sure you don’t make a mess of things.’

Which he did, like a hawk, every movement, longing for me to go wrong. But those monkeys were on my side and treated me as if I was their dad, clinging to me with their scratchy little hands and feet, making small sad noises in their throats. No fight in them at all. ‘In you go,’ I said, loosening their fingers, and in they went. There was a skittering of shadows in the cage as I pushed the bar across. I would have stayed to see how they got on, but Tim grabbed the lantern and swept us along down to the cage of the big ape who had looked at me.

‘Old Smokey,’ he said.

Old Smokey looked at me like before, straight at me, calm. His eyes, flat in his face, were very black with two bright spots of light from the lantern. Something between serenity and caution was in them. His mouth was a thoughtful crooked line.

Oh, you lovely thing, I cried, not aloud but loudly inside.

‘Do you want to go in with him?’ Tim asked.

Of course I wanted to go in with him, but I was no fool. ‘Not till Mr Jamrach says,’ I replied.

‘Smokey’s all right,’ said Tim. ‘He’s been living like one of the family with some big nobs up in Gloucester Square for years. He’s just like one of us.’

‘Why is he here?’

‘Dunno. He’s off up north on Tuesday,’ Tim said. ‘Wanna go in with him?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Go on. I’ve got the keys. You don’t think he’d let me have the keys if it was dangerous, do you?’

Smokey and I studied each other.

‘Go on,’ Tim said.

‘No.’

‘Coward.’

He walked away, leaving me in the dark.

‘Settle down!’ he yelled at the restless beasts as I stumbled after, stopping and starting as my toes stubbed against the stupid tortoises, which just kept walking and walking as if they knew where they were going.

I should have hit him for calling me a coward. I thought about it as I pounded down the ramp, but I never was one for fighting.

‘All well?’ called Jamrach.

He was standing by the pen of the black bear with a short stocky man in a long coat and sea boots. Smoke billowed in clouds above their heads in the queasy light from the back door.

‘All well!’ called Tim, then to me: ‘See him? That’s Dan Rymer, that is. I’m going to sea with him when I’m old enough.’

Jamrach called us to the office. The smell of coffee, rich and hot in the air, set my mouth watering as we went in the back door. A mild flutter danced along with the light from the lantern as we passed through the sparrow and bluebird room. The office was bright. Bulter was pouring coffee from a tall pot. Steam rose in slow, hot coils, mingling with blue smoke.

‘Ah, good job well done there, Dan,’ Mr Jamrach said, taking his seat behind the desk. ‘I daresay you’re home for a good while now?’

‘Never enough and always too long,’ said Dan Rymer, taking off his cap. His voice was as rough as sand.

Bowls of coffee filled up on Bulter’s desk and I felt near fainting at the smell. But something terrible was happening in my feet.

‘This is the boy I was telling you about,’ said Jamrach, ‘the one who sees fit to pat a tiger on the nose.’

‘Does he now?’ The man turned his small wrinkled eyes on me and looked very closely at me down his nose. A long clay pipe, white and new, stuck out of his mouth, and smoke from it wreathed his head. Now that I was thawing out, the pain of my feet was unbearable. Tears poured down my cheeks. The man reminded me of a tortoise or a lizard, but at the same time he seemed young, for there was hardly any grey in his wiry brown hair.

‘He needs shoes,’ Tim said.

Everyone looked at my feet. I looked. My feet were the flat hardened pads of an animal, and they were blue with cold. The plasters that clothed my bloody toes were weeping.

The man sat down and took off his sea boots. He peeled off a thick pair of bright red socks, much darned, and pulled them over my frozen feet. ‘My wife made these,’ he said, ‘and all the darnings were made by her. See. She is a genius, my wife.’

He gave me coffee.

‘Soon as you get home, you wash them feet,’ he said.

Of course, they were much too big, but I wore them like sacks and they had the heat of his feet on them.

I loved working at Jamrach’s. I was looking after the animals. Mr Jamrach bought me boots. We swept the yard, cleaned cages and pens, changed straw and water and feed. Big Cobbe did the heavy stuff. Bulter kept the books mostly, but slouched about in the yard when he was needed, handling the beasts with practised aplomb. Too easy, his manner said. Too easy for me, all these lions and crocodiles and bears and man-engorging snakes.

Tim wrote up stock. I counted and he wrote down. Thus:

One Chinese alligator. The alligator stretched smiling beside us on the other side of iron bars, half in, half out of his water.

Four Japanese pigs.

