Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [116]
on’t look at me with those eyes, sailorboy.”
“What eyes? These eyes? They’re mine. What other eyes should I look at you with?”
Red haired. A little poxed but not much. Pretty face, chin too long. She has the faint remains of a scab in the corner of her mouth and I feel sorry for her.
“What’s your name?”
“Faith,” she says.
“Pretty,” says I.
“Want a place to go?” says she.
I must have been grinning. She took my hand. “What you laughing at?” she said. “You laughing at me?”
“Have you got a place to go?”
“I have that. You come with me.” She led me good as gold through the streets of Greenwich in the rain. She’d picked me off the quay, from among all those sun-beat faces, those half-savage things that seamen are when they’re coming in after long years at sea, pulled me from the heave and holler of those touts and crimps and runners all wanting a piece of me. But I wasn’t green anymore. I shivered as she led me through those glorious, green and grey, rain-sodden Greenwich streets, how beautiful and shining they were, how altogether heartbreaking. I started crying.
She noticed as we reached the tall, dark house. Pushing me against the wall just by the doorway in the hall, seizing my head between her hands and staring in my eyes with blazing grey eyes. “Go on then,” she said, “have a bloody good cry, chicky.”
“I’m not green,” I said. “I know you want to rob me. Just letting you know I know.”
“There we are then,” she said, letting me go. “Glad we got that one straight. Come on.”
So up the stairs, one flight only, to a bare landing, where she lit us a candle from a cupboard on the left, then a door with spotted brown paint that opened onto a small room almost filled with a bed covered with an Indian cloth. The candle flickered on the ceiling and the walls, adorned here and there with sentimental pictures of violets and kittens, and there in the window was a linnet in a cage.
“Here, Faith,” I said, “what’s your charge?”
She smiled, lopsided. Her forehead was high, with mobile wrinkles that spoke as much as her eyes. I guessed her at thirty. Business done, she took off her jacket and sat down on the bed to take off her boots. It was nice, I thought. Cosy. Outside the sounds of life. Footsteps that tocked along the pavement. I am home, I thought. Home.
“Did you get this from Jamrach?”
The linnet.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not my room.”
I put my face up against the bars of the cage and looked at the linnet.
“Linnet,” I said. “Linnet, hello, linnet.”
“Is that what it is?” she said.
I cried again.
“You lay down,” she said, getting up and leading me firmly to the bed. “You got half an hour, have a nice lie down and a little weep.”
So I did. I was very drunk. I was drunk before I left the ship. It’s all fady, through a veil. I’d paid her for half an hour, had a bit more cash in my breeches and knew she might try and steal it, and knew my head was full of whirling clouds and that I could no more stop crying than the rain could stop pouring till its true time was up; and that made me feel the rain against the window-pane, its glowing drops moving leisurely, its song, its soft lullaby. My head hit the pillow, a poor, hard, straw pillow softer to me than rose petals and goose down. How could I save my money now I was going out like a candle?
“Here,” I said, “I’ve paid for you.”
She lay down next to me and I took her in my arms.
“You rob me I kill you,” I said.
“No, you won’t,” she said indulgently, “ ’cos you got no need to.”
Couldn’t stop the tears. She