The Everlasting Story of Nory

37. Pig Bladders

Then there was drama class, where they were doing sword fighting. Sword fighting is useful to know because you never know when you might be in a play in which there was sword fighting. Although that was as if a student said, ‘I.T. is useful because you never know when you might need to spend the morning taxiing all over the airport in an airplane.’ The drama teacher warned them again that you have to be very very careful with sword fighting, because even though the swords aren’t sharp, they’re heavy. And they were heavy, they weighed about five hundred grams, Nory thought. The teacher told a story about going to see a play by Shakespeare where a man had a rib broken by a wooden sword because he was supposed to take three steps one way and he forgot and took three steps in the opposite way by mistake and wound up in exactly the wrong place. A wooden sword plunged through a curtain, for some reason in the play, and slammed right into his ribcage and he had to go out on a stretcher, not as an actor but sincerely as an injured person. Shakespeare was famous for writing plays. Boy were they ever plays, and boy were they ever long. Nory’s aunt and uncle took her to a Shakespeare play outside in a park one time, Romeo and Juliet. It might have been very interesting for a twelve-year-old, but for an eight-year-old, which was how old she had been when she went, it was impossible to understand, too long, and extremely boring. Thank goodness for the Inman Toffees that Nory’s aunt brought along — Nory ate quite a number of them and thought about what it was like to chew them. Sometimes you think when the candy sticks to your teeth that maybe your teeth will be plucked right out, but they’re stuck into the gums pretty strongly.

Shakespeare’s name was probably William R. Blistersnoo but he thought he needed a preferable name in order to be famous, and since there was tons of stabbing and spearing of people with swords in his plays he thought, ‘Let’s see, William Swordjab, no. William Fight? No. William Killeveryone? No. William Stabmyself? No. Aha! William Shakespeare! Yes, that will be just the thing.’ In Shakespeare’s plays what they would do, according to the drama teacher at the Junior School, is they would have an outfit on and they would sew a pig’s bladder in a little tiny place under the outfit that would have a little mark on it so that the person knew right where to stab. The guy would go king! — stabbing lightly right at that particular spot, and blood would instantly coosh out from the pig’s bladder.

‘But wouldn’t they run out of pigs quite quickly?’ Nory thought to herself. ‘And therefore run out of pig’s bladders, and therefore could not do another play?’ Shakespeare would have to go on stage before the play and say, ‘As you may know, we cannot do any of the blood we were going to do tonight, because we have run out of our lovely pig’s bladders. We checked in the cupboard this morning, but due to good business, and a number of highly gruesome plays, we have run out. Please enjoy the show. You can have your ticket refunded if you would rather not see the show without blood, since early next week we will have more fresh pig’s bladders shipped to us. We are also going to be getting some big, fat, juicy cow bladders in stock that we will be using for some extremely disgusting effects in a play I will be finishing soon. So please, dear friends, sit back, and enjoy the show.’ And say if somebody was in too much of a rush and forgot to empty out the urine and pour in the blood? In the big swordfight Shakespeare would stab the guy. ‘Die like a filthy scoundrel, you midget!’ And then, pssshooo, oh dear, that blood’s a bit on the yellow side, hm. ‘Oh, yellow blood, is it?’ Shakespeare would say. ‘You monstrous, yellow-blooded confendio master! Hah-hah! Return to your imperial distinctive land!’ Hack, chop. And a little later he would take a smug giggle and walk off the screen.

After drama there was Sciences. They looked through microscopes at different kinds of line — pencil line, crayon line, colored pencil line, medium-nib fountain pen line, and one other line. Biro line, they call it. A Biro is just a normal kind of everyday pen that you would use next to the phone to write out a phone message. In class they used an eraser on the lines to see what happens when you erase. The amazing thing was that the pencil left big gaps of white paper in its line, sort of the way an eraser will jump in a rubbery way in little tiny bounces if you pull it lightly over the paper, and the eraser left twisted shapes like something an insect would leave behind. One kid, Peter Wilton, was still in a state from drama class and was fidgeting all over the place. He was obviously in a Shakespeare mood of wanting to chop something up, and so he looked down at his desk and thought, ‘Here’s something.’ He had a whole nice beautiful green pen in front of him. He sawed a quarter of it off, using his ruler, and then another quarter, and then a whole half of it. Nory shouldn’t have smiled but it was quite cute, this tiny shrub of a pen, just enough for the cartridge to fit in, which he tried to write with. Then he got carried away and took the cartridge and sawed that in half. Now that was not a brilliant idea. As you can imagine, the cartridge went plume, everywhere. He said, ‘Mrs. Hoadley, my pen leaked.’ But Jessica — who was sitting right next to him and rather exasperated by this point since it’s very hard to look in a microscope even when things are calm and peaceful because your head moves and you push the thing the wrong direction and lose what you’re looking at, or the light gets boffled up — so Jessica had lost her patience and she said to the teacher, ‘Yes, it leaked because, ahem, he was sawing it into a-tiny a-little a-pieces.’ The science teacher got steamingly angry when she got the picture and breathed through her nose in a furious way after everything she said. She said, ‘Peter, that is unacceptable behavior, bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup.’

‘May I go wash my hands?’ he asked.

‘No, you may never wash your hands,’ said the teacher. ‘Your hands will stay blotched for the rest of your life.’

Which was a little joke by Mrs. Hoadley, although in fact she didn’t let him wash his hands. But it was really nice to see the pencil lines and to think how many adventures happen to a pencil line while you’re just writing a simple word.