Honeymoon at St Cat's

by Some Sort of Dog

Copyright ©2004 Some Sort of Dog

Part 3

Chapter 20: Steam Trains and Mousefaces

"Lucky that band showed up," said Corinne, leaning back in the revolving chair, putting her feet on the stained green leather-topped desk and sipping her first mug of coffee of the day. "Hey, this coffee's improved!"

Angelica scratched the antelope's ears. "They were the rest of the brass band that was playing carols outside the church. They hired a cab and went home for their instruments."

"They weren't anything special as a band," said Corinne. "But they were men, and we looked like having a shortage of those."

Cassiopaeia Cassowary looked up from her stack of notebooks and glared over her glasses. "You don't mean you slept with a musician last night?"

Corinne stared at her. "Great coffee. Hey, Labia? Any more of this stuff?" The coffee appeared shortly before she uttered the last words. "Have they all gone now, the band?"

Miss Cassowary sniffed. "They said they were going to walk across the fields to Lord Ted's and catch the early train this morning."

Corinne looked at her with her head tilted to one side. "Train? There isn't a railway down there."

"There used to be. It was closed to passenger traffic in 1928 although freight continued for a further five years, the track being finally lifted in 1935. Buses replaced the passenger service. The nearest railway station to St Cat's was Pork Farm."

"For Pete's sake, Cassowary! But that's what I'm saying. There isn't even a railway track there now, and hasn't been for seventy years. So how did the band expect to catch a train home?"

"An anomaly, I suppose." Miss Cassowary pointed her pen at the antelope. "A bit like that thing."

"But he's okay. He's permanent," said Corinne. "Helvetica told me so last night. Does that mean if we walk across the fields towards Lord Ted's this morning, we'll be able to catch a train to Borcester?"

"You'll have to hurry, it leaves at 1124," said Miss Cassowary after consulting her timetable. "That's the Borcester section of the 0907 ex-Paddington, strengthened on Fridays by the addition of three extra coaches from Fillamore Junction — which was closed in 1962, by the way — and normally requiring the services of a pilot over Longshott bank, which I'm sure you are aware is seven miles, seventeen chains, at a ruling gradient of 1 in 43."

"Before we leave today, Angel, remind me to do something about Cassie's parameters."

"Okay. Could we take this antelope with us?"

"No, he'd only keep running away back to St Cat's. You can have a badger if you like, but he'd have to stay outside in the yard."

"Didn't Shan say she was coming in to school this morning?" said Angelica.

"This morning? On the first day of her honeymoon?"

"She isn't doing anything this morning that she hasn't been doing for years. But she said she had a special announcement for the girls."

"I announced what they wanted to hear last night," said Corinne. "I told them they didn't have to get up until midday. Got the biggest cheer of the evening."

There was a knock on the office door, then it opened cautiously and Helvetica poked her head inside. "Ah, there he is! We thought he'd run away, with all the noise last night. No offence, Miss Grimbo."

Miss Grimbeau raised her mug and grinned through the steam. "None taken, kiddo."

Helvetica came in, followed by Valentina, who looked slightly the worse for wear of the two. Then came Georgina, appearing slightly bewildered as if she had no idea why she was in the office of the headmistress at nine in the morning when no one had told her to be there. She saw the antelope and looked only slightly reassured.

"We're going to fix the clock," said Helvetica. "So we'll take him off your hands. Come on, boy!"

"Don't go too far away, Helvetica," said Miss Grimbeau. "Miss Gruntworthy is coming in to make a special announcement."

"She might be sending you all home early for the Holidays," said Miss Meadowlark.

"By train," added Miss Cassowary.

"But we have to fix the clock first!" said Helvetica indignantly, to her own complete surprise.

The clock thunderously struck eleven times.

"Seems to have fixed itself," said Valentina. "Did Miss Gruntworthy really say we could all go home?"

"No, but she will." Miss Meadowlark picked up the phone. "What's their number at the cottage?"

Miss Grimbeau gasped. "You can't! Not on their first morning!"

"They'll probably be glad of the excuse to get out of bed."

Miss Labia came in with a tray containing six mugs of coffee, a pile of chocolate chip cookies and a saucer of milk. "301843," she said. "It's a local number."

"Thanks." Miss Meadowlark tapped out the numbers and waited. "It's ringing. Come on, you idle buggers, pick it up."

"Who are you calling?"

"Who are you calling?" I demanded crossly as I stomped into my office. "That's my phone, and my revolving chair, and my desk. Where's my coffee?"

"We didn't think you'd be coming in," said Miss Labia.

"I'll have this one, then." I assumed it had been intended for Georgina, but as I'd passed her making off down the corridor while I'd been on my way in, it would be safe to drink hers. Although why Labia should be supplying coffee to half the student population as well as to a staff reunion in my office was another matter entirely. "Ah, that's better!" I said as I sipped the brown nectar. "Now, what am I doing in here?"

"You were going to call an assembly and tell the girls they can all go home for Christmas," said Corinne.

"Was I? Where are the girls, anyway? Why aren't they in class? And which class am I teaching today?"

"I told them they could stay in bed until midday. They've got another hour. Then they'll want their breakfast. And their lunch. Better call the assembly for two o'clock."

"I already did," said Labia. "Then the baggage transport will be here at two-fifteen, there's a train from Pork Farm at two minutes to three, and for any girls who are allergic to steam, dads' cars will be allowed to use the antelope's paddock for short-stay parking."

I felt my hair slowly stand on end. "Pork Farm?" I quavered, selecting the most disturbing of this set of arrangements. Then another thought occurred to me. "Steam?"

Miss Cassowary began clearing her throat but Corinne cut her short. "Don't worry about it, Shan. One or two anomalies have arisen, probably because you screwed things up by actually getting married at last. Anyway, having a railway station just across the fields could be quite convenient, as long as the girls on Sex visits to Lord Ted's take care crossing the line."

"Who's looking after the antelope over the holidays?" I asked, completely surprising myself.

"Oh, Shan, how kind of you to take care of him!" Corinne gushed. "Normally, of course, in the case of a school pet, one of the girls would take it home and look after it, but something as big and cumbersome as an antelope probably wouldn't go down too well with their mothers. And of course, they'd need Barbarella as well, to take him for his walks. No, you'd be ideal. He knows you and Jeremy, and you're only just across the road. And if you go out for the evening, he'll be as good as a watchdog."

"I've already arranged for a jumbo catering pack of chocolate chip cookies and an extra gallon of milk a day to be delivered to your house," said Labia, producing a giant clipboard and leafing through several sheets of paper. "You'll probably find they've been delivered by the time you get home tonight."

"Oh, thanks," I said weakly.

"He prefers double chocolate chip these days."

"Well, whoop-de-doo!"

"The females will be okay in the paddock," Labia went on. "It's only for three weeks and there's plenty of hay in the barn if they get hungry and eat all the grass. But you don't need to worry about that; Mr McGonagall will have instructions to look in on them once a day on his rounds."

"Mr ... McGonagall?"

"The new security guard. I had concerns that the premises might be less secure than was desirable now that you and your husband aren't going to be here overnight any more, so I engaged Mr McGonagall."

"Oh. Most kind of you. Does he have a gun?"

"No, just a nightstick. And a very fierce haircut."

"I see. And who pays his wages?"

"The Governors. Actually he offered to do the job for nothing, but we felt he ought to have some spending money."

"What if I don't like him? When does he start?"

"Last week. You'll love him. The girls certainly do!"

"Ye gods!"

"You know what they're like about uniforms! Anyway, I can't waste all day chatting to you. I've got some letters to send before we knock off for the hols." She tucked her outsized clipboard — which seemed to have expanded even more — under her arm, picked up the tray of empty cups and vanished.

"We'll be off then, miss," said Helvetica and Valentina together. "Do we have to stick around for the assembly or can we leave straight away?"

"I beg your pardon? You will attend the assembly with the rest of your schoolmates." Then, to my own complete surprise, I softened. "Where are you going for Christmas? To Helvetica's parents?"

"Not this year," said Valentina. "Helvetica is spending Christmas with me. Here."

"Here?"

"Valentina's mother is the Nurse," said Helvetica. "She lives here, so why shouldn't she have a normal family Christmas like anyone else?"

"Just a quiet Christmas," said Valentina dreamily. "Mum and me and Helvetica and the kids. And my babies, of course."

"Oh, of course!" I said.

"And Jenufa, although nobody's ever seen her. You should just see the tits on that kid!"

"I should!" I agreed. "I should?"

"Besides, MacGonagall will be there, too. We asked Miss Clit, but she's going to the Lake District."

"Doesn't Miss Clit have any family to go home to?" I asked, and I realised that I'd never thought about it before. "No mother or anything?"

"No. Poor Miss Clit!" And Valentina took out a hankie and wiped her eyes.

"You were very kind to invite her for Christmas, Valentina. Even though she couldn't come. Not many people would have done that." Myself, for one, I thought. The last thing we'd want would be the bra-maker cluttering up our cottage at Christmastide. An antelope would be more than enough. "You don't need to come to assembly. Off you go and pack your things, but don't tell any of the others."

"Thanks, miss!" And Valentina leaned across and gave me a sisterly kiss. It wasn't too wet, and although there were tongues it didn't last more than twenty seconds or so.

"Listen very carefully, all of you," I shouted to the assembled school. A quick count of heads suggested that most of them were present, that not too many of them were still in bed or had sneaked away early. In fact, there seemed to be more heads than usual.

"Who's that in the back row?" I demanded, noticing that two girls seemed to be embracing. They can do what they like in the dormitories but not in the assembly hall. The snogging couple separated slowly, to be followed by several more couples in various parts of the hall. "Is that a man?" I pointed at the suspicious figure and reached for my glasses. Then I turned round to see if any of the staff had a pair they could lend me. Binoculars might have been better, those big heavy ones like a U-boat captain's. Ja wohl, ka-leun...

I looked back at the assembly and the man had disappeared. I scanned the hall. No men in sight. Maybe it had been an illusion after all.

"Who normally goes home by train?" I asked. About a hundred hands were raised. "Good. You can still catch the bus to Borcester but I believe there is now an alternative. You can walk across the fields, almost as if you are going to Lord Ted's." At about this stage I noticed frowns of puzzlement on many young faces below me.

"Yes, I know," I explained carefully, as if to a pack of intelligent dogs. "But there really is a railway station there! And you can catch a train to Borcester and change there for the West Country or for the Midlands or London. That's right!"

"Why, miss?" asked one girl with glasses. Sweaty Betty, I realised.

"Why what, Betty?"

"Why can't we catch the train from Pork Farm to Longshott Junction and take the London train from there. It's ten pounds cheaper."

"Because, you fool, the trains only go to Borcester. Miss Cassowary told me, so there!"

"No they don't!" said a dozen voices. "They go both ways."

"Nonsense!"

"Please, miss," said Betty again. "If they only went to Borcester and didn't come back, they'd run out of trains. There'd be dozens of them all queued up at Borcester station. There've got to be as many going back to Longshott as go to Borcester. It stands to reason, doesn't it?"

It did, as a matter of fact, but Miss Cassowary had only told me that trains went to Borcester. She hadn't mentioned them coming back. Stupid cow!

"Don't talk such rubbish!" I said dismissively. "There will be buses, and if you're allergic and your parents are collecting you, the antelope paddock will be available for use as a car park for this afternoon only. Any questions?"

"About the trains, miss...?"

"No! I am not discussing trains! The next girl who mentions trains will get a billion lines!" That told them!

It was at this point that I found my glasses dangling round my neck on a chain, which brought a chill to my spleen because I'd never worn them like that in my life. Were they actually mine, I wondered. If they were somebody else's, that might explain their being attached to a chain, although there would still be the mystery of how they got themselves around my neck. Tentatively I tried them on, and the world sprang into such miraculous focus that I reeled backwards and had to clutch at the lectern, or podium, or whatever it was called. I glared down at the school.

Then I may have screamed. In fact, I'm sure I did. Somebody did, anyway.

Every single one of the girls was in disguise. Their faces were painted to resemble mice, or rats, with little black noses, little round sticking-up ears and long stuck-on whiskers. They wore this face-paint with such unconcern that either they were blissfully unaware that someone had made them up like this, or it had hitherto escaped my notice that the girls of St Cat's were in the habit of wearing mousefaces the whole time. Whichever it was, it was equally disturbing. We couldn't have a respectable girls' school going around like this; we'd be a laughing stock, especially as half of them were just about to leave the school and catch non-existent trains to impossible destinations from a station that I doubted would be there when they'd carefully trekked across the fields to Lord Ted's.

"Cee!" I shouted.

"She's not here," said Smegs's voice from behind me. "She had to leave. Her and Angelica. They took Cassowary with them but they said we could have her back when they'd finished with her. Now are you going to Dismiss us with Thy Blessing or do we just walk out of here? Don't you want to get back to your honeymoon?"

I did. There was unfinished business to conduct. But before I could announce the hymn, a jazz band struck up what I could only assume was the familiar tune because all the girls were singing, Lord Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing. I had no alternative but to join in with the singing, which had the effect of making the Borcester Blue Blowers blow louder. The end-of-term hymn had never sounded quite like this, especially as the band now appeared from behind one of the grand pianos on the stage, proudly led by Boom-Boom with her borrowed drum, her ears and her whiskers, then clarinet, trumpet and trombone in line abreast and the oom-pah right behind them. Fittingly, they all wore bowler hats and stripey waistcoats. They led the way down the centre aisle and as soon as they had passed the front row the First Form broke ranks and fell in behind them, followed in turn by all the other classes, marching with a curious skipping, stomping gait which reminded me of Jeremy for some reason. Except that Jeremy didn't have huge bouncing tits.

"Oh, fuck it!" I yelled. "See you in the New Year."

"Oh, no you don't!" said Smegs, taking me by the arm and steering me down the steps from the stage. To my surprise we were the only members of the teaching staff present. "We're going to follow them to the station."

"There isn't a station!" I protested feebly. "They closed it seventy-five years ago. There aren't even any tracks."

"You're probably right, Shan. But can you think of a better reason to follow them and find out where they all end up?"

I couldn't. The student body of St Cat's was at this moment skipping along the footpath behind a thumping jazz band, hellbent on catching trains to God-alone-knew-where. They didn't even have their luggage with them, which would surely displease their mothers.

Smegs led the way outside, to where the beat of the music was echoing through the woods and the tail end of the procession was disappearing between the trees, a swirl of disturbed leaves in their wake.

"They've got some boys with them," I told Smegs. "The Sixth Form. I thought I saw a boy earlier, now I'm sure."

"They're going home for Christmas. Are you saying they're not allowed to have boyfriends?"

"They've probably spent the night with them."

"That's probably true."

"What about their bags?"

"What?"

"They're going home. They haven't got any baggage with them."

"Mrs Lashmore and Miss Underpants are looking after that. They've hired three tractors and trailers from the farm."

"Hired? Do they think we're made of money?"

"It didn't cost any money," said Smegs, touching the side of her nose with a conspiratorial finger.

"Oh, Jeez!"

I was nearly running, as usual, to keep up with Smegs, yet we still weren't catching up with the last of the school as they bounced along in the winter sunshine, like a plague of rats following the Pied Piper.

Rats!

"Are they all still wearing those ridiculous mousefaces?" I panted.

"I suppose so. Cute, aren't they?"

On the fire escape of the Third Form dormitory, Valentina handed the binoculars back to Helvetica.

"Well, there they go."

Helvetica fiddled with the focus wheel. "Shit, you must be half blind. Ah. Funny about those noses and whiskers they're all wearing."

"Yeah, it was weird when they all put them on this morning as soon as they came back from breakfast. I asked them what was going on but they just asked me why I wasn't wearing mine. It felt spooky, like I ought to be wearing a mouseface, as if it was a school rule or something."

Helvetica put the binoculars down and rubbed her eyes. "They've all disappeared round the corner. Where did they get them from?"

"They just had them. Most of them were in their top drawers. I even looked in mine but there was nothing there. What's going on?"

"It's got to be the computer again. We haven't been down to the IT lab for a couple of days. Maybe it's trying to attract attention."

"I suppose we'll be going down there, then?"

"Of course! We've got a few things that need sorting out. I'm sure it's because Miss Meadowlark was here. Mousefaces! And all that stuff with the band. And ol' Boom-Boom's drum!"

"And now they've all trooped off to the station, and everybody knows there's no station there." Valentina refocused the binoculars and gazed out across the fields. "Oh, shit! What's that?"

"Where?"

"Over the fields. Not towards Lord Ted's, the other way. I thought it was smoke, but it's steam."

"You mean Steam?"

"No, not Steam, steam. Like an old-fashioned train."

"Shit, that means there is an old railway down there. It also means we can't talk to the computer about it yet. What would happen if they were all on the train doing sixty miles an hour and we made it disappear? But I really wanted to do something about the mousefaces before it got too embarrassing."

"Is it anything to do with the antelope, do you think?"

Helvetica thought about it. "Indirectly, yeah. The antelope kicked holes in Boom-Boom's drum, so the school band couldn't play. Then the Borcester band came along so the school could march behind them. And that was like the Pied Piper. And so is the way they've all marched off to the station, following the jazz band. But the Pied Piper marched off with the rats, so the school had to wear those mousefaces."

"What's that got to do with the steam trains and the station?"

"I don't know. But you know Miss Cassowary's been talking about steam trains for ages. Maybe that's why Miss Meadowlark took her away."

"It's crazy."

"Of course it is. What else do you expect at this place?"

It was a sweet little station, like one of those paintings on a biscuit tin. It had a tiled roof and a space for taxis out the front, and a canopy over the entrance with a sign saying Pork Farm. Looking through the wooden paling fence we could see a man in a uniform and a peaked cap sweeping the platform. Another similarly dressed man was gathering up leaves from the flower beds which surrounded a larger sign which announced again that this was Pork Farm. In fact, it said:

No apostrophe, I noticed. That is, there was an apostrophe in Cat's but not in Girls, a strange inconsistency.

The jazz band were standing in a group near the doorway to the station, debating what to play next. Girls were milling round everywhere, some trying to buy tickets at the ticket office, some reclaiming their baggage from a farm trailer which stood in the station yard, its tractor driver carrying on a bellowed conversation with another driver who was about to leave with his empty trailer. "One ... two ... one, two, three, four..." announced a voice and the jazz band struck up a slow number that I recognised as some kind of blues.

Predictably, several girls were in tears. Some of them are quite simply incapable of making the most routine journey without losing their luggage.

"Seems to be going quite smoothly," said Smegs. "What time is it?"

From across the fields the quadrangle clock chose that moment to strike three.

"Three o'clock."

"How do you know?" said Smegs with a frown. She sniffed. "Bloody train's late, as usual."

But then there was a whistle in the distance, and the activity round the luggage trailer grew even more frenzied as buxom girls thinly disguised as mice tried to get reunited with their personal belongings. There were more tears, some unseemly jostling and several well-aimed punches.

"Stop them!" I yelled at Smegs. "They'll hurt each other!"

I had spoken too late. Smegs was already in amongst the girls, flinging orders left and right, and demonstrating the finer arts of fisticuffs to those girls who weren't doing so well. "Oh, nice work, Felicity!" I heard her cry as a Sixth Former went down poleaxed as a result of a well-aimed blow to the jaw.

Luckily, the fight didn't escalate. The train whistle sounded again, a lot closer, and the girls melted away, lugging their bags and streaming through the entrance into the station building. Felicity hauled her Sixth Former to her feet and the two of them went off arm in arm to catch their train.

No doubt Miss Cassowary would have been able to describe it better than I could, but it was big and black and noisy. It came under the bridge in a cloud of steam and clanked its way along the platform, getting slower and slower, groaning to a halt exactly opposite where Smegs and I were watching over the fence, not ten feet away. It began raining warm water on us in a steady drizzle.

