Bleak Expectations

by Mark Evans

  I may have digressed a little. Let me now return to my life story.2

  Trapped as I was in Britain’s cruellest school, the question of how to escape was one with no easy answer, as opposed to questions such as ‘Would you like a brandy?’ or ‘What is the capital of France?’ to which the answers are clearly ‘Yes, please’ and ‘Who cares?’

  Then how lucky it was that my new-found best friend and chum-us maximus Harry Biscuit should have had plans for an escape, indeed plans he had already planned.

  ‘I have two plans, Pip Bin. Three if you count the third one as well, which I do.’

  ‘Four plans? But, Harry, that is brilliant!’ This announcement filled me with cheer, excitement and a funny giddy feeling I recognized as hope. Or an incipient inner-ear infection.

  ‘My first plan is for a new method of transportation, using highly trained geese and compressed air.3 Look, here is my blueprint . . .’ He unfolded a sheet of paper with the word ‘Geese?????’ scribbled in blue crayon, followed by the word ‘air’.

  I began to leak cheer, excitement and hope, like a sad balloon or cracked joy-bottle, and it started to form a large puddle of disappointment at my feet. Yet Harry happily ploughed plannily on.

  ‘My second plan is for a new restaurant where you dine on raw fish brought to your table by a system of continuously moving belts.4 Good, eh?’

  He said this with such delighted aplomb that I felt guilty at the strong desire arising within me to punch him for his plan-uselessness. Somehow I punched him not and merely asked, ‘But, Harry, how will these plans help us escape?’

  ‘Well, I reckon either of them could make us enough money to bribe our way out of here with ease.’

  ‘By tomorrow morning?’

  ‘No. Hence my third plan.’

  I clenched my fists in preparation for a physical assault on his next batch of uselessness.

  ‘A large mechanical swan on which we may fly free from the school and soar to safety.’

  My fists unclenched – this sounded like a plan that had legs and, more importantly, wings. Harry moved to a sheet covering an object in the corner of the room and, with a flourish, removed it – revealing not a mechanical swan to safety but a bare table.

  ‘I shall build it on this. All I need is a forge, a small lathe, a plan of a mechanical swan and a large quantity of iron – and then for that iron to be lighter than air. But given those, we shall be free!’

  ‘Aaaaaarrrrgggh!’ I said.

  ‘I knew you’d like it,’ replied Harry.

  Reader, I punched him.

  Only lightly, for he was my best friend and best friends never punch each other with full force lest best friends they be no more or lest they hurt their knuckles. If the truth be known, my punchiness was not entirely caused by Harry’s nonsensical plans, rather by frustration at the dreadful circumstances in which I found myself. Alas, circumstances have no nose, and Harry did.

  ‘Harry, forgive me . . .’

  ‘No need for forgiveness, Pip Bin! Indeed, I am grateful. For my nose was a little blocked, and your punch has dislodged the phlegmy obstacle so I can breathe clearly again! Or, at least, I will be able to do so once the swelling has gone down.’

  To have a friend so full of forgiveness should be every man’s right, though no woman’s – or what would female friends gripe and grudge about? – and I knew I was lucky indeed, if you discounted the fact that I was still probably doomed to die.

  At that moment the dinner-bell tolled and we hurried to the dining hall for another pointless and indeed foodless mimed meal.

  But, oh, what nourishment for the soul fated Fortune was to provide at that meal!

  Mr Hardthrasher intoned the traditional grace – ‘For what you are not about to receive, may the Lord make you truly painful’ – and we fell on the fictitious food, none more eagerly than Harry, who managed to find delight in even mock eating.

  ‘Oh, yum, make-believe mash! And could you pass the pretend peas, please, Pip Bin?’

  Over the weeks, my physical theatre skills had grown, and I was able to pass the ersatz edibles both swiftly and convincingly. Sadly, other boys were less adept, and barely had we sat down than the headmaster leaped upon poor Spittleham’s latest mime-food lapse.

  ‘You, boy! What is that you are supposed to be eating?’ His voice lashed like a wordy whip.

  ‘A meringue, sir . . .’

  ‘A meringue? It seems more like a Yorkshire pudding. You are to be beaten, boy, as if you were the egg whites a meringue is made of.’

