The Lights of London (14 page)

‘The name’s Fisher. Jack Fisher.’ He spoke to Tibs but
was staring at Kit. She turned her head away.

Jack couldn’t believe it. She was shy! A tall, fine girl like her and she’d blushed as red as a robin’s breast. He couldn’t remember feeling so stirred since Tess had first let him kiss her.

‘Jack.
That’s me favourite name.’ Tibs was breathing huskily. ‘But there is one little problem.

‘What’s that then, lass?’ he asked, tearing his gaze away from Kit.

‘There’s this man what’s been bothering me. He’s got a bit, you know, keen on me and, how can I say it, his attentions are not welcome.’

‘You won’t have to worry about him.’ Jack reached down and ruffled the ears of the scraggy-looking mongrel who seemed attached to him by an invisible string. ‘Not with my Rex around.’

‘Is that right?’ Tibs asked, ignoring the fact that the dog looked as though it needed a bathchair. She smiled girlishly, all the while staring into his eyes with an unflinching self-possession that Kitty could hardly stand to watch, let alone imitate. It was just the way she’d been with the man whose watch she had taken. She could turn it on and off like a tap.

Jack was less analytical about Tibs’s motives and happily returned her smile – she really was a pretty little thing, although his taste had always leaned towards darker girls, like this tall one … ‘I’ll make sure you’re both safe and sound.’ He leaned forward and said softly, ‘And I’ve got another little pal to help me.’

Tibs flashed her eyebrows and grinned saucily. ‘Who’s that, then?’

He opened his jacket and pulled out a leather-covered cosh. ‘No one’ll bother you when you’re working for me.’

‘That’s all right then,’ breathed Tibs.

‘Glad to hear it. Now, let’s go upstairs to the hall and hear you sing. See what you look like up on the stage. Not too loud mind, lass, I’m feeling a bit under the weather this morning.

‘You go up first,’ Tibs said with a cheerful little wave of her hand. ‘Me and Kit need to discuss what tune we’re gonna give you. Don’t we, Kit?’

The moment Jack, accompanied by Archie and followed by Rex, had disappeared up the big staircase, Kitty turned on her heel and started towards the door. But Tibs was too quick for her. She had covered less than a few yards when Tibs threw herself across the door, barring her way.

‘Please, Kit, don’t do this to me. I need this chance to have a decent life. If I don’t then I’ll have to go back on the streets. You wouldn’t want that, would you?’

‘There are other jobs.’

Tibs gasped in wonder. ‘What other jobs? Fur pulling? Sack sewing? The match factory? They’re all lovely jobs, they are. Mind, I won’t die of a dose in there, now will I?’

‘That’s right,’ Kitty said, suddenly hopeful. ‘You won’t.

‘So tell me, Kit, what d’you want me to die of? ’Cos you know what you get doing them other jobs, don’t you?’

Kitty shook her head miserably.

‘Bad lungs. Wasting disease. Phossy jaw.’ Tibs was angry, her voice cold and hard. ‘You decide which is the best, Kit, ’cos me, I’m spoilt for choice.’

Kitty stared down at her boots, as tears began to trickle down her cheeks. ‘Don’t do this to me, Tibs. Please.

Tibs could sense her weakening. She smiled. ‘Here, did you see the way that bloke Fisher looked at you?
I reckon you could set your cap at him if you wanted.

‘I can’t do it, Tibs.

‘Just come up there with me. I’ll die of fright if I have to go up alone.’

‘No.’

‘Please?’ Now Tibs’s eyes were also brimming with fat salt tears. ‘If I can just get the courage to sing a few lines he’ll be bound to want me to do a show on me own. But I need you to be there with me.’

‘I thought you were the brave one.’

Tibs dropped her chin to her chest and began snuffling miserably. ‘That was all an act. I tried to be brave, but really I’m just a poor little thing and I’m that scared of Albert …’

Kitty sighed resignedly and Tibs realised that she might have had an easier time if she’d just told Kitty the truth in the first place. That she wanted a job, any job, where she could earn the money she so desperately needed for Polly and where she would be well out of Albert’s reach. And this job might just provide both those things. ‘I can’t stand the thought of running into him in the street, Kit …’

‘I’ll go up there with you. But I’m not singing.’

