Lawrence High Jinx

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31728-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Jinx Slater is delighted to have reached the giddy heights of the lower sixth at Stagmount, England's most exclusive school for girls. Her ground floor window affords her an excellent view of Brighton's bright lights, and Jinx is a girl with escape on her mind and a miniature screw driver kit in her tuckbox. Liberty Latiffe, Jinx's best friend and all round perfect partner in crime, is not at all worried about being caught out by her very strict father. Nor are the rest of the girls. Until, that is, Stella Fox - Stagmount's newest new girl - arrives on the scene, determined to make her mark.

Sara Lawrence attended Rodean School, which was founded by her relatives. Following her MA she became a journalist, working as a staff writer at the Times and the Daily Mail. Jinxed is the sequel to High Jinx.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lawrence, Sara

Leseproben

Jinx unscrewed the safety catch on her double-glazed window and giggled to herself as it swung wide open. The whole process had taken less than two minutes – whichever cowboy had put these in should be taken outside, blindfolded and made to take his chances with the scary security man’s lion-sized Alsatian.

Jinx, who spent an inordinate amount of time daydreaming up new reality TV formats, was jolted out of her Man Fights Dog: Who Wins? reverie as Liberty came crashing through the door, clutching handfuls of wispy tops, her face so sparkly it looked like she’d come off worst in a fight with a giant glitter machine.

Liberty dumped the twinkling mound of fabric on Jinx’s bed, gestured vaguely towards it and began rummaging through Jinx’s dirty laundry basket.

‘Liberty! That’s all dirty. Leave it alone for God’s sake – why don’t you wear one of these?’ Despite having been best friends with Liberty for years, Jinx never failed to be impressed by her pal’s seemingly limitless wardrobe. Jinx held up a shimmering grey vest covered in tiny sequins and checked the label. ‘Stella fucking McCartney? Jesus, Lib, you’ve kept this one quiet. It’s gorgeous.’

Liberty was busy applying the remains of Jinx’s Frizz-Ease to the ends of her long – and always absolutely frizz free – dark locks. ‘Oh, Dad bought it for me in Riyadh last year. I’ve never worn it. You have it if you like.’

Jinx also never failed to be amazed that Liberty’s terrifying father, despite his massive and oft-professed devotion to Islam, would buy these clothes for his daughter; not seeming to see anything incongruous in the fact that the majority of the girls who bought bags and bags full of stuff from the smart parades of designer shops staffed exclusively by men were forced to hide them underneath an oppressive burkha. Liberty loved her dad, but went home to Riyadh as little as possible. She spent most weekends and half terms with Jinx, and usually accompanied the Slater family on holiday.

The Slaters loved Liberty. The first time she’d come to stay, two weeks after the girls had started at Stagmount on their first official exeat weekend, Caroline and Martin had warmed to the beautiful and charming girl who offered to help clear up after their characteristically huge Sunday roast, but had to be shown how to load and operate the dishwasher first.

And Liberty loved the Slaters. She’d never really experienced family life like it. At her dad’s house in Riyadh, there were too many servants to mention; a veritable army of people to wash, cook, clean, drive, garden, everything.

At Jinx’s rambling house in the Hampshire countryside there were dogs, cats, brothers, sisters and numerous friends and relatives constantly dropping in to join the jostle for space and attention. Whatever it was it certainly wasn’t quiet, but the noise seemed to affirm the place’s inherent warmth.

The chintzy sofas thick with dog and cat hair, the colourful, threadbare rugs that covered the red stone of the kitchen floor and the almost too hot to touch Aga were truly a world away from the white lines and black marble floors of the oppressively silent mansion on the outskirts of the oppressively silent city of Riyadh.

Liberty looked stunning in the glittery Stella McCartney top – which Jinx insisted she wear – above indigo Levi’s and bright-white trainers, and the pair grinned at each other’s self-satisfied reflections in Jinx’s dirty mirror as they simultaneously applied a last minute slick of lip-gloss.

‘How your dad, Lib?’ Jinx asked as she blotted her lips with a tissue. ‘You’ve hardly told me anything about your holidays.’

‘Much the same – I do love him but you know what he’s like,’ Liberty sighed as she carefully drew a fine line of glittery silver eye shadow underneath her lower lashes. ‘We were getting on fine until he caught me waxing my bikini line by the pool.’

