Wicked! (52 page)

‘Thank God for a handy pair of safes,’ smirked Little Cosmo, as he and Lubemir cracked the combination of the safe in the school office, photostatted the 2002 GCSE and A level papers stored inside and flogged them for five hundred pounds a go to needy candidates.

‘We need never work again,’ crowed Cosmo, ‘and we’re doing our bit for Bagley by ensuring it does really well in the league tables.’

Having insinuated himself as a regular in the school office by plying Miss Painswick with chocolates and Dame Hermione’s latest CDs, Cosmo also overheard Alex chuntering over Bianca’s lack of intellect.

After his success at photographing the stars of
Romeo and Juliet
, Cosmo had been asked to do the pictures for the school prospectus and achieved an excellent multicultural mix by putting Anatole, Lubemir, Nordic blonde Amber and Bianca on the cover. No one could sack Bianca if she was in the prospectus.

Cosmo also found the proofs of the prospectus on Painswick’s computer and added ‘binge-drinking, buggery and Bruce-baiting’ to the list of pupils’ favourite activities. Fortunately this was picked up and deleted by an amused Hengist.

Alex also had to accept the fact that during Wimbledon, which coincided with the last fortnight of term, Hengist would be virtually incommunicado, claiming to be writing a crucial piece for
The Times
, when all you could hear was the thwack of tennis balls and the rattle of applause.

This year, Anatole’s father dropped in for ‘an important meeting’ and to thwack and rattle were added the chink of bottles and roars of laughter as he and Hengist enjoyed the dazzling Miss Kournikova in the first round.

Hengist fiddled, while Alex burnt with resentment.

50

Field trips are very hard work and enmeshed in red tape, so once Red Robbie refused to go as a matter of principle, the rest of Larks’s staff were only too glad to use their disapproval of the private sector as an excuse to opt out. Anyway, they were far too busy marking exams and writing reports.

So Janna buried her pride and pleaded with Robbie to change his mind: ‘Next term Year Nine will begin their two-year GCSE course. This trip will whet their appetite not just for geography but for history and English. There are wonderful activities planned. They’ll learn self-esteem and the ability to relate to people of a different background.’

Robbie had folded his arms and gazed mutinously up at the damp patch in the ceiling, until Janna lost it.

‘You’re just terrified of being shown up because Rufus Anderson’s such a brilliant head of geography.’

This caused a rumpus, with the senior staff blanking Janna and Sam Spink marching in accusing Janna of humiliating Robbie.

‘Good,’ snapped Janna.

So in the end, Janna only had Vicky who, having sworn she wouldn’t let Janna down, couldn’t back out, and Gloria who had a crush on Emlyn, and Skunk Illingworth who would do anything for a freebie and who also had a crush on Vicky, and Cambola who was always game for a jaunt. Mags would have come but her new grandchild was about to be born and the ever dependable Wally had his son, Ben, home on leave.

Batting for Bagley were Rufus and a couple of his young geography teachers, No-Joke Joan who also had a crush on Vicky and didn’t want to let any of her young women loose unchaperoned with Cosmo and all those dreadful Larks youths around, and, of course, Emlyn.

As Paris was moving to Bagley, it was felt the field trip would be a good way for him to bond with future form-mates. He was already enduring endless flak at Oaktree Court and at Larks for becoming a stuck-up snob, and as social services hadn’t yet confirmed Patience and Ian as his foster parents, it was a time of deep uncertainty.

Paris refused again to betray how gutted he was that Feral – and Graffi as well – had refused to join him on the field trip. Graffi’s father was off sick and heavily on the booze again; Feral’s domestic life was always shadowy; but both boys were needed at home. Both vowed, as a band of brothers, they would always be friends of Paris, but he knew it would never be the same.

Without the other two he also felt less sanguine about protecting himself against Cosmo and his bodyguards. The female remnants of the Wolf Pack were unlikely to provide support. Pearl would probably go off like a firecracker. Kylie had not only persuaded Chantal to look after Cameron while they were away, but, at the prospect of Kylie becoming the future Lady Waterlane, to also bankroll a snazzy new wardrobe. This included a glamorous dress because everyone had been told to bring something ‘eveningy’ for a mystery destination on the last night of the trip.

