The quartet made to move away, but Daisy grabbed Jinx’s arm above the elbow. Jinx flinched as she caught a whiff of Daisy’s death breath. ‘The thing is,’ said Daisy, excitement making her even more revolting than usual, ‘I heard she was made to leave Bedales. And no one gets expelled from there, do they?’
‘I dunno, Dais.’ Jinx was desperate to get away and so much nicer than usual. ‘We’ll let you know what she’s like later on. See ya!’
‘Wouldn’t wanna be ya,’ she muttered as Daisy headed off to the science labs, probably about to dissect a poor defenceless rat or frog or something, her straggly ginger ponytail swinging pathetically behind her. ‘Why doesn’t she get a fucking haircut, and try brushing her fucking teeth once in a while? Christ, she makes me want to puke.’
The others nodded pretend sympathy, trying to stifle their laughter. It was quite something to be ‘fingered’ – as they called any encounter with Daisy Finnegan – twice before first lesson.
They crashed into classroom 4b and took their seats. Chastity, Jinx and Liberty in that order in the very centre of the back row, with Liv who’d been in Steinem next to Chastity, and Charlie who’d been in Friedan next to Liberty. The five of them had shared every back row opportunity they could for the last three years and had no intention of changing anything just because they were now in the sixth form. Fiona – claiming bad eyesight, although she’d never once been seen to wear glasses – liked to sit at the front.
Just as Chastity was filling Liv in on the new girl, Mrs Carpenter, their form tutor, strolled through the door. The girls liked stylish, friendly Mrs C but were wary of igniting her legendary schizophrenic temper, and immediately fell silent. She was dressed in her customary all-black outfit accessorised with lots of silver bangles that jangled whenever she wrote something on the whiteboard, and her chunky silver-ringed hands were gripping an ‘Elvis Lives’ mug of black coffee so strong and lumpy it looked like oxtail soup.
Mrs C placed the coffee on her desk, shrugged off her long black cardigan and smiled around the room. ‘Hi, girls,’ she said, resting her forearms on the back of her extremely expensive ergonomic chair, the only one in the whole school. Legend had it she’d dashed screaming into the incredibly tight bursar’s office, stripped off her skirt and insisted on showing him the bruises on her bottom caused, she said, by her standard issue chair, and that he’d been so embarrassed he’d immediately signed the order form allowing her this one. She was clearly in a good mood.
‘How are you all?’ she asked, beaming her megawatt, some would say bipolar, grin around the room. ‘No problems with timetables or anything I hope? We spent days – weeks it felt like – sorting it all out at the end of last term. I nearly dropped dead of boredom. The thing that saved me was planning out’ – Mrs C was given to long monologues about her life in all its fascinating aspects, and the girls were used to being asked answerless questions, quite happy to sit back and zone out – ‘my new kitchen. I tell you, girls, it is fantastic. I’ve got an American-style fridge/freezer, black granite worktops – much better than wood, they’ll never chip or stain, and one’s got to bear things like that in mind of course – a stainless steel range and – come in!’
Mrs C’s full and thorough inventory of her new kitchen was, thankfully, interrupted by a knock at the door that heralded the arrival of Mrs Bennett and one of the most attractive girls the class had ever seen.
The room fell silent, and Mrs Bennett cleared her throat and coughed once before turning to Mrs Carpenter. ‘Good morning, Mrs Carpenter, good morning girls.’ Mrs Bennett was using her extra-polite voice. Since it had many uses, the girls could never decide whether to be pleased or concerned when they heard it. ‘This is Stella Fox. Stella will be in this tutor group, and, of course, in the sixth form house. Dave is taking her bags to her room, and …’
Whatever Mrs Bennett had to say about Stella’s baggage was lost on the girls as they stared at Stella. She was about five foot five inches, yet looked willowy despite her height. She had dirty blonde wavy hair with an inch of dark roots that looked intentional, Sarah Jessica Parker style, tied in a side ponytail at the nape of her neck and falling over her left shoulder to just above her elbow. Big green eyes underneath long dark lashes liberally plastered with thick, dark brown mascara peered unabashed around the room, and her big porno-mouth lips were painted a matt dusty pink.
