In the spirit of The Toast's 'Alternative endings to Great Expectations' I present: some alternate endings!
Great Expectations
the Harry Stephen Keeler Ending
Chilton Wheelhouse, the four-legged carnival huckster from Wilmiquanahwee, just down the road from Idiots’ Valley, had been haranguing Philip ‘Pip’ Pirrip for several weeks, taking up residence in his – Pip’s – humble brownstone in the western part of London – the Chicago of the East – in order to attempt to wheedle money out of him, of which Pip of course had none, his expectations having materialised into making him a better person via a course of snobbery soon drummed out of him by his reacquaintance with Mr Joseph ‘Joe’ Gargery and his family, and we may imagine what effect this had on the assumption that he was going at some point to marry Estella, the heiress of the very strange grande dame Leonora Havisham. Fate, as the Way Out reminds us, had other ideas!
Wheelhouse, meanwhile, who reminded Pip that he had double the normal requirement for shoes and trousers having four legs instead of the normal two and thereby was in need of more money, as though this were somehow Pip’s responsibility – this individual was now haranguing Pip from the entrance to the secluded Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London where Pip and Estella were engrossed deep in a tete-a-tete. Pip had placed his Barr-Bag – that remarkable invention and identical to others of its kind – between them on the bench as a kind of strategic blockage.
But your Expectations, said Estella frostily. Pip observed that she was incapable of other modes of discourse.
I am unconcerned, said Pip, and besides I am already engaged to be married. Pip on so saying embarked on a defensive manoeuvre taught him by Annabel Lin Chung of Chicago (the London of the West) but it was unnecessary.
Who is your fiancee, said Estella.
She is Artemisia Wang-Brown, said Pip, the daughter of the Chinese physicist 'Bang' Wang and the renowned jazz singer Clytemnestra Brown. I do not know how I can account for such good fortune.
It is well done, said Estella, pulling on the cable that connected her and the squalling four-year-old child who was eating the roses in the flowerbed. Now I must bid you adieu.
And she stood up and dragging the child with her walked towards the exit of the gardens and the distant tube station and as she did so passed Chilton Wheelhouse and gave him three dead legs. Wheelhouse hopped in agony then collapsed like a stricken oil rig.
Estelle turned and winked.
See ya, she said.
Pip expected that she never would. Now, that was an expectation.
The Cormac MacCarthy ending
Behind a pair of roans of around seventeen hands in height, the one of them bearing a white flash on the offside fetlock, a carriage trundling as the tumbrils had trundled in lost Paris bearing the haughty to their appointment with the executioner’s blade. No less haughty the black-laced woman who leaned out of the carriage window and spoke to the driver,
- Que se para aqui un momento.
- Aqui?
- Si, aqui. Hay que contestar con este senor.
And the carriage trundled on, its barely hispanoparlant conductor unable to seize the essence of the woman’s language, for thus is it with men.
And so it was that Don Felipe del Pirip, passing, glanced up and saw the proud face of Estella vanish in the window and the carriage led by two roans pass by and into the howling din of Rochester as the cart of Jehu thundered the roads of ancient Sidon and past a tree hung with the dessicated corses of lifeless infants and the dark juzgado stained with nameless exudates and the jacaranda birds shrilled in the trees.
He would never see her again.
The William Burroughs ending (n.b. I find Burroughs incredibly tedious and not to be admired. Parody is not endorsement)
Barely a day went by when Pip did not mistake a woman for a centipede and this was not one of them. He moved into the shadow of a wall to avoid the liquid amber sunlight streaming into his eyes and blinding him to the horrific skeletal nags leading the dark carriage in the street towards him. He needed yage. He thought of his seven souls ren sekhem sekhet khu ba and the rest leaving his terrified corpus callosum and taking up rent somewhere else like the rent-scaping lowlives they were. Trust a man with a dog to hound you out of town. Pip looked like a sheep-killing dog and always had done. The carriage drew closer. Pip, slouching against the wall, raised his gun and sighted it on the parapet. Take Your Time. Take Your Time. Those who did not were dead. Organism B-23 activated in the frontal lobes. Towers open fire.
He could hear skittering like centipede legs on the road the horses no real horses but something from the Crab Nebula beamed to earth in a foulness like a vulture shat out rotten land crabs. Eyes that could neither give nor receive love nor conceive of it. The sort of animal that would eat a cat. God damn anyone who would harm a cat. Only that tiny spark of empathy saved Pip from being entirely scoured of humanity.
The woman in the carriage looked up and straight into Pip’s eyes and reeled back in shock like some indignant desert bird.
Pip fired and missed. Somehow he had always meant to.