Dodger (13 page)

So he led the kids to the stall run by Marie Jo, who dispensed nourishing soup to all and sundry who could put down a few farthings – perhaps even less if she was in a generous mood.

Marie Jo was one of the good ones, and there weren’t enough of them. Among the tales that people told about her was that she had once been a famous actress over in Froggy parts, and indeed there was always, even in these days, something fey about her, something mercurial. According to rumours, she was once married to a soldier who got shot in some war or other, but fortunately not before he had whispered to her the whereabouts of all the loot he had picked up in his many campaigns.

She, being a decent sort, despite the fact of being married to a Froggy all them years, had set up this stall, which was one you could trust: trust for no rats in the soup, trust for no things worse than rats, trust her not to sell soup that had bits of cats and dogs in it. Marie Jo’s soup was full of lentils and other odds and ends; slightly scruffy perhaps, but taken all together it did you good and kept you warm. All right, there may occasionally have been a bit of horse, that being the Froggy way, but it just meant you had a slightly more nourishing soup. It had been said that even some of the grand eating places these days would give Marie Jo leftovers, knowing that they would be going on her stall. Apparently, people said, her French wiles twisted the nobby chefs around her little finger, but ‘Well done, her,’ everyone said, because it all went in the great big pot that she stirred all night, pausing only to dip the ladle in for the next customer; and what you paid was what she reckoned you ought to pay, and because people didn’t like to see her shake the ladle at them for being greedy, nobody haggled.

And so, when Dodger turned up with the two kids in tow, she looked him up and down and said, ‘Well now, aren’t we in the money, Dodger, and who did you steal that from?’ But she was laughing, perhaps because both of them could surely remember the time – years ago before her hair was so white – when Dodger himself was very small and had hung around near her stand with one hand out, looking very sad and very hopeful, just like the pair he was delivering.

He said, ‘Nothing for me, Marie Jo, but feed these two up today and tomorrow to the length of sixpence please?’

The expression on her face was strange. Like the soup she sold it was full of everything, but mostly it was full of surprise. But this
was
the street, and she said, ‘Let me see your sixpence, young Dodger.’ He plonked it on the stall, where she looked at it, looked at him, looked at the kids who were very nearly drooling with anticipation, then looked back at Dodger, who was red with embarrassment, and she said quietly, ‘Why, oh why, well now, here’s the thing and no mistake, what am I to do?’ Then her face broke out into wrinkly smiles as she said, ‘For you, Dodger, I will feed the little buggers today and tomorrow, maybe the next day too, but oh my word what has happened? Glory be! The world has gone upside down while I wasn’t looking! Don’t tell me that you have been going to church – I’m sure the confessional would not be big enough to hold everything you’ve got to say! And lo, what is this? My little Dodger has grown up to be an angel.’

Marie Jo pronounced his name ‘Dodgeurr’, which sent little silver messages passing up and down his spine every time he heard it. Marie Jo knew everybody, and all about everybody, and now she looked at Dodger with a dangerous smile, but you always had to play her game, so he smiled back and said, ‘Now don’t you go saying those things about me, Marie Jo! I don’t want nobody to whiten my name! But well, I was a kid once, you know what I mean? Mind, if you keep tally of what you feed them, I’ll see to it you get the cash later, trust me.’

Marie Jo blew him a little kiss with the smell of peppermint in it, lowered her voice, leaned forward and said, ‘I’m hearing all kinds of things concerning you, my lad. Careful how you tread! One of them was the little fracas you had with Stumpy yesterday. He’s boasting about it, you know.’ She lowered her voice still further. ‘Then there was a gentleman. And I know a gentleman when I see one. He was asking about someone called Dodger, and
I
don’t think it was because he wanted to give you a present. He was an expensive kind of gentleman.’

‘He wasn’t called Dickens, was he?’ said Dodger.

‘No, I know
him
– Mister Charlie, the reporter man, knows the peelers. One of you insufferable English, though. If I had to guess, my friend, this gentleman was more like a lawyer.’ Then, as if nothing had happened, she turned to the next customer without a further glance.

