The Black Joke

by David Bramhall

  Chapter 11

  They are all together become filthy (Psalm 14)

  The next day dawned dismally, a thin rain blowing in from the sea and hardly light at all. Trudging through the wet streets to school, Pert thought the day matched his own mood. As they neared the bottom of the town they were joined by other children walking in ones and twos, shrouded in raincoats or old sacks according to their status. No one ran, and no one smiled. There were few greetings. School was not something to look forward to. Fenestra was silent and withdrawn, walking by his side with her hood over her face.

  “Are you going to be all right?” he said. He knew what was worrying her. She was two classes below him, so he couldn't keep an eye on her. “Perhaps if you keep with the other girls at playtime?”

  “No, they're no good,” she said. “If anything frightens them they just run away squeaking. And they don't like me all that much, except for Esmerelda, because I'm Potts. And Esmerelda's

  scared of her own shadow.”

  “I'll come and find you as soon as I get out,” he said. His class had their playtime a little later than hers, with only a short overlap.

  “It'll be all right,” she said. “I'll ask Miss Clutterbrick if I can tidy the bookshelf at playtime. Esmerelda can help. And then we'll do it very slowly so it lasts for the afternoon as well.”

  “That sounds like a good plan,” Pert said.

  At the gates Esmerelda was waiting. She was Fenestra's only friend, a tiny waif of a girl with pale ginger hair and knock knees. They greeted each other with timid enthusiasm and disappeared towards their classroom.

  Pert's own class, the oldest, were housed at the far end of the building. The room smelled of generations of chalk dust, powdered ink and boy, though these days there were girls in the class as well. One of them was Rosella, but she hadn't arrived yet. She was always the last to arrive because she would march her sisters to school and then escort each one of them to the correct classroom first.

  Pert sat next to a boy called Vachel, a dim lad who spoke only in grunts and hated everybody including Pert. He was already in his place, his desk lid up. He had a dead mouse in his desk, and was busy sticking pen nibs in it. Pert greeted him but received no reply.

  In the desk in the far rear corner sat Fenestra's tormentors, Darren Durridge and Batty Bunt. They were great hulking lads, far too big for school but far too stupid to leave and too clumsy and sullen to find a berth on a fishing boat, at least with any skipper who valued the happiness of his crew, so there they sat with their boots up on the desk, chewing balls of paper with spit and throwing them at the girls.

  Pert felt a tap on his shoulder. In the desk behind him were two brothers, Seth and Solomon White. They were slim and dark and quick, lively lads who got on with everyone.

  “See who's come up from Mr.Trump's class?” hissed Seth, pointing towards the far front corner of the class. There sat a new boy, tiny and tousled. His clothes were an astonishing ensemble of other people's cast-offs. His shirt had evidently been a lady's blouse, for it had little purple flowers and horseshoes on it. His jacket was many sizes too large and hung off his shoulder. He had rolled up the sleeves so his grubby wrists and hands could get out, and one lapel was torn completely off. His trousers were also too large and torn in an embarrassing place, while on his right foot he wore a wellington boot and on his left an elderly plimsoll with the toes out.

  “Who's that?” asked Pert.

  Solomon White put his head beside his brother's. “Billy Moon,” he whispered. “His mum's Primrose Moon. She's a ... you know!” He winked, and dipped his head to one side meaningfully.

  “She's a what?” Pert asked.

  “You know ... she goes with men. Our dad calls her a good-time girl.”

  “And our mum says time's not all she's good for,” put in Seth, “but she charges by the hour!”

  The pair collapsed in a fit of sniggers. Pert examined the new boy. He had a snub nose and a great mop of tangled hair through which bright eyes shone. His mouth was wide, and half open in a happy grin as he gazed round the classroom. His face was extremely dirty.

  Before Pert could complete his examination, Rosella arrived, her big boots clattering on the floor and her nose in the air. She quick marched to her desk, flung her books inside it, slammed the lid and folded her arms, as if to say “Right! I'm here now, so get on with it!”

  She was tall and slender, built for speed. She could have been elegant, but moved too quickly and decisively for that. Her nearly-blonde hair was cropped and always untidy from the speed of her passage through life. Her dark eyes and delicate features spoke of pleasures not yet discovered, and her lips invited soft kisses though probably not from Pertinacious Potts. He and Rosella Prettyfoot had a secure and consistent relationship and both knew exactly where they stood. Pert had always

  adored her, and she had always ignored him.

