Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [11]
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 rotten 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