Back downstairs in the kitchen she made the most difficult decision of the day: whether to start the morning with strong tea or strong coffee. She decided to whet her whistle with a small pot of tea and take it from there. Her Brown Betty teapot was still brewing under her handmade tea cosy when the phone rang in the hall. It was Eva. Even in her foggy first gear version of herself so early in the morning Svetlana could detect that this was not just the usual "Everything all right with Rusty?" call she usually made when he had stayed the night. The pitch of her voice was wrong. There was a hint of Ransomite hysteria.
"Er, you remember that parcel that was delivered to me at home instead of school by mistake a few days ago and that I brought round to yours a couple of days ago, and then I forgot about it?"
"Yeees.." Svetlana sensed that this was a moment she needed to sound soothing.
"Well, the thing is, I have a Saturday morning departmental meeting this morning. Yes I know, and I'm already running late. I just had a call from Pauline Jenkins, you know the Deputy Head?" As if Svetlana needed reminding. No wonder Eva was sounding tense and undermined.
"Yes," she said again, maintaining her stance of patient neutrality.
"Well it's a parcel of stuff from the printer's and Pauline needs it right away, and she is willing to come round to your house this morning to collect it.."
"We are honoured", thought Svetlana.
"So I was wondering if you could just stay in until she gets there to pick it up. She said she should be round within the hour."
"Don't worry, dear," soothed Svetlana. "I'll stay here until she turns up." "And" she added to herself, "I bet you any money she'll make a point of not being round within the hour, just to make sure that we are all made to feel her importance!"
"Have a nice meeting, dear," she soothed down the phone at Eva and hung up.
"Now what's she got to feel so chirpy about?" said Eva looking at the receiver as if for inspiration, before putting it back down.
Muffled thudding and crashing from upstairs indicated to Svetlana that Rusty was conscious. "Put some boxer shorts on and get your butt down here!" Svetlana yelled uncharacteristically up the stairs, in the hope that this would provoke an early response. The guest room door opened immediately.
"WA!!!??" came the glottal stop response.
"I said get your butt down here" (Svetlana surprised herself sometimes). "We have a level five prank emergency!"
Complete with the boxer shorts that Rusty had now been wearing for twenty five consecutive days (he had a bet on with Fluke from school), his lanky form exploded into the kitchen, nearly taking the door off its hinges, just as Svetlana was demurely pouring herself her second mug of tea.
"Did you say a Level Five?" asked Rusty, now fully awake.
"I did," said Svetlana, sipping contentedly in her dressing gown.
"I'm all ears!" said Rusty, as an avalanche of Coco pops almost found its way into a bowl, followed by half a gallon of Jersey milk. "Tell me all", Svetlana thought he said through the munching.
"Well, Rusty," said his Granny, "you remember that awful woman who's Deputy Head at Ransom's?"
"Poor Lean Jen Tits?" queried Rusty matter of factly.
"That's the one," said Svetlana.
"Mum says she has a painting of Brussels Sprouts over her bed," said Rusty, offering conclusive proof of her total insanity.
"That figures," said Svetlana. "They generate quite a lot of hot air in my experience. The thing is, she's coming round here in an hour or so to pick something up, and…."
"Come on Gran, spit it out!" said Rusty, still munching.
Svetlana smiled. She looked up into a corner of the kitchen, as if for inspiration.
"As part of our ongoing plan to liberate your Mamma from Ransom's," she went on, "I feel we owe Ms Jenkins an unforgettable welcome!"
"Now you're talking," grinned Rusty, narrowing his eyes in glee.
"So what's the plan?"
As Svetlana had predicted, Pauline Jenkins did not turn up within the hour, or even within the hour after that. Instead, she strode up the garden path with a proprietorial air at 11.45 am, nearly three hours after Eva's worried phone call. But this did not throw Svetlana, for she had been expecting the ploy, just as she was also expecting to be patronized and had warned Rusty to expect the same.
The advantage of Mrs. Jenkins' self-important delay was that the two of them had plenty of time in which to prepare, in some detail, a scene that she would not forget in a hurry. Like many teenage boys, Rusty often assumed that his age group exerted a monopoly over tasteless pranks and other acts of devilment, but during the morning Rusty's respect for the senile sense of humour grew so exponentially that he was forced to admit he and Fluke were still amateurs.