"It's disgusting! Filthy thing!" I said.

"Of course it is, it's a train." Smegs took a deep breath. "God, I just love the smell of steam!"

All along the length of the train — which consisted of five dirty brown and cream carriages and a scruffy little luggage van — doors were slamming as girls clambered aboard and immediately lowered the windows to hurl abuse at their schoolmates. But somehow all of them got on the train and a mournful voice boomed, "Take 'er away!" Then a football referee's whistle shrilled and an urgent jet of brownish smoke issued from the engine's chimney followed by a toot on its whistle and a succession of clonks and hisses, before it began lumbering forward. It had gone a yard or more before the first puff, which I found surprising, but then it gathered pace and confidence and went chuffing away, its carriages accelerating past us, faster and faster until they were no more than a blur of little mousefaces and waving hands. Then it was gone, just a dwindling blob with a solitary red light, while clouds of fragrant grey smoke and dank steam hung around.

The jazz band came to the end of their tune and stood around shuffling their feet, wondering what to do next.

The two tractors and trailers had left the station yard and were chuntering away down the lane, heading for the farmhouse and a cup of tea.

"Well," I said. "Was that the train for Borcester, then?"

"Borcester's the other way, you fool," said Smegs with a jerk of the thumb. "Didn't they all try to tell you that? You never listen, do you!"

From behind us came the amplified, distorted sound of the station announcer. "That was the two-fifty-eight for Bristol Temple Meads, calling at Longshott, East Longshott, Fillamore Junction, Scroat, Little Porning, Fowell, Lucifer Green, Elephant, Dornier, Upoctopus, Smelling, Bubbles, Cockhappy and Bristol Temple Meads. Change at Dornier for Heinkel and Messerschmidt. Connecting at Cockhappy for Orgasm, Premature and Faykingett. You have just missed the two-fifty-eight, all stations to Bristol Temple Meads. 'Zat tea ready yet, Marge?"

I wasn't sure I'd heard all those names correctly, although some of them sounded vaguely familiar. But why announce a train that had just left?

"They've all gone," I said mournfully.

"Of course they have," said Smegs, sounding surprised. "It's the Christmas holidays. Which reminds me. I'd better get my things packed: I'm on a promise for tonight."

Boom-Boom watched from just inside the station doors. The tractors were driving away, and now she could see Miss Gruntworthy and Miss Mountains wandering off in the direction of St Cat's. They appeared to be arguing about something, wagging fingers at each other. At last they were gone and Boom-Boom peered round the edge of the doorway. The band members were still there!

In a slightly dazed fashion they were stowing their instruments into the back of a battered white van. She could see Ralph limping around at the back of the group with the bass drum. He looked downcast.

The procession had arrived at the station in good order but had broken up in disarray as soon as the girls sighted the farm trailers loaded with their luggage. Boom-Boom had unstrapped her borrowed drum and placed it carefully on the ground but had then been swept along with the rest of the school into the station building without managing to attract Ralph's attention. With the trainload of girls now out of sight, it was time for her to come out of hiding.

"Hello, Ralphie," said Boom-Boom, approaching quickly and tugging at his sleeve.

"Amanda!"

"Ralphie!"

"Oooh, Ralphie!" gurgled the rest of the Borcester Blue Blowers, hugging each other with delight. But then they moved away without a further word, once more unpacking their stuff from the back of the van and laying it on the ground.

"Why aren't you on the train? I couldn't see you with the others."

"I was hiding round the corner."

"Where's your bag?"

"I didn't pack one. I won't need it for a few days." She blushed prettily and traced a heart-shaped pattern on the ground with the toe of her surprisingly small shoe. Her nipples felt like little rocks inside her blouse, and she felt them pop out of the holes in the tips of her bra cups. Her panties were in serious need of adjustment but she couldn't do that in a public place like the station yard. Another mini-flood of moisture seeped into her crotch, and she moved her feet further apart and wriggled her bottom.

"What are you doing?" said Ralph uncomfortably, apparently trying not to stare.

"Nothing!"

The clarinettist, Arthur, appeared and Boom-Boom and Ralph took half a step away from each other. He ran a hand over his slicked-back silvery hair. "We've got the drum in the van, Ralph. If you want, you could...."

Boom-Boom looked across at the van, where the remainder of the jazz band were hovering by the open back doors. Ralph's bass drum was there on the ground. Evidently they were having difficulty fitting it inside while leaving enough room for the rest of them.

"It's in the van, Amanda," said Ralph. "We brought it along but didn't have a chance to get it out before the train came in. But then I couldn't see you anyway in the crowd...." His voice sounded croaky and his eyes were unnaturally bright.

"What are you talking about, Ralphie?"

"Your drum, of course. Arthur had it mended last night, and I ... we hoped to give it to you to take home for Christmas." His voice gave up altogether and he flapped his hands around in the air like a chicken flapping its hands in the air.

"You mended my drum? Oh, Arthur!" Boom-Boom flung her arms round the ageing clarinet-player and hugged him. Her aching nipples were compressed against his scrawny chest and they could both feel it. "Sorry!" she said, disengaging herself and stepping back. All three of them blushed prettily.

"What time ... your train?" Ralph asked her, leading her away from the rest of the jazzmen who had returned to fussing over their instruments.

"I'm not catching a train. I didn't know Miss Gruntworthy was going to send us home early for the Holidays so I told my dad to collect me on Wednesday. That's why I didn't pack a bag like all the others."

"But are you going back to the school? There won't be anyone there. Any staff, I mean. No teachers, no cooks...."

"I won't miss the cooks much. No, I thought I might be able to stay with you for a few days."

"With me?"

"Well, you live on your own, don't you?"

"Yeah, but ... stay? With me?"

Boom-Boom felt her cheeks growing hot. "You mean you don't want to?" she said in a small voice. Her eyes flickered away to the station entrance as if she were starting to regret not catching the train with the rest of the school.

"But my flat ... I mean ... I haven't tidied up or anything. It's like a tip."

"We can clear up together, then!" said Boom-Boom, grasping Ralph's hands and dancing an awkward little jig that inevitably drew his eyes to her rebounding bust. Then she looked at the van. "Can we all get in there?"

"No chance," said Ralph. We couldn't even get the whole band in there, not with two bass drums. That's what we were trying to do, fit everything inside."

"Well, why don't we go down to Borcester on the next train?" she chirped. "The boys can all get in the van, and take both drums. Then they can deliver the drums to your place when they get back to Borcester."

Ralph hesitated. "Why not?" he said at last.

"What time's the next train?" said Boom-Boom.

"How would I know? Until this morning I didn't even know there was a station here, and I've lived in Borcester all my life!"

"I expect there'll be a train about 15:24," she said, to her own complete surprise. "Let's catch that one. Tell the boys they can stop trying to make room in the van and go home."

So Ralph did. He limped across to the van and Boom-Boom watched him explaining to his colleagues. He pointed at her and the bandsmen all grinned and clapped him on the back. Then they piled into the van and the engine started with a clatter. As Ralph rejoined Boom-Boom, the van was already bucketing its way out of the station yard, with hands waving from the back windows.

"They said thanks," Ralph reported. "They reckon there's something weird about this place. They didn't think there was a station here either, especially a station with a steam train."

"There is! And here it comes now!" said Boom-Boom, pointing up the line towards Longshott where a cloud of smoke rose above the trees. A whistle confirmed her sighting. "Let's get in there and catch it."

Holding hands tightly they made for the station entrance as fast as Ralph could hobble. "Two to Borcester, please," said Boom-Boom, rapping with a coin on the window of the ticket office.

"You from St Cat's?" mumbled the clerk through a mouthful of cheese and tomato roll, not even looking at Ralph. He wiped a crumb of cheese off the window glass.

"Yes."

"It's free, then. Platform 2, over the footbridge. You've got plenty of time; he'll be taking on water."

The train came panting in as they emerged on to the platform and hurried towards the footbridge. It groaned to a halt and vanished in a cloud of steam, while the driver and fireman climbed down from the cab and busied themselves with the controls of the water column.

The lovers opened the door of the first compartment they came to and scrambled aboard, slamming the door shut behind them. Then they sank down on one of the dusty moquette seats and fell into each other's arms. For five minutes they were oblivious to their surroundings, lost in their kiss. There were tongues involved. Only the shriek of the whistle and the lurch as the train started brought them back to reality. Then they sat up and noticed for the first time that they were not alone in the carriage.

"Oh, shit!" muttered Boom-Boom.

"Oops!" said Ralph. "Good afternoon, vicar!"

"Bless you, my children," smiled the man of the cloth. But he continued staring at them, his mouth opening and closing slowly.

"What's the matter with him?" said Boom-Boom.

"I think it might be this," said Ralph with a laugh. He carefully peeled off Boom-Boom's shiny black nose and her mouseface whiskers.

Chapter 21: Strangers in the Night

"Now then, you!" said Helvetica, standing in front of the computer monitor with arms akimbo.

"What?" said the Fuckh Machine defensively.

"You're asking what? You bring an antelope to St Cat's. You fill the woods with badgers. You have failed utterly to do anything about the clock. You make the antelope shove its horns through poor Boom-Boom's drum. She was so proud of that drum. The antelope isn't even sorry! It just drinks milk and eats double chocolate chip cookies. You bring back a railway that hasn't been there for 75 years, you dress up the whole school in ridiculous mousefaces and send them off in the wrong direction on a train that could end up anywhere!"

"Yeah," the computer agreed, although it didn't sound particularly contrite about its recent record.

Valentina elbowed her way in front of Helvetica. "Why?" she demanded.

The Fuckh Machine was silent for a while. "I got bored," it whined at last.

"We all get bored sometimes, but we don't send two hundred girls away on a train to nowhere with mousefaces on."

"I thought the mousefaces were fun," said the machine. "Anyway, the drum wasn't my fault."

"Not your fault?" Helvetica screeched. "Whose fault was it, then?"

"Meadowlark's. You know all she has to do is to think something, and it happens. Then it's down to me to clear up the mess! Anyway, I reckon she's losing her touch. She started thinking about the Pied Piper, and before you know where we are we've got a broken drum, so we need a replacement band with a new drum, then a jazz band to play the music for Grimbo, then a bunch of happy clappies to sleep with the jazz band, but there were too many happy clappies so we had to invite the rest of the Borcester Brass band as well to sleep with the happy clappies, then Old Grunt gives everybody a holiday at a moment's notice and I have to arrange transport. One way and another, I think I did all right, all things considered. By and large. At the end of the day, when the chips are...."

"Where have you sent all the girls?" said Helvetica.

"They'll be okay," said the computer. "The railway is preserved now, so it will be there for years. It will be a major tourist attraction. It goes to Bristol via Dornier, for goodness' sake! A much-needed community service."

"Dornier? What's that?"

"I don't know," said the machine. "It was the station announcer's idea, throwing all those weird names into its announcement. But it doesn't matter, he only announces the trains after they've already gone. It's not a perfect system, I know, but it's better than giving the passengers a load of incorrect information. He still gives it to them but he waits until they're not there any more."

"We think you've been very naughty," said Valentina.

"You've caused a lot of trouble," said Helvetica.

"We ought to unplug you."

"Not that!" the machine bleated. "You can't!"

"Oh, can't we?" said Helvetica, realising to her own complete surprise that never before had she seriously considered simply disconnecting the Fuckh Machine from the main power supply. She'd always gone along with Valentina's crazy suggestions for stopping the quadrangle clock; suggestions that involved elaborate rituals with Georgina, treacle and the antelope. Unplugging the computer wouldn't stop the Fuckh Machine working, but it would certainly reduce its impact on day-to-day life at St Cat's if the pesky thing couldn't hear every word anyone said.

"I don't think you can," Valentina whispered to her anxiously. "We'd have to stop the clock again, and Georgina isn't here any more."

"I'll leave you plugged in," said Helvetica. "As long as you promise that there'll be no more weird stuff."

The computer appeared to consider. "I don't know about that...."

"No more weird stuff between now and the New Year!"

"Oh, shit," it said. "Okay."

Its tone of voice suggested that if it had fingers, they would be firmly crossed behind its back, but at least it had made a promise. What more could she ask of it?

"Come on, Tee," she said. "Let's go and pack our stuff."

They set off up the sloping corridor from the IT Laboratory and rounded the bend at the top.

"Ah, ladies! Y'all headed someplace?"

"Mr McGonagall!" Valentina blurted. "You remember us? I'm Valentina and this is Helvetica."

The security guard leaned against the wall and stared at them through his glasses, which signally failed to fit in with the warlike image of the uniform cap atop a close-shaven skull. He rapped his night-stick against his leg while he thought about things.

"Guess ah dew," he said at last.

"We can't call you Mr McGonagall all the time, can we?" Valentina wheedled. "What do your friends call you?"

McGonagall looked unhappy. "Poindexter," he admitted.

"Wow!"

"That's a nice name," said Helvetica. "Poindexter McGonagall."

"Haven't you got a dog?" simpered Valentina. "You ought to have a dog. Or an antelope...."

"A badger," Helvetica suggested. "A guard-badger."

"You can have as many badgers as you like," said Valentina. "Help yourself."

"No badgers!" insisted McGonagall. Then, as the girls started edging past him, he barred their way with his night-stick. "Where y'all goin'?"

"Up to the dorm to pack our things," said Valentina. She fluttered her eyelashes and thrust her chest so far out in front that McGonagall was forced to back away a yard and a half. "You want to come? You'll have to look the other way while we change, of course."

"Packin'?"

"Yeah, Helvetica's staying with me and mum. You know, Nurse?"

"Nurse is your mom?" McGonagall looked haunted. "You mean you're gonna be there for the Holidays?"

"Of course. Us, and my sisters. Even Jenufa, if we're lucky. You should just see the t...."

Helvetica butted in. "You mean you're going to be there, Poindexter? For Christmas?"

"Yeah," he grated.

"Hey, all right!" the girls enthused, exchanging a high five.

Mrs Lashmore and Miss Underhill staggered along the path arm in arm, swaying from side to side. Up ahead of them the quadrangle clock struck midnight.

"Can you hear that, Underwear?"

"Sure, Whiplash!"

"Great!"

"Excellent!"

They stopped, faced each other unsteadily, and embraced for several seconds before falling over in a heap and rolling into the bushes.

"You're my very very very very very very very beshtsesh friend!" said Mrs Lashmore.

"So am I," replied Miss Underhill.

"Lesh go sleep here."

"Nah. Warm bed. St Cat's."

Mrs Lashmore heaved herself to her feet then pulled her colleague up off the ground. "Come home wiv meeee. Tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Lishen...."

Mrs Lashmore cupped a hand to her ear. "What is it?"

"Nothin'. No, listen. I tell you somethin'."

"Oh, yeah? What?"

"Race you back to St Cat's."

And Miss Underhill immediately set off at a thunderous gallop, crashing through the undergrowth.

Mrs Lashmore sighed and began trudging along the path in the opposite direction; towards St Cat's. And as she walked she straightened her back, sticking out her tits. "Open up them pearly gates for meeeeee," she sang, not entirely tunelessly.

Farmer Cornfield had invited the two teachers back to the farm after delivering the girls' luggage to the station, and they'd all enjoyed a mighty steak and kidney pie around the big kitchen table; Farmer and Mrs Cornfield, their three strapping teenage daughters, and the three farmhands who had been driving the tractors. Then there was a monstrous suet pudding, stuffed with apple and served with lashings of thick custard. Then scrumpy.

It was probably the scrumpy that accounted for Mrs Lashmore's condition now — a feeling of disconnection from her feet and an overwhelming need to fart. She farted now, and it was good. She hadn't really been able to do it in the farmhouse, although she could probably have blamed the dogs, the same as everyone else did every five minutes.

It was strange; the farmhands seemed to have been under the impression that there would be some St Cat's schoolgirls there. One each. The teachers explained that all the girls had gone home on the new steam train that afternoon. There were simply none of them left to provide companionship for bloated and hiccupping farmhands. If there had been girls available, no doubt they would have obliged, being always polite and eager to please, but it seemed that the farmhands were going to be disappointed.

Sensing an opportunity, the farmer's daughters began giggling coquettishly and making simpering noises at the farmhands, who clammed up and nervously squirmed, trying to get away.

At that moment, Mrs Cornfield rose unsteadily from her seat and proposed that it was time for the ladies to withdraw. Then she slumped back into her chair again and fell asleep with her face in the apple pudding. Some of the ladies withdrew, all right, but it was the three daughters, grabbing a farmhand each and dragging them upstairs.

"How about something stronger?" Farmer Cornfield proposed, standing up and weaving towards the Welsh dresser. He came up with a serious-looking bottle and four glasses, glanced at his wife and put one of the glasses back. In fact, he reached the table and opened the bottle, before his eyes became glassy and he rushed from the kitchen, colliding with most of the furniture.

Mrs Lashmore and Miss Underhill never saw him again.

They'd helped themselves to a drink, just out of politeness, then made their excuses to the snoring farmer's wife and somehow found their way to the path leading back to St Cat's.

"Where am I?" mused Mrs Lashmore, finding herself in the quadrangle, staring at the fountain. "Water looks nice," she concluded. "Swim!"

Seconds later she was sitting naked in the icy fountain.

"Where's the fuckin' soap?" she yelled, scrambling out and gathering up her clothes in her arms. "Yes, it does, doesn't it!" she added, remembering the punchline.

"Someone at the door," said Valentina.

"Who can it be?" said Helvetica. "There's nobody here but us."

There was a cheerful fire blazing in the hearth of Nurse's house on the edge of the woods. Nurse and Poindexter McGonagall had made their excuses and presumably gone to bed an hour earlier, leaving Valentina and Helvetica in their nighties, playing Monopoly on the hearthrug. The quadrangle clock had reassuringly struck midnight a short while before.

The pounding on the door was repeated.

"They'll wake everyone up!" Valentina complained.

"Better see who it is," said Helvetica.

"It might be burglars!"

"Burglars don't knock on doors!"

"He might be new to the job."

"I'm taking this," said Helvetica, selecting a handy brass shovel from the fireplace. She hefted it in her hand then exchanged it for a poker. "Let's go!"

"I'm right behind you, Vets! Hang on a minute." Valentina took an umbrella from the hallstand and brandished it upside down, swishing the handle through the air like a 5-iron. The two girls approached the front door, then stopped.

"Why haven't you got one of those little spy-hole things?" said Helvetica.

"We've never needed one before. This is the first burglar we've ever had."

There was another thunderous bout of knocking and they clung to each other, squealing.

"You'd better open it," said Valentina. "Just open it a little bit and I'll jab him in the balls with the umbrella."

With a muttered prayer, Helvetica turned the doorknob and pulled the door open. She intended opening it no more than a foot, but as soon as the latch was released, the door swung open as if there was a heavy weight pushing against it. Valentina closed her eyes and jabbed out with the umbrella, meeting no resistance and thrusting it into the empty night. Then she stumbled over the heavy weight, whatever it was, staggered outside and sprawled on the doorstep.

The heavy weight crawled into the house as Helvetica let out a scream and backed away, startled by the sight of a soaking wet naked woman entering the house on hands and knees.

"Fuckin' freezin'!" Mrs Lashmore grunted, flinging out a foot and slamming the door shut behind her. Then she curled up on the doormat. "Leave me alone, it's bedtime," she whined, and fell asleep.

Valentina began pounding on the door.

"Shomeone at the door," said Mrs Lashmore happily, opening one eye briefly.

"You've locked Valentina outside," said Helvetica, shaking the teacher's clammy shoulder with little or no effect. She thought about digging her with the poker but couldn't decide which part to poke. "Please!" she wailed. "Let me open the door. She's only wearing her nightie."

"Freezhin' outside," Mrs Lashmore informed her. "Besh ... besh ... beshtesh friend out there. Underwear."

"Your bestest friend is out there in her underwear? What's going on?"

