Dodger (17 page)

Dodger began to protest. He hadn’t seen no heavenly host; no elephant neither – he didn’t actually know what one of those was – though he’d put a shilling on the fact that Solomon had probably seen both on his travels.

But Charlie was still talking. ‘The peelers saw a young man face down a killer with a dreadful weapon, and for now that is the truth that we should print and celebrate. However, I shall add a little tincture of – shall we say – a slightly different nature, reporting that the hero of the hour nevertheless took pity on the wretched man, understanding that he had lost his wits due to the terrible things he had witnessed in the recent wars. I will write that you spoke very eloquently to me about how Mister Todd himself was a casualty of those wars, just as were the men in his cellar. I will make your views known to the authorities. War is a terrible thing, and many return with wounds invisible to the eye.’

‘That’s pretty sharp of you, Mister Charlie, changing the world with a little scribble on the paper.’

Charlie sighed. ‘It may not. He will either hang or they will send him to Bedlam. If he’s unlucky – for I doubt he would have the money necessary to ensure a comfortable stay there – it will be Bedlam. Incidentally, I would be very grateful if you could attend
at
the premises of
Punch
tomorrow so that our artist, Mister Tenniel, can draw your likeness for the paper.’

Dodger tried to take all this in, and said finally, ‘Who are you going to punch?’

‘I am not going to punch anybody;
Punch
is a new periodical magazine of politics, literature and humour which, if you don’t know, means something that makes you laugh, and possibly think. One of the founders was Mister Mayhew, our mutual friend.’ Charlie’s jaw dropped suddenly, and he scribbled down a few words on the paper in front of him. ‘Now off you go, enjoy yourself and please come back here as soon as you can tomorrow.’

‘Well, if you will excuse me, sir, I have another appointment anyway,’ said Dodger.

‘
You
have an
appointment
, Mister Dodger? My word, it seems to me that you are becoming a man for all seasons.’

As Dodger hurried off, he wondered exactly what Charlie had meant. He was damned if he was going to ask him, but he would find out what it meant as soon as possible. Just in case.

CHAPTER 8

A young man takes his young lady for a constitutional walk; and Mrs Sharples comes to heel

DODGER MADE HASTE
towards the house of the Mayhews while in his mind he saw the cheerful face and hooked nose of Mister Punch, beating his wife, beating the policeman and throwing the baby away, which made all the children laugh. Why was that funny? he thought. Was that funny
at all
? He’d lived for seventeen years on the streets, and so he knew that, funny or not, it was real. Not all the time, of course, but often when people had been brought down so low that they could think of nothing better to do than punch: punch the wife, punch the child and then, sooner or later, endeavour to punch the hangman, although that was the punch that never landed and, oh how the children laughed at Mister Punch! But Simplicity wasn’t laughing . . .

Running faster than he had before, Dodger arrived, if you put any reliance on all the bells of London, at just about the time when people would have finished their lunch. Feeling very bold, he walked up to the front door – he was, after all, a young gentleman with an
appointment
– and rang the bell, stepping backwards when the door was opened by Mrs Sharples, who gave him a look of pure hatred, and since she then slammed the door, couldn’t have got a receipt from him.

Dodger stared at the emphatically closed door for several seconds and thought, I don’t have to believe what just happened. He pulled himself upright, brushed the dust off his coat and grabbed the bell pull for the second time, till at last the door was opened once again by the same woman. Dodger was ready, and even before she had finished opening her mouth he said, ‘This morning I defeated the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and if you don’t let me in we will see what Mister Charles Dickens has to say about it in his newspaper!’ As the woman ran down the hall he shouted after her, ‘In big letters!’

He stood waiting by the open door, and very shortly after this he saw Mrs Mayhew walking towards him with a smile of a woman who wasn’t sure that she should be smiling. She came a little closer, lowered her voice and said, in the tones of one almost certain that she was going to be told the most enormous lie, ‘Is it
really
true, young man, that you were the one who this morning defeated the most dreadful of villains in Fleet Street? The cook told me about it; and apparently, according to the butcher’s boy, the news is already the talk of London. Was that
really
you?’

Dodger thought of Charlie’s fog. Thought of wanting to see Simplicity again, and did his best to look suitably bashful and
heroic
all at the same time. But he did manage to say, ‘Well, Mrs Mayhew, it was all a sort of fog.’

It seemed to work, for Mrs Mayhew was speaking again. ‘Somehow, Mister Dodger, you will not be surprised that Simplicity herself, subsequent to your recent call, has made it quite clear to us that she would like to go out in the sunshine for a constitutional walk with you, such as you suggested previously. Since it is such a fine day, and she herself seems well on the way to being restored, I cannot find it in me to deny her this wish. You will of course, as we said before, have to be in the charge of a chaperone.’

Dodger let a little silence reign and then forced it to abdicate. He attempted to make the little noise that Solomon produced when he was trying to make conversation more pleasant and intimate, and said, ‘Mmm, I am most grateful, madam, and whilst I’m on the subject, if you don’t mind, I would like someplace where I can sit quietly while Simplicity is getting ready. I have a few aches and pains that I need to deal with.’

Mrs Mayhew was suddenly all motherly. ‘Oh, you poor dear boy!’ she said. ‘How you must be suffering. Are you very badly wounded? Shall I get somebody to bring the doctor? Do you need to lie down?’

Dodger hastened to stop her turning this into something dreadful and said, still slightly breathless, ‘Please, no, just a nice quiet room where I can sort myself out for a minute or two, if you don’t mind. That will do me fine.’

