Dodger

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,