Tibs led Kitty, trembling and sniffling, up the gaudily painted curved stairway and into the theatre. ‘You sit there,’ she said, shoving Kitty backwards on to the Chairman’s table, ‘I’ve just got to have a word.

‘He all the band you’ve got?’ she asked Jack in a disappointed voice, staring down her nose at the skinny bearded man sitting at the upright piano. ‘We’d be just as well with that old boy who played for us in the bar last night.’

The piano player looked offended. ‘Do you think so, madam?’ he asked in a haughty Russian accent. ‘Well,
this is not
all the band he’s got
. Usually we are four.

‘That’s right,’ agreed Jack, mentally going through his wages bill – he’d soon have more performers than customers if he wasn’t careful. ‘There’s four of them all right.’

‘Mr Fisher asked me last night to come along this morning,’ the musician continued, ‘as a favour. So that you could have some accompaniment.’

This was news to Jack but he never said so.

‘That’s all right then,’ said Tibs primly. She bent forward and said something to the man who, in contrast to his earlier sourness, had trouble suppressing a raucous burst of laughter. Next she straightened up and with a broad smile launched into a rendition of ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay!’ that had the bottles shaking behind the bar and Fisher’s brain rattling around his head like a pea in a colander.

Between verses, she polkaed over to Kitty and hissed at her through the corner of her mouth, ‘Now don’t you let me down, Kit.’ Then, with a few surreptitious pinches and wide-eyed glares, followed by another dramatic threat of tears, Kitty finally joined in. She might have been miming badly, and prancing about the place like a startled pony, but she was joining in none the less. Just as bossy little Tibs Tyler had known she would all along.

It was wintry for late April, exceptionally so; and, with the evening growing dark and the mist rolling in off the Thames and swirling about him in great dripping folds, Albert Symes felt damp, cold and miserable. He also felt angry. He should have been inside in the warm, getting a hot, thick stew down his neck, and looking forward to a bed with clean, bug-free sheets and the company of a willing woman. But here he was, scouring the streets and alleyways around the Ratcliffe Highway, looking for someone. And he wasn’t going to give up until he found her.

One night, maybe, when he’d made his fortune he would be able to relax a bit, care more for his creature comforts, but until then he had to earn his living and that was why he was out searching the streets for that ungrateful little cow, Tibs Tyler.

When he found her he’d make sure she paid, and not only the money she owed him. She’d pay up in all sorts of ways. He’d see to that. No one made a fool of Albert Symes. Letting people think you were weak was a mistake a pimp couldn’t afford to make. The girls were lazy liberty takers at the best of times, but if they caught wind of any sign of softness on his part they’d become uncontrollable and the floodgates would open for any Tom, Dick or Harry to challenge him for his lucrative territory down by the docks. Albert had to keep order, be strong, and be seen to be strong.

He pulled his worn, white silk muffler – the ever
present stolen reminder to himself that he too would one day dress in the style he deserved – tight about his throat, buttoned his old-fashioned, flared, tight-waisted coat to his neck and pushed down his dull black hat hard on his head.

Some day he would have himself a tall, shiny topper, like his so-called betters. Then he’d show them. He’d show them all. But till then he’d just have to do his best to look like a toff, even if it was a toff of twenty-odd years ago. If he’d learned little else from his wicked brute of a mother, the importance of keeping up appearances was something he’d drunk in with her milk.

He’d watched, night after night, with a mixture of relief and fear as she prepared herself to go out, donning all her tatty finery that, in the shadows of the streets around Piccadilly and the Haymarket, allowed her to pass as an upper-class whore of at least five years younger.

The fear he had felt as a small boy was knowing that he was about to be left alone yet again in that dark, dank room, with no light and paper-thin walls that did nothing to mask the terrifying screams and yells all about him – the ever present backdrop to daily life in the rookery that was his home. But he had also felt relief, knowing that for a few hours at least he was not going to be treated as a human punch bag.

But then things had changed for young Albert.

None of the neighbours – the assorted whores, pimps and drifters who peopled those slums – had been surprised when he had run into the street screaming that he had returned from an errand to find his mother burned to death. They had all agreed that the old witch must have passed out and then passed away, completely unaware that her crude bed of rags and
matting was blazing around her. Even among her notoriously hard-drinking profession she was known for the amount of gin she regularly put away.

