Dodger (10 page)

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 the gloom, Dodger smiled and went to sleep, dreaming of golden hair.

In the morning, as clean as he could be, he headed to the house of Mister Mayhew. By daylight, the man’s house looked pretty good; not a palace, but the place of somebody who had enough money
to
be called a gentleman. The whole street looked like that, smart, ordered and clean. There was even a policeman patrolling it, and much to Dodger’s surprise the policeman gave him a little salute as they passed. It wasn’t anything much, just a flick of the fingers, but up until now a policeman in a place like this would have told him to go somewhere else sharpish. Emboldened, Dodger remembered the way that Charlie talked, and saluted the constable back, saying, ‘Good morning, Officer, what a fine day it is to be sure.’

Nothing happened! The copper strolled slowly past him and that was that. Blimey! In a hopeful mood, Dodger found the house. He had learned at an early age how to hang about the back doors of houses on the swell streets, and also – and this was important – to get known as a spritely lad. He had realized that if you were an urchin, then it might help to treat it as a vocation and get really good at it; if you wanted to be a successful urchin you needed to study how to urch. It was as simple as that. And if you are going to urch, then you had to be something like an actor. You had to know how to be chatty to everybody – the butlers and the cooks; the housemaids; even the coachmen – and in short become the cheerful chappie, always a card, known to everybody. It was an act and he was the star. It wasn’t a path to fame and fortune, but it certainly wasn’t the road to Tyburn Tree and the long drop. No, safety lay in having one talent that you can call your own, and his lay in being Dodger, Dodger to the hilt. So now he walked round to the back door, hoping he might perhaps run into Mrs Quickly the cook again and come away once more with a pie or another piece of mutton.

The door was opened by a maid, who said, ‘Yes, sir?’

Dodger straightened himself up and said, ‘I’m here to see
Mister
Mayhew. I believe he is expecting me, my name is Dodger.’

No sooner had he said this than there was a clang from somewhere beyond, and the maid panicked a little, as maids do (especially when they met Dodger’s cheerful grin), but she visibly relaxed as she was replaced by Dodger’s old friend Mrs Quickly, who looked him up and down critically and said, ‘My word, ain’t you the toff and no mistake! Pray excuse me if I do not curtsey, on account of me being all but up to my armpits in giblets.’

A moment later the cook came back to the door again, this time unencumbered by the bits of the insides of animals. She shooed away the maid, saying, ‘Me and Mister Dodger is going to have a little chat, so go and see to the pig knuckles, girl.’ Then she gave Dodger a hug involving a certain amount of giblet, wiped him down and said, ‘You are a hero of the hour, my little pumpkin, yes indeed, they were talking about it at breakfast! It seems that you, you little scallywag, single-handedly stopped that
Morning Chronicle
being overrun by robbers last night!’ She gave Dodger a saucy smile, and said, ‘Well, I thought to myself, if that is the selfsame young man I met the other day, then the only way he would stop anything being stolen would be to put his hands behind his back. But now it appears that you fought a battle with some robbers and chased them to kingdom come, so they say. Just fancy that! Next thing you know they will be asking you to be the Lord Mayor. If that is so I would like you to take me as your Lady Mayoress – don’t worry, I’ve been married lots of times and know how it is done.’ She laughed again at his expression and, more soberly, said, ‘Well done, lad. We’ll get the girl to take you upstairs to the family, and you be sure to come down here again when you go, because I might have a little bundle of food for you.’

Dodger followed the maid up a flight of stone stairs to a door,
to
the magic green baize door between the people who clean the floors and those people who walk on the floors – the upstairs and the downstairs of the world. Actually, what he found was a kind of pandemonium, with a husband and wife as unwilling referees in a dispute between two boys over who had broken whose toy soldier.

Mister Mayhew grabbed him and nodded to his wife, who could only smile frantically at Dodger from the middle of this tiny war as he was hurried into her husband’s study. Henry Mayhew pushed him onto a uncomfortable chair and sat down opposite him, saying immediately, ‘It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance again, young man, especially in the light of your intervention yesterday evening, of which Charlie has informed me.’ He paused. ‘You are a most interesting young man. May I ask a . . . few personal questions?’ His hand reached for a notebook and pencil as he spoke.

Dodger was not used to this sort of thing: people who wanted to ask him personal questions such as, ‘Where were you on the night of the sixteenth?’ normally damn well asked them without permission, and also expected them to be answered with equal speed. He managed to say, ‘I don’t mind, sir. That is, if they ain’t too personal.’ He stared around the room while the man laughed, and he thought: How can one man own this much paper? Books and piles of paper were on every flat surface, including the floor – everywhere on the floor, but
neatly
on the floor.

