Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

  ‘Not a pat,’ I said, ‘a stroke. It was a stroke. I wanted to see what it felt like.’

  The three of them were looking at me, Sam and Joe and Comeragh, impressed. Mr Jamrach came out of that story very well, but it was me that was the hero, I knew that by now. Jamrach had bravely wrenched apart the beast’s jaws, that was true – though as I remember it being spoken of at the time, it was more like he got behind it and grabbed its throat and that made it open its mouth and cough me out. How should I know? I saw none of it. I remember being in the tiger’s mouth though, oh yes, I still remember. That’s why I was the hero. Not many had been in a tiger’s mouth. Not a one of them that didn’t in some way envy me that.

  ‘Now there’s a story to tell your grandchildren,’ Mr Comeragh said, smiling. He had a terrible cold and his top lip was red and peeling.

  Of course, the story was all over the place an hour later, and I had to tell it again and again so many times over the next couple of days that it recurred in me like a great wave, the very deep memory of it in my flesh and bones. I was cock of the fo’c’s’le for a while, which made a welcome change. It didn’t last, of course, but for a sweet day or two mine was the story circulating in the smoke as we lay on our backs on our bunks and in our hammocks, the smell of mildew, smoke rising under the low, oak ceiling, a cloudy room, dim by half lantern.

  The head of Skip’s bunk lay up against the head of mine. ‘What was it like really?’ he wanted to know. ‘Can you remember? You know, can you really remember? When you were in its mouth.’

  ‘Oh, I remember.’

  It comes back in my dreams again and again. In different ways. Now I’m a sensible lad, wouldn’t go anywhere near a tiger’s mouth, but then it was just a great glory. I could never and would never be there again.

  ‘I can’t describe it,’ I said.

  He was quiet for a while, then said ruminatively, ‘I wonder if it was like that for my dog, Poll.’

  ‘If what was like that for your dog, Poll?’

  ‘When she was killed,’ he said. ‘She was killed by a bloody great mad bloodhound down on the foreshore down by the reach. It was after someone and she got in the way and it grabbed her by the head, whole head in its mouth, huge great mouth it had, all slobbery, and it grabbed her by the whole head like that and threw her over its shoulder and – crack! – neck broken. Gone.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘That sounds much worse than what happened to me.’

  I relit my pipe, took a smoke and passed it back over my head to him. ‘Still,’ I said, ‘I don’t suppose she’d have suffered much. Well, not for long anyway.’

  I heard him popping his lips as he tried to blow smoke rings. ‘I used to say: here, Polly-dog! Here!’ he said, holding smoke in his throat.

  This got us onto the subject of Jamrach’s and how I worked there in the yard, and all the beasts that came and went over the years. It was the mention of the silent bird room that got him. I told him how they sat there unmoving in those tiny boxes, songbirds with locked throats, and he said that was all wrong. He said he hated to see a bird in a cage. ‘It’s something to do with the wings,’ he said, ‘it’s when they can’t open them up.’

  We smoked silently and I thought about how that room had saddened me as a child, but I had grown used to it over the years as it became an everyday thing. It was just how the world was.

  ‘They’re not kept like that for ever,’ I said. ‘They’re sold on.’

  Skip said he remembered a fish that his grandmother had. He said he was terrified of his grandmother; she was very old and ugly and she had horrible brown leather skin in big wrinkles and wore thick round eyeglasses with a patch over one lens and the other so thick it made her eye look as big and swimmy as a fat fish, and it stared at you in a peculiar way that made you think she was a witch. And she had this poor fish, a big goldfish with a swishy tail that she kept in a little glass globe like the kind they cupped on your skin for a boil. It lived in this in a few inches of water, just enough so it could turn its body round and round in one continuous loop forever. And that’s what it did. He said it was horrible. Something in the glass magnified the fish, just as the eyeglass magnified his grandmother’s eye, and when you went in her nasty poky little room you’d see the swirling goldfish thing like a shiny eye, and her eye too, and it was as if both of them were her eyes watching you.