  The headmaster might have been brutal, but his culinary knowledge was exemplary. Wielding six curved canes bent and lashed together to form a punishment whisk, he hauled Spittleham away and placed him in a large bowl, then proceeded to beat him, if not into stiff peaks then certainly into a bruised and terrified mess.

  And lo! As meringuey yelps of pain came from the bowl, fated Fortune bestowed her gift upon me. I had just slurped down the last of my pseudo-soup starter and was about to move on to my main course of fake steak and sham shallots when one of the school servants shuffled towards me.

  ‘Mumble, grunge, mumble,’ she mumbled and grunged, actual speech clearly far beyond her serving-class brain.

  The servants were the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile and hideousest of the hideous, but this crone was a particularly nasty specimen, less human being, more a human-shaped amalgamation of mud, warts and bizarrely placed hair, specifically a most unfeminine beard. And the smell! Her general odour was rank and unsavoury and her breath was not so much halitosis as Hellitosis, causing my nose to wrinkle so greatly that it nearly turned inside out, and my entire body to recoil in stenchy horror, bumping hard into Harry beside me.

  ‘Oh, great, you’ve knocked over my fantasy fondue! Can someone pass me a simulated serviette?’ As he knelt beneath the table to clean up a spill that existed only in his imagination, I decided that Harry might be taking the mimed meals a little too seriously.

  ‘Mumble, grunge, mumble,’ the servant repeated. But then: ‘’Ere, ’ave this, young ’un . . .’

  Words? Actual words? This grim-perfumed, lower-class hag could speak actual words?5 I was so stunned that I barely realized she was handing me something.

  ‘Wh-what is it?’

  ‘It’s a dumpling.’ It was indeed a dumpling. But she was not done with her handing. ‘And here’s a carrot.’ She did not lie, it was a carrot. And still she was not done. ‘And a sliver of game terrine. And a nice bit of Cheddar, couple of omelettes, slice of gammon, a mackerel salad, some stuffed mushrooms and a Wiener Schnitzel.’

  Truly this servant spoke truly, for from beneath her grimy robes she withdrew all these comestibles and placed them on the table before me. I could barely believe it: food! Real food! With all its smells and tastes and stomach-filling potential. Though I don’t like mushrooms.

  ‘You’d better eat it quick, afore the headmaster sees you.’

  ‘But . . . why are you doing this? Who are you?’

  ‘I’m just a friend.’ I had never had a grotesque crone for a friend, yet if food she had provided me with then friend she definitely was and, that food having been provided, friend indeed she had become.6 ‘A friend who’s here to help ye escape. Meet me here at midnight and I shall tell ye more. Mumble, grunge, mumble.’

  She grunged mumblily away, a haze of filth and rank reek trailing after her. Who was this strange creature? Why had she fed me? Would she really help me escape? And why did she not wash more or dress better? All these questions crossed my mind like an ugly man crossing a dance-floor in search of a partner, that is to say quickly and without answer.

  ‘What a mess!’ Harry had finally finished mime-mopping his imaginary spill and now sat back up at the table. Seeing the food the servant had left, his eyes went wider than Queen Victoria after an all-you-can-eat sausage buffet.7 ‘Oh, great! Now it is as if I can actually see real food! Curse my gastronomic imagination!’

  In frustration he bang
ed his head on the table, thereby squashing the stuffed mushrooms and affixing them to his forehead, which was fine because, as I mentioned before, I don’t like mushrooms.

  ‘No, Harry. It is real food. Given to me. Help yourself.’

  ‘No, it’s yours. I couldn’t.’

  But he could, and he did, for though his words said one thing his actions said another, and as our fellow pupils simply stared, the sight of actual, edible fare stunning them into inaction, Harry descended on the food like a swarm of peckish locusts or a hungry hurricane. At length, he sat back and emitted a loud, satisfied burp.

  ‘Oh, tremendous. That is the best and only meal I’ve had in ages,’ he said, as a mushroom slid from his forehead and into his mouth, punctuating the meal with a savoury full-stop.

  Harry and I were the only non-hungry boys in the school that day, apart from Bissington, who had eaten his own arm, and Frobisher, who had in turn eaten Bissington. But the meal had provided more than mere physical food, for the appearance of the mysterious servant meant I had also dined on the psychic food of hope.

