Bleak Expectations

by Mark Evans

  ‘Gotcha! Oh, you should see your face.’

  And so that I might indeed see my face, he produced a small mirror and held it before my eyes. I looked shocked, pale and unamused.

  ‘Prepare to die? No, prepare to be thanked, for I detested them,’ he said, to my great surprise. ‘Terrible brothers, weaker than baby’s gin and softer than a month-old apple. And they never bought me birthday presents.’

  Like his brothers, he was a large, fierce-looking man, but unlike them, this Hardthrasher was evidently the veteran of many wars: his face was grimly scarred with powder burns and his uniform was covered with medals, including the highly prized I Nelson badge given to those who had served at the battle of Trafalgar; and as I shook his offered hand of greeting, I noticed that it was hard to the touch.

  ‘Forgive my wooden hand. The fact is, after the number of body parts I’ve had blown off in battle I’m made mostly of wood. You see this leg?’ He gave the left one a tap and it resounded woodenly. ‘Teak. The other’s made of balsa – helps me float if I fall overboard. My right arm’s poplar and the left’s made of willow and doubles as a cricket bat. I’m literally a left-handed bat.’ Now he took a fork from a nearby table, ran it prongily down his side and a pleasing musical scale came in response. ‘That’s my ribs. Pure mahogany, cut precisely to xylophonic proportions. My kidneys are elm, my liver sycamore and, as a good sailor, I have a heart of oak. Oh, and my hair is chestnut.’

  Truly he was a man of his wood; a small deciduous forest in human form.

  ‘And did you sail here tonight, sir?’ I asked jokily, for we were far from the sea.

  ‘Yes. My ship is currently moored in Piccadilly Circus.’ This was unusual, but did at least explain the traffic jam I had encountered earlier that evening, as well as the mast and sails I had seen. ‘I never like to be more than a few hundred yards from her so I had my crew drag her out of the Thames and moor her there. But tomorrow HMS Grrr shall return to Portsmouth.’

  Suddenly my heart beat faster. For the picture of my father that Aunt Lily had shown me in the newspaper those weeks ago was of the docks in that fine naval town – and the ship he had been in front of was this admiral’s very own HMS Grrr. Perhaps this was my chance to go and investigate further.

  ‘I have always wanted to visit Portsmouth,’ I said non-chalantly, twirling a piece of hair round my finger as if the thought had only just occurred to me and was of no consequence at all.

  ‘It would be an honour to have such a distinguished inventor on board. Why not come down for lunch tomorrow?’

  ‘I should like that very much, Admiral.’

  ‘Then tomorrow it is. Now, excuse me, there are people I need to see.’

  The rest of the evening passed in a giddy blur, all champagne, dancing and excitement at the potential discoveries I might make the next day. I remember brief images – Harry and Pippa dancing together amid the human wreckage created by Harry’s dangerously uncoordinated movements; Mr Parsimonious yielding to his innately generous urges and pretending to be a waiter so he could give people things; and Admiral Hardthrasher walking past Mr Benevolent and seeming to wink collusively at him – but the party was no longer the most important thing, that status now being held by my imminent trip to Portsmouth.

  Indeed, as soon as the clock struck midnight and announced the arrival of a new day, I boarded a carriage to the south coast, found my way to the docks by following the night cries of desperate prostitutes, and as dawn broke over the Channel I was knocking on the front door of HMS Grrr.

  ‘Too early?’ I asked, as the admiral himself answered it.

  ‘It’s never too early in the navy. We’ve been up for hours swabbing and swibbing the decks.1 Come aboard and let me show you round.’

  The ship was a mighty chunk of oaky magnificence, a four-decker and nine-master, with a hundred and forty-seven cannon – it should have been a hundred and forty-eight but the admiral was an enormous snooker fan. We stood on the pointy bit at the front2 and surveyed the fleet at anchor.

  ‘Look at all those marvellous ships.’ The admiral sighed happily. ‘Let me tell you their names. We have HMS Aarggh, HMS Eeeurggh, HMS Anger, HMS Take-that-you-French-swine and HMS Take-that-you-British-swine, which we captured off the French. Ah, my ships, my lovely violent, cannony ships . . .’ He looked lovingly and longingly at them, shuddered briefly with joy, then snapped himself from his passionate naval reverie. ‘Now I shall show you below decks.’

