High Jinx

by Sara Lawrence

  As she stood, struck dumb, pointing a wavering hand towards the wreckage, the girls sent their desks flying in their haste to investigate the scene around and beneath the huge window, whose unseeing vista stared straight out to sea, sky and blinding autumnal sun. The blind’s partner was pulled down against the domineering light.

  ‘Shit,’ sniggered a delighted Chloe. ‘It must have collapsed right on her head as she tried to pull it down.’ The girls collapsed themselves as they pictured the scene. Even quiet Lulu clutched her stomach and had to sit down, tears rolling down her chubby cheeks, the hilarity steaming up her thick glasses.

  Jinx and Chastity grabbed each other, both laughing so hard they fell over. They lay where they landed, atop the white shards of cracked plaster and silver screws that had fallen from on high, a mishmash of flailing limbs, rocking and sobbing so hard they thought they might never stop.

  At least twenty minutes passed, in which no discernible sentences emanated from the shaking girls. As soon as one managed to collect herself enough to spit out an ‘Oh, imagine the …’ or an ‘If only we’d seen …’ it would cue a fresh fit of cackling, snorting and snuffling.

  Chloe managed to extricate herself from the flailing heap and was crawling doorwards, with the charming warning that ‘I might actually piss myself’ when Mr Thompson’s manly outline filled the doorframe. As the girls pulled themselves into standing positions and sought their seats, weak with hilarity, he surveyed the scene. A wry smile crossed the medieval history teacher’s face as he simultaneously clocked the damage to the Venetian blind whilst positioning himself behind the lectern at the front of the class.

  ‘Girls,’ he said, his ear-to-ear grin somewhat inappropriate given the circumstances. ‘I am sure you have by now – ha, ha – realised that Mrs Dickinson will not be taking your class today. She has suffered …’ here he paused, presumably to lend his words some much needed gravitas, ‘an accident. And is being taken to the Royal Sussex County Hospital as we speak. Mrs Bennett is taking her personally. It seems that one of the – ha, ha – blinds fell on her head as she was attempting to pull it closed.’

  The class closed its eyes as one, struggling to maintain some semblance of composure.

  ‘So,’ he concluded, wanting to get back to the very rare and dusty Norman manuscript that contained some fascinating new insights into the character of Edric the Wild he’d been examining through a magnifying glass in his study, ‘the sensible – ha, ha – thing would seem that you return to your studies forthwith and continue with your private revision.’ Mr Thompson beamed his wide smile around the room like a helicopter searchlight – he thought Susan Dickinson an extraordinarily tedious woman – winked cheerily once, and began to back out of the open door.

  A whole free afternoon! All thoughts of their rift forgotten, Jinx, Liberty, Stella and Chastity tripped as fast as they could down the Up stairs, past the bursar coming up almost as fast, who ignored them as he furiously pushed buttons on his calculator, desperately trying to work out exactly how much the damage would cost to set right. They raced along the corridor in the direction of the old reference library, crashed through the huge wooden door next to the sanatorium and emerged whooping and hollering into bright daylight above the stone steps leading to the tuck shop.

  Mrs Gunn was lounging in her favourite overstuffed rose-patterned armchair, laughing out loud in disbelief as she read a report in the Times Educational Supplement about how physical punishments were bad for girls. Ha! She’d never read such a load of bloody old nonsense. Wasn’t this supposed to be the newspaper of record?

  Only that morning she’d laughed heartily as she packed five of her most evil fourth years off to run around the grounds – which were vast – five times without stopping before breakfast. Since none would own up to the crime of stealing her beloved punishments book – a record of every punishment she’d ever dished out and to whom – she’d decided on one circuit for each of the cretins. They could whimper and protest their innocence as much as they liked, but she’d known it was one of them. Bound to be, always giggling and laughing about the place as if it were their God given right to be happy.

