There is Nothing More Certain by Clair Wright

 

“There is nothing certain except that nothing is certain,

And nothing more wretched than Man

Or more arrogant.”

Mattie had hated the school motto from the moment she first saw it. Her eyes were drawn to the stern, black letters, each a foot high, painted on the wall of the high-ceilinged dining hall. 

She supposed they had been there for years and years. The plastered wall was cracked and patched under its whitewash, but the words were solid – forbidding and black as crows. She thought they must be repainted every year, ready to frighten a new intake of children.

The motto was as stern and incomprehensible as the school itself, Mattie thought. 

As she hurried up and down the bewildering staircases and along the endless corridors of identical wooden doors, the words whirled around in her mind in a tangle of double negatives. Did the motto mean that everything was certain, or that everything wasn’t? She felt like Alice in Wonderland, spinning as she fell down the rabbit hole, trying to unravel impossible riddles about ravens and writing desks. 

Even when the chilly corridors became more familiar, and Mattie had begun to recognise one grey-haired, beak-nosed teacher from another, those words didn’t lose their sense of foreboding.  She tried to adopt an air of scornful disdain, copying her classmates. 

“Nothing is certain,” she read, in a doom-laden voice as she sat down on the long wooden benches. “Nothing is certain except lumpy mash, soggy cabbage and being bored to death in this place!”

The bleak words battled in her head with the rigid routine of the school day.   It seemed to Mattie that everything about school was in place to  impose certainty. From the certainty of grey itchy socks and a black shapeless hat, to the certainty of arithmetic on Monday morning and prayers on Friday afternoon, there was no room at all for the unexpected.

The words on the wall glowered down at her as she yawned her way through another grey school dinner. “Don’t be fooled by the monotony,” they seemed to say, “it will all crack and crumble beneath your feet which you least expect it.”

As her first term crawled by, Mattie felt more and more weighed down by the words on the wall. How could it be possible for her days to be so predictable, and yet, apparently, so uncertain.  She found herself staring at the wall, until she could see the words on the inside of her eyelids when she tried to fall asleep.  

One lunchtime, as the head mistress droned her way through Grace, Mattie’s eyes slid down to the second line of the motto. She sat up suddenly, and read it again. “And nothing more wretched than Man,” she read, carefully, “or more arrogant.” 

It came to her in flash. She had solved the riddle, just like that. “I’m not a Man, and I never will be!” she thought, triumphantly. 

She decided there and then, that the words had no power over her.  “I don’t want certainty,” she said to herself, staring out the words over the heads of her classmates, “and I am certainly neither wretched, nor arrogant.”

The great black letters fluttered and shook as she stared up at them, but Mattie didn’t blink. An “e” quivered, and crumbled as she watched. 

“There is nothing more certain except that nothing is curtain” Mattie read. She looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, but the rattle of spoons on dishes told her everyone was busy eating. 

A few more letters flew up in a flurry, and settled back down on the wall. 

“nothing more wretched than pans” read Mattie. Whole words flapped and pecked at each other, jostling for position. “there is no more ham’, they declared. “No more goats.” 

Mattie stared, transfixed, as the motto became more and more nonsensical. 

“except thin witches,” “more orange hats.”. 

Her stew went cold, untouched on her plate, her spoon hung from her fingers. 

Finally the bell rang for the end of lunch. Mattie dropped her spoon with a clatter. She quickly stood up and picked up her satchel, and began to shuffle after her classmates. As she reached the door of the dining hall, she glanced back at the wall. The words were back in their places, as black and stern as ever. 

Except, Mattie noticed, the last word of the first line still read “curtain”. She smiled to herself, and skipped off to afternoon class.