The Lights of London (3 page)

Maybe there was a boat just in.

The thought of trailing down to the dock gates and fighting for customers with all the other brides was even more depressing than admitting she’d been stupid enough to let herself be robbed.

‘Bloody, rotten bastard, thieving off me like that,’ she
muttered angrily. ‘If there was any thieving to be done it should have been
me
doing it. Off of that posh geezer. Not Lily pissing Perkins, and definitely not off of me. Sodding cheeky …’

‘Hello, Tibs, me old love.’

The sound of the gruff, tobacco-thickened voice coming out of the fog had Tibs straining to see who it was who had spotted her without her even realising she was being watched.

She must be getting soft. First Lily, then the bloke, now this. She’d have to get her wits about her or she’d really be in trouble.

The voice spoke again. ‘That is you, ain’t it, sweetheart?’

The figure of a heavily built woman in her late thirties stepped towards Tibs out of the mist.

A smile of recognition lit up Tibs’s pretty, if dirt-ingrained, face. She stretched out and took the far less attractive, smallpox-scarred face of the woman in her little hands and kissed her, smack, on her cracked, dry lips.

‘One-eyed Sal, you old bugger,’ Tibs greeted her, as she leaned back to get a better look at her friend. ‘How are you, me darling? I ain’t seen you for weeks.’

‘This is how I am. Cop a load of this.’ Sal whipped off her shawl and affected an ungainly pirouette, showing off the full, heavy swirl of her black-trimmed scarlet dress. ‘Not been this well off in years, have I, ducks? Proper swanky, ain’t I? Not even this bloody fog’s getting me down. Well, not much, but it’s still good to see a familiar face. Bit of company never comes amiss in this weather, eh, girl? You never know who you might run into. And what with that poor girl getting done in …’

As interested in avoiding the dangers of working
alone in the London fog as any other bride in the area Tibs, for the moment anyway, was more concerned with how Sal had managed to earn enough to pay for such luxury. ‘What the hell you been up to? That ain’t no fourth-hand rubbish off a barrow.’

‘It certainly ain’t. Look, leg-o’mutton sleeves, neat little bustle
and
it’s hardly been worn,’ Sal informed her proudly. ‘No darns or nothing. Well, not many. In fact, if it hadn’t been so foggy I’d have been twirling me little parasol what matches the hat. But I don’t wanna go ruining it.’

Tibs fingered the thick woollen cloth and the stiff black frogging trim. She was flabbergasted. It wasn’t only beautiful, it was as good as clean. And so warm. Wearing it must be like being all wrapped up in a big, soft blanket. ‘Blimey, Sal, you got yourself a fancy man or something?’

Sal threw back her head and roared with laughter. ‘One-eyed Sal with a fancy man?’ she spluttered, her hand instinctively going to the black patch that covered the empty socket of her left eye. ‘He’d have to have one more of his minces missing than I have to bother with an old haybag like me.’

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, Sal,’ said Tibs, flinching as she remembered how Albert, who ‘looked after’ Sal, as well as her and half a dozen other tarts, had taken the boat hook to her face for daring to answer him back that night. ‘You’re still a good-looking woman.’

‘Yeah and I was such a success at her Diamond Jubilee the other year that Queen Victoria’s asked me round to tea again, to show off me drawers to all her fine friends. Her parties’d be nothing without me.’

‘Sal …’

‘I don’t kid meself, Tibs. I know I’m almost fit for the knackers.’ She chortled wheezily to herself as she
reached under her skirt and pulled out a short, squat flask. ‘Here, have a drop of this nerve tonic to warm your cockles, me little love.’

Tibs took a pull of the liquor, screwing up her eyes as she waited for it to hit the back of her throat. But then she realised that her mouth wasn’t burning and her eyes weren’t watering either.

She examined the gin bottle in disbelief. It was proper stuff, not the sort of rot-gut that was brewed up in a bucket in someone’s backyard. ‘It’s good gear, this,’ she said after a long pause. ‘Right nice stuff.’

‘It’s that all right. And how about this.’ She scratched purposefully at her tightly corseted waist. ‘I might still be cootie, but look.’

Sal affected a mad grimace, showing a wide gap where her front teeth had once stood like rotting tree stumps. ‘I even got myself enough to go and see the dentist. Mind you, I ain’t never been before. That cocaine lark he gave me was a bit frightening. Made
that
seem like water,’ she said, pointing to the gin that Tibs was still holding. ‘I don’t think I’ll be going back to get the rest done.’

