Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [133]
I’m often dreamy. When I dream I feel the sea under me, and sometimes I think I hear it too, sounding away behind the distant music of the Highway. It never goes away. It’s what I always loved about this place, though I wasn’t aware of it when I first came. Stand in Ratcliffe Highway and you’d swear there was salt on the air.
Night sounds steal into the garden where I sit watching the smoke from my pipe rise up to the stars. The nightingale sings. I close my eyes and trace with my fingers the outline of a parrot carved into a piece of skrimshaw lying on the palm of my left hand. It was a gift.
Rossetti and Darwin died two years since. At that time too there was another passing, unremarked, my good friend Dan Rymer, nearest thing I ever had to a father, who died of a swelling on the brain at the age of seventy-six. Still, a good age. His widow still lives in Bow. She’s remarried and still has the youngest two of her children with her. She was twenty years his junior. Mr. Jamrach long since retired and Albert’s got the old business, but these days it’s me the real bird-fanciers come to, people from the Friendly and the Hand in Hand. Our shop’s on the right-hand side as you go towards Limehouse. You can buy a parrakeet or a pair of lovebirds and a decent cage to put them in. Or you can walk through the shop and pay your penny to go and sit as long as you like in the bird garden, by the fountain, or the statue of Pan who plays his pipes all day to the chaffinch and the bullfinch, the golden carp in the pool, the honeysuckled pergola.
Her ma likes to go in there with her knitting. Her ma lives with us now. Peace and quiet, she says, though you can still hear the sounds of the Highway. It’s a good old place, the place where late of night I go with my pipe, look up at the stars and roll away on billowy waves, hear the ocean’s roar, and the sky all thunder, feel the swell, hear the voices of the demons of the deep howling into it all. One way or another I suppose you could say that voyage was the making of me. I’d have been a yardboy. Is that what it was all for? To make of me the man I am now? Is God mad? Is that it? Stuck between a mad God and merciless nature? What a game.
I don’t fit the world of everyday things, the people going about their daily routines, bed on time, up on time, dinner on time. I don’t want to be a part of it. Sometimes I long for a monk’s cell, a hole in the rock, a bower in the woods, so my mind can flood all directions like water, the sea.
Time to gaze. On waves. Rise and fall, the breathing of the world.
This hurly-burly palls. Ishbel, of course, has to live with it. I’ve told her most things over the years, even about the dragon. “Poor thing,” she says softly, meaning me and the dragon both. She’ll never understand, but how could she? Understanding doesn’t matter, it’s the constancy that counts, so: I must go back to sea, she won’t let me go back to sea. We argue about that.
“You’d manage,” I say. “It wouldn’t be for long. David could help out.” But she won’t hear of it.
“Sorry, Jaf,” she says, “me and Ma can’t take it no more.”
So I go out in the garden. I’ll never go back to sea. My eyes are closed. The children have been in bed for ages. I take from my pocket a piece of