  Next day Skip turned strange again. We’d taken a whale, and it was while we were in the middle of it all, when the try pots were blowing out smoke and the firelight making demons of us and leaping and dancing on the blood that dripped down onto the deck from the stripped blubber. Skip was by me on the windlass and he suddenly let go so that it juddered and jerked and knocked me back. Just let it go and walked away as if someone had called him.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you are doing, Mr Skipton!’ Rainey roared.

  Skip seemed not to hear.

  Rainey took a step as if it was a deep breath, threw back his head and marched after Skip with his nostrils flaring like sails. Martin Hannah jumped in beside me and took Skip’s place and we pushed like hell, heads up, watching. Skip walked up the steps and onto the quarterdeck, looking straight ahead of him, stepping firmly, running the last couple of paces. He stood dead still looking up at the evening sky for a moment before laying himself down delicately upon the deck, curling up his knees and hugging himself with his arms, tucking his head in and giving a little judder of the shoulders as if of pleasure at turning into a cosy bed for the night.

  Rainey stood over him kicking and kicking him in a spoilt and furious way. ‘Get up! Get up, you bastard!’ he screamed. ‘There’s not a thing wrong with you. How dare you leave your post!’

  Gabriel ran up with Abel Roper. Proctor appeared.

  Skip rolled onto his back. Something about the look of him disturbed them.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Proctor, ‘give him room.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ shouted Rainey, ‘he’s just trying to get out of work.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s pretending, sir,’ said Abel. ‘Felix, go and ask Wilson for the salts.’

  When the salts were applied under his nostrils, Skip sneezed violently and sat up, only to sink back down again immediately.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Proctor asked.

  ‘It’s just a funny turn,’ replied Abel.

  ‘Ha!’ Mr Rainey barked. ‘Ha!’

  ‘Put him down below,’ Captain Proctor said. ‘Let him sleep it off, whatever it is. No good him staggering about the deck in this condition. What are you all standing around here for? Doctors, are you? Back to work!’

  Skip’s eyes were looking off in two directions as they hauled him across the deck, one arm on the shoulder of Abel, the other on Gabriel. He started to laugh. ‘Take me on the ferry!’ he shouted. ‘Take me on the ferry!’ Then he threw up.

  He was fine in a couple of hours.

  It was nothing, he insisted, he just passed out. It wasn’t true, of course. Later that night when just a few of us lay in the fo’c’s’le, he told the truth. ‘There was something following the ship,’ he said. ‘I went to look at it.’

  We all leaned forward to hear.

  ‘A bird,’ I said. ‘A cloud. A goney or a cormorant.’

  He said it was an eye with wings. An eye with wings, in the sky, following the ship. ‘Here,’ he said, pulled out his pad and pencil and drew it for us.

  No one spoke for a few seconds, then Tim laughed. ‘What colour was it?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Skip replied seriously.

  ‘Blue? Brown? A lovely green eye?’

  ‘Horus,’ said Gabriel thoughtfully.

  ‘Did it have an eyelid? Could it blink? Did it wink at you?’

  ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘Horus,’ repeated Gabriel. ‘I believe Horus is an eye.’

  ‘What’s Horus?’ asked Skip.

  ‘A god.’ Gabriel frowned, considering. ‘A god of the p
haroahs.’

  ‘How d’you know about pharoahs and gods?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’ve been around,’ he replied.

  ‘Maybe it was my brother, Barnaby,’ Skip said.

  Tim settled back with his arms behind his head. ‘More like this pharoah thing, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘Sounds more likely somehow.’

  ‘But what is Horus doing following you about, son?’ Gabriel asked.

  Skip said it didn’t surprise him. He’d been visited by gods before.

  ‘Aha,’ was Gabriel’s response, and not much more was said. We watched Skip more than ever after that though, all of us, and the voyage continued tranquil as we sailed on through a thick green sea, in which, at last, islands once more appeared. Long white strands. Palm trees that beckoned like graceful women. Shapes like giants loomed from the mist. Highlands rose above the sea. Cliffs of pink and sage green. The smell of the islands was earthy and spicy, and the sea was clear. You could look down and see bright fish swimming below, fronds of barbarous plants moving like slow music, long ridges of fantastic shapes and colours that thrust and pointed up to the ceiling of their sky, which was the surface of our sea.