  1 Now defunct phrase derived from Latin meaning ‘grapes that can be made into wine’.

  2 The Great Coffee and Cake Shortage of 1867 stopped every writer in Britain being able to work for several months, just after the author had completed the first part of the book. On starting the second part some months later, he found he had somewhat lost his thread, hence the meandering nature of this section.

  3 A reference to Brunel’s ill-fated ‘Goose Rail’ project, which failed because starving peasants kept stealing and eating the geese that were key to its functionality.

  4 Such restaurants existed in Victorian London, going by the name ‘Good Day, Sir, Raw Fish Shop’. They saved money by having no cooking expenses, but ultimately lost more money in compensation paid to customers they had poisoned with raw fish.

  5 Many servants of this low standing had their vocabularies removed as children.

  6 As an experiment, the author originally wrote this sentence in Latin, then translated it back into English, hence the strange sub-clausal nature.

  7 After the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria took to comfort eating in a major way. At one banquet she visibly expanded by eight inches in one hour. Stamps had to be reprinted almost daily to keep up with her hyper-inflation.

  CHAPTER THE NINTH

  In which good news is definitely not heard

  If thoughts are like animals, which they are not, then my thoughts were now like a hectic livestock market, full of jostling mind-cows, brain-sheep and think-pigs as my head teemed with the moos, baas and oinks of potential servant-aided escape.

  Yet shortly after dinner, to my mental livestock was added a ponder-horse with all its concomitant neighs and whinnies as I was summoned to the headmaster’s study where a visitor awaited me. Would it be a good visitor, such as my re-saned mother, come to take me from my schooly misery? Or a bad visitor, come to offer yet more pain for my young and frankly disappointing-at-this-moment-in-time life?

  Alas, it was the latter. ‘An anxious gale breezes not fine silks but bad stones,’ they say,1 and they are not wrong.2

  As I approached, I heard laughter, a sound which in that place of misery was as incongruous as a vicar at an orgy or a seagull in a waistcoat. But then I realized that the laughter was cruel, malicious and very definitely aimed at and not shared with, thereby making it far less incongruous, akin more to a vicar at a prayer-swapping party or a seagull in spats, which, as everyone knows, is a common seaside sight.3

  On entering, I saw the producer of this laughter: my guardian, Mr Gently Benevolent, in all his sharp-featured, black-clad and slightly scary glory. He and Headmaster Hardthrasher were sharing a glass of brandy, each sipping from one side of it, which made it awkward to drink from and look a bit like they were kissing.

  ‘Ah, young Pip. You seem well. By which I mean not yet dead.’

  Though my guardian was a harsh man, he was still my guardian, and if he heard the truth of my plight surely he would, as his title of guardian suggested, guardian me from it.

  ‘Mr Benevolent! How glad I am to see you! This school you have sent me to is intolerably cruel!’

  At this, the headmaster’s eyes blazed like a furious fire. ‘Such insolence! You dare accuse me of cruelty? Then you must be beaten, boy. Beaten to within an inch of your life. Possibly even closer. Now bend over!’ He raised his cane high, like the stick-wielding maniac he was.

  ‘No, Headmaster.’ Mr Benevolent raised a restraining hand. ‘Let us not beat him.’

  ‘Very well.’ The headmaster lowered the cane. ‘We’ll move straight to the hanging.’ He headed to the corner, where stood his personal portable gallows, Old Noosey.

  ‘No.’ Again, Mr Benevolent raised a restraining hand.

  ‘But . . .’ The headmaster emitted a plaintive whimper, like a sad puppy or a whoopee cushion that has been sat upon by a person not heavy enough to make it work properly. He tried once more to reach his gallows, forcing Mr Benevolent, the possessor of only two hands, to raise a restraining foot, making him wobble slightly as he tried to balance.

  ‘Time enough for beatings and hangings later. But now I wish to tell young Pip the good news.’

  Good news? That was good news. And the good news that it was could surely only be one thing.

  ‘I am to leave this school? Oh, that is a relief. For the curriculum is incredibly limited and the pastoral care practically non-existent.’ Joy filled me like a sack of happy jam.