  We went down to the next deck, the so-called throat of the ship, the remaining two decks being the stomach and bowels.

  ‘This is the officers’ mess, so-called because it is traditionally a terrible mess.’ Nearby the ship’s band was practising and I now heard a small drum-roll and cymbal-clash. ‘Of course, your invention’s changed that, so we’ll probably have to call it the officers’ neat from now on.’

  We moved on through the ship and entered a vast chamber with large pieces of terrifying-looking equipment on the walls.

  ‘These are the punishment quarters,’ said the admiral, proudly.

  ‘It seems the largest compartment on board.’

  ‘Yes, well, we do a lot of punishment in the navy.’

  ‘The cat o’ nine tails?’ I said, trying to sound knowledgeable.

  ‘Cat o’ nine tails? A pathetic tool. You might as well attack the men with a feather-duster. Which we do daily, of course, to keep them free of dust.’ Now he approached a fearsome chunk of metal on the wall, and stroked it fondly. ‘No, we use the dog o’ ten spikes, the rabbit o’ twelve punches and a very angry biting weasel. Proper punishments.’

  Though he may have appeared to like me, clearly this Hardthrasher was as violent and cruel as his three late brothers.

  ‘And if those punishments are not enough, the men go down here into solitary confinement.’

  He opened a hatch in the deck, revealing a dark, wretched space. I shuddered at the claustrophobic horror therein.

  ‘What sort of crime would see a man sent down there?’

  ‘Only three things: cowardice in battle; being rude about the King; or murder. So in you go.’

  Without warning, he shoved me hard in the back and I toppled forward through the hatch with a shout of alarm and a squeak of fear. I landed hard at the bottom and looked up to see the admiral glaring down at me.

  ‘When I thanked you for killing my brothers, I thought you had only disposed of Jeremiah and Ratched. But in the meantime it has come to my attention that you were also responsible for my brother Ezekiel’s demise.’

  Ah. The beadle.

  ‘I was not! Technically it was several blocks of stone with the Bible written on them that killed him!’ I protested. Weakly, it has to be said.

  ‘I don’t care. I may have hated the other two, but I loved that man like a brother. Because he was.’

  ‘But . . . how did you find out?’

  The answer came not from the admiral, but from a new, familiar arrival whose face now loomed over me framed in the hatch.

  ‘He found out from me.’

  ‘Mr Benevolent!’

  ‘Yup, me again. Thank you so much for helping me with my little problem, Admiral.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  ‘What are you planning to do with me?’ I asked fearfully.

  Mr Benevolent grinned down at me, his teeth tiny white shards of malice. ‘To use the vernacular your Bin invention has given us, the admiral is taking out the trash. Now, forgive me, but I must hurry back to London to woo your sister. For I am going to make her my bride, just to upset you. Even if you are dead when it happens. To upset your ghost, perhaps. Not that I believe in that sort of supernatural nonsense. But the principle stands.’ He came to a slightly awkward halt. ‘Aaaanyway, that’s what I’m off to do. Goodbye, Pip Bin. Goodbye for ever.’

  He waved at me, blew a kiss and then the hatch slammed shut. I could hear footsteps and evil laughter as he walked away, his horrid cackle dwindling to nothing.

  ‘Ha,
ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’

  All was briefly silence, but then I heard the sounds of the ship preparing to depart.

  ‘Haul anchor and hoist the mainsail!’

  ‘Middentrops to puncty and splice the shimmie-shangles!’3

  With creaks and groans the mighty vessel set off, its destination unknown to me, my fate unknown to me, the square root of eight hundred and twenty-one unknown to me, though after a few seconds’ rough calculation I reckoned it was just under twenty-nine, possibly about twenty-eight and three-quarters.

  Fear gripped me as I stared at the confining walls of my shippy prison; terror wrapped its sinuous fingers around my throat, and panic began to tickle me under the arms, making me jitter and shake nervously.

  What hope of escape was there for me now?

