‘There’s money in it, Ma,’ I said. ‘A lot of money in it. He’s a very rich man.’
‘Oh, sit down,’ she said, ‘have your tea.’ She knew there was nothing she could do.
‘That’s nothing,’ Tim said when I saw him. ‘You should have heard my ma. Funny!’ And his long, fluttery fingers flew up around his face. ‘“Oh, not you! Not you too, Tim! No-o-o! No-o-o-o! Oh, Lord God in Heaven! N-o-o-o-o!”’
We laughed. What’s a boy for if not to break his ma’s heart?
‘Let’s go to Meng’s,’ he said.
Ishbel was in Meng’s with Jane from Spoony’s. That’s what she did. Work all night bringing in the money at Quashies, at the Rose and Crown, at Paddy’s Goose, and in the afternoon go to Meng’s. Drago was long gone, broken up bit by bit over one sweltering June week when the sloppy green weeds smelled like Neptune’s armpit. Meng’s was our Drago now. A Chinaman in a shiny red coat stood at the door. The pictures on the walls were silky and the great mouth of the fireplace glowed yellow. I got next to Ishbel next to the wall, Tim on the other end of the bench sprawling round ginger Jane and chewing on a liquorice twig.
‘Oh, here they are,’ drawled Ish sarcastically. ‘Hail, the mighty explorers. These bum boils are leaving me, Jane.’
‘I know,’ Jane said, tweaking her tight red curls. ‘It’s all the talk.’
‘Three years! What am I supposed to do all that time stuck here all on me tod?’ She put her arm round my neck. Two years since we’d started cuddling, but she never let me kiss her. She was driving me mad.
Meng wanted to know if we were buying. Tim nodded and paid for us both.
‘Three years?’ said Jane. ‘That’s a very long time.’
‘Maybe less,’ I tossed in in the interests of truth.
‘Well, you couldn’t very well go much further, boys, could you?’ Jane said. ‘Bob says he don’t want to lose you, you know, Jaf.’
‘I think it’s mad.’ Ishbel fussed her hair, still hanging onto me. ‘I think Fledge is mad. Must be, the way you never see him, and he wants this and he wants that and he never shows his face, mad bugger, completely insane if you ask me. Probably lives in a castle and never goes out and wears a mask because he’s hideously ugly.’
‘No doubt.’ Tim was leaning down towards Jane’s round creamy throat. ‘Who cares? He’s paying.’
‘It’s not a real dragon,’ I reminded them.
‘How do you know?’ Tim said. ‘No one knows what it is.’
There was a dragon on the broad mantelpiece, along with a selection of pipes and an owl carved out of wax. I thought of this beast, this old story. Deep in a forest I saw it, great sad red eyes and a crimson tongue, forked like a swallow’s tail and thin as a grass blade, flicking in and out. Sitting there, waiting to be found.
‘Dan Rymer thinks there’s something,’ Tim said staunchly.
‘Oh, and he knows, does he?’ Ishbel said. ‘He knows everything.’
‘He knows a hell of a lot, that’s for sure.’ Tim put back his head and blew a great blue cloud of smoke up at the ceiling, smiling. His hair glowed gold in the firelight. I don’t even know if he really wanted to go. He said he did but you never knew with Tim. ‘Even Jamrach doesn’t know the half of what Dan knows about wild animals,’ he said.
There are dragons and dragons, of course. It was an eastern dragon we were after. The one on the back of the doorman’s shiny red coat and the one on the mantelpiece were eastern dragons, fierce sort of winged snakes with many coils, huge whiskered heads and enormous, bulging eyes.
‘It’s not a real dragon,’ I repeated. ‘It hasn’t got wings.’
‘I’m glad you’re going, Jaf,’ Ishbel said. She put her face right in mine so I could taste her spicy breath. I pulled back a little. It was always a now and then thing, and only when she felt like it. That wasn’t fair.
‘Glad to be rid of me?’ I said.
‘Don’t be silly.’ She put her head on my shoulder and it wasn’t fair. ‘You’re the one with sense. You’ve got to look after him.’
Tim, sinking into the lap of Spoony Jane, snorted at the idea of me looking after him. I placed my arm about Ishbel’s waist and she let it stay there. ‘It’s only a big crocodile,’ I said. ‘It’s just a crocodile hunt, that’s all.’
‘I know,’ she said, smiling, her heavy eyes sleepy, ‘and perhaps it’s not even there.’
Tim slept in the round lap of Spoony Jane. White dress, white shoes, Jane herself smiling as she hummed a little tune I knew from Ishbel, who sang it years ago on the balmy corner of Baroda Street by the herb man’s stall. The sky raining, dark spatters on the stones, the women beaming at the little thing, blue-jacket sailors, her mother standing by with huge-bosomed mermaids in her basket. Painted Ishbel singing ‘The Mermaid’, combing her hair with an imaginary comb while admiring herself in an imaginary glass. And when she sang ‘Three times round went our gallant ship, three times round went she …’, about in a circle she would dance three times and finish by falling down in a graceful heap of skirts on the pavement, arms aloft waving like seaweed.
… and she sank to the bottom of the sea,
the sea, the sea
and she sank to the bottom of the sea.
*
Their birthdays fell on the first of August, his and hers.
For her tenth I gave her a shell. She graced it with a look.
For her eleventh I gave her a flick book. She laughed once or twice, playing with it under the rain-drummed canvas.
For her twelfth I didn’t bother and vowed I wouldn’t bother again.
For her thirteenth I gave her an orange.
For her fourteenth I gave her a mouse with particoloured markings. She called it Jester and it ran about in her apron.
For her fifteenth I gave her a gold ring I stole from a drunken sailor in the Spoony.
Jester died.
For her sixteenth I gave her a special and very beautiful rat. She loved that rat. She called him Fauntleroy. When she walked down the street Fauntleroy would peep from her hood. He was snow white with bright pink eyes and he liked music. Fauntleroy was with her when she came to say goodbye.
Lord Lovell he stands in his chamber door
Combing his milk white steed
And by there has come Lady Nancy Belle
To wish her lover good speed.
Oh, I’m sailing away, my own true love,
Strange places for to see …
For the life of me I can’t remember the next line.
I’ve seen strange places and they have seen me. They have watched me with a calm appraising eye …
Two days before we sailed I was standing in the silent bird room, a place that drew me back again and again, and I got a feeling of being watched.
‘Just came to say goodbye, Jaf,’ she said.
‘Aren’t you coming to see us off?’
‘Oh, I will,’ she said, ‘but they’ll all be there then, won’t they?’
I fell on my knees and kissed her strong stumpy hands and bitten nails and wept and told her I loved her.