May every day be as good as this! Who would be a working man on such a day? A skilled chimney sweep would have to work for a week to get the money he had picked up today. Oh, to be a tosher on a day like this!
Then he heard the groan . . .
Dodger edged his way round the rat and into the smaller sewer, which was half choked with debris – much of it pieces of wood, some of them sharp as knives – and all the other detritus that had last night been dislodged. But to Dodger’s astonished gaze it appeared that most of the debris was a man, and that man did not look well; there was nothing very much where one eye should have been, but the other one was opening now and it looked Dodger in the face. It stank, the face Dodger looked into, and he shuddered, because he knew it.
He said, ‘That’s you, Grandad, isn’t it?’
The oldest tosher in London looked as if he had been tortured, and Dodger almost threw up when he saw the rest of him. He must have been working by himself, just like Dodger, and got caught up when the flood came down, and there would have been everything in it, anything that someone had thrown away or lost or wanted to hide and dispose of. A lot of it had apparently smashed into Grandad, who was nevertheless trying to sit upright, covered in bruises, bleeding and coloured with all sorts of nastiness, such as only a flooded sewer could provide.
Grandad spat mud – at least, Dodger hoped it was only mud – and said weakly, ‘Oh, it’s you, Dodger. Good to see you in such fine fettle, in a manner of speaking; you’re a good lad, I always said so, smarter than I ever was, see. So what I want you to do now, right now, is to get a pint of the worst brandy you can find, and bring it back down here and pour it down this thing what used to be my throat, right?’
Dodger tried to pull some of the stuff away from the old man, who groaned and mumbled, ‘Trust me on this one. I am banged about like nobody’s business, fool that I am, and at my age too! Should have known better, silly old fool. I reckon I have eaten more than my peck today and so it’s time to die. Be a lovely lad and get me the liquor right now, there’s a good boy; there’s a sixpence and a crown and five pennies in my right hand, and they’re still there ’cos I can feel it, and that is all for you, my lad, you lucky boy.’
‘Here,’ said Dodger, ‘I’m not taking anything from you, Grandad!’
The old tosher shook his head, such as was left of it, and said, ‘Firstly I ain’t your grandad really, you boys only give me the name just ’cos I’m older than what you lot are, and by the Lady you will take my stuff when I’m gone, ’cos you are a tosher and a tosher will take what he finds! Now I knows where I am and I knows there is a bottle shop just round the corner, up there downstream. Brandy, I said, the worst they’ve got, and then remember me fondly. Now piss off right now, or be followed by the curse of a dying tosher!’
Dodger came out of the next drain cover at a run, found the rather greasy bottle shop, bought two bottles of a brandy that smelled as if it could cut a man’s leg off and was back climbing down the drain almost before the echoes of his leaving Grandad died away.
Grandad was still there, and was dribbling something cruel, but there was something like a smile when he saw Dodger, who handed him the first open bottle, which he threw down his throat in one long glug. Some of it spilled out of his mouth as he beckoned for the other, saying, ‘This will suit me right enough, oh yes indeed, just the way a tosher should go.’ Then his voice dropped to a whisper, and with his one relatively good hand he grabbed at Dodger and said, ‘I saw her, lad; the Lady, standing large as life just where you are now, all crimson and gold and shining like the sun on a sovereign. Then she blew me a kiss and beckoned to me and scarpered, only in a ladylike way, of course.’
Dodger didn’t know what to say, but managed to say it anyway. ‘You’ve taught me a lot, Grandad. You taught me about the Lady of the Rats. So look, get the taste of the sewer out of your mouth, and then I reckon I can pull you out of here to somewhere better. Let’s give it a try, please?’
‘Not a chance, lad. I reckon if you were to pick me up right now I’d fall to bits, but if you don’t mind you will find the time to stay with me for a little while.’ In the darkness there was another liquid noise as Grandad took a further draught of the fiery brandy and went on, ‘You was a bloody good learner, I will say that for you; I mean, most of the lads I see doing it just don’t have the nose for toshing, but it done me good all these years to see how you was treating toshing like one of them professors going through all them books. I seen you just look at a whole pile of shite and your eyes would twinkle like you knew that there was definitely something worthwhile under there. That’s what we do, lad – we find value in what them above throw away, what they don’t care about. And that means people too. I seen you toshing, lad, and knew you had toshing in your blood, just like me.’ He coughed, and bits of his broken body moved in a rather ghastly dance. ‘I know what they call me, Dodger – king of the toshers. The way I see it, that’s you now and you have my blessing on it.’ What was left of his mouth smiled. ‘Never did know who your dad was, did you, lad?’
‘No, Grandad,’ said Dodger. ‘Never knew and probably neither did my ma; don’t know who she was neither.’ Water dripped off the ceiling as Dodger stared at nothing much and said, ‘But you were always Grandad to me, I certainly know that, and if you hadn’t given me the knowing of the toshing I would never have found out about all of them places down here in a month of Sundays, like the Maelstrom and the Queen’s Bedroom and the Golden Maze and Sovereign Street and Button Back Spin and Breathe Easy. Oh yes, that place saved my bacon a dozen times when I was still learning! Thank you for that, Grandad. Grandad . . .? Grandad!’
Then Dodger was aware of something in the air, or perhaps the subtle sound of something that had been there and then gently ceased to be so. But there was still something there; and as Dodger leaned over he felt something carried on the last breath and was simply hovering as Grandad said, from wherever he was now, ‘I can see the Lady, lad, I can see the Lady . . .’
Grandad was smiling at him, and went on smiling until the light in his eyes faded, when Dodger then leaned down and respectfully opened the man’s hand to take the legacy that was duly his. He counted out two coins, which he solemnly placed on the dead man’s eyes because, well, it was something you had to do because it had always been done. Then he looked into the gloom and said, ‘Lady, I am sending to you Grandad, a decent old cove who taught me all I know about the tosh. Try not to upset him ’cos he swears something cruel.’
He came out of the sewer as if Hell and all its demons were following behind him. Suspecting that it might well be so, he ran the short distance to Seven Dials and the comparative civilization that was in the little tenement attic where Solomon Cohen lived and worked and did business in a small room above a flight of stairs, which being high up gave him a view of things that he probably did not want to see.
1 Cockney rhyming slang, short for Richard the Third, which rather happily rhymes with another interesting word.
CHAPTER 3
Dodger gets a suit that is tough on the unmentionables, and Solomon gets hot under the collar
IT WAS RAINING again as Dodger got to the attic, a dreadful sombre drizzle. He fretted outside while the old man went through his convoluted process of unlocking the door, then spun Solomon round when he hurtled through. Solomon was old enough and wise enough to let Dodger lie in a smelly heap on the old straw mattress at the back of the attic until he was ready to be alive again, and not just a bundle of grief. Then Solomon, like his namesake being very wise, boiled up some soup, the smell of which filled the room until Onan, who had been sleeping peacefully beside his master, woke up and whined, a sound like some terrible cork being twisted out of a dreadful bottle.