Dodger

by Terry Pratchett

  The blade just occasionally touched the nape of Dodger’s neck. Onan would almost certainly attack if Dodger gave him the signal, but a knife at your neck is a great encouragement to careful thinking. The neck, Dodger knew, was tough and strong and quite capable of holding the weight of a very large man, as was demonstrated regularly at the Tyburn gallows, and sometimes difficult to puncture if you didn’t get the place right. But what it was vulnerable to was, of course, the slice.

  The unseen man had stopped talking; if it hadn’t been for the sensation of his breath close to Dodger’s ear, he almost wouldn’t have known somebody was there. All this went through the brain of Dodger at speed. The man was enjoying the fact that Dodger was helpless and totally in his power; you got that sort sometimes, and the man would never become a geezer. If a real geezer wanted you dead he’d have done it straight away.

  Now the man apparently decided that it was time for more tormenting of his victim. ‘I like to see a man take his time,’ he said, ‘so by now I reckon you’ve worked out you can’t break my grip and I could do very nasty things to your neck before your doggie got to me. Of course, there would be a wee little set-to between him and me, but dogs is not too difficult if you have the knowing of it and take care what clothing you wear. Oh, I didn’t spend years in the ring without knowing how to take care of myself in any fight you could mention! And I knows you can’t get to your knuckles right now, nor that little bar you like to carry – not like the last time we met.’ The man chortled. ‘I’m going to enjoy this after the way you came at us in that storm. You might have ’eard tell that someone has taken measures since then so as my associate of that night is now no longer in the land of the living – and you’re going to be joining ’im pretty sharpish, I reckon. Now if I don’t want to be amongst that happy crowd, I needs that information. Now.’

  Dodger gasped. So this was one of the men who had been beating Simplicity! And Sharp Bob was behind it! He had heard tell of the man – a legal cove, of sorts, widely respected by the unrespectable. Was he the geezer who had been talking to Marie Jo?

  Anger rose in him, a terrible anger that coalesced into one glittering shining certainty as the man’s blade gently stroked across his neck. It whispered, ‘This man is not going to walk out of here.’

  Nobody was nearby. There was the occasional scream, shout or mysterious sigh – the music of the night in the tenements – but for now Dodger and the unseen man were alone. Dodger said, ‘It sounds like I am in the hands of a professional, then?’

  The voice behind him said, ‘Oh yes, I guess you could say that.’

  ‘Good,’ said Dodger, and threw his head back so hard that he heard the reassuring noise of something breaking, and then spun round and kicked. It didn’t matter very much what he kicked, or indeed on what he stamped, but he found a multitude of choices, and in his rage he kicked and stamped on practically everything. When it came to it, the only sensible thing to do was stay alive, and the chances of staying alive with a man threatening you with a knife were reasonably small. Better him with a bloody nose and a great big bruise than you being nothing but a memory. And goodness, the bloke had been drinking before coming out – never a good idea if you wanted to be really quick. But this was one of the men who had been beating Simplicity, and no kicking now could be thorough enough for that.

  The knife had been dropped, and he picked it up, looked down at the man who was lying in the gutter and said, ‘Good news is that in a couple of months you will hardly remember this; the bad news is, that after about two weeks you will need to get somebody to break that nose proper for you again so’s you look like your old ’andsome self.’

  The man snuffled, and by the sight of him in the gloom, the way his face looked now was quite probably better than it had been before: it was all scars. People thought that a ragged face was a sign of a professional boxer, but it wasn’t – it was a sign of an amateur boxer. Good boxers liked to be pretty; it put the contenders off their guard.

  Dodger kicked the recumbent man in the fork, as hard as he could, and while the man groaned, he riffled his pockets to the total account of fifteen shillings and sixpence ha’penny. Then he kicked him again for good measure. He also pulled off the man’s shoes and said, ‘Yes, mister, I am the geezer that knocked you down in the storm. The geezer who stood up to Mister Sweeney Todd, and do you know what? I have his razor. Oh my, how it does talk to me. You tell Sharp Bob to come and ask me questions himself, right! I ain’t a murderer, but I am on good terms with such as is, and I’ll see you in lavender if I ever see you around here, or hear of you taking your fists to a lady again. You will float down the river without a boat, and that’s the truth.’

