lantern and take the marmosets up to the loft and wait for Tim. Don’t touch anything till he comes.’ And he showed me two tiny monkeys with white tufty ears and large round eyes staring up at me through a grid.
‘Hello,’ I said, squatting down to look at them, all huddled up in the corner of a box with their arms round each other.
Tim sniggered at me through the wire of the devils’ pen. ‘They’re not babies,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘Don’t you forget.’ He hoisted a bucket. ‘Don’t touch anything till I get there.’
I carried the box up the ramp, smelling the meaty breath of the lion to the right of me. It was too dark to see him, and darker still in the loft. The lantern’s light swung about, here and there it caught the shine of an eye. There were tortoises all over the floor, I had to pick my way. The apes were muttering. I waited by the marmoset cage, setting down the box. They shrank into one another. Tim appeared soon, whistling jauntily up the ladder, hauling himself up with jerky grace.
‘Jamrach says you can put them in with the others,’ he said, striding towards me with a big bunch of keys. ‘I’m to watch you and make sure you don’t make a mess of things.’
Which he did, like a hawk, every movement, longing for me to go wrong. But those monkeys were on my side and treated me as if I was their dad, clinging to me with their scratchy little hands and feet, making small sad noises in their throats. No fight in them at all. ‘In you go,’ I said, loosening their fingers, and in they went. There was a skittering of shadows in the cage as I pushed the bar across. I would have stayed to see how they got on, but Tim grabbed the lantern and swept us along down to the cage of the big ape who had looked at me.
‘Old Smokey,’ he said.
Old Smokey looked at me like before, straight at me, calm. His eyes, flat in his face, were very black with two bright spots of light from the lantern. Something between serenity and caution was in them. His mouth was a thoughtful crooked line.
Oh, you lovely thing, I cried, not aloud but loudly inside.
‘Do you want to go in with him?’ Tim asked.
Of course I wanted to go in with him, but I was no fool. ‘Not till Mr Jamrach says,’ I replied.
‘Smokey’s all right,’ said Tim. ‘He’s been living like one of the family with some big nobs up in Gloucester Square for years. He’s just like one of us.’
‘Why is he here?’
‘Dunno. He’s off up north on Tuesday,’ Tim said. ‘Wanna go in with him?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Go on. I’ve got the keys. You don’t think he’d let me have the keys if it was dangerous, do you?’
Smokey and I studied each other.
‘Go on,’ Tim said.
‘No.’
‘Coward.’
He walked away, leaving me in the dark.
‘Settle down!’ he yelled at the restless beasts as I stumbled after, stopping and starting as my toes stubbed against the stupid tortoises, which just kept walking and walking as if they knew where they were going.
I should have hit him for calling me a coward. I thought about it as I pounded down the ramp, but I never was one for fighting.
‘All well?’ called Jamrach.
He was standing by the pen of the black bear with a short stocky man in a long coat and sea boots. Smoke billowed in clouds above their heads in the queasy light from the back door.
‘All well!’ called Tim, then to me: ‘See him? That’s Dan Rymer, that is. I’m going to sea with him when I’m old enough.’
Jamrach called us to the office. The smell of coffee, rich and hot in the air, set my mouth watering as we went in the back door. A mild flutter danced along with the light from the lantern as we passed through the sparrow and bluebird room. The office was bright. Bulter was pouring coffee from a tall pot. Steam rose in slow, hot coils, mingling with blue smoke.
‘Ah, good job well done there, Dan,’ Mr Jamrach said, taking his seat behind the desk. ‘I daresay you’re home for a good while now?’
‘Never enough and always too long,’ said Dan Rymer, taking off his cap. His voice was as rough as sand.
Bowls of coffee filled up on Bulter’s desk and I felt near fainting at the smell. But something terrible was happening in my feet.
‘This is the boy I was telling you about,’ said Jamrach, ‘the one who sees fit to pat a tiger on the nose.’
‘Does he now?’ The man turned his small wrinkled eyes on me and looked very closely at me down his nose. A long clay pipe, white and new, stuck out of his mouth, and smoke from it wreathed his head. Now that I was thawing out, the pain of my feet was unbearable. Tears poured down my cheeks. The man reminded me of a tortoise or a lizard, but at the same time he seemed young, for there was hardly any grey in his wiry brown hair.
‘He needs shoes,’ Tim said.
Everyone looked at my feet. I looked. My feet were the flat hardened pads of an animal, and they were blue with cold. The plasters that clothed my bloody toes were weeping.
The man sat down and took off his sea boots. He peeled off a thick pair of bright red socks, much darned, and pulled them over my frozen feet. ‘My wife made these,’ he said, ‘and all the darnings were made by her. See. She is a genius, my wife.’
He gave me coffee.
‘Soon as you get home, you wash them feet,’ he said.
Of course, they were much too big, but I wore them like sacks and they had the heat of his feet on them.
I loved working at Jamrach’s. I was looking after the animals. Mr Jamrach bought me boots. We swept the yard, cleaned cages and pens, changed straw and water and feed. Big Cobbe did the heavy stuff. Bulter kept the books mostly, but slouched about in the yard when he was needed, handling the beasts with practised aplomb. Too easy, his manner said. Too easy for me, all these lions and crocodiles and bears and man-engorging snakes.
Tim wrote up stock. I counted and he wrote down. Thus:
One Chinese alligator. The alligator stretched smiling beside us on the other side of iron bars, half in, half out of his water.
Four Japanese pigs.
Fourteen Barbary apes.
Twelve cobras.
Eight wolves.
One gazelle.
Sixty-four tortoises. A guess. You never could tell with the tortoises; they moved around too much.
Tim and I got along fine as long as I deferred to him in every way. He was a great one for wandering off
