The Newgate Jig (27 page)

'Pa,'
I said to him, 'Pa.'

And that was my
childhood, snatched away. I have never sung childish rhymes nor played childish
games, nor yelled and hallooed in the streets. Christmas songs I have never
sung, nor Easter hymns, nor Harvest Home, yet I know every word and every note.
And I have never called for my mother or my father since.

That ravaged
childhood I re-live in dreams and in those dark places inhabited by my blue
devils. My little life, when I begged and tramped, when I found kindness and
cruelty. Children can make a home anywhere, even the gutter. If they have
nowhere to go, they will crouch for hours watching the trickle of water,
floating any scrap of dirt in that stream and make a boat of it. They will make
the filthy gutter a home, rather than look up. For when the child raises its
head, then it must see the world as it is: the boots that kick and the fists
that strike and the mouths that roar and spit.

Who
will care for this child? Who will take its part?

Silence

There was a real
commotion in Portland-road as I turned the corner, and all of it outside number
twenty-two.

But I hardly noticed
it, for I was bursting with new resolve. I had walked myself into the shape of
a new Bob Chapman, who was a man of action and resolve. From this moment, Bob
Chapman will come out of the shadows, and stand in the sun.

I would seek out
Will and Trim. We would go to the magistrate. I would make him understand.

So
I determined.

And
then I turned my attention to Portland-road.

The front door
of number twenty-two was flung open, wide open, in a very uncustomary way. The
window of the downstairs front parlour, Mrs Twentyfold's private room, was
also flung open and her good lace curtains were flapping about and dragging
upon the dirty sill. I was uncertain whether to hurry towards or away from the
house, but the decision was quickly made for me when Miss Slyte, one of our
neighbours, a vast dumpling of a woman, who trimmed bonnets and kept cats,
noticed me on her return from the gin-shop and waddled at me at an alarming
speed.

'Ah!
ye gob-shite, ye!' she shrieked, for she is of Irish ancestry and leaned heavily
upon that accent. 'Look at the trouble you bring upon this house and this good
lady wid yer evil friends and yer evil doings!' and she struck me hard upon the
chest, pushing her red face, heavily perfumed with the contents of a
gin-bottle, into mine. 'Look at the trouble, here!' she cried and she grabbed
my elbow and steered me to the house and up the steps, as though I was the very
criminal they had been seeking and she had caught him!

'Here he is,'
she cried triumphantly, 'the sneaking dog-face, with his animals a-slinking
behind him like the villains they are,' and we were all, Brutus, Nero and I,
thrust into Mrs Twentyfold's parlour, a room which was so very closely guarded
that I had never even glimpsed inside it before now. It was small, made even smaller
by the quantity of people pressed in there. All sorts of unfamiliar persons
were seated, standing, perched upon tables and sills, leaning and squatting
against the walls and threatening to upset any number of my landlady's mats and
doilies which covered every surface like a snowstorm. The air was full of heat
and loud chatter, and in the midst of it all, on a hard chair, was Mrs
Twentyfold herself, half a glass of gin in her hand and her cap lurching
drunkenly over one eye. She gave me a curious look, which changed by the moment
from curiosity to recognition to outrage.

'You!' she
cried. 'This is all your doing, you and your - associates.'

Someone patted
her shoulder, and another refilled her glass.

'They rushed her
and knocked her to the ground in her own kitchen,' murmured a swarthy-chinned
man with two fat rabbits slung over his shoulder, drinking gin from one of Mrs
Twentyfold's best cups, 'and rampaged through the 'ouse.'

If he had
broadcast it in the street, with a band and cheerful banners, it could not have
provoked more attention, for everyone in the room heard him and felt obliged to
express their own opinion of me and my character, my friends and my profession
loudly and vigorously.

I gathered - it
was not too difficult - that there had been a burglary, outrageous and in full
daylight. That the burglars - some agreed two, others three, all powerful and
dressed as road-menders - charged through Mrs Twentyfold's area and kitchen,
knocked her to the floor and went through the house 'like a hurricanoe'. It was
a bold enterprise, and though my good landlady was unhurt - except for the
damage to her pride in being tumbled to the flags and banging her elbow upon
the fender - it came to something, everyone agreed, when a respectable house
could be so entered and taken apart in the middle of a Tuesday morning. The
police were summoned and had attended; the sergeant would see Mrs Twentyfold
later at the station, but no one expected any great effort from them. My fellow
lodgers had been discovered and brought back from their places of work; I had
been sent for at the Aquarium and the Pavilion but could not be found.

'And no wonder,
ye Ned Fool,' roared Miss Slyte, 'since ye were slinging about here a-waiting
for yer thievin' pals!'

Did they really
believe I had arranged the robbery? Or had anything to do with it? Perhaps my
incredulity, writ large upon my face, satisfied some of them, but a rumble of
suspicion still drummed about the room. The bag-man and the thin clerk who
lodged above me (I never discovered their names) said they had already examined
their quarters.

'Nothing
missing from mine,' whispered the bag-man. 'But nothing in there anyway, except
a tea-pot which belonged to the previous.'

'Likewise,'
wheezed the clerk, who was anxiously binding himself up in his muffler
preparatory to leaving for his desk. 'Turned my mattress for me. Dusted the
mantle.
Nusquam captus.'

The rabbit-man
was on his second cup. His rabbits, having begged a ride upon his shoulder,
were slumped there with an easy grace, glassy eyes winking at me.