  Yes, watching those breathless tear-stained girls crying as they ran in the freezing cold dawn from the window of her warm and cosy bedroom had put her in a much better mood. She’d been beside herself with fury most of this term, she really had. She’d had to put up with being made to look ridiculous by Jinx Slater and Liberty Latiffe, never quite fast enough to catch them at their antics – and them not even in her house any more. Bah. It was enough to drive a woman to drink, she thought, as she took the hip flask filled with sloe gin from her pocket and took a long unthinking slug.

  Still cross at her failure to catch them out, last week had been a particularly bad one as far as adding to her bad temper was concerned. She’d woken up unaccountably early on Wednesday morning, desperate for a wee. She wrapped herself up in her dressing gown and stumbled to the loo just opposite the front door of her flat without putting the lights on. Half blind without the glasses she’d left on her bedside table, she sat in the dark and started to relieve herself, grunting with pleasure as the pressure on her bladder gradually released. Much as she hated to admit it, maybe that bloody interfering busybody Sister Minton was right and she had been drinking too much.

  After a minute or so she started to feel a strange sensation about her nether regions. Still half asleep, it was a few more moments before she realised her bottom area was becoming drenched in some kind of warm liquid. Wondering whether she’d forgotten to pull her pyjama bottoms down, she felt about her sturdy calves on the floor, grabbed hold of the waistband and knew that no, she had not. What on earth was going on?

  Since they’d never once been used, she didn’t trust her pelvic floor muscles to stop the gush of tepid, foul-smelling wee mid-flow, so had to sit it out in the awful knowledge that the bunched-up back of her favourite ruby-red dressing gown was undoubtedly becoming soaked through too.

  Mrs Gunn was confused and – most unusually for her – scared. Had she some sort of terrible medical complaint she had no idea about? Never one for looking on the bright side, she quickly decided she was dying, and this was the first sign of the probably incurable disease her bladder was harbouring. Even her body had turned against her, she thought, dramatically wiping a single tear from her ruddy cheek.

  She finished, shuffled to the light switch with her trousers round what the girls called her ‘cankles’ – her calves went straight to her feet ending in an unsightly overspill with no discernible definition where her ankles should be – and turned the light on. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the contrast before she noticed the sagging piece of wet clingfilm wrapped around the bowl underneath the loo seat.

  Her relief in the knowledge that she wasn’t about to kick the bucket was swiftly replaced with furious rage that she’d been the victim of such a disgusting prank. And it had clearly been meant for her – she was the only person who used this bathroom. As the inevitable migraine began to throb around inside her head she’d attempted to jump up and down with fury, forgetting that her sopping wet trousers were still down around her ankles.

  As if she were a carthorse hobbled for the night by its gypsy owners, she’d swayed, tried to steady herself by grabbing hold of the top of the radiator cum towel rail, and fallen crashing to the floor, landing in a cooling pool of her own putrid piss.

  And then, as if desperate to add injury to insult, the stainless-steel towel rail had started creaking ominously before deserting its fixings and landing on top of her with an almost jubilant thud. Crying for real now, Mrs Gunn had hefted it off her, propped it against the wall, grabbed her hand towel and given the soaked floor a very cursory mopping before she stumbled back to the sanctuary of her bedroom and her bottle of Talisker.

  Unable to get back to sleep after drinking down half the bottle whilst she cleaned herself up using a kitchen tea towel – which she returned to its drawer without rinsi
ng, she’d lain in bed dreaming up the worst punishments she could think of before thumping down the stairs to breakfast with a face like thunder, intent on putting the fear of almighty God into her houseful of reprobates.

  The only thing she could feel good about was that no one had seen her shame. Belinda Brown and Mary Hammerhead never had to put up with this sort of caper in their houses, she was sure. She could think of no reason on earth why her girls felt the need to behave so shockingly badly.

  She’d stood up and screamed and shouted at her Wollstonecraft girls with such intensity at breakfast, practically purple in the face, that one of the dinner ladies had come in and asked if everything was all right and whether the housemistress was aware that everything she was saying could probably be heard all the way down at the Marina. How Gunn had screamed at that. Even the bloody kitchen staff thought they could cheek her with impunity.