Fourteen Barbary apes.

Twelve cobras.

Eight wolves.

One gazelle.

Sixty-four tortoises. A guess. You never could tell with the tortoises; they moved around too much.

Tim and I got along fine as long as I deferred to him in every way. He was a great one for wandering off in the middle of a job and leaving me with the worst bit to do. ‘Off to the jakes,’ he’d say and that would be it for half an hour. And yet when Jamrach was there he was always around, cheerfully toiling, whistling, pushing a wheelbarrow. He’d been Jamrach’s lad since he was a tot, he told me. ‘Can’t do without me,’ he said. He had a way of putting himself in front of me, talking over me, jostling me back with his shoulder. I never said anything. How could I? He was gold and tall and marvellous, and I was a little, shitty, bedraggled creature from the other shore. Rock this wonderful boat which had hauled me over the side? Never. Not when he broke an egg in my pocket. Not even when he fed me a mealworm sandwich. He taught me how to hold a monkey, how to keep frogs damp and crickets dry, where to stand so as not to get kicked by an emu, how to tickle a bear, how to breed locusts and behead mealworms. Mostly though it was mucking out and swilling down, slopping out, mashing feed, changing water. Only Cobbe and Jamrach were allowed to go in with the fierce apes or feed the big cats. I could have gone in with old Smokey though. He was gentle. But he was gone on the third day, taken out in a cart, sitting looking out of the back of the box as patiently as he’d sat in his pen. None of them stayed long, apart from the parrot in the hall and Charlie the toucan, and a particular pig from Japan that Jamrach took a fancy to and made a pet of, letting it wander freely around the yard and deposit its sticky, black droppings all over wherever I’d just swept.

Trade was brisk.

My own tiger went to Constantinople to live in the garden of the Sultan. I imagined it: a hot, green jungle of flowers and shimmering ponds, where my tiger stalked for ever. I imagined the Sultan going out for a walk in his garden and meeting him, face to face.

Friday, nearly a week after I started, he sent me and Tim over to the shop after it was shut, to muck out the birds and feed the fish and clean up a new batch of oil lamps that had come in filthy on a ship from the Indies.

Jamrach’s shop was on the Highway, two big windows and the name up twice: Jamrach’s Jamrach’s, it said. It was a late, dark afternoon, and I was weary in those first days, all of a dream with the days and nights, biffing and banging about between the yard and Spoony’s and home, and hardly ever seeing Ma because she was on funny shifts in the sugar factory. The shop was a dusty rambleaway sort of place, and it seemed unearthly as we roamed around it with a lantern casting lurching shadows, thick with presence. Every inch was crammed. The walls came in on you. In the centre by the stairs stood a mannequin, a naked woman, black hair piled on top of her head. She gave me the creeps. Japanese, Tim said. ‘Look, you can move her arms and legs.’ And he twisted her into such a horrible pose she looked like a demon in the jumping light.

Inwards was a warren of small rooms and steps and narrow passages, the walls crammed full of pictures: idols, devils, dragons, flowers with curious fevered lips. Mountains and fountains, palaces and pearls. All came to me dreamlike. A green god watched me from a throne. There was a room full of suits of armour, a giant gong, knives, daggers, Japanese silk slippers, a blood-red shining harp with the fierce head of a dragon with eyes that bulged. Tim showed me around with such pride you’d have thought he’d personally found and conducted home each treasure from its far-flung source. ‘Stuff from all four corners!’ He threw out his arms. ‘Know what we had once? Shrunken heads! Human! Looked like monkeys. That’s what they do in them places, cut off your head and wear you round their waist like a … like a … looka this. That’s a demon’s tongue from Mongolia, that is. And see that over there on the wall? That’s a death mask. From Tibet. Bet you wouldn’t dare put it on, would you?’

‘No, I bloody wouldn’t,’ I said.

‘Dare you.’

‘No.’

‘Go on. Double dare.’

‘You put it on,’ I said.

‘I already have. I went out in it once. This old lady nearly dropped down dead on the corner of Baroda Place.’

Liar. I didn’t say anything.

The birds and fish were at the back. Fish from China, orange and white and black, fat, mouthy creatures with big round eyes that stuck out like milky warts on either side of their heads. White cockatoos, cramped and patient, reasonable, amiable birds that watched with every appearance of deep interest as we went about our work. They’d been moved to new quarters and we were scouring down their old. Deeply mucky they were too, the ground caked thick with hard white droppings that had to be scraped off with a chisel. It was getting on for half past five by the time we’d finished the cages, and we still had the fish to feed and the box to unpack.

