by Carol Birch
He blinked hard, walked over to where I was scooping porridge into my mouth and put out his hand.
‘I’m very sorry, Jaffy,’ he said, steadily holding my eyes. ‘I really am. Truly. It was a mean thing I did. You’ve still got your job. I’ve been to Spoony’s and I’ve told them.’
I stood up and we shook solemnly.
‘’S’all right,’ I said.
Midday. Ma was asleep when I got home. Mari-Lou and Silky slept too, long dreamy sighs behind the curtain. I got into bed next to Ma, hugging my telescope. Dan Rymer’s telescope that had travelled the whole world round. She did not wake, but gathered me into the crook of her arm, and a tall ship bore me away through painted waves into a long sweet sleep.
3
Mr Jamrach liked children. Tim and Ishbel had been running in and out of his yard to see the animals since they were little. They were twins and made him laugh, and he gave them pennies for odd jobs. When Tim came to work he’d made him go to school two days a week, and now he did the same with me. By the time I was eleven I could read and write. Mr Jamrach said he needed his boys to be able to write things down and read off lists. I was quick. Ma was impressed. ‘You clever boy, Jaf,’ she said when I read the posters plastered outside the seamen’s bethel.
‘Grand Fair, Thames Tunnel,’ I read smugly, ‘Madame Zan-Zan Fortune-teller. Crinelli’s Puppets. The Marvellous Marioletti Brothers. Snake-Charming. Fire-Walking. Swingboats. Entrance 1d.’
He let us finish early the day of the fair and slipped me and Tim a coin or two each as we pulled off our working boots outside the shed. We spruced up at the pump and changed our clothes, pushing each other about and shaking water from our hair, poking our ears as we strode down the alley. Ishbel had worked the afternoon at the Malt Shovel and drunk some gin. Maybe that’s why she was so sharp. At any rate she started screaming at Tim as soon as we walked in, which wasn’t unusual.
‘You were supposed to fetch the coals before you went out!’ She was ladling soup and had a face full of steam. ‘You lazy pig!’
‘Shut your trap, woman,’ Tim said loftily. ‘Who are you calling a lazy pig? I’ve been shovelling shit since five o’clock.’
There was a slightly deranged look about Mrs Linver. Her eyes bulged and her hair was dripping wet against her forehead. ‘Shut up!’ she screamed, tucking a bib into her fat husband’s collar. ‘I’m sick to death with the pair of you! Sick to death!’ She plucked a half-finished mermaid from Mr Linver’s pudgy hand and dropped it into a basket on top of a dozen finished ones. Apart from when he was eating, that’s what Mr Linver did all day with uncanny consistency, as if he’d been wound up: turned out wooden mermaids for his wife to flog in the streets, blobby-faced women with huge, bulby breasts and curled fishtails upon which they could sit. He’d been a sailor, and a handsome one too, though you’d hardly believe it. Ishbel remembered him running up and down the alley with Tim on his shoulders and everybody laughing. But he’d come home witless when the twins were six, having taken a knock from a spar somewhere in the vicinity of Cape Verde. No one took any notice of him. He was like the chair he sat on. No one took any notice of me either, so I took my accustomed place at the table and waited to be served. Ishbel flounced two bowls of soup to the table and thumped them down so hard that some of the thin brown liquid slopped up and onto the oilcloth. She was twelve now, a great sulker.
‘It’s not fair,’ she said, ‘you come home all washed and ready to go and I’ve not even had a chance to comb my hair.’ She pulled the greasy handkerchief from her forehead and shook her head.
‘Oh, you’re all right,’ her ma said, ‘it won’t take you a minute.’
Ishbel pulled a hideous face at her mother’s back, drawing all the muscles in her neck and jaw so tight that they quivered. ‘Who do you think got the bloody coal in?’ she demanded of Tim. ‘Me. Me me me me me again. I’m sick of you, I hate you, you do this all the time.’
Tim, hair still wet from a dousing under the pump in Jamrach’s yard, sat down to his soup with a lopsided grin intended to irritate. Mr Linver leaned forward and gobbed on the fire.
‘That’s foul,’ said Tim.
