chapter 3
Dodger gets a suit that is tough on the unmentionables, and Solomon gets hot under the collar
IT WAS RAINING again as Dodger got to the attic, a dreadful sombre drizzle. He fretted outside while the old man went through his convoluted process of unlocking the door, then spun Solomon round when he hurtled through. Solomon was old enough and wise enough to let Dodger lie in a smelly heap on the old straw mattress at the back of the attic until he was ready to be alive again, and not just a bundle of grief. Then Solomon, like his namesake being very wise, boiled up some soup, the smell of which filled the room until Onan, who had been sleeping peacefully beside his master, woke up and whined, a sound like some terrible cork being twisted out of a dreadful bottle.
Dodger uncoiled himself from the blanket, gratefully took the soup that Solomon handed wordlessly to him, and then the old man went back to his workbench with its pedal-powered lathe, and soon there was a homely, busy little noise that would have made Dodger think of grasshoppers in a field, if he had ever seen a grasshopper or, for that matter, a field. Whatever you thought it was though, it was comforting, and as the soup did its work of recovery and the grasshoppers danced, Dodger told the old man, well, everything – about the girl, about Charlie, about Mrs Quickly and about Grandad – and Solomon said not one word until Dodger was empty of words of his own, and then he murmured, ‘You had a busy day, bubele, and a great shame about your friend, Grandad mmm, may his soul rest comfortably.’
Dodger wailed, ‘But I left him there to be eaten by rats! He told me to!’
Sometimes Solomon talked as if he had just woken up and remembered something; a curious little mmm sound that came out, something close to the chirping of a little bird, heralding what he had to say next. Dodger never really understood what the automatic mmm stood for. It was a friendly noise and it seemed to him that Solomon was winding up for the next thought; you got used to it after a while and missed it when it wasn’t there.
Now Solomon said, ‘Mmm, was that any better or worse than being eaten by worms? It is the fate of all mankind, alas. You were with him when he died mmm, his friend? So that is a good thing. I have met the gentleman in the past, and I suppose he must be mmm oh, thirty-three? A very good age for a tosher, and from what you say he saw his Lady. Sad to reflect that I myself am mmm fifty-four, though thankfully in good health. You were lucky to meet me, Dodger, just as I indeed was lucky to meet you. You know about keeping clean and about putting money by. We boil water before we drink it, and I’m pleased to say I have mmm made you aware of the possibility of cleaning your teeth, which is why mmm, my dear, you still have some. Grandad died as he had lived and so you will remember him fondly but not mourn unduly. Toshers die young; what else can you expect if you spend half your life messing about in mess? You never see a Jewish tosher – you can’t be a kosher tosher! Remember fondly your friend Grandad, and learn what lessons you can from his life and death.’ And the grasshoppers continued to dance, sizzling as they did so.
Dodger could now hear a fight down in the street somewhere. Well, there was always a fight; fights sprouted up like a fungus, usually because a lot of people all pushed together in these wretched, dirty slums ended up not just at the end of their tether but right off it completely. He had heard people say that the drink was behind it all, but well, you had to drink beer. Yes, too much of it made you drunk, but on the other hand water out of the pump might quite likely make you dead, unless you boiled it first and had the money for coal or wood. That had to wait its turn, after the food and the beer (usually the other way around).
He thought, I believe that Grandad had the death he wanted. But surely no one should want a death like that? I can’t say it would do for me. There was suddenly another thought: if that isn’t what I want, then what is it I should strive for? It was a surprising little thought, one of those that hangs around out of general view until it pops up like a wart. He placed it behind his ear, as it were, for future deliberation.
Solomon was talking again. ‘Mmm, as for your Mister Charlie, I’ve heard of him down at the synagogue. He is a sharp cove, he is, sharp as a razor, sharp as a snake, so they tell me. They say he can take one look at you and he’s got a perfect study of you, from the way you talk down to the way you pick your nose. He is in with the police too, as tight as a tick with them, so now old Solomon is thinking, why did a man like him give a job of police work to mmm a snotty-nosed tosher like you? And it is snotty – I know you know how to use a wipe mmm, I taught you how; just sucking it down and spitting it out on the pavement is distasteful. Are you listening? If you don’t want to end up like poor old Grandad then you’d better end up like somebody else, and a good start mmm would be to look like someone else, especially mmm if you are to do this work for that Mister Charlie. So while I am making the dinner, I want you to go to see my friend Jacob, down at the shonky shop. Tell him I sent you, and that he is to dress you from head to toe with decent schmutter for one shilling, including boots, and mind you mention that last word. Maybe you could think of it as spending part of your legacy, mmm from the late Mister Grandad? And while you’re about it, take Onan with you – he could do with the exercise, poor old thing.’