‘What?’ Jinx burst out laughing. ‘Why the hell were you doing it by the pool? What’s wrong with using the bloody bathroom? I bet the poor man had the shock of his life.’

‘Yeah, well, it was a hot day and I didn’t want to miss any rays. And if anyone had the shock of their life it was me, when he came running round the corner ranting and raving and shaking his fist about “common prostitutes”, all that “you’re no daughter of mine” crap and his boring bloody stuck record stuff about taking me away from Stagmount.’

‘But …’ Jinx was always shocked by the things Liberty’s dad said to her. She knew damn well that whatever she might do wrong – and there was plenty – her dad would never call her stuff like that.

‘I know, I know,’ Liberty groaned, ‘he refused to speak to me for two weeks and wouldn’t let me out of the house. Not that there’s anywhere to there anyway, but it totally sucked. Anyway, he’s over it now and I can’t be bothered to think about it – I want to have fun tonight. Let’s go!’

As Jinx returned the screwdriver to her tuck box and put the tiny window screws in the pink ceramic pot on her desk for safekeeping – although she liked to go illegally, she didn’t much fancy anyone uninvited getting the same way – Liberty balanced precariously on the windowsill before lowering herself the couple of feet to the cigarette-butt-strewn grass below. God, the fight they’d put up to get these rooms had been so, worth it.

Liberty was rooting in the depths of her tan Mulberry Roxanne bag for her mobile phone as Jinx carefully placed her battered copy of – set texts did have their uses – between the window and the frame, before turning off the strip light and swinging her legs over to join her pal.

She hated that light – made the place look like a bloody prison cell. Not that she’d ever been in either a prison or a cell you understand, but she an avid reader of the ’s crime pages and now considered herself an expert on all aspects of incarceration at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. She’d tried draping a sarong over it, but it had caught fire and Mr Morris, Stagmount’s geography teacher and head of the lower sixth form house, had begged Jinx to leave it be.

She and Liberty liked Mr Morris a great deal, all the girls did. He was an incorrigible old flirt who encouraged them to call him ‘Brian’, but he let them smoke in his garage so long as they swept up the butts on a weekly basis, and allowed his girls to keep alcohol – wine and beer, only girls! – in their rooms.

Best of all, as far as house rules were concerned, he was remarkably laissez-faire about them tripping off into Brighton every evening so long as they were back by 10.30 p.m. in the week, and 11.30 at weekends. Which, considering most of the pubs they loved shut at this time anyway, was more than reasonable of old Brian and certainly left the girls well disposed towards him and therefore less inclined to break the rules.

Apart from tonight of course. But as far as Jinx and Liberty were concerned, it was a rule that just the two of them go out – illegally – in the first week of term, and this bore no reflection on Mr M or his relatively easy to keep rules. Indeed, if all went to plan, and there was no reason to think it would not, he would be none the wiser.

Liberty was still rummaging about as the two began walking round the back of the white painted lower sixth house and towards the perimeter fence. A muffled ‘Yesss’ escaped Liberty’s lips as her right hand emerged from the bag clutching her perennially elusive mobile.

As always, Liberty waited until they were halfway across the dark lacrosse pitch closest to the road before ringing for a taxi. Also as always, where these late night escapades were concerned, she asked that the driver meet them just outside the school’s huge ornate main gates.

They bent low to the ground as they traversed the side of the hockey pitch closest to the real world, but stood up straight again as they reached the cover of the line of wind-bent trees that shielded their progress from any prying eyes watching from the school.

The escapees grinned smugly and gave each other a congratulatory high five as they clocked freedom, waiting patiently in his familiar green and white striped car like the benign fifth member of Dürer’s

The driver winked at the girls in his rear-view mirror as he asked them where they wanted to go. Brighton taxi drivers were used to picking up Stagmount’s finest at odd times and places, and would no sooner squeal on their charges than they would change lanes without indicating.

Hell, they should be used to ferrying the girls about. They’d been at it since 1865, when the formidable Tanner sisters had founded Stagmount. Whilst education for upper- and middle-class boys in the nineteenth century was seen as a passport to success in public and professional life, girls were educated for the drawing room, if at all. In one of the earliest feminist experiments, these three bluestockings intended their charges to have the same educational opportunities as boys, and it was still going strong.

Huge oil portraits of the three hung in the imposing library; wherever you stood or sat in that grand,...