His father turned an expression of almost hatred on him, fleeting but unmistakeable.
‘And I’ve got to work again tonight,’ she said, ‘and I’m not going to, it’s not fair, so there.’ She grabbed a canikin, dipped it in the soup pot and swept away into the other room.
‘Oh yes, you are, young madam!’ her mother yelled after her.
The room next door was full of thuds and bangs and theatrical sighs while we ate our soup. When we’d finished Tim and I went outside and sat in the warm sun in the moss-lined alley, passing a pipe between us. We didn’t speak. At last Ishbel came out, wiping her mouth.
‘I’m not going with you two,’ she said.
Her mother’s voice flapped after her through the open door. ‘Oh yes, you are, young madam!’
‘I’ll go with Jaffy,’ she said, ignoring me and looking at Tim, ‘but not you.’
This was momentous to me. We three had been mucking about the shore together for three years now, me always tag-along, stumbling and running every now and then to keep up with them, and they always shoulder to shoulder ahead, fair heads bobbing side by side.
But, ‘The devil you will,’ said Tim, untroubled, sticking his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders, and off they went in front as usual. Ishbel’s hair was matted on the back of her head and plaited underneath, but her plait was coming loose.
It was a public holiday, thronging. We walked down to the river and paid our pennies and passed under the arch to the cool under tunnel where the fair went thrillingly on and on along the pavement, one thing after another as far as the eye could see: fortune-tellers, donkey rides, pinch-faced little monkeys wearing blue jackets. The barrows of the clothes sellers were decked out with brightly coloured ladies’ dresses, high above us like lines of airborne dancing girls. I smelled lavender, sugar, sarsaparilla.
Ishbel walked in a swinging about kind of way with her hands clasped behind her back. She and Tim had scarcely said a word to one another since we’d left their house. We wandered about for a bit and ended up watching all the fools falling off the slippery pole.
‘You go on it, Jaf,’ said Tim.
‘No fear,’ said I.
‘Coward,’ he said.
‘You go on it.’
‘What’s the point of me going on it? I’ve done it millions of times.’
‘Ha!’ said Ishbel.
He smiled. Small baboon wrinkles appeared at the sides of his nose.
‘You go on the bloody thing, Tim,’ she said, ‘you’re so clever. You leave him alone.’
‘He needs it,’ he said. ‘Needs pushing a bit. Don’t you, eh?’ Pushing me a bit, not much, just enough so he could still say it was all in fun if I complained. ‘Don’t you?’
‘He don’t need you pushing him,’ she snapped. ‘Who’d want you pushing him?’
‘He does. Don’t you? See, see? Go on, Jaffy, go on, you can do it. It’s always the little ones do it best, it’s a known fact. You give it a go, boy. You’ve only got to stay on for a minute and you get a guinea. That’s good.’
No sir, not me. No fool, me.
Still, somehow I found myself up there on the wooden steps that went up to the tail end of the greasy pole. The pole was long and dappled and round, like a stretched horse with a wispy tail and a painted head. I looked at the horse’s arse, the few sad wisps of fibre sprouting there. I saw a sea of faces, all delightedly waiting for me to make a horse’s arse of myself. I saw Tim grinning off to the side, and the hem of Ishbel’s skirt. I spread my legs and, knowing I was doomed for the drop, launched myself up and over the horse’s arse and onto the slippery pole. It was like climbing onboard a slug. I put my hands before me, gripped slime, shunted forwards and for one strong moment sat with head held high before the pole rolled me round. With my hair hanging down backwards from my head, I
clung on, ridiculously, like a drop on the lip of a tap, destined to fall. Then I fell on my back in the sawdust, floundering like a fool, and the people roared.
Red-eared, I stomped through the indifferent crowd, past his grin and her brown eyes. Away. He ran after me and grabbed my elbow. ‘Don’t be stupid, Jaffy,’ he said, seeing my face.
I cursed him to hell.
‘Don’t be a baby, it’s only fun! I done it. She done it. Showed all her bloomers and all, didn’t you, Ish? What’s your beef, Jaffy?’
