Ribblestrop (20 page)

The headmaster said: “Oh Lord, and I didn't even lock the door!”

The light clicked on. “You didn't lock the door?” said the other, more penetrating voice. Definitely Miss Hazlitt—they could hear the queer blend of grinding gravel and the hyenalike bray at the end of the question. “Security, Headmaster . . . is anything more important in a well-run school?”

“Well . . .”

“That's two lapses and the term has barely started. Video surveillance in due course, I think; one would like to have all the central areas covered and a camera over the main gate. One needs to know where the children are, and believe me . . .” There was a chuckle. It sounded like a flurry of stones breaking glass. “It's what today's children respect. How do you turn this . . . device
on
, Headmaster?”

“I trust all the children here, but I was foolish mentioning the map to Millie. I bit my tongue when I said it.”

“
Foolish
isn't the word—you've opened a can of worms. I've met characters like that one before, you know. A doctor would say medicate, but parents are always reluctant. She'll be challenging everything we do and say, it's her nature . . . Where's the map?”

“Right here.”

“The only cost-effective thing now is opening the door and waving good-bye; she'll infect the others. Influence is what she has, and—”

“I think we may have different views of young Millie. I was chatting to her the other night and I think she's got a lot to offer.”

“Attention is what she feeds on. It's all documented, the ego fighting for dominance because the amygdala is in constant stimulation—”

“What on earth is the amy—?”

“It's a part of the prefrontal cortex, the brain. Like I say, ritalin, methahydroxane—it would have some effect, it was all road-tested in the fifties. We could put her in for a scan but you'd be
throwing good money after bad: you have to work on these children at an earlier stage. It was her on the train, I'm sure of it. She's a very accomplished liar—you look at her eyes and watch the pupils. Eighteen hundred pounds in less than two hours—a rather desperate spending spree, I'd say. Perfume—she wants attention. Earrings, fur coat—she knows she's unattractive, that's a desperate insecurity. You could try a course of methotaxadil, that's another possibility, just to get some of the adrenaline down. Otherwise you'd have to be a little more drastic—cut and remove.”

“Well, that's not my field at all, and I'm reluctant to assume anything about the credit card episode. If the police come back to us—”

“I've had a word with our local man, Cuthbertson. He's on our side, we can count on him. He suggested I search her room, which I should have done as soon as I arrived, or
you
should have done. Soon as she's off at breakfast, I'll turn that little shed upside down. I'm tempted to wake her up now, that's when interrogations work, you know. You shake a lot more out at midnight.”

“No, I honestly think we have to respect privacy.”

“I don't. I have to show that I mean business, and this country will thank you in the end. Children like the Roads girl—they're a kind of
viral infection
and we're losing our resistance. Where are the parents?”

“London, though the mother no longer shares the family home.”

“It was a rhetorical question, I've read her file. I'll tell you about the parents: the mother refuses to see the child. The father's remarried and his new wife won't have her in the house. She spends half her life in hotels because the family's imploded. It's a social problem, this legion of unwanted, unloved
pyschomaniacs
and—like I said—it's sinking the country. I want a school that offers solutions.”

“When will you be able to restore our license, do you think?”

“How long does this thing take to warm up? Not yet. Rules and
uniform—it's an old combination, but my goodness it works.” The cell phone bleeped. “Diet, with appropriate medication—I'll introduce that sparingly at first. Hello, Hazlitt? And plenty of sleep. I'm with him now, down at Ribblestrop, I'll call you back. Yes, it's logged.” Her thumb danced over the keypad. “You get the basics into place and everything else follows. If I do my job we'll have it sorted by Christmas. You're going ahead with the building program, aren't you?”

“Oh yes, but—”

“Good. I'll ask for an inspection next year, my people will insist upon new buildings. We can't show stinking ruins, not if we're to attract proper funding. Third note to self: update and cross-reference building program, revisit schedule.”

“The roofing is important, yes. I firmly believe if these boys help
rebuild
the school, there'll be a real sense of ownership.”

“Till the little girl burns it down again. I liked the brochure, I have to say that. You're undercutting everyone at the moment and the pictures look good. What we need is a stall at some of the international fairs, and a few charities onside. One or two children to smile: proper, smart uniform, night and day. That's what sells a school. I'll need to run a course on basic manners, so I'll need a couple of classrooms and this office, as well. Ah, we're in business . . .”

From under the desk, Millie and Sanchez heard the photocopier come to life. It buzzed and hummed for a little while. Then the headmaster said, “That's that. Oh, I'd better lock the door this time.”

“We need a proper isolation block. Did you get my fax about a removal system? It's been trialed in some very difficult American schools on the basis of rat behavior. If you surround one child with a limited set of stimuli and bombard it with selected messages—”

“After you, Miss Hazlitt.”

“The results as published are breathtaking—I'll find you the journal. I think the first job is to weed out the dead wood. Turn the light off . . .” The voice faded into darkness.

The door was shut and locked, firmly. The children remained utterly still.

“Count to a hundred,” whispered Sanchez.

They did, slowly. Then Sanchez turned the flashlight on. Still they remained crushed and hidden.

“You okay?” said Sanchez.

“Yes.”

Sanchez could feel Millie trembling. He squeezed out of the recess and stood. “That was close,” he said, awkwardly.

Millie said nothing.

“Funny, eh? He hides the map away from you; you come looking. He's not so dumb.”

Millie still said nothing. She remained under the desk.

“Come on,” said Sanchez. “She's got a big mouth, that woman. She said stupid things. Millie?”

“She's dead,” whispered Millie.

“What do you mean? Stand up.”

“What she said about my mother . . . I'm going to kill her.”

“Hey . . .”

“I'll do it slowly. I'll make sure she suffers. She has just made the biggest mistake of her life. I hate her.”