  The classroom hubbub died abruptly as Mr.Merridew walked in. He stalked to his desk and surveyed the ranks before him, his hands in his pockets.

  “White and White, stop giggling like a couple of girls,” he said quietly. “And Potts, face front. Bunt, the cane's hanging behind the door. Do you want to get it for me?”

  Bunt shook his head, mute.

  “Well you will, if I see you throw one more piece of paper at the unfortunate girl in front of you, though I've no doubt she invited it, the hussy. And before you go out at playtime you'll pick up every scrap of paper from this floor. If I return and find just one, tiny, miniscule trace of paper,” his voice sunk even lower, full of menace, “I'll make you crawl on your stomach and lick it clean, so help me. Am I clear?”

  Bunt nodded.

  “Good. Any boy or girl want to draw themselves to my attention at all, before we start work? Anyone feel the need to flirt with danger or experiment with humiliation? Anyone fancy baring their spotty bottom to the world so I can demonstrate with my cane the futility of their pathetic existence? Yes, that boy? Are you volunteering?”

  The boy next to Billy Moon had his hand up. “Sir, please sir, no sir. Sir, please sir, can I move? He smells!”

  Merridew looked at him for a long moment. “Smells, does he? How unfortunate. Well, Moon, do you smell?”

  Billy Moon, unabashed, grinned at him. “Prob'ly. We ain't got no bath in our 'ouse, mister!”

  “Mm. If I were so importunate as to have no bath in my house, I'd keep quiet about it. Yes, you may move. There's an empty place in the second row. And you, Moon, come out here. Fetch the cane from behind the door.”

  A stir went round the class, a mixture of fear, disgust and glee at the discomfiture of another. It wasn't so bad, seeing someone caned, as long as it wasn't you.

  The teacher took the cane and bent the boy over the high teacher's desk. With a gesture of distaste he used the very tips of his fingers to yank down the trousers, and laid two strokes of the cane across the skinny buttocks.

  “In future, boy, you will address me as “Sir”. I do not answer to “Mister”, and I'll cane you every time you forget it. And do not come to my class again smelling like a midden, or I'll have Bunt and Durridge take you outside and throw buckets of water over you. They'll enjoy that, no doubt. It will appeal to what they laughingly regard as a sense of humour.”

  Billy Moon pulled up his trousers and returned to his seat. He was still grinning, but not quite so widely. The rest of the class relaxed. Now Merridew had got that out of his system they might get through the first half of the morning unscathed. There were few boys who did not know what it was like to bend over that desk for some small crime or other, and few of the boys' bottoms that had not been exposed to public view, from the White brothers' slender buttocks to the great pimply hams of Bunt and Durridge. No girls were punished in this way, but the fear that it might happen one day kept that half of the class subdued all the same. There was always a first time.

  Merridew stood and looked out over his class, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Take out your bible
s. Potts, you will begin.”

  Pert started reading aloud. “He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages: in the secret places doth he murder the innocent: his eyes are privily set against the poor,” he read. They had got as far as the Psalms.

  “He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den: he lieth in wait to catch the poor: he doth catch the poor, when he draweth him into his net.”

  Merridew rocked, and threw a piece of chalk idly from hand to hand. He was a cadaverous man, long of face and misshapen of jaw, his eyes small and his brow insignificant, a mop of lank grey hair obscuring it. He dressed like a magister from one of the great schools, in flannel suit and long black gown, but in his heart he knew that he was not cut from that cloth. He knew himself for a weak man, a man of limited intellect and fibre, a bully who had found his proper niche in life terrorising the youth of this abject little town.

  “He croucheth, and humbleth ...” Pert went on, but Merridew interrupted him.

  “Next,” he said quietly, and Seth White took up the verse: “... humbleth himself, that the poor may fall by his strong ones ...”

  Pert wondered what that meant. Who humbleth himself, and how did the strong ones make the poor fall? He liked the psalms. He specially liked “They grin like a dog and run about the city.” Dogs did grin, too, and hung their tongues out at one side. But his favourite was “The waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where no ground is. I am come into deep waters, and the floods run over me.” That was a proper fisherman's psalm, that was. But they said that the psalms had been written by desert people who lived in sand and rode around on camels and never saw the sea. Perhaps riding around in boring old sand all day made you have a good imagination, he thought.

  The turn had reached the back now, but Pert didn't allow himself to relax. Merridew had a habit of suddenly picking someone out of turn, even someone who had read already, and woe betide you if you weren't in the right place. Now Darren Durridge was reading, his head down and his face scarlet.