She had cheekbones to die for and a smattering of freckles across her San Tropez-tanned forehead and nose. She was wearing the tightest, skinniest grey jeans tucked into what looked suspiciously like Chloe black boots with a chunky wooden heel, and a skin-tight deep-purple T-shirt emblazoned with the legend ‘J’Adore Dior’ in red diamanté sparkles underneath a tight black tuxedo jacket. She carried an oversized pale-green Balenciaga bag in one impeccably French-manicured hand and a sheaf of papers in the other.
‘Jinx. JINX!’ Mrs Bennett was staring at Jinx, who, feeling slightly dazed, quickly shifted her focus to the head teacher. ‘Perhaps you would be so kind as to find a place for Stella to sit, and take her to the canteen at break time?’
‘Of course, Mrs B, no problem.’ Jinx stood up, smiled her best, brightest, most welcoming grin at the newcomer and marched to the front of the room where she held out her hand. ‘Hi, I’m Jinx. Lovely to meet you.’
‘Hey,’ Stella took the proffered hand and shook it almost as languidly as she spoke, ‘pleased to meet you.’
At the same time as Jinx spotted a spare seat next to Fiona in the front row, Stella turned to Mrs Carpenter who was staring at the new arrival as if she’d never seen anything like it – she probably hadn’t: even Mohammed Al Fayed’s daughter had never turned up at a lesson looking like this. ‘Hello, Mrs Carpenter,’ she said, in her accent-less slow voice, ‘would it be possible for me to sit at the back near Jinx? It’s just that I’m a bit nervous about sitting on my own at the front.’
Mrs Carpenter looked puzzled, but nodded her acquiescence when Mrs Bennett cleared her throat, for the second time, and scanned the back row. ‘Charlotte,’ she said, ‘perhaps you would come and sit next to Fiona.’
Charlie looked appalled, but didn’t say anything as she gathered her books together, glared at Stella and stomped her way to the front.
Stella smiled sweetly at Mrs Carpenter and followed Jinx to the back row, where she sat herself quietly down in Charlie’s chair, folded her arms and gazed expectantly around the room. She didn’t look even the slightest bit nervous.
‘Right girls,’ Mrs Carpenter seemed somewhat uncharacteristically dazed, ‘there’s no time left for tutor group business, but if any of you need anything you know where I am.’
‘And,’ she gestured towards Stella, still looking a bit bemused, ‘I trust you will all be as helpful to our new friend as you can be. Adios!’
The two teachers disappeared through the door, leaving behind an eerie silence amongst the usually rowdy girls.
Liv was the first to break it. ‘Nervous, my ass,’ she snorted as she scowled at Stella and jumped up to commiserate with Charlie, who’d been her best friend since they’d stolen the gardener’s tractor two years previously and tried to do handbrake turns in it on the grass tennis courts. The sports staff had been furious but Mrs Bennett had, eventually, seen the funny side and once they’d finished taking the tractor apart, oiling every cog and wheel until it gleamed and putting it back together again, she’d initiated a school-wide science project that involved building a sports car from scratch. The girls loved it.
The remarkably self-possessed Stella took zero notice of Liv, and turned to Liberty and Jinx. ‘So then, girls,’ she said, a slight sneer playing about her pink lips as she sarcastically imitated Mrs C, ‘what do you do for kicks in this dump?’
Liberty giggled admiringly at her, ‘Me and Jinx had a wild time on the Pier last week.’ Jinx bristled, but remembering Mrs Bennett’s request that she look after Stella until she was settled in, bit her lip and forced a friendly smile. ‘Take no notice of Lib,�
� she said, ‘the only thing playing in her head is fairground music on a constant loop.’ She winked at Liberty, who didn’t notice because she was busy staring admiringly at Stella’s boots.
‘So,’ Jinx said, ‘why did you come so late in the term then, Stella?’
‘So,’ said Stella, with another sneer, ‘why are you called Jinx?’ Jinx was sure Stella was being rude, but unsure of how to call her on it. She stared at her, but decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.
The others grinned – they’d heard this story so many times but never tired of it. ‘Well,’ began Jinx, smiling just thinking about it, ‘I’ve got two brothers, and we all loved the Famous Five books when we were growing up. Eventually, though, when I was about eleven, we decided George and Julian and the others were actually boring, prissy little bastards who didn’t even have that good adventures anyway, so we decided we’d be our own fivesome, but call ourselves the Fearsome Five instead and have code names to be, you know, cooler.’ Stella frowned.
