Three

Leaving Fecks was never an easy thing to do, and that evening Silas watched his friend until he had crossed Saddle Square. He waited for Fecks to turn and wave, knowing that he wouldn’t, but even the sight of the man’s back gave him strength. He wasn’t alone in this hell he’d chosen to inhabit.

Not chosen, he reminded himself, no-one would choose to live this life. There had been no work in Westerpool where his mother had birthed him nearly twenty years ago. She had come looking for respite from her famine-struck township, crossing the troubled grey sea with Silas heavy in her belly using money made from the streets of her home town to pay for her passage in steerage. She had arrived expecting the hospitality of a distant cousin who, family rumour said, had found work making straw bonnets for wealthy ladies in the thriving north-west port. The promised hospitality had not been what she was expecting. One room between twelve, seven of them infants, one tap shared between three similar families, a gutter for the bucket-slops and glassless windows. Silas was sloshed out onto a wooden floor, delivered by a grandmother who kept her only eye more on the gin bottle than her duties, and had escaped death in the first weeks of his life purely by chance.

He went on to survive worse while four of his seven cousins died before he was old enough to remember them, and his mam bore twins to an unknown man. He was existing, which was more than his mother was, but he had his sisters to care for, and their well-being was the only reason he was now standing in the October drizzle watching Fecks turn into Leather Lane on his way to The Ten Bells. Silas would join him there later and wait outside. That was the best he could hope for, needing his two coins to pay for his place on the bench.

Fecks had gone, and Silas left the square. He took the passage, heading east and emerged from its dripping gloom into the wider City Street where the last of the market traders were wheeling their barrows back to their yards. Carthorses plodded methodically, dragging drays, while boys as young as six worked together to carry woolsacks into shops. Women crouched in the gutter taking whatever pickings had been left, and Silas knew he would find no more coins here. Always optimistic, he kept his gaze on the cobbles as he crossed the road in case something caught his eye. Despite the apple Fecks had given him, his stomach growled, and pain jabbed. He scoured a pile of broken crates to no avail, but a few paces further, he found an orange behind a bundle of rags someone had kicked up against the crumbling brick of a disused mission hall. The fruit had been trodden on, and the skin was split, but the insides revealed themselves as edible, and with his fingers sticky from the juice his mouth salivated for, he lifted a piece to his lips.

‘That’s mine.’ The bundle of rags moved, and a bare, pale hand appeared.

Silas looked down into the large round eyes of a small girl, her grubby face apologising. She was younger than his sisters, but her situation was identical. He handed her the orange as he knelt.

‘I was just opening it for you, Ellie,’ he said, a smile covering his disappointment as she grabbed it. ‘Be more careful, yeah?’

She nodded fearful thanks and retreated beneath her blanket.

He walked on. The rope-house was situated a little way from City Street at the far end of Tanner’s Yard, and as soon as he turned into the dead end, the smell hit him. He stepped over the sewer channel in the centre of the street without looking at it. If there was money in it, it could stay there. There would be a queue for the tap at this time of day as returning factory workers washed up after their twelve hours at the machines, and Silas had no time to hang around to wash his hands.

The church clock struck six as he mounted the steps and entered the rope-house. Already bustling with sweat-soaked navvies, the lobby was alive with foreign tongues and foul language. A chain of small children weaved through his feet as he burrowed into the throng of rustling skirts and damp jackets, seeking Molly, the proprietor.

He found her at her table towards the back of the entrance hall, guarding the doorless entrance to the rope-room. Her grey hair was down, suggesting she had not had a good day. When she had found success in a transaction, which was mainly being paid the rent owed by her tenants on the higher floors, she wore it up and pinned neatly beneath a straw hat, or had it plaited and arranged with a lilac flower behind one ear. Today, it half curtained her furrowed face and covered one of her cloudy eyes. The other kept a vigilant watch on those entering and leaving the room, but when she saw Silas, she swept the grey curtain away and revealed not only two dulling eyes doing their best to twinkle, but a smile as crooked and cheeky as his own.

‘Here’s me lad,’ she announced as she wavered to her feet.

