Bleak Expectations (19 page)

‘The fire imagery makes it quite clear she has gone to Hell,’ said the beadle. My body was seething with unexpressed emotions of loss, but his attitude was quickly changing them to ones of fury and violence.

‘But she saw Jesus!’ Pippa protested.

‘The Devil in a Jesus costume. He does that a lot. Your sister must have blasphemed in life and now she will burn for eternity. Serves her right.’

At the cruel awfulness of his words, I could contain my fury no longer and hurled myself at him. But before I could reach him, he slammed the cell door shut and I simply ended up pounding ineffectually on it, screaming rageful abuse at him as he walked haughtily away, smugly content in the Christian rectitude he believed was his; and then the rage turned to sorrow, the sorrow to grief, and I slumped on the floor next to Pippa, both of us staring at our lifeless sister, whose dreams and ambitions were now all just tiny nothings dissipating in the universe’s cruel void of indifference, and we wept and wept and wept.

¹
Gosh, we haven’t had a footnote for a while, have we? But don’t worry: I’m still here and still paying attention.

²
Told you I was still here. ‘Omicron’ is a Greek letter literally meaning ‘little
o
’, as opposed to ‘omega’, which means ‘big
o
’. Similar letters include the Roman ‘nano-d’ and the early Cyrillic

³
The Salvation Army was disarmed and reformed as a peaceful organization in 1865 after they launched an ill-fated and ill-judged crusade to Bournemouth, killing hundreds of people they deemed not to be praying hard enough on the beach. The contemporaneous Salvation Navy was even more violent. They would sail round the colonies stealing soup and secondhand clothes from indigent populations, then distribute them to old British people.

A graphic and, indeed, geographic representation of my emotional reaction to recent events in my life would have rendered a Himalayan mountain range of joyful peaks lit by sunny hope and wretched troughs swathed in tenebrous gloom; and yea verily, at that moment truly did I walk through the valley of the shadow of the death of my sister.

Whereas until recently a statement of my family accounts would have read:

Self, one.

Sisters, two.

Father, one.

Mother, one (sane).

Balance: excellent.

Now, after sundry unwanted withdrawals and unexpected bills it would have read:

Self, one (sad).

Sisters, one (other one dead, remaining one sad).

Father, none (monkey-killed in Indies).

Mother, one (utterly bonkers), held by evil guardian.

Balance: awful.

True, I had opened a new deposit account of friendship, credited with:

Best friend, one.

And there had been an unexpected additional credit to the kin account, namely:

Aunt, one (recently discovered).

She in turn had added an interest payment of:

Father, one (feared monkey-killed, actually still alive but missing).

But only a day later she herself had been debited as if by a standing order of woe:

Aunt, none (recently discovered one swept away, presumed dead).

And now I stood a mere two or three incidents away from being permanently overdrawn in the matter of family attachments; even worse, my postal address for any statements to be delivered was currently ‘The Nastiest Workhouse in Britain, No Hope Street, London’.

In the moments after my sister Poppy’s death, the other residents of our cramped poverty-cell crept forward to offer us comfort, arms wrapping us in compassion and human solidarity; or so I thought. In truth, their sympathetic hugs were mere disguise for attempted theft of whatever possessions we had on our persons, up to and including the very clothes we stood in. I suppose, given their own wretched circumstances, one could not blame them, but as I stood now half naked, shivering with chilly grief, I found I could in fact quite easily blame them or, rather, hit them until they gave us our clothes back.

In matters of death the workhouse did not stint in its haste, and within the hour poor Poppy was buried in a pauper’s grave due to our pecuniary lack. The weather was not accomplice to our misery, it being a cheerily sunny day, so, as was the case back then, elements were matched to emotions by the deployment of the parish’s metaphorical meteorology maker, a contraption of hoses, pipes and suspended colanders that allowed a mock rain to fall upon our small mourning party.
²
The pauper’s service was a short one, meaning the beadle offered but a rapid ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to et cetera, chuck her in,’ before our beloved sister was deposited unfeelingly in a shallow, undignified scrape in the London clay, at its head a rough wooden cross with written on it: ‘Another povvo, 18whatever – 18whocares’.

But I cared; sister Pippa cared; and though he had known her but a short while, my best friend Harry Biscuit cared.

And, surprisingly, the viciously religious Beadle Hardthrasher also seemed to join in with the caring as he now leaned towards us and, in a tone far from tender but much less fierce than his regular one, said, ‘You may now have time to grieve.’

His Christianity might have been biceps-bulgingly muscular but at least it seemed to allow space for the weaker emotions and, thus given permission, we raised the sluice gates of grief and allowed our tears to flood out and attempt to wash away the pain of our de-sistering.

But barely had our lachrymose lament begun when the beadle struck his gold-plated staff of office on the ground and, fully re-fierced in tone, said, ‘And that’s enough of that!’ With a flick of his hand he summoned two of his under-beadles, who seized us and started to drag us away. ‘Now let us scourge the poverty from you with hard work! For by vigorous labour you may one day free yourselves and find respite in the arms of the ever-loving Jesus.’

Even to a non-euphemistically minded boy such as myself, this sounded less like worldly freedom and more like death, and it occurred to me that the Anglican Church of the time was much nicer to people who had money.

Then, still be-teared, we were assigned to the improving tasks of the workhouse. Pippa was set to work sewing. But not usefully, oh, no – for what use for usefulness did such a cruel establishment have? She was given a piece of torn material and told to repair it; as soon as she had done so, the weaselly witch who supervised her took it up and tore it once more, then compelled Pippa to re-repair it, the whole ritual designed to inculcate Christian patience, forbearance and, presumably, massive rage.

As for Harry and me, the workhouse had an attached bottling factory to which we were taken and where I was given the job of testing the strength and integrity of the bottles.

