Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

  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.

  ‘Will 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 tell you.’

  Jamrach told me to come back tomorrow at seven when they were expecting a consignment of Tasmanian devils and yet more marmosets. He rolled 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 called 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 all 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 jolly. When everyone was up on the floor dancing the polka, the pounding sound of all 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 called 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, all 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-smelling Bermondsey shore with me in her belly, the sailors had sung out there across the great river, and their siren song had come to the shell-pink enormity that was my listening ear newly formed in the amniotic fluid.

  Or so I believe.

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

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

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

  ‘What are they like?’ I asked again, but he wouldn’t tell me. They’ve got great big mouths, he’d say, or: They stink; but what kind of a thing they were he wasn’t telling. 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 still. 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 all 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. All 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 till he comes.’ And he showed me two tiny monkeys with white tufty ears and large round eyes staring up at me through a grid.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, squatting down to look at them, all 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 till I get there.’

  I carried the box up the ramp, smelling the meaty breath of the lion to the right of me. It was too dark to see him, and darker still in the loft. The lantern’s light swung about, here and there it caught the shine of an eye. There were tortoises all 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 small sad noises in their throats. No fight in them at all. ‘In you go,’ I said, loosening their fing
ers, 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 till Mr Jamrach says,’ I replied.

  ‘Smokey’s all 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 yelled 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 calling me a coward. I thought about it as I pounded down the ramp, but I never was one for fighting.

  ‘All well?’ called Jamrach.

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

  ‘All well!’ called 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 called us to the office. The smell 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 tall pot. Steam rose in slow, hot coils, mingling with blue smoke.

  ‘Ah, good job well 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 filled up on Bulter’s desk and I felt near fainting at the smell. But something terrible was happening in my feet.

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

  ‘Does he now?’ The man turned his small 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 pulled them over my frozen feet. ‘My wife made these,’ he said, ‘and all the darnings were made by her. See. She is a genius, my wife.’

  He gave me coffee.

  ‘Soon as you get home, you wash them feet,’ he said.

  Of course, they were much too big, but I wore them like sacks and they had the heat of his feet on them.

  I loved working at Jamrach’s. I was looking after the animals. Mr Jamrach bought me boots. We swept the yard, cleaned cages and pens, changed straw and water and feed. Big Cobbe did the heavy stuff. Bulter kept the books mostly, but slouched about in the yard when he was needed, handling the beasts with practised aplomb. Too easy, his manner said. Too easy for me, all these lions and crocodiles and bears and man-engorging snakes.

  Tim wrote up stock. I counted and he wrote down. Thus:

  One Chinese alligator. The alligator stretched smiling beside us on the other side of iron bars, half in, half out of his water.

  Four Japanese pigs.

  Fourteen Barbary apes.

  Twelve cobras.

  Eight wolves.

  One gazelle.

  Sixty-four tortoises. A guess. You never could tell with the tortoises; they moved around too much.

  Tim and I got along fine as long as I deferred to him in every way. He was a great one for wandering off in the middle of a job and leaving me with the worst bit to do. ‘Off to the jakes,’ he’d say and that would be it for half an hour. And yet when Jamrach was there he was always around, cheerfully toiling, whistling, pushing a wheelbarrow. He’d been Jamrach’s lad since he was a tot, he told me. ‘Can’t do without me,’ he said. He had a way of putting himself in front of me, talking over me, jostling me back with his shoulder. I never said anything. How could I? He was gold and tall and marvellous, and I was a little, shitty, bedraggled creature from the other shore. Rock this wonderful boat which had hauled me over the side? Never. Not when he broke an egg in my pocket. Not even when he fed me a mealworm sandwich. He taught me how to hold a monkey, how to keep frogs damp and crickets dry, where to stand so as not to get kicked by an emu, how to tickle a bear, how to breed locusts and behead mealworms. Mostly though it was mucking out and swilling down, slopping out, mashing feed, changing water. Only Cobbe and Jamrach were allowed to go in with the fierce apes or feed the big cats. I could have gone in with old Smokey though. He was gentle. But he was gone on the third day, taken out in a cart, sitting looking out of the back of the box as patiently as he’d sat in his pen. None of them stayed long, apart from the parrot in the hall and Charlie the toucan, and a particular pig from Japan that Jamrach took a fancy to and made a pet of, letting it wander freely around the yard and deposit its sticky, black droppings all over wherever I’d just swept.

