St Grizzle's School for Girls, Ghosts and Runaway Grannies

by Karen McCombie

  “Girls?” Miss Amethyst says, after a moment or two.

  There’s no answer, apart from giggles, and no sign of the Newts, apart from twenty dangling bare feet.

  “Well, time for a cup of tea, I think…” mutters Miss Amethyst and the screen goes blank.

  “YEAH! WAHHH!” go the Newts as the overhead lights flick back on.

  Lulu is standing by the switch, smiling enthusiastically. I wonder what she’s going to say. Swan has already had a word with her mum about the filming mutiny.

  “What SUPER first attempts, everyone!” she announces. “Really different and interesting takes on the project. But I was just thinking, maybe it would be even better if we all took a step back and left the films with Dani to mull over, since she’s the director.”

  I hear a sharp cough coming from the direction of Swan and instantly realize it translates as “Quick! Now’s your chance to say something positive!”.

  “Um, yes! I’d love to watch the films again—”

  Another sharp cough.

  “—with my production team of Swan and Zed,” I add quickly, “and see how we might use all your skills in the final version. If, er, that’s OK.”

  “Well, that sounds more than OK to me!” Lulu enthuses. “How about it, everyone?”

  There’s a moment’s silence, where I half expect someone to mutter “Nah!” out loud. But there are no “Nah”s. There’s only a whole lot of jumbled “Yeah!”s, “OK!”s and “Whee!”s.

  “Good stuff,” says Lulu. “Well, what an eventful day it’s been. So how about we all get ourselves up to bed early, eh, girls? And speaking of days, don’t forget, tomorrow’s a shiny new one!”

  It doesn’t take long for everyone to disappear. Lulu, Toshio and Zed go off to their ground-floor rooms, with Twinkle tip-tapping after Zed, since she sleeps in a snuffly pile next to his bed.

  Mademoiselle Fabienne and Miss Amethyst tipetty-tap up to their no-doubt fragrant rooms at the top of the house, as all of us St Grizzle girls go to our respective dorms on the first floor.

  While Swan glides off to brush her teeth, I head to Fungi dorm, where I wriggle into my PJs and sigh. My sighs are for a jumble of reasons…

  • happy sighs, cos no one is cross with me being in charge of the filming any more

  • glum sighs, cos I have NO fab ideas for the filming, and

  • confused sighs, cos I somehow got my head stuck inside the PJ top for a minute there.

  “Well, whoo for me – my plan worked,” says Swan coming into the dorm just as I wriggle my head free. “You’re back in control, Dani!”

  “Yeah, but back in control of what?” I reply as I lean on the windowsill and stare out at the dark woods beyond the garden. “Tomorrow’s Tuesday already, which doesn’t exactly give us much time to come up with something.”

  “Didn’t you listen to my mum? Tomorrow’s a shiny new day,” Swan says with an unbothered yawn. “We’ll figure something out. Night!”

  “Night,” I reply.

  As Swan pings out the dorm light, I watch the stars outside ping on.

  I suddenly wish I could speak to Granny Viv… In the excitement of the evening, I hadn’t tried to call her and she was obviously too busy with her broken-down Mini woes to get back to me.

  But I bet Granny Viv would know what to do for the film project – she’s full of excellent ideas. Once, she offered herself when I was stuck for a show-and-tell idea at school. Everyone was well impressed that a gran could still do the splits. And when I didn’t have a clue what to wear to Polly Brown’s fancy-dress party, Granny Viv went and bought me a giant rubber ring, superglued some marshmallows to it and turned me into a Krispy Kreme doughnut. I won second prize.

  I sigh (again) as another wibbly wiggle of homesickness hits me.

  Off in the distance, a faraway dog “ARF! ARF! ARF!”s and I almost imagine it’s Downboy…

  “Due to unforeseen circumstances, our school timetable this week will be ‘fluid’,” Lulu announced at breakfast the next day.

  I wasn’t totally sure what that meant, apart from “wet”, so I had to check with Swan.

  “Lulu’s trying to say that we won’t stick exactly to the usual classes,” she’d explained. “I bet we’ll be doing more ‘Life Skills’ lessons than usual!”