Shooing him before her like a hen with one chick, Mrs Mayhew guided him down the corridor and opened a door into a room which had white and black tiles everywhere and a wonderful privy, not to mention a washbasin. Complete with jug.

Once he was left alone and unseen, Dodger did indeed use the water to do something at least to his hair, which fortunately had not felt the ministrations of Mister Todd, and generally slicked himself down and made use of the privy. He thought, Well, I’ve made myself a hero to Mrs Mayhew, but it’s all about Simplicity, isn’t it? And Simplicity herself, it appeared, had totally understood what he had said the previous day and indeed was very keen on the walk.

Dodger had never heard the term ‘the end justifies the means’, but when you had been brought up like him its principle was nailed to your backbone. So after a discreet interval during which he essayed an occasional groan, Dodger turned himself into a hero and strode out of the privy ready to meet his young lady.

Mrs Sharples was waiting in the hallway, and this time she looked at him nervously, which you certainly should do when you’re looking at a man who is in the news, and what news! Since it had been such a good day, Dodger was generous enough to give her a little smile, and got a little simper in exchange, which suggested that hostilities, if not entirely forgotten, were at least temporarily suspended. After all, he was the wounded hero now, and that had to count for something, even to someone like Mrs Sharples.

However, he noticed when she took a small book off the hall table that it was one of those that some people used for jotting things down, the ones with a tiny little pencil attached to them by a piece of string. That meant she thought she might have
occasion
to write things down, and Dodger – who had always kept a significant distance between himself and the alphabet – started to wish that he had perhaps spent more time getting to grips with the irritating business of reading as opposed to picking at the
letters
slowly, one at a time. Too late, too late, and now there was a certain amount of movement upstairs and Mrs Mayhew came down, holding Simplicity by the hand and descending very carefully, making sure that every foot had found the right place before the next foot joined it. This took some time, about a year by Dodger’s reckoning, until they were both standing in the hall.

Mrs Mayhew gave him what you might call an inadequate smile, but Dodger looked just at Simplicity, and realized that Mrs Mayhew had been very careful to provide her with a bonnet and a shawl which covered quite a lot of her face, and therefore most of the bruises, which were already losing some of their colour. And just as Dodger looked at her, Simplicity beamed at him, and it was indeed a beam, because the bonnet made a sort of shield around her, so that the centre of her face seemed highlighted.

He held out his hand and said, ‘Hello, Simplicity, I’m so glad you’ve decided to come for this little walk with me.’

Simplicity held out her hand, grasped his very lightly and said . . . nothing that Dodger could hear; and her head turned very slightly so he could see the bruising to the throat, and that burden that he was carrying almost without noticing now whispered to him, ‘
You will make them pay!
’ In that moment, he thought he saw in Simplicity’s eye a glint like a falling star shining as it fell to earth; he had only ever seen one, a long time ago and a long way away on Hampstead Heath, and he had never seen another one since, because you don’t get many shooting stars when you are a tosher. But she hadn’t let go of his hand, which was extremely pleasant but not practical, unless he wanted to walk backwards.

In the end, Dodger carefully let go and trotted around her to grasp her other hand, all in one movement, with no harm done, leading the way gently to the gate, tiptoeing through the very
small
front garden, where a few roses attempted to make a difference. You saw this more and more these days, he thought; people with enough money at last to live in a decent area set about trying to make their tiny little bit of land look like a very small version of Buckingham Palace.

He didn’t often walk slowly in London; after all, he was Dodger, dodging here and there, and never there long enough to get caught. But now Simplicity was holding his arm and he was aware that she needed his support, which slowed him down, and that somehow also slowed his thinking so that the bits came together neatly, instead of in a hurry. He turned and looked at Mrs Sharples, walking behind them. It was early afternoon and around here it was pleasant to walk, and in this bright light he felt curiously happy and at home with the girl on his arm. She kept in step, and every time he glanced at her she smiled at him and there was a peace that you didn’t get in the rookeries until one in the morning when the dead had stopped screaming and the living were too drunk to care. Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter whether Simplicity recognized anything important or not; it was enough that they were out for this walk together.

Yet there was a part of Dodger that would always be a dodger, and it guided his eyes and ears around, listening to every footstep, looking at every face and watching every shadow, calculating, figuring, estimating, judging. Now he turned his attention to old Soft Molly, whom he could see approaching.

For a long time Soft Molly had been a puzzle to Dodger, because he had never been able to make out where the flowers came from that she sold in the streets – little nosegays, all very delicate and fine. One day the old lady, who had a face that was a playground for wrinkles, told him where she got them from, and
after
that he had never thought about the cemeteries in the same way. She had made his flesh creep, but he reckoned perhaps that when you were so very old that you were older than some of the people buried beneath your feet, and therefore deserving of some respect yourself, he could see why it would make sense to you to ‘borrow’ some of the blooms scattered on the headstones of the recently deceased. It was hard to see where the harm was, and if you thought about it, the flowers stolen from the dear departed who, it must be said, could hardly be able to smell them now, were nevertheless keeping the old dear alive.

It was a sad thought, and a horrible picture, that Molly would spend time in the graveyard at night methodically collecting floral wreaths to be carefully unravelled in the heart of darkness and lovingly made into little posies for the living. In the scales of the world, how much did it matter that the dead had been robbed of the flowers they could never have seen when, for one night at least, poor old Soft Molly, who had as far as he could tell just one tooth, was still living. Besides, he thought, some of those wreaths looked like a florist shop all by themselves so would barely miss a few blossoms, and that thought made him feel a bit better.