The Exiles

and moving away, purposely knocking books onto the floor. Further away people flapped their question papers and made inane suggestions. The bee buzzed in horror against the invisible glass.
    ‘Somebody put that creature out,’ ordered the teacher loudly.
    Ruth, who never helped; Ruth, inspired by a dream of glory, calmly walked across the no-man’s land that separated the humans and the bee, picked it up loosely in her hand, and dropped it through the open window. The gasp of admiration was even louder than she had hoped.
    ‘End of event,’ said the teacher, refusing to be impressed. ‘Sit down everyone. What’s the matter Wendy?’
    ‘She picked it up in her hand,’ said Wendy, as if to make the fact official.
    ‘Remarkable,’ replied the teacher. ‘Close the windows please, Ruth.’
    ‘We’ll suffocate,’ protested someone.
    ‘I don’t care if you do,’ replied the teacher with unprofessional honesty.
    ‘Weren’t you scared?’ wrote Wendy on Ruth’s answer paper.
    ‘Bees don’t sting me,’ wrote Ruth, grandly and untruthfully, ‘at least they haven’t done yet,’ she thought, and wondered how soon they would.
    By lunchtime the school office had run out of aspirin. A sticky, smothering feeling hung in the classrooms and the corridors, and there didn’t seem to be quite enough oxygen to go round.
    From the school kitchens an appalling smell of boiled meat rippled through the building. No other cooking smell in the world reeks like school dinners brewing on a hot day. Even the sweet, sour, musty smell of the dining room was blotted out by it.

    Irish Stew/Cold Fish Pie
    Steamed Lem. Sponge

    chalked the Head Dinner Lady on the blackboard that stood at the entrance to the dining room.
    ‘Irish Stew?’ asked Naomi in horror, ‘in this heat!’
    ‘There’s Cold Fish Pie. As you can see. If you can read,’ replied the dinner lady.
    ‘Good enough for you,’ she added over her shoulder as she stomped back to her cauldrons. Dinner ladies were entitled to a free school dinner, one of the privileges of the job, but they made no secret of the fact that without exception they all brought packed lunches from home.
    Slowly the school lined up, collected its dinners (‘Couldn’t fancy it myself,’ muttered the dinner ladies hacking stew free from the bottom of saucepans and pouring on mashed potato), poked them drearily around its plates and finally scraped the remains into the pig buckets that stood by the exit, dinner and pudding all mixed up.
    ‘The poor pigs,’ people murmured as they passed. Nearly everyone pitied the pigs. The most squeamish children scraped their plates with their eyes shut, so as not to see the stew fall into the custard. There was always a special dinner lady on duty to supervise the scraping, known as the Bucket Lady. She had been appointed the day after a girl had been lifted in as a birthday joke. Whenever the Bucket Lady glanced queasily away from the mixture somebody tossed in their cutlery, knowing the dinner ladies would be forced to dive for it later. It was only done on days when the food was more than usually appalling, days when the buckets were filled deep. It was safe if one got away fast enough as the buckets could never be left unguarded.
    Naomi caught the Bucket Lady’s eye as her knife tipped off her plate and sank out of sight, so she quickly dumped her dishes and hurried outside into the playing field.
    There were groups of people all over the grass, some huddled in bunches around magazines or comics, some apparently unconscious, some flat on their backs with their blouses rolled up and their skirts hitched high, endeavouring to acquire bikini shaped sun tans. Naomi, looking for an empty patch where she could read in peace, noticed a lump of shrieking girls crouching around some reluctant sacrifice, and was not very surprised to see that the victim was her sister Ruth.
    ‘Is it true,’ asked Egg Yolk Wendy, recognising Naomi, ‘is it true that bees don’t sting your sister?’
    Naomi did not commit herself to any reply. She stood with her hands in her pockets a little outside the circle, wearing an assumed expression of boredom, and hoping that Ruth would not disgrace them both. Inside her pockets her fingers were crossed.
    Ruth was kneeling in front of a clump of clover. Her voice was a bit higher than usual and she was saying, ‘I don’t want to hurt them, lifting them about.’
    ‘You won’t,’ said Wendy, who as Charity Monitor and