A Kid for Two Farthings

by Wolf Mankowitz

  ‘Big factory,’ the other old man said.

  ‘You got a bigger factory?’ the first old man asked.

  ‘So?’ asked Mr Kandinsky.

  ‘He just got a new presser for his new factory, and he’s chucking out the old one.’

  ‘It works?’ asked Mr Kandinsky.

  ‘To look costs nothing,’ the old man said.

  ‘So I’ll look,’ replied Mr Kandinsky, and patted Joe’s head.

  Joe was very pleased, especially when you remember that Africana wasn’t really with him in the cellar at Madame Rita’s. It may have been the green remnant, because you can never tell where an odd bit of magic is going to turn up, so why not in the cellar of Madame Rita’s? Joe thought they had better get home quickly now, because it might start to happen any minute.

  The first thing Joe did when they got home was to go into the yard and thank Africana. He put his arm round his neck and kissed him gently on the head, next to his horn bud. Africana coughed and his head jerked up and hit Joe’s jaw, making him bite his tongue.

  9

  The following day the weather was cold again.

  It was going to be one of those springs which stops and starts, unable to make up its mind whether to stay or not. One moment the stone streets were pink and bright in the sunshine, and the next they were grey and dirty again, the sun sunk away somewhere behind a million chimneys on a million slate roofs. But though Saturday morning brought no quick pools of sunlight and the Kremlin, a disused shirt factory, looked blank and dead in the grey light, no one bothered, for they were all impatient for the evening. Once the evening comes, what does it matter how bright or dull the day has been? So far as the evening is concerned, all days are bright, and tomorrow can be still brighter. Hurry along tomorrow, a brighter day, and for an overture, let the evening bring great moments of life such as the spectacular fight between the Aldgate Hammer and the dreaded Python Macklin. And for the sake of tailors everywhere, let the tailor win.

  Shmule gave Mr Kandinsky four seats in the second row for Joe and his mother, Sonia and himself. The fights didn’t begin until half-past seven, and Shmule’s bout came up an hour later. Mr Kandinsky was going to get them there in good time for Shmule’s fight, but he would in no circumstances hear of them seeing the fights which came before.

  ‘We are not,’ said Mr Kandinsky, ‘savages to go and watch the gladiators fight and to enjoy the struggles of people we don’t know. Shmule is our own boy, so we must encourage him, not have a good time while other people get broken necks. If it wasn’t for Shmule fighting we would never go, not in a hundred years.’ And even Sonia, who enjoyed wrestling even if she didn’t know the wrestlers – and she knew most of them, of course – had to wait round the house talking about her trousseau with Joe’s mother until it was time to leave.

  Africana was shivering. Joe tried to make him comfortable in his house, which had had so many bits and pieces tacked on to it through the winter that it looked like a wooden patchwork quilt. It was a shame that animals weren’t allowed at the wrestling, because if Shmule did win it would be Africana’s doing. Joe promised to tell Africana everything in the morning, and anyhow Africana’s cough was bad. He wouldn’t take Gee’s Linctus, even on cubes of sugar, and what with the break in the weather making it treacherous for bronchial complaints, it was just as well for Africana to stay at home. Joe told everybody that Africana wasn’t very well. Being the first dressed, he went out to have a word with Mavis on the subject.

  The street looked quite different at night. Great deeps of shadow gathered in the corners of the Kremlin, and the small shops were warm with lamps. The baker’s lamp was gas and spluttered, but Mavis’s were electric and steady. On the street corner there was a barrow with a big naphtha lamp spitting away white and blue, and two large iron braziers with iron trays red hot on them, roasting chestnuts and baking potatoes. Someone stood by the barrow, and Joe was surprised to find it was the man who helped the Eel King on Sundays, so it looked as if with the coming of the night everyone became someone else. Even Mavis looked different, older and paler in the yellow light, with tired markings on her face, her flowered overalls dirty from where she had clasped bins of potatoes all day long. She was surprised to see Joe up and about at that time of night.

  ‘You do look a toff, Joe,’ she said, ‘in long trousers and a jacket to match, a real toff. Where are you off to? You should be in bed.’

  ‘Yes, they are nice,’ Joe said, putting his hands deep into the pockets of his long trousers. ‘They have real flies, with buttons.’

  ‘I suppose old Mr Kandinsky run them up for you,’ Mavis said. ‘He run up all my old dad’s.’