  Above and around them there was the sound of windows being cautiously opened – cautiously because whatever it was that had just gone down in the street it might be something that you really didn’t want to see, especially if it was possible that the peelers might quiz you about it. In the rookeries, you needed to develop a blindness that could be switched on and off.

  Dodger cupped his hands and shouted cheerfully, ‘Nothing to worry about, folks, it’s me, Dodger, and a bloke from out of town who amazingly enough fell over my foot.’ The ‘out of town’ bit was necessary, to show to all those listening that the local patch, such as it was – and mostly it was mud and the remnants of Onan’s most recent meals – was being defended, and it did not hurt, did it, to let everyone know that it was being defended by Dodger, good ol’ Dodger.

  In the grey light there was a sleepy applause from everybody except Mister Slade, who was a bargee by profession and not known for the gentleness of his speech, him being a man who also had to get up very early in the mornings. He had clearly had a bad day and shouted down, ‘OK, now piss off and go back to bed.’

  Dodger decided not to take the invitation to piss off and go back to bed; instead, he half dragged, half carried the man off his patch, as the protocol of the streets demanded, then spent another ten minutes dragging him a further distance away from the tenement, just in case a peeler wanted to investigate. He propped the figure up against the wall and whispered, ‘You are a very lucky man. And if I ever see your face around here again you will have what we in the business call a very close shave. Understand? I will assume that was a yes.’ Then Dodger whistled to Onan, though not until after the dog had urinated on the man’s leg: something that in fact Dodger hadn’t intended, but that he thought in the circumstances was a perfect ending to that particular scenario.

  And then . . . there was just Dodger, and it seemed to him that the events of the evening needed one last touch, one last little detail that a geezer could look back on and be proud about – a detail that would give his reputation even more shine too. After a few moments’ thought, jingling the purloined coins in his hand, he walked back to his own streets, over to a small doorway and knocked several times.

  After a while, a very cautious old lady in a nightshirt peered out, saying with the deepest suspicion, ‘Who’s that? I ain’t got any money in the house, you know.’ Then it was, ‘Oh, it’s you, young Dodger. Cor blimey, I only recognized you ’cos of your teeth. Never known anyone with such white teeth.’

  Dodger, to the old woman’s surprise, said, ‘Yes, it is me, Mrs Beecham, and I know you haven’t got any money in the house, but you have now.’ He dropped the booty into her astonished hands.

  It felt good, and the toothless old woman perceptibly beamed in the darkness and said, ‘God bless you, sir, I will say a prayer for you at church in the morning.’

  This somewhat surprised Dodger; no one had offered him a prayer before, as far as he could recall. The idea that he might have one was, on this chilly night, a welcome warmth. Cuddling that to his bosom, he led Onan up the long stairs to bed.

  1 Rather soiled but nevertheless very well made, and which he had subsequently worn quite a lot afterwards – that was, after some serious washing.

  CHAPTER 11

  Dodger smartens up, and Solomon comes cle
an

  SOLOMON HAD BEEN waiting up for him. He hadn’t been in the neighbourhood audience, because no room in the attic faced the street. His windows instead looked out on one side of some warehouses, which Solomon had considered a much better view than the kind of things you have to see in the street itself. Only a very few words were exchanged in the darkness before Dodger flopped down onto his mattress and the last candle was snuffed.

  As he snuggled down under his blanket in the knowledge of a day well filled, Dodger watched his own thoughts swim past his eyes. No wonder the world spun – there were so many changes. How long ago was it that he had heard a scream and jumped out of a foaming sewer . . . how many days was it? He counted – three days. Three days! It was as if the world was moving too fast, laughing at Dodger to keep up with it. Well, he would chase the world and take what came and deal with it. Tomorrow he would be attending a wonderful dinner at a place where there was certainly going to be Simplicity, and it appeared to him as tiredness built up that the important thing in all this was how you seemed and he was learning how to seem. Seem to be a hero, seem to be a clever young man, seem to be trustworthy. That seemed to fool everybody, and the most disconcerting thing about this was it was doing the same to him, forcing him on like some hidden engine. And with that strange deduction still in his head, he fell asleep.