  Only I didn’t totally get that either.

  “I mean, we’re all going to do more housework and cooking, till Lulu finds a new Mrs Hedges,” Swan spelt out.

  So today, Tuesday, is a big laundry day. The Newts have been given the job of stripping all the beds, though when I passed their dorm five minutes ago, that seemed to consist of them getting inside the empty duvets covers and squidging around on the floor, pretending to be slugs.

  Downstairs in the utility room off the kitchen, the triplets are sorting out the washing into “whites”, “coloureds” and “darks”, which is taking ages – they’re holding up one T-shirt/ pillowcase/sock at a time and then having an intense, whispered conversation about it till they make up their minds which of the three piles to put it in. This might take till next Tuesday to finish.

  Presuming the triplets get a move on, it’ll then be the Conkers’ turn to take over once the wash has finished. They’ll hang everything out, since they’re tall enough to reach the washing line without standing on a box.

  Once school’s officially over, Miss Amethyst and Mademoiselle Fabienne are going to do the ironing – I heard them earlier discussing playlists and biscuit choices for the task ahead.

  Lastly me, Swan and Zed will put the laundry away before tea and make all the beds. It’s our job to do that since we’re the oldest and have more patience than the younger ones. They’ll be bored of this particular “Life Skill” lesson by then and want to practise dance moves they saw on YouTube (Conkers), braid each other’s hair in new and inventive ways (Otters) and scamper off to the tree house in the clearing in the woods to play Alien Vampire Cavemen or something (Newts).

  But for now, with our current “fluid” timetable, we three Fungi have been allowed time out to investigate locations for the Why We Love Where We Live project.

  Me and Swan are standing by the tree house and campfire pit, just about to set off into the woods. Zed is here, too, but he won’t be coming with us cos the knobbly-bobbly tree roots in the woods make trekking in a wheelchair kind of tricky. (Boo.)

  He’s still been very helpful, though, and has

  1) come up with a cool suggestion and

  2) drawn us a map to find it.

  “Look – there it is!” Zed announces, pointing at a scribbled-on piece of paper he’s holding up to me and Swan. “See?”

  “Oo-arrr!” I growl, doing my best pirate impersonation and making Swan snort.

  I can’t help it – Zed’s just handed us something that looks like a treasure map, complete with dotted lines and an X marks the spot.

  Only we’re not hunting for treasure … we’re looking for a fairy ring.

  Or at least what’s called a fairy ring. When I was teeny, I always imagined it to be just like it sounded – a gathering of dinky fairies, skipping and whee!-ing in a circle. I remember being totally disappointed when someone told me it was just a bunch of mushrooms, which sit there in a ring not even dancing a little bit.

  But now I’m older, and it sounds like it might be quite a special phenomenon. Also, I’m desperate.

  Anyway, lying in bed last night, Zed remembered that Maryam and Maisie – two ex-pupils from when St Grizzle’s was all straw hats and strict uniform – once came back to the school saying they’d found a perfect fairy ring, and described to him where it was.

  “Will you take a photo to show me?” he asks me and Swan.

  “Definitely, promise,” I say, patting my hoodie pocket where my phone is.

  “Yeah, and we’ll take a picture of the treasure chest and all the swag, too,” Swan adds to my pirate joke, as she snatches up the map.

  “Very funny,” Zed says wryly.

  �
��Thank you, I know I am,” says Swan and starts padding off through the undergrowth, with a quick order to Twinkle shouted over her shoulder.

  “Oi, heel!”

  Twinkle has been at the top of the ramp leading up to the tree house (which we built for Zed), happily headbutting the door. I don’t know what’s got her so excited – there’s only some cushions and a spider or three in there.

  It takes another, LOUDER “Oi, heel!” before she finally trip-traps down the ramp and skips over to join us.

  “So, I reckon we’ll need about five locations,” I say as we follow the route Zed sketched and head north-east-ish, which should bring us to a foresters’ track in a bit. Once we get there, we’ll check the map again.

  “Well, yeah, if that’s how many Spencer and his lot are doing, we need to do the same,” says Swan, before blowing a pink bubble. “Though maybe we should do MORE than them!”