  ‘You look a bit old, Mavis,’ Joe said. ‘The whole street looks sort of different at night.’

  ‘I am a bit old, dear, I reckon,’ said Mavis, ‘and with the end of the day you feel it more.’

  ‘You’ll have to hurry, because we’re going soon,’ Joe said, and told her about Shmule’s fight.

  ‘I shan’t come, Joe dear,’ Mavis said; ‘there’s still a lot to do, though no morning market to think about, and I don’t think blood sports should be allowed anyway, and wrestling is a sort of blood sport. Would you like a nice apple?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Joe, taking a large bite of the russet apple she handed him. ‘What’s a blood sport?’

  ‘Where they hunt poor dumb animals,’ Mavis said, ‘for their sport, like the early Christian martyrs and saints that were thrown to the lions.’

  ‘You mean the lions ate them up?’ Joe asked, thinking it was a good thing he never did get that lion cub for a pet.

  ‘Yes, poor souls, limb from limb,’ said Mavis, sorting through the tomatoes.

  ‘They must have been hungry,’ Joe said, taking another large bite of his apple.

  ‘It wasn’t them, poor dumb beasts, it was the sinfulness of their masters; and yet, Joe, they prayed for their torturers in the midst of their torment.’

  ‘What’s torturers and torment?’ Joe asked, although he really wanted to talk about Africana. ‘Don’t trouble your head about it,’ Mavis said. ‘Oh, what a rotten one,’ she added, throwing a soft tomato into a box, where it burst juicily. ‘How’s your little unicorn?’

  ‘That’s what I was going to tell you,’ Joe said. ‘He’s got this bad cold on the chest and coughs all the time, and he’s not interested in anything, and won’t touch the Gee’s Linctus, even on cubes of sugar. Do you think it’s the consumption?’

  Mavis stopped sorting for a moment.

  ‘He never was very strong, you know, Joe. He was always a delicate little thing. This has been a rotten winter for the best of us.’

  ‘I know,’ said Joe. ‘Mr Kandinsky has been getting terrible creaks down his back this winter, and I saw someone with a cough.’ He was going to tell her about the cannibal king that time in Itchy Park, but he didn’t want to think about it.

  ‘Will you have a look at Africana, Mavis?’ he said instead.

  Mavis closed the shop and they walked down to the house. They went through to the yard, and Mavis wrapped Africana in a piece of blanket and brought him into the workroom. In the light from the naked bulb over Mr Kandinsky’s bench Africana looked pinched and sick, and Mavis’s face was serious. While she examined Africana, Joe heard Mr Kandinsky call from the other room and went to see him.

  Mr Kandinsky was walking about in polished boots, wearing a combination woollen vest and long pants.

  ‘I can’t find them blankety trousers,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine, Joe,’ he added, ‘a trousers-maker without a pair of trousers to his back? Here they are.’ Grunting, he drew a pair of striped black trousers out from beneath the mattress and pulled them on. Joe told him that Mavis was in the workroom having a look at Africana, who wasn’t at all well. Joe made his face serious like Mavis's, the lips pressed tight together.

  ‘That animal,’ Mr Kandinsky said, ‘has he ever been not sick?’

  ‘Maybe we should send him back to Africa
, to his mother and father,’ Joe said.

  ‘Africa?’ asked Mr Kandinsky. ‘What’s with Africa?’

  ‘To the other unicorns,’ Joe said, a bit annoyed because Mr Kandinsky wasn’t thinking.

  ‘Oh my God, yes,’ said Mr Kandinsky. ‘Africa. Maybe we should. Quite right. Have a wine cherry, but only one.’

  Mr Kandinsky’s bedroom was almost filled by a big mahogany bed with two large feather beds on it. A huge wardrobe stuffed with clothes and books and remnants took up one wall. The other wall had a small fireplace choked with coloured crepe paper. But in the corner was a small barrel in which Mr Kandinsky made cherry wine. It was the best thing in the room, with a little tap and a mug hanging from it, full of soaked black cherries scooped from the bottom of the barrel, making the room smell always of cherries and wine. Joe took a cherry and put it into his mouth. He tasted the wine while the cherry was still on his lips. Then he bit through to the stone slowly so that the wine-taste spread right through his mouth.

  ‘So,’ said Mr Kandinsky, ‘I’m ready. Just let me put on my watch. This was my father’s own watch and chain, Joe. A real watch, with an albert. So, lead on, Macduff. Forward to the big fight.’

