Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [50]
The head of Skip’s bunk lay up against the head of mine. “What was it like really?” he wanted to know. “Can you remember? You know, can you really remember? When you were in its mouth.”
“Oh, I remember.”
It comes back in my dreams again and again. In different ways. Now I’m a sensible lad, wouldn’t go anywhere near a tiger’s mouth, but then it was just a great glory. I could never and would never be there again.
“I can’t describe it,” I said.
He was quiet for a while, then said ruminatively, “I wonder if it was like that for my dog, Poll.”
“If what was like that for your dog, Poll?”
“When she was killed,” he said. “She was killed by a bloody great mad bloodhound down on the foreshore down by the reach. It was after someone and she got in the way and it grabbed her by the head, whole head in its mouth, huge great mouth it had, all slobbery, and it grabbed her by the whole head like that and threw her over its shoulder and—crack!—neck broken. Gone.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “That sounds much worse than what happened to me.”
I relit my pipe, took a smoke and passed it back over my head to him. “Still,” I said, “I don’t suppose she’d have suffered much. Well, not for long anyway.”
I heard him popping his lips as he tried to blow smoke rings. “I used to say: here, Polly-dog! Here!” he said, holding smoke in his throat.
This got us onto the subject of Jamrach’s and how I worked there in the yard, and all the beasts that came and went over the years. It was the mention of the silent bird room that got him. I told him how they sat there unmoving in those tiny boxes, songbirds with locked throats, and he said that was all wrong. He said he hated to see a bird in a cage. “It’s something to do with the wings,” he said. “It’s when they can’t open them up.”
We smoked silently and I thought about how that room had saddened me as a child, but I had grown used to it over the years as it became an everyday thing. It was just how the world was.
“They’re not kept like that for ever,” I said. “They’re sold on.”
Skip said he remembered a fish that his grandmother had. He said he was terrified of his grandmother; she was very old and ugly and she had horrible brown leather skin in big wrinkles and wore thick, round eyeglasses with a patch over one lens and the other so thick it made her eye look as big and swimmy as a fat fish, and it stared at you in a peculiar way that made you think she was a witch. And she had this poor fish, a big goldfish with a swishy tail that she kept in a little glass globe like the kind they cupped on your skin for a boil. It lived in this in a few inches of water, just enough so it could turn its body round and round in one continuous loop forever. And that’s what it did. He said it was horrible. Something in the glass magnified the fish, just as the eyeglass magnified his grandmother’s eye, and when you went in her nasty, poky little room you’d see the swirling goldfish thing like a shiny eye, and her eye too, and it was as if both of them were her eyes watching you.
Next day Skip turned strange again. We’d taken a whale, and it was while we were in the middle of it all, when the try pots were blowing out smoke and the firelight making demons of us and leaping and dancing on the blood that dripped down onto the deck from the stripped blubber. Skip was by me on the windlass and he suddenly let go so that it juddered and jerked and knocked me back. Just let it go and walked away as if someone called him.
“What the fuck do you think you are doing, Mr. Skipton!” Rainey roared.
Skip seemed not to hear.
Rainey took a step as if it was a deep breath, threw back his head and marched after Skip