Dodger (6 page)

So now Dodger generally nicked only stuff that could be
burned
, drunk or eaten, such as the stuff on market stalls and other low-hanging fruit. Things had warmed up after that, and besides, Solomon read the newspapers down at the synagogue, and occasionally there would be sad little pieces in the Lost and Found column from somebody who had lost their wedding ring or some other piece of jewellery. And it was jewellery that was more to be valued, well, because it
was
the wedding ring, wasn’t it, and not just a certain amount of gold. There were often the magic words ‘Reward to finder’, and with a certain amount of careful negotiation, Solomon pointed out, you could get rather more for it than you would get from a fence. Besides, you would never take it to a kosher jeweller, because they would set the police on you even though you’d merely ‘found’ it, not stolen it. Sometimes honesty was its own reward, said Solomon, but Dodger thought it helped if some money came with it.

Money apart, Dodger found he felt happier on those days when he had indeed been able to bring somebody back in touch with some treasured necklace or ring, or any other trinket which they held dear; it made him walk on air for a while, which was indeed a cut above what he was normally treading on in the sewers.

One day, after a kiss from a lady who had recently been a blushing bride and whose wedding ring had unfortunately come off her finger whilst she was getting into the carriage to go to her new home, he had said to Solomon, because some of the other toshers had been teasing him a lot, ‘Are you trying to save my soul?’ And Solomon, with a little grin that was never far from his face, said, ‘Mmm, well, I am exploring the possibility that you may have one.’

That little change in his habits, which helped glue together the relationship with Solomon, meant that he didn’t – unlike some of
the
other toshers – have to shiver in doorways of a night, or hunker down under a piece of tarpaulin, or pay for the dreadful stinking ha’penny rope down at the flophouse. All Solomon wanted from him was a bit of company in the evenings, and occasionally the old man tactfully required Dodger’s companionship when he was going to see one of his customers and therefore carrying mechanisms, jewellery and other dangerously expensive things. In the vicinity, news of Dodger’s mercurial personality had got about, and so he and Solomon could travel entirely unmolested.

As a job, Dodger thought Solomon’s was pretty good. The old boy made small things – usually things to replace things, precious and treasured things that had gone missing. Last week Dodger had seen him repair a very expensive musical box, which was full of gears and wires. The whole thing had been damaged when some workmen had dropped it when the owners were moving house, and he had watched the old man handle every single piece as if it was something special – cleaning, shaping, and gently bending, slowly, as if there was all the time in the world. Some ornamental ivory inlays had been broken on the rosewood cabinet and Solomon replaced them with little bits of ivory from his small store, polishing it up so neatly he said that the lady he had done it for had given him half a crown over and above his normal charge.

OK, sometimes some of Dodger’s chums called him
shabbos goy
, but he noticed that he ate better than any of them, and cheaper too, since among the market stalls Solomon could haggle even a Cockney until the man gave in – and Heaven help any stallholder who sold Solomon short weight, bad bread or rotting apples, let alone a boiled orange and all the other tricks of the
trade
, including the wax banana. When you took into account the good and healthful eating, the arrangement was not to be sneezed at, and Dodger never liked to catch a cold.

When Jacob and his sons had got through with the dance of the flying pants, shirts, socks, vests and shoes, they stood back and beamed at one another in the knowledge of a job well done, and then Jacob said, ‘Well now, I do not know. Upon my word, what magicians we are, ain’t we? What we have created here, my sons, is a gentleman, fit for any society if they don’t mind a slight smell of camphor. But it’s that or moths, everybody knows, even Her Majesty herself, and right now I reckon, my dears, that if she walked in this door she would say, “Good afternoon, young sir, don’t I know you?”’

‘It’s a bit tight in the crotch,’ said Dodger.