"I'm drunk, miss. Scrumpy. Hic."

"You don't have to call me miss. Come into the living room by the fire," said Helvetica, dragging the teacher by one arm and a handful of hair.

"Ouch!" But Mrs Lashmore decided it might be a better idea to fall asleep in front of a warm fire rather than on the doormat. She crawled briskly out of the kitchen and disappeared through the open door of the living room. Helvetica flung the front door open and Valentina came in with an armful of the teacher's clothes.

"Who was it?" she said. "The cheeky burglar shut me out."

"It's Mrs Lashmore, drunk," said Helvetica, stunned. "She's gone to sit by the fire. Did you see anyone else out there? She said her bestest friend's out there in her underwear."

"Who's her bestest friend?"

"I dunno."

"In her underwear? Underwear! Her bestest friend is Miss Underwear!"

"Is she drunk too, do you think?"

"Probably." Valentina came in and shut the door, then dropped Mrs Lashmore's clothes in a heap on the kitchen floor.

"Strange, she's all wet," said Helvetica. "But her clothes are dry."

"I'd better get her a blanket. Doesn't look as if we'll be getting much sleep tonight," Valentina said as she started up the stairs. She was back in a minute with a bath towel, two blankets and a pillow. Then she put the kettle on. "We'll make her a cup of tea. Mum says you always give them a cup of tea."

Helvetica glanced at the front door. "I wonder where Miss Undies is. She might be wandering around out there in the woods, with all those badgers."

"As long as she's dressed, she'll be okay. She'll find her way back to her room, they always do."

The girls made Mrs Lashmore comfortable, giving her a mug of tea to slurp while doing their best to dry her off before wrapping her in the blankets and placing a pillow under her head. The teacher made no protest apart from advising them to fuck off from time to time, although her heart didn't really seem to be in it. Soon she was snoring contentedly by the fire. She did sit up once and let out an eerie wail, causing the girls to yelp with fright and scatter hotels and houses all over the Monopoly board, but she went to sleep again immediately afterwards.

The knock on the front door was so gentle as to be almost inaudible.

"Was that another knock?" said Helvetica.

"Yeah. It's got to be a burglar this time!"

Helvetica stood up and grabbed her poker, filled with resolve. "Bring your umbrella. We can't have people waking us up at all hours of the night. It must be nearly one o' clock."

The quadrangle clock's confirmation of her guess was deafening but mercifully brief.

They opened the front door more cautiously this time, Valentina standing ready to swipe out with her weapon.

Two badgers hurried in and sat down to scratch themselves, then Miss Underhill, listing at about twelve degrees, appeared out of the shadows and breezed in through the door. "Hi!" she said brightly. "I've come to the party! Wheeeee! Brought my dogs. Where they gone? Here, boys!"

"If you mean these two," said Valentina grimly, "we don't allow badgers in the house." She began poking at the unwilling animals with the business end of the umbrella but they refused to move.

"You can't send my dogs out on a night like this!" Miss Underhill protested.

Helvetica prodded them with the poker. "They're badgers, miss! Get out, you horrible things!"

"I know what will get rid of them," said Valentina, disappearing into the kitchen and improbably emerging seconds later with the vacuum cleaner. She switched it on and advanced briskly on the badgers, charging into their backsides and sending them in a panic-stricken dash for the doorway, where they became wedged for a few wriggling seconds before exploding out into the darkness. Valentina continued hoovering for a minute or so, sucking up dead leaves and stray badger hairs, before turning off the appliance and returning it to the kitchen.

"What the bloody hell are you girls doing down there?" Nurse demanded from the top of the stairs. "Jenufa's trying to sleep!"

"Sorry, Nurse," said Helvetica, "Valentina was just hoovering up some badgers." She ushered this latest drunken teacher into the living room. Valentina followed them in and closed the door.

"Wow, Monopoly!" Miss Underhill was loud. "We used to play this in the dorm and take our clothes off. I wanna be the boot." Then she pointed at her sleeping colleague. "What's that lazy bitch doing here? I won the race!"

"She's asleep. And you can't be the boot, that's mine. You can't be the dog, either, that's Valentina. You can be the racing car."

"Don't want the racing car," Miss Underhill pouted. "Is there a badger? Why isn't there a badger?"

"There's a top hat."

"Don't like top hats. Top hats are stupid. I hate this game anyway. I always lose."

"You don't have to play, miss" said Valentina. "I think we'd finished anyway."

"Have you been drinking scrumpy too, miss?" Helvetica asked.

"Didn't get laid," reported Miss Underhill obliquely. "You can call me Virgi ... Virgi ... Virginegar." She frowned. "That doesn't sound right." She pulled back Mrs Lashmore's blanket and crawled underneath, wrapping most of it round herself. "Wow, she's naked! All boobs and cunny and things! Beshtesh friend," she vowed, and promptly fell asleep.

The clock struck again, and Miss Underhill woke up and sat bolt upright. "God!" she said. "You two have got fucking great tits!" Helvetica blushed prettily. But having got that off her chest the teacher fell asleep again.

"Must be time for hot chocolate and cookies," sighed Valentina. "We'll never get any sleep tonight." She retired to the kitchen, leaving Helvetica to clear up the ruins of the Monopoly game. "There!" she said, coming back in triumph a few minutes later and setting a tray down on the rug.

"Where's ours?" Miss Underhill demanded petulantly, wide awake in an instant.

Mrs Lashmore sat up as well, rubbing her eyes. "Morning, girls!" she said.

"Oh, God!" said Valentina. "Help yourselves to cookies; I'll make some more hot chocolate."

"This is nice!" said Miss Underhill cosily when the rest of the chocolate arrived. "But you know what we really need?"

Valentina had a feeling she shouldn't ask. "No, what?"

"The antelope."

"How did I know you were going to say that, miss?"

"I told you to call me Virginia. We're on holiday as of this afternoon."

"You told us to call you Virginegar," muttered Helvetica.

"Whatever. And this is Dawn. But no, really..." Miss Underhill dunked a cookie in her hot chocolate. It broke in half and disappeared beneath the frothy surface. "Oh, shit!" she said, fishing for it with two fingers.

"I hope you remember where those fingers were a few minutes ago," Mrs Lashmore reminded her.

"Oh, miss!" said Helvetica, pulling a face and putting down her cookie.

Miss Underhill retrieved the soggy cookie and licked her finger with obvious relish. "He's lovely, though. I love his ears, and his smooth coat and his great big eyes. And his horns, of course."

"Oh, of course!" chanted Helvetica and Valentina in chorus.

"I hope he isn't going to be unhappy with Miss Gruntworthy and Jeremy. He's so used to all the girls being here, he'll be lonely. Other schools let one of the pupils take the school animal home at holiday times, so it's with a family."

"You couldn't let someone like Barbarella take an antelope home for Christmas, miss," Helvetica pointed out. "It would be a disaster to have around the house, trying to sleep with all her brothers and sisters."

"Oh, the family would soon get used to having it around. And it's just for Christmas, not for ever."

Helvetica and Valentina rolled their eyes at one another. They were beginning to think it might be well past their bedtime.

"Who's Jenufa?" Miss Underhill demanded suddenly.

"Whaaat?"

"Valentina's mother said Jenufa was trying to sleep."

"That was ages ago! You've been asleep since then. Twice."

"I've just remembered."

"Jenufa's my kid sister," said Valentina. "You should just see the tits on that kid!"

Miss Underhill leaned forward, licking her lips. "Big, are they?"

"We don't know. Nobody's ever seen her."

"But your mother said she was trying to sleep up there."

"So?"

"You must have seen her if she's asleep upstairs."

"Not necessarily. It's another of those things like the grand pianos and the deep-sea fishermen and the clock and the antelope and the badgers and the trains and the mousefaces. Get used to it."

"Why aren't you two wearing your mousefaces?" Miss Underhill said sternly.

"Oh, come on, miss!" said Helvetica. "Have you ever seen anything so ridiculous as all those girls wearing mousefaces in public, catching a train?"

"I thought they looked rather sweet," the teacher admitted. "Those lovely whiskers and little black noses...."

"Those huge tits?" Valentina enquired.

Miss Underhill pouted. "Why not?"

"You're only interested in our breasts!" said Helvetica, pulling her nightie around her shoulders with little noticeable effect. "We might as well just be pairs of tits on legs."

"I suppose so," Miss Underhill sighed. "You know, it's a lonely life, being a schoolteacher. We don't have any friends or anything." She dabbed at her eyes with a handful of industrial paper towel.

"Come on, Virginegar," Mrs Lashmore coo-ed, placing a comforting arm around her shoulders. "I'm your bestest friend."

"Only when I'm drunk," she sobbed. "The only real friends I've got are animals!"

"Look on the bright side," said Valentina. "If it's animals you want, you're at the right school. What are you doing for Christmas?" she added, to her own complete surprise.

"Christmas? Oh, nothing. I haven't anywhere to go...."

"You can come and stay with me," said Mrs Lashmore, to her own complete surprise.

"Oh, I couldn't possibly! But if you're offering...."

"Why don't you both stay here?" asked Valentina. "Ouch!" She bent to rub her shin where Helvetica had kicked her. Helvetica kicked her again, harder.

"Ouch!" said Helvetica, having nearly broken her bare toe.

"Oh, we couldn't possibly!" said Mrs Lashmore. "But maybe just for a couple of days?"

"Sure!" Valentina gushed. "Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Come for lunch. We always have the usual. About one o' clock, so you can call at the pub for a quick drink first, then we can all watch the Queen's speech at three. Then we hand out presents and mum falls asleep and wakes up all grumpy at tea-time. Boxing Day we get up late, have scrambled eggs and smoked salmon then we go for a walk with the dogs. Of course, we haven't really got any dogs but we could take the antelope and a badger or two."

"It sounds heavenly," said the two teachers together. "If you're absolutely sure...?"

Helvetica wasn't going to try kicking her friend again. Instead, she stood up. "Anyone for more hot chocolate?" she chirped, gathering up a fistful of mugs and heading for the kitchen. Valentina, as it was her mother's house, followed her out.

"What did you keep kicking me for?"

"It nearly broke my toes!"

"Well, why do it, then?"

"I thought you'd gone mad! What were you doing, inviting those two for Christmas? Your mum will go ape-shit!"

"She won't even notice," said Valentina, not believing a word she found herself saying. "The house is always full at Christmas, what difference will two more make?"

"I wish I could believe that," said Helvetica.

"Well, it's done now. Mum always gets a hee-yuge turkey and we're eating it for weeks afterwards. What was I supposed to do anyway? I couldn't refuse them."

"You didn't refuse them — they never even asked. You offered!"

"Sheesh, did I? What did you let me do that for?"

"I give up."

Chapter 22: O! Come All Ye

It wasn't our first fight, we'd had hundreds over the years, but it was only about the eleventh we'd had since moving into the cottage. There'd been the full and frank discussion we'd had over the curtains and the rug in the living room. Men are useless at colours. Then there'd been the minor disagreement over the shepherd's pie. The school restaurant always puts cheese on top and Jeremy therefore assumes that everyone makes it that way.

Then there was the spat we had after the antelope disgraced itself on the bed, but I think we agreed that these things do tend to happen when you have animals in the house.

The second shouting match over the antelope was more serious, but it was amicably resolved when I sent Jeremy out in the Jaguar to buy some more double chocolate chip cookies. I could have told him that Tesco's in Borcester are open all night, but he decided he needed to drive twenty miles to the nearest motorway service station and thirty-seven miles back. You'd think that a man who enjoys driving so much would have been in a better mood when he got home at two in the morning.

But this was our first real fight.

"We can't get it repaired today, it's Christmas. And we can't buy a new one until tomorrow, everywhere will be shut. And even if we did get one tomorrow, they wouldn't be able to deliver it for days."

"You broke it," I accused him.

"It wasn't me, it was you!"

Okay, maybe we both broke it, but that wasn't important right now.

"Where are we going to...?"

"Let's go over to the school," I suggested. "Plenty of...."

"We are not going over there. I see enough of that place during term time."

He seemed serious about it so I didn't pursue the point. But I had a better idea, which I revealed to him now.

He took it quite well, actually.

"Nurse?" he exploded. "Stay with fucking Nurse?"

"She's got a big house, and plenty of rooms. And I know for a fact that she always has a traditional Christmas dinner."

"We've got our own dinner." His eyes widened. "Haven't we...? Shan, surely you...?"

"I thought you were arranging it. It's one of those things men like to do, like cooking on a barbecue and bringing home the Christmas tree. A hunter-gatherer testosterone thing."

"You forgot to order the turkey," he said slowly and carefully. "Couples have been divorced for less than that. What were you thinking of serving for Christmas lunch?"

"I'd thought about steak and kidney pie. Or a nice corned beef hash...."

And so it was that we ended up trudging down the drive towards the school, and even the antelope was looking pretty subdued on the end of his leash as we plodded along in the steady rain.

We argued briefly, for no more than ten minutes, about who should knock on Nurse's door, until the antelope brought matters to a head by rattling the door-knocker with his horns.

"Oh, hi, miss," said Helvetica, looking the three of us up and down.

"Hello, Helvetica," said Jeremy, a touch frostily, I thought.

"We were just out for a stroll and we dropped by," I said.

Helvetica looked up at the leaden skies with disbelief. "Oh? Just taking the antelope for a walk? You'd better come in, then." She stood back and we advanced into the hallway, standing there dripping on the carpet.

Nurse appeared at that moment, accompanied by the security bloke, MacGonagall, or whatever his name is; both of them wearing matching flowery pinafores and looking vaguely harassed. "Shit, not two more!" she greeted us in a spirit of goodwill to all men. "Valentina? Did you invite these two as well?"

Valentina's head appeared round the living room door, then she confronted us in the hall with a baby on each arm. Unnervingly she was breast-feeding both of them at the same time. "Hi, miss, hi, Jeremy. Did I invite you as well?"

"She didn't invite us, Nurse Nightingale," said Jeremy, his eyes glued firmly to Valentina's bosoms. "But we've had a bit of a crisis at home."

"A crisis?" Nurse rolled her eyes to the ceiling. "Why am I not surprised? You'd better peel another panful of potatoes," she said, addressing MacGonagall then following him out into the kitchen.

"Crisis? Did I hear the word crisis?" Mrs Lashmore came out of the living room, with half a dozen youngsters trailing along in her wake. "Oh, hello, headmistress."

"Headmistress?" said Miss Underhill, emerging and making up the numbers so there were now what appeared to be several dozen people staring at us as we stood in a growing puddle of rainwater. Several of the children turned their attention to the antelope, prising the leash from my fingers and leading the animal away up the stairs.

"Chauntaille forgot to order the turkey," said Jeremy, and a vast number of accusing eyes were turned on me. But then he squeezed my fingers in his big warm hand. "But the real reason we're here is that we've broken our bed."

"Your bed?" gasped the Greek chorus.

"It collapsed last night," I admitted. "Well, more like this morning, actually."

"Wow, miss!" Valentina giggled. "What were you doing?"

Helvetica leaped forward to cover the ears of as many children as she could reach.

"Oh, just the usual," said Jeremy dreamily, placing his tongue in my ear. Not all of it, just the tip. After all, we were in company.

Helvetica regarded us dourly, deeply critical as ever of adults who try to behave like adolescents. "Back in the room, you lot!" she yelled as she shooed a dozen or so children away, then she clapped her hands loudly to dismiss several more who had gathered on the upstairs landing with the antelope, all listening agog to this tale of scandalous behaviour, although the antelope had certainly heard it before.

Worryingly, I noticed that all the children except Valentina and Helvetica were wearing mousefaces, but I didn't think it would be polite to mention it. Therefore, it took me completely by surprise when I found myself sternly reproving Helvetica and Valentina. "Why aren't you two wearing your mousefaces?"

The other children pricked up their mouse-ears as their elders came under withering fire from their headmistress. Their little black noses twitched and their whiskers quivered eagerly. The smaller children had whiskers which would have been disturbingly real if they hadn't been a couple of feet in length.

"Oh, come on, miss!" said Helvetica. "Those things are for kids."

A perplexed look appeared on Valentina's face. "You should see Jenufa's, though. Her whiskers must be five feet long!"

"You mean you've seen her?" I asked.

"Of course not. Nobody has."

"Dinner will be another hour," said Nurse, barely suppressing a smirk as she came out of the kitchen with her apron in disarray and a number of buttons unfastened. "Valentina, where are your manners, child? Offer our guests-of-honour a drink and some cheesy nibbles."

It's always so peaceful after Christmas dinner. Nurse was asleep and not snoring too loudly despite having demolished two bottles of red all on her own. I know she did because the rest of us were all on the white. MacGonagall had slithered under the table during the pudding so we'd left him there and retired to the living room to distribute the rest of the presents. People are always saying how they love the expressions of delight on the faces of the little ones as they eagerly unwrap each new present. I can't stand it myself; they tear at the paper like savages, sneer disapprovingly at the contents then move on to the next. But once all the presents were opened and the tears and tantrums were over, the little terrors retired upstairs and peace descended at last. Someone drew the curtains to keep out the darkness and the sleety drizzle that was hissing against the windows. A cheery log fire blazed in the hearth.

Miss Underhill brightly suggested a nice game of Trivial Pursuit, whereupon Jeremy immediately fell asleep. Dawn seemed to be up for it, and so did Valentina and Helvetica, but as their headmistress I feel it would be unfair to use my superior knowledge of all things trivial to take advantage of others. "A pound each a game," I suggested, to my own complete surprise, but the others seemed to have lost interest.

We sat in companionable silence for a while, bored out of our skulls.

"Why did they take that bloody antelope upstairs?" Dawn asked. The clopping of hooves from the bedroom just above our heads suggested that the children had saddled the beast and were riding it round and round the room, hurdling the furniture.

But the noise died down. I assume the antelope itself had decided it had had enough of being a racehorse and had gone to sleep. It likes a sleep in the afternoons.

"What's on the box?" somebody asked woodenly. Nobody would admit to knowing, so we all lapsed into silence again.

Then the door opened and a mouseface peered round it.

"Grumbleweed?" piped a little voice.

I don't know why, but I had an idea it was talking to me. "What is it?"

Encouraged, the child came into the room and approached my chair. Its mouseface was smeared with chocolate. "You know the lope?" it said.

"The what?"

"You know the lope?" the child repeated.

"She means the antelope," said Valentina.

"Why doesn't she say so, then?"

"She's only seven."

"Is she, by George?" I said, looking the child up and down, my gaze coming to rest on the improbable contents of its blouse.

"Lope," it reminded me.

"What about the damned lope?"

Most St Cat's girls would have been in tears by now, but these Nurse's brats were made of more resilient material. It perched itself on my knee and, this being Christmas, I didn't have the heart to shove it off.

"Please, Grumbleweed. If it's an auntie lope, why has it got a cock? Isn't it an uncle lope?"

"Ye gods!"

"You'll have to explain to her, miss," said Helvetica.

"Ask Miss Underhill," I suggested. "She's Biology."

"I'm asking you!" insisted the child. It looked at me gravely for a while then sneered. "Don't you know about sex?"

"Of course I do! I teach it."

"Good. If it's an auntie lope, why has it got a cock? Isn't it an uncle lope?"

"You already asked me that."

"Well, answer it, then!"

"There's no such thing as a lope," I snapped. "It's not an auntie lope or an uncle lope. It's an antelope."

"Aepyceros melampus," said Miss Underhill helpfully.

"Antelope," said the child, immediately sliding off my knee and de-wedgifying its underpants. "Aepyceros melampus," it added with uncanny accuracy. "I told Jenufa that's what it was. Thanks."

There was silence after the child had marched from the room and closed the door firmly behind it. We heard footsteps pounding up the stairs then there was a brief disagreement, with raised voices. Then there was no more noise from upstairs at all.