'I've had a
sniff round,' he said importantly, but to no one in particular. 'Nothing taken,
as far as I can see, though a deal of mess.' And then he eyed me. 'Except your
room. Second floor? Back?'

An odd feeling crept
into my belly, for an audacious robbery, in the middle of the day, nothing
taken and Mrs Twentyfold, who wore a deal of jet and a purse snapped about her
waist, only knocked to the ground, was more than out of the commonplace.
Pushing through the casually curious who were not admitted to the inner sanctum
and had taken up residence on the stairs, I hurried to my room, where the door
stood ajar. As the rabbit-man had pronounced, there was a deal of mess.
Everything had been turned over - bed, mattress (which was ripped apart and
the flock bubbling out of it like porridge), shelves, even my coal bucket and
the floorboards. I closed the door to the curiosity of people who would keep
wandering in and looking about them and staring at me as though I was suddenly
going be alarming. Brutus and Nero made themselves comfortable before the dead
fire. The clump of feet and the murmur of voices echoed from below. I perched
on the edge of the bed and considered. I must have been spied out on my
errands, and the Nasty Man had taken the opportunity to organize a thorough
search of my room. Otherwise it was a grand coincidence.

Perhaps
this was the start of his campaign.

A regular
turning-over, the destruction of my few possessions. And then one day me. Or
my dogs.

I
would leave for Strong's Gardens today.

I set to and put
my room to rights. I cleared all my belongings, put them all in a pile on the
table (it was a very small pile). Mrs Twentyfold could do what she wanted with
them. I worked quickly and assembled the half-dozen penny novels, two cracked
cups and a frying pan with a loose handle, a knife, fork and spoon, a tea tin
painted with pink Japanese flowers.

It was done. I
sat on my bed and contemplated my worldly assets. They were few enough, but
nothing I minded leaving behind. The tea tin had but a single spoonful left in
it and it was the appeal of a simple cup of tea to cheer me on my way that took
me down the stairs to fill my kettle in the scullery and to let Brutus and Nero
out into the area. In the hall was evidence of much to-ing and fro-ing, for Mrs
Twentyfold's polished banister rail was dull and sticky, and there were drips
and spots on the stairs. The painting of a watchful Saviour had been pushed
awry and stray cups stood on every surface. From the parlour came the murmur of
voices, and a knock upon the door went unanswered.

There
came another knock.

I had been
instructed by my landlady on many occasions not to answer the door upon any
account, and I was still eager to please. I ignored it. But when the knock came
a third time, and heavily, I wondered if it might be a policeman to see about
the robbery, and since no one emerged from the parlour to answer, I opened it
myself. Brutus and Nero were at my heels, curious to see the visitor.

It wasn't that
the sun was bright, or that I was distracted by an insult or a blow on the
chin, but for a moment I could not make out the two figures standing before me.
Neither did I see the covered cart in the road. But suddenly I realized who and
what they were, not because I recognized them, but because there was something
terrible in their faces. I tried to shut the door. One had his foot already in,
and the other shoved me hard to the floor, and by the time I regained my feet,
they had grasped Brutus and Nero by their collars - the dogs struggled a
little, but made no sound, for that was their training - and dragged them onto
the pavement.

It
all happened very quickly.

Now I know them.
They were part of the crew who bashed me, and I think I saw one at the Fish-lane
gaff. The thicker, darker, uglier of the two faced me from the pavement. He had
Nero on a choke, struggling to get away.

'You had plenty
of warnings, Mr Chapman, so now we're taking these beauties,' he said in a low
voice, and then raised it for the benefit of every passer-by. 'For ill-treating
these beautiful creatures! For training them up to be wicious curs! You ought
to be ashamed of yourself! Why, they attacked a man only the other evening!'

A soberly
dressed woman gave me an indignant look. 'Monster!' she cried. 'Shame on you!'

The dark man
nodded his head vigorously, and put on an air of outrage.

'True to you,
madam. Sure, shame upon you, sir!' he cried. 'And thank 'eaven for societies
like ours what rescue these poor dawgs and give 'em a good 'ome.'

The woman
agreed, and even gave him a coin from her purse, patted him upon the shoulder
and raised her fist at me, which his companion found hysterically funny.

I lunged at him
and tried to grab Nero's collar, but the man had attached - how had he managed
it so quickly? - a rigid lead, with a choke upon it, so that my attempt to free
him and every movement Nero made was strangling him!

'Give it up,
man,' he cried, 'unless you want to kill the creature dead,' and he bundled
Nero into the back of the closed black wagon. Brutus followed, his tail between
his legs and, straining against the choke, he turned his head to try and find
me. But he was roughly thrust into the cart, the door was slammed shut, the
bolt pulled across.

I rushed into the
parlour, knocking over a plant and rattling the china. There was a collection
of half a dozen matrons gathered about Mrs Twentyfold's table, and they stared
at me in amazement and anger. Miss Slyte, of course, rose to the occasion.
'Out! Out, ye heathen, ye! Don't ye even have the decency in ye to knock upon
the wood of the door and wait for a lady to call you in!'

I tried to
appeal to Mrs Twentyfold, but she would not look at me. If only I could
persuade her to pull back her lace curtains and look through the open window,
she would see what was happening outside. But she turned her head away.

I opened my
mouth, and felt my throat tighten, just as it does in my dreams, and I tried to
shout. But there was nothing, not even a breath. I could not make a sound.

I ran outside
again, and looked up and down the street. I was so completely associated with
the robbery that our neighbours shunned me, and when I hammered upon the
doors, no one came.