‘You hungry?’ Tim asked. ‘Why don’t I pop out and get us a couple of saveloys?’

‘You ain’t gonna be long, Tim?’ I said.

‘Two ticks,’ he said, and off he went, leaving me alone there, locking me in ‘for safety’, he said.

It didn’t take long to feed the fish. I was done with that and halfway through polishing the lamps, wondering with each one whether a genie would appear and offer me three wishes, when I felt the first creepings of fear. The lantern stood on the counter, casting a sombre glow that called up flickering shadows from all nooks and corners. Each lamp as I cleaned it joined its fellows in a small neat community on the floor. I was sitting cross-legged with my duster beside the box, reaching in for the next lamp and thinking bad thoughts about Tim Linver. Suddenly, the hairs on the back of my neck came very slowly and coldly to attention, a sensation not unlike a thin finger drawing itself from the centre of my skull down to the top of my spine. It surprised me. I had not been feeling particularly afraid. The shutters were pulled down over the front windows and I could hear the ordinary early evening sounds of the Highway going on outside. I looked around. Only the softly pulsing shadows. What had I expected? Nothing. Nothing I had ever experienced in life up to this point had led me to believe in ghosts. I never thought of them. Even now I don’t think Jamrach’s shop was haunted, but something happened to me there that night.

The first thing was that time stopped. I remember looking across and seeing that woman with black hair at the foot of the stairs, stark naked with her arms going backwards and one leg dislocated at the knee and pointing upwards in a horrible way, and realising suddenly that I had no idea how long Tim had been gone and no idea of what the time might be. The street was quiet, a strange thing in itself, and yet I had a queer sense of having just been woken up by a loud noise, even though I hadn’t been aware of sleep. And indeed, how could I have slept? Unless I slept sitting upright, cross-legged. Where the hell was Tim? The woman’s eyes were dark, merry slits in a white face, her mouth the merest dot. The lantern made movements pass over her face. I saw that the Eastern lamps were all cleaned and arranged in two straight rows along the counter, though I couldn’t remember having put them there. The box was set down at the side of the counter behind a great creel of fantastical shells, all spikes and whorls and smooth, pearly, opening mouths. I thought the light was going down. So the darker edges grew darker still, blacker and thicker, furry, and the shells appeared to writhe so gently it made a small pulse throb in the vein inside my left elbow. I stood up and looked stupidly at the lantern. We had lamps from all over the world, but there wasn’t one of them I could have kept alight.

Where was he? Surely he would not leave me here alone all night? I wondered if I’d lose my job at Spoony’s. Surely I should have been there ages ago? I liked Spoony’s. I was the best pot boy they’d had in ages, Bob Barry said. They were good to me there. Better than here, I thought. He’s done it on purpose, gone off and locked me in to frighten me. Why was the street so quiet?

A lump was growing in my throat.

I don’t know why I didn’t get up there and then to go and bang on the front door as loud as I could, and shout through the letter box at the top of my voice for someone to come and get me out. But I didn’t seem able to move. My mouth was dry and when I tried to lick my lips, my tongue was thick and sticky. I wondered if I was getting ill. It was quite cold. Somewhere deeper in the shop, somewhere in one of those crowded little rooms, one of those narrow passages, something fluttered. I felt a feather tickling my throat. A dense bank of darkness concealed the open door that led into the first small passage, off which was the musical instrument room. I looked into that darkness, and the flutter came again.

Of course. The birds. I longed for others. I thought it would be nice to be in the company at least of those cheerful white birds in the back room. Even the pop-eyed fish would be better than nothing. Surely Tim would be here soon. I took up the lantern very carefully and walked step by step towards the darkness, which retreated gracefully before me. Strange and beautiful, a dragon’s face appeared, a golden throat gleaming for a second. I turned a corner to the right and felt the left-hand turn open a gaping mouth upon my back. Down there were the tall Ali Baba jars, the vases from Nineveh, the fierce curved blades and delicate sets of china with cups with such tiny golden handles you couldn’t imagine anything but a fairy holding one. Before me were demons and idols, carved gods and sacred gongs, bamboo pipes, poisonous darts. My light threw up the tremendous horns of a buck. Left at the top and I’d reach the good old birds, but I must take care as I turned the corner not to look to the right where I knew I would see the suits of armour standing to attention with their visors hiding God knows what.