"Where have they gone?" I asked Valentina, whispering for some reason.

She shrugged. "Jenufa's room?"

"But...?"

"Maybe they've seen her before. I know I haven't and Mum hasn't, but you know what kids are like with their imaginary friends."

"Or maybe the antelope can see Jenufa," said Helvetica. "The same as when it helps us fix the clock."

This suggestion was altogether too spooky. In an uneasy silence we drew our chairs closer to the fire.

"Before anyone suggests it," I said. "No, we are not going upstairs to look for Jenufa!"

Jeremy stirred. "Did somebody mention Jenufa?" he muttered. "You should just see the tits on that kid!" Then he fell asleep again.

"Must be time for tea," Nurse announced, waking up and stretching. "Put the kettle on, Valentina!" Then she changed her mind and stood up. "No, I'll do it. I need a pee."

The rest of us sat there stunned, all presumably thinking the same thought. We put it from our minds with an effort.

"What's the time?" Miss Underhill asked.

The quadrangle clock obliged, striking six, and we all looked at one another.

"'Bout six o'clock," said Valentina.

"We can't have tea already," said Dawn. "We'll explode."

I looked sharply at her for trying to spread alarm and despondency.

"People don't explode, miss," said Helvetica. She looked at me for confirmation. "Do they?"

"I think they might make an exception today," I said, hearing the clatter of plates and dishes from the kitchen. "What's Nurse doing out there?"

Valentina knew the answer."We've got cold ham and turkey sandwiches, sausage rolls, mince pies and five different kinds of cake. But you've got to eat your sandwiches and sausage rolls before you can have any cake. And trifle. We've got trifle. We always have trifle."

The other two teachers had turned pale green. I nudged Jeremy. "Is it teatime already?" he said, sitting upright. "I'm starving!"

"However does he stay so trim and fit?" Miss Underhill wondered, looking at my husband with unalloyed lust.

"Plenty of sex," I told her. "With me."

She blushed prettily and shut up.

Conversation flagged a little after that. We sat around, bloated and trying not to fart.

"We've got more turkey and ham sandwiches for supper," said Valentina brightly.

"What time will supper be?" Mrs Lashmore half groaned.

Valentina looked surprised. "About ten. So you'd better eat plenty at teatime. You'll be hungry again by supper."

"Oh, my God!"

Snoring started up again, from Jeremy, Miss Underhill and, surprisingly, Helvetica.

"Food's ready!" Nurse bellowed from the kitchen.

Like automata, we rose from our seats and trooped obediently through into the kitchen, joined by a stream of children coming down the stairs. Nobody said a word.

"Sit down, everybody," said Nurse. "Children at the big table, grown-ups over here. Look after the little ones, Valentina. Don't let them have any trifle and cake until they've had at least two sandwiches or sausage rolls each, and I mean eaten them up completely, not thrown them on the floor."

The meal passed in almost complete silence, the only voices being those of Valentina and Helvetica as they maintained law and order at the children's table.

Then I became aware of a small person hammering its fist on my thigh.

"Ouch!" I looked down and observed my seven-year-old friend looking up at me.

"Antelope asleep," the child assured me. "Aepyceros melampus," she added in case of mistaken identity.

"Oh, good," I said. "I expect he's tired. He's had a long day. And so have you."

The child shook her head then retrieved her hair ribbon from my dish of trifle, for which kindness I thanked her sincerely before pushing the dish away. It was a pity really, as the trifle was made with lots of custard and fresh whipped cream.

"I think it's bedtime for children," said Nurse, clapping her hands and startling us all into wide-eyed wakefulness. "Take them up to bed, girls. Make sure they all go to the bathroom then read them a bedtime story."

"Antelope stay in our bedroom tonight!" demanded the child.

"I suppose so," said Nurse. "But if there's any noise, he comes downstairs straight away. And he's not allowed on the beds."

"In my bed."

"And certainly not in the beds! Whatever next?"

"I don't know," the child admitted after thinking about it for a few seconds. "But we'll fink of something."

We all considered that threat with a feeling of foreboding as Valentina and Helvetica collected the younger ones into a flock and shoo-ed them out of the kitchen. Their piercing questions carried clearly to us as they all went clattering up the stairs.

"Right!" said Nurse. "Who wants some more trifle?"

"Right!" said Nurse, two hours later. "Who wants another drink?"

Nobody said a word, so numb and bloated were we all, although a few empty glasses were held out limply. Helvetica collected them and set about filling them up. This was the umpteenth time we'd seen My Fair Lady but nobody could summon the energy to press the buttons on the remote control. Limply, we all joined in the all-too-familiar songs.

We were halfway through I Could Have Danced All Night when Helvetica held up her hand.

"Stop!" she said. "Listen! Somebody's singing Good King Wenceslaus." As far as I'm concerned they could share the same tune, but we all stopped singing and, sure enough, we could hear sweet voices raised in song.

"Who is it?"

"I told those kids to go to sleep," said Nurse grimly.

"It isn't the kids," said Valentina. "It seems to be coming from outside." She went to the window and pulled back a corner of the curtain. "It's snowing!" she reported.

"Don't be silly," we told her. "It's Christmas Day!"

"There's somebody out there," Valentina insisted. "They've got one of those lantern things like carol singers on Christmas cards."

"Oh, come on, Valentina!" said Miss Underhill.

"It's true!" And before anyone could stop her, Valentina struggled with the window catch before flinging the window wide open. The curtains billowed into the room and a whirlwind of greetings cards, tinsel and snow, both artificial and real, swirled into the room.

"Shut the thing!" Nurse yelled as we hugged our clothes tighter around us, but Helvetica was already at the window with her friend.

"It's true," she shouted. "There are some carol singers outside!" And as Valentina shut the window again and the debris drifted to the floor, Helvetica darted from the room and we heard the front door open. The singing went on for a few seconds then stopped. The front door closed again and we could hear the stamping of feet in the hall. "Look who's here!" Helvetica announced as she came back into the room.

We looked up, not knowing quite what to expect, but certainly not expecting to see Corinne, Angelica Grimbeau and Cassiopaeia Cassowary standing there, removing their woolly hats and brushing snow from their shoulders. Cassiopaeia was holding a lantern attached to a broomstick. To my disappointment it was battery-powered. She turned it off.

"You took your time," Corinne accused us sourly, obviously not in a very Christmassy mood. "We've been singing out there for ten minutes!"

"We couldn't hear you," said Nurse. "We were singing something else."

Corinne ignored her, warming to her theme as she peeled off her fleecy jacket and dumped it on the back of a chair. "And before that we were singing outside your bloody cottage for half an hour."

"We weren't there," I explained.

"We can see that! What are you doing here on a Christmas Day?" She accepted a glass of something from Helvetica, downed it in one gulp and held the glass out for more. Then she coughed. "What the fuck was that?"

"Whisky," said Helvetica. "Keeps the cold out."

"I can't stand whisky!" Nevertheless she accepted another glass and took a sip. "Mmmm, nice! Eventually, after we'd been through our entire repertoire twice, the people next door to you in the village invited us in for a drink. They said you'd gone out with your goat — I assume they meant that ridiculous antelope — just before lunchtime."

"That's right," I said. "Jeremy forgot to order a turkey for dinner."

"Hello, Angelica," said Jeremy.

"Hi, yourself!"

"You must be hot in that big coat?"

"I guess I am!" Angelica unbuttoned her coat and took it off, revealing a scarlet latex cat-suit. Cassiopaeia fussed around her, taking the coat then brushing the cat-suit with her handkerchief as if trying to buff it to a high shine — until Angelica politely but firmly pushed her away.

Corinne drained her second whisky and pulled a face. "How can people drink that stuff?" Helvetica poured her another. Corinne looked at the brimming glass with a slightly squiffy expression. She took a sip and sat down gratefully in the chair Valentina provided for her.

"Are you going to sing for us now?" Valentina asked. "We've got a piano in the other room."

"A piano?" Angelica pricked up her ears. "A grand piano?"

"Of course," said Nurse. "The school seemed to have plenty of those going spare, so we had Jeremy move one in here."

Angelica stretched her long fingers. "Well, what are we waiting for?"

"We mustn't make too much noise," said Nurse doubtfully. "The children are in bed."

"We'll sing all the nice quiet ones," Angelica promised.

So Valentina led the way through into the next room, the one without a television. Instead, there was a welcoming log fire in the grate and a white grand piano in one corner. Angelica homed in on it, clapping her hands, took her seat and played a few tentative notes. "It's been a long time," she said, then produced a rippling series of notes that seemed to encompass every one of the piano keys, black as well as white.

"Wow!" we all said, gathering round.

"Okay! All ready? How about Silent Night?"

It sounded good, even to me, and as the last notes died away we all burst into spontaneous applause in praise of our combined efforts. We moved on to We Three Kings, followed it up with I Saw Three Ships, then tried our hands at We Wish You A Merry Christmas, during which Cassiopaeia demonstrated an uncanny ability to reach such a high note that the whisky bottle shattered. Luckily, it was more or less empty by this time.

"Oh, this is great! What shall we sing now?" Angelica asked. She played a few quiet arpeggios while we debated among ourselves. "I know. Let's try this one...."

White Christmas isn't a carol, but it's certainly Christmassy, and given the weather conditions outside it was undeniably topical. We were halfway through the chorus when Helvetica stopped singing, her jaw dropping and her eyes widening as she stared at something behind us. Still mouthing the words we all found ourselves turning round to look.

Nurse was the last to turn round, and when she did she emitted a tuneless squeak.

Sitting in a row on the couch were seven small children, clutching their latest favourite toys, and all swaying their heads from side to side in time to the music. In the middle of them sat the antelope, swaying along with the rest of them. It was a curiously disturbing sight with its great curly horns wagging and waving like windshield wipers. It might have been highly dangerous except for the fact that they were all swaying in perfect synchronisation.

"What have you stopped singing for?" Angelica demanded, not looking over her shoulder. And she swung into Good King Wenceslaus, which was literally where this had all started. We watched as the antelope immediately picked up the beat. It took the children a few seconds before they followed its example.

"Oh, no!" said Corinne, with a little hiccup. "That's all we need. A musical antelope. It will start singing next."

I looked at Corinne and she looked at me. At that moment, the lights flickered once, twice, then went out.

Angelica stopped playing the piano and the singing wheezed limply to a halt.

"There is a God," said Corinne. "You don't know how close we came."

"Bedtime, children," said Nurse, not unkindly. "Goodnight kisses to everyone, please. And say thank you for being allowed to listen to the singing."

There followed several minutes of deepest unpleasantness as the children moved around the room, trying to remember which of us they had or hadn't kissed. At the same time they each had to describe to everyone every single Christmas present they'd had. As there were seven of them and eleven of us, it took a long time, but eventually it reached the point at which even the most creative children couldn't spin the process out any longer. They formed up in a line at the door and said goodnight.

"No, leave the antelope down here," said Nurse. "You've had more than enough excitement for one day."

"Will Lope be here in the morning?"

"Yes, he'll still be here," I said. "He'll be sleeping with Jeremy and me."

"You what?" Jeremy enquired.

"In our room," I said. "Not in the bed, of course."

"Oh, of course!"

"You're staying here tonight?" Corinne said with some surprise.

The children giggled. "Grumbleweed an' Jeremy broke their bed!"

Corinne stared at me. "You did? How did...?"

"Shagging!" the children revealed joyously.

"That's it!" said Nurse. "Bedtime!" She clapped her hands and marshalled them out of the room. I think I may have heard the antelope make a little sound of dismay.

On the other hand, he might just have been singing.

Nurse came back into the room, smacking the dust off her hands. "I think I'll turn in myself," she confided, dragging Poindexter MacGonagall to his feet and enveloping him with a powerful arm. "You and Jeremy will be okay on the couch in here?" It may have been a question but it came across as a direct order.

"On the c-couch?" I stammered.

"In here?" said Jeremy.

"That couch?" I pointed a shaky finger at the one so recently vacated by the smaller family members and their friend Lope, which had now curled up on the cushions as if he owned the thing.

"It's the only couch in here," said Nurse after a swift check of the inventory. "The back and the ends fold down to make a bed, and it's quite comfy, as long as you're really tired. Valentina will find you a blanket."

"Haven't you got any bedrooms?" I asked.

"Dozens. But they're all full up. Even Dawn and Virginegar are sharing a bed."

"I bet they are! But, damn it, I'm the headmistress!"

"In that case, it's your fault. If you didn't spend half the academic year teaching little girls how to make babies, I daresay Valentina wouldn't have had quite so many herself."

"Oh, mum!" Valentina protested, sticking a thumb in her mouth and scratching at the carpet with one toe.

"It's only for one night," said Jeremy. "And the couch is starting to sound quite comfortable. As long as we can persuade that thing to get off it."

"That's the spirit," said Nurse. "Now, Corinne, Angelica and Cassiopaeia, I'm putting you in the guest room. There's a double bed and a single in there and it's got an en suite bathroom."

"Oh, thank you, Mrs Nightingale," said Corinne. "We hate to put you to any trouble...."

"No trouble at all. It's my pleasure."

"B-but we were here first!" I protested.

"There are only two of you," said Nurse.

"Three," Jeremy muttered. He was poking the antelope in the rump with a candlestick but the beast wasn't planning on moving. It dug in its hooves and refused to budge.

Meanwhile Valentina appeared with an armful of blankets. Sizing up the situation she draped one over the antelope, tucking it in carefully around the edges, then spread two more on the rug in front of the fire. She even added a couple of cushions at one end, so we'd know which way round we were supposed to sleep.

"But we could have slept on the floor at home!" I said.

"Never mind!" said Nurse brightly. "It's Boxing Day tomorrow and the shops will be open. You'll be able to buy a new bed in the sales."

"Good night, then!" said Corinne, leading her room mates out of the door. Nurse followed them, and then Helvetica and Valentina, who gave us a little finger wave before closing the door with a soft click.

"After all I've done for that woman!" I said.

"Which woman?" Jeremy was already half undressed, leaning against the piano to kick off his shoes and trousers. "That bed looks really cosy and snug!" He scrambled on hands and knees over to the blankets and crawled underneath the top one. "Put the light out before you get undressed, dear heart!"

Chapter 23: 'Twas The Day After Christmas

Sleeping on Nurse's fireside rug was no less uncomfortable than I'd anticipated. At some time during the early hours the fire had almost gone out and the antelope, no doubt feeling cold and lonely, had come nuzzling around, trying to join us under the blankets.

"Go and fetch your own blanket," I told it. It made no reply but somewhat to my surprise it went away and returned a few seconds later, dragging a blanket with it. After that I didn't have the heart to turn it away. It showed its gratitude by curling up next to me and grabbing all my share of the bed covers. Jeremy still had a complete blanket to himself and was determined to keep it. Shivering with cold, I got up and dragged a chair closer to the dying embers of the fire, stirring them with the poker to resurrect a faint red glow. I tossed another log on to it and eventually it caught fire.

"That's a welcome sight to wake up to!" said Jeremy, waking me out of my doze. "My own little woman getting up to tend the fire on a chilly morning." He lay on his back and wrapped his blanket round him with just his nose sticking out. "Make us a nice cup of tea, there's a love." He looked across at the other occupant of the makeshift bed and added a kind and caring afterthought. "And a nice saucer of warm milk for him, too."

"Fuck off!"

A couple of hours later we trudged off through the snow, just the three of us. It had stopped snowing when it had reached a depth of three or four inches. The animal skipped along in front of us, none the worse for his disturbed night. He'd probably enjoyed his breakfast of double chocolate chip cookies and milk just as much as we'd relished our smoked salmon and scrambled eggs with champagne.

"We've got to try and find a new bed somehow," said Jeremy.

"And get it home. They won't deliver it today."

"We'll collect it ourselves. If we go down to Borcester in the mini-bus we can easily fit a bed in the back."

We arrived at the cottage, opened the gate and trudged up the path.

"Somebody's been here since last night." Jeremy pointed at the footprints. Dozens of them. He pulled the huge bunch of keys out of his pocket and searched for the one that fitted the front door.

"Ah, there you are!" said a voice, and we looked up, startled.

"It's an eskimo!" I shrilled.

"No, it's a girl," said Jeremy.

"They have girl eskimos."

"It's me," said the girl eskimo, snatching off her fur-lined hood and bashing the snow off it against the wall of the house.

"Georgina?"

"Of course it's Georgina. Where have you been?" She stood with arms akimbo. "And where are Helvetica and Valentina?"

"At Nurse's," said Jeremy in answer to the first question.

"At Nurse's," I said in answer to the second. "Why? What for?"

"We've got to fix the clock again. I've been here since seven this morning. I got a warning that it had stopped. I got my dad to bring me over as soon as he'd done the milking...."

"The milking?" I stared at her chest.

She ignored my perfectly reasonable enquiry. "Dad's had to go back to the farm. I could have frozen solid out here. The school's all locked up."

"Of course it is. It's the holidays." At that moment, the clock triumphantly struck ten, rattling the windows. "There," I said. "There's nothing wrong with that, is there?"

"Nothing wrong with holidays? No, miss. Holidays in principle are a good thing. But not when I get dragged up here to collect the antelope and meet those two."

"Nobody dragged you up here," said Jeremy. "I don't know what you mean about the clock, but I'm sure it's working okay." He opened the front door. "Come and have a cup of coffee and thaw out. Then we can give you a ride down to Borcester."

She went inside. The grumpy little cow.

"The Divas have been," she said as she shrugged out of her snow-covered fur-lined jacket and hung it on the back of a chair.

"What?"

"The Divas. Those happy-clappies from the church? They were all coming out of the house as we arrived."

"Wait a minute," I said. It had been an uncomfortable night so maybe I wasn't hearing too well. "The Devotional Divas were here this morning? In the house?"

"Of course," said Georgina. "We thought you must be indoors giving them breakfast or something."

"Give them breakfast? What would I want to do that for?"

Jeremy strode to the foot of the stairs. "I'd better look upstairs and see if they've pinched anything. You'd better stay down here."

"How did they get in?" I queried.

"You didn't let them in?" said Georgina.

"Of course not. We spent the night at Nurse's."

Georgina shrugged. Then she started swinging her arms around her chest, making one hell of a noise. "What about that coffee, miss?" she whined.

Against my better judgement I made three mugfuls. Jeremy must have forgotten to lock the back door. It was a sad reflection on modern times that you only had to leave a door unlocked during the Christmas holidays to come home and find the place heaving with guitar-strumming holy-josephines.

We heard Jeremy coming heavily downstairs. There was a brief pause while he peered into the living room, then he came into the kitchen, picked up his coffee mug and absently stroked the antelope's head. "Nothing's missing," he said after taking a couple of sips.

"Are you sure?"

"They weren't carrying anything when they left," said Georgina. "No television or video or anything."

"No bed?" said Jeremy.

Georgina snickered. "Of course not!"

"The bed's gone." Jeremy looked at me. "The broken one. There's another bed up there. A four-poster. Curtains all the way round it and everything."

"A four-poster? A new one?"

"I don't know. I didn't want to disturb it. I think if I'd sat down on it I'd have gone straight to sleep. Even though it is only ten o'clock in the morning."

"Quarter-past," I corrected him after the quadrangle clock stopped striking. "I'm going up there...."

It was a four-poster bed, all right. It felt soft and comfortable, as it ought to, as it had our mattress and bed covers on it. The curtains weren't ours, although I thought they looked vaguely familiar. But I couldn't think where I might have seen them before. I went downstairs again.

"Did they say anything when you met them coming out of the house?" Jeremy was saying.

"No."

"How did they look?"

Georgina wrinkled her nose. "Just ordinary. You know, grinning like idiots?"

We knew what she meant. Nobody could make happiness look quite so unattractive as the Devotional Divas.

"Well, at least they've saved us a journey into Borcester," said Jeremy. "We can still take Georgina, though. Where do you actually live?"