  “How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord?” he read. “For ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” Darren Durridge had got an easy bit, but he hated this embarrassment and someone would pay for it later. “How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?”

  Pert felt cross with the camel-riders. They were always moaning. They were always surrounded by enemies, and the Lord was always forsaking them, and all they could do was complain about the unfairness of it all. Why didn't they get off their backsides and fight for once? And on the rare occasions when the Lord did come through for them, and sent out his arrows and scattered their enemies and shot out lightnings and discomfited them, they behaved with unseemly glee and did rejoice a bit too much in his opinion, for the enemies soon regrouped and came back strong as ever. You'd think they'd have learned by now.

  He gathered his wits together and tried to concentrate, for it was Rosella's turn to read. “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, and there is none that doeth good,” she read. She read fluently but rather quickly, and did not stumble over the word “abominable” as most of them would have. “The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if any did understand, and seek God. But they are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”

  She rushed through this in clipped tones that made it clear she had no truck with any camel-riders or their whining. Pert felt pleased that she evidently shared his misgivings about them. Surely you could doeth good and not be filthy without seeking God? The Vicar presumably sought God regularly, but his collar was frequently grimy and he smelled of whisky. Perhaps he sought but did not understand? That would be a nice distinction, wouldn't it? Suppose you were thick like Batty Bunt and you just couldn't understand something – did that make you wicked? It earned you the cane, but did it make you wicked?

  “Miss Prettyfoot, you read accurately but you make it sound as though you would as soon read from a laundry list,” drawled Merridew. “Perhaps you find this beneath you?”

  Rosella looked at him coolly. “Did I make any mistakes, sir?” Pert felt his heart thump in his chest at her bravery.

  “You did not, but you read it without sense or understanding,” Merridew said. His relaxed pose was gone, and he rose to his full height, his cheeks flushing. “Have you any idea what you just read?”

  “Certainly sir. I was reading from Psalm Fourteen. The psalmist is observing that anyone who doesn't believe in God must be wicked, and that he can find no one who seeks to understand the truth. It is an interesting point, sir, to consider whether a non-believer can do anything that is not a sin. If you believe and give a poor person some money, that's a good act. Is it a wicked act to do it without belief? The Vicar touched on it in his sermon two Sundays ago.”

  Merridew twitched. He never went to church. His mouth moved convulsively. From his position at the front Pert felt sure he heard him mutter under his breath “I'll touch on you, you impudent hussy, see if I don't!” but the teacher covered it up by walking to his desk and sitting down with a swish of his gown.

  “Moon! Read on!” he barked.

  Pert was musing on the wonderful congruity of his thoughts and those of Rosella. He would like to be able to talk to her about this wickedness thing. He found a lot of what went on in the church rather hard to stomach, but he didn't feel wicked. He couldn't remember hurting anyone, or even being rude to them. Did this mean he was a good Christian really, but hadn't realised it yet?

  He was disturbed from this train of thought by the sudden silence that gripped the room. Billy Moon had no book in front of him, and sat sideways in his seat, grinning.

  “Sir, can't read, sir!” he said cheerfully. “Never learned it! I tried sir, but all them little 'ooks and curly fings don' mean squit to me, sir. But I do likes listenin' to the story, sir!”

  This can only end badly, thought Pert. Surely there was another caning in this. The class held its breath. Merridew rose to his feet. Two pieces of defiance in as many minutes could not be borne, his face said, and one must be made to pay for the other.

  Just then the bell rang outside the door, and the class breathed a sigh, relief for some, frustration for others. Merridew never let a moment of playtime be wasted, for he was addicted to his pipe and his nerves must be on edge by now. Without a word he wrapped his gown around him and swept out of the door and up the passage towards the staff room. Behind him a gabble of voices broke out, and a surge towards the playground and fifteen minutes of freedom.

  Pert had been in the staffroom once, sent by a teacher to fetch something forgotten. He could imagine it now, the ancient leather armchairs stained with ink and food and other unfathomable substances, collapsed on their springs under generations of magisterial buttocks. The air would be fusty and smoke-filled as Merridew and his companions Trump and Bristle stoked up their pipes, bubbling and sucking and filling their corner of the room with fumes. Trump, who taught the class below Merridew's, was a lazy, soft pudding of a man who used the cane just enough to secure adequate discipline but could not be bothered to do much more. The idea of actually teaching his pupils anything was a step too far, in his view. He left that energetic sort of thing to Merridew and Miss Clutterbrick.

