The Victorian city streets were amok with muck-rakers - and Blasphemy Fitzworth, still plying the trade of cat's meat vendor, needed to weave his steaming cart between the jabbing brown-clogged spokes. Following behind such spiky dredgers of the surface sewage that dogged our ancestors came the scratching of the solitary street-sweeper who completed the job, after the chunky bits had been mostly gathered up. Dickens was a lover of such street-sweepers, but there was a particular one he never met or, if he did, never deigned to write about. And, indeed, surprise, surprise, Blasphemy Fitzworth recognised him as Todger Weggs, one time stink-man supreme, now evidently promoted up the ranks of waste disposal.
"Hiya, Todge, got cleaner hands, these days, eh?" laughed Blasphemy, nodding towards the stiff-bristled broom, as he applied a wooden chock to his own meat cart.
"Well, Feemy, I spose I have," replied Todger. "But less dirt, less dough. Age creeps on forever, and dung's full of ills us oldsters can't fend off."
Blasphemy was about to delve into his pans for a scrag-end as morsel for Todger's taste, a morsel that would continue twitching with the bubbles that the cart's undercoals instilled from ladle to mouth. A real treat for his old mate, Todger Weggs. But, then, from across the roofs of turn-of-the-century London, there glided something that, in future times, would have been more at home preparing to land at Heathrow Airport. Despite its fleeting presence, Blasphemy could see its outlandish wings were ribbed, leathery ones with a body between spiking out with its own version of muck-rakes. After briefly touching the ridge of a nearby hospice, the massive kite-creature vanished beyond the fog that simply snaked along the Thames and nowhere else - the aeronautically inefficient tail-fins surging the sky in its wake, near drenching Blasphemy and Todger with more than just a piss-stained drizzle.
"Blimey, Todge, weather's not what it once will be," chortled the cat's food man, with his tongue so jammed in the cheek, it felt anticipatory of the tastiest titbit from the best belching meat-pocket of his cart.
"The Great Old Ones - they're a dying race, Feemy," announced Todger, with a basinful of unmock seriousness in his bowling eyes. "Soon you won't be seeing any at all in our skies."
"Zackly what I meant, Todge. Zackly what I meant. With history about to become the least favourite subject for our school kids, people may not even know that such critters once plied their paths 'cross our city."
Todger nodded his head so slowly it was as if he had already forgotten the topic of their conversation - a fact which, eventually, was underpinned by the phenomenon of a little girl's voice echoing from the depths of a yet unraked side-street:
"Stout cat! Nowt cat! Watch their spokes spike out, cat!"
Blasphemy smiled, since he suddenly recalled the even older days when his cat's meat sales-cry was built up on similar themes and rhythms - during that era when costermongers, such as he, were often followed by a flock of tiny frocks: with even tinier girls inside them. These delightful children loved to be thrown the odd morsel of gristle from the meat-cart and would flirt outrageously with Blasphemy Fitzworth with this end in mind. Indeed, the ghostly piping that had just bristled the ear-drums was as real as the air he breathed, Blasphemy considered: haunting him with memories of girls like Pansy Pie, Lettuce Weggs and Chelly Mildeyes.
Today, of course, with the fitful encroachment of Great Old Ones across the city - a fact that the dog-eared history books were due entirely to ignore - many of the children had been long since evacuated to rural areas. Although he missed the little girls' merry, pig-tailed faces, Blasphemy was thankful that their household pussy-cats had not fled, too, but remained in the aging city: customers for the varicose valves, gristly grits, mauve melts and ichorous innards that he steamed and poached amid those choicer cuts he so proudly purveyed from deeper in his cart.
As suddenly as the great substance of shadow had winged its way across the hovels of ancient London - and even more so vis-a-vis the abruptness of the ghostly girl's echoey satire on his erstwhile cri-de-coeur in costermongering cat's meat - Blasphemy Fitzworth felt a chill at his heart. A warning. A dire hint of futures with no goodness in any of them, whatever the choice. And he lifted the lid of one of his pans to reveal - not the brown and juicy-grey cooking chunks of scrag-end ready to be relished by all animalkind - but a bright red rawness and insipid layers of rare pox-greened flesh. That he had forgotten to ignite the slaggy coal in the cart's underscuttles was his immediate suspicion. But, earlier, amid dawn's piss-yellow, he had warmed his hands upon his own cart's very sides, hadn't he? And he had felt shudders up his arms as he pushed it, not only from the vibration of the cobbled streets, but also, he was sure, from the bubbles, burps and belches of the piping hot gravies.
"'Tis tidy strange, Feemy," croaked Todger, as he peered, along with Blasphemy, into the sorry raw mess.
"It looks like real bits of body! Not at all like meat for wholesome souls..." whined Blasphemy, in evident shock.
And the sky darkened with another Great Old One - so huge it stained the stagnant air with a pitch blackness that concealed the unsheathed and stretched-out claw that delved for a sweet soul as if it were a pearl in the oysterish crimson slurry of London's aspirant stews.
Later, quite unperturbed, and with unwelcome memories misplaced, Blasphemy Fitzworth decided to test out his erstwhile sales-cry, of which the day had somehow seen fit to remind him:
"Gout cat! Spout cat! Watch the whiskers sprout, cat!
House cat! Mouse cat! Give the girl a spouse, cat!"
Ever following the scrape of rhythmic rakes, Todger Weggs took up his bristly broom again - having wiped an aureate tear from his misty eye.
(published 'Stygian Articles' 1995)