  In the workroom, Mavis was rubbing Africana’s chest slowly, and talking to him in a whisper.

  ‘Mavis,’ said Mr Kandinsky, ‘nice to see you. You coming to the fight?’

  ‘This animal isn’t at all well, Mr Kandinsky,’ said Mavis. She looked in Joe’s direction, and moved her head.

  ‘Joe,’ said Mr Kandinsky, ‘you can take one more cherry yourself and take some upstairs for your mother and Sonia.’

  When Joe had left, Mavis said to Mr Kandinsky, ‘This poor little soul’s torment.’

  ‘Oy,’ said Mr Kandinsky.

  ‘It’s cruel to leave him,’ said Mavis, and she was suddenly very hard and determined. ‘It’s cruel.’

  ‘What must be, must be,’ said Mr Kandinsky. ‘But wait till we go.’

  ‘That man should never have sold it to him in the first place. How could it live in Fashion Street?’ She stroked the little animal’s head just where its stunted horn buds grew so close together as to seem one horn. ‘Poor little kid,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it to the People’s Dispensary.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Mr Kandinsky with a sigh. ‘How can a kid like this grow up in Fashion Street? It’s not strong enough. I’ll find something to tell the boy.’

  Joe’s mother and Sonia came down the stairs, still talking about Sonia’s trousseau. She had a nightdress of pure silk and another one with Flemish lace neck and hem; a shame to wear them really, except in hospital.

  Joe said goodnight to Mavis, who held Africana shivering in the blanket. Mavis would look after him, and he was pleased to go into the dark street again. He hurried ahead of Mr Kandinsky and the women, and only for one moment did he want to run back again to Africana.

  ‘One kid,’ sang Mr Kandinsky quietly, ‘which myfather bought for two farthings. Goodnight, Reb Mendel,’ he said to Reb Mendel Gramophone, who stood, a little bearded shadow, at the end of the street.

  Reb Mendel’s gramophone on top of an old pram pushed its big cracked horn towards Joe, and sang in a fast high voice like tin, ‘Eli, Eli, lamahazavtani.’

  10

  In the Whitechapel Road it was all bright lights and crowds of people, smart as paint, taking a Saturday night stroll after working the week as machinists and under-pressers and cabinet-makers.

  They queued at the Roxy for the second house, two big pictures, while an acrobat turned somersaults in the road for pennies, and sangAny old iron, jangling a string of real medals. They crowded into restaurants for lemon tea, and swelled out of the public-houses waving bottles, their arms about each other’s necks, their children waiting at the doors with glasses of lemonade clasped to their narrow chests. They walked slowly along, bright ties and high-heeled patent-leather shoes, eating chips out of newspaper, careful not to let the vinegar spill on to their new clothes. Arm in arm they walked, in trilby hats, brims down, girl-friends with bright lips and dark eyes and loud laughter, mothers and fathers arguing together, calling to children licking toffee apples and taking no notice, old men talking quietly raising their eye-brows, knowing the truth of things.

  Joe strode ahead of his mother, who chatted with Mr Kandinsky, while Sonia dawdled talking to a girl with heavy pencilled eyebrows and glossy silk stockings, out with her new fiancé, a bookie’s runner and flash with wide padded shoulders to his blue double-breasted suit. Joe took giant strides past Russian Peter with his crooked beard and Russian peaked cap. Russian Peter usually had wreaths of garlic cloves and pyramids of home-pickled cucumbers on his barrow, a large box with handles mounted on two wheels, but now he had a tray with packets of sweets and chewing-gum and toffee apples. Instead of calling out, ‘Cumber, knobbel, cumber, knobbel,’ as he usually did, he said, ‘Taffee eppls, taffee eppls,’ in the same high voice. Russian Peter’s cucumbers were pickled by a special recipe he brought with him from Russia, with his peaked cap. Joe went back to ask his mother for a toffee apple. Sure enough, it had a special taste, strange, black glistening treacle.

  They allowed plenty of time for the walk to the baths, which was just as well, because what with Sonia saying hello to all her friends and their new fiancés, and Mr Kandinsky talking to this one and that, and different people asking Joe’s mother how was his father, they would be lucky to get there at all. As it was, when they arrived at the baths, Joe heard a great roar from inside, and thought, that’s it, that’s the end of the fight; we’ve missed it. But they hadn’t. It was still the last round of the fight before.