It was nothing. Everyone fell off the slippery pole, that’s what it was for. It was just Tim doing what he always did, trying to put me in the way of ridicule. My own fault for doing what he told me. It was fury at myself that made me lash out and punch him right in the middle of his stupid smug face. That and the sudden tipping of a scale by one last grain of rice.
‘Oy!’ he yelled.
He didn’t even bleed. That infuriated me even more. He didn’t hit me back either and that was worse, the final insult. I swung at him again and forced him to protect himself, and we scuffled, me near tears, till a woman came out from behind a pie stall and chucked a bucket of cold water over us as if we were dogs. The three of us ran.
We stopped where the swingboats flew up to the great vaulted roof.
‘Come on, Jaffy,’ Ishbel said, brushing down my drooping shoulders, ‘me and you’ll go on these.’
‘What d’you mean?’ Tim cried. ‘We only got two bob. Who’s paying for him, then?’
‘I am. Bugger you,’ she said.
‘That means I can’t go on!’
‘Boo hoo hoo!’ She shoved her face in his. ‘You’re a cruel, mean, nasty, horrible pig, you are, Timmy Linver! Yes you are.’
And she grabbed me and dragged me onto a red and blue swingboat whose occupants had just now been brought to earth and disgorged.
I had never been on a swingboat before. Me and Ishbel faced one another, grinning wildly, the world lurching up and down, up and down, the boat like a painted crescent moon in the sky. The babble of the crowd waxed and waned. There was laughter, mine and hers. A smear of rouge remained on her cheek from her afternoon at the Malt Shovel, where she danced in brass-heeled shoes the colour of blood, and the men clapped time. When we came down Tim was nowhere to be seen. For a moment we stood taking this in, not speaking. I had never been alone with her before.
She shrugged, slung an arm round my neck and hoicked me away from the fair and through the streets as if I was her little brother. She’d grown up so much faster than me. That’s girls for you.
We wandered vaguely in the direction of home, wordless. A fat man with terrible burns, old and much puckered, had set up a Happy Family cage by the corner of Old Gravel Lane. He had dormice in with a cat and a rat and an owl, and they were all just living there and not bothering each other. Ishbel said it was like the lion lying down with the lamb, but I knew how it was done. They put stuff in their feed to make them sleepy. I didn’t tell her though. Outside the seamen’s bethel she bought me a ginger beer and told me to wait while she went inside and lit candles for the boys. The boys were two brothers lost at sea not long before she was born. The spotless saints, Tim called them in a faintly derisory way. Nothing was left of them about the house, but their spirits hovered invisibly there like benevolent angels, and every now and again at night when the chores were done and she was sitting by the fire, Mrs Linver would take off her spectacles and polish them sadly, weep a few tears and curse the sea on their behalf. You couldn’t blame her. Two sons gone and a whittling blob of a man sitting across from her. And still, Tim said he was going to sea. Couldn’t wait. That’s where real life was, he said. Soon as the man would take him, he’d be up and off with Dan Rymer. ‘Died at sea.’ That’s what it said after the names in the big book in the seamen’s bethel, died at sea like my father. I asked Ma once if his name was in there, but she said no. The ginger beer was good and sharp. I smelled fish, and lavender. A sugar wagon rolled by groaning, a knock-kneed brown horse between the shafts. The sound of hammering and singing was carried on the breeze, and the sun was warm. I closed my eyes and thought of her turning on her heel, flouncing her skirts as she flashed an ankle, the sailors in their threadbare duds throwing pennies. When she was doing laundry or hauling water from the pump or jumping around on rotting wooden piers with me and Tim, she was a matt-haired hoyden, but at work she was a small painted woman with leaves in her hair, dancing on a stage and blowing kisses at sailors.
I’m not sitting out here like a pile of washing, I thought, and followed her in. I’d never been inside before. There were a lot of people sitting about in the pews and a woman lighting a candle. Ishbel was looking at the pictures: Jephtha and his daughter, Jonah spitted up on shore, Job and his flaming boils. An arch of words above read: I am a brother to dragons and a companion of owls.
She came over and gripped my arm. ‘Come on,’ she whispered, ‘I’ve got strawberries.’
‘You were ages,’ I said.
‘Poor Jaffy.’ She ruffled the top of my head. ‘Were you getting bored?’
