Free The English Assassin by Michael Moorcock Page A

which hooted at him as it puffed past in the twilight. On the corner of the dowdy street, where it met Ladbroke Grove, under the unlit lamp and by the wall of the Convent of the Poor Clares, stood a group of younger urchins. They spotted him at once. They yelled at him, jeering insults which were more than familiar to him. He veered and began to walk in the opposite direction, pretending not to have noticed them, and went up towards Kensington Park Road and Sammy’s pie shop on the corner. Some people thought Sammy might be the boy’s dad, the way he favoured him. The boy always got first chance at shooting the rats in the cellar. Sammy kept a .22 pistol for the purpose. But, when pressed, the boy’s mother usually claimed the Prince of Wales for the honour. There was, however, a rumour concerning a Russian.
    A thick, tasty smell of grease billowed from the warm shop and steam boiled in the yellow light from the street door and from the grating in the pavement under the window where, on gas burners, sat enamel trays of pies, sausages, bacon, faggots, saveloys and baked potatoes, heavy with shining, dancing fat. At his stoves behind the wooden counter stood warm, greasy Sammy. With his thin assistant beside him he gave his attention to a score of a long-handled frying pans, each of which contained a different kind of food. The shop having just opened for the evening, the only customer was little frightened Mrs Fitzgerald, from round the corner in Portobello Road, getting her husband’s dinner. Her shawl was drawn close to her face, but Sammy had noticed what she was hoping to hide. “That’s a lovely shiner!” He grinned sympathetically as he wrapped the pies but Mrs Fitzgerald looked as if he had caught her in the act of some mortal sin. Her right eye was swollen green, blue and purple. She gave a barely audible but evidently embarrassed cough. The boy stared neutrally at her bruise. Sammy saw the boy. “Hello, there, nipper!” The colour of his own sausages, his fat, Jewish face ran with sweat. His striped shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows and he wore a big white grease-spotted apron. “You come to give me a hand, have you?” The boy nodded, stepping aside from Mrs Fitzgerald who seized her pies, left the correct number of pennies on the counter, and, like a mouse making for its hole, scuttled from the shop. “Mum says can I stay the night?”
    Sammy’s expression became serious and he said in a different tone, attending suddenly to his frying pans, “Yes, that’s all right. But you gotta work for your keep. Get yourself an apron off the hook, son. We’ll be busy in a minute.”
    The boy removed his threadbare Norfolk and hung it on the hook at the back of the shop. Taking down a sacking apron he pulled it over his head and tied the strings round his waist. He began to roll up his sleeves. Sammy’s assistant was a young man of eighteen or so, his face gleaming with large, scarlet pimples. He said, “Go on up the other end. I’ll do this end.” The boy squeezed past Sammy’s great bottom and went to stand near the window where the sizzling trays filled his nostrils full of the stink of frying onions. His eyes wandered past the trays and through the misted glass where they fixed on the street.
    It was now dark and populated. Men, women and children came from all sides, bearing down on the pie shop, because it was Friday. They all had the glazed look of the really poor—the poverty trance had overtaken them, robbed them of their wills and their intelligence, enabling them to continue life only in terms of a few simple rituals. There was little animation on even the faces of the children and their tired, heavy movements, their set expressions, their dull eyes made it seem that they all belonged to the same family, so strongly did they resemble one another. The boy felt a shudder of fear and for no reason that he could tell he suddenly thought, with some tenderness, of his mother. He turned to look at