“I wish ’e was dead, Boysie,” she said to me one hot August morning as we sat slicing up a horse steak.
“Dead, mother? Who?”
“Hollins!”
“Why, mother?”
“Cos ’e’s cruel, Boysie!” She lifted one fragile white hand and pushed back the hair which framed her face. “Look! He did that to me last night with a fag.”
I felt a sudden hatred for Hollins as I looked at the four neatly placed burn marks on my mother’s cheek. “Why’d he do that, mother?”
“Cos I wouldn’t kiss him. Well ’e stunk someink terrible, he did. Bin on the rum half the day, he had.” She shivered. “I hate ’im more than I ever hated your father, I’ll tell yer.”
“I’ll kill ’im if you like, mother.” I slashed at the meat. “I’ll slit his throat and chop his head off if you want me to.”
She let the hair flop about her face. She looked at me with a tenderness I’d never before witnessed. “I couldn’t let yer do that, Boysie. That’d be murder. Young as you are, they’d ’ang you for it.”
“Not if they never find out.” I selected a cube of meat and sliced it neatly. “And I know a way that I could get rid of him for sure. No one’d never discover what happened to ’im, and we could have a business and everything. Just me and you, mother. We’d be laughing. We’d be rich.”
There was a silence. I chopped more meat. Slowly. “But if I done him, mother, you’d have to make me a very special promise.”
“And what’s that, darling Boysie?” she cooed.
“You’ve got to promise never no more to go with other blokes. No kissin’ and cuddlin’, like. No more getting married.”
She smiled, leaned forward and kissed me gently on the forehead. “Of course, I promise. There’s only one man I need and that’s you . . . my darling little Boysie.”
I loved it.
Well, mother and me we worked it together. I done Hollins with a specially sharpened carver when he was totaling up his week’s takings in the upstairs back bedroom, then between us mother and me chopped him up into little lumps and mixed best part of him with the catsmeat on the window trays. Went down a treat with the clients, he did and old Mrs. Sollicutts from the buildings, a regular catsmeat eater, came back a-drooling, begging for more of that “real, lovely liver, what was the best she’d ever tasted!”
In fact, before Mr. Hollins was exhausted, mother and me were showered with flattering compliments.
“Delicious, braised!” said Beattie Flower, the barmaid from the Sailors’ Haven.
“Sure and I wouldn’t be after wasting choice cuts like that on my moggie,” enthused Old Man Murphy the Irish street fiddler.
“Nicest meat pie me mummy ever made,” commented little Timmy Brown, the postman’s son.
Course, it didn’t take long for mother and me to realize the potential. If we could get a regular supply of Hollinsmeat . . . well . . . we could bump our prices and make a fortune. Naturally, even though he was a big bloke, Hollins didn’t go far once he was diced up . . . and, I mean, there was a hell of a lot of wastage, like bones, teeth, hair . . . things like that (which we just buried in the yard) and it began to look, by the end of the week, that mother and me were going to be stuck with the regular line in catsmeat.
Any old rate, one night, mother and me were sitting in the cosy little parlor, downstairs back, she combing and brushing her long, golden hair and me just sitting back in this old rocker, gaping at her and marveling at her beauty when all of a sudden she looks at me with those green-gray gorgeous eyes of hers and says:
“Y’know, Boysie, mother’s been thinking.”
“Yes, mother. And what have you been thinking about?”
“Our future, darling.”
She tossed back her head and her soft hair seemed to float about that china-doll face.
“We could make a lot of money, y’know, if we . . . well, darling Boysie . . . if we could obtain another consignment of meat same as Mister Hollins.”
“But Mister Hollins has all run out, mother . . . ’cept for that pound of rump we’ve been saving for ourselves.”
She gave me a very fond smile and my heart went boomp, boomp, boomp! She said: “There are other gentlemen like Mister Hollins.”
I frowned: “You’re not thinking of goin’ a-courting again, are you, mother?”
She pouted her luscious lips: “Mmmmm . . . well . . . sort of!”
A sudden sort of evil-hate feeling came over me. “But you promised, mother,” I said. “No more chaps. No more kissing and cuddling. No more . . .”
“There’ll be no kissing, darling. No cuddling. I’ll just go parading around the bars and backstreets where the big men gather . . . and I’ll entice them with me looks.”
“Entice?” I felt this dark rage welling up. “Sounds dirty. What’s it mean, mother?”
She put her finger to her lips and thought for a moment. “Entice means . . . lure!”
“Lure?”
“Well . . . seduce!”
“Sounds dirty too,” I said. I frowned. “You promised.”
Like the tinkling of bells was her laughter. “Silly, darling Boysie,” she trilled. “Mother loves you. All mother’s suggesting is that she brings,” she wagged a finger, “just brings, mind you, these gentlemen home.”
I whined. “But why, mother?”
“So that you, my darling, can dispatch them, same way as you dispatched the late Mr. Hollins!”
The evil-hatred feeling flew away from me like a passing dark raven. I felt love now. Love for this mother of genius.
“Then we chops ’em up,” I enthused, “just like we chops up the late Mr. Hollins . . . and we sells ’em at twice the normal catsmeat price per pound and its all profit and within a year or so we’ll be livin’ in style . . . wahoooo!”
She came over and draped her arms about me, pulling my face to her springy bosom, till I almost sweetly stifled in that tender flesh. “Oh, my lovely Boysie,” she cooed. “Won’t it be wonderful?”
Illustration by Tim Kirk.
During the next year a brigade of gentlemen passed through our street door. Mr. Hargreaves, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Squires, Mr. McCauley, Mr. Hartwell, Mr. Smith, Mr. O’Grady, Mr. O’Toole, O’Hara and O’Dee. Mr. Wallington-Smith, and D’Arcy-Jones, Mr. Ivor D. Evans from somewhere in Wales . . . by the dozen they came and went. Mother enticing ’em, me dispatching ’em and all of ’em, rich and poor, holy and unholy, young and middle-aged ending up as slices and cubes on the catsmeat trays in the window. It was a marvelous arrangement and with our bank balance swelling like a fat man’s belly, mother and me were seriously considering bigger and classier premises . . . and all the while the fame of our tasty catsmeat spread wider abroad, people coming from as far afield as Hammersmith Broadway and Kings Cross to buy.