Jamrach's Menagerie (9 page)

‘I’m going to sea! With Dan! We’re going to catch a dragon! And we’l 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 stil further east til 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, pul ing 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. ‘Tel him.’

He went behind his desk and leaned back horizontal y 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’l 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 cal ed the
Lysander.
It had sailed out of Hul 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’l 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 wel 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 wel , 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 bel ies 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. Stil 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 jol y her along.

‘Eh? What shal I bring you back?’

‘I don’t want anything, you sil y sod.’

‘Don’t worry, Ma! It’l be the making of me. Can’t hang about here al 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 al 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 al the time.

Oh damn. Have you eaten?’

‘Had plenty. Look, Ma, just pour me some tea, wil you?’

‘Wel , it al 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 tel 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, al wanted to take me into their soft, lemony, lavender bosoms. Many a time for sure I sank my face in there between the creamy swel s 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 wel , you London girls. Jaf Brown is off around the world, and when next you see him he’l have a tale to tel .

‘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 al 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 smel ed 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 wal s were silky and the great mouth of the fireplace glowed yel ow. I got next to Ishbel next to the wal , Tim on the other end of the bench sprawling round ginger Jane and chewing on a liquorice twig.

‘Oh, here they are,’ drawled Ish sarcastical y. ‘Hail, the mighty explorers. These bum boils are leaving me, Jane.’

‘I know,’ Jane said, tweaking her tight red curls. ‘It’s al the talk.’

‘Three years! What am I supposed to do al that time stuck here al 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.

‘Wel , you couldn’t very wel 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, stil 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 swal ow’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 hel 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 real y 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 pul ed 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 sil y.’ 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 al .’

‘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 stal . 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 gal ant ship, three times round went she …’, about in a circle she would dance three times and finish by fal ing 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 fel on the first of August, his and hers.

For her tenth I gave her a shel . 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 cal ed 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 cal ed 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 wil ,’ she said, ‘but they’l al be there then, won’t they?’

I fel on my knees and kissed her strong stumpy hands and I fel on my knees and kissed her strong stumpy hands and bitten nails and wept and told her I loved her. No, I didn’t.