Jamrach's Menagerie (4 page)

So when, back in the smoky office with the pale clerk Bulter lol ing 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 smal , isn’t he?’ Tim Linver said. ‘You sure he’s up to it, Mr Jamrach?’

‘Wel , Jaffy?’ Mr Jamrach asked jovial y. ‘
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 al 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.’

Wel , 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 careful y and with the utmost respect, he lifted out a snake, one greater than al 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 tal er than me. Its body was triangular, covered in dry, yel owish 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.

‘Wil 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 tel you.’

Jamrach told me to come back tomorrow at seven when they were expecting a consignment of Tasmanian devils and yet more marmosets. He rol ed 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 cal ed 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 al 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 jol y. When everyone was up on the floor dancing the polka, the pounding sound of al 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 cal ed 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, al 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-smel ing Bermondsey shore with me in her bel y, the sailors had sung out there across the great river, and their siren song had come to the shel -pink enormity that was my listening ear newly formed in the amniotic fluid.

Or so I believe.

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

The place was stil wild when I knocked off at midnight and went home to Ma. The streets were ful and roaring. There was money in my pocket. I bought a great lump of brown sugar and sucked it al the way home. Ma was stil out, so I asked Mari-Lou to make sure she told her to cal 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 al I could do was doze and dream, al 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 tel 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 wel as clerk, was lounging by the gate with Cobbe, a brawny great square of a man who swept the yard and al the pens.

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

‘What are they like?’ I asked again, but he wouldn’t tel me.

They’ve got great big mouths, he’d say, or: They stink; but what kind of a thing they were he wasn’t tel ing. 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 stil . 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 al 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. Al 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 til he comes.’ And he showed me two tiny monkeys with white tufty ears and large round eyes staring up at me through a grid.

‘Hel o,’ I said, squatting down to look at them, al 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 til I get there.’

I carried the box up the ramp, smel ing the meaty breath of the lion to the right of me. It was too dark to see him, and darker stil in the loft. The lantern’s light swung about, here and there it caught the shine of an eye. There were tortoises al 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 smal sad noises in their throats. No fight in them at al . ‘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 til Mr Jamrach says,’ I replied.

‘Smokey’s al 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 yel ed 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 cal ing me a coward. I thought about it as I pounded down the ramp, but I never was one for fighting.

‘Al wel ?’ cal ed Jamrach.

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

‘Al wel !’ cal ed 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 cal ed us to the office. The smel 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 tal pot. Steam rose in slow, hot coils, mingling with blue smoke.

‘Ah, good job wel 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 fil ed up on Bulter’s desk and I felt near fainting at the smel . But something terrible was happening in my feet.

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

‘Does he now?’ The man turned his smal 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 pul ed them over my frozen feet. ‘My wife made these,’ he said,