Dodger had started to argue before he realized that this would be stupid. Solomon was right; if you lived on the streets that’s where you died, or perhaps, as in the case of old Grandad, underneath them. And it seemed the right thing somehow to spend part of his gift from Grandad – and the bounty from the sewers – on smartening himself up a bit, and it would help to look better if he was to try this new line of work . . . he liked the idea of more specie from Mister Charlie. Besides, if you were going to help a lady in distress, it paid to look smart while you were doing so.
He set off, trailed by Onan, who was overjoyed at going out in daylight, and you just had to hope that he didn’t get carried away. For all dogs smell – this being a chief, nay essential component of being a dog when being able to smell and be smelled is of great importance – but it had to be said that Onan not only smelled like every other dog; he introduced a generous portion of Onan smell into the mix as well.
They headed for the shonky shop to see Jacob and, if Dodger remembered correctly, Jacob’s rather strange wife whose wig, however you looked at it, never quite seemed to be right. Jacob ran a pawnshop as well as the shonky shop, and Dodger knew that Solomon suspected that Jacob also bought things without troubling himself where they came from, although he never said why he suspected that.
The pawnshop was where you took your tools if you were out of work, and where you bought them back again when you were back in the job, because it’s easier to eat bread than eat hammers. If you were really skint you popped your unnecessary clothes too; well, at least some of them. If you never turned up to buy them back they would go into the shonky shop, where Jacob and his sons worked all day sewing and mending and cutting and seaming and generally turning old clothes into, if not new clothes, at least into something respectable. Dodger found Jacob and his sons quite friendly.
Jacob greeted Dodger with an expensive grin, which is one where the seller hopes that the buyer is going to buy something. He said, ‘Why, it’s my young friend who once saved the life of my oldest friend, Solomon, and . . . put that dog outside!’
Onan was tied up in the little yard behind the shop with a bone to worry at – and good luck to him in that endeavour, Dodger thought, since any bone that got given to a dog in old London town had already had all the goodness boiled out of it for soup. This didn’t seem to trouble Onan all that much, and so he snuffled and crunched in happy optimism, and Dodger was ushered back inside, made to stand in the very small space available in the middle of the shop and treated like a lord going to one of the nobby shops you found in Savile Row and Hanover Square, although quite probably in those places the clothes you put on hadn’t already been worn by four or five people before you.
Jacob and his sons bustled around him like bees, squinting at him critically, holding up only slightly yellow ‘white’ shirts in front of him and then whisking them away before the next tailor was magically there, holding up a pair of highly suspect pants. Clothes spun past, never to reappear, but never mind because here came some more! It was: ‘Try these – oh dear no’; or, ‘How about this? Certain to fit – oh no, never mind, plenty more for a hero!’
But he hadn’t been a hero, not really. Dodger remembered that day three years ago when he had been having a really bad afternoon on the tosh, and it had started to rain, and he had heard that somebody else had picked up a sovereign just ahead of him so he was feeling angry and irritable and wanted to take all that out on somebody. But when he was back on the foggy streets, there had been two geezers kicking the crap out of somebody on the pavement. Quite possibly, in those days, when his temper was more liable to explode into a spot of boots and fists, if some little wheel in his head had turned the wrong way, he might have helped them, just to get it out of his system. But as it happened the wheel turned the other way, towards the thought that two geezers kicking an old cove who was lying on the ground groaning were pox-ridden mucksnipes. So he had waded in and laid it on with a trowel, just like last night, didn’t he indeed, panting and kicking until they cried uncle and he was too tired to chase them.
