‘In and out in no time, this lot.’ Tim rocked back on his heels, speaking like a man, as if the entire operation belonged to him.
The second room was quieter. Hundreds of birds, like sparrows but done out in all the colours of the rainbow, in long boxes. A wall of bluebirds, breasts the colour of rose sherbet. The air, fluty with song, like early morning.
‘Six shillings a pair,’ Tim said.
The third and last bird room was completely silent. All the way up to the ceiling, tiny wooden cages piled on top of one another, in each one a bird just the right size to fill the space, all of them mute and still. More than anything I’d seen, this room bothered me. I wondered if Mr Jamrach would let me have one. I could tame it and it would fly free in our room and sing.
Out into the dazzling yard. Bulter from the office was there with another man, sweeping up outside a pen. A camel chewed behind the bars. A camel has to chew like it has to breathe. I know that now. Then, I might as well have stepped into a picture book. The animals were the stuff of fairy tales, the black bear with the white bib, the sideways-looking eye of the baby elephant, the head of the giraffe, immense, coming down at me from the sky to wet me with the heat of its flexing nostrils. I grew light of mind from the gorgeous stench. A wilderness steamed in the air all about me. And then I saw my tiger in his cage, with a lion on one side and some dog things on the other. The lion was a majestic and dreadful cat with the stern, sad face of a scholar and wild billowing hair. He looked me in the eye for a whole moment before turning away in total indifference. A thick, pink tongue licked out, carressing his nostrils. The hair stood up on the backs of the dog things. My tiger paced, rippling, thick tail striking the air. Little black fishes swam on his back. Scimitars, blades, dashes, black on gold, black on white. Heavy-headed, lower jaw hanging slack, backwards and forwards, steady:
three paces and a half – turn—
three paces and a half – turn—
three paces and a half—
‘See!’ said Jamrach. ‘This is the bad boy. He knows he’s been a bad boy, he is shamed, see.’
‘Has he got a name?’
‘Not yet. He hasn’t found his buyer yet.’
‘Who buys a tiger?’ I asked.
‘Zoos,’ Tim said.
‘London Zoo,’ I said. I’d never been there.
Tim and Jamrach laughed as if I’d said something funny.
‘Not just zoos,’ Jamrach said, ‘people who collect.’
‘How much for my tiger?’ I asked.
‘He is a full-grown Bengal tiger,’ Mr Jamrach said. ‘Two hundred pounds at least.’
Tim babbled: ‘Two hundred for a tiger, three hundred an elephant, seventy for a lion. You can pay three hundred for some lions though. Get the right one. An orang-utan, now that’s three twenty.’
We went up a ladder to a place where there was a beast like a pie, a great lizard mad and grinning, and monkeys, many monkeys, a stew of human nature, a bone pile of it, a wall, a dream of small faces. Baby things. No, ancient, impossibly old things. But they were beyond old and young. The babies clung fast beneath sheltering bellies. The mothers, stoic above, endured.
‘And here …’ Jamrach, with some showmanship, whipped the lid off a low round basket. Snakes, thick, green and brown, muscled, lay faintly flexing upon one another like ropes coiled high on the quay. ‘Snappy things, these,’ Jamrach said, putting back the lid and tying a rope round it.
We passed by a huge cat with pointed ears and eyes like jewels that miaowed like a kitten at us. Furry things ran here and there about our feet, pretty things I never could have imagined. He said they came from Peru, whatever far place that was. And right at the end in the darkest place, sitting down with his knuckles turned in, was an ape who looked at me with eyes like a man’s.
That was all I ever wanted. To stay among the animals for ever and ever and look into their eyes whenever I felt like it. So when, back in the smoky office with the pale clerk Bulter lolling behind his desk once more drinking cocoa, Mr Jamrach offered me a job, I could only cry, ‘Oh yes!’ like a fool and make everybody laugh.
‘Very small, isn’t he?’ Tim Linver said. ‘You sure he’s up to it, Mr Jamrach?’
‘Well, Jaffy?’ Mr Jamrach asked jovially. ‘Are you up to it?’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I work hard. You don’t know yet.’
And I could. We’d be fine now, Ma and me. She was on shifts at the sugar bakers, the place with the big chimney, and I was starting as pot boy at the Spoony Sailor that very night. With all that and this new job, we could pay our rent up front.
Tim came over and bumped me roughly with his shoulder. ‘Know what that means, Lascar?’ he said. ‘Clearing up dung in the yard.’
Well, no one could be better suited for that than me, and I told them so, and that made them laugh even more. Mr Jamrach, sitting sideways at his desk, leaned over and folded back the white paper cover from a box next to his feet. Very carefully and with the utmost respect, he lifted out a snake, one greater than all the others I’d yet seen. If it had stretched itself out straight and stood itself on the tip of its tail, I suppose it would have been taller than me. Its body was triangular, covered in dry, yellowish scales. Its long face moved towards me from his hands. I stood three feet or so away, and it stretched itself out like a bridge between me and him, straight as a stick, as if it was a hand pointing at me. A quick forked tongue, red as the devil, darted from it a foot from my nose.
‘S-s-s-o,’ said Jamrach in a snake voice, ‘you are joining us, Master Jaffy?’
I put my hand out to touch, but he drew the snake in sharply. ‘No touching!’ he said seriously. ‘No touching unless I say so. You do what you’re told, yes?’
I nodded vigorously.
‘Good boy,’ he said, coiling the snake back into its box.
‘Will I be in charge of him, Mr Jamrach?’ asked Tim anxiously. ‘See,’ he said to me, ‘I know about everything. Don’t I, Mr Jamrach?’
Jamrach laughed. ‘Oh, indeed you do, Tim,’ he said.
‘See,’ said Tim, ‘so you have to do what I tell you.’
Jamrach told me to come back tomorrow at seven when they were expecting a consignment of Tasmanian devils and yet more marmosets. He rolled his eyes at the thought of marmosets.
That night I went to work at the Spoony Sailor. It was a good old place and they were nice to me. The landlord was a man called Bob Barry, a regular mine host, tough as nails and rumpled as year-old sheets. He played the piano, head thrown back, voice like tar banging out some dirty old ditty. Two men in clogs danced a hornpipe on a stage, and the waiter got up and did comic songs dressed as a woman. I ran about with beer all night and cleaned up the pots and mopped the tables. The ladies pinched my cheeks, a big French whore gave me bread and bacon, everything was jolly. When everyone was up on the floor dancing the polka, the pounding sound of all the feet was like a great sea crashing down.
The women in the Spoony Sailor were whorier than the ones in the Malt Shovel, but not as whory as those in Paddy’s Goose, though the Goose girls were by far the swishest and the prettiest. I knew a girl there who wouldn’t be called a whore, said she was a courtesan. Terrible women, some of them, I suppose, but they were always nice to me. I’ve seen them rob a sailor blind in less than ten minutes then kick him out bewildered on the street. Then again, I don’t know if I ever saw a sailor who wasn’t pretty much down on his knees begging for it anyway. The women slapped them about, but the sailors kept coming. I watched them reel about like stags, and remembered how beautiful their singing could be in the night, out over the Thames, heard from my cot in Bermondsey. Sailors from every farthest reach of the