Dodger wandered on, meeting somebody he knew on every street corner, with a bit of banter here and a bit of conversation there, and every now and then asking a little question – not very important really, just as a sort of afterthought, concerning a girl with golden hair escaping from a carriage into the storm.

Not that
he
was interested, of course; it was just something he had heard, in a round about way, as it were – not for any special reason, of course. It was just good old Dodger, and everybody knew Dodger, wanting to know about the coach and the girl with the golden hair. He would have to be careful how he walked, but so what? He always was. And right now he was at the bottom of the rickety staircase that led up to the tenement attic.

Home, where Solomon was, as usual, at work. He always was; he was never
hard
at work – he was always soft at work, almost always on tiny things that needed tiny tools and considerable amounts of patience, and a gentle hand as well as, sometimes, a large magnifying glass. Onan was curled up under his chair, as only Onan could curl.

The old man took his time relocking the door, then said, ‘Mmm, a busy day again, my friend, I hope it has proved fruitful?’ Dodger showed him the largesse from the kitchens of the Mayhews, and Solomon said, ‘Mmm, very nice, really very nice
and
a fine piece of pork, I see; possibly a casserole later, I think. Well done.’

Some years ago, after he had brought home a piece of pork that had remarkably tumbled out of a kitchen window and right into the innocent hands of Dodger, who had merely been passing by, Dodger had said to Solomon, ‘I thought you Jews were not allowed to eat pork, right?’

If Onan was the king of curling up, Solomon was a prince of the shrug. ‘Strictly speaking,’ he had answered, ‘that may be so mmm, but another set of rules applies. Firstly, this is a gift from God and one should never refuse a gift given freely, and secondly, this pork appears to be quite good, better than usual, and I am an old man and I am mmm very hungry. Sometimes I think that the rules made centuries ago for the purpose of getting my excitable and bickering forebears across the desert cannot easily be said to apply in this town with its rains, smogs and fogs. Besides, I am an elderly man and I am quite hungry, and I have mentioned this twice, because I think it is very relevant. I think in the circumstances that God will understand, or He is not the God I know. That is one of the mmm good things about being Jewish. After my wife was killed in that pogrom in Russia I came to England with only my tools, and when I saw the white cliffs of Dover, alone without my wife, I said, “God, today I don’t believe in you any more.”’

‘What did God say?’ Dodger had asked.

Solomon had sighed theatrically, as if he had been put upon by the question, and then smiled and said, ‘Mmm, God said to me, “I understand, Solomon, let me know when you change your mind,” and I was really pleased with that, because I’d had my say and the world was better, and now I sit in a place that is rather dirty, but
I
am free. And I am free to eat pork, if God so wills it that pork comes my way.’

Now Solomon turned back to his work. ‘I am making sprockets, my boy, for this watch. It is engrossing work requiring considerable coordination of hand and eye, but also in its way the work is very soothing, and that is why I look forward to making a sprocket or two. It means I’m helping time know what it is, just as time knows what I will become.’

There was silence after that, apart from the reassuring noises of Solomon’s tools, and that was just as well because Dodger didn’t know what to say, but he wondered whether all that was because Solomon was Jewish or because Solomon was quite old, or both, and so he said, ‘I want to do a bit of thinking, if that’s all right with you? I’ll get changed, obviously.’

This was because Dodger was certain he did his best thinking on the tosh. It had rained a bit last night, but not too much, and now he wanted some time with nobody else in it.

Solomon waved him away. ‘Take your time, boy. And take Onan too, if you would be so kind . . .’

A little while later, a little way away, the lid rose on a grating and Dodger dropped comfortably into his world. It wasn’t too bad, because of the rain, and because it was still daylight there were echoes, oh yes, the echoes. It was amazing what the drains picked up, and voices could echo along for quite a way. Every sound left its dying ghost, bouncing who knew how far?