"The other side of Borcester. I could get a bus from the bus station in town." She jerked a thumb at the antelope. "But what about him? And the clock?"

"I think the clock's all right, Georgie," Jeremy said. "Whatever it was, it must have been a false alarm. But it was very good of you to come in during your holidays."

Georgina began simpering. It was not a pleasant sight. St Cat's girls do tend to fall in love with my husband, but damn it, Georgina lives on a farm, for God's sake. She should know better. "Oooh, Mr Gruntworthy!" she coo-ed, causing both of us to look round in case my dad had suddenly appeared.

"Well, yes," said Jeremy, and I could swear he was blushing prettily. "I suppose we ought to call the vicar and find out what his pop band are up to, breaking into people's houses and replacing their bedroom furniture. You did lock the back door, didn't you, Shan?"

"Of course not! You mean you didn't?"

We could have gone on in this vein for some time. In fact, we probably did. It was only when we became aware of Georgina putting on her fur-lined jacket and making embarrassed little noises that we decided to abandon the discussion.

"Where are you going?" I asked her.

"I thought I'd call my dad and get him to come and collect me."

"Don't be silly!" said Jeremy. "I'll just warm the car up and we'll be on our way. If you don't mind, we'll call in and see the vicar as we go past."

Ten minutes later, having locked all the doors, we were all tucked up in the Jaguar — me in the front seat, Georgina and the antelope in the back — crunching through the frozen snow in a cloud of steam.

"They told me about it," said the vicar, standing aside then ushering us into his study. "They seemed more than a little confused, I must say. Well, to be honest, they're always pretty confused." He sighed. "The Devotional Divas; they're lovely people, but they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer."

"Ah," I said. "Not the brightest stars in the firmament, then?"

"You could say that, yes."

"They seem happy enough," said Georgina.

"This is Georgina," I explained. "From the Third Form."

The vicar shook hands with Georgina, ogling her substantial rack.

"And this...?" he said, regarding the antelope with some uncertainty.

"He's safe," said Jeremy. "He just gets over-excited sometimes."

"So I heard," said the vicar. "That poor child with the drum. How is she now?"

"She's shacked up with a musician in Borcester," said Georgina, making me wonder how she knew. It must be the talk of the whole county. Nobody tells me anything.

"Oh, I see," said the vicar. "I'm very happy for her."

Modern clergy are so broadminded these days.

"Ah, here comes the coffee. Thank you, Mrs Culshaw. It's all right, apparently he's quite tame. And cookies, too. Cookie, Mrs umm...?"

"Thank you," I said, taking three to save time. The antelope watched us with a hurt expression on its face.

"Now, about this bed," said the vicar. "The Divas said it came to them in a flash of light, like St Paul on the road to Damascus."

"A four-poster bed came to them in a flash of light?" I said.

"They found it on the road?" said Jeremy.

"I didn't mean literally. They said they were rehearsing their songs for Sunday's service. They were halfway through...."

"Kumbaya," we all said at the same time.

"Kumbaya," said the vicar. "Then suddenly, they said, the lights started flickering, so they stopped singing. And just at that moment they knew they had to visit the school."

"St Cat's?"

"Not the school itself. They went over there, in at the main door, then up the stairs, so they said. What is upstairs?"

"The staff domestic quarters," I said. "Bedrooms."

The vicar nodded. "That would explain it. They went along a corridor and there was a room with a very wide door. In fact they said all the rooms had wide doors, but this door was even wider than the others. And they went in, and it was like an office, but there was a back room leading off it, and this bed was in there. And they knew they had to bring it back."

"Corinne's old room!" I blurted. "I knew I'd seen those curtains before."

"Corinne?" said the vicar.

"Meadowlark."

"Ah, yes. One of the girls said there was a brass plate on the door, and it said Corinne Meadowlark on it. I thought that sounded a silly name, but the girl insisted. You mean there's really a teacher at St Cat's called Miss Meadowlark?"

"Not any more. She left ages ago. But we hadn't got around to clearing out her bedroom yet."

"It's cleared out now! The door was wide enough for the bed to go through without taking it apart. Of course, they had to take it apart to get it in through your back door."

"Oh, of course!"

Jeremy shrugged. "So this bed won't cost us anything? It belongs to ... what ... the school? To Corinne?"

"The school paid for it, if anyone did, but I suspect the Fuckh Machine arranged for it to arrive in the first place." I stopped, aware that the vicar was blushing prettily and Georgina and the antelope were hanging their heads in shame. "It's the name of a hugely powerful computer," I explained lamely.

The situation was rescued by the front door bell ringing, and we heard Mrs Culshaw talking to somebody. Then the study door opened quietly and the woman came in. "We're so popular this morning, and no mistake, reverend. There's two girls here. Well, young women, more like." She used her hands to demonstrate the difference between girls and young women.

"Helvetica and Valentina!" I gasped.

"That's right, ma'am. They told me their names but they was so high-falutin' I din't take no notice."

The vicar sighed. "That's all right, Mrs Culshaw. Please show them in. If we could get a congregation like this every Sunday we'd have a new roof on the church in no time." The housekeeper admitted the girls and withdrew.

Helvetica's eyes grew huge as she surveyed us all. "Is something wrong with the clock?" she demanded.

"The clock's all right," said Jeremy, and the clock demonstrated, to some of us at least, that it was still working just fine.

"Then why are we here?"

Good question, Valentina.

I don't know quite what the vicar was thinking at this moment. His study had been occupied by the headmistress of St Cat's High School for Growing Girls, who had a bosom best described as formidable. She had brought with her a husband, a normal enough sort of bloke, and a schoolgirl of extremely robust construction. They had now been joined by a tall and powerful girl with a mind-bogglingly large, firm chest, and a friend who appeared to have thrust a couple of beanbags down her shirt. Just to provide a reassuring touch of normality to the scene, an antelope — of all things — had stolen the last of the chocolate chip cookies from the plate on the coffee table and was now trying to get its tongue into the milk jug.

Nobody was saying a word.

"Well, thank you, vicar," said Jeremy at length. "You've been very helpful."

"Happy to oblige."

"We ought to thank the Devotional Divas in some way. It was a wonderful thing they did."

"Oh, yes! An act of true Christian charity, in the real meaning of the word. But they will not be expecting anything in return."

Valentina got one of those looks in her eye, which should have warned me to be on the lookout for skulduggery. "Oh, I'm sure we could arrange a little something to say thank you to them."

It was time to leave. I stood up and snapped my fingers to bring the antelope to heel. It took not the slightest notice but continued licking the cookie crumbs off the plate. Jeremy, however, stood up hurriedly, spilling coffee into his saucer then setting it down with a nervous clatter.

Outside in the snow, we clustered round the Jaguar. Jeremy had an idea. "Look," he said to me. "Why don't you go back to the cottage and think about rustling up something for lunch? A nice corned beef hash or something? I'll take Georgina home and see you later."

"Oooh!" said Valentina. "Can we come too?"

"I suppose so," said Jeremy, but Georgina was already in the front seat and Valentina and Helvetica were making themselves at home in the back. The antelope climbed in on top of them, which served them right. I was left stamping my feet in the snow.

"What about me?"

"It's only a few hundred yards, Shan. And it's a lovely morning for a brisk walk."

Whereupon my husband closed his window and the car purred away down the village street. I stomped off after it, not in the most charitable of moods — in the real meaning of the word.

My feet were numb as I plodded up the garden path and fumbled for the keys. Nothing. With rising hopelessness I tried all my pockets in turn. Jeremy had locked the doors when we came out — I remembered the huge bunch of keys jangling in his hand — and I had left my own keys on the kitchen table. I got close to the front window and looked inside, until the view steamed over and threatened to freeze my nose to the glass. The sun went behind a surly bank of cloud and a chill wind blew snow flurries round the front garden.

"You bastard!" I howled.

I indulged in a pleasantly tear-jerking little scene in which Jeremy and the girls came back from their ride in the country to find me frozen like a snowman on the front path. That would teach them.

At this point, the front door opened and a voice enquired what I was doing out there.

"Cee?"

"Of course it's me! What are you standing around in the snow for?" She looked around the landscape and shivered. "Are you coming in or not?"

"B-but...."

A small but determined hand seized my collar and dragged me into the cosy warmth of my own home. The door slammed shut. "I've got a pan of soup on the stove," said Corinne, flitting into the kitchen, then turning round to stare at me. "Well, come on, then! It's chicken broth. It will thaw you out."

Dumbly I followed her into the kitchen, which was filled with a warm, soupy aroma. She ladled out a generous bowlful and placed it on the checkered tablecloth beside my bunch of keys. A basket of crisp bread rolls appeared from somewhere. I half expected her to appear at my shoulder like an Italian waiter brandishing one of those three-foot-long phallic peppermills.

"How did you get in?" I asked her after a couple of heart-warming slurps.

"You didn't lock the back door?" she said, phrasing it as a question.

"People seem to think they can just walk in and out of this house willy-nilly! First it was the Devotional Bloody Divas with a bed, now it's you!"

"Yes," she said, which wasn't a very satisfactory answer at all. "More soup?" Another steaming helping slopped into the bowl. "Help yourself to bread, we've got plenty."

"How long have you been here?" I asked her.

"God knows. Angel has gone back down to Borcester. She wanted to phone for a taxi but Cassie insisted the trains were running this morning from Pork Farm station, so they set off walking across the fields. I came down here so we could talk about a few things. Things that need doing urgently."

That sounded ominous. "Any more soup?" I asked.

"We've got to discuss this, Shan. The Fuckh Machine can't be allowed to go on the way it's going. Helvetica does her best but the thing's just plain out of control most of the time. It's taking over!"

"I promised I'd make a nice corned beef hash for Jeremy," I droned.

"It's in the oven," said Corinne. "There's enough there to feed an army. The vegetables just need five minutes when he comes in. So if you've finished that soup, we'll go into the front room by the fire."

I looked more closely at my ex-friend, lover and colleague. Unnervingly, she was wearing one of those aprons that tie around the middle with a kind of bib that has a string round the back of the neck. Her bosom was really too full for this kind of thing; it made her look like a St Cat's schoolgirl dressed up as a housemaid. The effect was sadly enhanced by the little white lacy cap perched on top of her blonde locks. "You've made a nice corned beef hash?" I blurted. "You've lit a fire?"

"Of course! Now come on." And I followed her swinging ponytail as she led the way, for all the world as if it wasn't my own house we were in. "We'll sit on the couch. We need to be close together so we don't need to raise our voices. I know it ought to be pretty safe at this distance but we can't be too careful."

"It can hear us from half a mile away?"

"Why not? A dog could. And right now there's nobody in the school, so there's no noise to distract it. And of course, it doesn't even need to hear me, my thoughts can trigger it. Luckily, I'm sober at the moment so I'm pretty well under control. So, what are we going to do about it?"

"It's not too bad!" I insisted. "Weird stuff happens but it all works out okay in the end. The wedding went off all right...."

"If you believe that Growing fifty-six bridesmaids is 'going off all right'. And the school band, rehearsing for hours on end, until that pesky antelope comes along and destroys that poor girl's beautiful drum."

"I heard she's shacked up with some musician in Borcester," I whispered.

"Well, whoop-de-doo!"

"I mean, it turned out all right in the end. The antelope buggered her drum but she's found a bloke."

"Yes, but you don't seem to care about all the bad things that happen in between. Those girls did all that rehearsing and dressing up just for you, and then they never even got to play any music! They like you, Shan — God alone knows why, but they do — maybe they even love you, in a funny kind of a way."

"Love?" I shuddered. "That's perverted!"

"Did you never have a crush on a teacher when you were at school?"

"Of course I did, but not when I was a student!" I blushed prettily.

"You know what I mean! Those girls would bend over backwards — they'd jump through hoops — if they thought it would give you pleasure."

I considered this gymnastic improbability and decided that, yes, on the whole, it probably would.

"But all you ever do is scream abuse at them, hand out draconian punishments, humiliate them publicly...."

"Now and again, perhaps...."

"And treat them as nothing more than giant pairs of breasts on legs."

"But that's what they are!"

"Don't shout! It can hear you! Where's Jeremy gone?" she added, so completely out of the blue that I spun round to see if he'd suddenly left the room.

"He's taken Georgina home. Helvetica and Valentina have gone along for the ride."

"Georgina came to mend the clock, I suppose?"

"That's what she said, yes. I told her there was nothing wrong with it. It struck just at that moment but the stupid cow can't hear it."

"And it didn't occur to you as strange that every time the clock needs mending, the same three girls find themselves being brought together — with an antelope — to go up in the clock tower to fix it?"

"I know it's strange," I admitted. "But, hey, as long as it works...."

"Except that now, the clock-fixing team are being called out when there's nothing wrong with the clock at all! What's that all about?"

"I don't know. An anomaly?"

"Anomaly!" Cee's voice rose to a shriek. "You wouldn't know an anomaly if it jumped up and bit you on your fat arse. The Fuckh Machine is seeking attention, that's what it's all about. Not content with altering reality and rewriting history, it now gets bored when nothing's happening so it decides to throw its weight around. The next thing we know, it will nuke Borcester and leave it a smoking pile of debris."

There was a horrified silence while we both waited for the lights to flicker and the cottage to shudder from the shock wave. Mercifully, nothing happened. After all, it would have been damned inconvenient having to go all the way over to Longshott for our weekly shopping.

"Shit!" said Corinne. "Why didn't you stop me?"

"It wouldn't really drop a bomb on Borcester, would it?" I quavered. "Although if it did, I suppose everything would work out all right in the end, of course. Wouldn't it?"

To satisfy our curiosity we went upstairs and looked out across the fields to where the factory chimneys and church spires of Borcester stood reassuringly firm. No mushroom cloud darkened the wintry skies.

"Looks like more snow on the way," said Corinne after a while.

"I hope Jeremy and the girls don't get stuck on the road."

We turned to go downstairs again.

"Hey, nice bed! Where did you get it?"

"The Devotional Divas delivered it this morning. Don't you recognise it?"

"Oh, yes. I hope you find it more comfortable than I did. I could never sleep more than a couple of hours a night in the thing. The Devotional Divas brought it?"

"Yes, in an act of pure Christian charity."

"In the real sense of the word?"

"Of course!"

"Oh, of course!" Corinne sniffed the air. "Shit, the dinner's burning!" And we thundered downstairs like a herd of antelope to rescue that nice corned beef hash from the oven.

It wasn't the nice corned beef hash burning, it was some soup that had been spilt on the hob. Corinne made coffee then gathered up an armful of clothes and put them in the washing machine.

"Excuse me," I said. "Whose house is this?"

"Yours. Why?"

"Oh, nothing." If she insisted on doing the housework why should I stand in her way?

The front doorbell rang, surprising me because I didn't know we had one. Besides which, most people seemed to simply walk in.

"See who that is," said Corinne, taking a seat at the kitchen table and tilting her chair back on two legs.

"I was just going to," I protested weakly, on my way to the front door. I opened it and stared at the group of young people standing on the doorstep. "Who are you lot?"

"Hello, Mrs Gruntworthy. We're the Devotional Divas! Some of us, anyway. Didn't you recognise us?"

Some explanation is in order at this point. I genuinely didn't recognise the Devotional Divas because they weren't all dressed in identical sweaters and sensible skirts — the two boys in their number always wore sensible trousers — and they weren't wielding guitars and drums and things. They were wearing weatherproof clothing of the type that suggested they were planning an assault on the North Face of some local mountain or other.

"What do you want?"

The Devotional Divas didn't seem fazed by my brusqueness. The loving smiles never dropped from their earnest faces. "We just wondered if you'd noticed the bed."

More explanation is in order. There were only eight of them instead of the full round dozen. Doubtless this explained their earlier comment that they were only "some of us", which had been troubling me at a kind of subconscious level. Furthermore, I observed, the Devotional Divas didn't have an elected spokesperson; they seemed to operate as an entity, like cockroaches, all appearing to speak together. Not that cockroaches all speak together, but if cockroaches did speak, I imagine that's how they'd do it.

I realised they were staring at me, the way people do when they're expecting an answer.

"You'd better come in, then," I said, standing back to let them in to the cottage. "There's a fire in the front room, or you can...."

"Come through into the kitchen," Corinne shouted. "I've dished you up some soup."

Sure enough, when we all crowded into the kitchen, we found eight bowls of steaming soup on the table. I'm sure we didn't have that many soup bowls.

"Help yourselves to bread," said Corinne, producing a basket which had miraculously refilled itself with warm crusty rolls.

"Where's your goat?" the Divas asked, after a few appreciative slurps. "We thought he'd be here."

"He's gone out in the car," I explained, somewhat frostily. "And he's not a goat, he's ... it's an antelope."

"Won't you take your coats off?" said Corinne. "You won't feel the benefit when you go out."

There was a kind of mass striptease, at the end of which I was aware of one more reason why I found the Devotional Divas so depressing. They were all more or less flat-chested, including the boys, of course. A thought naturally occurred to me, but I hurriedly dismissed it. I glanced quickly at Corinne, hoping that she hadn't been thinking the same thing.

The lights flickered briefly.

"The lights are always doing that," the Divas laughed. "It's something wrong with the line from the power station."

"I hope that's all it is," I said darkly, with a glare at Corinne.

She seemed anxious to change the subject. "Isn't that the car? Jeremy and the girls must be home. I'd better put the vegetables on." She beamed at the Divas. "You'll stay for lunch, of course, won't you?"

I was aghast. "Wha-aat?"

"Oh, we wouldn't want to put you to any trouble...."

"Well, some other time, then," I suggested.

"It's no trouble!" Corinne gushed. "I've made enough to feed thousands. It's a nice corned beef hash."

"Oh, yummy!"

What followed could best be described as a strained silence, apart from the din of eight spoons striking sparks from eight soup bowls, and a chorus of youthful voices asserting how scrummy the soup was.

Then the back door opened and the antelope's head appeared, looking gravely around at all of us before venturing indoors. It was followed by Jeremy, then Helvetica, and finally by Valentina, carrying a large plastic tub which she dumped on the table with a curious heavy ringing sound. She looked round at the flat-chested Divas and announced, "We stopped off at the Sexual Chemistry lab for this. Have you got a spoon, Miss Meadowlark?"

Before I could stop her, Corinne fetched a wooden spoon from the drawer and handed it to Valentina.

The rest was something of a foregone conclusion.

"That was my favourite spoon," I said as Helvetica opened the back door and flung the thing outside, where it lay steaming and hissing in the snow.

The cries of the Devotional Divas gradually faded away.

"It's just an ordinary wooden spoon, Shan," said Jeremy. "We've got box-fulls more at the school."

"That's not the point!"

"It's a good batch," Valentina announced, taking a deep sniff of the contents of the tub before reluctantly replacing the lid. "Later. After we've had lunch. What is it?"

"It's a nice corned beef hash," said the Devotional Divas.

"Oh, yummy!"

"We're starving," said Helvetica.

"We've had nothing since that snack we had at Georgina's dad's farm," said Jeremy. "Just a bacon sandwich...."

"Really crisp, crunchy bacon," said Valentina.

"With a fried egg," said Helvetica.

"And coffee," said Jeremy.

"You had all that?" I shrilled. "When?"

"About an hour ago." Valentina said, as the quadrangle clock obligingly chimed the hour. "But cold weather always gives growing girls an appetite!"

Worryingly, the Devotional Divas agreed.

Corinne had been hovering over the stove in a cloud of steam. Now she stood back and untied her ridiculous fantasy apron. The Devotional Divas stared at her somewhat expansive bust as it strained within the confines of a drum-tight blouse. She took a deep breath and stretched with her arms above her head. "I feel like I've been slaving over this stove for days," she said. "What do you say we all go in the front room and make ourselves comfortable around the fire? Then Shan can bring in the nice corned beef hash and serve it up? Anyone for more soup first?"