  We anchored in a harbour somewhere and the white man of those islands came down and spoke with Captain Proctor and Mr Rainey on the beach. Mr Comeragh was fluey and didn’t go ashore. A hundred dark slave faces watched us from the forest fringes at the top of the beach. When Captain Proctor returned, he said there was sickness on the island and we would not be going ashore. Abel Roper, Martin Hannah and Joe Harper went down and loaded fresh water and coconuts, and we went on our way.

  A day passed, two, three. Those seas turned me in and deeper in on myself, so little speech any of us seemed to have at that time. Islands came, islands went, suns rose and set, the ocean flowed on, and the sense of immensity returned in me, uncomfortable, an apprehension of something far beneath, beyond my grasp.

  We reached a long shadow on the horizon, very far. Low-lying cloud, soft grey. Doves and ladies gloves and goose breasts.

  ‘Land,’ said Gabriel, leaning sharp sideways from the helm.

  It came up like a soft roll of dustball, kitten fur. Cloud wall.

  Land.

  Long land. Miles and miles and miles of land, this way and that, long long miles of green jungle and a scattering of islands.

  Proctor called us all once more upon the quarterdeck and said there were Malay pirates with spears in these seas, murderers, savages. ‘Now,’ he said in the big captain voice he kept for these occasions, ‘we are truly far from our homes. These are dangerous seas.’ He glared at us as if it was somehow our fault. ‘Dangerous seas.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ whispered Tim in my ear.

  Proctor said our normal course from here would take us straight up through the China seas. Good whale seas, the China seas. Good whaling, good sailing, all the way to the Japanese grounds. ‘However,’ he continued, ‘as was explained to you all when you made your marks, we are also bound to fulfil a certain commitment to our ship’s owner, Mr Malachi Fledge of Bristol.’

  I was amazed. I’d never heard Fledge called anything but Fledge before.

  ‘Mr Rymer. Would you say a word?’

  Dan shambled forward. ‘You all know,’ he said gruffly, ‘I’m charged with finding and taking alive an animal that may or may not live on some of the islands to the east of here. You know all about this.’ He paused. ‘I never knew anyone who saw this creature but I met a man in Surabaya, who told me he’d spoken to a Lamalera whale man, who’d seen something come out of a forest on an island out from Borneo.’

  A showman at heart, Dan looked down and fiddled with his pipe.

  ‘And there were remains,’ he said softly. ‘Two fishermen. Killed by something, and eaten.’ He looked up. ‘In any case, Mr Fledge has heard these things too.’

  ‘These remains,’ Mr Comeragh said in a thick voice, ‘where were they found?’ His nose was so big you couldn’t help but imagine he must have twice as much snot as normal people because of the size of that conk.

  ‘On Rinca Island, Mr Comeragh,’ Dan said, looking at him. ‘On a beach. Rinca Island is not far from here, as you know.’

  Comeragh raised his eyebrows and nodded.

  ‘So that’s where we go?’ Mr Rainey asked.

  ‘Not necessarily, Mr Rainey. Pulau Lomblen is where the man who saw it lived. We start there. To sniff the air. Then to – wherever seems wise.’

  ‘We can get a boat at Pulau Lomblen,’ the Captain remarked.

  ‘You signed up as whale men,’ Dan went on, ‘not dragon hunters. Apart from me and my two boys, none of you will have anything to do with the animal. If the creature exists Tim and I will find it and drive it down to the shore, where the cage will be waiting.’ He looked at me. ‘Jaffy will make sure the creature goes in the cage and see that the door’s made firm as soon as it’s in.’

  This was the first I’d heard of it.

  ‘That sounds easy,’ whispered Tim down my neck.

  A big smile broke out on my face.

  ‘None of you will approach the creature,’ Dan continued, very serious. A terrible urge to laugh was stealing over me. ‘You will be equipped with drums.’

  ‘Drums?’ whispered Tim. I snorted.

  ‘And torches,’ said Dan. ‘You form lines and as soon as the creature appears you scream and shout and jump up and down, and bang whatever you can and wave your torches on all sides and drive the creature towards the cage. Tim and I will be right behind, driving it down the beach. You will close in on either side till it has nowhere to go but the cage, and if at any moment there appears to be any serious danger to any man, I shoot and kill. Understood?’