  Miss Clutterbrick was the only woman teacher, and the only one with any kind of formal training for she had spent two years at the diocesan training college in St.Portius. She excelled at lists, forms, schedules, reports, posters and anything that required several different coloured inks. Her class was orderly, the children mostly complaisant and rather baffled by the exercises they were required to do. They liked the nature table, which held bunches of flowers, shrubs, grasses and dry sticks in jam-jars according to season, and odd coloured stones the children found on the beach, some seaweed that was supposed to tell you if it was going to rain, and a fish. The fish was changed once a week.

  They also enjoyed the daily story wh
ich was invariably of a moral and improving nature intended to demonstrate that virtue will always be rewarded in this world and vice will get you nothing but illness and degradation. It never occurred to them that this was entirely at odds with the world they saw around them and in which their parents had to live, which consistently rewarded corruption and ignored virtue. It was a story, after all.

  Fenestra was in Miss Clutterbrick's class, and saw through her completely. She knew the stories were absurd, and preferred her own, where cruelly abused princesses were made miserable through no fault of their own. In Fenestra's stories virtue was never rewarded, which made Fenestra herself a rather remarkable little girl for she was always virtuous and harboured no malice for anyone except, possibly, Batty Bunt and Darren Durridge who hunted her unmercifully.

  Miss Clutterbrick avoided the staffroom, feeling the eyes of the male staff upon her and fearing that they harboured mad, lustful designs upon her person. This was probably not true, as she was a thick, ungainly person with coarse features and an unfortunate habit of sniffing, but she believed it sincerely all the same and found it a vaguely satisfactory obsession to see her through the long lonely evenings in the two rooms she rented over the butcher's in Low Street.

  In fact the conversation in the staffroom tended to revolve not around the feminine charms of Miss Clutterbrick but around the various depraved acts of the children in their charge.

  "What the bloody hell do you mean, Trump," demanded Merridew sucking furiously on his pipe, "what do you mean by sending me that stinking illiterate? What do you expect me to do with him?"

  Trump chuckled lazily, watching spirals of blue smoke ascend from his own pipe to join the blue cloud layer that hovered near the ceiling. "It's your turn, old boy. I've put up with him for two years, so now someone else has to take him on. He does no harm. He just sits in the corner and grins, and smells. If you don't disturb him, he won't disturb you. And it's generally a good idea not to disturb him, because while he's still the smell doesn't spread so much."

  "He does disturb me, though. He disturbs me very much. Do you know he called me 'mister' this morning? He soon learned the error of that particular way though, with a couple of cuts from my cane on his miserable backside. Bristle, why can't you have him? He can't read, so he ought still to be with you!"

  Bristle waved slackly. His pipe was refusing to draw, and he had sucked at it so long that the tobacco was now wet with spit and never would burn. He was a long, lean, cadaverous man whose clothes didn't fit. He had a wife he was unpleasant to, and several children whom he alternately ignored and chastised. He taught the very youngest children to read, and had discovered a simple and efficacious method of doing it. His class learned one letter a day. On the first day of term he taught them the letter A. They practised writing it, they looked through their books and found all the words like 'and', 'apple', 'apostate' and 'antediluvian' that began with A, and repeated those words in chorus. In the afternoon they did it all again. The next morning they were tested, and any child who could not remember either A or 'apostate' received a cut of the cane. Then they moved on to B.

  It was a method of beauteous simplicity, and in some cases it worked. But it had not worked with Billy Moon, who seemed to feel little pain and would distract himself and others by asking the meaning of 'apostate' and 'antediluvian'.

  "No point," Bristle said, "he's unteachable. Deep, deep stupidity, entrenched and undiluted. Trump's right, it's your turn, Merridew."

  Merridew crossed his legs angrily. "And another thing," he said, "that girl Prettyfoot! If I don't wipe the superior smile off her face before this term's out, I'll ... I don't know what I shall do. She thinks she's so clever, does she? Thinks she can get one over on me just because she's read a few books, does she? I'll bend her over my desk and take it out of her hide, you see if I don't!"

  Trump giggled. "Oh, whacking girls are we now, Merridew? That's a new departure, isn't it?"

  "Sounds good to me," said Bristle morosely. "I never saw why they should be treated any different. My girls at home get the cane, same as the boys."

  Trump sat up and took interest. "Do they, my dear Bristle? Do they? And for what heinous crimes do you cane your daughters, pray?"

  "Oh, anything," Bristle waved his sodden pipe vaguely. "They don't have to do anything much. I just give 'em a lick once a week to keep 'em in shape."