"Now the first thing I would like you to do, dear," his Granny had said, in the tone she generally used if when talking about black plastic sacks full of rubbish, "is just pee on to the old towel I've put into this plastic bowl. I'd pee on to it myself, only it seems a pity to waste good teenage pee when it's in the house. It's far more acrid and smelly, I think you will agree."
Rusty seemed to consider this fact to be obvious enough not to merit disputing. He seemed to be frozen to the spot.
"Oh!" said Svetlana, as a light suddenly went on in her head. "I don't mean in front of me, dear! Just pop upstairs into the bathroom."
"Er, how much, er, wee do you actually need?"
"Oh, as much as possible dear," answered Svetlana brightly. "But the main thing is to have enough to make a really good smell."
Rusty went upstairs and obliged with a fairly impressive quantity. As he only seemed to need to relieve himself twice a day anyway it was lucky Granny hadn't left it for another fifteen minutes before asking him.
He returned downstairs with the plastic bowl containing the wet towel, holding it slightly away from him as if it were radioactive.
"Well done, dear," said Granny cheerfully. "Now would you just help me to move my armchair so it's facing the living room door, but quite close to the fire. Put the bowl down for now." Rusty helped her shift the furniture around.
"Let's put the gas fire on, so the fumes will evaporate nearby!" Svetlana put the fire on. "Right then, we'll just pop the pee bowl next to it, but out of sight, so it will steam away there nicely!"
As they worked, Svetlana explained the broad outline of her action plan, which was an adroit mixture of revenge and wrong-footing tactics designed to confuse Ms Jenkins, who, they had both decided, richly deserved it. In order to create the right effect of degenerate senility, it was necessary to work on the living room to suggest the right mixture of domestic chaos and unsanitary neglect. Having created a satisfactory impression there, they then set to work on Svetlana herself. Rusty was sent to retrieve from the laundry basket a pale blue candlewick dressing gown that she had unwisely worn while baking a cake. The daubs and splashes down the front made her look deliciously disreputable. The laundry basket was then placed behind the living room door to put the parcel in. Next, Rusty was given a crash course in the sixties' hairdressing technique of backcombing, so that odd strands of Svetlana's white hair were made to stand on end. Rusty even managed to find a couple of dead flies on the windowsill to place at strategic points in this new coiffure. When she looked at herself in the mirror over the fireplace she almost gave herself a shock.
"Excellent!" she purred. "Now for the finishing touches." Rusty was then dispatched upstairs to his Granny's bedroom to fetch a tube of KY jelly. Rusty, whose knowledge of this substance so far consisted only of mono, rather than stereo versions of its uses, did not dare allow his mind to venture into the uncharted waters of his Granny's possible uses for it. Instead he donned his best effort at tightlipped matter of factness and did as he was told. He returned and handed it to her without looking, hoping she wouldn't notice how red he had turned.
"Now the great thing about this stuff," said Svetlana, making a satisfying farting sound with the tube as she squeezed some jelly into her hand, "is that it can give you a really convincing, and above all long lasting, senile dribble!"
Rusty nearly collapsed in such a paroxysm of humour and relief from potential embarrassment that he was glad he already had the peeing behind him.
Next, they experimented with the lamps to get the angles right, so that a KY dribble down the right hand side of Svetlana's mouth would be shown off to best effect. Finally, they put the parcel at the bottom of the laundry basket, and the basket back behind the door in the living room (they didn't want to risk spoiling the effect by having Ms Jenkins go upstairs and see how well cared for the house really was). Then they sat down to wait, amusing themselves in carefree innocence with a game of Scrabble, while discussing some final touches to their role play. They were already on their second game when they heard a car being parked resolutely outside. The garden gate clicked open and they caught their first glimpse of Ms Jenkins striding up the path.
"Poor Lean is here," announced Rusty superfluously, looking up from the Scrabble board and strewing a few biscuit crumbs on the floor from an empty packet of shortbread.
"Would you like to open the door, dear?" smiled his Granny conspiratorially. "And remember: for once, I don't want you on your best behaviour! In fact," she added, "the best thing you can do Rusty, is a parody of yourself."
