The Lights of London (4 page)

Then it was all over.

Someone grabbed her, spun her round, and crashed her already bruised and aching body hard against the wall. This was finally it. Forget about finding the river. Her heart was about to burst. She would simply die there and then.

‘For Christ’s sake belt up!’ One-eyed Sal, with her fists stuck in her waist, was bellowing furiously at Kitty who, to Sal’s increasing annoyance, continued to scream like a stuck pig.

Sal flapped her arms in impotent exasperation. ‘Just shut up and listen will you? Just
shut up.
Tell her, Tibs, tell the noisy mare how lucky she is that I never gave her a right-hander when she come running into me like that.’

But Tibs didn’t have a chance to tell anyone anything, not with Sal in full flow.

‘I’m telling you,’ Sal went on, ‘if you don’t shut that bleed’n’ gob of your’n I’m gonna forget I’m a lady and bloody well shut it for you.
Do you hear me
?’

This time Tibs actually managed to slip in a few words. ‘All right, Sal, that’s enough. Leave her alone, eh?’ She eased her friend out of the way and reached out to touch Kitty on the sleeve to reassure her, but Kitty, wild-eyed with fear, snatched her arm away as though Tibs was about to grab her. She had no intention of letting anyone lay a single finger on her ever again.

Tibs dropped her hands to her sides and looked up into Kitty’s face. ‘It’s all right, darling, no one’s gonna hurt you.’ She moved a tentative step closer. ‘Here, you’re soaking. What you been up to? Someone chucked you in the drink, did they?’

Kitty shook her head frantically and backed away from the garishly made-up women.

‘Bloody hell, what a performance.’ Sal rolled her single eye in undisguised annoyance. ‘I hate simpering twerps like her. It’s all toffee, you know. She should be on the boards. Mind you, at least she’s shut her cake-hole at last. That’s something to be thankful for. Come on, Tibs, let’s get going or we’ll miss our chance down the Dog. The third show’ll be starting any …’

‘Hang on, Sal.’ Tibs hadn’t taken her eyes off Kitty’s terrified face. ‘That’s better, sweetheart,’ she soothed her. ‘Now, why don’t you tell us what’s happened? You hurt, are you? Someone bash you up or something?’

Kitty’s mouth turned down, her face crumpled and she began snivelling pitifully.

Sal started groaning. ‘Leave her alone, Tibs. Can’t you see she’s barmy?’

‘No, she ain’t. Look at her. She’s scared.’ Tibs held up her hands as though she were surrendering. ‘Don’t worry, love, I ain’t coming near you and I ain’t gonna touch you. I just wanna help. All right?’ All the while she was talking, Tibs was sighing inwardly; she wouldn’t be able to go to work with this one tagging along. But she couldn’t just leave her. She was too soft to be left alone in an area as tough as this.

‘Look, Tibs,’ One-eyed Sal hissed into her ear, ‘you said if you didn’t earn another few bob you was gonna be in trouble with Albert. And that old cow Mrs Bowdall won’t take kindly to you missing giving her her wages neither. So why you have to go and give a flying fart about this soppy mare, whoever she is, I do not know. She ain’t nothing to you. Come on, she’ll be all right. Let’s be on our way.’

‘How can I leave her? Especially here of all places.’

Sal grabbed Tibs’s arm. ‘Easy.’

She shook herself free. ‘No, Sal. I can’t.’ As she spoke, Tibs smiled gently at Kitty. It seemed to be calming her
down a bit. Either that, or the shock of whatever had happened to her had sent her into some sort of a trance. Tibs had seen people in trances before, in the mesmerist’s act at the Pavilion – and this was pretty much how they looked: pole-axed.

‘You can leave her,’ Sal insisted.

‘No, Sal, I can’t. Look, thanks for the tip about the Dog and everything, but you go on. If I can, I’ll catch up with you later.’

‘You’re too good, Tibs, that’s your trouble.’

‘If I was good I’d never have wound up in this dump in the first place, now would I?’ she said with a weak attempt at a smile.

‘I’m being a fool to myself,’ Sal bristled, ‘but I’ll do you a favour and hang on for a bit. But only till you see sense, mind.’ With that she folded her arms tightly across her bosom and stared hard at Kitty, daring her to cause any more trouble.

One-eyed Sal liked Tibs, genuinely so. Not only because she was the sort who’d help anyone – even this dopey great rasher of streaky bacon – but she was a good laugh, who could always be depended on to cheer everyone up. But Sal also had other reasons to wait for her. Tibs was a nice-looking girl, the type who attracted the kind of punters who had lovely fat wallets. And apart from that, it was always useful to have a bit of company on a filthy night like this. You never knew who might be lurking in the foggy alleyways, ready to jump out and slit your throat for the few coppers you had tucked in the leg of your drawers. Sal shuddered involuntarily. She would definitely feel more secure with a companion, especially so close to the river …

‘What’s your name then, darling?’ Tibs asked softly.