It had been a madness born of frustration and hunger, although Solomon said it was the hand of God, which Dodger thought was pretty unlikely since you didn’t see God in those streets very often. Then he had helped the old man home, even if he was an ikey mo, and Solomon had brewed up some of his soup, thanking Dodger fulsomely the whole time. Since the old boy lived by himself and had a bit of space to spare in his tenement attic, it all worked out; Dodger ran the occasional errand for Solomon, scrounged wood for his fire and, when possible, pinched coal off the Thames barges. In exchange, Solomon gave Dodger his meals, or at least cooked whatever it was Dodger had acquired, coming up with dishes much better than Dodger had ever seen in his life.
He also got much better prices for the stuff Dodger came back with from the toshing; the drawback of this was that the old Jew would always, always ask him if what he was buying was stolen. Well, stuff from the sewers was definitely OK – everybody knew that. It was money down the drain, lost to humanity, on its way to the sea and out of human ken. Toshers, of course, didn’t count as humanity – everybody knew that too. But in those days Dodger was not above a bit of thievery, getting stuff you could say was extremely dodgy and totally not, as Solomon would say, ‘kosher’.
Every time the old man asked him if this stuff was just from the toshing, Dodger said yes, but he could tell by the look in Solomon’s eyes when the old man thought that he was not telling the truth. The worst of it was that Solomon’s eyes invariably got it right. He would take the stuff anyway, but things would be a little bit chilly in the attic room for a while.
So now Dodger generally nicked only stuff that could be burned, drunk or eaten, such as the stuff on market stalls and other low-hanging fruit. Things had warmed up after that, and besides, Solomon read the newspapers down at the synagogue, and occasionally there would be sad little pieces in the Lost and Found column from somebody who had lost their wedding ring or some other piece of jewellery. And it was jewellery that was more to be valued, well, because it was the wedding ring, wasn’t it, and not just a certain amount of gold. There were often the magic words ‘Reward to finder’, and with a certain amount of careful negotiation, Solomon pointed out, you could get rather more for it than you would get from a fence. Besides, you would never take it to a kosher jeweller, because they would set the police on you even though you’d merely ‘found’ it, not stolen it. Sometimes honesty was its own reward, said Solomon, but Dodger thought it helped if some money came with it.
Money apart, Dodger found he felt happier on those days when he had indeed been able to bring somebody back in touch with some treasured necklace or ring, or any other trinket which they held dear; it made him walk on air for a while, which was indeed a cut above what he was normally treading on in the sewers.
One day, after a kiss from a lady who had recently been a blushing bride and whose wedding ring had unfortunately come off her finger whilst she was getting into the carriage to go to her new home, he had said to Solomon, because some of the other toshers had been teasing him a lot, ‘Are you trying to save my soul?’ And Solomon, with a little grin that was never far from his face, said, ‘Mmm, well, I am exploring the possibility that you may have one.’
That little change in his habits, which helped glue together the relationship with Solomon, meant that he didn’t – unlike some of the other toshers – have to shiver in doorways of a night, or hunker down under a piece of tarpaulin, or pay for the dreadful stinking ha’penny rope down at the flophouse. All Solomon wanted from him was a bit of company in the evenings, and occasionally the old man tactfully required Dodger’s companionship when he was going to see one of his customers and therefore carrying mechanisms, jewellery and other dangerously expensive things. In the vicinity, news of Dodger’s mercurial personality had got about, and so he and Solomon could travel entirely unmolested.
As a job, Dodger thought Solomon’s was pretty good. The old boy made small things – usually things to replace things, precious and treasured things that had gone missing. Last week Dodger had seen him repair a very expensive musical box, which was full of gears and wires. The whole thing had been damaged when some workmen had dropped it when the owners were moving house, and he had watched the old man handle every single piece as if it was something special – cleaning, shaping, and gently bending, slowly, as if there was all the time in the world. Some ornamental ivory inlays had been broken on the rosewood cabinet and Solomon replaced them with little bits of ivory from his small store, polishing it up so neatly he said that the lady he had done it for had given him half a crown over and above his normal charge.
