The Newgate Jig (10 page)

It
was a good exhibition, full of variety, and I was pleased that Brutus and Nero
showed their skills, and the people who paid their pennies to come and see us
were so appreciative. We gave half a dozen exhibitions like this, and I hardly
stopped to breathe, as they say, which helped me more easily to put aside the
unpleasantness of earlier events. But when the evening dropped down and the
room was quiet, I fell to thinking about it and felt heavy again with that
melancholy that comes over me when I am upset. No wonder that my hand shook as
I scraped the stray tea leaves from the table and straightened my pot and cups.
My little collection of books were all awry, pulled off the shelf and shoved
roughly back, and the picture of the Queen, which was propped on the top, had
slipped behind and only her crown was showing. It quite sent me off my hinges
and I made haste to go home to be rid of the world and back in my own little
room, safe and sound.

Upstairs
it was all quiet, but for the gentle rumble of Bella, the lioness: Conn was
shutting up the menagerie for the night. In one of his rare moments of
conversation, he once told me that the animals know when the Aquarium has
closed.

They
fall silent,' he said in his own strange tongue, half- Irish, half-darkie (for
he was of a mulatto strain). The apes stop swinging from the bars and sit in
their corners. Birds stop calling. Bella, she lies down and sings herself a
lullaby.'

Bella
was the great golden lioness that Mr Abrahams had bought from a travelling
menagerie, along with her keeper, Conn.

'Old
Bella, that fine, fierce girl, she knows well enough about everything that goes
on. She keeps her teeth back though.'

Conn
was as affectionate in speech about Bella as I was about my dogs, but there the
similarity ended, for I could pet and play with Brutus and Nero, but Conn could
only stand and stare at the bars of the cage.

'She
had me once, Bob,' he confided, when I had taken a packet of medicinal powders
up to him for Bella's skin, 'and she will bide her time until she can finish
me. Look into them old eyes, will you, and tell me if they are not full of love
and blood-lust.'

Indeed,
I could not say! Riddles dropped easily from Conn's lips and when his voice
faded to a whisper, it was difficult to know whether he was in all seriousness
or in drink, for he did have a weakness in that area. When he was overcome, he
would stagger up to the menagerie to sleep in an empty cage, and later would
terrify Nightman (a nameless dwarf employed to mind the menagerie through the
night hours), who never quite got used to Conn's habits. One gloomy afternoon I
discovered Conn crouched upon the second landing, nursing a bottle and
clutching by the tail a petrified lizard from one of the cabinets. He caught
it, he said, when it was trying to steal away. And as he drained the bottle, he
said more. About his life on the road. The travelling menagerie. The woman he
had loved and lost. And Bella, the lioness, raised by him from a cub, who one
day turned upon him and tore the flesh from his back and arm.

'Here,'
he whispered, tearing at his back, 'is where she laid her claws upon me and
caressed my spine! And here is where her mouth kissed my shoulder and arm till
I thought I should die from the pain.'

He
talked of his nights of agony, of the pain endured as doctors struggled to stem
the blood and sew up the flesh - 'with thread so fine you couldn't see it' - and
the fever and delirium which sent him nearly mad.

They
tied me to my bed, Bob, and I howled like a dog, and wanted to die. Who would
not want to die, in my place, with a back torn to shreds and an arm useless. I
begged Holy Jesus to take me, but He wouldn't. And as I screamed and howled,
Bella roared back to me. Talked to me. Beast to beast. "Next time,"
she cried, "next time it shall be the rapture for you." And that,' he
said, laying a hand upon my arm, 'is death.'

Then
the drink overcame him and he slumped under the Roman table, with his head upon
the petrified lizard. I laid his coat over his shoulder and dragged a rug
across him to hide him from the visitors, for he was much troubled and I
couldn't help but pity him. In his drunken rages, he would pull off his shirt
to reveal the terrible wounds which the lioness had inflicted upon him - 'Look
at my back, Chapman!' he would cry. 'Get a cloth and stop the blood before I
bleed to death!' But when I examined his back and shoulder, there were no
gouges of flesh and skin, no torn muscle and ragged sinew, no raw wounds, still
open and bleeding, as he often claimed. Just the hard, white stripes of
childhood beatings, like the grain in wood, deep and ridged. Scars of the belt
and the lash applied often and long to his young skin and paining him still, so
much so that he had to invent a story to account for them. Bella, the lioness.
The nearest thing to a family Conn had ever had.

But
whether she had mauled him or not, Bella was the most vocal of the creatures in
the menagerie, and she could be heard all over the Aquarium. From a terrifying
roar, which made my two boys stop in their tracks, to the gentle rumbling
lullaby which I could hear now. Unlike Conn, I couldn't tell what she was
saying but, having already had an unwelcome visitor to my stand, I wondered if
something might be amiss. So it was out of concern for the animals and Conn,
and the disquiet over that earlier intruder, that I mounted the gloomy back
stairs to the menagerie, what Mr Abrahams called the 'service stairs', the
route by which Conn brought up straw and animal food, and used by all of us if
we wanted to avoid general scrutiny. The stairs were plain and bare, narrow
and dimly lit, not intended to be seen at all, and had the advantage of leading
to all parts of the building.

