“Like to earn a bob, Joe?” I says. So we took him along to the Elephant, pointed across the road to the little Welsh girl who was still standing there where we left her.
“Now take her that bag, Joe,” I says, “and give it to her and tell her that Jimmy and Alf have sent it, and they can’t put her up no more.”
Joe grins to himself and says: “I’ll tell her.”
Then Jimmy pulls Joe back and says, “Look here, Joe. Lay off.”
Joe says: “What do you mean? You done with her, ain’t you?”
Jimmy says: “Look here, Joe, we ain’t touched that kid, and we don’t want her round under our noses. So you give her that bag, and beat it.” So we watch Joe cross the road, and then we beat it. We didn’t want to wait to watch him hand it over. We knew we had to get away quick. So we jumped on a 63 bus that was coming along at that minute. And the last I saw of her was the sight of her standing up against the rails and looking at Joe as he handed her the bag.
When we got back to the room, late that night, I was hoping that she’d somehow come back and got in. But she hadn’t. That room was never the same again. It didn’t take long for most of the signs of her to wear away. The windows got all grimed over, and the curtains went back to their old colour, and the floor and everything got dirtied over the way they had been before she came. But it seemed every time I turned the door handle to go into the room, my eyes would always look round the place expecting to see her. And it seemed to me old Jimmy was the same.
We did see her again, about two years later, over the West. In that street that leads off Piccadilly to the Regent Palace. We wouldn’t have known her if she hadn’t stopped us. She looked real smashing. She was wearing a lovely little fur coat, what Jimmy, who’s worked amongst hides, said was the real thing. She had on a blouse trimmed with white frilly stuff. And she’d a nice warm smell of scent and drink and that. We was both moggadored for the minute when she spoke to us. I thought Jimmy would come out with one of his comical strokes, but this time he missed. She had an old bloke in tow, looked like a toff, umbrella and that, and he didn’t like her stopping. Just as she was going off she opened her bag, and pulled something out, and stuck it into my hand. “I owe you that,” she said, “for what you did for me.”
“What we did,” I said, “we did out of our feelings. We don’t want nothing.” Anyway, I didn’t like to refuse the money. And when she’d gone off, I looked and there was a couple of fivers. I gave Jimmy his one, and he spat on it for luck.
“Stone me,” says Jimmy, “but she looked a cracker!”
“Yeh, she did,” I says, “you could take her anywhere now and not be ashamed of her.”
“It was her voice I knew her by,” says Jimmy.
“Yeh, the same voice,” I says, “but not as singified as it was.”
“Did you hear what she said,” says Jimmy, “that we was the two decentest blokes what she’d met in London?”
“Then she must have met some stinkers,” I says.
“You never know,” says Jimmy, “we might be decent an’ don’t realize it.”
“That’s right,” I says. “Come to think of it, we never took no liberties with her.”
“It was the way she made that old room look like home that put me off,” says Jimmy. “Let’s go in The Standard an’ drink her health.”
As we was supping our light ales, Jimmy says: “We was a couple of goms, you know. If I’d have known she was going to turn to brass-—”
“Just what I was thinking,” I says. “We could have sent her out on the bash ourselves.”
* Bum bailiffs—officers who collect debts, so called because they come up from behind.
* A Very popular boys’ comic of the time.
* The boys’ shoes had thick wooden soles tipped with iron.
† Brew—hill.
* The name of a famous eighteenth-century furniture maker, and his style of design.
* Pop shop—pawn shop, from which money could be borrowed if a valuable was left as security.
* Gaffer—man in charge.
* Mayo—a county on the west coast of Ireland.
* A famous writer of adventure thrillers.
* The Elephant and Castle—a large, busy roundabout and meeting place in South London.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © Bill Naughton
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ISBN: 9781448204311
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Late Night on Watling Street Page 15