Just before the turn, I saw a ship. The raised lantern revealed a painting of a curious vessel that reared up tall out of the sea at either end, a high-shouldered, many-turretted, floating castle of a ship, a thing upon which in a dream you might embark and sail away to the ends of the earth.

The light went out.

I did not panic. I stood there holding my darkened lantern in a void so full it licked me all over like a cat washing a kitten. For a minute or so I just let it. Then I panicked. I turned and ran. All the devils of hell followed after, clutching at my back. I crashed into a wall, turned, ran again, stopped, holding onto the wall and gasping. My own scared breath was loud. The wall beneath my hand held steady.

I would feel my way like a blind boy.

I stilled my breath and set off, feeling my way back in mortal terror every step of the way, till I came to an open doorway, an unseen gaping mouth breathing coldly on me. I couldn’t get past. God knows what lurked silently inside. How long did I stand there? Time froze, I froze, the universe froze. How long until I felt my soul leave my body like a ribbon of smoke and float loose and free through the air, thick with a million other lost souls all hoping for a landing. I floated past the door and found myself once more on earth in Jamrach’s pitch-black shop in the middle of the night, groping my snail-like way along the wall towards where I knew I must find the right turn into the passage that led to the front.

I found it and hauled myself around it as if reaching the top of a mighty mountain. Something touched my ear, a mere flicker, the breath of a fly or a gnat.

I crossed Sinai, inch by inch, fading in and out of myself, and when there were no more walls to hold onto, launched out across the void. I walked slowly, arms before me. Something caught me in the soft part just under my knee, pain pranged through me, sharp and sickening. I went flying and hit my head on something.

I was lying full stretch against something soft that jingled and jangled softly.

So tired.

I cried. Not a trace of light from the shutters. There was no point in getting up again. When I put up my hand to feel, there was a large lump swelling hot on my forehead. The rest of me was icy. I cried, drew up my knees and hugged myself. My brain swirled with all the colours of all the things from every part of the world, all brought here by the sailors and the captains, come to rest at last. As I began the slide down to sleep, there arose before my eyes the tall ship upon the wall, the last thing I’d seen before the light went out.

Did I sleep? It was more of a floating in and out of the real; a pitching, drifting, endlessly renewing progress through a night with no limits and no friendly striking hours. And at some point, some sudden peak of wakefulness, my mind cleared miraculously and stood watching and waiting at full attention. Then something lay down next to me and put its arms round me from behind. True and solid, it cleaved to the length of me and hugged hard.

It was as real as anything I ever felt, but then again, since that night I know that I have taken for true things that were not.

Of course, it could not have been human, because it would have had to put its arm through the floor in order to hold me. The feeling I had was beyond fear. It was a giving in, a swift plummet, a death.

I don’t remember anything else.

The morning assistant woke me up, the turn of his key in the lock. The light found me lying by a sack of shells that jingle-jangled as I sat up, squinting at the glare.

‘What the devil are you doing here?’ the man said rudely. ‘You the new boy? You been here all night?’

I tried to tell him what had happened, but he couldn’t be bothered to listen and shooed me out. The sun was above the house tops and I was late for work. I’d missed Spoony’s. I ran straight to the yard. Cobbe was hauling hay. ‘Gor, what you done to your noddle?’ he said. Tim was on the ramp, but he jumped off the side and ran straight up to me.

‘Sorry, Jaf,’ he said, smiling as if it was nothing. ‘Couldn’t help it, could I?’

‘I’ve lost my job!’

My skin crawled with weariness.

‘Well, it wasn’t your fault, was it? They can’t sack you for something that wasn’t your fault, can they?’

‘How do you know? You did it on purpose.’

My eyes burned. I ached all over. I hit him in the chest.

‘Oy!’ he cried, backing off with a hurt look in his eyes. ‘What’s up with you? Wasn’t my fault.’

‘You locked me in!’

‘I know. Only twigged when I seen you come in the gate just now. And there were the keys in my pocket.’

‘You knew!’

‘I didn’t. I met a couple of friends, you know what it’s like. I thought you’d finish up and go home. What you done to your head?’ He reached out but I jerked away.

‘I fell over,’ I said. My voice caught and my eyes overflowed. ‘The lamp went out.’

‘Baby,’ he said, smiling, ‘don’t cry.’

My nose ran.

He had the cheek to try and sling an arm round me. I hit him again and we scuffled futilely, falling under the ramp. Cobbe barked a warning from the end of the yard.

‘I hate you!’ I screamed.

