(frozen), stuffing (God knows), pigs in blankets (raw) and figgy pudding and custard (grim) and though the sight of it all brought bile into my throat, I took a spoonful of each, knowing that if I didn’t there was nothing else to eat until dinner. The food at Bathory had always been bad. When I’d first arrived as an eight-year-old Pup, I’d been vegetarian. The first week, when I realised the vegetarian option was either a saucer of grated Smart Price cheese or a grey hard-boiled egg, I quickly switched back to meat to keep myself alive.
On a more positive note, Clarice Hoon hadn’t given me any more grief about Seb, aside from the odd snide look as I walked up Long Corridor. This I could handle. First to lose their cool loses the argument, Seb told me, and he was right. As always.
Midway through lunch, Mrs Saul-Hudson marched in and dragged Maggie out. It turned out she’d just had a phone call from a pilot at RAF Lyneham who’d done a fly-past the previous day, who’d kindly informed her that the school now had letters crudely daubed on its roof. Instead of assisting with the Christmas Fayre preparations, I gladly spent the afternoon helping Maggie to clean it off.
‘Why though? Why not expel me for this? It does NOT make sense!’ she shouted, as I scrubbed away at the second S in ‘SAVE US’. ‘Why keep giving me these stupid meaningless detentions? I mean, I’ve tried EVERYTHING to get out of this place. I’ve done it all …’
‘… even vandalised a listed building now,’ I added.
‘Yeah. I don’t know what more I can do,’ she cried. ‘Maybe I could get a boy in here. Yeah, that might do it.’
‘Why do you want to leave so badly?’ I asked. She didn’t answer immediately, so I pressed. ‘Seriously, you can tell me.’
‘I just wanna go home, that’s all. I don’t need an education.’
‘But they’ll only send you somewhere else, won’t they?’
‘Fine. Then maybe they’ll send me back to my old comp where I was happy and settled and didn’t have to wear this cheap scratchy boy-repeller.’ She loosened her tie like it was hurting her neck.
‘I’d miss you,’ I told her.
‘Yeah, right.’
‘I would. You’re the thing that’s keeping me going at the moment.’
‘Yeah, well, you’ll get over me eventually.’
She carried on scrubbing. I felt no padlock on my urge to tell her any more, so I just said it. ‘They’re paying double the fees.’
‘Huh? Who?’
‘Your parents.’
‘WHAT?’ she cried, standing up and slamming her scrubbing brush down on the flat roof where a thousand soap bubbles flew up into my face. ‘What do you mean? How? How do you know that? Are you joking me?’
I shook my head, wiping little flecks of foam from my nose and cheeks. ‘Your file was out on her desk when I was in there a few weeks ago. I wasn’t going through it or anything, I was just putting her cocoa down. And it was there, in your file. I read it.’
Maggie sat back down on the roof. ‘Double fees? That’s really why I’m still here?’
I nodded. ‘There was a letter in the file, open, from your dad. I only read a bit, as I said, it was just there on the desk. He wants you to get your GCSEs here so you can go to a good Sixth Form or get a good apprenticeship when you leave. He doesn’t want you sponging off them like your sister does. And because you were kicked out of two other schools, Mrs Saul-Hudson agreed to keep you here, come what may. He thanked her for it. But that was it, that was all I read.’
Maggie shook her head. I sat down next to her. She looked beaten down. Flattened. Lost. ‘I can’t believe he’s done this. He knows how much I hate it here. I’ll run away.’
‘No you won’t.’
‘I will.’
‘You won’t, Maggie. You’d have to walk at least ten miles to the nearest train station.’
‘I’ll hitch.’
I looked at her. ‘Maggie, don’t.’
‘Why not? My parents clearly don’t give a toss. He’s leaving me here all Christmas, that’s how much he loves me. Git.’
‘They’re paying £18,000 a term so you can get your education, Maggie. I’d say they love you a hell of a lot. And anyway, I’m here all Christmas too so it won’t be so bad.’
‘They’re sadists. Actual, factual sadists.’
‘Why do you hate it here so much?’
‘Why?’ she repeated. ‘Look around you, Nash. We’re in the middle of actual NOWHERE.’
I shrugged, looking around us beyond school land towards the moors and the hillsides dusted with icing sugar snow and spindly black trees. Coupled with the cinnamon smells rising up from the Fayre and the tinkling of a carol from somewhere, it felt like we were in a scene from a Christmas card. It was stunning. ‘That’s not so bad. It’s quite beautiful, don’t you think? Look at the snow on the hills, on the trees.’
‘And I hate nature.’
‘That can’t be the only reason you want to leave, the isolation.’
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘The food’s crap as well.’
‘Yeah it is a bit, isn’t it?’ I grinned.
‘And …’
‘What?’
She went to tell me something then stopped herself. ‘It’s like you said—the place is “fundamentally flawed”. Why else would we be allowed up on this very old, probably very unsafe roof, to scrub tiles. No one gives a crap about Health and Safety here, do they? No one gives a crap about us.’
‘Look, the parents are starting to arrive.’
Cars were trickling through the top gate at the far end of the driveway. There was the lightest fluttering of snow on the gelid air as a succession of Rolls-Royces, Mercedes, Porsches and Volvos rolled up the drive and parked up, their occupants following the signs through the formal gardens towards the stalls. I stopped scrubbing and walked to the West Turret roof to look down on the Orangery lawn. Stallholders had been at the school all morning, setting up their Christmas glögg, hickory smoked nuts, handmade crafts, wicker baskets, pomanders and tree ornaments. A ginger girl, Rosanna Keats, was standing at the arched entrance to the formal gardens, with a tray of glögg in little tumblers and a plate of sugared plums. Two girls standing next to her—I think it was the twins Hannah and Heather Bolan-Wood—bore fat chunks of stollen and gingerbread on little red and white napkins.
My mum and dad would have loved to see all this. They’d enjoyed it last year. Dad had gone on about his eggnog for months afterwards and Mum had bought these Hansel and Gretel tree ornaments which she said reminded her of me and Seb. Seb’d taken the piss, as he usually did at my school events, about our indoor and outdoor shoes, our ‘no whistling’ and ‘no TV except on Saturdays’