They had sympathised with little Albert, shaking their heads and tutting, even ruffling his filthy black hair, but had hurriedly disappeared back into their bug-infested rooms when it became clear that the boy had no one to care for him. No one in the rookery either wanted, or could afford, another mouth to feed.

And so it was that Albert was left to his own devices, no longer an abused and neglected child of a prostitute, but with no money for food or rent, a hungry, homeless orphan. In spite of the harshness of his previous young life, Albert was still frightened to find just how alone he was, but it didn’t take him long to discover the many other street urchins and ragamuffins in his position who, despite not being half as bright as he was, still seemed to get by. Some of the cleverer ones, the ones who used their cunning, even appeared to be doing quite well for themselves. And Albert began to see all sorts of possibilities.

He watched and noted how the successful ones always put their own interests above that of others, doing whatever was necessary to succeed, with no thought of what it might do to those less brave or able. And that’s what Albert did too, and it was exactly what he was doing now. Looking out for number one.

Narrowing his eyes, he chewed thoughtfully on his lip and stuck his hands deep into his pockets. They were more holes than cloth, but he had nothing else to keep out the chill, no fine, rabbit-lined gloves. Not yet. But one day he would. And he would leave this place for ever, laughing at those who did nothing to escape their stinking riverside existence, those fools with no ideas, no imagination and no determination. Not like him.
He had determination, plenty of it, and it had stood him in good stead. It had meant he always had a slice of bread and scrape for breakfast, when other kids were starving. And, as now, it had given him the strength to drive himself on, despite the bitterly cold night, to find Tibs Tyler.

He did have one trait that some, although not Albert himself, would describe as a weakness, one he could do nothing about: Albert had a temper. A temper that had so blinded him as a nine-year-old boy that he could strike a match and throw it on the bed of a drunken woman who had beaten him once too often.

Tonight the fuse of Albert’s temper was growing shorter and shorter with every blank response he got from the girls.
His
girls. If they didn’t start giving him the answers he wanted soon he would have to make an example of one of them.

But why bother to wait when there in front of him, on the corner of the street waiting for business, stood another one of the unappreciative mares?

He shot out a hand and grabbed Marie by the arm, twisting it so hard that she threw back her head and screamed in pain. Albert pulled her round to face him and slapped her hard across the cheek; something he didn’t usually do. They earned less when they had black eyes, but he couldn’t stomach her wailing.

‘Sorry, Albert,’ she stuttered, ‘I didn’t realise it was you.’

‘Obviously. Now, where’s Tibs?’

Marie shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Albert, I …’

‘Don’t waste your breath on that old toffee.’ He gripped the top of her arm, his fingers digging deep into her flesh despite the thickness of her jacket, and marched her into one of the dismal, urine-reeking alleyways that ran between the high walls of the
warehouses and surrounding tenement blocks.

He slammed her against the wall. ‘I’m; getting bored with this,’ he snarled.

His face, only inches from hers, was illuminated by the sulphurous yellow of the single gas lamp at the alley’s entrance; the pale light reflecting off his scarred, sculpted cheeks.

Marie felt sick.

‘Now, let’s start again.’ He leaned even closer. ‘Where is she?’

She gnawed nervously at the inside of her cheek. Her bowels felt as though they were turning to water. But she was Tibs’s friend, had become so soon after she’d first met Albert. When he had vowed his undying love for her, just as he had to all the other girls he’d suckered into working for him, Marie had refused to acknowledge that she was anything like them. Her relationship with Albert was different, anyone could see that, she insisted. But it wasn’t long before she was forced to admit what a fool she had been, that what she really meant to Albert was just another means of bringing in the cash.

She had thought her heart would break.

Instead of sneering at Marie, as the others had done – to cover their shame at their own past naivety – Tibs had soothed and supported her.

Such kindness had meant a lot to Marie, but she had had no way of repaying her. But she had now. Tibs was in some kind of trouble. That much was obvious, and Marie wouldn’t let her down, not even if it meant taking a good hiding for her trouble. ‘Who did you say you was looking for?’ she asked, keeping her voice as calm as she could manage, when her arm was being wrenched out of its socket.