Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

  ‘I been telling you what might happen, Mr Jamrach!’ shrilled 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 full,’ 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 will 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 stalls 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 all 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 pulled over the stones, and it brought the realisation of pain. I felt where the tiger had made my collar wet.

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

  He gave her a card with his name on.

  We ate well that night, no hunger sickness for me. I was very happy, filled up with love for the tiger. She washed my toes with warm water and rubbed them with butter she got from Mrs Regan. Mr Reuben sat in our room sucking on his pipe, and all the neighbours jostled at our door. It was like a carnival. Ma was tickled pink and kept telling everyone, ‘A tiger! A tiger! Jaffy got carried off by a tiger!’

  The tiger made me. When my path and his crossed, everything changed. After that, the road took its branching way, willy-nilly, and off I went into the future. It might not have been so. Nothing might ever have been so. I might not have known the great thing that came to pass. I might have taken home Mr Reuben’s baccy and gone upstairs to my dear ma and things would have gone altogether differently.

  The card sat propped importantly on the mantelpiece next to Ma’s hairbrush and a jug of wispy black feathers, and when Mrs Regan’s son Jud came home from work he read it to us.

  Charles Jamrach Naturalist and Importer of Animals, Birds and Shells

  2

  The first time I saw Tim Linver he was standing out in our street shouting up at the house.

  ‘Jaffy Brown’s wanted!’

  It was the morning after my great encounter. I was standing in the room of Mari-Lou and Silky, who knew nothing of my adventure, the tops of my toes still burning and my plasters turning dirty and raggy. Mari-Lou, unlaced, fat brown breasts spilling, counted pennies into my palm for the fried fish stall, and a penny for me for going. Mari-Lou wore her hair very black with scarlet roses at the sides. Elaborate crinkles sprouted round her eyes, and a great round belly stuck out in front and carried her forward. ‘Now, Mister Jaffy,’ she instructed, ‘no brown bits. Yah? No brown bits and a nice big pickle, and no you sucking on it.’ Her rouge was faded. The mountain of silk that was Silky was sitting up in bed with her two thin breasts drooping down to her waist. They’d have their fish supper in bed and be snoring deeply in half an hour.

  And the cry came: ‘Jaffy Brown’s wanted!’

  I went to the window and looked out with the pennies warm in my hand and there he was. Older, bigger than me, different as could be, straight goldy-haired, pretty and girl-like of face. Tim Linver. It was late morning, the street thronged.

  ‘Who wants him?’ I shouted.

  ‘Jamrach wants him,’ he said. ‘Come down.’

  ‘What about our cod, Mister Jaf?’ Mari-Lou’s long red claws dug into my arm.

  ‘I’m going!’ I cried and bounded down the stairs.

  The boy came forward. ‘You him?’ he asked gracelessly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve got to get you a raspberry puff,’ he said morosely. ‘Jamrach said.’

  The raspberry puffs in the windows of the pastry cook’s shop I walked past every day on Back Lane were beyond me. The berries bled juice through their hairs. The furrowed cream was pale gold, the pastry damp with sugar.

  The tiger had opened magical doors.

  ‘I’m running an errand,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get fish.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got to get you a raspberry puff and take you to Jamrach,’ he said, as if that was far more important. ‘Getting the special grand tour, you are. See all the wild animals?’

  Mari-Lou leaned out of the window. ‘Off you go and get that fish, you, Mister Jaf!’

  ‘What’s it like getting eaten?’ the boy said.

  ‘Eaten?’

  ‘You’re eaten,’ he said, ‘so they say.’

  ‘Do I look it?’

  ‘It’s all around that you’re eaten,’ he said, ‘eaten up and just your head left on the stones.’

  I saw it, my head on the stones. It made me laugh.

  ‘Just your head,’ he said, ‘and your hands and feet. And some bits of bone, I suppose, gnawed ragged.’

  ‘Didn’t hurt a bit,’ I said.

  Mari-Lou threw a bottle at my head. It missed and smashed in the gutter.

  ‘Two ticks,’ I said to the boy. ‘Wait.’ And I ran all the way to the fried fish stall and all the way back.

  Mrs Regan was just taking up her post on the doorstep and looked disapprovingly at my filthy feet as I shot past her. ‘You’ll get blood poisoning, you will,’ she remarked. I pelted upstairs and shoved the steaming bundle into Mari-Lou’s eager red claws. Mari-Lou and Silky liked their fish drenched till it was soggy. My eyes stang from the vinegar. I’d forgotten the pickle. You’d have thought I’d robbed a cripple. I had to give them back a penny, but I didn’t care. Wild animals were roaming in my head: lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes. I was going to have a raspberry puff and see the animals.