“Look,” said Sanchez. He knelt down close to her. “Hang on. She jumps to conclusions. She loses a credit card, she thinks she saw your face on a train—”

“Oh, she did,” said Millie. She stood up slowly. “She's right about that. She left her purse on the seat, she was bending down looking for something. I robbed her blind, she was asking for it. I just wish I'd spent more. I wish I'd bankrupted her!”

“Look, she's upset you.”

“No she has not!” Millie wiped her eyes savagely and crossed the room. “She's just made me angry. Oh, this school! An inspection coming up and she's been brought in to sort it all out. She's the boss, isn't she? She was bossing him around and he doesn't have the spine to stand up to her. Right, I'm staying. I'll help her make a few changes, I'll show her manners—I'll show her a
viral infection
. Me
and
Miles when he comes back . . . Hey.”

“What?”

Millie's hands had needed to hold something. They were trembling and, in her wandering, she had settled them on the lid of the photocopier. For no reason, she had opened it. She didn't need a flashlight to see that there was a paper on the glass.

“Sanchez.”

“What? What have you got?”

“They've left the original,” she said. She started to laugh quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“So thick. Look: when they copied the map. They left it on the glass.”

“Millie,” whispered Sanchez. “They may realize. They may come back any minute.”

Millie was laughing still, quietly and bitterly. “We've got what we came for,” she said, sniffing heavily. “And I know I'm about to be searched. And I know what she's doing, so I can plan. I think this has been a successful mission.”

“We're locked in,” said Sanchez.

“Big deal. We climb out of the window. Down the drainpipe.”

“We're on the third floor, Millie.”

“Yes?”

Sanchez said, quietly, “I can't climb anymore. You may have to help me.”

*

They eased the window closed after them and climbed down the drainpipe together, Millie leading. She took Sanchez's weight and helped him to the ground. Sanchez took her hand and shook it. “I think you're very brave,” he said. “I think you're very strong.”

“When do we go down?” said Millie.

Sanchez closed his eyes.

“You promised, Sanchez. We've got a map, there's no excuse now!”

“Friday night. After soccer training.”

The changes to the school were immediate. There were new rules, a new timetable, and a new sense of scrutiny. The medicals were prioritized, just as Miss Hazlitt had promised. The very next night, every orphan was ordered to a dusty, charmless classroom where two neon tubes had been strung from the crumbling ceiling.

The orphans had heard rumors that they were to be examined and they were quivering with excitement. Not one of them had ever been weighed in his life. They hadn't been timed, probed, listened to, or even poked—the thought of anyone paying careful attention to their chests and their tongues filled them with such joy that they couldn't keep still.

Once they'd been through the first series of checks, they simply went to the back of the line and, inventing new names for themselves, managed to go through the whole procedure again. This led to confusion, of course, as Miss Hazlitt couldn't yet put faces to names and had to keep changing her glasses. Her briefcase contained folders full of complex-looking grids that folded out over the table, some of them three meters long; soon the papers were utterly confused. She had been told there were twelve orphans when there appeared to be twenty-one. The roll calls she attempted were chaotic as she couldn't get the children to stay in one place, and Asilah—being as excited as the rest—exerted no control. Miss Hazlitt abandoned the first medical at three o'clock in the morning, looking haggard, and Anjoli
boasted that he had been examined four times with four different hairstyles.

The next night, she started again.

She was clever enough to take photographs and clip them to the orphans' files. She had more equipment this time, including an exciting little flashlight that could shine right into the center of an eyeball. She wheeled in a machine that buzzed and bleeped and was wired to a kind of hair dryer on a tripod. This sat on an orphan's head and was then connected to what might have been a telephone exchange or a very old computer. Soon she was producing charts that rivaled the children's maps of the school. Nobody knew their function, but they spread importantly across the classroom walls, surrounded by numbers, arrows, pins, and cascades of tiny handwriting. She would take pulse rates in the morning, afternoon, and evening. She took blood pressure and heart rates. She measured chests, necks, wrists, waists, kneecaps, nostrils, and earholes, and an orphan discovered he could be weighed and measured several times as he moved from one lesson to the next. The sight of Miss Hazlitt with some new measuring device became as common as the chirp of her cell phone.

*

One lunchtime, a new rumor circulated that Miss Hazlitt was getting ready to distribute medicine.

Now the orphans lived in a part of the world where a family might save for months to buy half a dozen pills. The idea that such things were to be given out free turned them into a squabbling mob. They bolted their food and soon a pushing, scrambling queue had formed by the classroom door. When the door opened, the orphans gasped: there were capsules and powders, pellets and liquids . . . It was a paradise of psychedelic medication, and the orphans were openmouthed.

“What exactly are these things for?” said Professor Worthington. She had heard the excitement and had pushed to the front of the queue.

“It's all in my report,” said Miss Hazlitt.

“I haven't seen a report. I don't know where to get it—what report are you writing?”

“We've got problems, Worthington. I've discovered that most of these children are completely without resistance; we need to get them properly vaccinated.”

“They seem pretty hardy to me.”

“That's the self-serving instinct of the physicist, my dear. If you think I'm going to stand around waiting for measles, or chickenpox, or worse—then you underestimate my sense of duty. If we act now, we can avoid a lot of very messy illnesses, if not the closure of the entire school . . . Israel! Don't you dare touch that! Who are you?”

“Sanjay,” said Sanjay.

“But there's no name on this bottle,” said Professor Worthington. “What's in this?”

“It's all in my report:
Legal Responsibilities to Children of Foreign Origin
. Please put that back, Eric—did you swallow that pill? Where's it gone? Professor, you're distracting me. I have a duty of care, because we have admitted children from the other side of the world, and we have to ensure they are properly inoculated.”