Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [20]
“It’s not fair,” she said, “you come home all washed and ready to go and I’ve not even had a chance to comb my hair.” She pulled the greasy handkerchief from her forehead and shook her head.
“Oh, you’re all right,” her ma said, “it won’t take you a minute.”
Ishbel pulled a hideous face at her mother’s back, drawing all the muscles in her neck and jaw so tight that they quivered. “Who do you think got the bloody coal in?” she demanded of Tim. “Me. Me me me me me again. I’m sick of you, I hate you, you do this all the time.”
Tim, hair still wet from a dousing under the pump in Jamrach’s yard, sat down to his soup with a lopsided grin intended to irritate. Mr. Linver leaned forward and gobbed on the fire.
“That’s foul,” said Tim.
His father turned an expression of almost hatred on him, fleeting but unmistakeable.
“And I’ve got to work again tonight,” she said, “and I’m not going to, it’s not fair, so there.” She grabbed a canikin, dipped it in the soup pot and swept away into the other room.
“Oh yes, you are, young madam!” her mother yelled after her.
The room next door was full of thuds and bangs and theatrical sighs while we ate our soup. When we’d finished Tim and I went outside and sat in the warm sun in the moss-lined alley, passing a pipe between us. We didn’t speak. At last Ishbel came out, wiping her mouth.
“I’m not going with you two,” she said.
Her mother’s voice flapped after her through the open door. “Oh yes, you are, young madam!”
“I’ll go with Jaffy,” she said, ignoring me and looking at Tim, “but not you.”
This was momentous to me. We three had been mucking about the shore together for three years now, me always tag-along, stumbling and running every now and then to keep up with them, and they always shoulder to shoulder ahead, fair heads bobbing side by side.
But, “The devil you will,” said Tim, untroubled, sticking his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders, and off they went in front as usual. Ishbel’s hair was matted on the back of her head and plaited underneath, but her plait was coming loose.
It was a public holiday, thronging. We walked down to the river and paid our pennies and passed under the arch to the cool undertunnel where the fair went thrillingly on and on along the pavement, one thing after another as far as the eye could see: fortune-tellers, donkey rides, pinch-faced little monkeys wearing blue jackets. The barrows of the clothes sellers were decked out with brightly coloured ladies’ dresses, high above us like lines of airborne dancing girls. I smelled lavender, sugar, sarsaparilla.
Ishbel walked in a swinging-about kind of way with her hands clasped behind her back. She and Tim had scarcely said a word to one another since we’d left their house. We wandered about for a bit and ended up watching all the fools falling off the slippery pole.
“You go on it, Jaf,” said Tim.
“No fear,” said I.
“Coward,” he said.
“You go on it.”
“What’s the point of me going on it? I’ve done it millions of times.”
“Ha!” said Ishbel.
He smiled. Small baboon wrinkles appeared at the sides of his nose.
“You go on the bloody thing, Tim,” she said, “you’re so clever. You leave him alone.”
“He needs it,” he said. “Needs pushing a bit. Don’t you, eh?” Pushing me a bit, not much, just enough so he could still say it was all in fun if I complained. “Don’t you?”
“He don’t need you pushing him,” she snapped. “Who’d want you pushing him?”
“He does. Don’t you? See, see? Go on, Jaffy,