I
opened the door and was greeted by the warm smell of animals and straw and the
sound of them moving in their cages. Brutus and Nero sat, obediently, in the
open doorway, their noses high, sniffing the unfamiliar scents, whilst I cautiously
stepped in. Conn had turned down the lights and left, and all was dim and
shadowy. It ran the whole length of the building, a great, high room with long
windows and a skylight. Full of cages. When it was first opened, there had been
fish up here, in an aquarium, the biggest in all London, according to Mr
Abrahams.

'But,'
said he, 'the weight of a tank full of water, you know, Bob, caused the
floorboards to sag, so it had to go. I sold it to a man from Manchester. In
twenty parts, each one labelled separately. And the fish in buckets. I hope
they survived the journey.'

He had looked sadly around the long room.

'I
liked to come up here and watch the fish. My Mimi liked it too. We would sit
together in the dark, and watch them. Peaceful, she used to say, like another
world under the water. And she was right. It was popular, Bob. We had the only
aquarium in the whole of the city that contained not only sea- snakes, but a
speaking fish too. In a separate tank, of course, and his own keeper. Pongo was
the first talking fish since Jacko was exhibited in the Strand thirty years
ago.'

He had pointed to a flash above the door.

'That's him. Pongo. A clever creature.'

It
was still there, a painted board. 'See Pongo. The talking fish. He will count!!
He will sing!!!'

But
now, instead of a great glass tank in the middle of the floor, cages ranged as
far as the eye could see, and the animals within, lizards and apes, pigs and
snakes, as well as Bella, the lion, were crowded together like the inhabitants
of a strange ark. A snuffling creature from Africa in a cage alongside a badger
from Wales. Birds with feathers the colours of a rainbow fluttering in a cage
next to one in which lay a sleeping fox. I peered into the tank of snakes
where, in the corner, they were coiled and heaped, one upon another, and in the
cage above it, a rabbit, grey and white, with ears that trailed upon the
ground, its eyes bright and its nose twitching. Cage upon cage, they were
crowded together, offending my sense of order and design, but that was not the
worst of it for me. It pained me more acutely to see wild animals so confined,
and so I rarely came up here. Brutus and Nero were similarly uneasy and would
follow me into the room only if commanded, preferring to sit in the doorway as
they did now. It was clear, as I walked along the range of cages where eyes
blinked at me out of the gloom and Bella grumbled away, that there was no one
here. No intruder, and surely nowhere for them to hide.

But
passing Bella's cage, I realized that it was Nero and not the lioness who was
growling, a low rumble in his throat, and barely audible except, perhaps, to
me. I went quickly along the length of the cages to the door where he was now
on his feet, growling still and looking hard at the flight of stairs up to the
attics where, standing at the top, framed by the open door, was Mrs Gifford.

'Chapman.
Why are you still here? And what are you doing, creeping about like a burglar?
You're fortunate I haven't called the constable and had you run in.'

I
wanted no truck with this woman and started down the stairs, but she was not
about to let me go and hurried after me.

'Just
you wait there, Chapman. Don't you budge an inch!'

I
waited, though it pained me to obey her and she caught me up, standing three or
four steps above me and staring me out.

'If you have interfered with anything in there, Mr
Abrahams shall know about it,' she said. 'You've no business in there, Chapman.
Your place is on the second floor.'

She
continued finding fault, reminding me of my place, complaining about my dogs,
the untidiness of my workplace, and yet all the time was looking beyond me,
over my shoulder, never meeting my eye, until - was it my imagination? - I
heard the soft thud of the front door closing, when she released me with a
peremptory 'Good night'.

I
felt as though she had kept me there on purpose, and when I reached the hall, I
stood for a moment, as it were, in another's breath. There was an unfamiliar
scent upon the air and when I looked up, Mrs Gifford was still there, leaning
over the banister.

The Pavilion Theatre — Em Pikemartin

I am a busy man these days, for I have prospects in view,
to

which
end I have been scouring the 'For Sale' columns and found a number of market
carts which will fit my bill (and pocket, eventually), and horses too. I have
made calculations and worked into them the cost of feed and stabling and general
upkeep - things which I think Mr Strong would be pleased I had considered. I
feel as though I am almost a man of business!

But
I must earn and save the money to do it, so I had my work at the Aquarium,
giving six shows a day, and more on Friday and Saturday nights. And I was
attending rehearsals at the Pavilion Theatre, where Mr Carrier had Brutus, Nero
and myself in the cast of the Christmas extravaganza of
Elenore the Female Pirate,
to open (and Mr Carrier will not give way on this
tradition) on Boxing Day. So I was constantly running between the Aquarium and
the Pavilion, with my dogs at my heels. People who knew me in the neighbourhood
(for it was small and close) started to notice, and called after me, 'Hoi,
Chapman! Dragged again!' and 'Run, don't walk!' after Mr Scarsdale's humorous
song 'Walk, don't run, Sonny Jim'. And when Mr Carrier got to hear about it, he
suggested that, because I was well known now for trotting around the district
with Brutus and Nero at my heels, I should make our entrance in
Elenore
in this fashion - on the trot, as it were!

Chapman's
Sagacious Canines already had a name, of course, but a little extra attention
in the exhibition business never goes amiss and helps to keep up numbers at my
Aquarium show. Indeed, I believe one had already helped the other, and would
increase in that way once
Elenore the Female Pirate
was running nightly at the Pavilion, for Mr Abrahams said more than once that
he hoped Mr Carrier's enterprise was a success and had no doubt it would be a
plusser for my business at the Aq.