The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway Read Free Book Online

of our school. Her
real
name is the Evangelist, and it is thus that God and his angels and Yahweh and his angels and Allah and his angels and all the other gods of the world and their angels, demons, avatars, servitors, minions and mugwumps know her, and it is thus that she is inscribed in the hundred lists of the living and the dead that they all carry around like so many celestial bookkeepers. She masquerades, however, as Mrs. Assumption Soames, of the Warren, Cricklewood Cove, where she is headmistress of the eponymous Soames School for the Children of Townsfolk. She is small and slim at an age which has never been disclosed, but any child with access to a Bible (and all children at the Soames School have plentiful, even overwhelming, access to Bibles) would confidently date her from the tenth chapter of the Book of Genesis as coming somewhere between Aram and Lud. It is rumoured among the brave and foolish who speculate on such matters that she may be as old as fifty. Mr. Soames, whose father’s father’s father founded the school, died sometime back of a marsh fever, and the tacit consensus among the parents is that it was with a considerable sense of relief. Mr. Brabasen even suggested that Mr. Soames’s sole intention in his frequent and prolonged fishing trips to the darkest and most pungent area of the Cricklewood Fens was to infect himself with said disease, a virulent virus which in 80 per cent of cases claimed either the victim’s hearing or his life, either sad outcome being, in Mr. Brabasen’s opinion, reason enough for Mr. Soames to seek it out.
    If Assumption Soames’s nickname sounds sophisticated for our infant wit, the reason is that it originates among the teachers, a flea-bitten and secular motley of brilliant minds culled from institutions too prissy to put up with their foibles. To the Evangelist, these weaknesses are burdens given by Providence along with their gifts to test their metal. In accordance with the perfect wisdom of the divine plan, failure in these trials serves only to bring them into her healing and censorious arms so that they can teach her charges and atone and learn restraint. More than one of them has a nervous collapse during my time at school, and at least one of those surviving is heavily medicated purely as a result of Gonzo’s inventive deployment of a thirty-foot spool of number seven line, a plastic skull and a ragged horse blanket. For all this, they’re a solid lot, and despite the Evangelist they push the educational boat out further than they otherwise might. Mr. Clisp the gambler teaches us not only mathematics but also materialist ethics, setting logic puzzles on the board which appear to be value-neutral but which, when resolved, condemn the vituperative harridan in ringing tones. He also explains the rudiments of poker and the business of making book. Ms. Poynter (whose precise sin is whispered to involve negotiated services of a physical nature) includes in her biology classes a smattering of first aid and natural history, and also sexual education of increasing sophistication as the years pass, so that by the age of ten we can recite a list of erogenous zones and appreciate the difference between primary and secondary sexual characteristics in humans, and by the onset of puberty no one is in fear about the inevitable swellings and expulsions. Later, Ms. Poynter is temporarily relieved of duty by the Evangelist before the Board of Governors can object to her decision to teach a class on sexual technique to the girls and impart a stern lecture on mores and self-restraint to the boys (spiced with a brief but memorable digression on the theory and practice of cunnilingus). Mary Jane Poynter takes two weeks in Hawaii with Addison McTiegh, the PE teacher, and both of them return quieter and less twitchy and when the exam results come in with a near-perfect pass rate, the Evangelist elects not to fire her on the condition that no more parents