  Not one of the little bitches had owned up of course, so she’d gated the entire house for three weeks straight and banned them all from visiting the tuck shop for the rest of term. Some of the parents had complained, as per usual, but she’d refused to return any of their phone calls and most of them were too wary of igniting a deeper rage to complain further. And those who did could rest assured their daughters would wish they hadn’t.

  Anyway, nicely recovered by now, she was enjoying the sea breeze whispering through the window, calmly flicking through the pages of her TES and thinking that this week was going really rather well so far. One concerned parent had rightly decided that bribery was the only option if her daughter was to be allowed out to attend her sister’s wedding, and sent her a huge Harrods hamper full of delicious treats.

  Another parent had a holiday request coming up and had couriered in a magnum of vintage Taittinger champagne. Gunn was planning – if she could keep her fat hands off it in the meantime – to invite that lovely Susan Dickinson to share it with her one night next week. She thought about how much she admired Susan and smiled to herself once more.

  This pleasant reverie was destroyed by whoops and yells coming from the tuck shop. Dashing to the window to check that none of her girls had the bare-faced audacity to ignore the house-wide ban she’d placed them under, Gunn was appalled to see Jinx, Liberty and that silly blonde Chastity something or other jumping about and screaming, clearly delighted by some evil deed.

  She knew they all smoked. Maybe this time she’d catch them in the act. It wasn’t a bad enough offence for a suspension, but they’d get fined and it would be fun to see them squirm all the same. If she were really lucky they’d be at that wacky baccy stuff – she just knew they did it, their moronic glazed eyes and constant stupid giggling at nothing gave them away – but sadly she’d never caught them at it.

  She reached for the trench coat she’d flung across the sofa and was gratified to see her punishment book underneath it. Of course! She’d been reading through it in here last week. Feeling very pleased with herself indeed, she called for Myrtle and rammed her ridiculous Nancy Drew glasses on top of her head.

  Liberty insisted on treating the others to cheese and onion crisps and Diet Cokes in honour of their wondrous good fortune and the Dick’s demise. Clutching their bounty, they raced down the closely mown green lawn and past the hockey pitches to the cricket pavilion just in front of the fence that separated the school from the road and beyond, the sea.

  They flung themselves on to a patch of slightly longer grass on the sea side of the pavilion and out of view of the main building. They lay on their jumpers and stretched luxuriously like cats in the fresh air.

  Jinx reached into the side pocket of her book bag and pulled out a big bag of weed, a ripped and torn packet of long silver Rizlas – the only ones she would use – and a half-smoked Marlboro Light. She took a long swig of her Diet Coke and stuffed a handful of crisps into her mouth.

  Stella was still droning on about Fabric to Liberty, who squinted at her from behind the slender hand she’d thrown up to shield her face from the sunlight. Chastity giggled as she rolled over towards Jinx.

  ‘I cannot fucking believe the Dick. Whoever said pride comes before a fall was sooo right.’ Chastity sighed with extreme pleasure, rolled her head from side to side against the grass and emitted a truly majestic snort.

  Jinx nodded acquiescence, but couldn’t speak as she was pulling one side of a Rizla tight between her lips at the same time as she twirled the mixture of tobacco and weed into a tightly rolled slim cone with two careful hands.

  As she did so she thought about how profoundly irritating she found Stella’s studiedly slow voice. She also thought about how since Stella had arrived she was not having quite so much fun at Stagmount as she usually did.

  Although she’d always maintained ambivalence about where she was sent to school, once she’d seen Stagmount and met the headmistress, Mrs Bennett, Jinx insisted that this was the place for her. And when Jinx insisted upon a thing she was rarely disappointed.

  The thing she liked best about it – although she didn’t tell anyone this – was that during their one-on-one interview Mrs Bennett had asked her what she most wanted to do for a job when she left school. A job! The thirteen-year-old Jinx had been dead-set on being a vet, but no one had ever asked her this question before and she was beyond impressed when Mrs Bennett acted like it was the most reasonable thing in the world to ask, and went on to list all the subjects she would have to take.

