Dodger

tosh, at least if you were a Dodger? The world, which meant London, was built for him, just for him; it worked in his favour as if the Lady had meant it. Gold jewels and currency were heavy and got trapped easily, while dead cats, rats and richards tended to float, which was a good thing because you never like to tread in a dickie – thank goodness they floated. But, Dodger mused, as he almost absentmindedly but very methodically felt his way along the sewer, taking care to cover his favourite traps while at the same time keeping an eye out for any new ones, whatever would a tosher do if he got hold of such a thing as a real tosheroon? He knew them, the tosher lads, and when they had a good day, what did they do with their loot? What did they do with all the hard-earned money they had splashed through the muck for? They drank it, and the bigger the amount the more they drank. Maybe if they were sensible ones they’d put a bit aside for a bed for the night and a meal; in the morning they would be poor again.
    There was a
clink
under his fingers! That was the sound of two sixpences together in the spot he called ‘Old Faithful’ – a good start.
    Dodger knew that he had the edge on the other toshers; that was why he had broken every tosher rule and gone into a sewer during the storm, and it would have worked too if it hadn’t been for that fight and what had followed. Because if you had your eye to business, you could see places in the sewers where a tosher could hang on in a bubble of air while all around him the world raged. He’d found a good one, and while it was damned chilly, he would have been the first one down in this vicinity to reap the harvest of the night. Right now, he had to hurry because other toshers would be coming up the sewers towards him, and suddenly there was a glint in the gloom as the sun caught something. It went away instantly, but he had marked it in his mind and so he worked his way carefully to where his head told him the glint had been, and found a pile of muck on a little sandbank where the outflow of a smaller sewer flowed into this one; it was still dribbling.
    There it was – a dead rat, and in its jaws what looked like a gold tooth but turned out to be, as it happened, a half sovereign gripped tightly in the teeth of Mister Rat. You never, if you could help it, touched a rat, which was why Dodger carried a little crowbar with him down there. Using it together with his knife, he levered the nasty little jaws open and flicked the half sovereign out. Balancing the coin on the blade of his knife, he held it up to the trickle coming down the wall, giving it something of what you might call a wash.
    May every day be as good as this! Who would be a working man on such a day? A skilled chimney sweep would have to work for a week to get the money he had picked up today. Oh, to be a tosher on a day like this!
    Then he heard the groan . . .
    Dodger edged his way round the rat and into the smaller sewer, which was half choked with debris – much of it pieces of wood, some of them sharp as knives – and all the other detritus that had last night been dislodged. But to Dodger’s astonished gaze it appeared that most of the debris was a man, and that man did not look well; there was nothing very much where one eye should have been, but the other one was opening now and it looked Dodger in the face. It stank, the face Dodger looked into, and he shuddered, because he knew it.
    He said, ‘That’s you, Grandad, isn’t it?’
    The oldest tosher in London looked as if he had been tortured, and Dodger almost threw up when he saw the rest of him. He must have been working by himself, just like Dodger, and got caught up when the flood came down, and there would have been everything in it, anything that someone had thrown away or lost or wanted to hide and dispose of. A lot of it had apparently smashed into Grandad, who was nevertheless trying to sit upright, covered in bruises, bleeding and coloured with all sorts of nastiness, such as only a flooded sewer could provide.
    Grandad spat mud – at least, Dodger hoped it was only mud – and said weakly, ‘Oh, it’s you, Dodger. Good to see you in such fine fettle, in a manner of speaking; you’re a good lad, I always said so, smarter than I ever was, see. So what I want you to do now, right now, is to get a pint of the worst brandy you can find, and bring it back down here and pour it down this thing what used to be my throat,