river and paid our pennies and passed under the arch to the cool under tunnel where the fair went thrillingly on and on along the pavement, one thing after another as far as the eye could see: fortune-tellers, donkey rides, pinch-faced little monkeys wearing blue jackets. The barrows of the clothes sellers were decked out with brightly coloured ladies’ dresses, high above us like lines of airborne dancing girls. I smelled lavender, sugar, sarsaparilla.
Ishbel walked in a swinging about kind of way with her hands clasped behind her back. She and Tim had scarcely said a word to one another since we’d left their house. We wandered about for a bit and ended up watching all the fools falling off the slippery pole.
‘You go on it, Jaf,’ said Tim.
‘No fear,’ said I.
‘Coward,’ he said.
‘You go on it.’
‘What’s the point of me going on it? I’ve done it millions of times.’
‘Ha!’ said Ishbel.
He smiled. Small baboon wrinkles appeared at the sides of his nose.
‘You go on the bloody thing, Tim,’ she said, ‘you’re so clever. You leave him alone.’
‘He needs it,’ he said. ‘Needs pushing a bit. Don’t you, eh?’ Pushing me a bit, not much, just enough so he could still say it was all in fun if I complained. ‘Don’t you?’
‘He don’t need you pushing him,’ she snapped. ‘Who’d want you pushing him?’
‘He does. Don’t you? See, see? Go on, Jaffy, go on, you can do it. It’s always the little ones do it best, it’s a known fact. You give it a go, boy. You’ve only got to stay on for a minute and you get a guinea. That’s good.’
No sir, not me. No fool, me.
Still, somehow I found myself up there on the wooden steps that went up to the tail end of the greasy pole. The pole was long and dappled and round, like a stretched horse with a wispy tail and a painted head. I looked at the horse’s arse, the few sad wisps of fibre sprouting there. I saw a sea of faces, all delightedly waiting for me to make a horse’s arse of myself. I saw Tim grinning off to the side, and the hem of Ishbel’s skirt. I spread my legs and, knowing I was doomed for the drop, launched myself up and over the horse’s arse and onto the slippery pole. It was like climbing onboard a slug. I put my hands before me, gripped slime, shunted forwards and for one strong moment sat with head held high before the pole rolled me round. With my hair hanging down backwards from my head, I clung on, ridiculously, like a drop on the lip of a tap, destined to fall. Then I fell on my back in the sawdust, floundering like a fool, and the people roared.
Red-eared, I stomped through the indifferent crowd, past his grin and her brown eyes. Away. He ran after me and grabbed my elbow. ‘Don’t be stupid, Jaffy,’ he said, seeing my face.
I cursed him to hell.
‘Don’t be a baby, it’s only fun! I done it. She done it. Showed all her bloomers and all, didn’t you, Ish? What’s your beef, Jaffy?’
It was nothing. Everyone fell off the slippery pole, that’s what it was for. It was just Tim doing what he always did, trying to put me in the way of ridicule. My own fault for doing what he told me. It was fury at myself that made me lash out and punch him right in the middle of his stupid smug face. That and the sudden tipping of a scale by one last grain of rice.
‘Oy!’ he yelled.
He didn’t even bleed. That infuriated me even more. He didn’t hit me back either and that was worse, the final insult. I swung at him again and forced him to protect himself, and we scuffled, me near tears, till a woman came out from behind a pie stall and chucked a bucket of cold water over us as if we were dogs. The three of us ran.
We stopped where the swingboats flew up to the great vaulted roof.
‘Come on, Jaffy,’ Ishbel said, brushing down my drooping shoulders, ‘me and you’ll go on these.’
‘What d’you mean?’ Tim cried. ‘We only got two bob. Who’s paying for him, then?’
‘I am. Bugger you,’ she said.
‘That means I can’t go on!’
‘Boo hoo hoo!’ She shoved her face in his. ‘You’re a cruel, mean, nasty, horrible pig, you are, Timmy Linver! Yes you are.’
And she grabbed me and dragged me onto a red and blue swingboat whose occupants had just now been brought to earth and disgorged.
I had never been on a swingboat before. Me and Ishbel faced one another, grinning wildly, the world lurching up and down, up and down, the boat like a painted crescent moon in the sky. The babble of the crowd waxed and waned. There was laughter, mine and hers. A smear of rouge remained on her cheek from her afternoon at the Malt Shovel, where she danced in brass-heeled shoes the colour of blood, and the men clapped time. When we came down Tim was nowhere to be seen. For a moment we stood taking this in, not speaking. I had never been alone with her before.
She shrugged, slung an arm round my neck and hoicked me away from the fair and through the streets as if I was her little brother. She’d grown up so much faster than me. That’s girls for you.
We wandered vaguely in the direction of home, wordless. A fat man with terrible burns, old and much puckered, had set up a Happy Family cage by the corner of Old Gravel Lane. He had dormice in with a cat and a rat and an owl, and they were all just living there and not bothering each other. Ishbel said it was like the lion lying down with the lamb, but I knew how it was done. They put stuff in their feed to make them sleepy. I didn’t tell her though. Outside the seamen’s bethel she bought me a ginger beer and told me to wait while she went inside and lit candles for the boys. The boys were two brothers lost at sea not long before she was born. The spotless saints, Tim called them in a faintly derisory way. Nothing was left of them about the house, but their spirits hovered invisibly there like benevolent angels, and every now and again at night when the chores were done and she was sitting by the fire, Mrs Linver would take off her spectacles and polish them sadly, weep a few tears and curse the sea on their behalf. You couldn’t blame her. Two sons gone and a whittling blob of a man sitting across from her. And still, Tim said he was going to sea. Couldn’t wait. That’s where real life was, he said. Soon as the man would take him, he’d be up and off with Dan Rymer. ‘Died at sea.’ That’s what it said after the names in the big book in the seamen’s bethel, died at sea like my father. I asked Ma once if his name was in there, but she said no. The ginger beer was good and sharp. I smelled fish, and lavender. A sugar wagon rolled by groaning, a knock-kneed brown horse between the shafts. The sound of hammering and singing was carried on the breeze, and the sun was warm. I closed my eyes and thought of her turning on her heel, flouncing her skirts as she flashed an ankle, the sailors in their threadbare duds throwing pennies. When she was doing laundry or hauling water from the pump or jumping around on rotting wooden piers with me and Tim, she was a matt-haired hoyden, but at work she was a small painted woman with leaves in her hair, dancing on a stage and blowing kisses at sailors.
I’m not sitting out here like a pile of washing, I thought, and followed her in. I’d never been inside before. There were a lot of people sitting about in the pews and a woman lighting a candle. Ishbel was looking at the pictures: Jephtha and his daughter, Jonah spitted up on shore, Job and his flaming boils. An arch of words above read: I am a brother to dragons and a companion of owls.
