The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(88)
I began to understand that the loudspeaker was trying to tell me something. I sat on the edge of the bed, for I always fume better in a seated posture. How, I asked myself, had the old she-butch known that I had been casting wistful looks at the window? My eye fell upon the big looking-glass which commanded both my bed and the entrance to the bathroom. I snapped out the light, stole to the mirror, flattened my nose against it. Sure enough, there was a faint glow to be discerned; the unmistakable glow of a cigarette being puffed upon by an ageing Girl Guide. It was the work of a moment to find my First Aid Kit, to tape a First Field Dressing across the mirror and to switch the light on again.
‘Oh, well done, Mortdecai, there’s good stuff in you after all.’ said the loudspeaker. ‘That was going to be Lesson Five, after the girls had watched you get into your sleeping-suit, ho ho.’
I did not deign to answer but marched into the bathroom to ply an angry toothbrush and conceal one or two trifling matters which had not been in either suitcase. On the bathroom mirror a message was scrawled in lipstick: ‘PLEASE DO NOT HIDE THINGS IN THE LAVATORY CISTERN: IT ONLY MAKES WORK FOR THE PLUMBER.’
Huddled in my comfortless bed, I made shift to study the thinnest of my lesson-brochures: the one entitled Mastering Five Simple Ways of Suicide, for this seemed to fall in with my mood at the time. I was shuddering my way through the passage about how to bite through the large blood-vessel at the base of the tongue and breathe in the resultant blood until asphyxia supervened, when the lights went out.
‘Soddem,’ I said to myself, composing myself to sleep.
12 Mortdecai finally realizes that he is not attending a night-class in self-defence for old ladies
Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet ’tis early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon your bugle horn.
Locksley Hall
Towards morning, in that half-awakened state when the worst and best dreams come, my repose was marred by hideous visions of female dominators: Catherine the Great, Mrs Bandaranaike, the Erinyes, Mrs Indira Gandhi, Leila Khaled, Ulrike Meinhof, Marion Coyle, Fusako Shigenobu, the Valkyries, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ermyntrude of the Bloody Sword, Mrs Golda Meir, Carrie Nation, the Empress Livia … all trooped before my inward eye, gibbering and cursing and waving their blood-boltered hands, red to the elbows. I was bracing myself to receive comfort from the vision of Mrs Margaret Thatcher, for I have ever been a staunch Tory, when to my delighted relief I was aroused into full wakefulness by a whirr and a clunk from the time-lock on my door.
‘Wakey wakey, Mortdecai,’ cackled the hateful loud-speaker. ‘Three minutes for a shower, one for brushing teeth, two for shaving. Draw a tracksuit from the Quartermaster in eight minutes, be at the Gym in ten. Any questions?’
‘Tea?’ I questioned feebly.
‘No, Mortdecai; PT. Do you a power of good. You can skip it if you like but the only entrance to the breakfast-hall is through the Gym.’
PT was hell. People made me prance absurdly, climb up and down wall-bars, hurl myself at hateful vaulting-horses and try to do press-ups. Then they threw monstrous medicine-balls at me. I panted and groaned my way through it until a bell rang and we all trooped into the showers. They were communal, unsegregated showers. Kitty twinkled at me as she soaped her luggage-like carcass and the younger girls played pranks on me.
Breakfast, on the other hand, was unrivalled. It was one of those lovely country-house breakfasts where you lift the lids off silver dishes on the sideboard and find eggs and kidneys and chops and bacon and kippers and haddock and kedgeree and fried ham and devilled turkey and scrambled eggs and grilled tomatoes and, when you sit down, there are two sorts of tea as well as coffee and jam and three sorts of marmalade and people keep bringing you more and more hot toast. I ate heartily for, although I do not love such things, I knew that I must keep my strength up, you see.
‘This is your last time to sit at the head of the table beside me,’ said the Commandant. I made rueful noises, muffled by the piece of toast (laden with that black, chunky marmalade which Oxford makes so well) which I was gnashing. ‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘another guest will arrive before luncheon and it is the privilege of the latest-arrived to sit on my right hand, naturally.’ I opened my mouth to make the kind of joke that chaps like me make but closed it again.
‘Quite understand,’ I gurgled, sluicing a recalcitrant shard of toast down with another cup of capital coffee.
‘Ladies!’ she suddenly bellowed – ignoring the weedy males at the table – ‘Ladies. Captain Mortdecai will be reporting to the Armoury in five minutes to shoot-in his new pistol. According to the custom of the College, when he emerges he will be Fair Game for 24 hours.’ People laughed and said ‘hooray’ and things like that, but the piece of toast jolted to a halt on its way down the Mortdecai gizzard.
‘?’ I asked courteously.
‘It means,’ she explained courteously, ‘that from 1010 hours you are Fair Game. It is the custom here with new students, whatever their age, sex or weight. Let me put it like this: it will be open season on C. Mortdecai from the hour stated. Your fellow students will take all reasonable care to avoid maiming you seriously, for it is all in fun, you see. Some of your predecessors have survived their Fair Game Day with little more than the loss of a tooth or two.’ She gazed at the butter melting into her toast and heaved what might well have been a sigh of regret for happier days, days when no pat of butter durst slink into a piece of toast without written orders signed by herself.