Paris, fretting about his lack of wardrobe, was extremely touched when Ian took him aside and gave him sixty pounds, gruffly bidding him not to spend it all at once. Carrying this out to the letter, Paris nicked some T-shirts and trainers and sauntered out of Gap in unpaid-for dark-grey jeans, which he promptly slashed across the knees and thighs to age them up.

On the morning of departure, Janna was drying her hair when Emlyn rang and said he was dreadfully sorry, he couldn’t make the trip. Whereupon Janna, mostly from disappointment and because Emlyn was the only person who could control this mob, lost her temper and bawled him out.

As she paused for breath, Emlyn repeated how sorry he was but that his father had died in the night, from lungs wrecked by a life down the mines, and he was on his way home to Wales to look after his mother and organize the funeral.

A mortified Janna was frantically apologizing when Emlyn displayed a flicker of his old self:

‘Now the even worse news. Biffo Rudge has been press-ganged into going in my place. He’ll be as anxious to chaperone his boys as Joan is. I’m sorry, lovely, I’ll buy you dinner when I get back.’

‘I’m the one who’s sorry,’ wailed Janna, ‘I know how you loved him.’

The weather was hot and jungly. The journey in three coaches seemed to take forever. Paris read
Le Rouge et Le Noir
; Rocky the
Mirror
with one finger; Cosmo read the score of
Harold in Italy
; Jade and Milly read each other’s palms; Boffin read
A Brief History of Time
and, as litter monitor, bawled out everyone for dropping sweet papers. Amber read text messages from admiring boyfriends; Kylie, who felt sick on buses, tried to look at the pictures in
Hello!
and had to stop near St Jimmy’s on the outskirts of Larkminster to throw up.

‘You don’t think she’s up the duff again?’ Pearl murmured to Paris.

Whereupon Rocky, realizing he’d left behind his Ritalin, leapt into the driver’s seat and drove the bus back to Larks to collect it. Everyone was too petrified of a Ritalinless Rocky to stop him. When the outraged bus driver took over on the second journey, it was noticed how many desirable residences Randal Stancombe was building within the catchment area of Rod Hyde’s school.

‘These are the sorts of houses you can afford if you don’t have to fork out for school fees,’ observed Cosmo nastily.

Before leaving, both schools had received individual pep talks on the importance of good behaviour and overcoming the traditional animosities which divide private and state schools.

Cosmo, cash rich from flogging exam papers, had listened in amusement. He liked Emlyn, but they would be much freer without him. Biffo couldn’t control an ant. Cosmo had packed a first-aid kit of vodka, brandy, cocaine, grass, Alka-Seltzer, a hundred condoms, the morning-after pill and amyl nitrate, and had had a bet with Anatole that he’d pull both Gloria and Vicky by the end of the trip.

He also fancied a threesome with Milly and Amber, was going to bully Xavier to a jelly and unsettle Paris, to whom he intended to give a rough ride next term, particularly as the Bagley Babes had just announced that, in the absence of Feral and Graffi, their target on the trip was to pull Paris.

As the coaches moved into open country, Cosmo proceeded to ring up Dora, ordering her at pain of death not to forget to water his marijuana plants – not that they would need it, as rain was now chucking itself like lover’s gravel against the bus window.

Poor little Dora, being ordered around by a pig like Cosmo, thought an indignant Pearl, who was sitting across the gangway. Pearl was utterly miserable; her little stepbrother was teething and her mother had discovered fifteen pounds missing from her bag, which Pearl had nicked to pay for a long-sleeved olive-green T-shirt from New Look. This had meant her mother’s toyboy couldn’t go to the pub, whereupon her mother had hit Pearl and screamed that ‘she could bleedin’ leave home if there was any more trouble’.

The long sleeves had been needed to cover Pearl’s arms, which she’d attacked with a razor and which now throbbed unbearably. Cosmo smiled evilly across at her. He was vile but dead sexy, with his night-dark eyes and his satanic pirate’s smile.

Down the bus, Biffo Rudge, noisily crunching an apple as sulphuric farts ruffled his long khaki shorts, was sharing a seat with a pile of Lower Fifth reports.

