Dodger (22 page)

I cannot recall how long I slept in that bed but I do know that
my dreams was strong, vivid and featured many shifting scenes in which Ruby was the star turn. In them she and I was busying ourselves making all manner of daring love and I was swearing to her my everlasting fidelity like I was a gallant knight of old. The kisses and caresses what she received from me was of a much more superior kind to those brief and half-hearted attentions she had received upstairs. This dream Ruby was a noisier and more appreciative lover then she had sounded above but, as is often the faithless way of dreams, she did not remain Ruby for good. Although I had been smitten with the girl for less than one day and my pure heart had already promised to be true to her alone, my tomcat of an imagination had already begun sniffing about for someone to betray her with. Ruby soon transformed into Constance Cherry, she what had worn that diamond ring I had wanted so much, and I did nothing to prevent the change. A person cannot feel guilty for what happens in a dream and I applied myself to this new bed-partner with as much vigour as I had to the girl I loved. But even Constance did not hold my dream's attention for long and she soon shifted into someone else, someone who had been visiting my dreams for many years.

Nancy. She was as glorious and as naked as the others and as we embraced I whispered about how lovely she was, even if she was much heavier than I had expected. She was on top of me then, her hair hanging down so I could not see her face, her legs astride and grinding down with force and the panting sounds she was making was rough and urgent. My dream self grew weary of her and, as wakefulness crept upon me, I wanted to look upon Ruby, to gaze on her face. So I reached up and pushed her hair away, and just before I did so I recall wondering who she would turn into now. I told myself that it was time to wake up but the woman above pushed my hand away as I reached for her hair and
I heard her murmur something in a voice I did not recognise. It was something about me showing her what I had and, as she continued to jump her now considerable weight up and down she was squealing in pleasure. I wanted the dream to go back to where it was, I had preferred it when it was just me and Ruby, but I could feel the heat in my loins bubbling up for release and I was powerless to stop it. The dream-girl's breasts was up and down like a pair of church bells on the Sabbath and, as my hips carried on thrusting away, I grabbed both as if to silence them. As I did so she threw her hair back, hair what was now orange and curly and did not seem to belong to anyone I had seen before, and she showed me a round unfamiliar face what was overheating with excitement. It was then that I made the startling discovery that I was no longer asleep.

‘Sorry to wake you, handsome,' said the merry-faced girl as she continued bouncing away on top of me. My pipe was still solid iron from the dream and she was enjoying every stiff inch of it. ‘My name's Greta,' she panted without stopping, ‘and don't fret, I'll be finished up here in no time.'

This Greta was much larger than me and she pressed me down and held me captive beneath while she carried on taking her pleasure without ever having asked permission. I tried to put up a struggle, to push her off me and say that I was in love with another, but she was so very determined to have her wicked way that I could not resist. The squeaky iron bedstead made such an almighty racket as she pounded up and down that I feared we would snap the slatting and fall through it. As I rose up to stop her she pushed me back down, ignoring my attempts to tell her that I was not a willing participant in this here sweaty coupling.

‘Tell that to the rest of you,' she giggled, continuing to ride the full length of my masculinity which, to be fair to her, was telling a very different story. And although I was much shocked to find a stranger astride me that morning I cannot claim that the experience was an unhappy one and before long I had given up fighting for my virtue and was very much getting into the spirit of the thing. ‘'At's a good boy,' she cheered me on. ‘Girrit to me.' She was, as has been acknowledged, a lady of some carriage but, as my arms reached around her and my hands explored her large, magnificent body, I raced towards that magical moment with
blissful abandon. Greta seemed to know this and, after reaching her face down to mine and covering it with kisses, she told me to give her fair warning. ‘Say when you're ready to fetch mettle, lover,' she demanded. ‘Say, and I'll climb off.' By this point my hips would not have stopped their happy thrusting had she pointed a pistol at my face and demanded me to desist. ‘Don't let Greta down now,' she said. ‘Let me know when it's time.' My arms squeezed her tighter than before, my jerks became all the more urgent and she was wise enough to take this as the best warning she would get. In a second she was off and lay beside me, her hand was around my stiff manhood and, with two clean strokes, she had helped me reach satisfaction all over the sheets. I sighed in relief and Greta gave her encouragement as I did so. ‘That's a good lad,' she said as if proud of me. ‘Better out than in.' We lay beside one another then, both breathing hard from our exertions, and I told her that this was the nicest thing that had happened to me since I had returned to England. ‘So I see,' she said, as she wiped her hand on the sheets. Then she kissed me once more, a long, tender kiss what spoke of true love between innocents, and she stroked the hairs on my chest as I got my breath back.