  “But we haven’t even definitely got one yet,” I remind her, before competitiveness blanks out her common sense. “We don’t know if the mushrooms will still be th—”

  Ding-a-ling-a-ling!

  My mobile trills into life and, after a quick scrabble, I grab it out of my pocket and see that Granny Viv is calling.

  “Hello, Dani, darling!” she says. “How’s my favourite grandaughter?”

  “Hi, Granny Viv!” I say, beaming. “It’s so nice to hear your voice properly.”

  “And it’s so nice to hear yours! Ooh, I feel like scooping you up and giving you a great big hug right now…”

  I grin, and feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

  “Well, that would be lovely but it’s kind of impossible,” I say, “since you’re at home and I’m all the way away at St Grizzle’s.”

  “Hmm… Yes, I suppose you’re right,” muttered Granny Viv, sounding disappointed. “Anyway, sorry it’s taken an age to get back to you. Everything got complicated last night. I was having these endless ping-pong phone conversations with Eric.”

  Eric is a very good friend of Granny Viv’s and an old punk. When he’s not being an antique punk and gigging, singing shouty songs, he fixes cars.

  “Did he sort your engine?” I ask.

  “No … he wasn’t around, darling. But he kept suggesting things for me to try. Sadly none of them worked, including begging the engine to start, pretty please!”

  I smile, happy to hear Granny Viv joking around.

  “But what are you up to, sweetheart?” she asks me.

  “Well, I should be in normal lessons but the classes have all got changed around cos of a project,” I say, then frown as something occurs to me. “So what are you doing phoning me now?”

  “Ah … let’s call it a grandmother’s intuition,” she says after a pause, which translates as “Oops, I didn’t notice the time”. “What ARE you doing, if you’re not in normal lessons, then?”

  “Me and Swan are in the woods that back on to the school grounds,” I tell her as I watch Twinkle’s white bum and twitchy tail bob ahead of us. “Our project is to make a film about where we live so we’re having a mooch around to see if we can find something interesting.”

  “Ooh, lovely! Woods are magical places,” Granny Viv enthuses. “I’m sure you’ll find some gorgeous spots, like rocky outcrops and little waterfalls, and old carvings people did in tree bark years ago and maybe a fairy ring, since … well, since they often grow on forest floors.”

  “Wow! A fairy ring is exactly what we’re looking for!” I say excitedly. “We heard that there’s one somewhere near—”

  “Dani! C’mere!” Swan calls out.

  She’s hurried ahead after Twinkle and it looks as if she’s found something. Is it the fairy ring already? But we haven’t come across the foresters’ track yet… Unless we didn’t figure out the map properly and have come a different way.

  I’d better catch Swan up. It would be a disaster if the fairy ring is amazing and then Twinkle eats it before we get a chance to film anything.

  “What’s your friend shouting?” asks Granny Viv.

  “She’s just calling for me,” I say, my voice going juddery as I start bobbing under branches and weaving over roots. “I think she might have found the fairy ring.”

  “I’d better let you go then,” I hear Granny Viv say wistfully. “Will you call me later and let me know how you’re getting on, Dani? It all sounds very exciting.”

  “Sure – I’ll ping you a photo if we find anything cool,” I hurriedly promise her. “Bye!”

  I catch sight of Swan’s sheeny-shiny long hair just up ahead and hurry towards her with a big ball of giddy in my chest.

  Till she turns round and I see that she’s not looking exactly giddy, and has her finger held to her lips.

  “What is it?” I hiss as I catch her up.

  Swan says nothing but just points.

  There, up ahead, is the foresters’ track – and parked across it is a beat-up old camper van.

  “So? What about it?” I say, talking louder. It’s not as if we’re looking at something sinister, like a WWII tank or a spy’s car with blacked-out windows or a vintage hearse or something. If camper vans could look friendly, then this one does. It’s got flower stickers around the headlights and is painted purple.

  “What’s it doing here?” Swan insists on whispering as we take a few, tentative steps forward.

  “Maybe the driver’s taking their dog for a walk in the forest?” I suggest, since people do like walking in forests, particularly with their dogs. It’s not exactly rocket science.