  For the wrestling season, the swimming-baths were boarded over, a relief to Joe who had been wondering how they could wrestle in baths. There were big lights over a ring in the middle, and you could make out the diving boards at one end, dim in the darkness, with canvas sheets hanging over them. There was no water beneath the boards though, because Joe dropped a small stone through them and there was no splash. It was like the railings over the pavements in the streets. If you made up your mind they were fixed, it was all right. People sat in rows, on seats in front and benches behind, while further back still they stood on wide steps, sitting on the floor in the intervals.

  Men went round with trays selling hokey-pokey ice-creams, roasted peanuts, and cold drinks, and there was a great hum of noise, which, during the fights, quietened down so that only one or two voices would be heard over the grunting of the wrestlers. Two wrestlers were tied up together on the floor of the ring, one of them grunting as he pressed down harder and harder, the other shouting out ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh!’ every time he was pressed. He wore a red mask but he was losing all the same.

  Someone called out ‘Wheel ’em out,’ and someone else shouted ‘Carve-up,’ and a red-headed woman screamed ‘Tear his arms off, Mask.’ All around people munched peanuts and drank ice-cold drinks out of bottles. As Joe sat down a man in a big coat started to eat a sandwich and a pickled yellow cucumber at once. At the end of the row where they were sitting, Joe saw Madame Rita and Lady R. Madame Rita had his arm round Lady R. He shouted ‘Chuck ’em out, they’re empty,’ waving a cigar in his other hand. Lady R watched the wrestlers closely. Her eyes stared and her lips moved in a small tight smile, and when one threw the other, she clasped her hands together, breathing out hard between her teeth. Then, when they finished, she sank back in her seat and looked round with shining eyes at Madame Rita, who squeezed her shoulder in case she was frightened.

  The end of the fight came while Mr Kandinsky was buying them roasted peanuts. The bell rang, and one of the wrestlers, puffing and blowing, had his arm held up by the referee, while the other one still writhed on the floor. Half the people cheered, and the other half booed. The two wrestlers left the ring, sweating hard, their dressing-gowns draped over their shoulders. One of them tripped on the ropes.

  There was a good echo in the baths, although with all the shouting and laughing it was diffic
ult to hear it, but sometimes there was a gap in the noise, people were suddenly quiet, as if getting their wind, and then one voice would ring out and the echo pick the words up and throw them back into the smoke and the smell of ozone. Joe would have liked to shout for the echo, but while it was all right under the arches, you didn’t like to in front of so many people, and anyhow as soon as you decided to try it, the noise started again. ‘Wheel ’em in,’ they shouted. ‘Money back, get on with it.’ But nothing happened because it was the interval.

  At the ends of the aisles St John’s men in uniforms with polished peaks and white bands sat looking out for people to faint, but no one did. Programme-sellers went up and down, shouting out that the lucky programme number got two ringsides for next week. Madame Rita had two, but bought two more, just to show off. The hokey-pokey men in white jackets did very well, and almost everyone was sucking orange and pink ice-creams or drinking from bottles or eating peanuts, crunching the shells under their feet.

  Then, just as the crowd was getting bored with lucky programmes and hokey-pokey, and restless for the big fight to start, the M.C. climbed into the ring. There was a great roar, and though he held up his arms, it went on. He shook his arms, turning from one side to the other, and the dickie front of his evening suit opened a little. ‘Ladees and gentlemen!’ he shouted, ‘your attention if you please, ladees, your attention gentlemen, please.’ The crowd quietened and the M.C. smiled. ‘For your entertainment, at great expense, Sam Spindler, the well-known harmonist, will entertain you.’ There was a groan as Sam Spindler, a thin bald-headed man in a Russian silk blouse with red ruching, and black trousers cut wide at the bottom but tight in the waist, climbed through the ropes with a piano accordion, all ivory and silver and red enamel, on his back. He bowed twice and playedTiger Rag, getting the tiger so well that lots of people threw pennies into the ring when he finished. Then he played a medley of songs likeMy Old DutchandTipperaryand everyone sang, but when he stopped and got out a piece of wood, took his accordion off and started to tap-dance, the crowd started to boo. He had to play the accordion again, which was a shame, because Joe was interested in tap-dancing and liked to watch the arms and the legs bent at the knees and the little head jerks.