"That shouldn't be too difficult!" grinned Rusty over his shoulder as he made for the door. He remembered to muss his hair over a second time (he had already gelled the wayward tufts on the back of his head to stand up as waywardly as they could) and rolled up one leg of his jeans to calf length, leaving the other trailing down over his trainer. He also had a streak of dirt from the back garden down one cheek to complete the effect.
While removing her dentures, Svetlana peaked discreetly round the curtain of the bay window as she waited for Rusty to open the door. This gave her an opportunity to watch Pauline arrange herself on the doorstep. Svetlana had already heard from Eva about the recent emasculation of the school hymn book. Taken together with the person Svetlana now saw standing before her, that bizarre ritual of political correctness began to acquire a kind of warped logic. Ransom's seemed to have been taken over either by a race of gender free mutants or some bizarre form of android that someone had neglected to equip with any of the less tangible and attractive attributes of humanity, such as emotion or humour. Any aspect of reality that could not be captured and expressed in the form of a list passed them by.
The most striking aspect of Pauline's appearance was her lack of discernible gender. She was tall, angular and slim, with largish feet that she was in the habit of setting at right angles to each other while standing in conversation, as if in an attempt to contain her opposite number in an invisible box. Up to the middle of her head behind her ears her dark blonde hair gave the impression of having been shaved off with a hedge trimming device, leaving a long fringe that went right round her head at the same length, in a severe version of the pudding basin cut. This in turn evoked a caricature of a medieval monk or eunuch in Marks and Spencers slacks.
After the Valedictory service in the Cathedral at the end of the previous school year, Svetlana had overheard the Head of Newbourne College remark to someone nearby that Pauline was the "campest guy" he had ever seen. Pauline herself had missed this gem, although standing not far away. She had just spotted the Dean of the Cathedral and was executing a deft cutting movement in front of Eva, to whom she had been talking at the time, in order to invest in some impromptu networking. The version of a smile that marked the opening gambit of this smart move called for a strong stomach indeed, somehow reminding one of a digital version of Uriah Heep, and Eva had gladly conceded social defeat and moved away from the group.
Pauline's ecclesiastical connections were nonetheless deep, even intimate. She had, it was rumoured, been married to a vicar for a while (one couldn't help wondering how physical union could have been possible). She was also a midlife refugee from a theological college that had been closed down because of the dwindling number of recruits to the clergy. In a last ditch stand, the college had tried to pass itself off as a university, but to no avail.
Pauline had thus arrived at Ransom's with little more than a suitcase full of clerical connections, but this had proved enough to pique the interest of the Head, to whom social climbing was her life's work. Pauline was welcomed with open arms. While she was being groomed for stardom as the new Deputy Head (a human being was only months away from retirement), she was put to work, for the sake of form, in the school library, where she was able to practice jargon such as "synergy" and "paper driven culture", mainly by issuing death threats to people who had forgotten to return their library books, or rebuking colleagues who had ventured into her android sanctum with cups of coffee. In her spare time, which she seemed to have quite a lot of at this stage in her career, she also enjoyed walking around the school corridors straightening pictures. All this proved wonderful practice for later, when she would stand behind pillars early in the morning, waiting in ambush for unsuspecting teachers trying to avoid going to assembly. As behooves someone who is being groomed for stardom and has little more to prove, she was also the first person to get into her car at four thirty in the afternoon, while the mere underlings put on their third pot of coffee of the day, gulped down another betablocker and got stuck into their preparation and marking for the next day. Meanwhile, the Head prepared with a barely concealed frisson of upward mobility for her social triumph in Cathedral Close.
An android apparatchik smile was still arranging itself on Pauline's face as Rusty made to open the front door, but since the elderly mother of a teacher at Ransom's hardly ranked her on the same level of importance as high clergy, there were few teeth showing. Rusty, looking as greasy and disreputable as he could, opened the door and gazed at Pauline with his most impenetrably stupid teenager expression, leering slightly into the pale sunlight. The ratchets of Pauline's brain were not quite fast enough to put on the brakes and repurse her mouth, already poised for the obligatory dose of name dropping that opened most of her conversations: "So sorry I'm late, I got held up unexpectedly by the Dean at the Bishop's Palace!" she beamed with digital superfluousness at Eva's son. Her voice, Svetlana noticed, had already acquired some of the unfortunate circular saw pitch and intonation of Barbara Styles, the Head, evoking distasteful suggestions of an unhealthy symbiosis.
