Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [120]
I slipped into the seamen’s bethel. Nothing changed. Jephtha and his daughter still there. Old Job and his boils. What a homecoming! I went into a kind of dream in there. I had money in my pocket so I just about wiped them out of candles. Now! Here’s fun! Trying not to forget anyone. I decided to start with Ishbel’s brothers, remembering that day when she and I came in here—that day—where had we been? Was it the day she fell out with Tim after we’d been on the swingboats? Anyway, one each for those brothers, tall, upstanding, side by side, for ever faceless. Next, count: Joe Harper making the cage on deck, his sliding toolbox. One and two: Mr. Rainey with his sneer. Three: the captain, of course, more like a big schoolboy than the captain of a whale ship. Four: ah now, Martin Hannah, pudding. Abel Roper. And are you? Are you that, Mr. Roper? Ha ha ha! That’s five. Six. Each one a light coming into being, quivering, standing tall and straight in the quiet chapel. Gabriel. My friend. Yan holding my sick bucket. Billy Stock, outraged. Where am I? Let’s see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight? Nine: oh, Mr. Comeragh, he was a nice man. Poor Mr. Comeragh got bitten by the dragon. What a wild, ancient thing that was. Did he get back to his island? Is he walking with weird rounded steps along his sandy beach, flick-a-tongue, low swaying of the head? Nine: Wilson Pride, flat-footed, bloodshot eyes. Ten: Henry Cash, head like a seal, going under. Eleven: Felix Duggan, mouthy, nuisance. Twelve: Simon, of course, playing his fiddle. We never found out what became of the captain and Simon. And Sam, thirteen. Sam Proffit, whose voice was a silver thread. Dag. Dag Aarnasson, who hunted the dragon with me. Fourteen. Fifteen …
I went blank. There was, of course, we last four, me and Dan and Tim and Skip, which still left two more. It was horrible, not remembering. As if by losing them in my mind, I was consigning them to outer darkness for all time.
John Copper! How could I forget?
I’ve missed someone. Or have I miscounted? Start again. One, two three, four …
In the end I got it. I wouldn’t have left there if anyone was missing. I looked back from the door. My twenty candles burned steadily.
It was Saturday. Mrs. Linver lived in Fournier Street now, so I wandered in that direction, hands in pockets, collar up. I passed by Watney Street and walked past our old house, and looked out for a sign of Mr. Reuben or Mrs. Regan or anyone else, but the door was closed and there was no one sitting on the step. Three times I bumped into people I knew and had to stop and talk, stand and get clapped once more on the shoulder, my face searched nervously, congratulated on my survival. I pushed on through the Saturday Highway of whores and drunken sailors, mulish laughter, shrieking hilarity, screeching fiddles beyond doors. The pot man, a short, dirty man smoking a short, dirty pipe, leaned in the doorway of Spoony’s. He wasn’t there in my time. I thought about going in and having a drink, in fact getting filthy drunk and falling asleep on the floor till some woman came and hauled me off somewhere soft to sleep it off. But this cloud, hovering: go see Tim’s ma. Got to be done. Ishbel might be there. I hear she’s gone into service but still, she might be there. Her face like his. There’s no forgetting Tim. The taste of a raspberry puff. Push on, Jaf, push through. Go down to the docks and get on the first ship that’ll have you.
Till I ended up on Fournier Street, searching for her door. Sadly unnumbered some of these houses were. She had a black door at the side of a cooper’s yard, with three steps up to it and a poster in the downstairs window for tonight’s show at the Gunboat. Ishbel opened the door. Dressed in black, bright brown eyes, pale face, fair hair pinned back behind her ears. A glance and then I couldn’t meet her eyes anymore and looked slightly to one side.
“I wondered when you’d come,” she said.
“Hello, Ish.”
She stepped forward and embraced me formally, her silky cheek one moment against my new stubble. Dear God, let