Once she was as stable as a gin-soaked proprietress could be at six in the evening, she opened both arms to him, and Silas was obliged to accept the over-enthusiastic greeting. Her jacket was tacky and smelt of fish, her breath of alcohol, and her skin was cold as they touched cheeks.

‘And here’s my only lady,’ Silas replied, standing back and letting her go. His words, said loudly enough for those close by to hear, were intended to curry the favour he needed to secure a space. ‘How d’you get to looking so beautiful with all your hardships, Molly?’ he beamed, and for good measure gave her a flirtatious wink. ‘You got that something special about you.’

‘And you’ve got the stinking charm of the Irish,’ she shot back. ‘Which don’t pay the rent on an arse space. You got money?’

As usual with Molly, it was a case of a drunken hello, a quick tease, and then straight to business.

‘How much are you wanting for a place on the rope?’ he asked, looking into the room where half the bench space was already taken.

‘Tuppence,’ she answered, as if he was ignorant to ask.

‘But, how much for me?’ He sidled up to her, placing one hand on her shrivelled backside and wished he hadn’t. It was wet.

‘Tuppence,’ she repeated, unimpressed. ‘And a farthing for the grope.’

He let her go and patted the greasy hair of a passing child in an attempt to dry his hand while his other fished for his coins.

‘You can have the grope for free, Molly,’ he winked back, confusing her. ‘And I’ll give you many more if you give me two for one in case me man, Fecker, needs to hang his head. A grope for a rope?’

‘Fuck off. You want it or not?’ She sat, any vestige of amiability gone while the deal was in progress.

‘Then here’s your tuppence.’ He handed it over. He wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t know the relative comfort of the public bar, but at least he would have somewhere to sleep. ‘If Fecks shows, I can sleep in his lap.’

‘I’ll have no doubling on my ropes,’ Molly complained as she scrawled in her ledger. ‘You arse-dippers can do what you want out there, but this here’s a respectable establishment.’

A man vomited on the flagstones three feet away. Molly ignored it.

‘In on time,’ she ordered as she always did. ‘Else you’ll find the door locked and your money gone.’ By locked, she meant guarded as there were no doors.

Silas sat side-saddle on the table glancing at her ledger and wondering how anyone could read it.

‘Now don’t you find it ironic, Moll?’ he said, engaging the rich Irish accent he had learned from his mam.

‘I might if I knew what it meant,’ she replied and bit both coins before dropping them into the bottomless pocket of her apron.

‘Ironic that you call me a molly ’cos of me work, like it were some word only the devil should know, and yet that’s your name. But what’s even funnier is how you say you’ll lock the door come two a the morning, but this dosshouse ain’t seen a door for longer than I’ve been using it.’

‘Get off me desk.’

‘Give us a kiss there, Molly.’ He leant in closer, holding his breath.

‘Fuck off.’

‘It’ll be the only offer you get,’ he warned, playfully. ‘One kiss from the charmed lips of your Irish lover boy.’

She threw back her head and cackled, the crack of her mouth revealing two uneven rows of wooden teeth. ‘I know where your lips ’ave been,’ she slurred. ‘And they’ve been places I don’t want to think about. Now get off me desk and slap this on your place.’ She took a numbered tag from the desk’s only drawer and threw it on the table. ‘I saved it for you, and it’s the best I can do for me favourite blue-eyed charmer.’

‘And it’s a mighty fine gesture.’

Silas snatched the wooden tag before anyone else could steal it. She had given him number one, the bench space furthest from the doorway and the draughts. It was also the safest as he would have plenty of time to see thieves clambering over the sleepers to reach him.

Others were aggressively calling for Molly’s attention now, and Silas had no desire to make himself unpopular by holding up the queue. He slipped from the table and left her to her business, which in this case involved speaking very loudly to a Polish man who understood no English while fighting off an insistent child trying to rob her apron.

He secured his place by tying the tag to the rope in the furthest corner and sat a while on the bench to rest his legs and plan his evening. He wouldn’t stay here long, there was no need to guard his place. Despite the desperation of those who used it, the rope-room had an honour code. If anyone took his place or stole his tag, they would find no respite here again, nor at any of the other houses Molly’s extended family ran, which was most in the City Road area. Stealing from a sleeper’s pockets, however, was not in the code, but his place was secured until two in the morning should he need it.