‘I was christened Jane, although everyone called me Jin, because I once drank a pint of it by mistake, but with a J because of the Jane bit, and then my brother Damian decided on Jinx and it stuck. We all had to have a special power as well, and mine was causing bad luck to my enemies using psychic waves of pink energy, cos pink was my favourite colour. Still is actually.’
Stella looked confused. ‘What was Damian’s name then?’ she asked.
‘Oh, we called him Gaymian, because he’s gay,’ Jinx laughed. ‘He’s been gay for, like, for ever. And his special skill was lighting a cigarette the first time he tried in any weather condition.
‘It still is for him too, alongside the best spaghetti bolognese in town,’ Jinx continued, on a roll now. ‘He keeps saying he’s going to put it on his CV.’
The girls spent the morning trailing from one lesson to another, watching Stella carefully, but she sat quietly at the back, not saying much and seemingly impervious to their curious glances.
Sister Minton, the cuddly school nurse with an unfortunate arrangement of thick black hairs above her top lip, whom the girls always fondly referred to as Mister Sinton, took Stella off at lunchtime to be weighed and measured and all the rest of the terrible things the school medical entailed, leaving the others a perfectly timed forty-five minutes in which to shovel down their customary carb-fest, watch Neighbours and get changed for games. There was precious little time to discuss the new girl.
Miss Strimmer and Miss Golly eyed the lower sixth as they stood in a straggly line along the edge of the hockey pitch.
Strimmer wore a short navy netball skirt every single day, winter or summer, and the girls were used to the faintly horrific sight of her mottled tree-trunk thighs glowing red with exertion as she ran manfully up and down the edges of the long pitches shouting praise and abuse in equal measure, although rather more of the latter where the older girls were concerned.
Where Strimmer was quite short and rather fat, Golly was tall and thin. All the sporty girls loved them, and the odd couple delighted in holding court in their office in the sports hall. So much for Mrs Bennett’s clique bashing – they ran the absolute worst one in terms of exclusivity and all the sporty girls stuck together; which was just as well really, as far as Strimmer and Golly were concerned.
They were the only two people in the whole school who looked unhappy at the end of term. Neither had ever married, or was ever likely to, and it was hard to imagine them leading any kind of normal life. They both spent every waking hour lording it over the girls, organising interminable house tournaments of every conceivable kind and refereeing – or fixing more like – matches against their rivals.
Golly was the cleverer of the two, but since Strimmer was an absolute bona fide, card-carrying moron it’s fair to say that wasn’t saying much.
Jinx hated both of them, had done ever since they’d had a spectacular fallout at the end of the first third year. A neighbouring farmer specialised in breeding and selling miniature farm animals at ludicrously inflated prices. His rather sound reasoning for charging whatever he liked was who knew how much a petite pig should cost anyway?
Amongst the ageing City boys and showbiz lawyers who snapped up countryside homes in commutable Sussex – making life very difficult for most of the normal farmers as property prices flew through the roof – it was a serious status symbol to have a couple of small sheep or a diminutive donkey keeping the grass down on the front lawn.
On the morning of a very important tennis match against Millfield, the reigning champions at just about everything, his entire flock of pigmy goats appeared – as if by magic – in the courts. They’d proved an absolute devil to catch and round up, and the match had to be cancelled.
Strimmer and Gosh – as all the girls called them – had been so unreasonable and rude about the whole affair – swearing at the poor (actually rather rich since he gave up dairy farming in favour of the lucrative miniature beasts) farmer and aiming futile kicks at the poor (actually highly delighted) little goats – that Jinx had simultaneously resigned from the hockey, tennis, swimming and netball (of which she’d been captain) teams.
They’d tried to get her back on side, but Jinx had refused. She’d tasted – literally – the benefits of match-free weekends, and was not at all inclined to go cap in hand begging forgiveness. She’d still played lacrosse, but then there had been the hitting of dreadful Daisy incident so she’d jacked that in too. It had wound them up to the max and they’d never forgiven her.
