Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [130]
Jamrach’s cages were prisons. I imagined those poor feathery scraps inside, flying wild in my pencil’s dove-grey depths, and remembered the man with the milky eye crafting his bamboo palaces, patiently tapping in the little wooden pegs. Poor things, I thought, you’re here now and there’s no going back. I’ll make you some nice houses. And I drew cages with tops you could lift off, and ones you could open by a door in the side. Space. Lofts for roosting. You could have a ladder between, they’d like ladders.
Then I thought: Why can’t you have a shop where all the birds fly about? Like an aviary? An inside garden, with a pergola, and plants that grow indoors, and a glass roof. Like rich people have, only it would be a shop and people could come in and buy a bird. You could make a wild. You could have rocks and streams and rivers and fish and birds and even a few small animals, voles and dormice and such, all living free. Waterfalls and pools. Trees.
People would pay to come in and wander in Eden for half an hour. Everlasting joys and fountains flowing. Bowers for sitting. A treetop walk. Green and yellow parrakeets flitting here and there.
“You’d never make money like that,” Jamrach said when I showed him my sketches of the wild.
A cartload of canaries had just come in from Norwich, spangles and lizards. The boys were stowing them, stacking up the waxbills a level or two higher to make room.
“Nice cages though,” he said, turning the pages. “You could sell those.”
A little laudanum suits me. Now and then. A little absinthe with sugar. It brings a little dream sense now and then. Dreams are not real, but have a very weighty seeming, and spawn feelings, and change the way things look the next day. So, for instance, as I was rapt in the soft shading on a siskin’s throat, suddenly I saw Skip’s face, and knew I’d dreamt him last night and this was why I woke so strange and frail this morning.
Clear as day, he was. First time I ever saw him, first day out on the ship. Mr. Rainey clouted him on the head. I was scared of Mr. Rainey. The story begins again its endless repetition. Then, dreamlike, I was at Jamrach’s smoking a cigar and idly sketching Charlie the toucan and Mr. Jamrach was telling me business was good. Mr. Fledge gave up on the dragon idea. Said he fancied a polar bear now. “Fancy a jaunt to the Arctic, Jaf?” Jamrach asked, and we both laughed. Rossetti the artist wanted an elephant, Jamrach said, to clean his windows, but couldn’t stretch to the price. He settled for owls instead, owls and a laughing jackass, a marmot, a wombat. And that was the day he told me about this place that Albert had been using as a warehouse, but didn’t need anymore, and said he’d help me with the deposit.
I had money put by, I was able.
So I came here, and went to sea no more. But the sea never left me. It called and moaned and dreamed in me day and night, beat like a heart at the back of everything, even when I slept, even as I created my wilderness. I had two storeys with a ladder connecting, and a yard out the back. I lived upstairs and had my workshop below. I discovered an aptitude. First thing I made was a round cage on eight legs, five feet tall and domed, with a carved eagle on the top, and a zigzag trellis. I put in twigs and perches and mirrors, blue-patterned, china feeding bowls that slid in and out, a pull-out tray at the bottom. Ten green linnets moved in and seemed content. I tamed a jackdaw. That’s easy enough. Guess what I called him? Jack. He took to sitting on my shoulder picking at my ear while I worked. I made cage after cage after cage, all kinds, bells and squares and lanterns, none too small,