He hoped he wouldn’t. He had used the rope twice the previous week when neither he nor Fecks had earned enough to rent a bed, and on both occasions had wondered why he bothered. He would have had more sleep lying down in the main road for all the snoring and farting, the sleep talking and sounds of sex that accompanied the numbing of his arse on the wooden bench. Leaning with the rope beneath his arms so he could hang his head cut off the circulation and pained his chest, and there was always the possibility of picking up lice from the stranger crammed in beside him. So far, he had avoided that, but in his line of work, lice were the least of his worries. There were far more dangerous things than crabs in the dark alleyways and unlit courts of the East End, and as far as he knew, he had escaped syphilis and the coughing sickness that had seen off his mother.

If Silas had a reputation among the street-rats, it was for being clean, and the hour he spent waiting for two minutes’ use of the communal tap would pay off later if he caught a trick. He dropped his trousers with his back to the queue and washed his dick to the jeers of men in line. He always cleaned his dick first. The cold water shrivelled it and tightened his balls until they were nothing better than two Christmas walnuts and he believed that they needed as much time to warm and recover as he could give them. The jeers became shouts of outrage as he washed his arse under cover of his coat, but he ignored them with ease. Such taunting was part of his daily routine. By the time he was done, he felt marginally cleaner, slightly refreshed, but just as famished.

‘Two sausages, a chunk of bread and an apple,’ he mumbled to himself as he tied his belt and moved away from the muddy ground. That was all he had eaten in the last three days. ‘At least the orange smelt good.’

The church clock struck seven-thirty as he wandered back across City Road. There was no point in hurrying. There would be no activity in the yards and backstreets until later in the evening. He was not like Fecks, he had rarely risked daylight trade for fear of being seen, arrested and thrown in a workhouse. Sure, there he would be fed gruel and be given reasonably fresh water, but he would be forced to conform, to weave baskets and to pray. It was worse than being in prison. At least there he could trade his body for favours, but more people died in the cells than died in the workhouse, although only just, and the one thing he valued above all else was his freedom.

Night trading it was, and tonight his hunger once again led the hunt. He walked to the river and along where the boats landed their catch, hoping to find fish heads to boil, or better, a whole mackerel discarded by accident. He found no such luck, only more like him doing the same, and sat a while on a bench outside a warehouse to wonder how his sisters were doing in the care of their cousin.

His legs were the coldest part. Unprotected by his waist-length coat between the top of his boots and his thighs, the worn-thin wool of his trousers was no defence against the damp chill. At least there was no wind, which when blowing from any point of the compass, cut through the material as easily as a bushelman’s blade through straw.

It was his left leg that first alerted him to the presence of trade. A hand landed on his knee, jerking him from his reverie, and he silently berated himself for being caught off guard. The touch, brief but understood, came from a large man who caused the bench to groan as he sat.

‘Share a light for my tobacco?’ the man asked, withdrawing his hand.

His voice was heavily accented, but Silas couldn’t place it. Overseas for sure, but the origin of the potential customer was important to know. The Poles liked to fuck hard, the Germans had bigger dicks and could hurt, while the French preferred to be sucked.

‘Where you from, mate?’ Silas asked, risking a quick glance at the man as he searched his pockets for a match he knew he didn’t possess. All he could see of his potential meal ticket was a full white beard, dark eyes and thinning, white hair. His bulk was shrouded by a heavy overcoat forming him into a black boulder.

‘Ireland,’ the man replied.

Silas knew that was a lie. ‘More like Russia,’ he ventured.

‘Da,’ the man confirmed.

Silas was now forearmed. The Russians didn’t care what they did as long as long as the boy was young, but they were known for trying to run without paying.

‘I ain’t got a match,’ Silas said and, as if to prove it, stuck a finger in his top pocket.

‘You have anything else I can suck?’ The Russian wasn’t exactly subtle.

Silas’ finger brushed against something hard in the pocket which he had thought was empty and he drew it out by his fingertips.

A sixpence?

‘Hey,’ the Russian insisted. ‘Boy?’

