Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [118]
The broth was food for gods.
I found myself crying.
“There now, it’s all over,” Ma said, bending and putting her arms round me, swamping me with her old familiar smell. “Everything’s going to be all right from now on.”
“I know, I know.”
She showed me my room. It was tiny, but the window looked out over rooftops towards the river, where the masts of tall ships traced the sky. A lovely bed she’d made up for me, with a silky counterpane patterned with red flowers, and beside it, on a squat, four-legged stool, a spray of honesty in that old green jug we used to have on the mantelpiece in Watney Street. My bed. All I wanted to do was get into it and sleep and sleep. But when my head touched the pillow and Ma drew the curtains and kissed me goodnight and went out closing the door softly, my mind ploughed uneasy billows in the darkness. All the things I had to do: go see Ishbel and her mother. Get that over with. Sleep. A lot. Everyone said I needed it, the doctor on the ship, the doctor in Valparaiso. What else? Get myself back, my mind, that is, reel it in from these far chasms and boiling seas, think about the future that might never have been. What to do now? Go out and meet the eyes. Everyone knows. Nothing was hidden. These people of the docks have lived so long with the sea and heard so many mariners’ tales, nothing surprises them. They won’t look askance at me. Still, there’ll be something in their eyes, a knowing.
I slept at last, but sleep was not restful and tossed like the sea. This was when I started to fathom these deepest deeps, and conclude nothing.
Mr. Jamrach came to see me next morning. I heard his voice, he was talking to Ma, saying he’d had a long talk with Dan Rymer, and that Dan had said he would not ever go back to sea. Ma said, well, it was about time he settled down, wasn’t it? A man his age with such a young family. “He wants to stay at home now and enjoy what he’s got,” she said. I could hear David chuckling in the background. He was like that. He’d sit and play with his fingers and chuckle and chatter to himself, quite wrapped up in some happy world of his own for ages.
I didn’t want to go down. I wouldn’t. No one could make me. Not yet. It was all too much for me at the moment; I’d just stay in bed for as long as I possibly could. Days even, if they’d let me. While I worked out what to do next. Sleep. That was the thing. Life now would be simple: fish, soup, warmth, sleep, baccy, beer. My head was spinning: all the sounds, the smells, the endless proliferation. Yet so many gone. So when she came in and said Mr. Jamrach’s come to see you, I said I was feeling too tired to get up, and he called out not to worry, another time would do, and I turned over and tried to get back to sleep, tried hard, hard, with the light seeping in the window.
Next day though she made me get up and she shooed me out of the house. First I went to the barber’s then to see Mr. Jamrach. Cobbe was still in the yard, looking just the same as ever, only balder, which gave him the look of a convict. He put down his bucket and came over and embraced me gruffly, a thing I never could have imagined in a million years.
“Hello, Cobbe,” I said.
He grunted and walked away.
Something in the yard was changed, but I couldn’t work out what it was. Jamrach’s fat Japanese pig was eating cabbage down the far end. Mr. Jamrach saw me through the window and came out to greet me. He’d thickened and widened and reddened since I last saw him. “At last!” he cried, beaming from ear to ear. “Jaffy boy! Feeling better?”
“Very much better,” I replied, feeling nothing of the sort. I had no idea why I was out of my bed and couldn’t wait to get back to it.
He clapped me on the shoulder, man to man. “This business, Jaf,” he said, looking me in the eye, “a terrible thing.”
“Yes.”
“Terrible.”
I nodded.