Or so I believe.
The air was woolly in the Spoony. The floor was slippery with the saliva gobbed out all over the floor. And yet, look up into the rafters and see the smoke curling there so elegant, while two golden girls painted like dolls sing high over a pair of keening violins. Could there be much better than this?
The place was still wild when I knocked off at midnight and went home to Ma. The streets were full and roaring. There was money in my pocket. I bought a great lump of brown sugar and sucked it all the way home. Ma was still out, so I asked Mari-Lou to make sure she told her to call me at half past six sharp for my new job, then went to bed and closed my eyes, determined to sleep. But there was so much noise out on the street, and so much singing going on somewhere in the house, that all I could do was doze and dream, all about a big black sea pushing up against the window.
‘Last boy we had got bitten by a boa,’ Tim said. ‘Died. Foul it was, you should of seen.’
First words he spoke to me in the early morning yard. Dark and cold, fog catching the throat.
He ruffled the jet black curls that made me look like a Lascar, and poked me. ‘What’s this? What’s this? Little Lascar, are we? Little Lascar, is it?’ Ma said my dad was a Maltese or a Greek, she wasn’t sure which, but anyway not a Lascar. You could never tell with her though; she said different things at different times. Tim was smiling, a sudden dazzle of big square teeth. We were waiting by the pen. Bulter, who served as keeper as well as clerk, was lounging by the gate with Cobbe, a brawny great square of a man who swept the yard and all the pens.
‘These devils,’ Tim said, ‘these devils have got a rotten temper.’
‘What are they like?’ I asked again, but he wouldn’t tell me. They’ve got great big mouths, he’d say, or: They stink; but what kind of a thing they were he wasn’t telling. He enjoyed his superior knowledge, holding it from me like a dog with a bone. A marmoset was a little monkey, that I knew. I wasn’t scared of a little monkey. I’d made up my mind not to be scared of any of these things, but it did help if you knew what you were up against. A devil? A devil from Tasmania, wherever that was. I pictured a thin red demon with horns and a tail, a whole cartload of them, walking on two legs with big mouths and foul tempers.
‘What do they eat?’ I asked.
‘Fingers,’ he came back, quick as a flash. ‘Nothing else.’
‘Ha ha,’ I replied, and blew on my own.
‘Cold?’ said Tim. ‘You got to be tough in this line.’
I laughed. I was tough. Tougher than him probably. Catch him getting shit in his golden locks. He grinned. My teeth were chattering. His were still. He vibrated slightly with the effort of not being cold. Our breath came in clouds.
‘You just watch me,’ he said. ‘You won’t go far wrong if you do.’
The gate creaked open and there was Jamrach with the cart come up from the dock, and the devils in a crate on the back. The cart came just close enough for Bulter and Cobbe to unload straight into the yard from its back. I heard the devils before I saw them. As soon as they felt the crate move, those creatures set up a terrible screeching and moaning like the hordes of the damned. A howling of monkeys began in the loft in sympathy. But when I saw them, they were just little dogs. Poor, ugly little black dogs with screaming mouths and red gums. They stank rotten.
There wasn’t much for me to do. I stood looking on while Tim went into the pen with Bulter and Cobbe. Cobbe opened the crates. Bulter, with an air of graceful disdain, tipped those poor things out. There were six of them altogether, and they all set about sneezing as if they’d landed in a giant pot of pepper. Tim herded them down the far end where they turned, stretching out their mouths as if they’d break them at the corners. Their eyes were tiny and piggy and scared. All the big cats and dogs were howling and roaring now.
‘Jaffy,’ Mr Jamrach said, ‘take the lantern and take the marmosets up to the loft and wait for Tim. Don’t touch anything till he comes.’ And he showed me two tiny monkeys with white tufty ears and large round eyes staring up at me through a grid.
‘Hello,’ I said, squatting down to look at them, all huddled up in the corner of a box with their arms round each other.
Tim sniggered at me through the wire of the devils’ pen. ‘They’re not babies,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘Don’t you forget.’ He hoisted a bucket. ‘Don’t touch anything till I get there.’
I carried the box up the ramp, smelling the meaty breath of the lion to the right of me. It was too dark to see him, and darker still in the loft. The lantern’s light swung about, here and there it caught the shine of an eye. There were tortoises all over the floor, I had to pick my way. The apes were muttering. I waited by the marmoset cage, setting down the box. They shrank into one another. Tim appeared soon, whistling jauntily up the ladder, hauling himself up with jerky grace.
‘Jamrach says you can put them in with the others,’ he said, striding towards me with a big bunch of keys. ‘I’m to watch you and make sure you don’t make a mess of things.’
Which he did, like a hawk, every movement, longing for me to go wrong. But those monkeys were on my side and treated me as if I was their dad, clinging to me with their scratchy little hands and feet, making small sad noises in their throats. No fight in them at all. ‘In you go,’ I said, loosening their fingers, and in they went. There was a skittering of shadows in the cage as I pushed the bar across. I would have stayed to see how they got on, but Tim grabbed the lantern and swept us along down to the cage of the big ape who had looked at me.
‘Old Smokey,’ he said.
Old Smokey looked at me like before, straight at me, calm. His eyes, flat in his face, were very black with two bright spots of light from the lantern. Something between serenity and caution was in them. His mouth was a thoughtful crooked line.
Oh, you lovely thing, I cried, not aloud but loudly inside.
‘Do you want to go in with him?’ Tim asked.
Of course I wanted to go in with him, but I was no fool. ‘Not till Mr Jamrach says,’ I replied.
‘Smokey’s all right,’ said Tim. ‘He’s been living like one of the family with some big nobs up in Gloucester Square for years. He’s just like one of us.’
‘Why is he here?’
‘Dunno. He’s off up north on Tuesday,’ Tim said. ‘Wanna go in with him?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Go on. I’ve got the keys. You don’t think he’d let me have the keys if it was dangerous, do you?’
Smokey and I studied each other.
‘Go on,’ Tim said.
‘No.’
‘Coward.’
He walked away, leaving me in the dark.
‘Settle down!’ he yelled at the restless beasts as I stumbled after, stopping and starting as my toes stubbed against the stupid tortoises, which just kept walking and walking as if they knew where they were going.
I should have hit him for calling me a coward. I thought about it as I pounded down the ramp, but I never was one for fighting.
‘All well?’ called Jamrach.
He was standing by the pen of the black bear with a short stocky man in a long coat and sea boots. Smoke billowed in clouds above their heads in the queasy light