long time ago it went to the bottom of the sea. Wish I still had it. It was a lovely thing – the patterns in the high-polished mahogany, the lacquering on the brass. On the sunshade, silver engraved with a feather pattern. The telescope I have now is stout and plain, but you can’t fault its clarity. I look at birds, and on certain nights I look at the stars through the mesh over the garden. I got to know the stars well at sea. You can’t rely on the sun and moon – they do funny things sometimes – but you can rely on the stars. When you look at them through a telescope, they start to flutter like little white wings burning in a silver fire. Then, if you focus your lens here below on a bird’s eye, you can see the shine in it, the life. And sometimes a thing comes so close it makes you jump.
It’s the same when you look at the past. Far away the white wings twinkle, nothing can be known. Further in, details: the riggings of great ships that web the darkening sky; rooftops, clear on the inner eye, magnified; and sometimes a pang, up close. Tonight is a late spring night. The carving on a piece of scrimshaw, rough beneath my fingers, reminds me of the feathers engraved on the old telescope I had when I was a boy, and I remember a long-ago night: a wonderful day gone, my heart thrumming softly, coming home and crying, and not knowing why, swooping here and there with my all-seeing eye over rooftops, thinking about Ishbel. She’d be on the stage, grinning wildly, catching coppers in her small, bloody, stubby-fingered hands. She’d sing ‘Little Brown Jug’, ‘The Blind Boy At Play’ and ‘The Heart That Can Feel for Another’, and the drunken sailors would laugh and weep.
So much for Jaffy the child. He didn’t last long, did he? What was he? A butterfly thing. A great wave came and took him away. A tiger ate him. Only his head remains, lying on the stones. Let it speak. Let it roll around old Ratcliffe Highway, a hungry ghost, roaring its tale for all who will hear. I know why the sailors sing so beautifully on their boats out in the river, why my raw senses wept when I listened in my Bermondsey cot. I found out when I was fifteen.
Tim was a bigwig now. When Bulter got married and moved away, Jamrach had said he was too clever for the yard and too dreamy to work with animals, so me and Cobbe and a new boy now did all the dirty stuff, and Tim was an office boy and got more money. He wore a collar to work. His mother starched it for him every night. By this time, we were close. He could still be a swine, but he was just one of those the world forgives. Some are. I didn’t speak to him for three weeks once and he couldn’t stand it, came over all noble and upright and faced me like a man, said I was the best friend he’d ever had, the only real one. Life’s short. What can you do?
The day we heard about the dragon, he was in the yard with us, bouncing from foot to foot in the cold. Mr Fledge’s man and Dan Rymer had been in the office all morning, hard in talks about something momentous. They’d sent him out so they could be private.
‘Something’s afoot,’ he kept saying importantly, affecting to know more than he did. There were kiss curls on his forehead, and his eyes were bright. His breath hung on the air. They called him in when Fledge’s man left, and ten minutes later he came running back out.
‘I’m going to sea! With Dan! We’re going to catch a dragon! And we’ll be rich!’
‘There are no dragons,’ Cobbe said.
But Tim babbled on about how Dan knew a man who knew a man, who saw one walking out of a forest on an island east of the Java Sea. How Mr Fledge, who always wanted what no one else had, what no one else had ever had, was now determined to be the first person in the civilised world ever to own a dragon. A ship was leaving in three weeks’ time and Tim would be on it, right-hand man to the big hunter, sailing east and still further east till they’d rounded the globe.
‘He’s gone off his rocker,’ Cobbe said, pointing to the side of his head. ‘That’s what it is.’
I pictured a big flying monster that flaps its wings slowly like a heron, breathes out fire, fights heroes, sits on a hoard of treasure or eats a girl. Very big nostrils, round, the sort you could crawl up like a Bermondsey sewer.
I was the one who was good with animals, everyone knew that. Why wasn’t I going?
‘I don’t think much of your chances,’ I said, ‘not with the fire.’
‘What fire?’
‘They breathe fire.’
‘Don’t be stupid. That’s only in storybooks. Don’t believe me, do you? Come on.’ He was mad, beaming with delight, pulling me along into the office where Dan Rymer and Mr Jamrach were drinking brandy in a thick smog of smoke.
‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Tim said. ‘Tell him.’
He went behind his desk and leaned back horizontally in his chair with his long legs stretched out across the desk and his fingers knotted behind his head.
‘It’s true,’ Jamrach said. ‘Fortunately Mr Fledge has more money than sense.’ He and Dan burst out laughing.
‘A dragon?’
‘A dragon of sorts.’ Dan doodled on a scrap of paper. ‘If it exists. Certainly the natives believe it does. The Ora. There have always been rumours. I talked to a man on Sumba once who said his grandfather had been eaten by one. And there was a whaleman once, an islander. He had a tale. There are lots of tales.’ He showed me what he’d drawn. It looked like a crocodile with long legs.
‘It’s not a dragon if it hasn’t got wings,’ I said, ‘not a real dragon.’
Dan shrugged.
‘We’ll be gone three years,’ said Tim rapturously.
‘Two or three,’ said Dan. ‘Depends.’
‘On what?’ I asked. He shrugged again.
Mr Fledge owned a whale ship called the Lysander. It had sailed out of Hull and was this moment loading at the old Greenland Dock. They’d join the whaling crew on the voyage and take care of wildlife – should there be any – on the way home. ‘Bring back a dragon,’ Fledge’s man said, ‘and you’ll never have to work again.’
I let Tim crow for a few days then went down to the Greenland Dock. The Lysander was a very old vessel, one of the last of its kind, I should say, and it was looking for crew. I signed. Mr Jamrach knew well he could get another boy for the yard.
‘You need me for the animals,’ I said when I told Dan I was going. ‘I’m better than him.’
He leaned his head back and squinted into the white smoke trickling up his face, and said, ‘Oh well, I suppose you can keep an eye on Tim.’
Poor Ma, though, she was distraught. ‘Oh, I don’t want you to go to sea, Jaffy,’ she said when I told her. ‘I always knew this would happen one day and I always wished it wouldn’t. It’s a horrible life. Much too hard for a lad like you. You can’t turn back when you’re out there, you know.’
She was living in Limehouse those days. She’d taken up with a fish man by the name of Charley Grant, a good enough sort. She was preparing herrings on a board when I told her, slitting their bellies and slapping
