Unexpected Twist Page 6

  One day, Oliver and Noah had descended into the kitchen at the usual dinner hour, to banquet upon a small joint of mutton – a pound and a half of the worst end of the neck – when, Charlotte being called out of the way, there ensued a brief interval of time which Noah Claypole, being hungry and vicious, considered he could not possibly devote to a worthier purpose than aggravating young Oliver Twist.

  Noah put his feet on the tablecloth; and pulled Oliver’s hair; and twitched his ears; and expressed his opinion that he was a “sneak”; and furthermore announced his intention of coming to see him hanged, whenever that desirable event should take place; and entered upon various topics of petty annoyance, like a malicious and ill-conditioned charity-boy as he was. But, making Oliver cry, Noah attempted to be more facetious still; and in his attempt, did what many sometimes do to this day, when they want to be funny. He got rather personal.

  “Work’us,” said Noah, “how’s your mother?”

  “She’s dead,” replied Oliver; “don’t you say anything about her to me!”

  Oliver’s colour rose as he said this; he breathed quickly; and there was a curious working of the mouth and nostrils, which Mr Claypole thought must be the immediate precursor of a violent fit of crying. Under this impression he returned to the charge.

  “What did she die of, Work’us?” said Noah.

  “Of a broken heart, some of our old nurses told me,” replied Oliver: more as if he were talking to himself, than answering Noah. “I think I know what it must be to die of that!”

  “Tol de rol lol lol, right fol lairy, Work’us,” said Noah, as a tear rolled down Oliver’s cheek. “What’s set you a-snivelling now?”

  “Not you,” replied Oliver, sharply. “There; that’s enough. Don’t say anything more to me about her; you’d better not!”

  “Better not!” exclaimed Noah. “Well! Better not! Work’us, don’t be impudent. Your mother, too! She was a nice ’un she was. Oh, Lor!” And here, Noah nodded his head expressively; and curled up as much of his small red nose as muscular action could collect together, for the occasion.

  “Yer know, Work’us,” continued Noah, emboldened by Oliver’s silence, and speaking in a jeering tone of affected pity: of all tones the most annoying: “Yer know, Work’us, it can’t be helped now; and of course yer couldn’t help it then; and I am very sorry for it; and I’m sure we all are, and pity yer very much. But yer must know, Work’us, yer mother was a regular right-down bad ’un.”

  “What did you say?” inquired Oliver, looking up very quickly.

  “A regular right-down bad ’un, Work’us,” replied Noah, coolly. “And it’s a great deal better, Work’us, that she died when she did, or else she’d have been hard labouring in Bridewell, or transported, or hung; which is more likely than either, isn’t it?”

  Crimson with fury, Oliver started up; overthrew the chair and table; seized Noah by the throat; shook him, in the violence of his rage, till his teeth chattered in his head; and collecting his whole force into one heavy blow, felled him to the ground.

  A minute ago, the boy had looked the quiet child, mild, dejected creature that harsh treatment had made him. But his spirit was roused at last; the cruel insult to his dead mother had set his blood on fire. His breast heaved; his attitude was erect; his eyes bright and vivid; his whole person changed, as he stood glaring over the cowardly tormentor who now lay crouching at his feet; and defied him with an energy he had never known before.

  “He’ll murder me!” blubbered Noah. “Charlotte! Missis! Here’s the new boy a murdering of me! Help! help! Oliver’s gone mad! Char-lotte!”

  Noah’s shouts were responded to by a loud scream from Charlotte, and a louder one from Mrs Sowerberry; the former of whom rushed into the kitchen by a side door, while the latter paused on the staircase till she was quite certain that it was consistent with the preservation of human life to come further down.

  “Oh, you little wretch!” screamed Charlotte: seizing Oliver with her utmost force, which was about equal to that of a moderately strong man in particularly good training. “Oh, you little un-grate-ful, mur-de-rous, hor-rid villain!” And between every syllable, Charlotte gave Oliver a blow with all her might: accompanying it with a scream.

