Dodger

beer itself. Occasionally, the brewery men and the landlords would have another beer, so great was their determination to make sure that the beer was in the best possible condition. In fact, Dodger could smell it, even above the scent of the horses, and even with a certain essence of horse to contend with, it still made him thirsty.
    He had always loved the smell you got in the sewers by the breweries. A geezer called Blinky, who was a rat-catcher by profession, had once told him that the rats in the sewers underneath the breweries were always the biggest and fattest anywhere, adding that the rat-catching fancy would pay extra for brewery rats because they had a lot of fight in them.
    Whatever he did now, though, Dodger knew he wasn’t going to catch up with that damned coach. The men above him were being very assiduous in deciding on the quality of the beer, and while he could, of course, run along to the next grating, his quarry by then would have got lost in the street noise of London, as sure as Heaven. All he could do was seethe at an opportunity lost.
    He trudged on anyway, mostly because the large shire horses also did other things than piss – that’s why some of the street urchins used to follow them with a bucket. You often heard them shouting their wares among the nobbier houses, where people had gardens, with the refrain ‘One penny a bucket, missus, well stamped down!’
    The only thing to do now was hurry along to the next drain cover and get out there. And so, after a day of dodging, he traipsed through the maze of streets, tired, hungry and well aware that there was indeed
not one mark
on the shonky suit; it was now, in fact,
made up
of marks. Jacob and his sons were pretty good at cleaning things up, but they would have their work cut out on this. No hope for it, though; he would have to take his lumps.
    Gloomily he walked on, paying attention all the time for heads that dropped out of sight as soon as they knew that they had been made, or people who very swiftly disappeared into alleyways. This was what a geezer did; a geezer knew that most of the hurrying, scurrying crowd would be simply minding their own business, although with the option of minding somebody else’s business as well if the opportunity arose. What Dodger was looking out for was the interrogating eye, the eye of purpose, the watchful eye, the eye that read the street.
    And right now the street seemed clear, in so far as any street could, and at least Simplicity was safe for tonight, he consoled himself . Although not safe if she went out. It was dreadful the things that could happen on the street, in full view.
    Not so long ago, he remembered he had dressed up as a little flower girl; he was young enough to pull it off with his auburn hair sticking out fetchingly from a scarf, and it wasn’t even his hair because he had borrowed it from Mary-Go-Round, who had pretty good blonde hair. Mary’s hair grew like a mushroom and looked like it too. But she made good money every few months or so by selling it to the wig-makers.
    The reason he had been doing this favour was that the flower girls, some of whom were as young as four years old, had been having a certain amount of . . . harassment from a particular kind of gentleman. The girls, who mostly sold violets and daffodils in season, were a decent bunch, and Dodger quite liked them and cared for them. Of course, they had to make a living as they grew older, just like everyone else, and it might be said that in certain circumstances a little bit of hanky-panky might just be acceptable to the older ones, provided that they were in control of the hanky, not to mention the panky. However, they were furiously protective of their younger sisters, at which point Dodger had been persuaded to don his first dress.
    And so when the sharp-suited gentlemen who liked to go down among the poor flower girls to see if there were any new blossoms they could pluck came to ply them with strong liquor until they could have their wicked way with them, they would actually be subtly directed to the shrinking and simpering violet who was, in fact, Dodger.
    Actually, he had to admit that he had been incredibly good at it, because to be a geezer was to be an actor and so Dodger was better at being a shrinking violet than any of the other flower girls who had, how could you put it, better qualifications. He had already sold quite a lot of his violets because his voice hadn’t broken then and he could