Tim held my wrists and I kicked out at his knees.

‘Look, Jaf,’ he said in an infuriating, reasonable voice, ‘you won’t tell Jamrach, will you?’

‘I will! I’ll tell him!’

I looked around for the big German but there was no sign of him. ‘Fucking hate you, Tim Linver,’ I said, and kicked and pulled free and ran towards the door to see if Jamrach was in the office.

‘No!’ Tim ran after and grabbed my shoulder. He was pleading suddenly, really scared. ‘Don’t tell him, Jaffy. If you tell him he’ll get rid of me.’

‘Serve you right.’

But Jamrach wasn’t in yet. Only Bulter, his feet on the desk, picking his teeth with a long fingernail.

‘Here, you two, out of here,’ he said.

Tim dragged me out into the lobby. He had tears in his eyes. Good. We ran through the silent bird room. ‘It was a joke,’ he said desperately. We were out in the yard again. I picked up my broom and ran at him like a jouster, chased him right up against the alligator pen.

‘You’re mad!’ he yelled.

I bashed him with it, hard as I could, over and over.

‘Stoppit! Ow!’

‘Pack it in, you two,’ growled Cobbe, ‘he’s here, I heard the carriage.’

I dropped the broom and ran for the door. Tim ran after, grabbing my arm. ‘Jaffy!’ His face was white. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘don’t tell. I’ll give you my telescope. I promise, I’ll give you my telescope if you don’t tell him.’

And there was the front door and the voice of Mr Jamrach cheerfully greeting Bulter.

‘Please!’

I wanted that telescope. Dan Rymer’s telescope had been all around the world twice and he had given it to Tim. Dan Rymer had first seen the great Patagonian condor soaring high above the blue sierras through that telescope, Tim said. Once, once only, I had been allowed to look through it, and only for a few seconds. I saw the world anew. I saw the querulous shadow in the eye of a starling.

‘Please!’ said Tim.

I worked till about ten, then I fainted. Or something. Just fell over.

We’d had in three small elephants. I suppose they were very young, one of them was no taller than the big mastiff that used to guard the tannery in Bermondsey. They were not happy. Each had a chain round its foot. Side to side, side to side, trunks curling and unfurling in time, great feet lifting and listlessly kicking, turn by turn they swayed together with no space to turn about, an endless dance. So hypnotic was their movement, so steady and slow, that it got in my head and made me dizzy, and the rake fell from my hands and I fell over. Next thing I knew I was in the office, lying down upon a scratchy coat, and Mr Jamrach was pouring water in my mouth from a jug. Bulter and Cobbe were there, and Tim’s gawky neck was sticking up, an anxious face peering over Jamrach’s shoulder.

‘What’s this? What’s this?’ Jamrach said. ‘Are you ill?’

‘I’m tired,’ I said, ‘and I haven’t had my breakfast.’

‘No breakfast! Why not?’

And then it all came out that I’d been up all night in the shop and missed my shift at Spoony’s.

‘Tim locked me in,’ I said.

‘I was going to go back but I forgot!’

I hated Tim at that moment. ‘He did it on purpose,’ I said.

His face went red. ‘I didn’t.’

‘He did.’

He started to cry.

‘Tim,’ said Jamrach sternly.

‘Please don’t sack me, Mr Jamrach,’ Tim said wretchedly. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’

‘Are you telling me,’ said Jamrach, ‘that you locked this boy overnight in the shop?’

‘It was a joke,’ said Tim.

And that was the only time I ever saw Jamrach lose his temper.

His thin lips went hard and quivered. He roared. He cried that Tim was a wicked boy, a vile, cruel boy who’d end up on the gallows and serve him right! He could get out now! And never come back! ‘Always have to be top dog, don’t you, Tim?’ he said. ‘Well, I’m finished with you!’ and lifted me up onto his knee.

And now I was sorry for Tim. He begged. He sobbed. His face was a wreck. He said he was sorry, he didn’t realise, he’d never ever do such a terrible thing again, never, never.

‘Go away, Tim.’ Jamrach touched the great lump on my forehead. ‘Where did this come from?’

‘I fell over in the dark,’ I said.

Tim stood by the door, hands hanging helpless, tears pouring down his face. ‘I’ll give you my telescope,’ he said in a watery way.

‘Don’t sack him, sir,’ I said.

Jamrach heaved a great sigh. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why should I keep him after this?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

The soft snuffling of Tim crying was the only sound for a moment. Jamrach’s eyes were sad.