  Charlotte’s fist was by no means a light one; but, lest it should not be effective in calming Oliver’s wrath, Mrs Sowerberry plunged into the kitchen, and assisted to hold him with one hand, while she scratched his face with the other. In this favourable position of affairs, Noah rose from the ground, and pommelled him behind.

  This was rather too violent an exercise to last long. When they were all wearied out, and could tear and beat no longer, they dragged Oliver, struggling and shouting, but not daunted, into the dust-cellar, and there locked him up. This being done, Mrs Sowerberry sunk into a chair, and burst into tears.

  “Bless her, she’s going off!” said Charlotte. “A glass of water, Noah, dear. Make haste!”

  “Oh! Charlotte,” said Mrs Sowerberry: speaking as well as she could, through a deficiency of breath, and a sufficiency of cold water, which Noah had poured over her head and shoulders. “Oh! Charlotte, what a mercy we have not all been murdered in our beds!”

  “Ah! mercy indeed, ma’am,” was the reply. “I only hope this’ll teach master not to have any more of these dreadful creatures, that are born to be murderers and robbers from their very cradle. Poor Noah! He was all but killed, ma’am, when I come in.”

  “Poor fellow!” said Mrs Sowerberry: looking piteously on the charity-boy.

  Noah, whose top waistcoat button might have been somewhere on a level with the crown of Oliver’s head, rubbed his eyes with the inside of his wrists while this commiseration was bestowed upon him, and performed some affecting tears and sniffs.

  “What’s to be done!” exclaimed Mrs Sowerberry. “Your master’s not at home; there’s not a man in the house, and he’ll kick that door down in ten minutes.” Oliver’s vigorous plunges against the bit of timber in question rendered this highly probable.

  “Dear, dear! I don’t know, ma’am,” said Charlotte, “unless we send for the police officers.”

  “Or the millingtary,” suggested Mr Claypole.

  Chapter 8

  The lesson was over and Shona sat opposite Miss Cavani in the place that Miss Cavani laughingly called her “suite”. In truth it was a cupboard at the edge of the drama studio.

  And Miss Cavani was not really in a laughing mood; she was being “firm”. She was sitting as upright as the pillar by the school gates and repeating the word “no”.

  “No, no, no, no, no!”

  This was to try to impress on Shona that she had got it completely wrong about Rory, that she, Miss Cavani, had had a long talk with Rory and was quite certain that Rory didn’t mean anything whatsoever to do with Shona’s mother for the very simple reason that it was quite clear to Miss Cavani that Rory didn’t know that Shona’s mother had died. His gestures were, it seems, said Miss Cavani, something to do with how Shona was in trouble or going to get in trouble or some silly stuff that was in Rory’s head.

  “Sometimes,” said Miss Cavani, doing her best not to sound too contemptuous, “boys can’t – how shall I put it – express their feelings of affection or admiration for girls – and, er … so, do the opposite.”

  Shona didn’t know how to respond to all this. As far as she was concerned, Rory was laughing at her and at the fact that she had no mum and this was bad, totally bad, and there was no way back from that. Even so, the hard truth of what Miss Cavani was saying was, bit by bit, filtering through to her un-angry, un-raging self. Perhaps Rory was just being an idiot. Is that it? And she had strangled him for that? OK, not strangled, but damaged.

  “You know I could have given you a D8 or a D2, Shona,” Miss Cavani said. “If I had really wanted to, I could have had you excluded. But look here; I think it’s more important we go forward together on this. I don’t want to lose you. If I bring the full weight of the system down on top of your h
ead, I can well imagine that you’ll go off the rails, start hanging out with – well, I won’t say – but as I’m sure you know there are some types in the school who it’ll be very much in your interest to steer very clear of. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  Shona only half-heard this. Speeches from teachers were hard to hear. Well, you could hear them, but you couldn’t always “get” them. What did “steer clear of” actually mean? Where do you steer to? Who’s doing the steering? And what were the “rails”? Where are the “rails”?

  “Now you’re late,” said Miss Cavani, cutting into Shona’s daydreaming. “You’d better let your dad know where you are. Have you got a phone?”

  “Yeah,” said Shona, pulling it out, “but it doesn’t work.”