‘So where’d it all come from then? The bottle of jacky’ – Tibs held up the flask – ‘all the new clobber.’ She frowned with concern; they both knew Albert’s views on girls who made private arrangements with their punters. ‘Here, you sure you ain’t got no one on the quiet? I wouldn’t say nothing, Sal, you know me, but you’d better watch yourself if you have.’

One-eyed Sal had a swallow of gin, put the bottle back under her skirt, leaned forward and pinched Tibs’s cheek. ‘I’ve got better than that, my little pet, I’ve got a new hall I’m working. And you know how the halls attract the posh sorts out slumming. They’re always on the look-out for business. And this one, well, even old
crows like me are getting plenty of custom.’ She slapped Tibs playfully on the shoulder. ‘Specially from the ones what’ve been to fancy West End parties and have spent all night staring at their friends’ wives’ titties bulging out of them fancy frocks, and all without getting even a little squeeze of ’em. By the time they get down here they’re bloody screaming for it. Us brides are well away.’

‘Where’s this hall then, Sal?’

‘You know, down the Old Black Dog.’ Sal took a pipe from her pocket, tried and failed to light it. ‘Bugger this weather. It’s colder and damper than a witch’s tit. If this fog don’t …’

‘They’re putting on turns at the Dog? The one in Rosemary Lane?’ Tibs broke in impatiently.

‘Yeah, Jack Fisher, the new landlord there, he’s opened up that big room upstairs. The one old Mary Fishguts used to …’

‘Mary who?’

Sal chuckled deep in her throat. ‘I forget, Tibs, you’re just a youngster, ain’t you. Wish I was. You know, when I was your age …’

‘So how long’s it been open then?’ Tibs interrupted again. She didn’t want to be rude to her old friend but she had to find out more. This could be the answer to her prayers.

‘Been going for almost a fortnight, it has.’ Sal sniffed loudly and wiped her nose along the back of her hand, leaving a trail of silvery snot that traced its way up and along her scarlet sleeve. ‘They can try all they like with their licensing nonsense, but I’m telling you, they’ll never close down the halls. Never. They can …’

‘Look, Sal, I know I’ve been working more over towards Aldgate,’ Tibs said a bit more sulkily than she’d intended. ‘Trying to keep out of Albert’s way to tell you
the truth. That old cow Mrs Bowdall stung me for more money over the last fortnight and I sort of owe him a bit. But someone could’ve mentioned it to me.’

‘Don’t be like that, love. No one who knew about it reckoned it was gonna last more than a week. See, it ain’t exactly Drury Lane. I mean, brides like me don’t usually get a look-in at the better sort of halls. You have to be done up like a sodding duchess even to get your foot through the door at the Empire or the Alhambra. But down the Dog …’

‘What? What about the Dog?’

Sal chuckled. ‘The turns really stink, but ’cos it’s new it’s still a bit of a novelty. That’s how it’s managing to pull in the punters. But they don’t hang around for long. They start looking for other distractions, if you know what I mean.’

Suddenly there was a distant look in her eye. ‘You know, Tibs, I really thought I was ready to start walking the parks of a night. Doing Gawd knows what for all them strange ones with their funny ideas and that. But now the Dog’s come along.’ She grinned broadly, showing her few remaining back teeth to be as brown and broken as a set of ill-kept railings. ‘It’s not only brought a lot of that mob back who’d moved on to the boozers down Shadwell, it’s brought in all these toffs and all. For now, anyway. But wait till it gets around what a load of old shit Fisher’s putting on every night and the novelty of having a laugh at all the old tripe wears off.’ She winked gleefully. ‘You wanna get yourself down there with me, young ’un. And make it a bit sharpish and all. Make hay while the sun shines, as they say. But don’t let on about it to too many others, eh, ’cos it’s got what I think you might call a very limited potential for any sort of a run.’

Tibs pinched Sal’s crêpey cheek gently between her
fingers. ‘You are an angel from above, sweet Sal, a genuine angel of mercy.’

Sal laughed coarsely. ‘I’ve been called some things in me time, darling, but it’s the first time I’ve ever been called that.’