  There was a solemn nodding and a murmur.

  ‘I will not risk a man,’ Dan said.

  Captain Proctor stepped forward, smiling. ‘I think we will need some training for this,’ he said gamely.

  ‘Of course.’ Dan grinned. ‘Though you’re whale men, remember. If you can hunt a whale you can hunt anything.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Skip.

  ‘What if it breathes fire?’ a voice piped up.

  It was Felix Duggan, his wide eyes looking truly scared. Everyone laughed.

  ‘I don’t think it will breathe fire,’ Dan said, ‘I truly don’t. But if it does, I tell you what we do.’ He looked very serious then burst out laughing. ‘We run like hell!’

  Everyone else laughed too.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Dan said, ‘you’ll hear us coming, pants on fire. In the boats and back to ship.’

  ‘What if it flies?’

  That was John Copper.

  We all saw it, the mighty flying dragon, vast scaly wings, streams of fire blasting all to waste before it, scorching the earth. Flying after our ship. An eye in the sky.

  ‘There are no credible reports that it flies,’ said Dan.

  It.

  Dan said: ‘We give it two weeks. Then on with the whaling with or without the beast. No one is obliged to take part in this. Anyone who really wishes to can stay with the ship.’

  ‘Fairly spoken, Mr Rymer,’ said the Captain. ‘I for one look forward to the experience. If we do succeed it will be a great thing, a great thing indeed.’

  ‘Chances are we won’t find anything,’ said Dan wryly. ‘Chances are we’ll poke about on a few islands and come back with nothing but a poll parrot.’

  Captain Proctor chuckled. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘to business.’

  Business meant the Straits. We sailed on among the islands, and passed many small boats, any one of which could have been a pirate craft for all I knew. None were. How could you ever tell? The others, Gabriel and Sam and Yan and even John Copper just seemed to know. ‘That,’ they’d say, ‘that’s just a sampan.’ As if it was obvious. As far as I was concerned, those faces looking up, they could have all been Yan’s dad. I wouldn’t know the difference between a pirate and Yan’s dad. Then a great ship of the line loomed on the horizon, and a high mountain appeared
on our larboard side. The ship passed us at a great distance, heading for the open ocean. Land closed in. The sea was fast and there were sandbanks, but we made no poor moves, and by late afternoon had passed the narrowest part of the passage and taken the eastern channel where an island divided the opening sea.

  We emerged into an inner sea of islands, some no more than just rocks. The sun was setting. A thick forest of cloud lay motionless on the horizon, here and there throwing up foamy explosions of wild cumulus. Long ripples moved over the sea, and the orange rays of the sun radiated behind the clouds in the likeness of a flower spreading its petals. Then it sank, and all was red, dark blood red, and the sea black.

  We awoke to a long blue coastline. For a long time we had only good sailing, and a kind of peace settled over the ship. I felt we had reached those storied places, the siren realms where mermaids sing and lotus-eaters gorge, where Sinbad the Sailor paces the deck and dreams of crystal streams and rubied caverns. I thought of islands that come and go, are found and not found again. Days and days went by, and I fell into a long delight. We took a whale now and then. For a while burnt flesh and boiling oil was thick about us, but we sailed on, out of the stench and into the wine-sweet air, a good draught of which was like apples and spices and flowers. A pod of dolphins joined us off an island of white sand and coconut palms, rode our bow wave joyfully for a mile or two, shiny backs breaching the air. They left us and took with them the time of stillness. After them the breezes got up in a jolly, whistling kind of way, and the waves began to rise against a mountainous region to starboard, breaking hugely over miles of shimmering strand that edged a dense green jungle, whence came, faintly but definitely carried on the occasional stillnesses between gusts, the sound of drumming. Slow, thoughtful in tone, like a single voice exploring its range, the drumming was all of a one with everything else. I was afraid of the drumming – the voice of a jungle through a growing thinness in the air, announcing mist.

  The dolphins called the breeze called the drumming called the mist. That’s how it felt.