A Kid for Two Farthings Read Free Page B

orange, and sliding his hand beneath brought out a small envelope with a fortune in it; the pavement all round his stall was covered with torn envelopes. Once, when the market finished, Joe kicked his way through empty boxes and newspapers past the Indian’s stall. He saw him counting sixpences into piles, and putting them into small blue bags, but the bowl looked like an ordinary bowl for goldfish. An Indian girl who wore a long blue silk robe was packing the bottles into boxes on a barrow. When the Indian pushed the barrow away, the girl walked behind him; they went to the bottom of the street and turned away into the darkness under the railway arches, back to India.
    The Sunday came when Joe had saved enough of the sixpences Mr Kandinsky gave him every week for helping in the workshop, to buy a unicorn, should one appear. Mr Kandinsky was always busy on Sunday mornings, and he hardly noticed Joe leave. He was arguing with a customer who wanted a zip fastener on his trousers, something to which Mr Kandinsky could not agree.
    Joe ran quickly through the crowd to the singing-bird end of the market. Alf was talking to a budgerigar and a tall thin man with a sad face. The bird wasn’t replying, but every so often the thin man said, ‘It’s no good, Alf – it’s no good,’ till at last Alf put the cage down. Then the bird suddenly said, ‘Hello’, and Joe said hello back. The thin man looked sadder still and left, and Alf said, ‘Talks better English than I do. Hello, Joe, what are you after? No more chicks, remember.’
    ‘Do you know where I can find a unicorn, Alf?’ Joe asked.
    ‘Try down by the dogs, Joe,’ Alf suggested. ‘Hello,’ the bird said again.
    ‘Hello,’ Joe replied and started towards the other end of the market.
    On the way Mrs Quinn, the hen woman, called him over.
    ‘Joe,’ she said, ‘tell your mother I’ll bring the eggs over meself tomorrow.’ She was holding a fat hen which squawked as an old woman pinched it and complained. ‘If you don’t like the bird, for the love of St Patrick leave it,’ shouted Mrs Quinn in Yiddish. ‘So tell your mother now,’ she said to Joe.
    ‘Do you know where I can buy a unicorn, Mrs Quinn?’ Joe asked.
    ‘What do you want with heathen animals?’ she answered. ‘Get yourself a nice day-old chick.’
    ‘That day-old chick man, the louse,’ Joe said, ‘he should be put in a box.’
    ‘Will you leave the bird alone now?’ screamed Mrs Quinn at the old woman, who was still pinching its bottom.
    ‘There’s no harm,’ Joe thought, ‘in at least having a look at the chicks.’
    At the stall, hundreds of them were running about in a large glass enclosure with a paraffin lamp in the middle of it, all squeaking like mice. When someone bought them they were put into cardboard boxes with air-holes, and the squeaking became fainter. It was a pity they had such small lives.
    ‘Another one already, cock?’ asked the chick man.
    ‘Not today, thank you,’ said Joe. ‘I’m not a born chick-raiser.’
    ‘You got to know the trick of it, cock.’
    ‘I’m going to buy a unicorn this time,’ Joe said. ‘You do that,’ the man said, ‘you do that.’ He bundled two dozen chicks into a box and tied it up with string.
    Just about the middle of the market, near the herring women, was the fritter stall which also sold hokey-pokey ices and sarsaparilla fancy drinks. The smell rushed up so thick from the great vat of frying oil that if you stood nearby for a while you had a whole meal of fritters. The hokey-pokey man called out, ‘Get your hokey-pokey, penny a lump, the more you eat the more you jump,’ but Joe hurried on. He passed the cat-lady with her basket of kittens mewing, and the long line of hutches where the rabbits were always eating. He waited for the bearded sandwich-board man to shout at him, ‘The wages of sin is death, repent lest ye perish,’ because he was studying to spit when he spoke. ‘Sthin – death,’ Joe spluttered as