Rusty had been well primed. "Oh yeah, right", he responded, remembering to ban as many "T's" from his pronunciation as possible. "Gran's 'specting ya," he enunciated as slowly as he could, in the hope that Svetlana would be assembling her decrepitude to full effect in the living room. He entered first, followed by an erect, supercilious Pauline.
It was like pricking an upright sausage balloon. The first thing that hit Pauline, as she attempted to make out shapes through the chink in the thick drawn curtains, was the most appalling smell of warm urine. A huddled shape sitting by the gas fire farted and grunted in that order (Svetlana and Rusty shared a passion for whoopee cushions).
"Er, I've, I've, I've," Pauline stammered, then remembering her android manners, "I mean, good morning Mrs, er," (remembering that she had forgotten Svetlana's name).
Rusty had been carefully instructed by Svetlana to allow any ensuing silences in the encounter to mellow gently, like the urine in front of the fire. "If you are tempted to break the pause," she had said, "just count the flowers on the wallpaper or distract yourself in some other way. You'd be amazed what a powerful weapon silence can be in the right hands." Now, Rusty could see what she had meant. Pauline was starting to shift her weight from one big flat foot to the other and, as if in a desperate attempt to take charge of this uncomfortable reality, even started steepling her hands the way Barbara Styles used to do in assembly when talking about that Christian love they both professed interminably, but which they seemed to find so elusive in practice.
Something close to a sixty second eternity may have passed before Pauline clutched at the traditional straw of those out of their depth. She decided to shout. "I've come to collect the parcel!!!!" she intoned very slowly to the smelly huddle in the armchair, which responded by picking what appeared to be a dead fly out of its dishevelled hair and proceeded to examine it closely in front of thick spectacles. The woman was clearly dribbling down one side of her mouth.
"Parcel!" croaked the crone in the chair, holding the fly out for Pauline to inspect.
"No, no, Mrs er… PAR-CEL!"
Rusty, on the verge of an explosion that threatened to detonate his innards at any moment, rocked forwards and backwards on his trainers, hands clenched behind his back, keeping his eyes trained downward on the carpet so that Pauline would not notice the tears of laughter.
The doorbell rang. With the instant eyeball to eyeball communication of hardened anti-snob squad insurgents, Svetlana and Rusty agreed wordlessly in a glance that she would hold up the front in the living room while he went to answer the door. A couple of seconds later, Eva entered the room, followed by Rusty, who with a shrug communicated a nonplussed silent enquiry to Svetlana. His Granny merely grinned as inanely as she could and thrust the dead fly forward proudly towards her daughter.
"Parcel!" she repeated, nevertheless managing a quick wink that Eva was able to discern, but Pauline, who was now visibly sweating from her loss of customary command and upwardly mobile poise, could not.
With a subtle but instantaneous inward shifting of gears which Eva was able to register as pleasing to her, Eva grasped the situation.
"Now mother, I've brought your medicine, dear," she said, leaning down to Svetlana and seizing the benefit of Pauline's blind side to raise her eyebrows and grin at the same time. Then, savouring the moment, she took in a long, deep breath, stood up very slowly and, turning to Rusty, inquired in her sweetest voice: "Where did Granny put the parcel this time, dear?"
Rusty, still under the sway of an earlier phase of his anti-snob squad training, stretched his best blank insolent look to about ten seconds, gazing round the room while pouting, before responding: "Laundry basket", pointing to the plastic basket behind the door.
Eva, suddenly every inch her mother's daughter, beamed a smile of equanimity on Pauline, even giving Pauline's arm a patronizing little pat for good measure as she passed by her. Opening the lid, she dexterously picked each item of soiled linen out by hand, dropping it on to the carpet, asking herself with rhetorical good humour: "Now, I wonder where it can be?"
At last she found the parcel, nestling among some knickers. She pulled it triumphantly out of the basket with both hands, like one of the Three Wise Men at a nativity play.
"Here we are!" she exclaimed brightly, handing the treasure over to a speechless Pauline, whose locomotive system appeared to have temporarily disengaged itself from her brain. Svetlana, Eva and Rusty bathed in a hiatus of silent, beatific bliss, in which Pauline struggled in vain to find words, repair her damaged persona, or even move one of her gender free limbs towards the door.
