Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [131]
I sold the cages in the front of the shop and worked in the back. I made a cage that was completely spherical, and another like a huge pumpkin. I made a loft for turtle doves, an aviary for larks and goldfinches, and the whole yard I covered with wire work and laid with turf and planted with shrubs.
I became another sort of recluse.
I read Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication and Haeckel’s Natural History of Creation. I continued with my birds of the world. In the evenings the doves sighed in the loft. At some point I heard that Ishbel was fancy-free again and living towards Aldgate, but our paths hadn’t crossed in a long time. She was far away, part of a life that was gone. I’ll go and see her, I thought, but I did nothing, kept making plans and finding ways out of them. She’ll come if she wants to, I thought. Me and my birds, we’d found a kind of peace. I was scared. I’d see her and all the old pain I’d tamped down would rise up. I’d look at her face and see her brother, and the great fact of what I’d done, the unthinkable, would fall between us. We were grown-ups now, different people. It was all too hard, too dangerous. My thinking consisted only of a toiling moil of impressions and didn’t stretch to making decisions. My brain hurt. Anyway, I couldn’t stop working on my wilderness. If I stopped something terrible would happen. I carried rocks, chopped eggs for the nightingales, mixed pea meal and moss seed, treacle and hog’s lard to make paste for the skylarks. My heart hurt, and at night I’d look up at the sky and remember the stars at sea and ask: Am I forgiven?
You should hear my nightingales. Here in the seedy depths of a Ratcliffe Highway night, they carol like angels. There are no words for that high sweetness. They carol to me that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well (Jaffy Brown, see, became quite well read), yet I know the tiger’s mouth awaits. Come what may, whatever we may say, the tiger’s mouth awaits. Every little second is the last chance to savour the time that remains. How I swam here to this rock I’ll never know. A canary lands before me on a cherry branch, a jonquil, pure deep yellow.
She had a spangled-back canary on her shoulder next time I saw her, I remember. It was at Jamrach’s, funnily enough, because she never went there. I’d gone to pick up some flax seed and some rape, and there she was sitting in the office with a canary on her shoulder and a wombat on her knee. She was all made up as if she was on her way to work and she looked at me and smiled. “Hello, Jaffy,” she said, and something lifted like a veil.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her, cheerful as I could sound.
“I came to see the wombat,” she said, looking down at the furry brown creature.
Mr. Jamrach got up from his desk. “Poor thing won’t last,” he said.
“Why, what’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing yet.” He chuckled and poked it in the stomach.
“I like wombats,” Ishbel said.
“Doesn’t have luck with his animals.” Jamrach fiddled with the blinds. “Rossetti. The last one ended up stuffed in his hall.”
“Well, this one won’t. Will you, cherub?” She lifted it up in front of her face as if it was a baby, an amiable, round bear of a thing with a very large head and beady black eyes, gave it a kiss and deposited it once more in her lap, where it sat like Buddha, staring out at the world.
“You’ve got a canary on your shoulder,” I said. My mouth had gone dry.
“Just grew there.” She smiled, rocking the wombat. Her bonnet was shabby. “Mr. Jamrach,” she said, “could you move this little birdie, please? I don’t want it shitting down my back.”
Jamrach leaned across the desk and took the bird onto his finger. “Nice little batch, this lot,” he said.
I went out and filled my sack. I felt a little frantic. I even thought about not going back into the office, just walking out and going home and pretending nothing had happened. But my feet walked right back in and I licked my lips and said, “What are you doing these days, Ishbel?