The Exiles

stray lumps of Lego. Phoebe in the bottom bunk dreamed of crocodiles; the ones that lived in the front room behind the settee. There was nothing to be afraid of as long as you poked crisps into their mouths, and there were plenty of crisps left over from tea. Happily in her sleep Phoebe fed the dream crocodiles. Beneath the bedclothes her fingers moved, picking up crisps. Phoebe was safe in the dark; it never frightened her. Sometimes she woke herself up, singing loudly.
    Rachel, in the top bunk because she was the eldest of the two, slept with her back jammed against the wall as far from the edge as possible. It was very uncomfortable. She had fallen asleep with her face resting on her hard brown plait, and it was printing a pattern of twists across her cheek. She did not dream, but all through her sleep hung a nervous distrust of the edge of the bed.
    The dark was thickest and blackest in Ruth and Naomi’s room, where huge old blue velvet curtains hung, smothering the windows. The curtains had faded round the hems to a browny-grey colour, and they held in Ruth and Naomi and the dark like gaolers.
    Ruth lay awake, staring at nothing and thinking. One day, she dreamed, she would spend summer in the countryside, somewhere hilly, not like the Lincolnshire flatness she was accustomed to. She would have two houses – one for herself, and one for her family to come and visit her in – and she would be a famous … a famous … a famous what? Well, famous anyway, and very rich of course …
    ‘Are you awake?’ hissed Naomi through the dark.
    ‘I’m thinking.’
    ‘What about?’
    ‘When I’m rich.’
    ‘Huh!’
    Silence for a while.
    ‘Is that all you’re thinking about?’ asked Naomi eventually.
    ‘One more week of school.’
    ‘Yucky-pucky,’ said Naomi, and fell asleep.
    Mrs Conroy was dreaming of being lost in a strange town. She dreamed the same dream every night, but tonight she was rescued and returned to her safe dark bedroom by Mr Conroy, who seemed (from his kicking) to be dreaming of football.

Chapter Two
    The last week of school began in the usual manner of last weeks of term.
    ‘Can’t we play games?’ wailed all the children at their unfortunate teachers, first thing on Monday morning.
    ‘Certainly not,’ snapped the teachers, ‘you can play all summer. There’s another week left yet. We’re paid to teach, not to baby-sit.’
    Nobody was disappointed by this. It was the traditional reply. The class ringleaders went on to the next question.
    ‘Can we go to the television room and watch Wimbledon?’
    Everybody knew how much the teachers hated missing Wimbledon.
    ‘Can we have a general knowledge quiz?’
    ‘Can we play hangman on the blackboard?’
    Ignoring these questions, the teachers ruthlessly handed out wads of worksheets, and old exam papers. Demanding absolute silence they began the end-of-year frantic counting of marks in registers. Their faces grew twisted and tortured and they held their foreheads in their hands.
    The morning sun shone straight into the third year maths classroom where Ruth sat staring at a list of questions. The windows were open, but no air circulated.
    ‘It smells like a greenhouse full of corpses in here,’ wrote Ruth on her question paper, knowing that it would probably never be marked.
    ‘Speak for yourself,’ wrote her neighbour Wendy, who had naturally egg-yolk coloured hair, tied into a proud and flouncing ponytail.
    ‘I’ll work out the odd numbers and you do the evens and we’ll swop,’ proposed Ruth.
    ‘No,’ scrawled Wendy, writing without looking at the paper to avoid detection.
    There was a jug of sweet peas standing on the teacher’s table. Wendy had brought them in that morning; she often did bring flowers – she was Charity Monitor and it went to her head. The jug was too tall for the flowers and only their heads and a stump of stem showed, poking over the rim. A bee spotted them from outside and flew in to investigate. Nobody noticed him.
    The teacher was counting tiny attendance ticks in the register almost hysterically, using her fingers because fifteen years of teaching mathematics had made her incapable of adding up in her head. The little marks zipped up and down before her eyes until her brain squirmed. When the bee hurled himself against the classroom window and tried to drill his way through the glass she jumped and gave a startled scream. The class looked up in relief, those sitting at desks near the bee squealing