Jamrach's Menagerie (8 page)

Two each, ripe and squashy, gone in a flash.

‘Wonder where Tim went,’ I said.

She shrugged, passing the beer. ‘Do you think we’ve upset him?’ she asked.

‘Probably.’

‘He’l get over it.’ She licked her strawberry lips.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘he doesn’t care when he upsets other people.’

She smiled and said, ‘He doesn’t mean to be a pig.’

‘I know. He just is.’

We laughed.

‘He’s always been a jealous boy,’ she said simply.

The bottle was wet from her mouth. I took a good long swig.

‘I’m not going to work tonight,’ she said. ‘Don’t feel like it.

She can’t make me, can she?’

‘You’l catch it.’

‘So?’

‘She’l wal op you,’ I said.

She did this sometimes, just couldn’t be bothered with al the palaver of dressing up. Much spoilt and fussed over, she was also much slapped and pushed. Once she said she’d only get ready if her mother brought her a cake, and when she got it she smeared it on the pretty dress hanging over the back of the chair, waiting to be slipped over her head ready for a good night’s work.

‘You evil little bitch!’ her mother had shrieked. ‘Do you know how long I worked on that?’ and thwacked her hard on the side of her head and made her cry.

Tim never got hit though.

‘I don’t care if she does wal op me,’ said Ishbel, reaching for the bottle.

‘Yes, you do.’

‘Wel ,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t make any difference; I’m not going. I’l stay here til it’s dark.’

‘You can’t do the wal in the dark,’ I said. ‘If you stay here til dark, you’l have to stay al night.’

‘I wil !’ she cried, jumping up with a grin. ‘Al night!’

‘Me too!’ I stood up.

She gave me the bottle and did a funny dance, al flailing arms and tapping feet. I was afraid the rotten boards would col apse underneath her and we’d both go plunging through to the filthy, freezing water.

‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘If you want to dance you might as wel go to work.’

She stopped. Her shoulders heaved. ‘We can’t,’ she said,

‘it’s too cold.’

‘What?’

‘Can’t stay al night. We’d freeze.’

That was true.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘we’l just walk around al night til it’s real y late.’

She was assuming my company.

‘Let’s go west,’ I said, ‘past the Tower. Let’s just keep walking that way along the river al night and see where we end up.’

‘We can sleep under hedges,’ she added, ‘and beg. You can be a gyppo and tel fortunes. I know a girl at the Siamese Cat that tel s fortunes, it’s dead easy. You look like a gyppo anyway.’

Tim came whistling along the wal . He was a good whistler. First we heard him, then his dirty bare feet appeared over the canopy and he dropped down beside us, frog-fashion, pul ing his boots from round his neck and tossing them up the boat. ‘What’s the fun?’ he asked.

‘We had strawberries,’ I said. ‘You missed them, but there’s some beer left.’

Ishbel tossed the bottle and he caught it and took a swig.

The sky had that look it has, as if it’s about to settle down for the night.

‘I’m not going to work,’ Ishbel said.

‘Don’t say.’ He smacked his lips and swigged again, wiping the bottle top considerately with a big, grimy palm before handing it on to me. It was as if nothing bad had happened between us. A great flapping of birds’ wings crossed the river.

‘I’m hungry,’ I said, ‘I could eat a horse.’

‘That’s a thought,’ said Ishbel.

‘Any boodle?’ asked Tim.

She shook her head. ‘Spent it.’

‘Ah wel ,’ he said and took a pipe out of his pocket. We sprawled in the bow, smoking as the evening cooled and dimmed. Ishbel lay on her back with her feet resting on Tim’s knees.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘Should I go?’

‘Up to you.’ He watched coils of smoke stalk and twine in the stil air and sang ‘Tobacco’s but an Indian weed’, a song Dan Rymer taught us once when we were roaming about and met him on the Wapping Steps.

Grows green in the morn, cut down at eve …

Ishbel kicked him. ‘Miserable,’ she said.

He laughed and continued and I joined in. We’d sat on the Wapping Steps with Dan. Dan smoked a long white pipe, it stayed in the corner of his mouth while he sang: The pipe that is so lily white,

Wherein so many take delight;

It’s broken with a touch,

Man’s life is such …

And we’d al joined in the chorus:

Think of this when you smoke tobacco.

We sang it round the yard sometimes with Cobbe, and laughed. But we could never remember al the words, nor could we now, so we gave it up and lay for a long time in comfortable silence, til Ishbel said in a smal , sad voice, ‘I’l have to go back now, I suppose.’

Tim opened his eyes and stroked her foot. They were not identical, but not far off. His chin was longer, her hair a shade darker. She had dimples on both sides, large, flickering, nervous things that flashed on and off. He had none. It must be funny to look at another face and know it’s just like your own. Like looking in a mirror. Sometimes they stared into one another’s faces as if fascinated, and once I’d seen them close their eyes and explore each other’s features with their fingers, hers bloody from biting, his long and graceful, like blind people do. It made them laugh.

We sighed, tossed the empty bottle overboard, slung our shoes round our necks and went in turn along the wal .

Mrs Linver made us have a wash, then gave us some broth, thin and delicious. The old man whittled, the fire crackled.

There we were, the three of us sitting at the table messing about and niggling at one another, when their mother came bustling over and offered Ishbel a nip of gin. ‘A drop, lovey,’

she said, ‘takes the edge off.’

‘I’m not going,’ said Ishbel, not looking at her but taking the gin anyway.

‘Now, don’t play stupid.’ Mrs Linver scowled at the rat’s tail hair straggling over Ishbel’s shoulders. ‘Have you taken a comb to this al day?’

‘No.’

‘I can see that. You’d better start getting ready.’