  The boy was still there when I reached the street, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders high. ‘Come on,’ he said, and I followed his straight, insolent back down through the crowds between the market stalls till we came out on Back Lane, where he barred me from going with him into the shop with one movement of his arm and not a word. Himself, he went in and requested one raspberry puff to eat now please, Rose, darling, as if he was a man. I did no
t know then that he was only a year my senior and thought he must be at least eleven.

  I could see Rose through the glass, a nice smily girl with flour dusting her eyelashes. Then he strolled out, looked up at the sky, handed me a raspberry puff nestled in a little napkin for me to hold to keep my fingers clean. Not that they were clean in the first place.

  There he stood with his hands in his pockets and watched me eat the raspberry puff. The first bite was so bitterly sweet the corners of my mouth ached. So beautiful, a film of tears stung my eyes. Then the pain dispersed and there was only delight. I had never tasted raspberry. Never tasted cream. The second bite was greedy and gorging, stopping my mouth up. He had eyes like a statue. Never moved. He’d probably never had a raspberry puff himself. He was better dressed then me, shoes and all, but still, I bet he never ate a raspberry puff in his life.

  ‘Want a bit?’ I said.

  He shook his head sharply and made that banning motion with his arm again, smiling a little, proudly.

  The smell hit me first, a good thrilling smell, stronger than cheese. Then the noise. We came in from the street to a lobby where coats were hung, and boxes and great sacks stored, and a green parrot leaned over me and peered into my face. It looked as if it knew something funny.

  ‘She speaks,’ said the boy. ‘Go on, Flo, say: “Five pounds, darlin’.”’

  Flo cocked her head sharply, shifting her gaze to him in a sympathetic way but saying nothing.

  ‘Five pounds, darlin’! Go on, you stupid bird.’

  She blinked. He made a quick sound of disgust and led me to an open door from which a smog of dark smoke was visibly spreading into the hall.

  ‘Here he is, Mr Jamrach. He’s had his creamy doodah.’

  I followed him in. The great, red-faced Jamrach came down through the murk with a smile and cried: ‘Ha! Jaffy Brown!’ He punched me gently on the shoulder. ‘Did you have a good supper last night?’ He bent down with his face so close I could count the red veins in the whites of his eyes. The air was heavy, lush and rotting, filled with traces of bowels and blood and piss and hair, and something overall I could not name, which I suppose was wildness.

  ‘Mutton stew,’ I said. ‘It was lovely.’

  ‘Excellent!’

  Mr Jamrach stood up and rubbed his palms together. He wore a business suit that made him look stout, and his hair was parted in the middle and slicked down with oil.

  ‘Bulter,’ he said to a pale young man scowling and picking his nails behind a very untidy desk, ‘get Charlie out.’

  Bulter stood, long and thin, flounced round the desk and stopped before a large cage. A wonderful, outrageous bird perched attentively, watching the dim room as if it was the most wonderful show. The bird was all colours, and its beak was bigger than its body.

  ‘Come out, Charlie, you stupid bird,’ Bulter said, lifting the latch.

  Charlie danced with delight. Didn’t he crawl as gentle as a sleepy kitten into Bulter’s arms and nestle up against his breast with that hard monster beak and the downturned head bashful? Bulter stroked the black feathers on top of the bird’s head. ‘Daft he is,’ he said, turned and placed Charlie in my arms. Charlie raised his head and looked into my face.

  ‘He’s a toucan,’ Tim said.

  ‘Got the touch, you have,’ Bulter said to me. ‘He likes you.’

  ‘Likes everyone,’ Tim said.

  Charlie was a sane and willing bird. So was Flo, the parrot in the lobby. The birds that came after were not.

  Mr Jamrach led me through the lobby and into the menagerie. The first room was a parrot room, a fearsome screaming place of mad round eyes, crimson breasts that beat against bars, wings that flapped against their neighbours, blood red, royal blue, gypsy yellow, grass green. The birds were crammed along perches. Macaws hung upside down here and there, batting their white eyes, and small green parrots flittered above our heads in drifts. A host of cockatoos looked down from on high over the shrill madness, high crested, creamy breasted. The screeching was like laughter in hell.

  ‘This is how they like it,’ Jamrach said.

  My eyes watered. My ears hurt.

  ‘They flock.’