  "Splendid, splendid," groaned Merridew, hauling himself with difficulty from the depths of his chair, "I wish one could do the same in school. It would save no end of trouble. Just line the little bitches and the little bastards up with their trousers down and their skirts up and give them what for down the line and back again, and they wouldn't dare step out of line the rest of the week!"

  "I believe Mistress Grubb operates a similar system at her Emporium," said Trump amiably. "But I imagine our dear Headmaster might find it just the tiniest bit draconian. Well, once more to the chalkface. Ours not to wonder why, ours just to do or ... what's the word?"

  "Die," said Bristle, and followed him out into the corridor.

  At lunchtime instead of marching out of the classroom as usual, Rosella came to Pert's desk, and he put his books away and lowered the lid to find her standing over him.

  “You need to keep a closer eye on your sister, Pertinacious Potts,” she said. “I found Batty Bunt and Darren Durridge having a go at her at playtime.” And she turned on her heel and walked off.

  This was a red letter day indeed, when Rosella actually spoke to him, but the news was alarming. Pert hurried to find Fenestra.

  “Oh yes,” she said, “They grabbed my arms and they said they were going to take me in the bogs and turn me upside down.”

  “Why are they picking on you?”

  “Don't know,” she shrugged. “Because I'm here. Because I haven't any friends, only Esmerelda and she ran away. I asked Miss Clutterbrick but she wouldn't let us tidy the books. She said they were tidy already.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Rosella Prettyfoot came, and she wasn't scared at all. She said to let me go or she'd kick them where it hurt most. And Darren Durridge said they ought to take her in the bogs instead and show her something, so she hacked him on the shins and they swore at her and then they went away. I was scared, but she didn't seem to bother.”

  They went to sit on the playground wall to eat their sandwich. Fenestra prattled, and Pert watched. Rosella would not appear again, he knew: she had a hot lunch in school, which their mother could not afford. Instead he kept an eye open for Bunt and Durridge. Billy Moon wandered out into the playground, and passed by them, grinning. He sat on the wall a few feet away and swung his feet.

  “Who's that?” whispered Fenestra. “Why's he got odd shoes?”

  “Billy Moon. He's in my class. I think he's poor.”

  “Poorer than us? Coo!”

  Billy Moon sat on his hands and grinned. He grinned at the school building, he looked up the street and grinned towards the church, and then he stretched his head up and looked at the top of Bodrach Nuwl, where cloud was streaming inland.

  “Old Man's got 'is 'at on,” he grinned to no one in particular. “Rain later.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Fenestra.

  “Always rains when Old Man gets 'is 'at on,” said the boy, and came to stand in front of them. Pert caught a whiff of pungent odour, a mixture of dung and wellington boot and stale clothing.

  “You're a bit smelly,” Fenestra said, holding her nose.

  “Fenestra, really!” Pert said, but the boy laughed. When he laughed his eyes crinkled up. “Yeah, I do whiff a bit,” he said. “Everyone says. It's on account of not washing.”

  “Why don't you wash, then?” asked Fenestra. “Haven't you got any lunch? Would you like some of my sandwich?” Without waiting for an answer she tore off half and handed it to him.

  “Cor, fanks!” he said, sat on the wall and stuffed it all into his mouth at once.

  “Why don't you wash?” she
asked again. “Everyone washes!”

  “You arsk a lot o' questions, don'cha? I jus' never got in the 'abit, like. No water in our 'ouse. No bathroom, no sink, no nuffin', 'cept a bucket, an' then my mother 'as to carry it all the way from the pump in the Square. So I don' want ter waste it wiv washin', do I?”

  Fenestra had no answer to that. After a few minutes of grinning, Billy Moon got up and stood in front of them.

  “Wot's yer name?” he asked. “I knows you, you're Pert in my class. But what's yer lady-friend's name?”

  “This is my sister, Fenestra.”

  “Fenestra?” He pronounced it carefully, as though it were something precious. “Fenestra. Cor, that's posh. You're pretty,” he said. “I got to run aroun' now. I 'as ter run around a lot, otherwise I can't sit still in class, see?” and off he dashed.

  “He's a funny boy,” Fenestra said, “I like him. But he does smell. Couldn't we take him home and wash him? There's the tap in the yard, and we've got lots of soap.”

  “No, silly. You can't start taking strange boys home and washing them. You'll get an odd reputation.”

  “I've got one of those already. Am I really pretty? No one ever said that before.”