Often she treated me like a dog. Usually when you hear someone say they were treated like a dog, it means getting kicked about and locked out and told to get under, but not in this case. Ishbel liked dogs. In time she took to cooing a little whenever she saw me and tickling me behind the ears, a thing she’d also do to any old mutt encountered on the street, and I didn’t mind at all.
‘Let’s go to the boat,’ she said.
No longer trailing behind, I walked along beside her like Tim. A wreck called Drago lay aslant on the foreshore in a muddy creek long silted up with effluent, reached only by a sideways climb along a slimy black wall. There were hooks here and there, and if you took your shoes off and slung them round your neck and didn’t breathe in too deeply, it was easy.
The Drago had once been a proud little fishing craft, big enough for three or four men at most, with a canvas roof flung over the half of it, and a box at one end where they’d stowed the fish. We put the beer there now. The benches were gone, but if it wasn’t too wet you could sit on the floor and crumble the old wreck’s wood between your fingers and watch the quick black beetles emerge from its soft depths. We used to play games here when we were younger. He father, she mother, me kid. He captain, she first mate, me cabin boy. And the best one: me robber, she posh lady, he policeman. These games had given way to flights of fancy, stories we conjured between us of monsters and beasts stranger than any we ever saw at Jamrach’s. We scratched pictures of them on the insides of the boat, and gave them names like mandibat and camalung and koriole, and we knew all their habits and natures and peculiarities. Great humped beasts came up from the mouth of the Thames, slow, hot, darting forked tongues. We shared a mind’s eye that saw these things from the bow of the Drago, facing out across the river.
But we hadn’t been for ages.
She had four strawberries wrapped in a bit of wet cloth. ‘Get the beer, Jaf,’ she said.
We sat in the bow and shared the spoils. I don’t know where the strawberries came from. She didn’t have them when she went into the seamen’s bethel but she did when she came out, so perhaps she’d stolen them from someone in there.
Two each, ripe and squashy, gone in a flash.
‘Wonder where Tim went,’ I said.
She shrugged, passing the beer. ‘Do you think we’ve upset him?’ she asked.
‘Probably.’
‘He’ll get over it.’ She licked her strawberry lips.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘he doesn’t care when he upsets other people.’
She smiled and said, ‘He doesn’t mean to be a pig.’
‘I know. He just is.’
We laughed.
‘He’s always been a jealous boy,’ she said simply.
The bottle was wet from her mouth. I took a good long swig.
‘I’m not going to work tonight,’ she said. ‘Don’t feel like it. She can’t make me, can she?’
‘You’ll catch it.’
‘So?’
‘She’ll wallop you,’ I said.
She did this sometimes, just couldn’t be bothered with all the palaver of dressing up. Much spoilt and fussed over, she was also much slapped and pushed. Once she said she’d only get ready if her mother brought her a cake, and when she got it she smeared it on the pretty dress hanging over the back of the chair, waiting to be slipped over her head ready for a good night’s work.
‘You evil little bitch!’ her mother had shrieked. ‘Do you know how long I worked on that?’ and thwacked her hard on the side of her head and made her cry.
Tim never got hit though.
‘I don’t care if she does wallop me,’ said Ishbel, reaching for the bottle.
‘Yes, you do.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t make any difference; I’m not going. I’ll stay here till it’s dark.’
‘You can’t do the wall in the dark,’ I said. ‘If you stay here till dark, you’ll have to stay all night.’
‘I will!’ she cried, jumping up with a grin. ‘All night!’
‘Me too!’ I stood up.
She gave me the bottle and did a funny dance, all flailing arms and tapping feet. I was afraid the rotten boards would collapse underneath her and we’d both go plunging through to the filthy, freezing water.
‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘If you want to dance you might as well go to work.’
She stopped. Her shoulders heaved. ‘We can’t,’ she said, ‘it’s too cold.’
‘What?’
‘Can’t stay all night. We’d freeze.’
That was true.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘we’ll just walk around all night till it’s really late.’
She was assuming my company.
‘Let’s go west,’ I said, ‘past the Tower. Let’s just keep walking that way along the river all night and see where we end up.’