  Trade was brisk.

  My own tiger went to Constantinople to live in the garden of the Sultan. I imagined it: a hot, green jungle of flowers and shimmering ponds, where my tiger stalked for ever. I imagined the Sultan going out for a walk in his garden and meeting him, face to face.

  Friday, nearly a week after I started, he sent me and Tim over to the shop after it was shut, to muck out the birds and feed the fish and clean up a new batch of oil lamps that had come in filthy on a ship from the Indies.

  Jamrach’s shop was on the Highway, two big windows and the name up twice: Jamrach’s Jamrach’s, it said. It was a late, dark afternoon, and I was weary in those first days, all of a dream with the days and nights, biffing and banging about between the yard and Spoony’s and home, and hardly ever seeing Ma because she was on funny shifts in the sugar factory. The shop was a dusty rambleaway sort of place, and it seemed unearthly as we roamed around it with a lantern casting lurching shadows, thick with presence. Every inch was crammed. The walls came in on you. In the centre by the stairs stood a mannequin, a naked woman, black hair piled on top of her head. She gave me the creeps. Japanese, Tim said. ‘Look, you can move her arms and legs.’ And he twisted her into such a horrible pose she looked like a demon in the jumping light.

  Inwards was a warren of small rooms and steps and narrow passages, the walls crammed full of pictures: idols, devils, dragons, flowers with curious fevered lips. Mountains and fountains, palaces and pearls. All came to me dreamlike. A green god watched me from a throne. There was a room full of suits of armour, a giant gong, knives, daggers, Japanese silk slippers, a blood
-red shining harp with the fierce head of a dragon with eyes that bulged. Tim showed me around with such pride you’d have thought he’d personally found and conducted home each treasure from its far-flung source. ‘Stuff from all four corners!’ He threw out his arms. ‘Know what we had once? Shrunken heads! Human! Looked like monkeys. That’s what they do in them places, cut off your head and wear you round their waist like a … like a … looka this. That’s a demon’s tongue from Mongolia, that is. And see that over there on the wall? That’s a death mask. From Tibet. Bet you wouldn’t dare put it on, would you?’

  ‘No, I bloody wouldn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Dare you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go on. Double dare.’

  ‘You put it on,’ I said.

  ‘I already have. I went out in it once. This old lady nearly dropped down dead on the corner of Baroda Place.’

  Liar. I didn’t say anything.

  The birds and fish were at the back. Fish from China, orange and white and black, fat, mouthy creatures with big round eyes that stuck out like milky warts on either side of their heads. White cockatoos, cramped and patient, reasonable, amiable birds that watched with every appearance of deep interest as we went about our work. They’d been moved to new quarters and we were scouring down their old. Deeply mucky they were too, the ground caked thick with hard white droppings that had to be scraped off with a chisel. It was getting on for half past five by the time we’d finished the cages, and we still had the fish to feed and the box to unpack.

  ‘You hungry?’ Tim asked. ‘Why don’t I pop out and get us a couple of saveloys?’

  ‘You ain’t gonna be long, Tim?’ I said.

  ‘Two ticks,’ he said, and off he went, leaving me alone there, locking me in ‘for safety’, he said.

  It didn’t take long to feed the fish. I was done with that and halfway through polishing the lamps, wondering with each one whether a genie would appear and offer me three wishes, when I felt the first creepings of fear. The lantern stood on the counter, casting a sombre glow that called up flickering shadows from all nooks and corners. Each lamp as I cleaned it joined its fellows in a small neat community on the floor. I was sitting cross-legged with my duster beside the box, reaching in for the next lamp and thinking bad thoughts about Tim Linver. Suddenly, the hairs on the back of my neck came very slowly and coldly to attention, a sensation not unlike a thin finger drawing itself from the centre of my skull down to the top of my spine. It surprised me. I had not been feeling particularly afraid. The shutters were pulled down over the front windows and I could hear the ordinary early evening sounds of the Highway going on outside. I looked around. Only the softly pulsing shadows. What had I expected? Nothing. Nothing I had ever experienced in life up to this point had led me to believe in ghosts. I never thought of them. Even now I don’t think Jamrach’s shop was haunted, but something happened to me there that night.