Unfortunately, this was done by having them smashed over my head.

‘Bow your head!’ commanded the beadle, and I did. He then lustily swung a bottle at my skull, hitting it squarely and precisely.

The bottle shattered instantly, the impact being both painful and full of pain.

‘A bottle as weak as the human spirit.’ The beadle sighed.

‘Ow!’ I exclaimed, not unreasonably, I thought, as my cranium was now suffering from both blunt trauma and an infusion of small splinters of glass.

‘What did you say, boy? Did you cry out weakly in the face of pain?’ He wheeled upon me, wielding a Bible. ‘Did our wonderful Lord Jesus cry out weakly on the Cross? He did not. He bore His pain stoically, reciting poetry and composing witty epigrams. If you lack such fortitude you dishonour His name and fiery Hell awaits you!’

Of course it did.

‘Right, next bottle!’

This bottle did not shatter, instead merely striking me with a hollow but no less painful clunk.

‘Behold! A good, strong bottle, fit for the Lord. But we must test it yet further.’

This time he hit me with it really, really hard and it shattered shardily and, I need hardly add but will anyway, with a gargantuan amount of agony.

‘Alas, its faith has fallen short. But we fill find a worthy bottle yet!’

We didn’t, because even if it took a good five or six goes, each bottle was eventually found wanting in its rendezvous with my skull.

Meanwhile Harry’s job seemed at first to be much easier for he was assigned the task of clearing up the fragments of broken bottle, and to that end the beadle opened a cupboard full of brooms and brushes suited to that task.

‘You must choose your tools as splendid Jesus would have chosen,’ said the beadle.

‘Ooh, well, I think Jesus would have liked that one,’ said Harry, reaching for a broom.

‘You chose poorly!’ yelled the beadle, slamming the cupboard door closed. ‘Super Jesus would not have chosen at all. For brooms and brushes are the Devil’s cleaning tools, sent to tempt us into proud laziness, and by reaching for one you have surely condemned yourself to fiery Hell.’

‘That’s not fair!’ wailed Harry, and I saw his point, particularly since the broom he had reached for had actually had ‘Jesus’s special broom’ written on it.

‘You must take a more bodily path to redemption.’

Thus it was that Harry was compelled to lick the pieces of bottle from the floor.

He didn’t enjoy it.

Nor did his tongue, rapidly becoming swollen and hurty.

‘Do you feel closer to our Lord now, boy?’ enquired Beadle Hardthrasher.

‘Yuth,’ replied Harry, unleashing more Christian rage.

‘You dare speak unclearly? Diction is next to godliness! By your slurring words you have surely condemned yourself to fiery Hell!’

Was there any act in this place that did not lead to fiery Hell? Though as the pain-filled hours dragged on, that Hadean destination began to seem a marginally more attractive option than the workhouse.

Eventually our shift was over and, exhausted and pained, Harry and I headed for our quarters.

All we wished to do was sleep, but that desire was flung from my mind like a badly strapped-in child from a poorly maintained merry-go-round as I heard a voice from the past, and not just a random or ghostly voice from the past, such as that of William the Conqueror or a mad old monk, but a real, friendly, much-liked voice.

‘Young Pip? Pip Bin? Is that you?’

Why, it was the voice of Mr Parsimonious, once the ironically named business partner to both my father and my evil guardian, Mr Benevolent; and close behind it came the body and face of Mr Parsimonious as well. Unhappily, whereas he had once been a plumply prosperous figure, jolly-clothed and gaudy, now he was be-ragged, tatty and poor – though evidently still his old generous self.

‘Dear Pip, though I wish we had met in better circumstances you must still have a gift!’ This most munificent of men now patted his pockets and looked about him. ‘But what do I have to give you? I know! Have this crust of bread, this hard, mouldy crust of bread . . .’ He handed over just such an unappealing object. ‘And this fetid water!’ He now knelt and scooped a handful of gruesome-looking fluid from a puddle on the floor. ‘Lice! All must have lice!’ At this he scraped his hands through his hair and offered us the contents he found therein. ‘And these rags, these hideous, tattered rags . . .’ Now there was desperation in his voice as he tore at his clothing, rending it from his body. ‘And why not share in these weird sores and bodily lesions that affect me?’ By this point his words were turning into a high-pitched shriek of misery and, sinking to the ground, he began to weep. ‘And these tears! Have these salty tears of shame and regret! And who wants some of my misery? I’ve got a lot to go round.’ Now he was into a full-frontal crying fit.

‘Mr Parsimonious, you must not weep . . .’ This was not just an attempt at comfort, it was a statement of the actual legal situation, for at that point in Britain it was still illegal for a man to cry; if the beadle saw him doing so he could be hanged or, worse, pointed at disapprovingly and mocked in public.
³

After a while, he sniffled to a halt and the threat of the law receded.

‘I am sorry. It is just that to see a friendly face after such a long time . . .’

‘How did you end up in here, Mr Parsimonious?’ I asked.

‘Sadly, my fortunes have not run fortunately. It turns out the old adage is true.’

‘What old adage?’

‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. But annual income twenty pounds and it turns out your one remaining business partner is a colossal duplicitous bastard, result misery.’

‘You refer to Mr Benevolent?’

‘Aye! A name I cannot say any more!’

‘Me neither,’ said Harry, though he meant it in a more physical sense as all his glass-splintered tongue would allow him to say was ‘thlee eeeephher’, a pair of incomprehensible words I have chosen not to set down here, though I realize I just have.

‘This is my new best friend, Harry Biscuit, by the way,’ I informed Mr Parsimonious.

Harry stuck out his hand and his tongue in an attempt to get some clarity to his speech. ‘How do you do?’ he somehow managed to emit.