steal from his own mother who had always done the best she could for him, but he was only a boy and he wasn’t very bright, he just liked to play with bits of coloured paper, so if she could have her money back, she paused and leered in expectant servility.
Mr Daunders knew when he was beaten. He gave her the two ten-shilling notes, and since she was an honest woman and a good mother she didn’t keep them both. She gave one to Noddy.
‘There y’are, ma son,’ she said tenderly, and threw him across the kitchen in the excess of her affection. ‘There’s your share like you promised me. And the next time you find anything jist you let me know and don’t go causing a lot of bother keeping things tae yersel. Ye’ve goat tae let yer mammy know. Yer mammy’s yer best friend.’
Noddy took the note silently. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with it, but it was good to have it in his pocket again.
‘Ah ye’re a guid wee boy,’ his mother grinned, and she rumpled his long uncombed hair. Noddy jerked his head away and scowled. Any show of affection distressed him.
He was even more upset to find he was in the bad books of the Brotherhood. The news of his interrogation had spread with the speed of foot and mouth disease, and he was brought on his knees before Percy at the next Friday Night Service. Percy was frightened. First the stranger and now Noddy’s two ten-shilling notes. He saw them as two straws that suggested there was a wind rising somewhere, but he didn’t know where to look for it.
‘I gave you a pound note,’ he said severely to Noddy. ‘How did you come to be caught with a couple of ten-bob notes? Tell me that.’
‘I changed the note you gave me,’ Noddy declared, primed in advance by Savage. He tried to rub one of his knees as he was forced to remain on them by Specky and Skinny while the Regent Supreme examined him. It was a most uncomfortable position. He wasn’t used to it. Looking at the squalid urchin Percy had an idea. He must get them all to kneel during the Friday Night Service.
‘What did you go and get it changed for?’ he demanded with the soul-searching stare in his mournful eyes again.
‘Because,’ said Noddy. ‘Let me go, let me up! Ah never told nuthin. Ah swear it, Ah kept the oath. You ask old Daundy. He’ll tell you Ah never told him nuthin.’
‘What did you change it for if you’re saving up?’ Percy persisted. ‘You’re sure nobody else has been giving you grace?’
‘Course Ah’m sure,’ Noddy complained, rubbing the other knee ostentatiously. ‘Let me up! Ah’ve got a sore knee. Sure you’re the only one with a key. Who else could it be?’
‘If I find any of yous fellows coming in here behind my back,’ Percy addressed the congregation threateningly, ‘I’ll burn the whole lot, so I will. Have you no respect for nothing? I made you make a gentlemen’s agreement, I taught you about El and how powerful he is if you keep him secret, and now you go flashing ten-bob notes in the school. I don’t like it. If there’s the least danger of strangers getting a lead into the sanctuary of El we’d be much better to burn the chests and all that’s in them. I’m warning yous.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Savage, squatting at the right foot of the Regent. ‘You’re the only wan wi’ a key. Whit are ye worrying aboot?’
‘All right,’ Percy said grudgingly. ‘I’ll let it go but I’m telling yous I don’t like it, I don’t like it one little bit, so I don’t but.’
Savage smiled, and Percy passed sentence. Noddy was condemned to forfeit payment for four weeks for being caught in possession of the money they had all sworn never to be found with. Noddy wasn’t bothered. It was enough for him that he could get up off his knees. He relied on Savage for the month that followed. Savage had promised to give him double his ration if he didn’t let Percy find out where the ten-shilling notes had come from.
His mother wasn’t bothered either when the other cleaners talked about her son being up before the headmaster for stealing money.
‘He never stole it, he found it,’ she said, choosing to concede at last that she had heard them talking behind her back and under her nose. She shook out a duster as if she were a toreador at a bullfight, her torso swivelling on her enormous hips. ‘And I may say for your information if you’re interested that my Nicky is a good son to me. Anything he does steal he brings straight home to his maw. He’s always been a good boy, I don’t care what yous say about him.’
‘There’s nobody saying anything about him,’ said Mrs Phinn, gaunt and chilling.
‘Not bloody much,’ said Mrs Mann. ‘Dae yous think I don’t hear ye? Dae yous think I’m bloody-well deaf?’
‘I was only saying I wish my Percy could find a couple of ten-shilling notes and give me one of them,’ said Mrs Phinn from about three storeys above her.
‘Him,’ snorted Mrs Mann. ‘Your Percy couldna find his way frae here tae there withoot tripping ower his big feet. Him! He couldna gie ye a kind look, he’s that bloody sour. Ma wee fella’s aye cheery anyway, I’ll say that for him. He doesna go aboot wi’ a face that wid turn milk.’
‘He was never a midgie-raker anyway, my Percy,’ said Mrs Phinn proudly. ‘He was never a lobby dosser like some weans that never see their faither.’
The vernacular struck home and Mrs Mann could only grunt contemptuously. The janitor was coming along anyway to break it up. She couldn’t deny Noddy had been a lobby dosser more than once in his short life. A lobby was the word for the long stairhead landing found in older tenements, and a dosser was a person who slept there. So a lobby dosser was a waif, stray or vagrant who took shelter at night in the common stairway of a tenement and went to sleep in the lobby. Noddy had done it often, playing truant and staying away from home for nights on end. But he was always discovered by some man leaving at five or six in the morning to go on the early shift in Singer’s or Beardmore’s. Yet he never learnt. He would do it a week after he had promised never to do it again. There wasn’t all that much difference between sleeping on the stairhead in a strange close and sleeping under the old coats on top of the boards in the recess-bed in his mother’s kitchen.
‘Come on, my darlings,’ Mr Green bustled them jovially. ‘You’re not paid for standing there arguing the toss. It’s time you did some work. I bet you I’ve got the biggest blethers in Glasgow for cleaners. So she says to me so I says to her. Yap-yap, morning and night. Come on, get cracking.’
They shuffled off, but he came after them with a hand up, remembering.
‘Here, wait a minute! Who’s got my key for the cellar? I had it hanging up on its nail in my room, and it’s not there now. Do any of you know who took it?’
‘We’ve no occasion to go near the cellar,’ said Mrs Phinn, her pail with a shovel in it in one hand and her brush in the other. She was the self-appointed spokeswoman for the cleaners because she was the late janitor’s widow, but she was far from being the oldest cleaner, and her assumption of seniority didn’t increase her popularity with the other widows. ‘Nobody here touched your key.’
‘Well, somebody’s took it,’ Mr Green insisted. ‘A key doesn’t just go for a walk all by itself.’
‘Why should we touch your key?’ Mrs Phinn asked him straight, putting down her pail and brush and folding her arms across her flat bosom in a position of rebellion. ‘We never need to go down there.’
‘Maybe