Now Mister Mayhew said, ‘I imagine, sir, that you were not actually christened? I find the idea unlikely. Mister Dodger is a name you . . . came by?’

Dodger settled for a variant on honesty. After all, he’d been through all of this with Charlie, and so what he delivered was a
slightly
abbreviated version of ‘the Dodger story’, because you never told anyone everything. ‘No, sir, was a foundling, sir, got called Dodger in the orphanage because I move fast, sir.’

Mister Mayhew opened the notebook, which Dodger looked at with suspicion. The pencil was poised over the paper, ready to pounce, so he said, ‘No offence meant, it makes me come over all wobbly if things gets writ down, and I stops talking.’ He was already scouting the room for other exits.

However, much to his surprise, Mister Mayhew said, ‘Young man, I do apologize for not asking your permission. Of course I will not make further notes without asking you. You see, I write things down for my job, or perhaps I should say my vocation. It is a matter of research – a project on which I have been engaged for some time now. I and my colleagues hope to make the government see how terrible conditions are in this city; it is, indeed, the richest and most powerful city in the world, and yet the conditions here for many may not be far removed from those in Calcutta.’ He noted that there was no change in Dodger’s expression and said, ‘Is it possible, young man, that you do not know where Calcutta is?’

Dodger stared for a moment at the pencil. Oh well, there was no hope for it. ‘That’s right, sir,’ he said. ‘Do not have a clue, sorry, sir.’

‘Mister Dodger, the fault is not yours. Indeed,’ Mister Mayhew continued, as if talking to himself, ‘ignorance, poor health and lack of suitable nutrition and potable water see to it that the situation gets ever worse. So I simply ask people for a few details about their life, and indeed their earnings, for the government cannot fail to respond to a careful accumulation of evidence! Curiously, the upper classes, while generally very gracious in the
amount
of money that they give to churches, foundations and other great works, tend not to look too hard below them, apart from occasionally making soup for the deserving.’

The thought of food once again got Dodger’s stomach rumbling. It must have grumbled enough for Mister Mayhew to hear, because the man was suddenly flustered and said, ‘Oh my dear sir, you will be very hungry, of course; I anticipated this, so I will ring the bell and get the maid to bring you some bacon and an egg or two. We are not rich, but thankfully we are not poor. It must be said that everybody has a different calculus on this matter, however, because I have met people who I would have thought were amongst the most extreme of the poor, who nevertheless protest that they are jogging along nicely, whilst on the other hand I have known men who live in very large houses on really good incomes to consider themselves one step away from debtors’ prison!’ He smiled at Dodger as he rang the bell, and said, ‘How about you, Mister Dodger, who I believe is a tosher as well as dabbling in other lines of ad hoc business when the opportunity arises? Do you consider yourself rich, or poor?’

Dodger knew a trick question when he saw one. Mister Mayhew, he considered, was probably not as darkly sharp about the world as Charlie was but it wouldn’t pay to underestimate him; and therefore he took refuge in the last resort, which was honesty. He said, ‘I reckon me and Sol aren’t really the poor, sir. You know, we’re doing a bit of this and a bit of that and we do pretty well, I think, compared to many, yes.’

This seemed to pass muster, and Mister Mayhew looked pleased. He glanced at his notebook and said, ‘Sol being the gentleman of the Jewish persuasion with whom Charlie tells me you share lodgings?’

‘Oh, I don’t think he needed any persuading, sir. I think he was born Jewish. At least, that’s what he says.’

Dodger wondered why Mister Mayhew laughed, and he wondered too how it was that Charlie knew enough to tell the man where he lived when Dodger himself couldn’t seem to remember telling him. But that didn’t really matter, because he could hear the sound of the servant just outside the door, and the rattling of a tray. A rattling like that meant that it was heavy – always a good thing. And, as it turned out, it was. Mister Mayhew said that he had already had breakfast, so Dodger tucked in to bacon and eggs at considerable speed.

‘Charlie has high hopes of you, as you know,’ said Mister Mayhew, ‘and I must confess my admiration of the fact that you have put yourself out for our young lady, especially as, I understand, you had never met before. I will take you to see her shortly. She seems to understand English, although I fear that her mind has been disturbed by the nature of her ordeal and she seems unable to give an account of the dark events which appear to have befallen her.’

Most unusually for Dodger, he looked at the food in front of him without instantly finishing it up, and instead said, ‘She was very scared. She’s been married to a cove who treated her rotten and that’s a fact. And . . .’ Dodger was about to say more, but hesitated. He thought: She’s hurt, yes; she’s frightened, yes; but I don’t reckon she’s lost her mind. I reckon she’s biding her time until she finds out who her friends are. And if I was her, badly beaten though she be, I reckon that I would find it in myself to appear a little worse off than I was; it’s the rule of the streets. Keep some things to yourself.