‘Then don’t think naughty thoughts until it stretches,’ said Jacob. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Seeing as it’s you I will throw in this excellent hat, just your size if you padded it out a bit so it ain’t covering your ears, and I reckon the style will soon be all the rage again.’ Jacob stood back, mightily pleased with the transformation he had achieved. He put his head on one side and said, ‘You know, young man, what you need now is a very good haircut and then you will have to poke the ladies off with a stick!’

‘Solomon helps me cut it when it gets too hot and I want things to cool off a bit,’ said Dodger, upon which Jacob gave the kind of explosive snort that only an offended Jewish tradesman could make, even more expressive than a Frenchman on a very bad day. Generally speaking, if it had to be written down, it would begin with something like ‘phooieu’ and end with a certain amount of spittle in the general vicinity.

Jacob wailed, ‘That’s not a haircut, my boy. You look like you’ve been sheared! As though you’ve just got out of the clink! If Queen Victoria saw you
then
, she’d probably call out the runners. Take my advice, next time go to a proper barber! Take the advice of your old friend Jacob.’

And so, in company with the dog Onan, who was still optimistically carrying his bone in his jaws, Dodger walked back into the world. Of course, shonky was shonky, however you looked at it; it might just do, but it wasn’t the full shilling. What around here was? Nevertheless, Dodger felt all the better for the new clobber, even with the associated crotch problem and a certain prickling under the arms, and it was certainly better than anything else he owned and hopefully worthy of the girl from the storm.

He walked back to the alley and climbed up the rickety stairs to the attic, where Solomon greeted him with, ‘Who are you, young man?’

On the table, spread out, were the contents of the Happy Families game. ‘Mmm . . . very interesting,’ said Solomon. ‘This is a remarkable and mmm somewhat deadly device you have presented to me. It is mmm deceptively simple, but dark clouds soon gather.’

‘What?’ said Dodger, looking at the brightly coloured cards laid out on the table. ‘It looks like something for kids – though nothing like the Happy Family man and his wagon, which is strange. It’s just a kids’ game, ain’t it?’

‘Alas, yes it is,’ said Solomon. ‘I shall expand on my little theory. Every player is dealt a hand from the pack of cards, and the object appears to be to put together one complete family,
the happy family
, simply by asking one of your opponents if they have a
particular
card. It would seem a cheerful game for children but, in fact, if they only did but know it, the parents are setting the child on the way to be a poker player or, worse, a politician.’

‘What?’

‘Allow me to elucidate,’ said Solomon, and after a glance at Dodger’s blank face, ‘I mean,
explain
, young man. It appears to go like this. In order to mmm get your happy family, you have to choose one family, and so you might, as it were, choose to collect all of the mmm Baker family. You might think that all you need do is simply wait until it is your turn again, and boldly ask somebody to give you the next card you were looking for. It might be Miss Bun the baker’s daughter. Why? Because mmm when the cards were dealt out at the start of the game you had already got Mister Bun the baker, and so his daughter would be a step in the right direction. But beware! Your opponents might mmm, if you keep simply asking for a Bun, in their turn start asking
you
for a member of the Bun family; they may not be collecting the Buns themselves, but possibly they intend to get together a whole set of the mmm Dose family, the head of which is Mister Dose the doctor. They are asking you for a Bun when they need a Dose, because they had noticed your interest in Buns, and despite their longing for a Dose would rather use their turn mmm to put you off track whilst at the same time depriving you of a precious Bun!’

‘Well, I would just lie and say I hadn’t got it,’ said Dodger.

‘Ah ha! As the game lumbers to its conclusion your ownership of the disputed Bun will come to light, mmm yes indeed! And it will be a very sad day for you. You have to tell the truth, because if you don’t tell the truth, you will never win the game. Thus this terrible battle wages, as you decide to forsake Buns now and see if
your
salvation might lie mmm in collecting the family of Mister Bung the brewer, despite the fact that your family is teetotal. You hope to put at least one of your enemies under a false impression of your real intentions, while all the time you must suspect that every single one of them, no matter how 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 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.