Maureen JENNINGS - Under the Dragon’s Tail

He sat up, swung his legs out of the bed, and pulled off his nightshirt. He was ashamed at how persistently and vividly his imagination conjured up an image of the young widow sleeping curled up in her bed. He felt disloyal to Liza’s memory.

He dressed hurriedly. His black woollen bicycle sweater was getting quite rank with sweat, but it would have to do until washday. Boots in hand, he tiptoed down the landing, using the light from his bicycle lamp to guide him. The house was silent, even Arthur seemed to have gained some peace. Before he became ill, he had been a crack wheeler and over the past few weeks they’d spent enjoyable evenings planning strategies for the upcoming race. At the last tournament, Murdoch had won the mile sprint, but this year he’d wanted more challenge and he’d entered the five-mile handicap. Tired and gritty-eyed, he berated himself as a flagellating fool.

Don’t think, just keep moving. It’ll be a chop when you get started. At this time of day, the air of the city was fresh, the streets clean. With all the sluggards still wallowing in sleep, he could ride on the sidewalks and avoid the horse droppings and dust of the road.

He crept down the stairs to the front hall where he stowed his wheel. He’d saved for a year to buy it, sixty dollars, almost a month’s wages. The light from his kerosene lamp gleamed on the polished ram’s horn handlebars. The finish was a modern maroon and the double tires the best Morgan and Wright made. The bicycle was still new enough for him to experience sinful pride in the treasures of the world. A considerable amount of pride if the truth be known.

He manoeuvred carefully through the front door. Outside, the dreaming street was hazy in the grey light of dawn. Suddenly, a cat yowled. Its rival answered and they both dashed across the road in front of him. The leading cat was black and thin, the other animal, a big marmalade, looked better nourished. Murdoch watched them disappear into the shrubbery of his neighbour’s front yard. The eternal conflict he thought, then grinned to himself. Liza had often chided him about finding allegories everywhere he looked.

He tugged his cap tight on his brow, mounted his wheel, and pushed off from the curb.

“Hear me, Varley, I intend to be the cock of this race.”

George Tucker opened his eyes. As usual, his nightshirt was drenched in sweat. He always blamed their small, stuffy room, which retained the heat better than the Gurney did. In fact, he sweated nightly from a terror his survival depended on denying. He sniffed. There was a bad pong. Freddie had wet the bed as he always did when he was afraid. He’d moved as far to the edge as he could but George could feel the heat from his body, smell the stink of the other boy’s breath. Viciously, he kicked out with his heel, connecting with a crack on Freddie’s shinbone. With a cry the boy awoke and clutched his leg.

“You pissed again,” said George, and Freddie’s hands flew to protect his privates, where retribution was usually exacted. He didn’t say a word, knowing from long experience it would do no good and was more likely to worsen George’s ire.

“Get up, you stinking darkie fice. It’s late. She’ll have our arses on a bandbox.”

He sat up and scratched at his ankle, where a rash of new bites had come up in the night. It was impossible to eliminate the voracious bedbugs in the old house, and with the heat they flourished.

“I don’t hear nobody,” said Freddie.

George felt like kicking him again. He always did when the boy spoke so timidly. But he was right. Lily’s bedroom was directly across from them but he couldn’t hear her. When she washed herself in the morning she made strange humming noises, tuneless sounds the way an old deaf dog might still bark at silent shadows. Not that Lily was old yet. Not young either but still with firm diddies and a round arse. George was considering trying out his sugar stick on her. Although nobody celebrated, he’d claimed July the thirtieth for his birthday and he thought this might be a present to himself.

“Where’s Mrs. Mother?” asked Fred, who was sitting up in bed but waiting for George to move first.

George listened. The parlour was directly beneath them and they could usually hear Dolly moaning in her sleep, shouting at a bad dream, breaking wind noisily. She was always in a bad skin when she first got up and they were careful to stay out of her way.

“D’you think Lily’s gonna get it?” asked Freddie.

“’Course she is.”

In spite of his scoffing tone, George felt a pang of fear. The punishments that Dolly exacted on her daughter were fearsome to behold.

He got out of bed and went over to the slop pail to pee. Then he splashed tepid water on his face from the tin bowl on the washstand and pulled off his grubby nightshirt. Last week, Lily had washed his one shirt, a brown holland. He’d sat bare-chested until it was ready, arms hugging his bony ribs. George was ashamed of his size and yearned for the day he would grow taller and heavier. He slipped the shirt over his head. It smelled of carbolic soap and sunlight, a smell he liked. His plaid woollen trousers, however, were filthy, torn at the knee and too big. He’d acquired them last year on one of his hunts along the riverbank. Didn’t matter that the owner was in swimming. George just walked away with the trousers over his arm, casually and calmly.

Underneath the clothes, his body was dirty and smelly but he didn’t care. He never went to school, never associated with anybody who was clean enough to notice the difference. As long as he could remember he had lived with Dolly, although she was not his mother and never ceased to remind him of the fact. His own mother was a tart, a doxie who had kissed the devil’s behind which was why he looked the way he did and why she had abandoned him to Dolly’s care when he was an infant.

“If it wasn’t for me you’d have ended up in a pauper’s orphanage,” she said, and George often thought his life might have been better if he had.

“Get a move on,” he said to Fred, who was watching him with dark, nervous eyes. Their first job was to scavenge along the river, then go down to the lakeshore. They searched mostly for firewood to keep the stove going, but they could expect a cuff from Dolly if they didn’t come back with something she could use or pawn. She’d actually smiled at him once when he found a woman’s earbob of silver filigree buried in the sand.

He listened again but there was no sound at all from the room below. He couldn’t let go of the tight knot of fear in his stomach. They were all going to get it as soon as she woke up, not just Lily. And he knew for sure it would be bad.

Murdoch, thinking weighty and melancholy thoughts about the capriciousness of life, watched two flies crawl around the lip of the saucer. One succumbed to temptation and fell into a sweet, sticky death, the other flew away. Because the stables were adjacent to the police station, it was impossible to keep the fly population anywhere close to bearable. However, Mrs. Kitchen had assured him the best way to catch flies was with a mixture of egg yolk and molasses and he’d placed two full saucers on his desk. So far he’d only netted four carcasses. It was more efficient to swat them. He despatched two in quick succession, both unfortunately crawling across the portrait of Her Majesty which hung behind him and which was now pocked with tiny blood stains. The matching portrait of Chief Constable Grasett was even more defaced but that was probably because Murdoch pursued the flies on that picture with more vigour.

He stretched his arms above his head and rubbed hard on his brow to wake himself up. He would have given a day’s wage for a short kip, but he knew that if Inspector Brackenreid found him asleep it would be truly costly. The problem wasn’t only his sleepless night. The cubicle that passed as his office had only one small, high window that let in plenty of flies and dust but not much air or light.