  The following morning, the man whose job it was to open the doors of Coutts Bank to the customers found himself looking at an elderly Jewish gentleman in a ragged gabardine coat, whose eyes gleamed with mercantile zeal. This apparition pushed past him, followed by a young man in an ill-fitting suit and a nasty-smelling dog. Among some of the other clients, there was some murmuring about poor people coming in there, until it turned out – after every coin above the rank of sixpence was duly bagged and signed for – that these were poor people with a lot of money.

  A receipt and a shiny new bank book were received, the little party swept away as fast as they had come in, and the Red Sea closed again, the planets wobbled back to their rightful orbits, first-born children once again played happily and all was right with the world. Except that part of it now contained one of Mister Coutts’ senior partners, who was realizing that somehow he had agreed to a rate of interest that they seldom offered, but he had considered cheap at the price if it got Solomon out of the building before he threw out the moneylenders. The suggestion was, of course, ridiculous and unfounded in every respect, but Solomon nevertheless was always a winner when it came to bargaining and it tended to leave everybody somewhat dazed.

  As soon as they got outside the bank, Dodger reminded Solomon, somewhat reluctantly, that he was due in the offices of Punch magazine, so that some artist or other could draw a picture of him for the front cover.

  Mister Tenniel turned out to be a young man only a little bit older than Dodger and whose brown hair seemed closer to red. With Dodger in a seat in front of him, the two of them chatted away while the artist drew. Being drawn by Mister Tenniel wasn’t all that difficult, and a lot less difficult, Solomon said, than being drawn and quartered, at least. That was apparently a Solomon joke; one he didn’t explain to Dodger.

  Perhaps, Dodger thought, he should have said that the process was not difficult but occasionally worrying, because Mister Tenniel would scribble and scribble and then suddenly dart a glance towards Dodger, which pinned him like a butterfly, and then just as soon disappear as Mister Tenniel got back to the scribbling again. Only the top of his head could be seen as the artist bent over his work, while Solomon sat drinking coffee and reading a complimentary issue of Punch.

  To Dodger’s amazement, being drawn didn’t take very much time, and finally Tenniel made a sudden few last-minute adjustments to the portrait on his easel and turned it towards Dodger with a grin. ‘I’m pretty pleased with this, Mister . . . may I call you Dodger? I think I have your essence down pat, but of course the paper is always somewhat cluttered, and I will be expected to add a few other details to give the public some vision of what transpired in Mister Sweeney Todd’s shop. I need to draw Mister Todd too, you know – the public demands both hero and villain.’

  Dodger swallowed. ‘But Mister Todd wasn’t really a villain, sir—’ he tried.

  Tenniel cut him off with a wave of his brush. ‘I hear that Talavera was a most dreadful battle. They say that Wellington simply threw men forward into the mouths of the cannons in abandon, and to great loss of life. One can only hope that the deaths were worth the sacrifice, if that could be possible.’ He shook Dodger by the hand and went on, ‘Mister Dickens told me the truth about what happened on that day in Fleet Street, and it is wonderful, is it not, how the public perception of what is true these days seems always biased towards the macabre? It would seem that the common man likes nothing so much as an ’orrible murder.’ He paused and added, ‘Is there something the matter, Mister Dodger?’

  As often as Tenniel had closely scrutinized Dodger, so had Dodger in his turn scrutinized him. He had seen not what was there, but at one point seen something very subtly out of kilter. It took a while for him to see it properly and to find the words.

  Embarrassed at being caught staring, he decided to make a clean breast of it and said, ‘I believe you have something wrong with your left eye, don’t you, Mister Tenniel? I hope it ain’t too much of a drawback in your profession?’

