I heard Old Mary, when dawn finally came and the house was quiet, sobbing herself to sleep. I did that sometimes too, of course. But I was quiet as a mouse, and you’d never have known.
“That’s him!”
A woman’s screech, and my actor gentleman went rigid.
“That’s the one! Him right there!”
It was Luna Queerendo. She’d come in a minute ago, and now there she was with Mother Clatterballock, rearing up like an angry stick-bug. She was long and skinny, was Luna, with a little head wobbling on a long stick-bug neck, and a great long nose for looking down at you, and long bony fingers like Death himself in an old painting, and one of them was pointing straight at my actor.
Mother C peered through the haze of smoke, and saw. “Tim!” she called, in a voice like doom.
There was a stirring across the room, and Tim Diggory raised his awful head.
Tim was the bully here, which is to say he made sure gentlemen took no liberties but the ones they paid for. He was six and a half foot tall, with a chimney-pot hat on top of it, and a lantern jaw that worked from side to side when he was trying to get his thoughts round an idea, for Tim weren’t swift. Not even to begin with, and that was before a hand with a cosh in it had reached out from a drunken brawl one night. It laid Tim out twitching, and he never rose again for three days. He finally got up, but the cosh had broken something crucial, some kind of spring deep inside the brainpan, and Tim was never quite right again—even by Tim’s standards.
Now he came looming up behind Luna, who had that finger in my actor gentleman’s face. He was shrunk back against the wall like the last rat left alive in the rat-killing ring.
“He never pays for his drink last time, the shitsack! He never pays for me neither! He pulls it out, I reaches for the basin, and he’s gone—out the door and down the stairs, still hoisting his breeches up over his spindly erse!”
Tim Diggory fixed his left eye upon my actor gentleman. His right eye drifted across the room. Tim’s eyes always looked in different directions, and the left eye—the one he used for fixing upon you—was changeable. Sometimes it was sleepy, like a child’s. On those occasions there might even be a little smile on Tim’s lips, like he’d just remembered something that used to make him happy. But then without warning his eye would go all narrow, and flash like a telescope on a hill. When that happened, God help somebody—which God never did of course, either because he didn’t care to look round in places such as Tim Diggory was to be found, or else because God was no fool, and lay low like everyone else when Tim’s left eye went flash.
It was flashing right now.
“No, look, I’m sorry,” my actor gentleman was stammering. “I’m terribly sorry, but there’s been a misunderstanding. I’ve never been here in my life.”
“Fuck you ent been here!” cried Luna.
“All right, then I was—you’re quite right about that, ha ha—but I paid—I did—I left the money on my way out—at least I thought I did. Ha ha ha. There’s clearly been some mistake, and—”
“There’s been a mistake indeed,” Mother Clatterballock wheezed, for she’d put herself out of breath hauling her bulk across the room, “and you’re the one who’s made it.” She held out a great grubby hand. “Two pound.”
“Two pounds?”
“A pound for Loo, five shillings for the drink, five shillings for putting me out of temper, and ten shillings for the hinsult to the hestablishment. Plus the collection fee and something for Tim—better round it out to two guineas. Payable instanter.”
I laughed out loud.
“Oh, come on. Luna was never worth a pound on the best day in her life—and God knows that day came and went.”
“You shut your pie-hole, Nell Rooney!” cried Luna. “I’m worth more than you’ll ever be, with your pinched little phiz like a weasel. And my name isn’t Luna, you little scrawny slut, it’s Louise!”
Matter of fact, this was true. Her real name was Louise Maggs. I started calling her Luna Queerendo after finding out she’d been married once. The marriage happened years earlier, when some poor wealthy gentleman actually fell in love with her, and him with three thousand pounds a year. Well, this was the magical pot of gold she’d been dreaming of all her stick-bug life. But when the gentleman’s family found out they got themselves a writ—de lunatico inquirendo, which meant some magistrate had to judge whether he was soft in the head. Sure enough, guess what? That was the marriage annulled, and the pot of gold snatched back again, which would have been very sad I suppose if I hadn’t hated her. And of course I felt bad as anything about what happened to her in the end. I wouldn’t have wished that on any living creature in this world.
“I don’t have two guineas!” my actor gentleman was stammering. “Dear God, where would I get hold of two guineas? Look, here’s what I’ve got. I’ve got a shilling—that’s all the money I have, I swear. But you can have it. It’s yours, with my very best wishes. And I won’t come back. At least, I will come back—yes—I’ll come back directly, with the rest of the money. All right? You just wait here.”
He looked from Luna to Mother C to Tim, all charming and desperate, like a piglet hoping these wolves might like vegetables instead. There was silence.
“It’s the cheek of it,” said Mother Clatterballock. “That’s what stuns you. The sheer gall.” She looked to Tim Diggory, like a magistrate about to reach for the black cap. “Tim? I don’t believe I want to see this one again.”
“No, listen to me. Wait—please—!”
My actor gentleman’s voice was sounding strangled, but nowhere near as strangled as it was about to be, cos Tim Diggory was already reaching out to take him by the throat.
“Oh, leave him be, for Christ’s sake. I’ll pay what he owes.”
“You?” Mother C shifted to stare at me. “Cos why?”
“Cos he’s my brother.”
Even Tim stopped.
I’m still not sure why I said it. It’s not as if I liked him, even. Probably it was just me being contrary.
“And it’s not two guineas, it’s ten shillings. Three for the drink, two for the trouble, and five for Luna—which is at least three shillings on the generous side, where’s she’s concerned.”
That was the other reason I spoke up. I couldn’t stomach the smarmy sneer on Luna’s face, with her supposing anyone could value her at a pound.
“Don’t you have a doll to go play with?” Luna flung back after sputtering for a bit, this being her best go at deadly sarcastic wit.
Mother C wasn’t listening. Her eyes were fixed on the guinea I had fetched out of my pocket.
“You can take it out of this,” I said, very casual. “I was give it by a gentleman I met this afternoon—a real gentleman, with a carriage, who liked what he saw, and knows you have to pay top price for quality.”
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