Lowewood Academy

“My loneliness is killing mee-ee-ee! I must confess! I still believe - still belie-hee-heeve!” Charlie bellowed into a plastic microphone. The blonde wig sat askew over his flaming mane. He was wearing my skirt (unzipped and barely covering his , thigh-high wooly socks and his own school shirt coquettishly unbuttoned over his hairless, freckled chest. I was following his gyrations with the eye of my little camcorder, one hand pressed to my mouth to keep my laughter from ruining the take.

To my profound relief, Charlie didn’t corpse, taking the song to its conclusion as he danced between the desks. We were safe in the Art classroom, because Mr Compton was known to have taken his form to sketch snowdrops in the woods. Yet, I felt a lot better after the recording was finished, and the singer took a final stance on a desk, his legs arranged in a come-hither position.

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“Are you sure that you can manage all that paint Lydia?” said Mr Compton. “I can give you a hand over to Dashwood with it if you like?”

“It all fits in my bag Sir! I’ll be fine” I said, smiling at Mr Compton.

“Well take it straight over to Dashwood. Otherwise it’s an accident waiting to happen!” he warned me, with a twinkle in his eye.

I loaded two, three-litre tubs of blue paint into my satchel. Dr Higgins, probably whilst on the gin, had said I could do a mural on the wall of the general house meeting room in Dashwood. I was going to do loads of Dashwoodians, past and present on it, but for the moment, I wanted to colour-wash the whole wall blue, to form the background of the picture, which was going to be a summer sky.

Once I got out of the art block, I found Claudia waiting for me.

“You’d better hurry up – we’re going to be late for prep” she said.

“I’ll just take this paint to Dashwood” I replied.

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“Right class, those are the rules and I expect you to follow them to the letter. After all, where would we be if we didn’t have rules?” demanded Mr Simmons, eyeballing the class.

“France, Sir,” we chanted back dutifully.

“Exactly,” he said, his face grim. “Now get on with it.”

I stared down at my canvas. It had been painted purpley-black last lesson to look like the night sky and now that it had dried, it was time to paint on the moon and stars and all that crap. Except we couldn’t just paint them on, oh no – we had to cut out stencils with sharp fuck-off Stanley knife things. Hence the tightening of Lowewood’s already excessively stringent rules.

Jen leaned towards me under the pretence of dipping her paintbrush in my water. “C’mon hon’, spill. I’m getting tired of this whole ‘wall of silence’ thing now.”

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