Dodger Page 0,82

leave behind.’ Solomon drained his coffee cup and said, ‘Since it’s a long way, and my feet hurt, we will take a growler, and behave like the gentlemen we are.’

‘But that’s a lot of money!’

‘So? I should walk all that way in this rain? What are you, Dodger? You are a king of infinite space – provided that said space is underground. You are a man who picks up money for a living, and because you have a wonderful eye for it I think it makes something of an everlasting child of you. Life is fun with no responsibilities, but now you are taking on responsibilities. You have money, Dodger, as that shiny new bank book proves. And you hope to have a young lady, mmm yes? This is good for a man because responsibilities are the anvil on which a man is forged.’

Just as soon as they were outside the baths Solomon had to rescue an elderly lady who had simply patted Onan. He helped her brush herself down, then, when both her dress and Sol’s handkerchief were cleaner, he hailed a growler, which stopped without the driver having meant to, his horse’s hooves leaving sparks on the cobbles.

Once they were safe on the cushions inside, with the London rain and all its stickiness falling outside the windows, Solomon sat back and said, ‘I have never really understood why these gentlemen seem so hostile to their clientele. You would have thought that driving a growler was a job for somebody who liked people, wouldn’t you?’

It was pouring down now and the sky was the colour of a bruised plum. It was not a good day to be a tosher, but the night might be, when with any luck Dodger could be back after dinner where he belonged, underground . . . With Solomon’s recent lecture in mind, he amended it in his thoughts to ‘the place where he sometimes chose to be’.

He felt he would need to be there because he was once again feeling not entirely sure about himself. He was still Dodger, of course, but what kind of Dodger? Because he was most definitely not the Dodger that he had been a week ago. And he thought, If people change like this, how can you be sure about what you get and what you lose? I mean, these days, well, getting into a growler . . . easily done, I’m the kind of lad who goes around in growlers, not the lad with the arse hanging out of his trousers who used to run up behind them and try to hold on. Now I actually pay; would I still recognize the boy?

It looked as if the weather was shaping up to be a storm akin to the one on the night when he had met Simplicity for the first time. In front of them, the coachman himself was out in all elements and weathers, which may have had something to do with the growling, and surely only the horse could be doing the navigating in this downpour. There was nothing in the world but rain, it seemed, and now, surely against all the rules of nature, some of it was even falling upwards, since there was no room anywhere else.

At this point Dodger heard, only very slightly, the sound he had for days been subconsciously listening for – it was the squeal of metal in pain. And it was ahead of them. He dived towards the little sliding plate that enabled the inmates of a growler to speak to the coachman, if ever he wanted to listen to them, and water splashed on his face as he yelled, ‘If you overtake the coach in front of us – that one with the squeaky wheel – I will give you a crown!’

There was no answer – and how could you hear one in these crowded streets of vapour and flying water? – but nevertheless the speed of the growler suddenly changed, just as a puzzled Solomon said, ‘I am not at all sure we have a spare crown on us!’

Dodger wasn’t listening; a growler had a lot of places where somebody with quick wits could grasp and pull their way to the roof of the thing, in this case much to the extreme annoyance of the driver, who swore like the devil and shouted out above the noise of the storm that he would be mogadored if a poxy upstart was going to climb all over his vehicle.