A forest of hands shot up, voting for the soup, mine amongst them. That was when I realised that I was also voting for myself to carry a load of hot dishes and plates into the front room, then what looked like a ten gallon pot of soup and a nice corned beef hash big enough to feed an army. Having done all that, I was expected to wait hand and foot on all these people, like a member of the restaurant staff.

"I can't do that all on my own!" I wailed, but there was nobody there. They'd all trooped out of the kitchen, leaving only the antelope standing hesitantly inside the door. I looked at it, but despite its being an obliging animal it didn't seem to be equipped for serving food to a roomful of ravenous guests, so I gave it a saucer of milk and patted it on the head.

"Excuse me, boy," said Valentina, coming back into the kitchen and edging carefully round the beast. She picked up the tub from the table and carried it out of the room. "We'll need this later," she said over her shoulder. "I'm going to let it warm up in front of the fire."

As it turned out, it was a most enjoyable meal. After I had served up thirteen bowls of soup and passed around the basket of warm crusty bread rolls, the Devotional Divas helped clear everything away before bearing in a gigantic steaming stoneware dish containing the main course.

"Stir it up with that wooden spoon first," Corinne advised, causing the Devotional Divas to back away nervously.

"It's all right," Valentina laughed. "It won't catch fire!" But significantly, I noticed, she didn't volunteer to stir it, and nor did Helvetica. Neither did I.

"Oh, for God's sake!" Corinne said with a giggle, picking up the spoon. But she didn't stir it either, instead handing the spoon to Jeremy.

He turned pale. "I can't stir it," he protested. "I'm a man."

In the end, I took the spoon and uttered a silent prayer. It didn't catch fire, even when I plunged it into the steaming depths of the nice corned beef hash and stirred it around. Confidence returned to the group as I slopped a great mound of the stuff on each plate and Helvetica handed them round.

"Oh, it's so tasty!" was the agreed verdict.

"My secret ingredient," said Corinne, tapping the side of her nose before unaccountably confiding her secret without being asked. "A few drops of Worcestershire sauce."

There was enough for second helpings and when we had scraped out the dish and given it to the antelope to lick clean, Corinne revealed that there was another complete one still in the oven, just as big as the first.

"It will only go to waste if we don't eat it," said Jeremy.

So we ate it, before stacking the dishes and rolling on our backs on the floor, holding our bloated stomachs, farting at intervals. Every now and again, someone would groan.

"Anybody want some apple pie?" Corinne asked in a faint voice, from somewhere behind the couch.

Nobody answered.

We must have lain there for the best part of an hour. It was only when the quadrangle clock struck seventeen that Valentina sat up. "Two o'clock," she interpreted. "That Cream must be warm enough by now."

"What's it for?" the Devotional Divas asked.

"It's for you!" said Valentina.

"Oh, but we've had quite sufficient, thank you. We couldn't eat another mouthful, could we?"

They all looked at one another and replied that no, they couldn't.

"You don't eat it!" said Valentina. "You rub it on. Well, I mean, the boys rub it on to the girls."

The two boys among the Devotional Divas turned their heads on one side. "Rub it on where?" they asked, and I realised that this was the first time I'd heard any statement from them that didn't appear to come from the entire group. The six girl members glared at the boys; evidently they had noticed this blatant contravention, too.

"On their chests, of course!"

The Devotional Divas opened their mouths in a silent gasp. They repeated the word "chests" then blushed prettily.

They blushed prettily, in fact, for something like a minute and a half, which I thought was probably over the top, even for a bunch of happy-clappies. Eventually, one of the girls spoke, in a thin reedy voice.

"The boys rub it on our chests?" she said, which as far as I was concerned didn't advance the plot very much at all. "Why?"

"Well, there's no point in the girls rubbing it on the boy's chests, is there?" Helvetica snapped.

"Oh, you mean it's something to do with...?" said the sole Devotional Diva, cupping her hands and tracing the shape of an imaginary pair of sizeable breasts in front of her empty sweater.

"Of course!"

"Are you ready, then?" Valentina asked, yanking the lid off the plastic tub and inhaling the fragrance.

"B-but you mean we have to rub that on our f-friends' ... fronts?" the boys stammered.

"Naturally," said Valentina. "It feels nice, so people say."

The boys glanced nervously at their co-musicians. "But will they let us?"

"Of course they will. It feels nice for them, too!"

The Devotional Divas sat and stared at one another, wondering why no one had ever told them this fact before. Eventually, the girl who had acted as spokesperson made the first move. Sitting cross-legged on the floor she grabbed the hem of her sweater and pulled it off over her head. Then she unbuttoned her shirt and took that off, too. And there she sat in her unhappy-looking bra, a flush of pink spreading down from her face to her shoulders and beyond. But as she looked down at her tiny mounds a very strange thing happened. Suddenly she leaned back, placed her hands behind her on the floor and thrust out her chest.

"Well? What are you waiting for?" she purred huskily.

"Oh, my God, the little slut!" I croaked.

Helvetica looked at Valentina. "Looks like we're in," she said.

"How much do we use?" said Valentina. "I s'pose we'll need more 'cause her tits are so tiny."

Helvetica wasn't so sure. "We normally use enough to cover the boobs. Since hers are so small, we won't need to use as much."

Corinne surfaced from behind the couch with a horrified expression. "You mean you haven't worked out a standard dose yet? Next thing, you'll be telling us you haven't developed an antidote."

There was a momentary flicker of the lights and we stared at the antelope, expecting it to sprout tits or something.

"How can there be a standard dose when there's no such thing as a standard girl?" said Valentina.

"Why not use a handful?" Helvetica suggested.

"Yeah, but whose hand? Yours are bigger than mine. Jeremy's are huge."

"You're not using my husband's hand for this," I said.

"Okay, let's use the boys' hands," said Valentina. "They're going to be doing the rubbing anyway. One handful each."

"Each girl, or each boob?" said Helvetica.

"Why do you always have to make everything so complicated?" Valentina pushed the tub in front of the nearest boy. "Here you go."

The boy shrank back. "What do I have to do?"

"You take a handful in each hand, then you rub it on a girl's breast," Valentina explained patiently. "Take your tops and bras off, girls."

Somewhat surprisingly, the girls did as they were told. In about twenty seconds, six pairs of more or less perky nipples were pointing at the two appalled boys. The owners of the nipples seemed to have divided themselves into two groups of three, each group pressing closer to one or other of the boys. They did it without squabbling or punching each other. How unlike St Cat's girls they were. In every way.

The boys still hadn't dipped so much as a finger into the tub.

Valentina urged them on. "Come on, it won't bite!"

"What if it catches fire?"

"It's only spoons that catch fire."

"How do we know that?"

"Look, it won't catch fire!" said Valentina. And to prove her point, she ripped open the top half dozen buttons of her shirt, scooped out a handful of Cream and splodged it on to her left breast. "Oooh!" she gasped with delight as she spread it over as much of the surface of the taut globe as she could reach.

The Devotional Divas stared, transfixed. They could hardly have failed to notice the extreme size of Valentina's tits but they'd been too polite to mention it until now.

"Does it feel nice?" the girls asked.

"Shit, yeah!"

"Gosh!" The six of them began to wriggle, which I found deeply embarrassing. "Come on, then! Rub it in!"

The two boys looked at me as if for permission. Then they looked at Jeremy who was sitting there with his mouth open. They looked at Corinne, who vanished behind the couch again. So they looked at Helvetica and Valentina, who nodded vigorously. So they plunged their hands into the tub and came up with four separate mounds of quivering Cream. Then they homed in on the two nearest girls.

It was the noise I found most disturbing, I think. The two girls set up a kind of ullulation, not entirely untuneful, while the boys provided a moaning background. Quite why the girls needed to lie flat on their backs with their legs spread wide, why they shoved both hands down the front of their jeans, I had no idea. Well, okay, I did, but these were the Devotional Divas, for crying out loud, not Third Formers enjoying their first Sex Practical lesson. They were the vicar's Chosen Ones; they were practically holy!

The boys had progressed to their second pair, and then to their third. By the time the hullabaloo finally died away I think we were all drained. Helvetica and Valentina were going hard at it on the rug, Corinne hadn't emerged from behind the couch, and I had given my husband a good seeing-to. Orally, of course. There are limits to what one may do in mixed company in an English living room.

The newly-rubbed Devotional Divas lay on their backs, still panting, now caressing their little bright-pink bosoms, while the boys inspected their glowing hands.

"Anybody ready for some more?" they asked without much real hope.

"That's probably enough for the first dose," said Valentina, replacing the lid on the tub and dragging it out of reach. "Now we have to wait to see how well it works!"

The boys looked startled. "Works? What is it supposed to do?"

"It makes their boobs bigger, of course," said Helvetica.

"Bigger?" said the boys. "Bigger boobs?"

"Bigger boobs?" chorused the Devotional Divas. "As big as ... yours?"

Helvetica regarded her own bosom as if seeing it for the first time. "Probably not," she concluded.

The Devotional Divas looked slightly relieved. "Our mums would kill us if we came home with boobs that size."

If I had a pound for each time I'd heard this excuse before, I'd be a rich woman. Most girls seem convinced that their mothers would kill them if they went home with greatly enlarged breasts. I don't know where they get these half-baked ideas. In all the time I've been at St Cat's I'm pretty sure I have never heard of a mother killing her child because of the size of her breasts. It's the kind of thing you'd certainly hear about if it happened.

"How soon do we get them?" the Devotional Divas asked.

"Oh, you should see something in a couple of days," said Valentina.

"A couple of days? Doesn't it take years?"

"Of course not!" said Valentina, genuinely shocked.

"We'd better go home and start looking through all our clothes," said the holy songstresses, rising to their feet and noticing that they all had their little boobies hanging out. They tucked them away and began thanking everybody for a lovely lunch.

"Thank you, Mrs Gruntworthy, Miss Meadowlark, Helvetica, Valentina. Thank you, Mr Grumpwortley. Thank you...." They were addressing the antelope which had fixed them with an inscrutable gaze. "Why have you got one of those?" they asked me.

"Why not? It's the school mascot."

"Doesn't it bite?"

"No, it's only the badgers who bite."

"Why an antelope, though? Why not have a unicorn? Unicorns are nice."

I glared at Corinne before she could start daydreaming a herd of unicorns into existence. The lights did not flicker.

"Did you know?" said one of the boys. "The only way to catch a unicorn is when a virgin gets it to put its head in her lap."

Valentina broke the stunned silence. "Why on earth would it want to do that?"

"They just do," said the boy. "It's what unicorns do."

"We'd never catch one at St Cat's then," said Helvetica, which struck me as a pretty sound argument for not trading in the antelope for a model with only half as many horns.

The Devotional Divas stroked its head in turn, and it showed no inclination to put its head in any of their laps. I found my thoughts drifting away to unicorns, wondering which way up their heads were when they placed them in virgins' laps. If this was some mediaeval legend about deflowering of young girls by beasts, I reflected, our antelope could deflower them two at a time. A wise choice of mascot.

Chapter 24: Back to School for the Umpteenth Time

"You can't just take on a whole bunch of new girls just like that!" Smegs declared, leaning back and placing her feet on my desk. "Which class will they be in? What about the extra desks?"

I consulted my notes. "They're in the Thirds, Fourths and Lower Fifths. Two in each class, so any desk shortage will only be a matter of one or two desks, at the most."

Smegs wasn't so easily put off her stroke. "And even assuming we can find two extra desks to put in every classroom in the whole school — not to mention extra beds for three dormitories — what about their qualifications? Girls can't just walk in to St Cat's without qualifications."

"Oh, they're qualified, all right. At least, they will be by now. I haven't seen them since Boxing Day, but I'm sure it won't be a problem."

She stared at me. "What have you been up to? Honestly, I let you out of my sight for a few days and all Hell breaks loose. What's happened?"

Honestly, I thought, she can talk about getting up to things. I let her out of my sight for a few days and she was seducing my daddy and setting up a ménage à trois right under my mother's nose. Or thereabouts.

It's the Devotional Divas, I explained stiffly. They're very nice, well-brought-up girls, full of kind, loving thoughts...."

"That bunch of happy-clappying Holy Josephines from the church?" Smegs blustered. "They're flat as planks!"

"Were, maybe."

She passed a hand over her forehead. "What have you done?"

"It wasn't me! It was Cee's idea. And Valentina Nightingale and Helvetica Bold fetched the Cream. Then the boy Devotional Divas rubbed the Cream on. I didn't do anything. I was eating corned beef hash. It was nice."

Smegs ignored the finer details of our Boxing Day menu and cut to what she probably felt was the chase. "You lured innocent girls to your cottage and Creamed them!"

I suppose I could have introduced a pun at this point on the words Cottage and Cream, but it probably wasn't the right moment. "You'll see them soon enough, anyway. They're starting today. Helvetica and Valentina told me the results are pretty satisfactory. Not spectacular, but the girls were flat-chested to begin with. Anyway, I didn't."

Smegs was taking a sip of her coffee, fresh supplies of which had just been delivered by Miss Labia. She stopped and looked at me. "You didn't what?"

"What?"

"You said you didn't."

"Didn't what?"

"That's what I just asked you."

"You should have said. I said I didn't lure the girls to my cottage. They turned up of their own accord. Volition."

"Why?"

We sipped our coffee for a minute or so, both trying to remember what the original question was again.

"They came about the bed," I explained.

"What bed? What about the bed? Shit, Shan, can't you try to concentrate, just once, for long enough to pass on a simple piece of information?"

So I explained about the bed that broke, and Jeremy forgetting to order the turkey, and how we spent Christmas Day at Nurse's, and Mrs Lashmore and Miss Underwear being there, and Corinne and Angelica turning up, not to mention Cassiopaeia, and trying to sleep on the rug, then going home and finding a four-poster bed in the bedroom, and where it came from and how it got there. It took some time.

"Jeez!" said Smegs at the end of the story, and I think that probably summed things up fairly well.

"So they're here, starting tomorrow on the first day of term."

"Miss Clitress isn't going to like it, you know."

"Miss Clitress can go and get stuffed," I said, and I rilly-rilly meant it. "I'm in charge round here." I rilly-rilly meant that, too, but I felt it lacked conviction so I said it again. "I rilly-rilly am," I said.

Smegs knew better than to argue. "What are their names?" she said with a sigh.

"God, how would I know?"

"You enrolled them!"

"Yeah, but they're just the Devotional Divas. They're interchangeable. Two in each class...."

"You're going to have to find out their names, Shan. It's the law."

I found this statement astonishing. "The law? They have laws about new girls at schools needing to have names?"

"Of course they do!"

"Why can't we just give them each a number? Or a letter of the alphabet? There are only six of them, after all. They could be A, B, C, D, E and F. Or refer to them by their measurements?"

Smegs had taken her feet off my desk. Instead, she had buried her face in her hands and she was sobbing gently. I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't all getting to be too much for her.

"What are your names?" Helvetica asked. The Third Form classroom fell silent in expectation. The new girls were about to be subjected to an inquisition.

Does it matter?" asked the two Third Form Devotional Divas, speaking in chorus.

"It helps if we know your names," said Valentina. "Then we can all talk to one another."

"But we've known each other for a week," the Devotional Divas pointed out reasonably. "We've seen you every day when the boys have been rubbing that Cream on our tits...."

"Breasts," Helvetica scolded them. "Tits isn't a nice word for Devotional Divas to use. Or you can say boobs if you like."

"We prefer tits. These are tits!" And together they thrust out their chests. Outwards and upwards.

"Okay, okay, before you have somebody's eye out," Valentina snapped. The two new girls breathed out noisily and their peaks drooped by a matter of no more than two inches. "And you don't get away with it that easily." She seized the nearer of the Devotional Divas by a scrawny shoulder. "What's your name?"

"Jennie Taylor."

"Genitalia?"

"No, Jennie Taylor."

"Get over it."

"And what about you?"

"Conceptua."

"Contraceptua?"

"No, Conceptua."

"No wonder they didn't want to tell us their names," said Helvetica. "What are we going to call them?

"Nothing, I suppose. We've managed for a whole week without knowing their names. Nice tits, though!"

"You said we mustn't call them tits!" the Devotional Divas shrieked.

"Oh, piss off!"

The Devotional Divas burst into tears.

"You can stop that, as well," said Valentina. "You'll have plenty to cry about for real when Ol' Gruntworthy gives you a billion lines each."

"What for? What have we done?"

"Nobody has to do anything," said Valentina. "Ol' Gruntworthy dishes out lines whether you've done anything or not. It's the feeling of power that makes her wet."

"B-but, surely she's not allowed to do that?"

"Allowed?" Valentina strolled casually to her desk and sat down.

Helvetica finished adjusting her face, snapped shut her little mirror and slid into her chair.

Then Ol' Gruntworthy entered the classroom. Unhappy.

I wasn't completely unhappy. During Assembly twenty minutes earlier I had been almost ecstatic when I noticed that there were two hundred-odd girls lined up in front of me, and not a single one of them was wearing a mouseface. But now I wasn't very happy at all. I was even less happy when I marched into the Third Form for Sex: Relationships and Tongues, and found two girls standing up in the middle of the classroom. They were girls I didn't recognise, so they must be new.

"You two, standing up, write out one zillion times each, When The Headmistress Enters The Classroom I Am Supposed To Be Sitting At My Desk Ready To Commence Work. Who are you, anyway?"

Valentina raised her hand. "Is that last bit part of the lines, miss?"

"Which last bit?"

"The bit about who they are anyway, miss. Or was it just the first bit, about when the Headmistress enters the classroom? And how many is a zillion, anyway? Is it the same as a gazillion?"

I sat down heavily. "Lots," I said. "They're still not sitting down."

"That's because their desks haven't arrived yet. Your husband is supposed to be dealing with it."

"My what? Oh, him! I mean, is he?"

"They'll be here this morning, he said. Meanwhile, they can't sit down."

"They'll never be able to sit down again by the time I've finished with them," I growled. "What are their names, anyway?"

"You wouldn't believe us if we told you," said Helvetica.

"We don't call them anything," Valentina elaborated. "It works okay. They're Devotional Divas."

"I know that!"

That was when I caught sight of the new girls' tits. I thrust a questing hand down my skirt and touched myself. It felt nice.

"Oooh, wooo-wooo-wooo!" the class echoed my cries of joy.

"Shut up!"

To silence them I stood up and wrote the word TOUNGES on the blackboard. It didn't look right, somehow.

"That's wrong, miss," said Helvetica, the smartarse.

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yes, miss." Smug little tart.

"What's wrong with it?"

"The U is in the wrong place. It goes after the G."

"After the G?"

"Yes, miss."

I tried putting it there and, yes, it did look slightly better.

"I knew that, of course. I was testing you. Did anyone else notice it was misspelled?" About thirty hands went up. Cows. "Now, you two new girls. What do you know about tongues?"

"We've got some," the Devotional Divas confirmed. The class giggled.

"Yes, but what do you do with them? Surely you've put your tongue in a boy's ear? Or in his mouth?"

The Devotional Divas looked at one another and turned pale. "Certainly not!" If they'd been American girls, they'd probably have said 'Eeeeuuuw, gross!', so at least that was one thing to be grateful for.

"But what do you do when you're with boys?" I asked them.

"We sing Kumbaya mostly." The class were helpless with giggles. "Although we've been learning Morning Has Broken. Or they rub our tits." A great whoop of delight went up from the class.

"So while they're rubbing your ... breasts, what are you doing? Aren't you interacting with them in some way?"

"No, we just lie there."

I was beginning to see Smegs's point of view. Were these girls really suitable candidates for St Cat's? First and foremost, I wanted them to sit down. They made the place look horribly untidy. "Sit down!" I bellowed at them, somewhat to my own surprise.

"But we haven't got any desks...."

