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By Root 975 0

went inside and lit candles for the boys. The boys were two brothers lost at sea not long before she was born. The spotless saints, Tim called them in a faintly derisory way. Nothing was left of them about the house, but their spirits hovered invisibly there like benevolent angels, and every now and again at night when the chores were done and she was sitting by the fire, Mrs. Linver would take off her spectacles and polish them sadly, weep a few tears and curse the sea on their behalf. You couldn’t blame her. Two sons gone and a whittling blob of a man sitting across from her. And still, Tim said he was going to sea. Couldn’t wait. That’s where real life was, he said. Soon as the man would take him, he’d be up and off with Dan Rymer. “Died at sea.” That’s what it said after the names in the big book in the seamen’s bethel, died at sea like my father. I asked Ma once if his name was in there, but she said no. The ginger beer was good and sharp. I smelled fish, and lavender. A sugar wagon rolled by groaning, a knock-kneed brown horse between the shafts. The sound of hammering and singing was carried on the breeze, and the sun was warm. I closed my eyes and thought of her turning on her heel, flouncing her skirts as she flashed an ankle, the sailors in their threadbare duds throwing pennies. When she was doing laundry or hauling water from the pump or jumping around on rotting wooden piers with me and Tim, she was a matt-haired hoyden, but at work she was a small painted woman with leaves in her hair, dancing on a stage and blowing kisses at sailors.

I’m not sitting out here like a pile of washing, I thought, and followed her in. I’d never been inside before. There were a lot of people sitting about in the pews and a woman lighting a candle. Ishbel was looking at the pictures: Jephtha and his daughter, Jonah spitted up on shore, Job and his flaming boils. An arch of words above read: I am a brother to dragons and a companion of owls.

She came over and gripped my arm. “Come on,” she whispered, “I’ve got strawberries.”

“You were ages,” I said.

“Poor Jaffy.” She ruffled the top of my head. “Were you getting bored?”

Often she treated me like a dog. Usually when you hear someone say they were treated like a dog, it means getting kicked about and locked out and told to get under, but not in this case. Ishbel liked dogs. In time she took to cooing a little whenever she saw me and tickling me behind the ears, a thing she’d also do to any old mutt encountered on the street, and I didn’t mind at all.

“Let’s go to the boat,” she said.

No longer trailing behind, I walked along beside her like Tim. A wreck called Drago lay aslant on the foreshore in a muddy creek long silted up with effluent, reached only by a sideways climb along a slimy black wall. There were hooks here and there, and if you took your shoes off and slung them round your neck and didn’t breathe in too deeply, it was easy.

The Drago had once been a proud little fishing craft, big enough for three or four men at most, with a canvas roof flung over the half of it, and a box at one end where they’d stowed the fish. We put the beer there now. The benches were gone, but if it wasn’t too wet you could sit on the floor and crumble the old wreck’s wood between your fingers and watch the quick black beetles emerge from its soft depths. We used to play games here when we were younger. He father, she mother, me kid. He captain, she first mate, me cabin boy. And the best one: me robber, she posh lady, he policeman. These games had given way to flights of fancy, stories we conjured between us of monsters and beasts stranger than any we ever saw at Jamrach’s. We scratched pictures of them on the insides of the boat, and gave them names like mandibat and camalung and koriole, and we knew all their habits and natures and peculiarities. Great, humped beasts came up from the mouth of the Thames, slow, hot, darting forked tongues. We shared a mind’s eye that saw these things from the bow of the Drago, facing out across the river.

But we hadn’t been for ages.

She had four strawberries