‘Can’t make me. No one can make me.’ Ishbel glanced at me with mischief in her eye and suddenly smiled.
You
understand, her look said.

Her mother had turned away but swung round. ‘I haven’t got time,’ she snapped. ‘Up. Now.’

‘I’m not going.’ Ishbel knocked back the gin in one and slapped her lips.

‘Don’t be soft,’ said Tim. ‘It’s only work. We al got to work.’

‘I’l work when I want to,’ she said.

‘If you don’t go down there tonight, they’l not have you back.’ Her mother took hold of her arm and tried to yank her off the chair, but she just laughed and held onto the table.

Only when it began to tilt and wobble, me and Tim hanging onto it, everything fal ing over and splattering about, only then did she let go and al ow her mother to drag her to her feet.

‘I’m not going, you stupid woman!’ she shouted right in her mother’s ear.

Mrs Linver winced and rubbed the side of her head.

‘I’m tired!’ Ishbel screamed. ‘I don’t feel like dancing, can’t you get that into your stupid head?’

‘That’s dangerous!’ her mother screamed back. ‘You can make somebody go deaf doing that!’

‘I don’t care!’

That’s when her mother slapped her. I’d seen scores of these scenes, but this one was different. This time Ishbel slapped back. It was quick – a second – and there were her mother’s glasses askew, and her mother’s eyes exposed.

We al gasped. Ishbel began to cry and fel on the floor by the old man’s knees. He shifted his benign glance towards the top of her head vaguely, scraping gently away at the scales on the tail of his latest mermaid.

Mrs Linver took off her spectacles. Her mouth was trembling, her eyes pouched and meekly narrowed. She wiped the glasses on her apron with shaky hands, glancing up at us, mournful y blind.

‘Oh, Ma!’ cried Tim, jumping up and running over to give her a hug.

‘You’l find out one day, you selfish girl,’ Mrs Linver quavered.

Ishbel jumped up, face streaked with tears. ‘I know, I know, I know,’ she said harshly.

‘It’s al right, Ma,’ Tim said. ‘Don’t upset her any more, Ish.

It’s al right now, Ma.’

‘Yes yes yes, of course of course of course.’ Ish smiled extravagantly and leapt to her feet. ‘Time for work! Time for bloody work.’ And off she flounced into the inner room.

She was sul en as we walked her to work twenty minutes later. She’d put on too much powder to hide the slap mark on her cheek, and her lips were too red. ‘You never stick up for me,’ she said to Tim.

‘That’s not true.’

‘You always take her side.’

‘What am I supposed to do?
I
have to go to work. I’m up four in the morning sometimes. So’s Jaf. Everyone has to work.’

‘I’m sick of it,’ she said and kicked a stone. When she looked up again her eyes were shiny.

I put my arms round her. ‘I’l wait for you and take you home when you’ve finished,’ I said.

‘No need for that.’ Tim pushed against us.

She gave me a hug. ‘Thank you, Jaffy.’ The white grains of her powder got up my nose and made me want to sneeze.

She looked like a dol . ‘You’re very noble.’

‘Noble?’ snorted Tim.

I wanted to hold onto her. But I let her go.

He came round her other side and placed himself in front of her, saying nothing. For a long time he just looked into her eyes, his own rough and tender. Something was passing between them, some brother–sister thing I could have no part in. His shoulders were hunched, his lower lip pendant.

There was something old in his face. Where it was coming from I couldn’t tel . She softened visibly.

We walked on, the three of us separate. At the Malt Shovel door, she turned to me and said, ‘You might as wel run along home now, Jaffy. Thanks ever so.’

‘She’s got to get ready now,’ Tim said.

Ma was out when I got home. I remember I took down Dan Rymer’s telescope and poked it out of the window and looked over Watney Street, closing in on odd details here and there in the thickening dusk: a face, a cat, an artichoke, a shining puddle under the pump.

A long time ago it went to the bottom of the sea. Wish I stil had it. It was a lovely thing – the patterns in the high-polished mahogany, the lacquering on the brass. On the sunshade, silver engraved with a feather pattern. The telescope I have now is stout and plain, but you can’t fault its clarity. I look at birds, and on certain nights I look at the stars through the mesh over the garden. I got to know the stars wel at sea.

You can’t rely on the sun and moon – they do funny things sometimes – but you
can
rely on the stars. When you look at them through a telescope, they start to flutter like little white wings burning in a silver fire. Then, if you focus your lens here below on a bird’s eye, you can see the shine in it, the life. And sometimes a thing comes so close it makes you jump.

It’s the same when you look at the past. Far away the white wings twinkle, nothing can be known. Further in, details: the riggings of great ships that web the darkening sky; rooftops, clear on the inner eye, magnified; and sometimes a pang, up close. Tonight is a late spring night.

The carving on a piece of scrimshaw, rough beneath my fingers, reminds me of the feathers engraved on the old telescope I had when I was a boy, and I remember a long-ago night: a wonderful day gone, my heart thrumming softly, coming home and crying, and not knowing why, swooping here and there with my al -seeing eye over rooftops, thinking about Ishbel. She’d be on the stage, grinning wildly, catching coppers in her smal , bloody, stubby-fingered hands. She’d sing ‘Little Brown Jug’, ‘The Blind Boy At Play’ and ‘The Heart That Can Feel for Another’, and the drunken sailors would laugh and weep.

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 rol around old Ratcliffe Highway, a hungry ghost, roaring its tale for al who wil hear. I know why the sailors sing so beautiful y 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 al the dirty stuff, and Tim was an office boy and got more money. He wore a col ar to work.

His mother starched it for him every night. By this time, we were close. He could stil 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 al 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 al 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 cal ed him in when Fledge’s man left, and ten minutes later he came running back out.