Then, as if on the cue of an invisible conductor, the three of them exchanged a glance of accord, as if to say: "That'll do for today" and Eva, turning to Pauline, said: "See you on Monday morning then!" and ushered her stumbling out of the door. Svetlana and Rusty, arms round each other, tears streaming down their grimy faces, gazed through the net curtains as Pauline staggered back down the path towards her car and shooting a puzzled frown back over her shoulder before driving off in a cacophony of excessive revs and crashing gears. "You'd think a robot like her would drive an automatic!" Rusty commented.
The front door closed, Eva returned to the room. She looked at Rusty, then at Svetlana, then burst into giggles and splutters. "You're both very, very naughty!" she said, wagging her finger first at one, then the other.
"I know!" grinned Rusty.
"I know!" smirked Svetlana. "But then so are you, darling!"
"So it would seem," said Eva, collapsing on to the couch. "And what on earth is that awful smell?"
Svetlana and Rusty both burst out laughing.
"Pissed off android?" guffawed Granny, winking at Rusty.
Arriving at school, still dazed from her experience, Pauline Jenkins was too disoriented to notice some unfamiliar cars parked outside the main entrance in places normally reserved for the Head and her partner. As Pauline made her way pensively up the stairs, eyes down, holding the parcel in front of her, she did not even notice Barbara Styles, looking white and drawn, who was standing waiting for her at the top of the stairs. She almost bumped into her.
"Come into my office right away," Styles muttered through lips tight with multiple blown covers.
"Is something wrong?" inquired Pauline superfluously.
"The police are here," said Barbara in a low voice, that still echoed mercilessly around the oak panelled landing, enunciating the word "police" with a special care that denoted its placement in verbal quarantine. She was attempting to say what she had to say without actually having to say the words out loud, and discovering that she couldn't.
"The police?" repeated Pauline vacantly, retaining the tone of verbal quarantine that this unsavory word merited.
"The fraud squad, to be precise," came the reluctant specification. In a working environment to which buzzwords and euphemisms were its life's blood, this abrupt restoration to a discourse in which words had clearly defined, unequivocal meanings was like a sharp pain to their minds, which were used to the moral anesthetics of their own corporate jargon.
"The fraud squad," echoed Pauline blankly, irritated by the sound of her own empty words.
"The fraud squad," confirmed Styles, tightening her jaws.
"What fraud?" Pauline found herself asking, at the same time aware that this sounded as if one would hardly know where to begin the list, therefore annoying herself yet again with her own inadvertent truthfulness.
Styles' knuckles clenched yellow.
"The Bursar's, it seems."
"The Bursar's?" Pauline could hardly bear the sound of her own drone by this stage.
"Yes," the Head went on cautiously through the minefield, "it seems that there are some funds missing from the Head hunting budget." Pauline did not even notice herself being ushered into the Head's inner sanctum and the door being closed behind them.
"But how," asked Pauline, at last relocating some of her Ransom's priorities, "did they find out?"
"God knows," answered Styles, oblivious to the irony of including the Lord in her equations so very late in the day.
"All I was told is that someone very high up is involved."
"Someone very high up? You mean in the Church?" Pauline was still struggling for some social scaffolding.
"No, I mean in the government. Some kind of fiscal watchdog committee stumbled on it by accident, it would seem."
"The government?" flailed Pauline.
"Yes," answered Barbara. "It would appear that the Bursar's cover was blown, directly or indirectly, by a cabinet minister, no less."
Faced with this much social status in one sentence, Barbara and Pauline would normally scarcely have known whether to weep or preen themselves. Looking out of her study window down on to the lawn below, Barbara's eye was caught by the Bursar's rather silly wife Beth, shoulders trembling, with her face turned away towards the driveway, being hugged sympathetically by Father Barnes. Uncomfortable in the presence of all displays of sincere feeling, she instinctively turned her head away from them and back into the room. This was perhaps fortunate. Had she delayed for only a couple of seconds longer, she would have been in time to see Beth turn her head back round to face the Father, and seen, inexplicably, that she was trembling not with grief, but with tears of laughter, as was Father Barnes.
"So you did manage to whip up a bit of support after all?" he teased, putting his arm round her as the Bursar, in handcuffs, was led towards one of the inappropriately parked cars and driven away.
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