Then, of course, there were the noises from the street; sometimes you could follow a conversation if it was near a drain, people talking away totally oblivious to the tosher hiding below.
Once
, he had heard a lady get out of a carriage, stumble and drop her purse, which opened. Some of the money, as the luck of the tosher would have it, rolled into the nearest drain. Young Dodger had heard her cries, and the curses to the footman who she said hadn’t been holding the door properly, and he followed the sound already down in the sewer to where, falling like manna from heaven, one half sovereign, two half crowns, a sixpence, four pennies and a farthing dropped almost into his hands.

At the time he had been quite indignant about the farthing; what was a grand lady with a coachman doing with one farthing in her purse?! Farthings were for poor people, and so were half farthings!

You didn’t often get days as good as that, but it was night time when the sewers became strangely alive. Toshers liked nights with a bit of moonlight. If they went down there then, they sometimes carried a dark lantern – one of the ones with the little door so you could shut off the light if you didn’t want to be seen. But those came expensive and were cumbersome, and the tosher sometimes had to move fast.

It wasn’t only good honest toshers down there in the dark, though, oh no and dearie! There were rats too, of course – it was their natural home, and they didn’t particularly want to meet you and you didn’t want to meet them – but after the rats came the rat-catchers, trapping rats for the dog fights.

And then you got down to the really dreadful things . . .

There were still plenty of places in the city where the sewers were open and above ground, and where some of them were pretending to be rivers; this meant that anything that could float or anything that could roll could be dropped or trapped in them in the dead of night. A sensible tosher stayed away from those areas,
but
there were other people who used the privacy of the sewers for purposes of their own – they were the kind of people who normally wouldn’t go out of their way to do a horrible thing to a tosher, but on the other hand they were the kind of people who might just do so if the mood took them, just for a laugh.

They liked a laugh . . .

Dodger’s thoughts shot back to what Marie Jo had told him. Someone who looked like a lawyer was asking after somebody called Dodger. And Marie Jo was a very shrewd lady; otherwise she wouldn’t have survived.

These thoughts spread out in his brain like the incoming tide (always a nuisance to toshers near the Thames). And an answer sprang back at him.

This was his territory; he knew every sewer in the length and breadth of the city, every little hidey hole that could barely be seen lest you knew where to look, the places that were half blocked off and nobody knew they were there. Honestly, he could navigate by the smells themselves and he knew exactly where he was right now. If someone is looking for me, he thought, if I’m going to have to fight someone, I must see to it that it’s on my patch. I’m Dodger; I can dodge down here.

Right now, the air in the tunnel was more or less sweet – well, in comparison to the things that weren’t sweet at all, with the possible exception of Onan who had, of course, brought his own particular odours with him. Dodger gave the two-tone whistle that every tosher knew, and listened for a reply; there was none, and so, at least for now, he had this area all to himself, as he so often did.

Almost without thinking he picked up a tie pin and a farthing within a couple of yards; luck was with him, and he wondered if
it
was because he had just done a good deed. As he thought this, Onan began to snuffle and whine and worry at something in a broken-down pile of old bricks. Dodger suddenly heard a
clink
as Onan’s nose knocked something loose. Now the dog had something golden in his jaws – a gold ring with a big stone in it! Worth at least a sovereign!

Good old Onan! And thanks to the Lady. But things happened, or didn’t happen, and that’s all there was to it, Dodger knew. You could drive yourself mad thinking otherwise.

In the gloom, listening to the sounds of the world above, hunting through the tunnels, Dodger was in his element and Dodger was happy.

Elsewhere, others were not . . .

There were many candles in this room, but none of them illuminated the face of the man seated by the tapestry. This considerably disconcerted the man known to his special clients as Sharp Bob – most certainly not the name he used when dealing with more ordinary legal affairs. He always liked to see whoever it was who was employing him; on the other hand, he also liked gold sovereigns, and they didn’t worry him at all – he was always pleased to see them. He could see two of them now; a lamp in the darkness before him showed them shining on a low table. He hadn’t picked them up yet, because he thought, If I pick them up before that incredibly toffish voice tells me to, for a certainty I might just have my knuckles rapped, or worse.