‘Kitty,’ the girl rasped in a voice made almost as harsh as Tibs’s own by the overwhelming combination of
swallowed Thames water, vomiting and weeping.

‘Here, what a coincidence. We’re a right pair of pussycats, we are.’

‘They call her Tibs,’ Sal explained flatly, jerking her thumb towards Tibs’s face. ‘Got them slanty eyes, see.’

‘Yeah, me best feature they reckon. Well, me best till I get me corsets off!’ Tibs, realising immediately from Kitty’s expression that she wasn’t used to such ripe talk, tried another tack. ‘You can’t stand here and catch your death, now can you, love? You come with me. Come on, sweetheart, and we’ll have you all warmed up and dried out in a trice. All right? Come on, let’s get going, shall we?’

Kitty stiffened, her eyes widening in apprehension.

‘Darling, believe me, you ain’t got no choice. You don’t know this place. Anyone could tell from a mile off that you’re a stranger round here, and if …’

‘Not in this fog, they couldn’t tell,’ snapped Sal sarcastically.

Tibs ignored her. ‘Look at you. You’re as nervous as a rabbit and with them soaking-wet things hanging off you, slowing you down, you won’t last five minutes with some of the tripe hounds you get roaming around these parts. I wouldn’t trust ’em with me old granny, let alone a fine-looking girl like you.’ She smiled winningly. ‘You might not realise it, you know, but it’s lucky you bashed into me mate Sal here. If you’d have kept on running in the direction you was heading you’d have wound up in Chinatown.’

‘Yeah, I can just see her in an opium den.’ Sal puffed out her cheeks and slapped her arms about her shoulders to keep warm. If
she
was cold in her thick woollen dress, this dopey cow must be perishing in all that wet gear. Why wouldn’t she just get walking? That’d be a start.

‘I won’t take no for an answer, Kit.’

‘She won’t,’ emphasised Sal, eager for something, anything, to happen, so she could get off with Tibs and on with the business of earning a few bob.

‘Let’s at least go somewhere where you can find a bit of shelter and have a little rest,’ Tibs coaxed her. ‘You look like you’ve done a three-day shift in a sweat-shop.’ As she spoke, she stretched out her hand as cautiously as if she were trying to trap a butterfly. ‘I’m just gonna slip me arm through your’n, so as we don’t lose one another in this fog. Then we can walk part of the way with Sal.

‘That’ll be nice,’ said Sal, narrowing her eye at Kitty, ‘you can let me go off alone and earn a few bob, while you look after your new friend here and earn bugger all. Still, I’ll enjoy your company while you can spare it, I suppose.’

‘Enjoy me company? Enjoy me protection more like,’ retorted Tibs.

One-eyed Sal smiled in resigned agreement. ‘Don’t look so surprised, Kitty, or whatever you reckon your name is. She’s a right street scrapper this one. Might look like a pretty little pussycat but she acts more like a terrier.’ Without so much as a pause, Sal added, ‘You in the family way, are you? That why you chucked yourself in the drink? I suppose you reckoned that
that’d
make ’em all feel sorry for you. Guilty, like.’

Kitty didn’t answer, but some progress had been made: she was so bewildered by Sal’s barrage of words and questions that she was allowing Tibs to steer her gently forward.

‘He pissed off and left you, I’ll bet. That’s the usual story, eh Tibs?’

‘No.’ Kitty dropped her chin. ‘It weren’t like that.’

‘Here, Tibs. Listen to that voice. She’s only a sodding
carrot cruncher. Up from the sticks, are you, dear?’ Still walking along, she turned to Tibs. ‘No wonder she’s so flaming dopey. They’re all like that down there.’ She gestured vaguely over her shoulder towards where she imagined the countryside might be. ‘It’s all that fresh air, see. Can’t be no good for you, can it?’

Tibs flashed a warning glare at Sal, then returned her attention to Kitty. ‘Here, I’m a country girl and all,’ she enthused in her broad cockney croak. ‘I come from …’

‘Here, hang on a minute.’ Agitated by her friend’s siding with this feeble-minded bumpkin of an interloper, Sal decided she’d had enough. ‘I’m sorry, Tibs,’ she said with a haughty sniff,
‘but
I’ve heard your life story before. You won’t think I’m rude if I say I’ll be getting along, now will you, girl?’ With that, she stretched her lips at Kitty in a thin approximation of a smile and strode off ahead of them.