OK, sometimes some of Dodger’s chums called him shabbos goy, but he noticed that he ate better than any of them, and cheaper too, since among the market stalls Solomon could haggle even a Cockney until the man gave in – and Heaven help any stallholder who sold Solomon short weight, bad bread or rotting apples, let alone a boiled orange and all the other tricks of the trade, including the wax banana. When you took into account the good and healthful eating, the arrangement was not to be sneezed at, and Dodger never liked to catch a cold.
When Jacob and his sons had got through with the dance of the flying pants, shirts, socks, vests and shoes, they stood back and beamed at one another in the knowledge of a job well done, and then Jacob said, ‘Well now, I do not know. Upon my word, what magicians we are, ain’t we? What we have created here, my sons, is a gentleman, fit for any society if they don’t mind a slight smell of camphor. But it’s that or moths, everybody knows, even Her Majesty herself, and right now I reckon, my dears, that if she walked in this door she would say, “Good afternoon, young sir, don’t I know you?”’
‘It’s a bit tight in the crotch,’ said Dodger.
‘Then don’t think naughty thoughts until it stretches,’ said Jacob. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Seeing as it’s you I will throw in this excellent hat, just your size if you padded it out a bit so it ain’t covering your ears, and I reckon the style will soon be all the rage again.’ Jacob stood back, mightily pleased with the transformation he had achieved. He put his head on one side and said, ‘You know, young man, what you need now is a very good haircut and then you will have to poke the ladies off with a stick!’
‘Solomon helps me cut it when it gets too hot and I want things to cool off a bit,’ said Dodger, upon which Jacob gave the kind of explosive snort that only an offended Jewish tradesman could make, even more expressive than a Frenchman on a very bad day. Generally speaking, if it had to be written down, it would begin with something like ‘phooieu’ and end with a certain amount of spittle in the general vicinity.
Jacob wailed, ‘That’s not a haircut, my boy. You look like you’ve been sheared! As though you’ve just got out of the clink! If Queen Victoria saw you then, she’d probably call out the runners. Take my advice, next time go to a proper barber! Take the advice of your old friend Jacob.’
And so, in company with the dog Onan, who was still optimistically carrying his bone in his jaws, Dodger walked back into the world. Of course, shonky was shonky, however you looked at it; it might just do, but it wasn’t the full shilling. What around here was? Nevertheless, Dodger felt all the better for the new clobber, even with the associated crotch problem and a certain prickling under the arms, and it was certainly better than anything else he owned and hopefully worthy of the girl from the storm.
He walked back to the alley and climbed up the rickety stairs to the attic, where Solomon greeted him with, ‘Who are you, young man?’
On the table, spread out, were the contents of the Happy Families game. ‘Mmm . . . very interesting,’ said Solomon. ‘This is a remarkable and mmm somewhat deadly device you have presented to me. It is mmm deceptively simple, but dark clouds soon gather.’
‘What?’ said Dodger, looking at the brightly coloured cards laid out on the table. ‘It looks like something for kids – though nothing like the Happy Family man and his wagon, which is strange. It’s just a kids’ game, ain’t it?’
‘Alas, yes it is,’ said Solomon. ‘I shall expand on my little theory. Every player is dealt a hand from the pack of cards, and the object appears to be to put together one complete family, the happy family, simply by asking one of your opponents if they have a particular card. It would seem a cheerful game for children but, in fact, if they only did but know it, the parents are setting the child on the way to be a poker player or, worse, a politician.’
‘What?’
‘Allow me to elucidate,’ said Solomon, and after a glance at Dodger’s blank face, ‘I mean, explain, young man. It appears to go like this. In order to mmm get your happy family, you have to choose one family, and so you might, as it were, choose to collect all of the mmm Baker family. You might think that all you need do is simply wait until it is your turn again, and boldly ask somebody to give you the next card you were looking for. It might be Miss Bun the baker’s daughter. Why? Because mmm when the cards were dealt out at the start of the game you had already got Mister Bun the baker, and so his daughter would be a step in the right direction. But beware! Your opponents might mmm, if you keep simply asking for a Bun, in their turn start asking you for a member of the Bun family; they may not be collecting the Buns themselves, but possibly they intend to get together a whole set of the mmm Dose family, the head of which is Mister Dose the doctor. They are asking you for a Bun when they need a Dose, because they had noticed your interest in Buns, and despite their longing for a Dose would rather use their turn mmm to put you off track whilst at the same time depriving you of a precious Bun!’