  “Yeah, and the driver’s making themselves totally at home. Look – there’s washing hanging up!”

  OK, now that IS a bit odd, I think, looking at the towel and jeans dangling between two nearby trees.

  “They’ve even got a camping stove,” hisses Swan.

  I glance at the ground and, sure enough, there’s a camping stove by the door of the camper van, complete with a small silver pot containing what looks like baked beans. A plate’s been left beside it, which Twinkle is licking so hard she’s pushing it under the van.

  “And they must’ve been here like, really recently,” hisses Swan.

  “How can you be so sure, Detective Swan?” I lightheartedly ask my friend.

  “There’s still steam coming out of the pot on the stove.”

  I study the wisps of hot air rising for about half a second and then all the hairs rise up on my arms.

  It’s like me and Swan (and Twinkle) are Goldilocks(es) and three camper-van-driving bears are about to crash through the trees and come after us at any second.

  I turn to look at Swan and she turns to look at me.

  We have the same word on the tip of our tongues, I’m sure, and it’s not porridge.

  “RUN!”

  We don’t stop till we flop breathless on the back lawn, hearts pounding.

  Lulu is there and frowns at me and Swan, wondering what’s going on.

  But she finds it impossible to ask us, since a cluster of eight-year-olds are bouncing around her like Tiggers, jabbering at loud volume.

  Lulu is trying desperately to calm and shush them but they have tipped over the edge of reason and there doesn’t seem to be any way to haul them back to normality, apart from chucking a bucket of cold water over them.

  I spot concerned faces at the windows – Conkers, Otters, Zed and the teachers, all wondering what on earth is going on.

  “Girls! QUIETEN DOWN!” Lulu roars, to absolutely no effect.

  And then I notice Toshio ambling out of the back door, his headphones round his neck, the ever-present polite smile on his face.

  In his hand is a megaphone. As he gets closer to the mayhem, he raises it to his mouth.

  “SHUT UP NOW, PLEASE! AND THANK YOU VERY MUCH!”

  It does the trick. The Newts are so stunned by Toshio’s blaring voice that they freeze – and look at the megaphone longingly. I hope Toshio goes back into the office and locks it up somewhere they can’t get a hold of it, or life – with a
mplified Newts – could become unbearable.

  “Excellent, Toshio,” says Lulu. “I really appreciate your ingenuity.”

  Toshio smiles and nods. I don’t think he understood a word Lulu said, apart from “Toshio”, but he can certainly tell that…

  1) Lulu is pleased, and

  2) what he did worked.

  “Right!” Lulu says, addressing the Newts again, now they’ve stopped going off like fireworks. “Can just one of you tell me what’s wrong? Blossom?”

  I swap glances with Swan. What’s going on around here? We’ve both been spooked by someone living in the woods, and now the Newts have been spooked by something, too.

  Is it the same thing?

  The same someone?

  “Lulu!” screeches Blossom, bouncing so much that the small twigs that seem permanently lodged in her hair fall right out. “There is a WITCH LIVING IN OUR TREE HOUSE!”

  Me and Swan glance at each other and our shoulders sink in unison.

  We are NOT thinking about the same thing.

  The Newts are lovely but they are lovely twits, and have just dreamed up something ridiculous.

  Actually, maybe me and Swan sort of dreamed up something ridiculous, too. Why did we panic so much at the sight of an empty pot of beans and a towel left out to dry?

  “There’s a witch living in the tree house?” says Lulu, raising her eyebrows. “Well, she has VERY good taste. It’s an extremely well-built and good-looking tree house.”

  She glances over at us, still flumped on the grass. She’s looking at Swan in particular, cos it was Swan who spray-painted the most amazing black crow in flight on the front of the tree house.

  Though I think Lulu is also glancing over to check we’re OK and letting us know that she’ll come to us asap after she’s dealt with the … er … “witch” issue.

  “So, Blossom, what did this witch person look like?” asks Lulu.

  Behind her, Zed is rolling his way out of the back door of the house, followed by a raggletaggle bunch of curious Conkers and Otters plus Miss Amethyst and Mademoiselle Fabienne.