Jamrach's Menagerie (41 page)

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 tel ing 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 cal ed 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 tal and domed, with a carved eagle on the top, and a zigzag trel is. I put in twigs and perches and mirrors, blue-patterned china feeding bowls that slid in and out, a pul -out tray at the bottom. Ten green linnets moved in and seemed content. I tamed a jackdaw. That’s easy enough. Guess what I cal ed him? Jack. He took to sitting on my shoulder picking at my ear while I worked. I made cage after cage after cage, al kinds, bel s and squares and lanterns, none too smal , 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’l go and see her, I thought, but I did nothing, kept making plans and finding ways out of them. She’l 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 al 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 fal between us. We were grown-ups now, different people. It was al 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 al shal be wel and al shal be wel and al manner of things shal be wel (Jaffy Brown, see, became quite wel -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’l never know. A canary lands before me on a cherry branch, a jonquil, pure deep yel ow.

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 al made up as if she was on her way to work and she looked at me and smiled. ‘Hel o, Jaffy,’ she said, and something lifted like a veil.

‘What are
you
doing here?’ I asked her, cheerful as I could sound.

‘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 hal .’

‘Wel , this one won’t. Wil 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 fil ed 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 tranquil ity!’ 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 tal er 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 al 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 fil ed 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 yel ow 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. ‘Al this is yours, Jaffy. Al this!’ And I was guilty al over again for being alive and having al this. But she meant no harm. She flitted about admiring it al , the cages, the parrakeets, the parrots, the Java sparrow, my pictures stuck al 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

Al 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 cal it nowadays, but people around here stil cal it the Highway and I daresay always wil .

They’ve closed down a lot of our familiar haunts, and they’ve cleaned up al 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. Stil 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 eternal y bruised. The other night I caught a glimpse of my face in the glass and it pul ed me up short. Didn’t look like me. And when I look at the faces of my friends I see that they’re al 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 stil merrying up the dark reaches of the night no matter how far I’ve sailed in dreams. You’d think after al this time I’d know I was back, wouldn’t you? But sleep stil scrambles me. When my head fal s down that great gulf it crashes like a bauble into a mil ion fine shards, and al 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’l 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, casual y drops me. Here a drop, there a drop. Anywhere wil do. Carried. That’s me. Carried. Stil 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 swel ing on the brain at the age of seventy-six. Stil , a good age. His widow stil lives in Bow. She’s remarried and stil 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 al day to the chaffinch and the bul finch, 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, though you can stil 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 rol away on bil owy waves, hear the ocean’s roar, and the sky al thunder, feel the swel , hear the voices of the demons of the deep howling into it al . 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 al 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 cel , a hole in the rock, a bower in the woods, so my mind can flood al directions like water, the sea.

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

This hurly-burly pal s. 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’l never understand, but how could she?