  Or indeed for Pippa, whose future would involve a lot more Mr Benevolent than anyone might wish. True, she had Mr Parsimonious and Harry to protect her but . . . well, you know, they were both a bit rubbish.

  Only I could protect her; and it seemed as if I could not protect even myself. For even if I could escape from this confinement – and it seemed as if I really could not – then I would have to fight my way off the ship, which again seemed incredibly unlikely, and even if I managed that I would be adrift alone in the ocean with all the dangers that entailed.

  Despair set in; and though I was now eighteen I felt nothing other than a boyish misery and the strong desire to shed bitter, illegal tears of woe.

  So I did.

  1 Swabbing technically refers to the vertical strokes of a mop, swibbing to the horizontal; they are equivalent to the warp and weft in weaving.

  2 He means the prow. With tight deadlines and the absence of Wikipedia, nineteenth-century authors often just ploughed on if they couldn’t think of the right word.

  3 Sir Philip may have made up these supposedly nautical terms. I have never come across them in any other literature, and I’ve read at least two Patrick O’Brian novels.

  PART THE FIVETH

  CHAPTER THE TWENTY-NINTH

  Doom-despair to hope-happiness and back again

  I slumped tearfully against the rough wood of the ship, as miserable as that most woeful of fish, the saddock.1 All my money, success and fame as the inventor of the Bin meant nothing, for I was trapped and doomed to die, leaving behind a mad mother, a still missing possibly dead father, a daft best friend and an imminently Mr Benevolent-seduced sister. But as I rested my forehead despairingly against the coarse planks that encased me, I realized that the wood was not just rough from nature but from design – someone had scratched writing on it.

  The near darkness of my captive space prevented reading, so I traced the letters with my fingers and read: ‘Tnqneg 8lm’.

  Alas, it was just nonsense. Or I’d got it wrong, accustomed as I was to reading with eyes not fingers.

  Squinting in the dim, lazy light, I tried to make out the letters by more conventional ocular means and, over a period of some hours, my eyes gradually adjusted until I could read two sensible, non-nonsense words, which together formed a name, and not just any name, but a morale-boosting name of great import.

  That name was Thomas Bin.

  My father.

  He had been on board this vessel! Admittedly in the hellish prison I now found myself in, but it proved that he was alive, or at least had been back then and might indeed be so still if in the meantime no deathy circumstance had waylaid him; though given that I had not heard from him in ages I was less than optimistic on that front, being perhaps only nano-hopeful or pico-positive.

  Nevertheless, his name and that eency-weency teeny-tiny bit of hope was enough to fill me with both resolve and a resolution: I was going to get off this ship if it was the last thing I ever did.

  Which was a bit of a silly resolution, actually, for if getting off the ship was actually the last thing I ever did then I might as well not bother, as other than some sense of satisfaction at having achieved that nautical escape, I would have gone no further to saving my family and would still be dead.

  I re-resolutioned thusly: I was going to get off the ship and make sure it definitely was not the last thing I did, instead making sure that I went on to do more things, such as de-maddening my mother, finding my father and saving Pippa from Mr Benevolent’s saucy clutches.

  With that purpose in mind, I began to formulate a plan. Within an hour, I had got one. It was bold and ambitious, and required a tin of gunpowder, a small trampoline, seven yards of silk ribbon, a pineapple, a large trampoline and five highly trained parakeets, none of which I had to hand, so I abandoned it and started planning again.

  But I had got no further than reformulating my original plan so that it needed only four parakeets, no ribbon and just the small trampoline, when the hatch above me opened to reveal the sadistically grinning face of Admiral Horatio Hardthrasher.

  ‘Out you come, young swabbo!’

  Two sailors reached down and hauled me out of my tiny, solitary compartment. They smelt of rum, seawater and gunpowder.2 It was quite pleasant, actually, manly and mildly intoxicating. They threw me on to the deck in front of the admiral, and left, holding hands. Not each other’s, just some hands they happened to have with them.

  ‘So, just you and me, Bin. Before I send you down to Davy Jones’s locker to fetch Ryan Jones’s kitbag,3 I thought I’d make you pay for killing the brother I loved.’ The admiral was holding something out of sight behind his back, and I trembled at what horrific punishment it might be. ‘Say hello to the rabbit o’ twelve punches!’