‘Well, I would just lie and say I hadn’t got it,’ said Dodger.
‘Ah ha! As the game lumbers to its conclusion your ownership of the disputed Bun will come to light, mmm yes indeed! And it will be a very sad day for you. You have to tell the truth, because if you don’t tell the truth, you will never win the game. Thus this terrible battle wages, as you decide to forsake Buns now and see if your salvation might lie mmm in collecting the family of Mister Bung the brewer, despite the fact that your family is teetotal. You hope to put at least one of your enemies under a false impression of your real intentions, while all the time you must suspect that every single one of them, no matter how innocent mmm they appear to be, are trying by every strategy they can think of to foil your plans! And so the dreadful inquisition continues! Son learns to deceive father, sister learns to distrust father, and mother is trying to lose in order to keep the peace, and it is dawning on her that her children’s facial expressions of fake desire or optimism to put others off the track might mmm trick an opponent into thinking in the wrong direction.’
‘Well,’ said Dodger, ‘that’s like haggling in the marketplace. Everybody does it.’
‘And so the game comes to a conclusion, undoubtedly with tears before the end, not to mention shouting and the slamming of doors. In what way then does this make a family happy? Exactly what has been achieved?’ Solomon stopped talking, his face very pink and upset.
Dodger had to think for a moment before he said, ‘It’s only playing cards, you know; it’s not as if it’s important. I mean, it’s not real.’
This didn’t satisfy Solomon, who said, ‘I have never played it, but nevertheless a child playing with their parent would have to learn how to deceive them. And you say this is all a game?’
Dodger thought again. A game. Not a game of chance like the Crown and Anchor man, where you might even walk away with a pocket full of winnings. But a game to play as a family? Who had time for family games? Only babies, or children of the toffs. ‘It’s still just a game,’ he protested, and received one of Solomon’s stares, which if you were not careful would go right through your face and out the back of your head.
Solomon said, ‘What’s the difference when you are seven years old?’ The old man had gone red, and he waved the finger of God at Dodger. ‘Young man, the games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore and things we change make us what we become.’
It was biblical stuff, right enough. But when Dodger thought about it, what was the difference? The whole of life was a game. But if it was a game, then were you the player or were you the pawn? It seeped into his mind that maybe Dodger could be more than just Dodger, if he cared to put some effort into it. It was a call to arms; it said: Get off your arse!
The one thing you could say about this dirty old city, Dodger thought as he headed out of the attic, strutting along in his new suit with Onan at his heels, was that no matter how careful you were, somebody would see anything. The streets were so crowded that you were rubbing shoulders with people until you had no shoulders left; and the place to do a bit of rubbing now would be the Baron of Beef, or the Goat and Sixpence, or any of the less salubrious drinking establishments around the docks where you could get drunk for sixpence, dead drunk for a shilling, and possibly just dead for being so stupid as to step inside in the first place.
In those kind of places you found the toshers and the mudlarks hanging out with the girls, and that was really hanging out because half of them would had worn the arse out of their trousers by now. Those places were where you spent your time and your money, so that you could forget about the rats and the mud that stuck to everything, and the smells. Although after a while you got used to them, corpses that had been in the river for a while tended to have a fragrance of their very own, and you never forgot that smell of corruption, because it clung, heavy and solid, and you never wanted to smell it again, even though you knew you would.
Oddly enough, the smell of death was a smell with a strange life of its own, and it would find its way in anywhere and it was damn hard to get rid of – rather, in some respects, like the smell of Onan, who was faithfully walking just behind him, his passage indicated by people in the throng looking around to see wherever the dreadful smell was coming from and hoping it wasn’t from them.
But now the sun was shining, and some of the lads and lasses were drinking outside the Gunner’s Daughter, sitting on the old barrels, bundles of rope, hopeless piles of rotting wood and all the other debris of the riverside. Sometimes it seemed to Dodger that the city and the river were simply all the same creature except for the fact that some parts were a lot more soggy than others.
