I always remember the ending of Codlin and Short’s letter, when we had written to them to broach the problem. It read:
“Why doesn’t she die?”
When we wrote asking them to elaborate on the question, they sketched in the plan which eventually with slight changes we adopted.
“Have dear little Eleanor sicken, slowly, inexorably. Orchestrate a chorus of village concern as she sinks, passing into a better world. Resist the temptation to open the deathbed scene to the general public at a shilling a time. Do it all tastefully. Have her practise short breathing – getting tiny gulps in a way that hardly moves the lungs. When she is ‘dead’ have a simple funeral, though one marked by inconsolable local grief. Take the coffin to the local church and have grandpa mount guard over her all night. Keep a supply of sand in the vestry (NOT rubble, it tends to rattle). Fill (or half fill) the coffin with it. In the morning have the ceremony, bury the sand, and get Nell off to London suitably disguised – as her real self, we would suggest. Hey presto! In the future she can come back to visit her grandad if she wants to – posing as a long-lost cousin.”
It was a wonderful idea! It left grandad free to use his great gifts in the country gaming holes, and it left me in London sampling the high life of Mayfair and the low life of Dan Quilp and his haunts. I liked the idea so much that I fell ill the very day we got the letter.
I didn’t overdo it, of course. I am nothing if not tasteful. At first I was very brave, denying that I was ill at all. When they commented on my pallid complexion (flea powder) I shook my head bravely, then said there was nothing wrong. Then I thought it must be something I had eaten. Then I lost the use of my legs (they all shook their heads gravely at that). Before ten days were out I was permanently confined to bed, offering my visitors sickening platitudes, and sweetly prophesying I would soon be up again and as busy as ever. Tears flowed like cataracts. Behind their hands everyone started making suggestions for the gravestone.
The end was unutterably poignant. We made it semi-public. The schoolmaster and The Bachelor were there, and a couple of rustics who could be relied on to get everything wrong and then rehash their account to the whole village, over and over again. I was visibly failing, and much whiter than the sheets on my bed. When the little knot of witnesses was assembled I began the tearful climax to my short life.
“Grandad,” I said (he was sitting on my bed, and now clutched my hand in his horny one), “I think a change is coming. I think I am getting better. Is the sun shining? How I would love to see the sun again. It is getting light. The whole world is becoming brighter. I feel I am in a new place – better and more lovely than anything I have known before-”
And so on. And on. I managed about ten minutes of this, and then my voice started to fade. Words could be heard – “world”, “bright”, “sun” and others, but nothing together that made sense until I suddenly said “Grandad, give me the sun” and my head fell back on the pillow, and my grandfather let out an anguished howl.
Artistic, I’m sure you’ll agree.
The witnesses clustered round, observing the lifeless corpse and the sobbing frame of that old fraud my grandfather. Then he stood up, still wracked with sobs, and ushered them out of the door.
He drew the heavy curtains, locked the door, and then the pair of us had a good if quiet laugh. After a while grandad slipped out to order a coffin from the village carpenter. He found it was almost ready, as the carpenter with his practised eye had made a note of the likely size and had done most of the work a couple of weeks earlier. We, or he, took delivery that evening.
We made a slight change of plan. The nights were drawing in and the days were nippy. I didn’t fancy (as we had planned) a long day in the staircase leading up the church tower while the funeral went ahead and night fell. We agreed to do the substitution in the cottage. We had a showing of me in the coffin next day, when the whole village and rustic dolts from miles around filed past uttering idiocies like “She do seem at peace” and “Oh what a ‘eavenly hexpression she do ‘ave”. When that collection of human rubble had passed through I jumped out of the coffin. Grandfather and I heaved the sack of sand (purloined by him from a building site) into the coffin and he nailed it down extremely tightly. We heaved it on to a trestle and went to bed in Grandad’s bed. It will not have passed my sharper readers by that, whatever else he was, Grandad was certainly not my grandfather.
I have, writing now from the Old Curiosity Shop and awaiting another visit from dear, excitable Mr Quilp, who is finding me a bit of a handful, only one or two details to add. The next day, the funeral, was a big laugh. It was the last day of Little Nell, that brilliant creation the world had come to love. The vicar was in church, and the schoolmaster, the Old Bachelor, the gravedigger and Grandad assembled in our cottage to carry the coffin to the churchyard. As they were heaving it up on to their shoulders the schoolmaster said, in his typically spiritless tone of voice:
“I’m sure Little Nell is already there, at home in Paradise, chanting with the heavenly choir.”
“I’d lay you ten pounds at whatever odds you choose to name that she’s up there now, singing along with them other angels, lungs fit to bust,” said Grandad, winking towards the bedroom door, where I was surveying the delicious scene through the keyhole and barely suppressing my roars of laughter.
I laugh when I think of that now. We made such fools of them all, Grandad and I. Putty in our hands, that’s what they were. I long to have Mr Quilp helpless like the yokels, also putty in my hands. Already he is mad with jealousy every time I look at a London swell, which is fairly often, because they’re on every street corner. But I must go very slowly. I have so much to learn from Mr Quilp about crime, about gaining the upper hand over the fools around me. I learned a lot from Fagin, but I could not use my sex with him, for obvious reasons. With Quilp I can use my sex to get from him every jot and tittle he knows. I said to him two evenings ago I needed above all to learn, and he was my chosen master, the one who would lead me up the path to my being Europe’s Queen of Crime. “Wait till I see you next time,” said my dear Quilp. “I’ll give you a lesson as’ll last you a lifetime.”
I think that’s him. Those are his uneven steps on the stairs. I can’t wait to see his delicious deformed body. His hands are on the doorkn-
Here the creator of Little Nell fell silent for ever.
JOHNNY SEVEN by David Bowker
His name was Johnny Seven.
You think the name is weird, you should have seen his eyes. They were real blue and bright, like the eyes on some kind of light-up action figure. First time I saw him, there was this silence, like that part in a western when the stranger walks into the saloon. The new kid was thin and not very tall, with longish fair hair. He had a tiny rip in the left elbow of his jacket, like his folks were on welfare or something. Pretty neat jacket, all the same. He sure didn’t carry himself like he was on welfare.