Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [25]
She was sullen as we walked her to work twenty minutes later. She’d put on too much powder to hide the slap mark on her cheek, and her lips were too red. “You never stick up for me,” she said to Tim.
“That’s not true.”
“You always take her side.”
“What am I supposed to do? I have to go to work. I’m up four in the morning sometimes. So’s Jaf. Everyone has to work.”
“I’m sick of it,” she said and kicked a stone. When she looked up again her eyes were shiny.
I put my arms round her. “I’ll wait for you and take you home when you’ve finished,” I said.
“No need for that.” Tim pushed against us.
She gave me a hug. “Thank you, Jaffy.” The white grains of her powder got up my nose and made me want to sneeze. She looked like a doll. “You’re very noble.”
“Noble?” snorted Tim.
I wanted to hold onto her. But I let her go.
He came round her other side and placed himself in front of her, saying nothing. For a long time he just looked into her eyes, his own rough and tender. Something was passing between them, some brother-sister thing I could have no part in. His shoulders were hunched, his lower lip pendant. There was something old in his face. Where it was coming from I couldn’t tell. She softened visibly.
We walked on, the three of us separate. At the Malt Shovel door, she turned to me and said, “You might as well run along home now, Jaffy. Thanks ever so.”
“She’s got to get ready now,” Tim said.
Ma was out when I got home. I remember I took down Dan Rymer’s telescope and poked it out of the window and looked over Watney Street, closing in on odd details here and there in the thickening dusk: a face, a cat, an artichoke, a shining puddle under the pump.
A long time ago it went to the bottom of the sea. Wish I still had it. It was a lovely thing—the patterns in the high-polished mahogany, the lacquering on the brass. On the sunshade, silver engraved with a feather pattern. The telescope I have now is stout and plain, but you can’t fault its clarity. I look at birds, and on certain nights I look at the stars through the mesh over the garden. I got to know the stars well at sea. You can’t rely on the sun and moon—they do funny things sometimes—but you can rely on the stars. When you look at them through a telescope, they start to flutter like little white wings burning in a silver fire. Then, if you focus your lens here below on a bird’s eye, you can see the shine in it, the life. And sometimes a thing comes so close it makes you jump.
It’s the same when you look at the past. Far away the white wings twinkle, nothing can be known. Further in, details: the riggings of great ships that web the darkening sky; rooftops, clear on the inner eye, magnified; and sometimes a pang, up close. Tonight is a late spring night. The carving on a piece of skrimshaw, rough beneath my fingers, reminds me of the feathers engraved on the old telescope I had when I was a boy, and I remember a long-ago night: a wonderful day gone, my heart thrumming softly, coming home and crying, and not knowing why, swooping here and there with my all-seeing eye over rooftops, thinking about Ishbel. She’d be on the stage, grinning wildly, catching coppers in her small, bloody, stubby-fingered hands. She’d sing “Little Brown Jug,” “The Blind Boy at Play” and “The Heart That Can Feel for Another,” and the drunken sailors would laugh and weep.
o much for Jaffy the child. He didn’t last long, did he? What was he? A butterfly thing. A great wave came and took him away. A tiger ate him. Only his head remains, lying on the stones. Let it speak. Let it roll around old Ratcliffe Highway, a hungry ghost, roaring its tale for all who will hear. I know why the sailors sing so beautifully on their boats out in the river, why my raw senses wept when I listened in my Bermondsey cot. I found out when I was fifteen.
Tim was a bigwig now. When Bulter got married and moved away, Jamrach had said he was too clever for the yard and