  I flinched in painful anticipation of this no doubt monstrous device, but instead the admiral merely produced a glove-puppet of a fluffy, sweet-looking rabbit, an object that seemed designed to make me say ‘aw’ rather than ‘ow’.

  ‘Why is it called— Ow!’

  The admiral rapidly punched me twelve times, thus physically explaining the device’s name, and I realized I had been wrong. For while the rabbity exterior might elicit coos of sweetness, the massive fist within was definitely meant to hurt, and it really, really did.

  But it also unleashed a ferocity within me I had not known existed. Before the admiral could reload his punching bunny – by which I mean hit me again – I charged him and tackled him to the ground as if I was playing Bastardball, the hideously violent game taught me by one of his own brothers, though the irony of that fact was lost on me as only aggressive thoughts filled my mind.

  As the admiral tried to get up, I hurled myself atop him and, seizing his wooden left arm, I pushed it hard against his wooden right leg and desperately began to rub the two together. My frantic efforts soon bore fruit as tendrils of smoke issued forth and then – glory be! – a spark followed by a small flame. I blew gently and encouragingly on the tiny fire, and it grew, spreading rapidly until every wooden part of him was aflame.

  ‘No!’ he shouted, staggering flamily around the deck. Where he touched, the ship too blossomed into fire, which raced pyromaniacally across the walls, ceiling and floor until I was surrounded by flickering menace.

  It seemed as if I had leaped straight from an admiral-shaped frying pan into a fire-shaped fire, for I could see no way out. Then I espied a potentially life-saving axe on the wall, grabbed it, started hacking desperately at the walls of the ship and, after several splintering blows, a great rent appeared and seawater flooded in – surely this would now extinguish the fire.

  It did.

  It also sank the ship.

  And so, mere minutes later, I found myself adrift in the English Channel. Alone. Wet. Cold. Frightened. But free.

  1 Basically a haddock with a frown. Probably sad because its name is a pun.

  2 This was the original scent of popular gentlemen’s aftershave Old Spice, which was first sold in the nineteenth century as New Spice.

  3 Nineteenth-century nautical slang terms for the sea-bed and therefore drowning. Oddly, in recent years the phrase ‘Ryan Jones’s kitbag’ has become a Welsh rugby slang term to den
ote general excellence.

  CHAPTER THE THIRTIETH

  Regarding rescues and returns

  I quickly realized that my freedom from the ship might very soon be converted into a different kind of freedom, that is to say freedom from life, for the salty chill of the Channel rapidly began to suck the warmth from my body, like an aquatic vampire. There seemed no chance of survival as I was far from land and entirely at the mercy of the capricious tides; for this was still some years before Professor Wilkie Swim invented his famed method for propelling oneself through the water without the aid of a sail or a well-trained fish.1

  And as I bobbed helplessly, feeling the cold sap my life-force, I saw a terrible sight in the form of a large, floating sign: ‘Warning: you are about to leave the Channel and enter La Manche.’

  I was drifting towards France.

  ‘Help!’ I began to cry, as the watery border approached. ‘Help!’ Yet no help came, and I knew that within minutes I would have to shout, ‘Au secours!’ to attract aid, a thought that made me sick to my incredibly British stomach.

  Though it also occurred to me that if the cold waters continued their effective work at driving me towards death I might not actually live to face that French fate, in some ways a positive, but on balance a distinctly mixed blessing.

  ‘Help!’ I cried again, though more weakly than before. ‘Help,’ I now merely said, weaker still. ‘Help . . .’ I whimpered, my strength nearly gone.

  I closed my eyes, and prepared to yield to the briny embrace of the sea. The river had claimed my aunt Lily; now its salty cousin was going to claim me. In fact, here from her watery afterlife, as if to guide me Charon-like2 into the next world, was my late aunt, for I now heard her voice.

  ‘Pip! Open your eyes, Pip!’

  I did, and there she was before me, my brave, noble aunt Lily appearing to stand on the waves like a sea-nymph or Channel-elf.

  ‘Are you come to carry me over to the other side, dear aunt?’