At that moment, a number of things happened in rapid succession. The lights flickered several times. The quadrangle clock began chiming the hour, although it was twenty past nine. It had already reached fourteen without showing any sign of stopping. Valentina, Helvetica and Georgina stood up with resigned expressions and plodded to the door where, I saw, the antelope was waiting for them.

"See ya later, miss," said Valentina over her shoulder. "They can sit in our desks while we're away."

"I thought you said this was fixed," said Helvetica.

"It was," said Valentina.

"Where are we going?" said Georgina in a voice that suggested she knew only too well what the answer would be.

"Fix clock," said the antelope.

All four of them skidded to a halt.

"Who said that?" said Valentina.

"It wasn't you?" said Helvetica.

"It was him!" said Georgina. "I swear it was! It had an African accent."

"South African?" said Helvetica. "It wouldn't be South African. It comes from further north."

Georgina's eyes boggled at this argument. "I don't know where in Africa. Shit, it only said two words. I'm not Professor Higgins!"

The three girls had slowly backed away from the animal, which was looking at them as if butter wouldn't melt in its mouth. It wasn't saying a word; reassuring to a certain extent, but not proving much, one way or another.

"I'm not going up there in that tower with a talking goat!" Georgina declared. "I've had it up to here."

"But we've got to fix the clock," said Valentina.

Helvetica was beside Georgina, clinging to her arm while getting ready to flee. "Why bother?" she said. "Most of the school can't hear the clock anyway."

"Yeah, but we can!" said Valentina. "It's struck seventy-five times already."

"Get used to it," Helvetica advised. "We've put up with enough of this shit. Grand pianos and stuff are okay, but not talking antelopes. I draw the line at talking antelopes."

"Are we sure we heard it?" Valentina asked. Helvetica and Georgina nodded in the affirmative.

"Didn't you?" said Helvetica.

"I'm not sure." Valentina wiggled a finger around in her ear. "All I can hear right now is that bell."

"Let's go down to the IT Lab," said Helvetica. "It's about time that machine got a good talking-to."

"It was only a temporary solution," the Fuckh Machine protested. "Ol' Gruntworthy needed desks for those new girls to sit down, so I took you two out of it to fix the clock. Of course, Georgina had to come along as well."

"Oh, of course!" said Helvetica.

Georgina pointed a finger at the screen. "It's talking! And making sense."

"If you can call it sense," said Helvetica. "It must be the stupidest computer in the world. Why couldn't it just let Mr Jeremy bring a couple of new desks in from somewhere?"

"They're out of stock," said the machine with a self-satisfied little chuckle. "Usual week to ten days delivery."

"We're not having that bell ringing for another week to ten days!" Valentina yelped.

"S'not my fault you decided not to fix it," said the machine sniffily.

"Hello?" said Georgina. "Can I talk to it?"

"If you like," said Helvetica. "But it might not take any notice."

"What does she want?"

"Go ahead and talk to it," said Valentina. "It's listening."

"The antelope spoke," said Georgina, speaking loudly and clearly. "And you won't catch me up that clock tower with a talking antelope, it's as simple as that."

"Suit yourself."

"She can't hear the clock," said Valentina. "We can. And it's got to stop."

"Stop the clock?" the machine gasped. "You cannot be serious!"

"No!" Helvetica screamed. "Keep the clock running. Just stop the thing striking!"

"But surely you can do that yourselves using the antelope?" said the machine. "That's part of the reason we gave him to you in the first place."

"It was?"

"Of course! But if you want the bell to stop ringing — how's that?"

The clock stopped striking instantly. Helvetica and Valentina put fingers in their ears and waggled them around.

"It's stopped," said Valentina wonderingly.

"Will it start again?" asked Helvetica.

"Probably," the machine said glumly. "It chimes the hours but then it gets carried away with the sound it makes. But you know how to stop it, don't you?"

"I'm not going up in that tower with...." Georgina began again.

"Can you make sure the antelope doesn't talk again?" Helvetica pleaded quickly.

"Why don't you want it to talk? People would pay a lot of money to see a talking antelope."

"Don't let Miss Gruntworthy hear you say that," said Helvetica. "We don't want him talking, we really don't. It's too spooky."

"I wonder why I bother sometimes," said the machine. "You're an ungrateful bunch of tossers."

Helvetica moved her hand towards the switch for the loudspeakers.

"Okay, okay!" the machine blurted urgently. "No more talking antelope."

"And...?"

"I'll try and get the clock not to get buggered up more than once a day. All right, once a week!"

"Yes?"

"And the new desks will arrive in five minutes. And the beds. God, you want everything?"

"That will do for now," said Helvetica. "Thank you." She turned off the monitor.

"Wow!" said Valentina as soon as they were out in the corridor. "That's telling it!"

"As long as it behaves itself, yes," said Helvetica. They emerged into the crisp morning air. A slightly familiar van was weaving down the driveway between the trees, careening in a top-heavy manner. It stopped in front of the main entrance and three deep-sea fishermen climbed down from the cab, rubbing their hands together as they disappeared round the back of the van.

"That will be the new desks arriving," said Valentina. "Excellent service!"

"How did you do that?" asked Georgina.

"You've just got to show it who's boss," said Helvetica. "There'll be no point in going back into the Sex class now, it will be full of fishermen moving furniture around. What shall we do?"

Valentina sniffed the air. "It's a nice morning. We could go into Borcester on the bus."

"You mean now? All of us? But it's the first day of term."

"Nobody will miss us. They think we're fixing the clock. Look, there'll be a bus in five minutes. We can buy some cream cakes and eat them by the river. C'mon!"

They hurried down the driveway to the main road, arriving just as a big red double-decker bus came to a halt.

"Mornin' girls!" the driver greeted them.

"Family travelcard, please," said Valentina, producing a five pound note.

The man regarded their blouses suspiciously. "'Ow old are you all?"

"Old enough. But young enough for half fare."

"Hurrrumph!" The driver took the money and held it up to the light, then glowered at the antelope. "'Zat a goat?"

"No, he's an antelope."

The driver seemed to be consulting a list in his cab. "No antelopes allowed on family travelcards. It can't come on."

"Try impala," Georgina suggested.

"Impala? Why didn't you say so first time?" He issued the ticket. "Jus' keep its 'ooves orfa my seats."

"It's okay, he'll be sitting on Georgie's lap. Come on, girls!"

"I'm knackered," I said to Smegs as we took our seats in the school restaurant.

She poked suspiciously at her steak and kidney pie before loading a forkful into her mouth. "You haven't done anything yet!" she said through a spray of shortcrust pastry crumbs. Then I had to slap her on the back because she'd started choking. Several girls gathered round with unnecessary advice, glasses of water and industrial paper towel. One of them even had a fire extinguisher.

I picked a stray chunk of Smegs's dinner off my plate and placed it carefully on hers. "We had those new desks arrive in the middle of a class. Jeremy said they weren't coming until next week some time. The clock started going bananas and the Three Musketeers went out with the antelope to fix it. Then it stopped and those fish blokes brought the desks in."

Smegs looked up, red-faced and with streaming eyes. "Never mind me," she croaked. "I'm only choking to death."

"Serves you right, you shouldn't breathe while you're eating." She gave me a somewhat judgemental look. "Funny, I didn't see the girls after that. I'd have thought that once the clock was fixed they'd have come straight back. Still, looking on the bright side, I did make some progress with the newbies. I'd got them on to Tongues: Stage Three by the end of the lesson. One of them can touch the tip of her nose with hers. I'll have to schedule her for some private tuition."

"How big are their tits?" Smegs squeaked. Honestly, she sounded as if she were at death's door. You'd think if she was on the verge of choking she'd be able to think of something more important than the size of new girls' tits.

"Big enough," I said, sticking my fork into the pastry crust of my pie and watching in astonishment as pieces flew off in different directions across the table.

Smegs started coughing again. It's virtually impossible to hold a sensible conversation with somebody when they're choking all over the place.

"I'll see you later," I said, getting up and leaving. As I went out of the door I saw Smegs surrounded by solicitous girls, patting her on the back and plying her with glasses of water. She was in good hands.

I had already reached the antelope paddock before I realised that I had left my lunch practically untouched. No point in going back to finish it, it would be long gone by now. Quite unaccountably, shrapnel pie was one of those St Cat's favourite dishes. But then, it was a perpetual mystery how the girls could pack away everything that the restaurant kitchens could throw at them and keep coming back for more.

"Come and get it!" Georgina yelled as she thrust her way into the Third Form dorm carrying a large cardboard box. "Don't you lot never say we don't never do nothin' for you!" She dumped the box on the table and stood back, wiping her hands down the sides of her skirt.

"You mean we have to always say you do always do nothing for us?" Sweaty Betty enquired from her bed where she sat surrounded by her classmates' maths homework.

The rest of the girls ignored her. "What's in the box?" they enquired, clustering round.

"Cakes," said Valentina, elbowing into the dorm with a second box which she placed carefully on her own bed. Helvetica followed her in with the antelope trotting placidly at her heels.

"Cakes? For us? Where did they come from?" the girls squealed.

"The cake shop in Borcester," said Helvetica.

A massed gasp went up. "You've been to Borcester? All day? But you missed classes?"

"Of course. We had to fix the clock, and by the time we'd finished, it wasn't worth going to classes and disrupting everything."

That made sense. Helvetica's use of a big word like 'disrupting' made sure of that. She opened Valentina's cake box and helped herself to a chocolate éclair.

"These are ours. Yours are in the other box," she said indistinctly. "Four each. Sort them out amongst yourselves."

"What sort are they? What's in them?"

"Why don't you just open it up and find out?" said Georgina. She took out a cream doughnut and fed one end of it to the antelope, which accepted it with its head daintily tilted to one side.

What the girls lacked was a natural leader. Nobody wanted to be the first to open their cake box. Meanwhile, they were practically weeing themselves with delicious anticipation.

"Oh, for God's sake!" said Sweaty Betty, lumbering across the dorm with her big breasts bouncing and slapping against her belly. The rest of the girls fell back and allowed the fragrant mathematician to open the box lid. "Wow!" she said, looking inside. "Thanks, Georgie! Thanks, Valentina! Thanks, Helvetica!"

The antelope looked up at her with some indignation on its face.

"Thanks, antelope! Line up, girls. Take one each then go to the back of the queue."

"Why can't we just take four each instead of queueing up four times?" the Devotional Divas wanted to know.

"Because, that's why." Sweaty Betty was already handing out cream doughnuts to eager little hands which bore them away in triumph to hide them before returning for more. It was a good system, bring a warm feeling to the recipients while at the same time ensuring that any less desirable kinds of cake would be doled out evenly. Not that there were any; the cream cake shop in Borcester was renowned for its quality products. Nevertheless, a lively trade had sprung up as éclairs were traded for Belgian buns by those girls who didn't like chocolate for some reason. The result was that the cakes began to take on a slightly grubby and battered appearance. It didn't affect the taste, but it might have repelled any girls with squeamish tendencies.

Like the Devotional Divas, for example.

"What kind of cream is this?" they asked.

"Just cream."

"Cream? You mean, the same as that stuff the boys rub on our tits? We can't eat that!"

"Why not? It wouldn't do you any harm. Besides, this is cream cake cream. Are you going to eat those?" The class stared hungrily at the eight cakes lying in a heap on one of the Devotional Divas' beds.

"We don't know. We had lots to eat earlier."

"We're always hungry," said the class.

"There are twenty-six of us," said Sweaty Betty. "If you don't want those, we could share them out. We could cut them all into four pieces and all have a piece each. Then you could have three quarters of a cake each if you liked. Because they're yours."

"Oh, thanks," said the Devotional Divas, not sure if this represented very much of a bargain.

"Or if you liked, you could have a whole one each and we could cut the rest of them into four point three three recurring slices. It won't be easy."

"No, we suppose it wouldn't."

"Or you could just pass the cakes round and we'll take a bite each until they're all gone. You probably won't get any yourselves by the time it's been all the way round the dorm."

"That sounds a bit harsh!" said the Devotional Divas.

"Yes, it does, doesn't it," said Betty. "Never mind."

"So we could eat them ourselves?"

"If you really want to, but I thought you said you weren't hungry."

The Devotional Divas looked at one another. "It's not that, so much, it's that we're full up after all that dinner we had. Besides, we don't want to get fat and lose our excellent bust to waist ratio."

The other twenty-six girls immediately lost interest in the Devotional Divas' eight cream cakes and melted away.

"What did we say?"

Across the room the three girls and the antelope sat on Valentina's bed with their private box of cakes between them. They had loosened the top three or four buttons of their shirts to make it easier to breathe. Every few minutes one of them would dip a desultory arm into the box and come out with a cake which she would stare at blankly before eating it in a jaded manner. If the cake turned out to be one of the more boring ones, such as a cream-filled scone with strawberry jam, it would be offered to the antelope. The animal hadn't refused a cake yet but as time wore on, it had allowed a small pile of cakes to build up in front of it. Most of them had been licked once.

"I'm full up!" Georgina admitted at last.

"Why did we get so many?" said Helvetica.

"To show how we always think of our classmates who are less fortunate than ourselves," said Valentina.

"They haven't eaten all theirs," said Helvetica, gesturing towards the Devotional Divas who were toying with their cakes, idly rubbing the cream on the upper slopes of their breasts.

"What a waste," said Georgina.

"I wonder if it works," said Valentina.

"Make their boobs bigger?" said Helvetica. "Why should it?"

Georgina bit the end off a cream doughnut the size of a small submersible. "It's only cream cake cream. Fresh cream. You can't get bigger boobs by rubbing that stuff on them. Maybe if you ate enough of it, but not by rubbing it on."

"Have you ever tried it?" said Valentina, with a slightly surprised expression on her face.

"Of course not, it would stink." Georgina's eyes flickered between the cream doughnut and her own cleavage. "Although I suppose we could always wash it off." Then to her own complete surprise she squashed the doughnut between her breasts and pushed them together, hard. "Wow, it's still cold!" she remarked.

"It has to be cold," said Helvetica. "That's what stops it going off. Is it doing anything yet?"

"Like what?" Georgina stopped mashing her breasts together for a moment, pulled a face of acute displeasure then continued, closing her eyes and leaning back on her elbows like a model in a big breast fetish video.

Helvetica cleared her throat loudly to get get Georgina's attention. "Getting warm? Tingling?"

"No, not really. It just feels messy and sticky."

"That will be the jam," said Valentina. "They always put jam in cream doughnuts for some reason."

Georgina paused in her lewd display long enough to sit up, pluck the flattened doughnut from between her twin torpedoes and toss it to the antelope, who caught it deftly and swallowed it whole. Then she resumed her massage and the dorm filled with sticky little sounds and soft moans. The girls became aware that a crowd had gathered round the bed.

"What ya doin', Georgie?" Sweaty Betty enquired on behalf of her classmates.

"Making her tits bigger," grunted Valentina, captivated by Georgina's performance. "Have some more," she urged, selecting a Belgian bun from the box, scooping out the cream filling and sploshing it in between Georgina's heaving globes before placing the remains of the bun before the antelope.

"Does it work?" said Betty.

"I don't know," said Valentina. "But it's fun to watch."

"Can we do it, too?"

"Why not? You've all got cakes."

"But we've eaten ours."

"You can use ours!" the Devotional Divas crowed, in a spirit of goodwill towards their fellow men — or in this case, girls. The scurried back to their beds and returned with eight only slightly battered cream cakes.

"Are you sure? Can we?" Taking no chances, Sweaty Betty grabbed the cakes from the Devotional Divas and placed them in a careful row on the edge of Valentina's bed. She scooped the cream out of the first, moved along to the second and continued until she had a quivering handful of cream and a litter of discarded pastries which she kicked under the bed so as not to make a mess. She looked round for a flat surface to place the cream, then after only a moment's hesitation she dobbed it down in a neat mound on the antelope's narrow, bony back.

"Gosh!" said the girls, who would never have dreamed of putting it there.

"Right, who's first?"

There was some nervous shuffling of feet and a muted chorus of "after you" until Sweaty Betty surprised them all, not to mention herself, by ripping open her blouse. As the class fell back, holding their noses, Betty swept up the mixture of cream, jam and antelope hairs and went splwoosh with it right between her firm globes.

"Shit!" she said. "It's warm!"

Chapter 25: The Perfidious Miss Labia

"Shit! It's warm!"

Those were the words I heard as I crept along the corridor and paused outside the door of the Third Form dormitory. What were they doing in there? I straightened my skirt and tried to do something with my hair, then put my hand on the doorknob. To my surprise, I found the door suddenly being yanked open and I staggered inside, passing an urgent schoolgirl on the way through. It is easy to forget that schoolgirls tend to postpone their visits to the bathroom until the last possible moment. The girl was followed by another of the species, travelling just as fast.

"Good evening, Miss Gruntworthy!" chanted a ragged chorus of half a dozen voices. I took in the scene. The entire class was gathered round Valentina's bed, most of them with their blouses pulled back off their shoulders and their breasts glistening as if they'd been anointing them with Sexual Chemicals.

Interesting!

"What's going on here?" I demanded, placing my hands on my hips as the girls fell back. I could now see Valentina herself, together with Helvetica, Georgina, and — how did I guess? — the antelope. In the middle of this group was a teetering pile of second-hand-looking cakes. Even as I watched, the antelope stretched its neck forward, turned its head delicately sideways and plucked a cake off the heap. It fixed me with a what's-it-to-do-with-you look while it munched the cake briefly then swallowed it. "Where did all these cakes come from?"

"Ooops! Sorry, Miss!" said Valentina. "Would you like one?"

I wouldn't. They didn't look at all appetising, but Valentina plunged her hand into a cardboard box and came up with a profiterole, crowned with dark chocolate and positively bulging with cream. She handed it to me.

"Well, if you're sure...."

"I had my eye on that one," said Helvetica huffily.

"We've still got some more," said Georgina, looking into the box.

"Borcester," said Valentina.

"What?" I paused in the middle of a bite and stared at her.

"You've got cream on your top lip," Valentina pointed out. "It looks like Miss Mountains's moustache."

"Miss Mountains hasn't got a ... does it really?" I wiped it off with a fistful of industrial paper towel which one of the girls handed me. "Has it gone?"

"Most of it. We got them in Borcester," Valentina continued. "Fixing the clock took longer than we expected, so we bunked off and went down to Borcester for some cakes. We brought some back for the girls."

There was a bit of a gasp from the rest of the girls at this terrible admission of guilt, but I always think that if a girl makes a clean breast of a crime her punishment ought to be light.

"Ah!" I said, pointing at the rest of the girls. I had put my finger on Valentina's most obvious omission. "So why are they rubbing the cream all over their chests?"

"We don't really know," said Helvetica. "The Devotional Divas started it."

I remembered why I had come here in the first place. I finished off the last of my profiterole and licked my fingers.

"Another one, miss?" said Valentina politely.

"I've had quite sufficient, thank you. The Devotional Divas? Where are they, anyway?"

"They've gone to the bogs," said Sweaty Betty. "Too much dinner. You passed them on the way in."

That explained it. "Which is the one with the very long tongue?" I asked, dropping my voice to a confidential whisper.

The girls giggled. "That would be Contraceptua," said Betty.

"Have you...?"

"Not yet, miss! It's only their first day."

"Good." I returned to my theme. "Now, why are you all rubbing dairy cream on your chests?"

"Oh, the usual reasons, I suppose," said Betty. "It might just work. Gotta be worth a try, anyway."

"You want yours to be even bigger?" I shrieked.

"Yeah, why not?"

"Okay. That's fine. That's splendid. Excellent. But it's just ordinary cream. Why would we spend hundreds and hundreds of hours teaching you all that Sexual Chemistry stuff, mixing weird mixtures, setting fire to spoons, making Cream that gives girls the most enormous tits, if ordinary cream cake cream worked just as well?"