  ‘They’re crying out for parrots,’ Tim Linver said sagely, bobbing alongside with a loose and cocky gait.

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘People is.’

  I turned my head. Small ones, pretty things, blue, red, green, yellow, in rows behind the wire, good as gold and quiet.

  ‘My parakeets,’ said Jamrach. ‘Lovely birds.’

  ‘In and out in no time, this lot.’ Tim rocked back on his heels, speaking like a man, as if the entire operation belonged to him.

  The second room was quieter. Hundreds of birds, like sparrows but done out in all the colours of the rainbow, in long boxes. A wall of bluebirds, breasts the colour of rose sherbet. The air, fluty with song, like early morning.

  ‘Six shillings a pair,’ Tim said.

  The third and last bird room was completely silent. All the way up to the ceiling, tiny wooden cages piled on top of one another, in each one a bird just the right size to fill the space, all of them mute and still. More than anything I’d seen, this room bothered me. I wondered if Mr Jamrach would let me have one. I could tame it and it would fly free in our room and sing.

  Out into the dazzling yard. Bulter from the office was there with another man, sweeping up outside a pen. A camel chewed behind the bars. A camel has to chew like it has to breathe. I know that now. Then, I might as well have stepped into a picture book. The animals were the stuff of fairy tales, the black bear with the white bib, the sideways-looking eye of the baby elephant, the head of the giraffe, immense, coming down at me from the sky to wet me with the heat of its flexing nostrils. I grew light of mind from the gorgeous stench. A wilderness steamed in the air all about me. And then I saw my tiger in his cage, with a lion on one side and some dog things on the other. The lion was a majestic and dreadful cat with the stern, sad face of a scholar and wild billowing hair. He looked me in the eye for a whole moment before turning away in total indifference. A thick, pink tongue licked out, carressing his nostrils. The hair stood up on the backs of the dog things. My tiger paced, rippling, thick tail striking the air. Little black fishes swam on his back. Scimitars, blades, dashes, black on gold, black on white. Heavy-headed, lower jaw hanging slack, backwards and forwards, steady:

  three paces and a half – turn—

  three paces and a half – turn—

  three paces and a half—

  ‘See!’ said Jamrach. ‘This is the bad boy. He knows he’s been a bad boy, he is shamed, see.’

  ‘Has he got a name?’

  ‘Not yet. He hasn’t found his buyer yet.’

  ‘Who buys a tiger?’ I asked.

  ‘Zoos,’ Tim said.

  ‘London Zoo,’ I said. I’d never been there.

  Tim and Jamrach laughed as if I’d said something funny.

  ‘Not just zoos,’ Jamrach said, ‘people who collect.’

  ‘How much for my tiger?’ I asked.

  ‘He is a full-grown Bengal tiger,’ Mr Jamrach said. ‘Two hundred pounds at least.’

  Tim babbled: ‘Two hundred for a tiger, three hundred an elephant, seventy for a lion. You can pay three hundred for some lions though. Get the right one. An orang-utan, now that’s three twenty.’

  We went up a ladder to a place where there was a beast like a pie, a great lizard mad and grinning, and monkeys, many monkeys, a stew of human nature, a bone pile of it, a wall, a dream of small faces. Baby things. No, ancient, impossibly old things. But they were beyond old and young. The babies clung fast beneath sheltering bellies. The mothers, stoic above, endured.

  ‘And here …’ Jamrach, with some showmanship, whipped the lid off a low round basket. Snakes, thick, green and brown, muscled, lay faintly flexing upon one another like ropes coiled high on the quay. ‘Snappy things, these,’ Jamrach said, putting back the lid and tying a rope round it.

  W
e passed by a huge cat with pointed ears and eyes like jewels that miaowed like a kitten at us. Furry things ran here and there about our feet, pretty things I never could have imagined. He said they came from Peru, whatever far place that was. And right at the end in the darkest place, sitting down with his knuckles turned in, was an ape who looked at me with eyes like a man’s.

  That was all I ever wanted. To stay among the animals for ever and ever and look into their eyes whenever I felt like it. So when, back in the smoky office with the pale clerk Bulter lolling 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 small, isn’t he?’ Tim Linver said. ‘You sure he’s up to it, Mr Jamrach?’

  ‘Well, Jaffy?’ Mr Jamrach asked jovially. ‘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 all 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.’

  Well, 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 carefully and with the utmost respect, he lifted out a snake, one greater than all 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 taller than me. Its body was triangular, covered in dry, yellowish 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?’