Wicked! Read Online Free PDF Page A

she won’t be. Where are the playing fields?’
    ‘Don’t have any: they were sold off by the council. The rest of the land is on too much of a slope and you can’t swing a gerbil in the playground.’
    The playground was indeed awful: a square of tarmac surrounded by broken rusty railings with no basketball nets and two overhanging sycamores, whose leaves, curling and covered in sinister black spots, provided the only shade.
    Everything had deteriorated since Janna’s interview in May. A lower-angled sun revealed damp patches and peeling plaster in every classroom. The once lovely garden and parkland were choked with thistles and nettles. Pale phlox and red-hot pokers were broken or bent double by bindweed which seemed to symbolize the red tape threatening to strangle Janna’s hopes. An in-tray of forms to be filled in nearly hit the ceiling.
    The GCSE results out in late August had dropped to four per cent of the pupils gaining A–C grades in five subjects. Only these gave Larks points in the league tables, and only Cara Sharpe and Phil Pierce, the gentle head of science who’d met Janna at the station, had got most of their children through.
    ‘Phil’s a good bloke,’ said Wally, ‘firm, but very fair. He’s always online to answer pupils’ homework questions. The kids love him.’
    ‘Why’s he still here?’ asked Janna gloomily.
    ‘He’s very loyal. Trouble with kids here, they leave at sixteen so they don’t have to come back and face the music of terrible GCSE results.’
    ‘Where do they go on to?’
    ‘The dole queue or the nick.’
    Janna kicked off by tackling her office, which was full of the presence of Mike Pitts, who’d done her job for the spring and summer terms and who clearly hadn’t wanted people to follow his movements. The door had a security lock and a heavy dark blind pulled down over the big window hiding a view over the playground to houses, the River Fleet and grey-green woods beyond.
    Janna insisted a doubtful Wally remove both lock and blind.
    ‘I want to be accessible to both children and staff.’
    Shaking his head, Wally got out his screwdriver.
‘It really ain’t surprising [he sang in a rich baritone],
That we’re rising, rising, rising,
Soon we’ll reach Division One.
Premier, Wembley, here we come.’
     
    ‘What’s that song?’ demanded Janna.
    ‘Larkminster Rovers’s battle hymn. We got to the second division last season. Now we’ve got to stay there.’
‘Larks is going up the league tables too [sang Janna],
Soon we’ll reach Division One.
Premier, Wembley, here we come.’
     
    Wally nearly dropped his screwdriver as her sweet soaring voice rattled the window panes.
    Having scraped scented candle wax off the furniture and scrubbed the room from top to toe, Janna and Wally painted her office white, hung cherry-red curtains and laid rush matting on the floor.
    ‘I need a settee and a couple of armchairs so people can relax when they come in here.’
    ‘The kids’ll trash them, the settee’ll be an incitement to rape or teachers grumbling and those white walls won’t last a minute,’ sighed Wally.
    ‘Then we’ll cover them with pictures.’
    Up went Desiderata and Hold the Dream embroidered by Janna’s Auntie Glad, followed by big photographs of Wharfedale, Fountains Abbey and Stew’s photograph of all the children and teachers at Redfords waving goodbye in front of a square grey school building.
    On a side table Janna put Stew’s Staffordshire cow and a big bunch of Michaelmas daisies and late roses rescued from Larks’s flower beds.
    ‘My goodness, you have been working hard,’ mocked Rowan Merton when she looked in a week before term started.
    As a working wife and mother with photographs of her husband and two little girls all over her office, on the door of which was printed ‘Assistant to the Head’, Rowan prided herself on juggling. She had wound Mike Pitts round her little finger and clearly didn’t fancy extending herself for a