"Yes, miss."

"Yes, miss? What kind of an answer is that?"

Smegs took a slurp of coffee, leaving a glistening light brown film on her upper lip. Valentina had been right; Smegs did have a moustache. Not a big furry one, but quite noticeable.

Whappp!

She slammed the newspaper on the green leather top of my desk, making me spill coffee down my front.

"What did you do that for?"

"Read it! Front page. You've brought St Cat's into disrepute!"

"Oh, really?" I grabbed the paper eagerly. "I haven't seen this week's yet. Oh, look at this! Bus fares are going up again. Why do they always say 'Fares Set to Rise'?"

"Have you quite finished? Read the article in the middle of the front page."

I heaved a sigh. She's so bossy. I don't know why I've put up with her for so long. Of course, she used to be my friend and confidante during our schooldays, but that was then, and this was now. Or is now. Whatever. I glanced up at her. She was still glaring at me with a steely eye. Or maybe two.

I looked for the article she was talking about.

"This one?" I said. "Village in Grip of Breast Epidemic? What's a breast epidemic?"

She said nothing so I decided to shut up and read it.

"Bloody Hell!" I blurted, not bothering to turn the page and find the rest of it. "Unusual animals? The cheeky cows!"

"Never mind the animals!" Smegs stormed, causing the antelope to raise its head and stare at her accusingly from its armchair. "Read the rest of it."

I fumbled with the ridiculous pages full of small ads for used cars. "Look at this," I complained, jabbing at the paper. "Y-Reg 3-Series BMW, 72,000 careful miles, drives superb. Didn't these people go to school? And what's a careful mile?"

Smegs produced a small notebook from her cleavage. "Is there a phone number?"

"Only a mobile. You're not supposed to answer ads that only give a mobile phone number. They're crooks...."

She was glaring at me again. "You're supposed to be reading the rest of it." But before I could even find page 17, she snatched the paper away from me. "I'll tell you what it says. It says the girls' mothers are going to kill them if they come home from St Cat's with bigger tits."

"They never do," I said. "The girls are always saying that, but we've never had a girl killed by her mother yet."

"This isn't the girls saying it, it's their mothers."

"Gosh!"

Smegs took another slurp of coffee, with the same result as last time. "They're jealous."

"The mothers are jealous? Who of?"

Smegs looked pained. "Of whom?"

"That's what I said. Who are they jealous of?"

"Their daughters, of course. The mothers are flat-chested, with saggy boobs...."

"How can they have saggy boobs if they're flat-chested? How can they have any boobs at all?"

She ignored me again. "While their daughters have suddenly grown whopping great pairs of tits, out to here...."

I glanced at her sharply but she wasn't indicating anything with her hands at all.

"...Great big gazongas. Bazooms. Jugs. Watermelons. Lallas. Tatas. Wobblers. Knockers. Beanbags."

"Go on, go on!"

"All of them! I don't know what you've been doing to them with Sexual Chemicals."

"Cream cake," I said, revealing my secret. "From the shop in Borcester."

Smegs stopped in full flow. "They got those tits just by eating cream cakes?"

"No, the antelope eats them."

Smegs looked at the antelope, which was wearing its most innocent face, then raised her eyes to the ceiling.

I thought I'd better explain.

"The girls rub the cream on to their chests."

She turned pale. "You mean...? You don't mean...? Ordinary cream? Not Sexual Cream? No speeder-upper? No blazing spoons?"

"I don't think so. Valentina and Helvetica brought a tub of Cream for us to rub on to the Devotional Divas on Boxing Day — at my place when we had that lovely thick soup and that nice corned beef hash with Corinne? The boys rubbed it on. Then six of the Devotional Divas came to St Cat's, and the rest, as they say, is...."

"It isn't History," Smegs yelled. "I teach History and I know. Those six Divas we've got at St Cat's have grown, but what about the rest of them?"

A shudder ran through my spleen. "I don't know, do I? They're nothing to do with me."

"They soon will be," said Smegs kindly. She waved page 17 at me. "The mothers of the other Devotional Divas are demanding that their kids be allowed to join St Cat's as well. They want beanbags, too. So does the vicar."

"The vicar wants boobies?"

"He wants his happy clappy group to have them. He thinks it might enlarge his congregation."

"It might enlarge something else, too. But I suppose we could fit them in, at a pinch. There are only another eight or so of them...."

"Yes?"

"But ... four of them are boys!"

"And?"

"And that would mean we'd have to become St Cat's High School for Growing Girls and a Few Boys."

"Hmm. Catchy name. Memorable."

I took a sip of coffee then wiped my upper lip in case Smegs might think I had a moustache. "Well, look on the bright side. We'd have an excellent school choir."

"Yeah, a choir that only knows one song," Smegs reminded me. "Not that you'd ever notice, of course: all tunes sound the same to you."

Which was a bit harsh, I thought.

"Besides," she went on, "who'd be the choirmaster?"

"Me, of course!" I said, to my own complete surprise.

Smegs seemed stunned. Then, apparently to her own complete surprise, she said, "Yeah, I suppose you could. Great idea, Shan!" Then she stared into her empty coffee mug, looking confused. "What am I saying?"

"They know the tune," I said. "All I'd have to do would be to waggle my stick around."

"They still need to know more than one song."

"They're learning Morning Has Broken," I said, prepared to defend my choir against all comers. "And I could teach them the St Cat's school song." I took a deep breath while I tried to remember the first line.

"Sint Ketts for evvah!" sang a crystal-clear voice at about 95 decibels, rattling the used coffee cups and threatening the windows.

"No!" Smegs shrieked, clapping her hands over her ears. "Shan, stop it!"

I could only just hear her as I had my fingers in my own ears. "It wasn't me!" I yelled.

"Course it was," Smegs roared. "It wasn't me!"

Cautiously I uncovered my ears and Smegs did the same. The office was mercifully silent, although I swear there was still an echo ringing around the solid silver plated trophies on the bookshelves. We stared at one another.

"It wasn't me," I repeated, more softly. "It must have been you."

"It certainly wasn't me."

At that moment, the door opened and Miss Labia came in backwards bearing a tray. As she made her way to the desk I observed that she was interestingly naked apart from a French maid's frilly apron. She placed the tray on the desk. It contained a heaped plate of chocolate chip cookies, a saucer of milk, a rack of toast, pots of butter and marmalade, and three steaming mugs of fresh coffee. Three?

"And before you ask," she said, perching her cute little bottom on the edge of the desk with a squeak of bare skin on green leather. "Before you ask," she picked up the third mug and took an appreciative gulp. "It wasn't me either. It wasn't I, actually," she added for some reason. She nodded in the direction of the armchair. "It was him," she said. "Well, he, actually."

We turned to look at the antelope.

"It can sing?" said Smegs after a decent interval.

The animal may have blushed prettily, or maybe it was my imagination. It unfolded its various elbows and knees from the armchair and clopped over to the desk. Tilting its head delicately to one side it selected a cookie and carefully dunked it in its saucer of milk before crunching it up and swallowing it with every sign of enjoyment.

Smegs and I grabbed our mugs before the thing could start enjoying those too.

"It can talk," said Labia. "It's been listening and learning. It still has that awful South African accent, of course...."

"Oh, of course!" we said.

"In fact, the only reason it doesn't say more is that it's shy. Embarrassed about its accent. It would really like to go to elocution lessons but I checked on the Internet and as far as I could see, none of them take antelopes. So I thought, why not Valentina?"

"Valentina?" I said. "Valentina Nightingale?"

"We've only got two hundred and ten girls here," said Labia. "Two hundred and nine, if you count Sally Chung. Or two hundred and fifteen if you count Sally Chung and include the Devotional Divas. Or maybe if you include the rest...."

"Never mind the rest of the Devotional Divas," I interjected. "Get to the point!"

"We've only got one Valentina," she said. "She's got a lovely pure St Cat's accent. She can break test tubes at ten paces."

Didn't I know it? I like to hear well-spoken girls, but Valentina's accent could be just a little nerve-jangling, like Miss Cassowary's fingernails on a blackboard.

"She could teach the antelope to speak really nicely," said Labia. "Just think, not only would be the only girls' high school in the country for virginal hypertrophs, we'd have the only school choir led by a genuine singing antelope. Probably."

"Yes, probably," said Smegs faintly. "Shan, I've been carrying this around for the last year or two, ever since all this weird stuff started happening." She produced a brown envelope from her cleavage and placed it on the desk beside the tray, where the antelope studied it with interest. "It's my formal resignation."

I was struck speechless. Smegs? Megan Mountains? Bestest friend of my schooldays and constant companion ever since? Resigning? Leaving me with ... what? I'd be the headmistress of a small, exclusive school in the west of England, with an overworked handful of staff and no one to teach English and History. Just when I'd thought I could gently slip out of teaching. My mind skipped ahead, trying to sort out the future.

"I suppose I could take over English," I said. "If Mrs Lashmore can take History. Now it has been established that Sexual Chemicals can be replaced by fresh dairy cream for breast enhancement, we could probably cut Sexual Chemistry classes down to two double periods a week for each class. Except for the Juniors, of course."

Smegs didn't ritually repeat "of course". I noted the omission and continued. "And maybe Miss Clit could help out with Support and Mobility classes."

Miss Labia had produced a clipboard from somewhere; I dreaded to think where. She scribbled a few notes then crossed them with bold strokes. "And Miss Malone can do English...."

"Hang on, I said I'm doing English!"

"So that's Miss Malone — English." She wrote carefully on the clipboard with the pointy pink tip of her tongue poking out. I'd had occasional thoughts of Miss Labia as a sex symbol since her dramatic transformation into a big-eyed bosomy idol, but seeing her with her tongue sticking out like that I was tempted to bend her backwards over the green leather desktop and ravish her among the abandoned coffee mugs.

"Shan," said Smegs. "Please put your skirt back on. I assume my resignation has been accepted?"

Miss Labia hadn't finished her staff restructuring. "Miss Underhill can do the Sexual Chemistry lessons, since it's only two double periods a week for each class now. And the antelope will be choirmaster, of course."

"Oh, of course," I echoed numbly.

"So you're both redundant!" Miss Labia ended, waving her clipboard in happy triumph. "You'll be entitled to a small severance payment commensurate with the length of your employment with the Company, and I think you will find our offer to not be unacceptable." She looked around the office — my office — mentally refurnishing it. "I'll move in here next week, if that's okay. So my secretary will be able to start work on Monday morning. Perhaps you could arrange to clear your desk by, oh, Wednesday of this week? Is that reasonable? Good! Not that I'll be using this desk, of course. I'll be getting a new one. This one's seen much better days."

Yes, I mused. It had.

"We'll have a few drinks on Friday afternoon for the two of you. I think I can let the girls have Friday afternoon off, as long as they make up the lost time next week. You probably deserve the chance to say goodbye properly instead of being marched off the premises this morning. After all, you are still nominally in charge, although I am headmistress."

"Headmistress?" I echoed, and I could hear Smegs saying the same thing at the same time. "You?"

"Of course. It's the dawn of a new era for St Cat's." Miss Labia preened herself and strode over to the window to look down into the quadrangle. "Time to take stock, to move on with an eye to the golden future. To put our sordid past behind us. The girls can hardly wait, I can tell you!"

"They can't?"

Smegs and I looked at one another. In barely five minutes — in less time than it takes for our coffee mugs to become cold — our secure futures had been dashed from our grasps. Redundant! Sacked! Thrown out on the street without so much as a word of notice. And me only just married, with a husband and a cottage to support.

"What about Jeremy?" I asked suddenly.

"Good question," said Miss Labia. "A male caretaker is probably inappropriate at a girls' high school, but it will take quite a while to find a female replacement. The advertisement will have to be approved by our legal department, of course."

"We've got a legal department?" I said, feeling totally drained.

"My new boyfriend," said Miss Labia. "He's got to be a lawyer. American, probably, they have plenty of spare lawyers over there."

"Probably?" said Smegs. "You mean you don't know if he's American or not?"

"He doesn't exist yet," said Miss Labia. "The Fuckh Machine will sort all that out when I say the word. The machine is going to be busy, so I'd better let it find me a boyfriend before we embark on the Great Breast Reduction Programme."

"The what?" Once more, Smegs and I were in complete accord.

"The girls are ridiculously huge up top," Miss Labia went on blithely. "It's bad enough for me," she said, grabbing handfuls of bosom and tossing them heavily up and down inside her shirt. She was wearing a bra but you'd never have known. "If we can get the average bust size down to fifty inches by the end of the summer we'll be making the kind of progress I'm looking for. Having the smallest-busted girl in each class as Form Head will be a tremendous help, naturally. My aim is to convert the bra facility into a netball court by Easter, or maybe a small chapel, and we'll be able to let that dreadful Miss Clitress go. Whoever heard of a girls' school with its own custom bra-maker?"

"Who indeed?" we said.

"But still." Miss Labia returned to the desk and picked up the tray. "It's always a delight to talk to you two, but I simply don't have the time to waste. So much to do. Places to go; people to see. So you will excuse me. Try and make yourself scarce after lunch, by the way, the decorators will be measuring up for the new curtains. Come on, Dennis," she ended, and the antelope clip-clopped after her. The door closed behind them.

I was still more or less speechless. "Dennis?"

Smegs picked up her resignation letter from the desk and thrust it back into her bosom. "This won't be necessary, after all. It would affect my redundancy entitlement."

The door burst open again and Miss Labia marched back in. "Where is it?" she demanded. "It was on the desk, just here. Now it's gone. A brown envelope."

"It wasn't a resignation letter," I blurted, thinking quickly. "It's an old private joke of ours. She hands in her 'resignation' once a week."

Miss Labia's eyes narrowed. "Are you sure? I shall find out, you know." She glowered at us for a minute or so before backing out of the door again. She gave us a final glare before disappearing.

"Thanks, Shan," said Smegs. "Old friend."

"Oh, it was nothing. I expect you'd do the same for me?"

"I don't know," she said. "I don't think I'd go as far as that."

She got up from her chair and came round to my side of the desk and flung her arms around my neck.

"Oh, shit!" she sobbed. "What the holy fuck's happening?"

"I was hoping you'd know. You always know what to do."

"Not any more. Everything's falling apart. We're out of a job! What are we going to do?"

"You can't leave, miss!" Valentina sobbed in a choking voice, clutching a handful of industrial paper towel and mopped her eyes.

"We all have to move on," I said bravely, taking one more reluctant step down from the main doors of the school to the level of the roadway where one of the village taxis purred silently in a cloud of steam. I stopped, surveying the little group of Third Formers. "Where are the rest of them?"

"We're it, miss. The others are all in classes. They couldn't come."

"They couldn't come to say goodbye to us? To me?"

"We're here, miss. That's all that matters. Never mind the rest of the school."

And to think that the perfidious Miss Labia had promised to give the whole school this Friday afternoon off to bid farewell to their departing headmistress.

"They'll find out, miss," said Valentina savagely. "They won't be able to manage without you!"

"No, Tee. Myself ... Miss Mountains ... Miss Clitress ... none of us are indispensible."

"Is indispensible, miss. It's singular. 'None of us' means 'not one of us', so it's singular."

"I suppose so." As I was still on the premises and still nominally headmistress I could technically have awarded her a billion lines, but what the hell? She might even be right. May even be right? No, might was right. How would they all survive with the appalling Miss Malone teaching her own brand of mangled English? They'd find work at the BBC, I guessed.

"Don't cry, miss!" It was Helvetica, offering me the obligatory roll of industrial paper towel. "We wouldn't be able to ... to ... if you...." She issued a croaking noise and lowered her head to Valentina's bosom, a difficult manoeuvre, involving bending almost double.

"She's upset, miss," said Valentina, patting her friend's massive heaving shoulders. "She hasn't stopped crying since we heard the news. What are we going to do for bras now Miss Clitress is leaving?"

"I'm sure you'll find somewhere in Borcester," I said with an effort.

"And then there's Miss Mountains," said Valentina. "And you! Most of all you, miss. We ... we love you!"

"Oh, Valentina!"

"What's going on?" demanded Smegs, appearing on the outskirts. "This blubbing has got to stop!" She dabbed at her reddened eyes.

"They ... they love us!" I husked, past the lump in my throat. "After all the grief we've given them over the years. All those lines. Those spankings. The abuse! And now we're leaving, they tell us they love us! If only we'd known."

"You mean we'd have changed if we'd known?" asked Smegs.

"That's right, miss," insisted Valentina. "We know you didn't mean any of it."

"We most certainly did!" I protested indignantly. "And you can write that out ten billion times: I Must Not..."

"Leave it out, miss," said Helvetica, raising her head with some relief and straightening up. "You know we never write lines. You'd never read them if we did."

"That's not the point!"

"The point is, miss, we're all going to miss you, miss."

"Miss me?"

"Miss you, miss. Yes, miss. You too, miss," Helvetica said to Smegs. And we all indulged in a group hug, which helped to disguise the fact that we were all crying our eyes out. Somehow we had arrived at the foot of the steps without falling over in a wailing heap.

"Can I join in, miss?"

It was Boom-Boom, accompanied at a distance by her lover.

"I cried and cried when the antelope broke my drum, miss, but it was your big day, and it all turned out okay in the end. It always does, miss, you'll see! At least you've got a husband, not like poor Miss Mountains, miss."

I made room for Boom-Boom to join the group, although Smegs was literally howling in despair by now.

"And me, miss!"

We spontaneously decided that a group hug wasn't such a good idea after all, and stood back a step or two, looking faintly embarrassed.

"Sorry!" said Sweaty Betty, raising an arm and taking a sniff of her dank armpit. She was a braver girl than any of us. "Bloody hell, I stink!" she complained. "Why didn't any of you tell me?"

"Come here, Betty!" said Valentina. "You can join in!"

And the group hug formed up again for another communal cry. This is what true love really means, I thought.

"You will come and visit us, won't you, miss?" said Helvetica when we broke up again and stood gasping for air.

"I don't think that's a very good idea, sweetheart," I said. "It's better if we make a clean break and get on with our lives. You have all yours ahead of you. We'll ... we'll get by."

"Speak for yourself," Smegs snarled.

"But what will you do, miss?"

"Don't worry yourselves about us," I said. "We'll think of something." Maybe we would, but I couldn't think of anything right now. I could get a job in a factory, perhaps, or an office somewhere. Or I could take in ironing. At least Miss Clitress could always make bras, although never again on such a scale as at St Cat's. And Smegs could drive a car.

"All ready, miss?" The taxi driver got out of his warm vehicle and brushed Cornish pasty crumbs from his off-white shirt. "Only i've got another fare at 'alf past four."

Obligingly, the quadrangle clock boomed out the hour. It stopped striking at four.

"At least, Miss Labia got the clock fixed," said Helvetica. "So we won't need to go up the tower ever again."

"Georgina will be pleased," said Valentina. "I don't think she really trusts that antelope."

"You mean everyone can hear the clock now?" I asked.

"How would we know?" said Valentina innocently. "Good-bye, miss." She placed a little sisterly kiss on my cheek, but somehow it slipped down on to my lips. There were no tongues. It didn't seem an appropriate moment.

"See you, miss," said Helvetica, taking my hand in hers and giving it a squeeze. "Thanks for everything. We'll all miss you, miss."

I hoped she wasn't going to start all that stuff again. "Thanks." I ducked my head and bent to get into the car. Smegs got into the front seat and the driver climbed in beside her with a relieved slam of his door.

The car moved silently away. I wasn't going to look back, no way. St Cat's could roast in Hell before I'd do that.

But as we crunched over the gravel past the Wendy House where the badgers were going about their business, the road curved round so I accidentally caught a glimpse of the old well-loved school buildings as I craned to look out of the back window. I'd be able to give my young friends one last little wave of farewell.

The steps were empty. They'd all gone.

The End