Right now, in this tangled, smelly but usually cheerful disarray, he recognized Bent Henry, Lucy Diver, One-Armed-Dave, Preacher, Mary-Go-Round, Messy Bessie and Mangle, who despite whatever else was on their minds all said what people everywhere said in those circumstances when one of their number turned up wearing clothes that might be considered to be a cut above their station. Things like: ‘Oh dear, what is this pretty gentleman then?’ and ‘Oh my, have you bought the street? Cor, don’t you smell nice!’ And, of course: ‘Can you lend us a shilling? I’ll pay you on St Never’s Day!’ And so on, and the only way that you can survive in these circumstances is to grin sheepishly and put up with it, knowing that at any moment you could stop the merriment; and stop it he did.
‘Grandad’s dead.’ He dropped it on them out of the sky.
‘Never!’ said Bent Henry. ‘I was toshing with him only the day before yesterday, just before the storm!’
‘And I saw him today,’ said Dodger sharply. ‘I saw him die, right there in front of me! He was thirty-three! Don’t nobody say he ain’t dead, ’cos he is, right? Down below Shoreditch around about the Maelstrom!’
Mary-Go-Round started to cry; she was a decent sort, with an air all the time of being from somewhere else and having only just arrived here. She sold violets to ladies during the season, and sold anything else she could get the rest of the time. She wasn’t all that bad at being a pickpocket, on account of looking very much like an angel what had been hit on the head with something, so she wasn’t suspected, but however you saw her, she had more teeth than brains, and she didn’t have many teeth. As for the others, they just appeared a bit more miserable than they had before; they didn’t look him in the eye, just stared down at the ground as if they wished that they weren’t there.
Dodger said, ‘He gave me his haul, such as it was.’ Feeling awkwardly as if this was not enough, he then added, ‘That’s why I came here, to buy you all a pie and porter to drink his health.’ This news appeared to raise the spirits of all concerned more than somewhat, especially when Dodger reached into his pocket and disembogued himself of sixpence which magically became tankards all round of a liquid so thick that it was food.
While these were being emptied with variations on the theme of ‘glug’, Dodger noticed that Mary-Go-Round was still snivelling, and being a kind sort of cove, he said softly, ‘If it’s any help, Mary, he was smiling when he went; he said he’d seen the Lady.’
This information apparently didn’t satisfy, and in between sobs Mary said, ‘Double Henry stopped off just now for some grub and some brandy, seeing as how he’d just had to pull another girl out of the river.’
Dodger sighed. Double Henry was a waterman, constantly paddling his way up and down the Thames looking for anyone who wanted transport. The rest of Mary’s news was unfortunately quite familiar. The gang of people who were more or less his own age that Dodger met most often were a tough bunch, and so they survived; but the city and its river were harsh indeed on the ones who didn’t make the grade.
‘He reckoned she’d jumped off the bridge in Putney,’ said Mary. ‘Probably up the duff.’
Crestfallen, Dodger sighed again. They usually were with child, he thought: the girls from faraway places with strange-sounding names like Berkhamsted and Uxbridge, who had come to London hoping it would be better than a life among the hay seeds. But the moment they arrived, the city in all its various ways ate them and spat them out, almost always into the Thames.
That was no way to go, since you could only call what was in the river ‘water’ because it was too runny to be called dirt. When the corpses came to the surface, the poor old watermen and lightermen had to gaff them and row them down to the coroner of one of the boroughs. There was a bounty for turning over these sad remnants to the coroner’s office, and Double Henry had told him once that sometimes it was worthwhile to take a corpse quite a long way to get to the borough that was paying the most, though it was generally the coroner at Four Farthings. The coroner would post notice of the dead person and sometimes, Dodger had heard, the notice got into the newspapers. Maybe the girls’ bodies would end up in Crossbones Graveyard, or a paupers’ burying ground somewhere else, and sometimes, of course, as everybody knew, they could end up in the teaching hospitals and under the scalpels of the medical students.
Mary was still snivelling, and in a conversation made up largely of blobs of snot said, ‘It’s so sad. They all have long blonde hair. All the country girls have long blonde hair and, well, they are also, you know, innocent.’
