Dodger

use – that automatically made Dodger lick his lips. Dodger never knew how Solomon managed it; the old man could make a delicious dinner out of half a brick and a lump of wood. When he’d asked him one day, Solomon had replied, ‘Mmm, I suppose it was all that wandering in the wilderness; it makes you do the best you can with what you’ve got.’
    Dodger lay awake on his mattress for most of the night, and lying awake was very easy to do; often there were fights back down in the yards when the blokes came home, and then the screaming babies and terrible rows – the whole cacophony that was the lullaby of Seven Dials. Happy families, he thought. Are there any? And over and above the streets there were the bells, clanging out all over the city.
    Dodger stared at the ceiling, thinking about the coach. Messy Bessie probably wasn’t going to be any more help, and so it seemed to Dodger that the only way to find out more was to continue to ask questions, in the hope of coming to the attention of the aforesaid people who didn’t like questions being asked, and especially didn’t like questions being answered. He bet they would know a thing or two.
    Where to start, where to start? A squeaky wheel, and a nobby coach. Did it have a crest on it? Maybe one with eagles? Perhaps the girl would remember more if he saw her again . . .?
    Well, he thought, Mister Mayhew wants to see me and so does his wife, and perhaps a smart young man could smarten himself up and try to put some kind of shine on his boots and wash his face before going to see them, in the hope that a good lad might at least come out of the meeting with something more than a cup of tea, perhaps something to eat. And who knows; possibly, if he was very good and very respectful, he would be allowed to see the girl with the wonderful golden hair again.
    Because you cannot switch cunning off when you want to, Dodger’s own cunning treacherously prompted him: maybe they will give you some money as well, for being a good boy. Because he thought he knew the kind of people that Mister and Mrs Mayhew were; amazingly, every now and again you came across nobby folks who actually cared about the street people and were slightly guilty about them. If you were poor, and perhaps took the trouble to scrub up as best you could, and had no shame at all and could also spin a hard luck story as well as Dodger could – though, frankly, he didn’t really
need
to make one up, since his life, as he had very nearly truthfully described to Charlie, had included big dollops of hard luck anyway – why, then they would practically kiss you, because it made them feel better.
    Lying there in the darkness and thinking about the girl, Dodger felt somewhat ashamed to be thinking only of what he could make out of it, for surely saving the girl was in itself a kind of reward, but he was only a little bit ashamed, because you had to live, didn’t you?
    Uncomfortable, he turned over and thought about Charlie, who seemed to think that Dodger was some kind of a pirate king, and when you thought about it, Charlie was playing a little game of his own. Every lad wants to be thought of as a wide boy, a geezer, right? Dodger thought. ’Cos it makes you feel big. For Charlie, words were a kind of complicated game and it might not be a game Dodger knew well, but it was still a game – and he, Dodger, was pretty good at the game of surviving.
    Staring up at nothing, he thought about Grandad, dying with a smile on his face in the sewers and in all that the sewers contained. It would be a long time before he ever went into the Maelstrom again. Rats were small, but there were a lot of them, and more and more when the news got around. He would leave a week or two at least before he would return to the place where the old man had died. Died, he reminded himself, where he wanted to be.
    Then there was Stumpy, who’d had two legs until a cannonball hit him when he was fighting somewhere in Spain.
    And here he was, and suddenly now Charlie’s words were clinging to him, changing his world – a world where one moment you are happily on the tosh, then quick as a wink coppers might call you a hero and you are wandering around in nobby houses. Not the person you had been when you woke up. It was like some great big spring was tugging at him – and maybe, perhaps sooner rather than later, a boy has to decide what kind of man he is going to be. Is he going to be a player, or a playing piece . . .?
    In