fair. ‘You’re the one with sense. You’ve got to look after him.’
Tim, sinking into the lap of Spoony Jane, snorted at the idea of me looking after him. I placed my arm about Ishbel’s waist and she let it stay there. ‘It’s only a big crocodile,’ I said. ‘It’s just a crocodile hunt, that’s all.’
‘I know,’ she said, smiling, her heavy eyes sleepy, ‘and perhaps it’s not even there.’
Tim slept in the round lap of Spoony Jane. White dress, white shoes, Jane herself smiling as she hummed a little tune I knew from Ishbel, who sang it years ago on the balmy corner of Baroda Street by the herb man’s stall. The sky raining, dark spatters on the stones, the women beaming at the little thing, blue-jacket sailors, her mother standing by with huge-bosomed mermaids in her basket. Painted Ishbel singing ‘The Mermaid’, combing her hair with an imaginary comb while admiring herself in an imaginary glass. And when she sang ‘Three times round went our gallant ship, three times round went she …’, about in a circle she would dance three times and finish by falling down in a graceful heap of skirts on the pavement, arms aloft waving like seaweed.
… and she sank to the bottom of the sea,
the sea, the sea
and she sank to the bottom of the sea.
*
Their birthdays fell on the first of August, his and hers.
For her tenth I gave her a shell. She graced it with a look.
For her eleventh I gave her a flick book. She laughed once or twice, playing with it under the rain-drummed canvas.
For her twelfth I didn’t bother and vowed I wouldn’t bother again.
For her thirteenth I gave her an orange.
For her fourteenth I gave her a mouse with particoloured markings. She called it Jester and it ran about in her apron.
For her fifteenth I gave her a gold ring I stole from a drunken sailor in the Spoony.
Jester died.
For her sixteenth I gave her a special and very beautiful rat. She loved that rat. She called him Fauntleroy. When she walked down the street Fauntleroy would peep from her hood. He was snow white with bright pink eyes and he liked music. Fauntleroy was with her when she came to say goodbye.
Lord Lovell he stands in his chamber door
Combing his milk white steed
And by there has come Lady Nancy Belle
To wish her lover good speed.
Oh, I’m sailing away, my own true love,
Strange places for to see …
For the life of me I can’t remember the next line.
I’ve seen strange places and they have seen me. They have watched me with a calm appraising eye …
Two days before we sailed I was standing in the silent bird room, a place that drew me back again and again, and I got a feeling of being watched.
‘Just came to say goodbye, Jaf,’ she said.
‘Aren’t you coming to see us off?’
‘Oh, I will,’ she said, ‘but they’ll all be there then, won’t they?’
I fell on my knees and kissed her strong stumpy hands and bitten nails and wept and told her I loved her. No, I didn’t.
I said, ‘Oh,’ and that was all.
‘I’ve only got a minute,’ she said.
‘Work?’
‘Ma wants me.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s going to be funny with you lot gone.’
I laughed. ‘Wish you were coming?’ I asked.
She pulled a face. ‘Whale ships stink.’
We were awkward. This may be the last time, I thought. I put my arms out and gathered her in close. ‘I hate you both for going,’ she said, suddenly tearful. When I kissed her on the mouth she kissed me back. Long sweet minutes till she pulled back and said she had to go, and took my hand and dragged me outside with my head reeling. I walked her to the back gate. Cobbe was mucking about in the yard. The lioness was gnawing peacefully on a lump of beef, holding onto it with her paws, licking amorously, eating with closed eyes.
‘You’ll look after him, won’t you?’ Ishbel said. ‘He’s not as brave as he makes out, you know.’
‘Neither am I.’
‘Pa won’t shake his hand,’ she said. ‘He cried. Don’t tell him I told you.’
‘’Course not.’
We stood smiling in a slightly demented way.
‘He’s a big baby really,’ she said.
‘So am I,’ I said.
‘How’s your ma?’ she asked.
It might never have happened.
‘She’ll do. She asked Charley to have a word with me about staying and getting into the fish business. “You serious?” I said. “Work on a fish stall or go around the world?”’
She laughed. ‘Oh well,’ tidying her hair, ‘better be on my way,’ and was gone.
Three years and come back a man, come back changed. See the strange places I itch to see. See the sea. Could you ever get sick of the sight of the sea? She said that to me one day when we were standing on the bridge. And she had never even seen it, and I pray she never will.
I went home and looked out of the window at sunset. It was May. The sky was a red eye, the rooftops black. There were islands in the sky. The waves were bobbing. It was the Azores, those beautiful islands. Jaffy Brown is gone. He turned, was turned, a ghost on a god-haunted ocean. My eyes and the indigo horizon are one and the same.
Early in the morning, a straggle of dockers and lightermen on the quay, a bunch of old women and a few mothers, not mine. Ma had gone all distant on me. We’d said our goodbyes. She hated all that, she said. If you’re going to go, just go, and get yourself back as quick as you can, and don’t expect me to like it. Mr Jamrach didn’t want me to go either. When I’d taken my leave of him the night before he’d clapped me on the arm and brought his face close to mine, and stared unwaveringly with watery blue eyes, making me uncomfortable. ‘You look out for yourself, Jaf,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ll not see you on the quay.’ We’d shaken hands very cordially and smiled awkwardly, till someone came to the door wanting birds, allowing me to slip away fast.
Dan Rymer’s wife was standing on the quay, a tall, straight-backed, fair woman with children in her skirts and a baby on her arm. A shipload of Portuguese sailors