‘Now then,' she said, after lighting a small tobacco cigar what she had produced from a tin by the bedside for us to share, ‘that'll be five shillings by my reckoning.'

‘You what?' I asked, after drawing on the cigar.

‘You heard,' she said, taking it back.

‘What will?'

‘
What will?
' she laughed, mimicking me. She tapped me on the nose with her finger, all playful. ‘You're a funny one.' She took a puff and smiled. I sat up in the bed to see if she was jesting.

‘What am I paying you five shillings for?'

Her sweet face then turned a nasty sour. She looked upon me
with fierce eyes, a look that was made even stronger by the two long puffs of smoke what blew out of her nostrils. ‘You know why, handsome.' Her voice was a low threat. ‘For my favours.' She tapped out the ash back into the tray and crossed her arms, ready for trouble. ‘Don't be a bother now. We don't want to fall out over this, do we, me and you?'

This sudden demand for my hard-stolen money left me most flummoxed. I looked about for my nightshirt and saw that it had been thrown down onto the unvarnished floorboards and was covering the tramp's boots what I had stolen the night before. I had not draped it there and so I knew that this woman, while I was sleeping most happily, must have removed the shirt from me and tossed it there herself. It was possible, considering the hot and heavy dreams I had been having, that I had helped her off with it and put up no struggle as she positioned herself on top of me. But the fact remained that I was asleep and she had taken full advantage of my stimulated self for her own personal gratification. So the idea that I owed her even one bent farthing, let alone five blessed shillings, for the privilege of jumping up and down on me was not one I was ready to subscribe to.

‘I'll be straight with you, my gentle dumpling,' I said to her after considering the matter for less than one second, ‘the way I see it, you should be paying me.'

‘
Paying you?
' she howled, as though she had never heard anything so outrageous. ‘I like your cheek! Why ever for?'

‘For my favours,' I countered as I reached down to the nightshirt before declaring, ‘There's many a woman who would.' Her response was somewhere between a laugh and a screech but either way the effect was deafening.

‘I ain't the one what dirtied the bedding, am I, sweet prince? The proof,' she grabbed at the sheet, ‘is in this here pudding.'

I shrugged at her and pulled the nightshirt over my head. ‘That is neither here nor there,' I reasoned. ‘I did not agree to take you as a bed-partner and I never would have if asked. My heart belongs to another. And this other I would never stoop to betray.' I pulled the shirt down so it covered my parts once more. ‘At least not for five shillings.'

On hearing this Greta released a great bellow what would have disturbed every man, woman, animal or child in the surrounding area. ‘This is my room, you cheeky wretch!' she cried, getting all hysterical. ‘My room where I works and brings men, young and old, back for my favours. They all pays me what they owes and so must you, handsome or no.' She was thumping me hard in the chest now, seething anger and I grew most frightened. ‘If you creep into my room, and I don't recall inviting you in, then you're here for business. And you must obey my one simple rule. You fetch, you owe!' She pulled back and held her head up in pride. ‘I have a malingering father and four lazy brothers to support. I don't expect to work for nothing.'

‘Greta!' Ruby's voice came from behind the closed door. ‘What's all this fuss? Who you shouting at? Is that Jack?' Her key rattled in the door and she entered to find Greta, naked and furious while I cowered next to her in the bed. Ruby was fully clothed in another red dress and she seemed most vexed at the scene she was witnessing.

‘This ain't what it looks like, Rube,' I promised her. ‘She forced herself upon me.' I pulled the strings of the nightshirt in tight. ‘I begged her to stop.' Ruby looked to Greta.

‘That ain't true,' Greta huffed. ‘I never forced him to nothing he didn't want, the lying toad. It was all love and kisses until it came time to pay up.'

