everything, chair backs, a table, a massive rack which hung from the ceiling above a blazing fire. A round, pale, hairless man sat in a saggy armchair by the fire, smiling vaguely and whittling away at a stick of wood, and the little girl who’d smiled at me from the crowd was there, standing by the range, turning with a dripping spoon in one hand. She smiled again.
It was not love at first sight, but love at second sight. Her hair was straight and fair, her face bright and innocent, her apron filthy. She had dimples.
‘Ishbel,’ her mother ordered, ‘get him some porridge. Your brother’s a nasty horrible boy,’ scrubbing my face and hands and knees with a hot cloth as she talked, her voice thin and quavery. ‘Well, you can see why the old man’s taken a shine to this one,’ she said, rinsing out the cloth, ‘just like poor Anton, he is. Bless!’
I saw the gnawed-down nails and bleeding fingers of the fair-haired girl as she cleared a space at the table for me. She pushed a bowl of porridge under my nose. Her skirt was dark red. I thanked her and she dipped a sarcastic curtsy. ‘Welcome,’ she said, twirling away and sitting down by the man’s feet. He had a look of Tim and of the girl, how it might be if you shaved them and puffed them up like balloons and took away their wits.
‘Don’t make yourself too comfortable, young lady,’ her mother said, but Ishbel leaned back against his legs, put her arms round her knees and her head on one side and stared at me with open curiosity.
Tim appeared in the open doorway. His mother ran over and screamed in his face. ‘He’ll give you the boot! You hateful boy! You! You! He’ll give you the boot and no doubt! You’ll ruin everything!’
He blinked hard, walked over to where I was scooping porridge into my mouth and put out his hand.
‘I’m very sorry, Jaffy,’ he said, steadily holding my eyes. ‘I really am. Truly. It was a mean thing I did. You’ve still got your job. I’ve been to Spoony’s and I’ve told them.’
I stood up and we shook solemnly.
‘’S’all right,’ I said.
Midday. Ma was asleep when I got home. Mari-Lou and Silky slept too, long dreamy sighs behind the curtain. I got into bed next to Ma, hugging my telescope. Dan Rymer’s telescope that had travelled the whole world round. She did not wake, but gathered me into the crook of her arm, and a tall ship bore me away through painted waves into a long sweet sleep.
Mr Jamrach liked children. Tim and Ishbel had been running in and out of his yard to see the animals since they were little. They were twins and made him laugh, and he gave them pennies for odd jobs. When Tim came to work he’d made him go to school two days a week, and now he did the same with me. By the time I was eleven I could read and write. Mr Jamrach said he needed his boys to be able to write things down and read off lists. I was quick. Ma was impressed. ‘You clever boy, Jaf,’ she said when I read the posters plastered outside the seamen’s bethel.
‘Grand Fair, Thames Tunnel,’ I read smugly, ‘Madame Zan-Zan Fortune-teller. Crinelli’s Puppets. The Marvellous Marioletti Brothers. Snake-Charming. Fire-Walking. Swingboats. Entrance 1d.’
He let us finish early the day of the fair and slipped me and Tim a coin or two each as we pulled off our working boots outside the shed. We spruced up at the pump and changed our clothes, pushing each other about and shaking water from our hair, poking our ears as we strode down the alley. Ishbel had worked the afternoon at the Malt Shovel and drunk some gin. Maybe that’s why she was so sharp. At any rate she started screaming at Tim as soon as we walked in, which wasn’t unusual.
‘You were supposed to fetch the coals before you went out!’ She was ladling soup and had a face full of steam. ‘You lazy pig!’
‘Shut your trap, woman,’ Tim said loftily. ‘Who are you calling a lazy pig? I’ve been shovelling shit since five o’clock.’
There was a slightly deranged look about Mrs Linver. Her eyes bulged and her hair was dripping wet against her forehead. ‘Shut up!’ she screamed, tucking a bib into her fat husband’s collar. ‘I’m sick to death with the pair of you! Sick to death!’ She plucked a half-finished mermaid from Mr Linver’s pudgy hand and dropped it into a basket on top of a dozen finished ones. Apart from when he was eating, that’s what Mr Linver did all day with uncanny consistency, as if he’d been wound up: turned out wooden mermaids for his wife to flog in the streets, blobby-faced women with huge, bulby breasts and curled fishtails upon which they could sit. He’d been a sailor, and a handsome one too, though you’d hardly believe it. Ishbel remembered him running up and down the alley with Tim on his shoulders and everybody laughing. But he’d come home witless when the twins were six, having taken a knock from a spar somewhere in the vicinity of Cape Verde. No one took any notice of him. He was like the chair he sat on. No one took any notice of me either, so I took my accustomed place at the table and waited to be served. Ishbel flounced two bowls of soup to the table and thumped them down so hard that some of the thin brown liquid slopped up and onto the oilcloth. She was twelve now, a great sulker.
‘It’s not fair,’ she said, ‘you come home all washed and ready to go and I’ve not even had a chance to comb my hair.’ She pulled the greasy handkerchief from her forehead and shook her head.
‘Oh, you’re all right,’ her ma said, ‘it won’t take you a minute.’
Ishbel pulled a hideous face at her mother’s back, drawing all the muscles in her neck and jaw so tight that they quivered. ‘Who do you think got the bloody coal in?’ she demanded of Tim. ‘Me. Me me me me me again. I’m sick of you, I hate you, you do this all the time.’
Tim, hair still wet from a dousing under the pump in Jamrach’s yard, sat down to his soup with a lopsided grin intended to irritate. Mr Linver leaned forward and gobbed on the fire.
‘That’s foul,’ said Tim.
His father turned an expression of almost hatred on him, fleeting but unmistakeable.
‘And I’ve got to work again tonight,’ she said, ‘and I’m not going to, it’s not fair, so there.’ She grabbed a canikin, dipped it in the soup pot and swept away into the other room.
‘Oh yes, you are, young madam!’ her mother yelled after her.
The room next door was full of thuds and bangs and theatrical sighs while we ate our soup. When we’d finished Tim and I went outside and sat in the warm sun in the moss-lined alley, passing a pipe between us. We didn’t speak. At last Ishbel came out, wiping her mouth.
‘I’m not going with you two,’ she said.
Her mother’s voice flapped after her through the open door. ‘Oh yes, you are, young madam!’
‘I’ll go with Jaffy,’ she said, ignoring me and looking at Tim, ‘but not you.’
This was momentous to me. We three had been mucking about the shore together for three years now, me always tag-along, stumbling and running every now and then to keep up with them, and they always shoulder to shoulder ahead, fair heads bobbing side by side.
But, ‘The devil you will,’ said Tim, untroubled, sticking his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders, and off they went in front as usual. Ishbel’s hair was matted on the back of her
