together. He wore a business suit that made him look stout, and his hair was parted in the middle and slicked down with oil.
‘Bulter,’ he said to a pale young man scowling and picking his nails behind a very untidy desk, ‘get Charlie out.’
Bulter stood, long and thin, flounced round the desk and stopped before a large cage. A wonderful, outrageous bird perched attentively, watching the dim room as if it was the most wonderful show. The bird was all colours, and its beak was bigger than its body.
‘Come out, Charlie, you stupid bird,’ Bulter said, lifting the latch.
Charlie danced with delight. Didn’t he crawl as gentle as a sleepy kitten into Bulter’s arms and nestle up against his breast with that hard monster beak and the downturned head bashful? Bulter stroked the black feathers on top of the bird’s head. ‘Daft he is,’ he said, turned and placed Charlie in my arms. Charlie raised his head and looked into my face.
‘He’s a toucan,’ Tim said.
‘Got the touch, you have,’ Bulter said to me. ‘He likes you.’
‘Likes everyone,’ Tim said.
Charlie was a sane and willing bird. So was Flo, the parrot in the lobby. The birds that came after were not.
Mr Jamrach led me through the lobby and into the menagerie. The first room was a parrot room, a fearsome screaming place of mad round eyes, crimson breasts that beat against bars, wings that flapped against their neighbours, blood red, royal blue, gypsy yellow, grass green. The birds were crammed along perches. Macaws hung upside down here and there, batting their white eyes, and small green parrots flittered above our heads in drifts. A host of cockatoos looked down from on high over the shrill madness, high crested, creamy breasted. The screeching was like laughter in hell.
‘This is how they like it,’ Jamrach said.
My eyes watered. My ears hurt.
‘They flock.’
‘They’re crying out for parrots,’ Tim Linver said sagely, bobbing alongside with a loose and cocky gait.
‘Who is?’
‘People is.’
I turned my head. Small ones, pretty things, blue, red, green, yellow, in rows behind the wire, good as gold and quiet.
‘My parakeets,’ said Jamrach. ‘Lovely birds.’
‘In and out in no time, this lot.’ Tim rocked back on his heels, speaking like a man, as if the entire operation belonged to him.
The second room was quieter. Hundreds of birds, like sparrows but done out in all the colours of the rainbow, in long boxes. A wall of bluebirds, breasts the colour of rose sherbet. The air, fluty with song, like early morning.
‘Six shillings a pair,’ Tim said.
The third and last bird room was completely silent. All the way up to the ceiling, tiny wooden cages piled on top of one another, in each one a bird just the right size to fill the space, all of them mute and still. More than anything I’d seen, this room bothered me. I wondered if Mr Jamrach would let me have one. I could tame it and it would fly free in our room and sing.
Out into the dazzling yard. Bulter from the office was there with another man, sweeping up outside a pen. A camel chewed behind the bars. A camel has to chew like it has to breathe. I know that now. Then, I might as well have stepped into a picture book. The animals were the stuff of fairy tales, the black bear with the white bib, the sideways-looking eye of the baby elephant, the head of the giraffe, immense, coming down at me from the sky to wet me with the heat of its flexing nostrils. I grew light of mind from the gorgeous stench. A wilderness steamed in the air all about me. And then I saw my tiger in his cage, with a lion on one side and some dog things on the other. The lion was a majestic and dreadful cat with the stern, sad face of a scholar and wild billowing hair. He looked me in the eye for a whole moment before turning away in total indifference. A thick, pink tongue licked out, carressing his nostrils. The hair stood up on the backs of the dog things. My tiger paced, rippling, thick tail striking the air. Little black fishes swam on his back. Scimitars, blades, dashes, black on gold, black on white. Heavy-headed, lower jaw hanging slack, backwards and forwards, steady:
three paces and a half – turn—
three paces and a half – turn—
three paces and a half—
‘See!’ said Jamrach. ‘This is the bad boy. He knows he’s been a bad boy, he is shamed, see.’
‘Has he got a name?’
‘Not yet. He hasn’t found his buyer yet.’
‘Who buys a tiger?’ I asked.
‘Zoos,’ Tim said.
‘London Zoo,’ I said. I’d never been there.
Tim and Jamrach laughed as if I’d said something funny.
‘Not just zoos,’ Jamrach said, ‘people who collect.’
‘How much for my tiger?’ I asked.
‘He is a full-grown Bengal tiger,’ Mr Jamrach said. ‘Two hundred pounds at least.’
Tim babbled: ‘Two hundred for a tiger, three hundred an elephant, seventy for a lion. You can pay three hundred for some lions though. Get the right one. An orang-utan, now that’s three twenty.’
We went up a ladder to a place where there was a beast like a pie, a great lizard mad and grinning, and monkeys, many monkeys, a stew of human nature, a bone pile of it, a wall, a dream of small faces. Baby things. No, ancient, impossibly old things. But they were beyond old and young. The babies clung fast beneath sheltering bellies. The mothers, stoic above, endured.
‘And here …’ Jamrach, with some showmanship, whipped the lid off a low round basket. Snakes, thick, green and brown, muscled, lay faintly flexing upon one another like ropes coiled high on the quay. ‘Snappy things, these,’ Jamrach said, putting back the lid and tying a rope round it.
We passed by a huge cat with pointed ears and eyes like jewels that miaowed like a kitten at us. Furry things ran here and there about our feet, pretty things I never could have imagined. He said they came from Peru, whatever far place that was. And right at the end in the darkest place, sitting down with his knuckles turned in, was an ape who looked at me with eyes like a man’s.
That was all I ever wanted. To stay among the animals for ever and ever and look into their eyes whenever I felt like it. So when, back in the smoky office with the pale clerk Bulter lolling behind his desk once more drinking cocoa, Mr Jamrach offered me a job, I could only cry, ‘Oh yes!’ like a fool and make everybody laugh.
‘Very small, isn’t he?’ Tim Linver said. ‘You sure he’s up to it, Mr Jamrach?’
‘Well, Jaffy?’ Mr Jamrach asked jovially. ‘Are you up to it?’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I work hard. You don’t know yet.’
And I could. We’d be fine now, Ma and me. She was on shifts
