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Authors: Carol Birch

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BOOK: Jamrach's Menagerie
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Flypapers hung over every door and every barrow. Each one was black and rough with a mil ion flies, but it made no difference. A mil ion more danced happily about in the air and walked on the tripe which the butcher’s assistant had sliced so thinly and careful y first thing that morning and placed in the window.

You could get anything down Watney Street. Our end was al houses, the rest was shops and pubs, and the market covered al the street. It sold cheap: old clothes, old iron, old anything. When I walked through the market my eyes were on a level with cabbages, lumpy potatoes, sheep’s livers, salted cucumbers, rabbit skins, saveloys, cow heels, ladies’

bel ies, softly rounded and swel ing. The people packed in, al sorts, rough sorts, poor sorts, sifting their way through heaps of old worn shoes and rags, scrabbling about like ants, pushing and shoving and swearing, fierce old ladies, kids like me, sailors and bright girls and shabby men.

Everyone shouted. First time I walked out in al that I thought, blimey, you don’t want to go down in that muck, and if you were smal you could go down very easy. Best stay close by the barrows so there’d be something to grab a hold of.

I loved running errands. One way was the Tower, the other Shadwel . The shops were al packed with the stuff of the sea and ships, and I loved to linger outside their windows and hang around their doors getting a whiff of that world. So when Mrs Regan sent me out for a plug of bacca one day for Mr Reuben, it must have taken me at least a half an hour to get down to the tobacco dock. I got half an ounce from one of the baccy women and was on my way back with my head in a dream, as was the way, so I thought nothing of the tray of combs dropped on the pavement by a sal ow girl with a ridge in her neck, or the people vanishing, sucked as if by great breaths into doorways and byways, flattened against wal s. My ears did not catch the sudden stil ing of the Highway’s normal rhythms, the silence of one great held communal breath. How could I? I did not know the Highway. I knew nothing but dark water and filth bubbles and smal bridges over shit creeks that shook no matter how light of foot you skipped over. ‘This new place, this sailor town where we wil stay now nice and snug awhile, Jaffy-boy,’ as my ma said, al of it, everything was different. Already I’d seen things I’d never seen before. This new labyrinth of narrow lanes teemed with the faces and voices of the whole world. A brown bear danced decorously on the corner by an alehouse cal ed Sooty Jack’s. Men walked about with parrots on their shoulders, magnificent birds, pure scarlet, egg-yolk yel ow, bright sky blue. Their eyes were knowing and half amused, their feet scaly. The air on the corner of Martha Street hung sultry with the perfume of Arabian sherbet, and women in silks as bright as the parrots leaned out from doorways, arms akimbo, powerful y breasted like the figureheads of the ships lying along the quays.

In Bermondsey the shop windows were dusty. When you put your face close and peered, you saw old flypapers, pale cuts of meat, powdery cakes, strings of onions flaking onto yel owing newsprint. In the Highway the shops were ful of birds. Cage upon cage piled high, each ful of clustering creatures like sparrows but bright as sweets, red and black, white and yel ow, purple and green, and some as gently lavender as the veins on a baby’s head. It took the breath away to see them so crowded, each wing crushed against its fel ows on either side. In the Highway green parakeets perched upon lamp posts. Cakes and tarts shone like jewels, tier on tier behind high glass windows. A black man with gold teeth and white eyes carried a snake around his neck.

How could I know what was possible and what was not?

And when the impossible in al its beauty came walking towards me down the very middle of Ratcliffe Highway, why would I know how to behave?

Of course, I’d seen a cat before. You couldn’t sleep for them in Bermondsey, creeping about over the roofs and wailing like devils. They lived in packs, spiky, wild-eyed, stalking the wooden walkways and bridges, fighting with the rats. But this cat …

The Sun himself came down and walked on earth.

Just as the birds of Bermondsey were smal and brown, and those of my new home were large and rainbow-hued, so it seemed the cats of Ratcliffe Highway must be an altogether superior breed to our scrawny north-of-the-river mogs. This cat was the size of a smal horse, solid, massively chested, rippling powerful y about the shoulders.

