Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [6]
Boy in ten million. My head was swelled to the size of St. Paul’s dome by the time we turned into Watney Street with a crowd of gawkers trailing after.
“I been telling you what might happen, Mr. Jamrach!” shrilled the bespectacled woman with the little girl, bobbing alongside. “What about us? What about us what has to live next to you?” She had the Scots burr and her eyes glared.
“The beast was sleepy and full,” the man replied. “He ate a hearty dinner not twenty minutes since, or we’d never have moved him. I am sorry, this should not have happened and will never happen so again.” He knuckled a tear from the side of one eye. “But there was no danger.”
“Got teeth, hasn’t it?” cried the woman. “Claws?”
At which the girl peeped round her mother’s side, clutching onto a scrap of polka-dot scarf wrapped round her neck and smiling. It was the first smile of my life. Of course, that is a ridiculous thing to say; I had been smiled at often, the big man had smiled at me not a minute since. And yet I say: it was the first smile, because it was the first that ever went straight into me like a needle too thin to be seen. Then, dragged a bit too fast by her wild-eyed mother, she tripped and went sprawling with her hands splayed out, and her face broke up. A great wail burst out of her.
“Oh, my God,” said her mother, and we left the two fussing at the side of the road and went on through the market stalls to our house. Mrs. Regan was sitting on the top step, but jumped to her feet and stood gaping when she saw the band of us approach. Everyone babbled at once. Ma came running down and I threw out my arms for her and burst into tears.
“No harm done, ma’am,” Mr. Jamrach said, handing me over. “I am so sorry, ma’am, your boy was scared. A dreadful thing—a weakness in the crate, come all the way from Bengal—pushed out the back, he did, with his hindquarters …”
She set me on my feet and brushed me down, looking hard in my eyes. “His toes,” she said. She was pale.
I looked wonderingly at the gathering crowd.
“Ma’am,” Mr. Jamrach began, reaching into his coat and bringing out money. The girl and her ma were back. She’d scraped her knees and looked sulky. I saw Mr. Reuben.
“I got your baccy,” I said, reaching into my pocket.
“Why thank you, Jaffy,” Mr. Reuben said, and gave me a wink.
The Scots woman started up again, though now she’d changed sides and was defending Mr. Jamrach as a great hero: “Ran after it, he did! Never seen anything like it! Grabs it like this, he does,” letting go of the little girl’s hand to demonstrate how he’d leapt on its back and grabbed it by the throat, “sticks his bare hands right down its mouth, he did. See. A wild tiger!”
Ma seemed stunned and a bit stupid. She never took her eyes off me. “His poor toes,” she said, and I looked down and saw them bleeding where they’d been pulled over the stones, and it brought the realisation of pain. I felt where the tiger had made my collar wet.
“Dear ma’am,” Mr. Jamrach said, pressing money into Ma’s apron, “this is the bravest little boy I ever encountered.”
He gave her a card with his name on.
We ate well that night, no hunger sickness for me. I was very happy, filled up with love for the tiger. She washed my toes with warm water and rubbed them with butter she got from Mr. Regan. Mr. Reuben sat in our room sucking on his pipe, and all the neighbours jostled at our door. It was like a carnival. Ma was tickled pink and kept telling everyone, “A tiger! A tiger! Jaffy got carried off by a tiger!”
The tiger made me. When my path and his crossed, everything changed. After that, the road took its branching way, willy-nilly, and off I went into the future. It might not have been so. Nothing might ever have been so. I might not have known the great thing that came to pass. I might have taken home Mr. Reuben’s baccy and gone upstairs to my dear ma and things would have gone altogether differently.
The card sat propped importantly on the mantelpiece next to