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 no,’ Mr Green granted. ‘But I’ve got to get down there, and soon. I’ve been trying to get down since I came here. I’ll need to get a weekend there and clean that place up. I opened the door once and shut it again quick. I’m keeping that place locked now. I don’t want Tom, Dick and Harry wandering in there. I’m fair ashamed of it. It would scunner you. It’s a real Paddy’s market, I’m no’ kidding.’
Mrs Phinn glared at him through her NHS spectacles.
‘Aye, it’s all very well for you,’ Mr Green said jovially to avert a quarrel, ‘but your man left that place in some bloody mess, so he did. Christ, it’s even got a piano in it! How the hell he ever got a piano down those stairs beats me. And what a stupid place to put a piano anyway!’
‘Where else was he to put it?’ Mrs Phinn asked indignantly. ‘That’s where he put everything there was no room for. That’s where he was told to put things when Mr Gainsborough was headmaster. That was years before your time, of course.’
‘Aye, and before Noah’s time too by the look of the place,’ Mr Green muttered, rather less jovial. ‘Did you ever take a look at it? I bet you you’d find St Mungo’s report card down there.’
‘St Mungo would never have been at this school,’ said Mrs Mann, only half-joking. ‘He’d have went to a Catholic school.’
‘If you think my husband’s to blame for the state of that cellar, I’m quite willing to work on Saturday and tidy it up,’ Mrs Phinn declared, standing straight and noble between her pail and her brush that leaned against the door of a classroom.
‘Oh, so you’re after some overtime, are you,’ Mr Green clapped hands, rubbed them, and smiled. ‘I couldn’t put you through for overtime. The Office would never wear it.’
‘Not for overtime, for my husband’s sake,’ Mrs Phinn answered, and drew surplus mucus up her nose in the way that always annoyed Percy. ‘If you think you can run him down. He was a janitor before you were born.’
‘I’m not running anybody down,’ Mr Green soothed her. ‘I’m only passing the remark that the cellar’s in a bloody mess. Many thanks for your kind offer of course. Nevertheless, notwithstanding, I’d better see to it myself. The trouble is the key’s lost.’
‘I know all about that piano,’ Mrs Phinn said aggrievedly. ‘My man told me all about it. He filled in a white requisition to have it uplifted and he was still waiting for them to come when he went and died.’
‘Oh, well, ye canna blame him for that,’ Mr Green said kindly.
‘Maybe wan o’ the boys has took it,’ Mrs Mann suggested. ‘Ye know whit boys is like.’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Mr Green, nodding his head and tutting. ‘They found a kid here the other day with forty- seven keys in his pocket. They pick them up and steal them and borrow