  ‘Leave? Gosh, no. This school will make a man or dead boy of you yet. No, the good news is this.’ My guardian paused, then smiled, and I sensed that the good news he brought was not good news, and that actually a huge steam train of nasty news was bearing down upon me. ‘I have decided I cannot wait until your sister is old enough to marry, so instead I am to marry your mother.’

  Ladies and gentlemen, the train recently arrived at Platform Pip is for Misery Town, calling at Woe City, Anguish Halt and What-the-Heck Junction.

  ‘Marry my mother? I do not understand . . .’ A sick feeling grew in my stomach. Possibly because of recently having eaten for the first time in weeks but more probably because of this news, which was as ungood or bad as I had feared.

  ‘If I marry her then I shall have all your family’s money and social standing.’ His obsidian eyes glinted with malice. ‘Are you not delighted?’

  I was not delighted. Indeed, I was de-delighted.

  ‘When is this to happen?’

  ‘Tomorrow. By three o’clock, I shall have a new wife and fortune and you shall have a new papa.’

  Now the sick feeling was replaced by a mix of hot anger and cold fury, like a baked Alaska of rage.

  ‘Never! I shall never call you Papa!’

  ‘You will call me Papa, whether you like it or not. And you will like it, whether you like it or not.’ He smiled at me like a small human shark. ‘Son . . .’

  ‘No!’ I hurled myself at him, fists flying, but Headmaster Hardthrasher seized me by the collar so that my fists found no Benevolenty target but instead only air. Though that air got pretty bruised, I can tell you.

  ‘Now, here is your invitation to the wedding.’ Mr Benevolent drew a beautifully embossed card from his pocket, flashed it briefly before my eyes, but then, rather than handing it over, he instead ripped it into tiny pieces, before gathering the fragments, setting fire to them and then dissolving the residual ashes in a bowl of acid. ‘Whoops. How careless of me. Looks like you won’t be coming. However, you may share in the wedding feast, for the headmaster has kindly agreed you may have an actual meal tomorrow in celebration. Let me fetch it for you.’

  He stepped across to a bag and rummaged inside. The rummaging continued for some time, the bag evidently being capacious and hard-to-find-things-in-y.

  ‘It’s here somewhere. Perhaps in this compartment? No. Or this one? No.’

  ‘Is that one of those new-fangled Gladstone bags, Benevolent?’ th
e headmaster asked.

  ‘Dear me, no, Headmaster. It is the much more fashionable Disraeli bag,4 which has many more compartments. For, as the great man once said, “When it comes to compartments, lay them on with a trowel.” Is it in here? Nope . . .’

  ‘Ridiculous.’ Mr Hardthrasher snorted derisively. ‘Bags should be like women: simple, and with one lockable opening.’

  ‘Aha!’ Mr Benevolent had found what he was looking for and turned, brandishing a tin. ‘Look: special delicious soup for you.’

  I could not help but feel that his soupy gift was not a generous one, for the label on the tin read ‘Poison’. I informed him of that fact. ‘It says “Poison” on it.’

  ‘What? No, it says . . .’ He turned away, grabbed a pen and scribbled hurriedly upon the tin, then showed me the amended label. ‘. . . poisson.’

  By the hurried addition of a scrawled extra s it did indeed now say that.

  ‘It is French fish soup?’

  ‘Yup. Definitely. Must have been a misprint in the fish-soup factory. Tsch, the French, eh?’

  We may have been opposed in many ways, but we could at least agree on the inefficiency and plain wrongness of the French, in particular their notoriously inefficient and government-subsidized soup industry. Reassured, I took the tin from him.

  ‘So, around three o’clock tomorrow, you guzzle that down and then Bob’s your uncle and Benevolent’s your father. Albeit very briefly. Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha!’

  He began to laugh and continued for some minutes, pausing only for breath and to motion between the tin of soup and myself before bursting into guffaws again. It was a strange sense of humour that found such fun in the idea of a boy eating soup, but then I was young and couldn’t possibly know the mind of my elders. After a while, the headmaster joined in as well, his deep, mocking laughter mixing with Mr Benevolent’s into a harmony of hilarity, which, despite the horror of my circumstances, I somehow found as contagious as funny cholera or chucklesome typhus, and, without really knowing why, I, too, ventured a laugh.