  The artist’s face froze and then thawed into a lopsided smile. ‘The scar is so small, I believe that you are the first man I have met to notice it. In fact, it was a trivial childhood accident.’

  Dodger, watching the smiling face, thought: Not, I think, so trivial.

  ‘Charlie was right in what he said about you the other day!’

  ‘Oh? Mmm, and what did Charlie say about my friend Dodger the other day, if you please, sir?’ Solomon rumbled, standing up and packing the magazine into the depths of his coat. ‘I would very much like to know.’ He smiled, of course, but the wording was emphatic.

  This was most certainly picked up by Tenniel, who blushed and said, ‘Since I have put my foot in it, sir, I can do no more than tell the truth – will you please not tell Mister Dickens that I mentioned it? What he said, in fact, was: “Mister Dodger is so sharp that one day his name will be known on every continent, possibly as a benefactor of mankind, but also quite possibly as the most charming scoundrel ever to be hanged!”’

  Mister Tenniel took a step backwards in amazement when Solomon, laughing, said, ‘Well, at least Mister Dickens is a wonderful judge of character, and directness in a man such as himself is admirable. But should you meet him before I do, please tell him that Solomon Cohen is endeavouring to see that the first option will prevail! Thank you very much for your time, sir, but please excuse us now, because I must go with the young ruffian to a place where he will get cleaner than he’s ever been in his life, because this evening we are due to go to a very important dinner engagement in the West End. Good day to you, sir, and thank you, but now we really must take our leave.

  ‘No time to dawdle, Dodger,’ said Solomon as the door closed behind them. ‘You know how keen I am on bathing? Well, we are today going to have a Turkish bath, with all the trimmings.’

  This was news to Dodger, but Solomon’s wisdom and efforts at basic hygiene had kept him alive so far, so it was almost inconceivable for Dodger to thwart his friend on this occasion; he dared not argue for fear that Solomon’s righteous zeal would cause him to drag Dodger there by the ear. Acquiescence was better than becoming a laughing stock in all the rookeries and stews. And so, putting a brave face on it, he followed the old man out into what was really a drizzle with smoke in its eye, where they unhooked Onan from the lamppost where he had been tethered in the certain knowledge that nobody would ever want to steal him.

  Dodger felt better when he cogitated on the word ‘Turkish’. Somebody, probably Ginny-Come-Lately – a nice girl with a laugh that made you very nearly blush; they had been quite close once upon a time – had told him about Turkey. She had filled his mind with excit
ing images of dancing girls and light-brown ladies in very thin vests. Apparently, they would give you a massage and then oil you with what she called ‘ungulates’, which sounded very exotic, although to tell you the truth, Ginny-Come-Lately could make anything sound exotic. When he had mentioned this to Solomon – Dodger had been much younger then, and still a bit naïve – the old man had said, ‘Surely not. I have not travelled widely in the countries of the Levant, but whatever else they do to their goats, I am quite sure they don’t rub them all over their own bodies. The goat has never been distinguished by the fragrance of its aroma. I suspect you mean “unguents”, which are perfumes distilled from fragrant oils. Why’d you want to know?’

  The younger Dodger had said, ‘Oh, no reason really, I just heard somebody say the word.’ Right now, though, whatever way you put it, the word Turkish conjured up visions of eastern promise, and so he became quite optimistic as he strolled through the streets all the way to the Turkish baths in Commercial Road.

  There were, of course, bathhouses all over the place, often used even by those who were really poor, when – as one old lady had put it to Dodger – ‘sometimes you need to knock the lumps off ’. Often, the baths were ordered just like the rest of the world, in that the more you paid the more likely it was that you got the hottest and cleanest water which was, at least before the soap went in, transparent. Dodger was aware that in some of those places the water that the nobs had bathed in ended up in the baths habituated by what you might call the middle classes, travelling afterwards to the great bath for the lower classes, where at least it arrived soapy, which if you took the cheerful view meant a saving. Even though you might never sit down at a table with mayors and knights and barons, at least you could share their bath, which made you proud to be a Londoner.