Despite being a tall, country-bred young woman, with shoulders almost as broad as a boy’s, Kitty was no match for Buggy and Teezer. What with having been half drowned, and with her sopping-wet clothes and soaking boots weighing her battered body down like lead, they were able to push and shove her up the flight of waterman’s stairs with no more effort than it would have taken to shift an uncooperative five-year-old.

She tripped up the final step, coughing and panting, and stumbled along the shoreway – one of the shadowy narrow walkways that ran between the massive warehouses – that led from the river to the Ratcliffe Highway.

Her stomach heaved and she vomited again, fetching up what she could only pray was the very last scrap of anything left inside her.

Wretchedly she slumped against a rough brick wall, not even noticing how it scraped her bony back. But the very next moment Kitty was standing as rigid as a barber’s pole, her senses sharp as freshly stropped razors, as she listened in open-mouthed astonishment to Teezer outlining his plans to Buggy.

Kitty had honestly believed, as she had tried to end it all by throwing herself into the Thames, that things could get no worse. Then she had been saved and had, just for a moment as she’d been dragged out of the boat and along the alley, wondered if it was meant to be. But now, here she was, with two apparently raving madmen, who seemed to be under the impression that, out of gratitude, she’d be more than happy to go on the
game for them. Maybe when she explained she’d rather go pure-finding for the South London tanning factories – collecting dog dung at a few pennies a bucketful for them to use for their leather dressing – than ever have a man touch her again, they’d throw her back in the river where they’d found her and she would sink into the oblivion she had obviously been right to prefer to this terrible life.

But her disgust at their idea clearly did not convey itself to either of the purl-men.

‘Gotta be realistic, Teeze,’ Buggy offered with a drunkard’s reason. ‘No point wasting time scrubbing her down if she ain’t gonna be any good. If you know what I mean.’ His tongue flicked over his lips and the suggestiveness of his meaning grew more evident. ‘She’s gotta be, you know, fit for the purpose, now ain’t she? Take me, for instance, I always go for a nice sort of a bosom. Big and firm. So if we have a butcher’s at hers we can see how she matches up. And her legs, we’ll have to have a look at them. I must admit I do like a nice pair of pins. And a nice sort of arse to grab hold of while I’m doing the business and all.’

‘And we might as well give her a seeing to while we’re at it,’ added Teezer, his voice thick with lust. ‘Try her out, like. Make sure there’s nothing wrong with her or nothing.’

The very thought of having these men’s hands – any man’s hands – anywhere near her ever again had Kitty wide-eyed and as taut as a fully wound clock-spring.

Summoning every bit of courage she had left, she spat at Teezer’s face.

She missed. Spitting wasn’t something she was used to, but the men’s slack-jawed shock at Kitty’s sudden and unexpected display of anger gave her the few precious moments she needed to make a run for it.

She’d almost reached the end of the shoreway when Teezer recovered from his stunned silence. He roared into the darkness after her, ‘I’ll kill you, you no-good, ungrateful trollop!’ and began swinging his arms about him, as if he were a punch-drunk prize-fighter in a penny booth.

Unfortunately, his wild flailings threw him off his already unsteady balance and he staggered backwards, knocking Buggy over into the bargain.

Kitty could hear them curse as they fell to the ground in a drunken heap of arms and legs and rapidly spreading bruises, but she couldn’t risk slowing down. She ran as though the devil himself – the one she’d been threatened with at the convent – were at her heels, not stopping even though she was being sucked deeper and deeper into the maze of fetid streets and byways of the dockside rookeries.

Past locked doors and secretive alleyways she ran, with the sound of fog-horns echoing in her ears, and the memories of once welcome hands touching her, then pawing her and crawling over her skin. Memories which drove her on.

She had to get away. And somehow she would find the river.

This time there would be no mistakes, she would finish it all for ever.

But what was that?

Kitty caught her breath in a fearful gasp at the sudden, unmistakable sound of laughter and music. Skidding to a halt on the filth-strewn cobbles, she steadied herself against a wall. The raucous male voices had her shaking uncontrollably. She must be close to a pub. She couldn’t risk being near the light, where she might be seen. Might even be found by the boatmen.

Kitty’s eyes brimmed with tears of helpless terror. It
was all she could do to turn herself round and stagger off in another direction. She had to find the river, her salvation.

She started to move quickly again, picking up speed, running on blindly, ever more lost in the unfamiliar streets of London’s East End, swerving and veering like a hound’s quarry at every little noise; her chest hurting, the blood pounding in her ears and her heart thumping faster and faster.