Messy Bessie intervened with, ‘I was innocent once. But it didn’t do me any good. Then I found out what I was doing wrong.’ She added, ‘But I was born on the streets here, knew what to expect. Them poor little innocents never stand a chance when the first kind gentleman plies them with liquor.’
Mary-Go-Round sniffed again and said, ‘Gent tried to ply me with liquor once, but he ran out of money and I took most of what he had left when he fell asleep. Finest watch and chain I ever pinched. Still,’ she continued, ‘them poor girls wasn’t born round here like the likes of us, so they don’t know nothing.’
Her words reminded Dodger of Charlie. Then his thoughts turned to Sol and what he had voiced earlier. He said, as much to the open air as anything else, ‘I should give up on the toshing . . .’ His voice trailed off. Now he was talking to himself more than to anyone else. What could I do? he thought. After all, everybody has to work, everybody needs to eat, everybody has to live.
Oh, that smile on the face of Grandad; what had he seen in that last smile? He had seen the Lady. Toshers always knew somebody who had seen the Lady; nobody had ever seen her themselves, but nevertheless any tosher could tell you what she looked like. She was quite tall, had a dress that was all shiny, like silk; she had beautiful blue eyes and there was always a sort of fine mist around her, and if you looked down at her feet you would see the rats all sitting on her shoes. They said that if you ever saw her feet, they would be rat claws. But Dodger knew that he would never dare to look, because supposing they were; or even worse, supposing they weren’t!
All those rats, watching you and then watching her. Just maybe – he never knew – it would take only one word from her, and if you had been a bad tosher she might set the rats on you. And if you were a very good tosher, she would smile on you and give you a great big kiss (some said a great deal more than just a kiss). And from that day on you would always be lucky on the tosh.
He wondered again about those poor wretched girls who’d jumped. Many of them, of course, were with child, and then, because the barometer of Dodger’s nature almost always gravitated to ‘set fair’, he let go that chain of thought. Generally speaking he had always tried to keep a distance between himself and grief; and besides, he had pressing business to attend to.
But not so pressing as to prevent him from raising his mug and shouting, ‘Here’s to Grandad, wherever the hell he is now.’ This was echoed by all concerned – quite possibly, knowing them, in the hope of another round of drinks. But they were disappointed because Dodger continued, ‘Will you lot listen to me? On the night of the big storm, somebody was trying to kill a girl – one of them young innocents you was just talking about, I reckon – only she ran away, and I sort of found her, and now she is being looked after.’ He hesitated, faced with a wall of silence, and then carried on again, losing hope, ‘She had golden hair . . . and they beat her up, and I want to find out why. I want to kick seven types of shite out of the people who did it, and I want you to help me.’
At this point Dodger was treated to a wonderful bit of street theatre, which with barely a word being spoken, went in three acts, the first being: ‘I don’t know nuffin’,’ and the next, ‘I never saw nuffin’,’ and finally that old favourite, ‘I never done nuffin’,’ followed at no extra cost by an encore, which was that tried and tested old chestnut, ‘I wasn’t there.’
Dodger had expected something like this, even from his occasional chums. It wasn’t personal, because nobody likes questions, especially when perhaps one day questions would be asked about you. But this was important to him, and so he snapped his fingers, which was the cue for Onan to growl – a sound which you could have expected might come not from a medium-sized dog like Onan but from something dreadful arising from the depths of the sea, something with an appetite. It had a nasty rumble to it, and it simply did not stop. Now Dodger said, in a voice that was as flat as the rumble was bumpy, ‘Listen to me, will you? This is Dodger – me, right, your friend Dodger. She was a girl with golden hair and a face that was black and blue!’
Dodger saw something like panic in their eyes, as if they thought that he had gone mad. But then Messy Bessie’s big round features seemed to shift as she struggled with the concept of something unusual, such as a thought.
She never had many of them; to see them at all you probably would need a microscope, such as the one he saw once on one of the travelling shows. There were always travelling shows, and they were ever popular; and in this one they had this apparatus you could stare into. You looked down into a glass of water, and when your eye got accustomed you started to see all the tiny little wriggly things in the water, bobbing up and down, spinning and dancing little jigs and having such fun that the man who ran the travelling show said it showed how good the Thames water was if so many tiny little creatures could survive in it.
