Dodger

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