Where had he found sixpence? It was enough for a bed, a drink in the Bells and food on top with enough left over for the morning. He had no recollection of finding such riches.

The Russian grumbled something in his native language and prepared to leave.

Silas snapped back to the present. He might have struck lucky in his pocket, but there was no point turning down work.

‘Yes, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something you’ll want if you’ve got…’ A thought struck him, and he changed his price. ‘A shilling.’

Whatever it was the Russian hulk said, it sounded like a swear word, and it preceded, ‘Go fuck yourself.’

‘I’m fifteen,’ Silas lied. ‘You have to pay more for fifteen.’

The man was interested. ‘Three pennies.’

‘Eight.’

‘Six.’

The deal was done, and without another word, Silas left the bench and walked ahead of the man until they came to a gate in the warehouse wall. This wasn’t his usual turf, and he had no idea what to expect on the other side, but was relieved to find the lock easy to pick and the yard beyond a maze of sheds and recesses. He chose one near the gate for ease of escape should things turn violent, and backed into it, balling his fists.

The hulk panted in after him, one of his flabby hands reaching eagerly for Silas’ belt while the other busied itself in the shadows of his own trousers.

‘Six,’ Silas repeated and gripped the man’s wrist to prevent him from grabbing his cock until he had been paid.

‘After.’

‘Six.’ His grip tightened, and he raised his other hand ready to strike.

More Russian swearwords were followed by the press of a cold coin against Silas’ fingers, and he released his hold.

‘But tell me you are fourteen.’

Silas was as young as the disgusting creature wanted him to be. He now had a shilling to his name.

‘That’s right,’ he said, grimacing at the man’s perverted fantasy.

The heavy body pressed against him as the Russian tried to kiss and dropped a bulky arm onto his shoulder.

Silas turned his head away. ‘No.’ The only man he would allow to kiss him was Fecks, and that had never happened.

Fecks!

Fecks had swung his arm around his shoulder and held him close for mutual support. As they walked, he must have secretly slipped the sixpence into Silas’ pocket. The act of generosity warmed his heart, and thoughts of his friend stirred his cock. Just as well as the creature now grappling with it as though it was an eel, did nothing but turn him off.

He imagined a day that would never come. Fecker standing beside a warm bed, naked, gleaming clean and smiling. He turned back the eiderdown to revel in the sight of Silas, his slim, near-hairless body on show with a tuft of black crowning his youthful erection. Fecks straddling him and lowering his swelling shaft gently, so their cocks touched as he bent willingly until their lips met…

He was hard, the Russian was chewing on his dick like it was a bone and thumping inside his own trousers. Silas cursed himself. He had let his guard down again. He should have insisted the man kept his free hand where he could feel it so he would have warning if the trick reached for a knife. He was vulnerable enough with his dick in a stranger’s mouth, but he had been lucky. This man had no teeth, and the hand he wasn’t beating his own dick with was wrapped around Silas’ length. He relaxed, thought of Fecks, and came in the man’s throat within a minute.

The Russian’s enthusiasm increased as he swallowed and jerked, grunting through his mouthful as he spasmed to a halt. Silas hurriedly withdrew his cock and was buttoned up and belt-tied before he reached the gate, leaving the man to find his own way back to anonymity. He slipped down to the shore and, under cover of the bridge, washed himself in the incoming tide. A barge chugged past, lanterns casting dancing beams of yellow on the ironwork and lighting Silas’ naked crotch, but no-one shouted or complained. The bargemen did the same after a day’s work, even though the river water was barely cleaner than the gutter.

Washed, Silas continued on his way, following the shore to the Cheap Lane steps where he returned to the black and grey throng of humanity busying itself with its own desperation. He fitted right in and made for The Ten Bells.

It was the same route and routine as always, but tonight he was different. He was rich in money and richer in companionship, because Fecks had, without fuss or word, given him food, shelter and hope. Above all, he gifted the warmth of friendship, and it was that which carried him on air into the pipe-fogged sweat of the gin palace.

Silas had journeyed from gloom to happiness in half an hour, and his life was back on track. It was just as well that he could afford a couple of hours to celebrate his good fortune, because his life was about to become far more complicated.