To Dodger, Bessie’s mind seemed to be like that – mostly empty, but every now and again something wriggling. He said, encouragingly, ‘Go on, Bessie.’
She glanced at the others, who tried not to look at her. He understood, in a way. It didn’t do to be known as somebody who told you the things they saw, in case those things included something they did not want to get about, and there were, around and about, people much worse than mudlarks and toshers – people who were handy with a shiv or a cut-throat razor and had not a glimmer of mercy in their eyes.
But now, in the eyes of Messy Bessie, there was an unusual determination. She didn’t have golden hair – not much in the way of hair at all, in fact; and such as it was, the strands that remained were greasy and tended to roll themselves into strange little kiss curls. She fiddled with a ‘curl’, then looked defiantly at the others and said, ‘I was doing a bit of mumping in the Mall, day before the storm, and a nobby coach went past with its door open, you see, and this girl jumped out and had it away down the street as if she was on fire, right? And two coves dropped off the thing, right, and legged it after her, spit arse, pushing people out of the way like they was not important.’ Messy Bessie stopped, shrugged, indicating that that was that. Her associates were idly looking around, but specifically not focusing on her, as if to make it quite clear that they had nothing to do with this strange and dangerously talkative woman.
But Dodger said, ‘What sort of coach?’
He kept his focus on Bessie, because he just knew that if he didn’t she would suddenly get very forgetful, and what he got, after some churning of recollection on Bessie’s part, was: ‘Pricey, nobby, two horses.’ Messy Bessie shut her mouth firmly, an indication that she didn’t intend to open it again unless there was the prospect of another drink. It was quite easy for Dodger to read her mind; after all, there was such a lot of space in there. He jingled the remaining coins in his pocket – the international language – and another light went on in Bessie’s big round sad face. ‘Funny thing about that coach; when it went off there was a, like, squeal from one of the wheels, nearly as bad as a pig being killed. I heard it all down the road.’
Dodger thanked her, sliding over a few coppers, and nodded at the rest of them, who looked as if a murder had just taken place there and then.
Then, suddenly, Messy Bessie, the coins in her hand, said, ‘Just remembered something else. She was yelling, but I don’t know what, on account of it being in some kind of lingo. The coachman too – he weren’t no Englisher neither.’ She gave Dodger a sharp and meaningful look, and he handed over an extra couple of farthings, wondering as he did so if he could reclaim some of this necessary expenditure from Mister Charlie. He would have to keep a tally though, because Charlie was definitely not the kind of man you could run rings around.
As he walked away, Dodger wondered whether he should go and see the man; after all, he had important information now, didn’t he? Information that had cost him money to acquire – a considerable amount of money, and possibly worth a bit more too if he put a shine on it. Although he knew it really wouldn’t be sensible to get ambitious about the amounts paid to start with . . .
He fumbled in his pocket, a receptacle that contained anything that Dodger could punch into it. There it was: the oblong piece of card. He carefully put all the letters together, and the numbers too; for after all, everybody knew where Fleet Street was. It was where all the newspapers were made, but to Dodger it was a halfway decent toshing area with one or two useful other tunnels nearby. The Fleet river itself was part of the sewer and it was amazing what ended up in there . . . He recalled with pleasure that once when he was exploring there he had found a bracelet with two sapphires in it, and on the same day also a whole sovereign, which made it a lucky place, given that a decent haul from a day’s toshing could often be as low as a handful of farthings.
So he set off, Onan still trotting obediently behind him. He walked on, lost in thought. Of course, Messy Bessie wasn’t the sort to come up with something so helpful as a crest such as might have been seen on a nobleman’s coach, and it dawned on Dodger that in any case, if the coach was doing such dirty deeds as taking young ladies to places they shouldn’t be going to, someone might not want to put their crest on it. But a squeaky wheel would go on speaking until somebody did something about it. He didn’t have much time and that was all he had to go on, in a city with hundreds of coaches and other miscellaneous conveyances.
It is, he thought, probably going to be a little bit difficult, but if I have anything to do with it, the squeaky wheel will get the grease, the grease being Dodger. And possibly, he entertained in the privacy of his own head, the men involved might form a close acquaintance with the comfort of Dodger’s fist . . .