Dodger Page 0,15
mind you mention that last word. Maybe you could think of it as spending part of your legacy, mmm from the late Mister Grandad? And while you’re about it, take Onan with you – he could do with the exercise, poor old thing.’
Dodger had started to argue before he realized that this would be stupid. Solomon was right; if you lived on the streets that’s where you died, or perhaps, as in the case of old Grandad, underneath them. And it seemed the right thing somehow to spend part of his gift from Grandad – and the bounty from the sewers – on smartening himself up a bit, and it would help to look better if he was to try this new line of work . . . he liked the idea of more specie from Mister Charlie. Besides, if you were going to help a lady in distress, it paid to look smart while you were doing so.
He set off, trailed by Onan, who was overjoyed at going out in daylight, and you just had to hope that he didn’t get carried away. For all dogs smell – this being a chief, nay essential component of being a dog when being able to smell and be smelled is of great importance – but it had to be said that Onan not only smelled like every other dog; he introduced a generous portion of Onan smell into the mix as well.
They headed for the shonky shop to see Jacob and, if Dodger remembered correctly, Jacob’s rather strange wife whose wig, however you looked at it, never quite seemed to be right. Jacob ran a pawnshop as well as the shonky shop, and Dodger knew that Solomon suspected that Jacob also bought things without troubling himself where they came from, although he never said why he suspected that.
The pawnshop was where you took your tools if you were out of work, and where you bought them back again when you were back in the job, because it’s easier to eat bread than eat hammers. If you were really skint you popped your unnecessary clothes too; well, at least some of them. If you never turned up to buy them back they would go into the shonky shop, where Jacob and his sons worked all day sewing and mending and cutting and seaming and generally turning old clothes into, if not new clothes, at least into something respectable. Dodger found Jacob and his sons quite friendly.
Jacob greeted Dodger with an expensive grin, which is one where the seller hopes that the buyer is going to buy something. He said, ‘Why, it’s my young friend who once saved the life of my oldest friend, Solomon, and . . . put that dog outside!’
Onan was tied up in the little yard behind the shop with a bone to worry at – and good luck to him in that endeavour, Dodger thought, since any bone that got given to a dog in old London town had already had all the goodness boiled out of it for soup. This didn’t seem to trouble Onan all that much, and so he snuffled and crunched in happy optimism, and Dodger was ushered back inside, made to stand in the very small space available in the middle of the shop and treated like a lord going to one of the nobby shops you found in Savile Row and Hanover Square, although quite probably in those places the clothes you put on hadn’t already been worn by four or five people before you.
Jacob and his sons bustled around him like bees, squinting at him critically, holding up only slightly yellow ‘white’ shirts in front of him and then whisking them away before the next tailor was magically there, holding up a pair of highly suspect pants. Clothes spun past, never to reappear, but never mind because here came some more! It was: ‘Try these – oh dear no’; or, ‘How about this? Certain to fit – oh no, never mind, plenty more for a hero!’
But he hadn’t been a hero, not really. Dodger remembered that day three years ago when he had been having a really bad afternoon on the tosh, and it had started to rain, and he had heard that somebody else had picked up a sovereign just ahead of him so he was feeling angry and irritable and wanted to take all that out on somebody. But when he was back on the foggy streets, there had