‘I was fast asleep when she found me,' I cried in response. ‘It was a disgraceful assault upon my innocent person.'

‘Yeah, well, I ain't no bear in a fairy tale,' Greta continued. ignoring me. ‘If I find someone lying in my bed I don't roar and chase them off, I get in with them and I set myself to work.' Ruby sighed as if this was something that was often happening.

‘I let him in here, Greta,' Ruby explained. ‘I thought you wasn't coming back until tonight.'

‘Well, come back I did,' my attacker sniffed. ‘And in my line of work you don't turn down easy trade when it presents itself.' She looked at me like I was a dog what had messed in her bed and shook her head in disappointment, ‘And now he's trying to weasel out of paying me five well-earned shillings.'

Ruby listened to both our stories and then stood in judgement before us, like she had the wisdom of Solomon deciding whether or not to divide a baby in half.

‘Jack,' she said at last, ‘did you fetch or did you not?'

‘Course he did,' said Greta, showing her the sheets.

‘Then you owe Greta five shillings,' she decreed. ‘Now be a good lad, pay the woman, put your trousers on and meet me upstairs. We've a morning's work to be getting on with.'

*

I did not have five shillings to pay Greta and this led to another almighty rumpus between us. I told her I was only kipping in her bed because I had no money and that if I had five shillings I wouldn't be nowhere near this crap-house in the first place. In the end she agreed to give me until this evening to pay her back and, now that she knew I was pals with Jem and Ruby, she said that she might even open an account for me with a view to future transactions. I had no intention of requiring her services ever again but I did assure her I was good for the money owed and that, in a gesture of goodwill, I would stand her a glass of gin in the Cripples some time soon. This softened her at last, and with the
big white sheet wrapped round her she walked me to the door and curtsied all dainty as I left to go back upstairs to Ruby's. ‘But don't be getting my shillings from no coiners,' she warned me before shutting the door, ‘cos I always know a forgery.'

Upstairs in Ruby's bedroom Jem was lying in that menacing old bed of theirs, buried under three thick different coloured blankets and looking as likely to emerge as that gardener he had buried the night before was to rise up from the sod. ‘Next time you sing one of your ballads,' I said to Ruby after hearing his arse carrying on like a battered trumpet, ‘you should get Jem to accompany you. Audiences love a horn section.' She laughed but told me that I should not be making fun of her fancy man, not when he had agreed to lend me some of his finest togs to go finding in.

It was shameful to me that I had appeared at this address in the early hours of the morning with fewer possessions than a vagrant. I was most keen to get out among the people and practise my art so I could pay for my own things and not go on living off the charity of an inferior thief. Jem was top-sawyer now, this was clear from the flash clothes what Ruby was laying out for me to pick from, but I was itching to show her that this situation was only ever a fleeting one, an irregularity what had come about from my getting lagged at an unfortunate age and one what would soon be corrected. She might well have been impressed with his success as a cracksman up until now, I thought as I perused his many shirts, but today she would see a real thief in action.

The floor was strewn with many other male garments, shirts of flaring orange, trousers of garish green, and none of these much appealed. ‘That superfine?' I then asked when she produced a black shirt and trouser set what looked to be of the highest quality. Ruby let me touch the cloth and it indeed felt like something worth having. ‘I'll take it,' I said. ‘I'm in a black mood.'

‘I can't imagine why,' Ruby replied as she began opening more drawers and closets in the search for other genteel items what I might wear. ‘You seemed to have had a fine old time with Greta just then.'

I could not tell whether she said these words in jealousy but I was hopeful that she had. As I tried on Jem's trousers and rolled up the legs on the inside, I reflected that it was hard to tell whether she cared about me or not and so I just grunted a reply and continued to peruse the many fine things that Jem had either purloined or purchased for himself with stolen money. I found myself feeling amazed and covetous at all the many possessions in that house. Ruby presented me with a thick scarf, what would hide the ringed scar Warrigal had left around my neck, and a coat in matching black. To adorn myself I had a choice of watches, chains, pins, rings and studs, all glittering gold or silver. If I was to move unnoticed among real quality today I would have to blend in with them.