  “Doesn’t work?” said Miss Cavani, her antennae bristling. She knew about phones that didn’t work all right. Oh yes, she knew about phones passing hands, phones that mysteriously appeared and disappeared even if she wasn’t a hundred per cent sure where they came from.

  She feigned ignorance. “Oh dear,” she said, “will you take it to the shop to get it sorted?”

  “No,” said Shona, unaware that she was walking into the great big hole that Miss Cavani had carefully dug one second before, “there’s a … er … a … I’m… I’ve…” Her voice petered out as she realized for herself that there was something odd about a boy higher up the school giving out a phone and then saying that he could get it to work.

  “Oh, you know someone,” Miss Cavani said with as little suspicion in her voice as she could conjure up. “I’ve heard there are one or two boys in the upper school who are good at phones.”

  “Yes,” said Shona.

  “Yes,” said Miss Cavani.

  But that was it. Miss Cavani could see that there wasn’t going to be any more coming from Shona on this.

  And Shona knew that there was something going on in the room that made her uneasy. She liked Miss Cavani. She liked her a lot, but not so much that she was going to risk not having YouTube, Snapchat and the rest at her fingertips.

  “For the next two weeks, Shona, at the end of the day, I want you to come and see me in my suite here, and you’re going to tell me about all the good things that have happened in the previous 24 hours and – if there are any – any bad. Now that’s going to be better than a D8 or a D2, isn’t it?”

  Shona nodded.

  “How are you getting on with the Oliver book?”

  “OK,” Shona said.

  “Right, a little tip for you here so that you can jump on ahead: Oliver is badly beaten by Mr Sowerberry, so Oliver runs away. We’ve all had dreams of doing that one day, haven’t we, eh?” Miss Cavani laughed.

  Shona looked puzzled. Miss Cavani had dreamed of running away? She, Shona, definitely had, but Miss Cavani? Didn’t she have it all just right? Nice job, nice clothes, nice looks.

  “So Oliver gets himself to London, he’s starving, freezing cold and, well, he’s nearly dead. He’s lying by the side of the road … as I say, nearly dead. There,” said Miss Cavani, handing Shona the next printout of the book, “carry on from there.”

  CLASS X10 READING COMPREHENSION

  “Hullo, my covey! What’s the row?”

  The boy who addressed this inquiry was about his own age, but one of the queerest-looking boys that Oliver had ever seen. He was a snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy; and as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man. He was short for his age: with rather bow-legs, and little, sharp, ugly eyes. His hat was stuck on the top of his head so lightly that it threatened to fall off every moment – and would have done so, very often, if the wearer had not had a knack of every now and then giving his head a sudden twitch, which brought it back to its old place again. He wore a man’s coat, which reached nearly to his heels. He had turned the cuffs back, halfway up his arm, to get his hands out of the sleeves: apparently with the ultimate view of thrusting them into the pockets of his corduroy trousers; for there he kept them. He was, altogether, as roystering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or something less, in half-boots.

  “Hullo, my covey! What’s the row?” said this strange young gentleman to Oliver.

  “I am very hungry and tired,” replied Oliver: the tears standing in his eyes as he spoke. “I have walked a long way. I have been walking these seven days.”

  “Walking for sivin days!” said the young gentleman. “Oh, I see. Beak’s order, eh? But,” he added, noticing Oliver’s look of surprise, “I suppose you don’t know what a beak is, my flash com-pan-i-on.”

  Oliver mildly replied that he had always heard a bird’s mouth described by the term in question.

  “My eyes, how green!” exclaimed the young gentleman. “Why, a beak’s a madgst’rate; and when you walk by a beak’s order, it’s not straight forerd, but always agoing up, and niver a coming down agin. Was you never on the mill?”

  “What mill?” inquired Oliver.

  “What mill! Why, the mill – the mill as takes up so little room that it’ll work inside a Stone Jug; and always goes better when the wind’s low with people, than when it’s high; acos then they can’t get workmen. But come,” said the young gentleman, “you want grub, and you shall have it. I’m at low-water mark myself – only one bob and a magpie; but, as far as it goes, I’ll fork out and stump. Up with you on your pins. There! Now then!”