He was gold, and the pattern painted so careful y al over him, so utterly perfect, was the blackest black in the world.

His paws were the size of footstools, his chest snow white.

I’d seen him somewhere, his picture in a poster in London Street, over the river. He was jumping through a ring of fire and his mouth was open. A mythical beast.

I have no recal of one foot in front of the other, cobblestones under my feet. He drew me like honey draws a wasp. I had no fear. I came before the godly indifference of his face and looked into his clear yel ow eyes. His nose was a slope of downy gold, his nostrils pink and moist as a pup’s.

He raised his thick, white dotted lips and smiled, and his whiskers bloomed.

I became aware of my heart somewhere too high up, beating as if it was a little fist trying to get out.

Nothing in the world could have prevented me from lifting my hand and stroking the broad warm nap of his nose. Even now I feel how beautiful that touch was. Nothing had ever been so soft and clean. A ripple ran through his right shoulder as he raised his paw – bigger than my head – and lazily knocked me off my feet. It was like being fel ed by a cushion. I hit the ground but was not much hurt, only winded, and after that it was a dream. There was, I remember, much screaming and shouting, but from a distance, as if I was sinking underwater. The world turned upside down and went by me in a bright stream, the ground moved under me, my hair hung in my eyes. There was a kind of joy in me, I do know that – and nothing that could go by the name of fear, only a wildness. I was in his jaws. His breath burned the back of my neck. My bare toes trailed, hurting distantly. I could see his feet, tawny orange with white toes, pacing the ground away, gentle as feathers.

I remember swimming up through wild waters, the howling of a mil ion shel s, endless, timeless confusion. I was no one.

No name. Nowhere. Then came a point where I
realised
I was nothing and that was the end of the nothing and the beginning of fear. I never had a lostness like that before, though many more were to come in my life. Voices came, piping in from the howling, making no sense. Then words—

he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, oh, lord mercy – and the hardness of stone, cold beneath my cheek, sudden.

A woman’s voice.

A hand on my head.

No no no his eyes are open, look, he’s …
there
, fine boy, let me feel … no no no you’re al fine …

he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead …

there you come, son …

here you come …

And I am born. Wide awake sitting up on the pavement, blinking at the shock of the real.

A man with a big red face and cropped yel ow hair had me by the shoulders. He was staring into my eyes, saying over and over again: ‘There, you’re a fine boy now … there, you’re a fine boy …’

I sneezed and got a round of applause. The man grinned. I became aware of a huge mob, al bobbing their heads to see me.

‘Oh, poor little thing!’ a woman’s voice cried out, and I looked up and saw her at the front of the crowd, a woman with a startled face and mad wiry hair, wild goggly eyes made huge and swimmy by bottle-bottom spectacles. She held a little girl by the hand. The crowd was like daubed faces on a board, daubed faces with smudged bodies, bright stabs of colour here and there, scarlet, green, royal purple. It heaved gently like a sea and my eyes could not take it in, it blurred wildly as if blocked by tears – though my eyes were dry – blurred and shivered and whirled itself around with a heaving burst of sound, til something shook my head awake again and I saw clearly, clearer than I had ever seen anything before, the face of the little girl standing at the front of the crowd holding her mother’s hand, drawn sharp as ice on a mess of fog.

‘Now,’ said the big man, taking my chin in his fist and turning my face to look at him, ‘how many fingers, boy?’ He had an accent of some kind, sharp and foreign. His other hand he held up before me, the thumb and smal finger bent down.

‘Three,’ I said.

This brought another great murmur of approval from the crowd.

‘Good boy, good boy!’ the man said, as if I’d done something very clever, setting me on my feet but stil holding me by the shoulders. ‘Fine now?’ he asked, shaking me gently. ‘Very fine, brave boy. Good boy! Fine boy! Best boy!’

I saw tears in his eyes, on the rims, not fal ing, which seemed strange to me as he was smiling so vigorously and showing a perfectly even row of smal , shiny white teeth. His wide face was very close to mine, smooth and pink like a cooked ham.

He hoisted me up in his arms and held me against him.