She was quickly out of sight, but Tibs noticed that her clip-clopping footsteps over the cobbles gradually slowed down until she was walking at the same pace as they were – albeit a dozen yards in front. Close enough to shout for help, Tibs thought with a fond grin, but far enough away for her to make her point. Typical of Sal.

Kitty interrupted Tibs’s thoughts with a pitiful sigh. ‘I never meant to upset your friend,’ she said in her soft rural burr. ‘I’m that sorry.’

‘Don’t you worry yourself, sweetheart,’ Tibs reassured her, pleased to hear Kitty talking, even if she did sound as miserable as the coalman on a sunny day. ‘It don’t take much to get that one going. Sal might be me mate, but even I have to admit she ain’t got much patience.’

‘You’re right lucky, you are.’

‘Me? Lucky? How come?’

‘I’ve never really had a friend.’

‘You don’t mean that.’ Tibs sounded shocked. ‘Everyone’s got friends. Someone they can turn to.’

‘Not me.’ Kitty shivered. ‘I’ve never had the chance to make any, see.’

Tibs shook her head. Poor cow. They were right what they said: there’s always someone worse off. ‘So you reckon you’ve got no one to turn to? No one at all?’

Kitty shook her head.

‘And you’re soaking wet, love you. And it’s parky enough to freeze the doodahs off of your … and I’ll bet …’

‘This is your last chance, Tibs,’ Sal bellowed out of the fog. ‘Now, are you coming or what?’

Kitty began weeping miserably. ‘You’d better go. Your friend’s waiting.’

‘Don’t be daft, and don’t go fretting and crying all over the place. It ain’t worth it. Nothing’s worth it.’ Tibs risked squeezing Kitty’s arm. ‘Anyway, you should be smiling. You’ve got yourself a friend now, ain’t you? Whether you like it or not, I’m gonna look after you. We’re gonna be a team see, Kit, me and you. Little Tibs and big Kitty. There’ll be no stopping us.’

Good job she don’t know the mess I’ve made of me own bleed’n’ life, thought Tibs.

‘
What did you say
?’ Teezer – his knee swollen and aching from where Buggy had fallen on him in the shoreway and his head thick with purl – stuck his face close to the man who’d dared question his right to barge past his table.

The man recoiled. ‘No harm meant, mate. I just asked you to be careful, that’s all. You nearly had the lady’s glass over, and …’

‘And
I’m
just asking you to shut your noise, while I mind me own business and make me way to the front of
this here theatre.’ Teezer pulled himself up to his full, barrel-chested height. ‘Or d’you wanna make something of it?’

As usual, Buggy couldn’t resist throwing in his long-winded two penn’orth of nonsense. ‘I wouldn’t actually call it a theatre, Teeze. More of a big room, really. In fact, its very much like a lot of little rooms that have been knocked through and …’

Teezer spun round. ‘Buggy.’

‘Yes, Teeze?’

‘You’re another one who can shut up. Now go and fetch us a round of drinks, while I go and baggsy us some decent seats. And while you’re about it, make sure you go down to the big bar. I don’t want you messing about in the crowds up here and taking all night about it. I’ve got a mouth on me like the inside of a boiler stoker’s glove.’

Buggy considered for a moment and came to the conclusion that he had had enough excitement for one evening. So, instead of making a song and dance about it as he usually would have, he did as Teezer told him without another word.

He turned round, shoved his way back through the boisterous crowd and trotted down the stairs to the main bar, leaving Teezer to secure a table for them near the tatty little stage at the far end of the room.

Teezer pulled out a chair and sat down just a few feet from where Jack Fisher, the new landlord, was standing surveying the room. He had no idea of the panic that Jack could feel creeping over him.

Like many similar venues, which had suddenly mushroomed all over London when it became known that the music-hall boom was creating some very rich men, the ‘theatre’ above the Old Black Dog was – as Buggy had tried to tell Teezer – no more than a series of
rooms converted into what Jack Fisher desperately hoped was about to become a theatrical money-spinner.

The fact that the hall bore only a passing resemblance to the magnificent theatres frequented by the stars didn’t seem to matter to the customers; they were as lively and as rowdy as any of the far grander music-hall crowds could be and, Jack had originally believed, as keen to enjoy the show. Almost every one of the tables that filled the high-ceilinged rectangular space was occupied, nudging right up to the stage at one end of the room and the busy, if tiny, bar at the other.

The room was decorated with luridly striped paper; there was gaudy gold paint highlighting the plaster covings and carvings dotted around the place; and the same gilt had been used to pick out the bits and pieces of moulding that only added to the faded look of the rickety, ill-matched tables and chairs. The windows and makeshift proscenium arch – created by an artful use of off-cuts purloined from a timber yard over in Shoreditch – had drapes which, even though made of tired-looking, dusty red plush, at least matched those framing the stage.