Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [13]
“Never enough and always too long,” said Dan Rymer, taking off his cap. His voice was as rough as sand.
Bowls of coffee filled up on Bulter’s desk and I felt near fainting at the smell. But something terrible was happening in my feet.
“This is the boy I was telling you about,” said Jamrach, “the one who sees fit to pat a tiger on the nose.”
“Does he now?” The man turned his small wrinkled eyes on me and looked very closely at me down his nose. A long clay pipe, white and new, stuck out of his mouth, and smoke from it wreathed his head. Now that I was thawing out, the pain of my feet was unbearable. Tears poured down my cheeks. The man reminded me of a tortoise or a lizard, but at the same time he seemed young, for there was hardly any grey in his wiry brown hair.
“He needs shoes,” Tim said.
Everyone looked at my feet. I looked. My feet were the flat, hardened pads of an animal, and they were blue with cold. The plasters that clothed my bloody toes were weeping.
The man sat down and took off his sea boots. He peeled off a thick pair of bright red socks, much darned, and pulled them over my frozen feet. “My wife made these,” he said, “and all the darnings were made by her. See. She is a genius, my wife.”
He gave me coffee.
“Soon as you get home, you wash them feet,” he said.
Of course, they were much too big, but I wore them like sacks and they had the heat of his feet on them.
I loved working at Jamrach’s. I was looking after the animals. Mr. Jamrach bought me boots. We swept the yard, cleaned cages and pens, changed straw and water and feed. Big Cobbe did the heavy stuff. Bulter kept the books mostly, but slouched about in the yard when he was needed, handling the beasts with practised aplomb. Too easy, his manner said. Too easy for me, all these lions and crocodiles and bears and man-engorging snakes.
Tim wrote up stock. I counted and he wrote down. Thus:
One Chinese alligator. The alligator stretched smiling beside us on the other side of iron bars, half in, half out of his water.
Four Japanese pigs.
Fourteen Barbary apes.
Twelve cobras.
Eight wolves.
One gazelle.
Sixty-four tortoises. A guess. You never could tell with the tortoises; they moved around too much.
Tim and I got along fine as long as I deferred to him in every way. He was a great one for wandering off in the middle of a job and leaving me with the worst bit to do. “Off to the jakes,” he’d say and that would be it for half an hour. And yet when Jamrach was there he was always around, cheerfully toiling, whistling, pushing a wheelbarrow. He’d been Jamrach’s lad since he was a tot, he told me. “Can’t do without me,” he said. He had a way of putting himself in front of me, talking over me, jostling me back with his shoulder. I never said anything. How could I? He was gold and tall and marvellous, and I was a little, shitty, bedraggled creature from the other shore. Rock this wonderful boat which had hauled me over the side? Never. Not when he broke an egg in my pocket. Not even when he fed me a mealworm sandwich. He taught me how to hold a monkey, how to keep frogs damp and crickets dry, where to stand so as not to get kicked by an emu, how to tickle a bear, how to breed locusts and behead mealworms. Mostly though it was mucking out and swilling down, slopping out, mashing feed, changing water. Only Cobbe and Jamrach were allowed to go in with the fierce apes or feed the big cats. I could have gone in with old Smokey though. He was gentle. But he was gone on the third day, taken out in a cart, sitting looking out of the back of the box as patiently as he’d sat in his pen. None of them stayed long, apart from the parrot in the hall and Charlie the toucan, and a particular pig from Japan that Jamrach took a fancy to and made a pet of, letting it wander freely around the yard and deposit its sticky, black droppings all over wherever I’d just swept.
Trade was brisk.
My own tiger went to Constantinople to live in the garden of the Sultan. I imagined it: a hot, green jungle of flowers and shimmering ponds, where my tiger stalked for ever. I