Anyway, Jinx was a glass half-full type of girl, always inclined to look on the bright side of life, and had seen the whole affair as not so much the end of her oh-so-promising sporting career, but the beginning of her much more fun binge drinking one. She’d approached the latter with eager alacrity and applied to it the same determination and competitive spirit as she had to games.
She grinned broadly as she stood there in the cold, thinking about how that tiny little black goat had seemed to smile so happily to itself as it bit deep into the seat of Strumpet’s pants and wouldn’t let go. Goats are brilliant, she thought to herself, smirking, they really will eat anything.
‘Slater!’ Gosh looked cross. ‘You can play in midfield, reds – and stop smirking.’ Jinx, smirking so hard her cheeks hurt, grabbed a red bib from the trunk, sauntered into the centre of the pitch, pulled it over her eyes and pretended to be blind, moaning and pointing about with her hockey stick.
‘SLAAAAA-AAATER!’
Jinx could hear the rest of the class laughing, so pretended not to hear Strumpet, dropped her hockey stick on the ground and did five cartwheels in quick succession, still blindfolded.
She jumped up, and pushed the bib up to her forehead, looking round in pretend shock. ‘Goodness gracious golly gosh,’ said Jinx, loving the fact that most of her classmates were creasing up on the sidelines, ‘I am sorry, I thought I’d gone blind for a second there.’
Strumpet and Gosh bared their collective teeth at Jinx, but decided against going head to head with her – they’d been made to look foolish too many times – and resumed picking the teams.
Liberty and Fiona were stuck at either end in goal. Both of them hated sport and Strumpet and Gosh had long given up trying to get them to show any interest.
Chastity, pleased because she thought blue looked lovely against her blonde hair, was playing opposite Jinx in midfield. Liv and Charlie were on Jinx’s team, on the wing, with Stella and Daisy opposite for the blues.
Jinx enjoyed playing the fool rather more than she enjoyed playing the game, but when she could be bothered she was really very good at hockey.
Jinx won the first ball and tapped it past Chastity, watching Stella out the corner of her eye, interested to see how she’d perform. Jinx dummied easily past Daisy and ran with it right up to the shooting circle. ‘Christ,’ she yelled back to Liv, ‘it’s not exactly competitive out here, is it?’ and did a little dance before aiming the ball straight between Fiona’s shaking legs.
&
nbsp; ‘RED GOAL!’ shouted Strumpet, waving her black and white ref’s flag, signalling a return to centre.
Jinx winked at Chastity. ‘You have it this time,’ she said, and hung back. Chas flicked it back to Stella, who began running deftly down the left half towards Liberty, who was examining her nails, looking for all the world as if she was in Harvey Nichols’ fifth-floor café awaiting her favourite chips and aioli and a glass of pink champagne.
‘PAY ATTENTION, LATIFFE!’ screamed Strumpet. As Liberty looked up, bemused, Stella’s ball smacked into the side of her head with a terrible thud. Liberty didn’t make a sound as she collapsed in a heap underneath the white string of the goal netting.
‘Fuck, FUCK!’ Jinx was sprinting up the pitch to Liberty and screaming at Stella, ‘YOU FUCKING BITCH!’
‘Slater! Stop this NOW!’ Strumpet was also running towards Liberty and shouting at Jinx, ‘I will NOT have that kind of language on my hockey pitch. Accidents happen, we all know that!’
Jinx ignored her as she dropped down next to Liberty. ‘Lib,’ she said shaking her shoulder gently and bending close to her best friend’s ear, ‘Lib, are you OK?’
‘Urgh,’ Liberty moaned, ‘my head hurts, Jin. What happened?’
‘You got hit by a hard ball, darling,’ Jinx spoke softly but her eyes turned black as she registered Stella close by, listening intently and seeming to smile. ‘You’re going to have a sore head, but you’ll be fine.’
‘Don’t all stand there gawping, someone go and get the fucking matron for Christ’s sake.’ Jinx was apoplectic and hadn’t regained her composure by the time Strumpet arrived.
‘First things first, secure the scene.’ This was Strumpet’s favourite saying. ‘Liberty – how are you feeling? No, don’t get up, lie there for a bit longer.’ Strumpet turned to Jinx, grabbed her elbow and frogmarched her away from where Liberty was lying underneath the goal.
High Jinx Page 6