Dodger

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,
some
body would see
any
thing. 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