  Assisting Oliver to rise, the young gentleman took him to an adjacent shop, where he purchased a sufficiency of ready-dressed ham and a half-quartern loaf. Taking the bread under his arm, the young gentleman turned into a small public house, and led the way to a taproom in the rear of the premises. Here, a pot of beer was brought in, by direction of the mysterious youth; and Oliver, falling to, at his new friend’s bidding, ate a long and hearty meal, during the progress of which the strange boy eyed him from time to time with great attention.

  “Going to London?” said the strange boy, when Oliver had at length concluded.

  “Yes.”

  “Got any lodgings?”

  “No.”

  “Money?”

  “No.”

  The strange boy whistled; and put his arms into his pockets, as far as the big coat sleeves would let them go.

  “Do you live in London?” inquired Oliver.

  “Yes. I do, when I’m at home,” replied the boy. “I suppose you want some place to sleep in tonight, don’t you?”

  “I do, indeed,” answered Oliver. “I have not slept under a roof since I left the country.”

  “Don’t fret your eyelids on that score,” said the young gentleman. “I’ve got to be in London tonight; and I know a ’spectable old gentleman as lives there, wot’ll give you lodgings for nothink, and never ask for the change – that is, if any genelman he knows interduces you. And don’t he know me? Oh, no! Not in the least! By no means. Certainly not!”

  The young gentleman smiled, as if to indicate that he was being playfully ironical; and finished the beer as he did so.

  Chapter 9

  It was Thursday. Shona sat in the caff. She’d asked Zeynep if she could sit in for a while with a glass of water; she was meeting someone. Again, there was that gorgeous smell of kebabs and chips and pitta bread in her nostrils. She felt the tug of her stomach and watched longingly as Mevlut laid the kebab sticks over the glowing charcoal.

  She put the phone on the table in front of her and conjured up for herself a picture of her tapping away, sharing pics, listening to whatever she wanted to. She checked to see if there was any Wi-Fi nearby. No. Nothing. She spun the phone round on itself. She slid it across the table and back and sipped the water. Everyone, but everyone, had a phone. Except her.

  “Hey!”

  It was the boy. He smiled. Beyond him, Shona caught a glimpse of Zeynep. She was staring at the boy and her. There was shock in that look.

  Oh no, Shona thought, Zeynep thinks it’s a date! Oh no, it’s nothing like that. He�
�s, like, fifteen or sixteen… This meeting’s not a date – sure he looks nice – but no, no, no, this is all about the phone. Isn’t it?

  The boy sat down. He nodded at the glass of water. “You want something?”

  “One of those frothy coffees?” Shona said cautiously. Look at me, she thought, I’m giving coffee a try.

  “Sure.”

  He got up, swung himself over to Zeynep and swung back. He picked up the phone, turned it over, pressed bits of it and put it down. “What it is, yeah… I mean, what it is, yeah, is that I can’t sort this right now. I mean, I’ve got to see someone so it can … like, go through.”

  Shona looked at him. Was he lying?

  “The thing is, it’s, like, the guy I’m seeing about this? You won’t understand, but I owe him.”

  That “owing” thing again. Everyone round here talks about “owing him” or “owing her”. How did it work?

  “I’ve got to do him, like, a favour, and I’m thinking … like, you could see your way to helping me here … and then, like, I’m tight with him, and you get your phone and we’re all cool, yeah?”

  As he spoke, it was as if the light of the phone screen came and went. One moment, it was in her hand and she was texting and watching stuff on YouTube and the next it was just as it was right now: dark, flat and still.

  I want that phone, I want that phone, she heard herself saying in her head and her fingers played across the smoothness of the screen.

  The boy looked at his watch and stood up. Shona watched him as he went from being one moment his usual lolling-on-a-chair self, to the next being Busy Guy in all of a hurry. “So, it’s like this, yeah? I have to do fetch-and-carry for this guy who – like, you won’t believe how lazy he is, yeah – I’ve got to pick up some stuff from LQ Sports for him, but…” He looked at his watch again, as if it was already ages and ages since the last time he looked at it, “But, I’ve got some other, like, stuff to do, so I’m asking you if you can get it to him for me, and then, I can sort the phone thing.”