  She was delighted at Mrs Bennett treating the matter with the utmost seriousness, and even more so when she promised Jinx that if she worked hard enough she would be able to do anything she wanted. Jinx didn’t want to be a vet any more – chemistry, physics and biology had been her worst subjects – but it was an early indicator to the Slaters that Stagmount encouraged its girls to aim high, higher, highest.

  Wowser. It beat that awful place in Bournemouth she’d seen the week before. There, the woman had told Jinx that if she worked really hard she might one day be a teacher too. No thanks, you miserable old cow, thought Jinx, as she dug her nails into her thigh, smiled sweetly, and agreed that yes, the home economics room was simply marvellous.

  Anyway, she was certainly aiming high now, but the weed was doing nothing to minimise Stella’s London whine, which was beginning to seriously grate. She’d been following Liv’s plan – they all had, apart from her outburst that morning, which she couldn’t have helped – but she was losing enthusiasm for it. How much longer were they expected to let Stella get away with all the shit she was continually spouting? Jinx felt it was high time for a spot of affirmative action; she must speak to Liv later.

  The most terrible thing about it all – as far as Jinx was concerned anyway – was the fact that Liberty wasn’t involved. In fact, she wasn’t so much not involved as totally in the bloody dark. Liberty was so wrapped up in her new high fashion friend she hadn’t noticed anything amiss at all.

  Jinx worried about Liberty, always had. She was always especially concerned that Liberty’s dad be kept in the dark regarding their less salubrious activities. Not that they did anything terrible or out of the ordinary, but she just knew that were Amir to get even a whiff of boys, booze or bongs the shit would hit the fan and Lib would be on the first plane back to Riyadh faster than you could say burkha.

  Even the staff knew never to telephone or fax through the usual letters detailing gatings, punishments or bad behaviour that other parents received with monotonous regularity. Jinx’s mum had told her that soon after meeting Mr Latiffe for the first time Mrs Bennett had pinned a notice about it in the staffroom and sent round an email to make sure they all knew never to contact him unless about strictly academic matters.

  Jinx and Liberty had been suspended for two days during the summer term of their first year for taking all of Mrs Gunn’s furniture out of her flat and setting it up in exactly the same position on the lawn outside her window. Unfortunately, it had rained in the night and Gunn had insisted that heads must roll. Mrs Bennett had had to agree with her, but tel
ephoned Caroline Slater to explain about Amir Latiffe’s incredibly short fuse regarding any breach of behavioural standards in his daughter and asked if she might accommodate Liberty too. Caroline had, naturally, told her daughter everything so Jinx was well aware of the special circumstances that applied to Liberty.

  Chastity roused herself to peer round the corner of the pavilion – they took it in turns to check every five minutes to make sure no teachers were heading their way – before quickly leaning down to stash the half-smoked spliff in the secret compartment at the bottom of her rucksack.

  It was ridiculous, actually, that being caught smoking weed was an instant expulsion offence, yet being blind drunk on Alcopops outside Asda at the Marina got the offender nothing more than a lightly smacked wrist.

  ‘Gunn two o’clock,’ giggled Chastity. They all laughed. Even in her short time at Stagmount, Stella had become used to the junior housemistress’s ubiquitous evil omnipresence.

  The girls whipped out their French textbooks, notepads and pens and pretended to be busily revising. By the time Mrs Gunn, huffing and puffing as if she’d just finished the London marathon, pounced from around the corner they looked the very picture of innocence.

  ‘What are you all doing here?’ she snarled, furious not to catch them up to anything untoward, ‘don’t you have any lessons to go to?’

  ‘No, Miss,’ said Jinx, affecting surprise at the sight of her old housemistress. ‘A blind fell on Mrs Dickinson’s head.’

  ‘And she’s been rushed to hospital,’ Liberty added, spluttering as she turned a laugh into a cough, earning her a deeply suspicious stare from Gunn.

  ‘What?’ Gunn looked appalled. ‘What are you talking about? I spoke to her at morning break time and she was fine. If this is one of your silly jokes, Slater, it’s not funny in the slightest. And stop laughing, Latiffe!’