Cosmo proceeded to convulse pupils from both schools by holding up behind Biffo’s seat the air freshener from the lavatory. As the bus crossed over into Herefordshire, plunging into thick forest with glimpses of silver rivers gleaming in the valleys below, Biffo fell asleep. Whereupon Cosmo seized the pile of reports, found his own and wrote ‘towering genius’ and ‘undeniably brilliant’ all over it. Buoyed up by the mounting mirth of his audience, Cosmo dug out Boffin’s report and scribbled ‘deeply irritating’, ‘unimaginative’ and ‘stupid twat’ all over it, before crying, ‘You dropped this, sir,’ as Biffo woke up.

At the back of the coach, Vicky had palled up very pointedly with Gloria: ‘Such a relief to have someone fun and my age on the trip.’

Now they whispered and played silly games: ‘In ten seconds – who would you rather go to bed with, Biffo or Skunk?’ followed by squeals of laughter.

Occasionally they cast covetous eyes at Rufus, head of geography, but he was too busy calling his wife and mother, who was looking after the children, even to notice them.

As Cambola was in another coach, Janna was forced to sit with Joan who, despite taking up most of the seat, insisted on clamping a beefy thigh against Janna’s.

‘All my Lower Fifth students have opted for triple science,’ she announced, adding that she was off to a conference in Atlanta at the end of term. ‘I’m giving a paper on the Place of the Runner Bean in Teaching Genetics,’ she boomed. ‘The runner bean is the perfect plant to illustrate multiple pregnancies.’

‘Why not Kylie Rose?’ murmured Amber to Milly. ‘Did you know, Joan rejected seventeen possible gardeners provided by the bursar this week because none of them was ugly enough for us not to jump on him?’

Despite a desire to get off with the opposite sex, Janna noticed a look of relief on the Larks girls’ faces when, after an interminable drive, they discovered they would be sleeping in one youth hostel near a river on the edge of a wood, while the boys would be housed four miles away in another.

‘Thank goodness,’ said Primrose Duddon, ‘boys always gobble up all the food.’

In fact the food was awful, spag bol full of gristle, vegetables boiled into abdication and great blocks of jam roly-poly.

‘Talk about Calorie Towers,’ grumbled Amber.

After supper, if you could call it that, the rain stopped so they dried off the benches outside and Joan brought out her guitar and, led by Cambola, they sang round a dispirited camp fire.

‘To think I got myself sacked from the Brownies to end up here,’ muttered Amber. ‘I need a drink.’

‘You’ll get cocoa at ten o’clock,’ said Joan tartly.

At ten-fifteen, she went round with a basket confiscating mobiles. ‘You’ve all got a long day tomorrow.’

So the Bagley Babes unearthed their second mobiles and rang their boyfriends.

‘If anyone tries to escape,’ boomed Joan as she marched up and down the rows of beds, ‘there’ll be trouble.’

‘I don’t know why we came on this jaunt,’ moaned Milly. ‘Tomorrow we’ll start digging a tunnel.’

As the lights were turned off and everyone stretched out on their hard beds, Kylie, who’d thought by now she’d be curled up with the Hon. Jack, started to cry that she was missing Cameron and Chantal.

‘I miss my dog and my horse more than my parents or even my boyfriend,’ said Amber, which made Kylie cry even louder, so Jade pelted her with pillows.

For the staff, Janna noted nervously that there were a double and three single rooms.

Joan looked warmly at Vicky. ‘I’m happy to share.’

‘No, no. You deserve the privilege of a room of your own,’ Vicky simpered. ‘Gloria and I don’t at all mind bunking up.’

Janna, who had watched the girls’ faces during that dismal dinner, prayed things would improve tomorrow. Hearing sobs, she went into the dormitory and sitting down on Kylie’s bed, patted her heaving shoulder.

‘Shall I tell you a story?’

‘Please, miss.’

‘“O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the best”,’ began Janna in her sweet, soft voice, which in the dark sounded like that of a young girl.

She can’t be more than early thirties, thought Amber. It was such a good story, she managed to stay awake to the very end.