‘Say your name, fine boy,’ he said, ‘and we’l take you home to Mamma.’

‘Jaffy Brown,’ I said. I felt my thumb in my mouth and whipped it out quick. ‘My name is Jaffy Brown and I live in Watney Street.’ And at the same moment a dreadful sound rose upon the air, as of loosed packs of hounds, demons in hel , mountains fal ing, hue and cry.

The red face suddenly thundered: ‘Bulter! For God’s sake, get him back in the crate! He’s seen the dogs!’

‘My name is Jaffy Brown,’ I cried as clearly as I could, for by now I was ful y back in the world, though my stomach churned and heaved alarmingly. ‘And I live in Watney Street.’

I was carried home as if I was an infant in the arms of the big man, and al the way he talked to me, saying: ‘So, what wil we say to Mammy? What wil Mammy say when she hears you’ve been playing with a tiger? “Hel o, Mammy, I’ve been playing with my friend the tiger! I gave him a pat on the nose!” How many boys can say that, hi? How many boys can go walking down the road and meet a tiger, hi? Special boy!

Brave boy! Boy in ten mil ion!’

Boy in ten mil ion. My head was swel ed to the size of St Paul’s dome by the time we turned into Watney Street with a crowd of gawkers trailing after.

‘I been tel ing you what might happen, Mr Jamrach!’

shril ed the bespectacled woman with the little girl, bobbing alongside. ‘What about us? What about us what has to live next to you?’ She had the Scots burr and her eyes glared.

‘The beast was sleepy and ful ,’ the man replied. ‘He ate a hearty dinner not twenty minutes since, or we’d never have moved him. I am sorry, this should not have happened and wil never happen so again.’ He knuckled a tear from the side of one eye. ‘But there was no danger.’

‘Got teeth, hasn’t it?’ cried the woman. ‘Claws?’

At which the girl peeped round her mother’s side, clutching onto a scrap of polka-dot scarf wrapped round her neck and smiling. It was the first smile of my life. Of course, that is a ridiculous thing to say; I had been smiled at often, the big man had smiled at me not a minute since. And yet I say: it was the first smile, because it was the first that ever went straight into me like a needle too thin to be seen. Then, dragged a bit too fast by her wild-eyed mother, she tripped and went sprawling with her hands splayed out, and her face broke up. A great wail burst out of her.

‘Oh, my God,’ said her mother, and we left the two fussing at the side of the road and went on through the market stal s to our house. Mrs Regan was sitting on the top step, but jumped to her feet and stood gaping when she saw the band of us approach. Everyone babbled at once. Ma came running down and I threw out my arms for her and burst into tears.

‘No harm done, ma’am,’ Mr Jamrach said, handing me over. ‘I am so sorry, ma’am, your boy was scared. A dreadful thing – a weakness in the crate, come al the way from Bengal – pushed out the back, he did, with his hindquarters

…’

She set me on my feet and brushed me down, looking hard in my eyes. ‘His toes,’ she said. She was pale.

I looked wonderingly at the gathering crowd.

‘Ma’am,’ Mr Jamrach began, reaching into his coat and bringing out money. The girl and her ma were back. She’d scraped her knees and looked sulky. I saw Mr Reuben.

‘I got your baccy,’ I said, reaching into my pocket.

‘Why thank you, Jaffy,’ Mr Reuben said, and gave me a wink.

The Scots woman started up again, though now she’d changed sides and was defending Mr Jamrach as a great hero: ‘Ran after it, he did! Never seen anything like it! Grabs it like this, he does,’ letting go of the little girl’s hand to demonstrate how he’d leapt on its back and grabbed it by the throat, ‘sticks his bare hands right down its mouth, he did. See. A wild tiger!’

Ma seemed stunned and a bit stupid. She never took her eyes off me. ‘His poor toes,’ she said, and I looked down and saw them bleeding where they’d been pul ed over the stones, and it brought the realisation of pain. I felt where the tiger had made my col ar wet.

‘Dear ma’am,’ Mr Jamrach said, pressing money into Ma’s apron, ‘this is the bravest little boy I ever encountered.’

BOOK: Jamrach's Menagerie
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