Bulter put his head round the door. ‘Mr Fledge’s man’s here,’ he said.

They come from all over. Russia, Vienna, Paris. Clever men. Jamrach cursed in German. ‘What’s he want this time?’ he said. ‘A unicorn? A hippogriff?’

Bulter sniggered.

‘Where is he?’

‘In the yard. Looking at the elephants.’

‘Tell him to wait,’ said Jamrach, and sighed again.

When Bulter had gone, Mr Jamrach put me down and stood up. He brushed his knees. ‘Tim,’ he said, ‘wipe your nose and stop whining. Make yourself presentable and go straight over to the Spoony Sailor and tell them there exactly what you did, tell them Master Jaffy is in no way to blame, and he will be back at work this evening. Tell them I sent you and that I vouch for Jaffy. Then you can get yourself back here as quickly as possible and get back to work.’

Tim ran.

Jamrach took me by the hand and led me out through the yard. ‘A moment!’ he called to a tall thin man standing by the elephants. There was a door at the side which he unlocked, and through this we passed into a narrow alleyway with high brick walls and weeds growing out of the cobbles. I had never walked like this, hand in hand with a man as I had seen others walk with fathers, and it made me feel peculiar. My own father’s name I didn’t know for sure. Sometimes Andre, sometimes Theo, you never could tell with Ma. A dark sailor with a glass to his eye. At the turn of the alley was a little house with an open brown door moulting paint. Jamrach rapped with his knuckles.

‘Mrs Linver!’ he called. ‘Patient for you!’

There appeared, wiping her steamed-up eye glasses on her apron, the wild-faced woman who had stood at the front of the crowd when Jamrach rescued me from the tiger. Her bulbous, unseeing eyes wavered over me with a look of startled and overdone emotion, then she put her glasses back on and focused. ‘The little tiger boy!’ she exclaimed, dropping to one knee in front of me and taking me by the shoulders. Mr Jamrach told her all that had happened and said she should give me a good feed and send me home to bed.

‘I’ll skin that boy!’ she cried when she heard of Tim’s crimes.

Mr Jamrach took himself briskly away down the forlorn alley, and she took me by the hand and led me into a room full of drying laundry that was draped all over everything, chair backs, a table, a massive rack which hung from the ceiling above a blazing fire. A round, pale, hairless man sat in a saggy armchair by the fire, smiling vaguely and whittling away at a stick of wood, and the little girl who’d smiled at me from the crowd was there, standing by the range, turning with a dripping spoon in one hand. She smiled again.

It was not love at first sight, but love at second sight. Her hair was straight and fair, her face bright and innocent, her apron filthy. She had dimples.

‘Ishbel,’ her mother ordered, ‘get him some porridge. Your brother’s a nasty horrible boy,’ scrubbing my face and hands and knees with a hot cloth as she talked, her voice thin and quavery. ‘Well, you can see why the old man’s taken a shine to this one,’ she said, rinsing out the cloth, ‘just like poor Anton, he is. Bless!’

I saw the gnawed-down nails and bleeding fingers of the fair-haired girl as she cleared a space at the table for me. She pushed a bowl of porridge under my nose. Her skirt was dark red. I thanked her and she dipped a sarcastic curtsy. ‘Welcome,’ she said, twirling away and sitting down by the man’s feet. He had a look of Tim and of the girl, how it might be if you shaved them and puffed them up like balloons and took away their wits.

‘Don’t make yourself too comfortable, young lady,’ her mother said, but Ishbel leaned back against his legs, put her arms round her knees and her head on one side and stared at me with open curiosity.

Tim appeared in the open doorway. His mother ran over and screamed in his face. ‘He’ll give you the boot! You hateful boy! You! You! He’ll give you the boot and no doubt! You’ll ruin everything!’

He blinked hard, walked over to where I was scooping porridge into my mouth and put out his hand.

‘I’m very sorry, Jaffy,’ he said, steadily holding my eyes. ‘I really am. Truly. It was a mean thing I did. You’ve still got your job. I’ve been to Spoony’s and I’ve told them.’

I stood up and we shook solemnly.

‘’S’all right,’ I said.

Midday. Ma was asleep when I got home. Mari-Lou and Silky slept too, long dreamy sighs behind the curtain. I got into bed next to Ma, hugging my telescope. Dan Rymer’s telescope that had travelled the whole world round. She did not wake, but gathered me into the crook of her arm, and a tall ship bore me away through painted waves into a long sweet sleep.