15. What Might That Be Like?
Exam fever grips the school during Briar’s second week.
This is confusing, at first - Briar’s exams were over back in June, and students at Temple are required to sit the same papers, if they intend to pursue higher education - until Westby explains that this is a second set of thaumaturgical exams, split into theoretical papers and physical demonstrations.
It’s slightly hard to make out what he’s saying, because he’s lying face down on his bed as he speaks.
‘Think of the champagne breakfast,’ Tate says comfortingly, from where he’s hunched over his own revision at Miller’s desk. To Briar: ‘They put it on for us in the great hall when exams are done.’
‘I can have champagne any time, Adams. I can’t get these brief snatches of my youth back.’
Briar, still reeling from the concept of a school-sanctioned champagne breakfast, is confused. ‘But . . . you love studying.’
‘Terrible simplification. I don’t love studying, I love the genuine pursuit of knowledge. Studying to pass arbitrary exams that only mean something to those vultures on the board of governors is pointless.’
Tate just shakes his head. It’s Tuesday afternoon, tea time, when scholars are encouraged to socialise together while they eat scones in their rooms. On the way down from the attic, Briar spotted harried pips and first-years dashing about with tea trays, jumping to do the older scholars’ bidding.
One boy had spilled an entire, piping hot pot of Earl Grey on the carpet, dark splashes on his polyester school trousers and tears brimming in his eyes.
Briar has ostensibly come to West’s room to be filled in on the rest of the Trials, but has so far been twiddling their thumbs and skimming a subscription magazine of Miller’s about steam railways.
Eventually Westby peels himself off the duvet and says, ‘Jones, let’s party,’ and Briar follows him as he limps out of the dorms and out into the grounds, leaning on his stick.
There’s a large pond over on the east side of campus, with a filmy jetty and a fluorescent orange life ring standing guard on a pole, indicating occasional sporting use.
Today a few scholars are lounging on its banks as if sunning themselves on some far-flung beach, heedless of the actual lacklustre British weather.
‘So first, there’s the Baptism,’ Westby says, as they settle themselves on a bench.
‘You know how that goes. I still don’t like having my head submerged in water to this day.
Next is usually the Blessing. You have to stand completely still for five minutes, and the other pips can do anything they like to you. No rules.’
‘Anything?’
Westby winces. ‘Anything.’
‘But what if they decide to be . . . nice?’
‘They do unto others exactly what they’re afraid will be done unto them.
If you hold back and then your despotic colleague kicks the living shit out of you, you’d feel hard done by, wouldn’t you?
If you’re as horrid as possible, you can’t lose.
Weeds a few out early, that one. I think Adams nearly went home, and I can hardly blame him. ’
‘Why?’ Briar asks.
Westby adjusts his crested cufflinks. ‘Children,’ he says vaguely, ‘are highly imaginative creatures. The third Trial is sort of ongoing. It’s called the Good Samaritan, and it involves complete and utter servitude.
Practice for entering first year. You know, they used to call it fagging. I’m amazed that they’ve stopped.’
Briar watches a group of young scholars mucking about on the far shore of the water. One of them splashes the other; in response, the splashed boy bodily shoves the other so hard that he stumbles and goes under.
‘Then there’s Receiving the Host. Watson puked for hours afterwards, don’t even try to talk to her about it or she’ll punish you thoroughly.
After that . . . the Betrayal. That’s purely psychological.
Designed to make the pips turn on each other, so they know there’s nobody they can truly trust. And finally, they make you run the Gauntlet.
Three nights without sleep, then an obstacle course through the woods, absolutely loaded with traps. ’
‘Wait, hold on,’ Briar says, trying to keep track of all this. They’re going to write it down in the Folder later. ‘What’s the Betrayal?’
‘Differs slightly every year. When I was a pip, they called what seemed to be an emergency meeting to say that someone from the incoming class had sent photos of the school to some rag of a newspaper. Everyone was punished, collectively, until people started to fold and dob each other in. Of course, there was no leak.’ Westby sighs.
‘You know, I don’t like talking about all this.
’ He says it as if it’s somehow Briar’s fault.
‘Um. Sorry?’
‘I blame Watson for dragging you into it. Do you think your parents would mind terribly if you died?’
It’s a blinder of a non sequitur. Briar blinks back at him, lost for words, until he nods and says, ‘Mmm. Shame.’
‘Come on. Be serious.’
‘I am being serious,’ Westby says tersely.
The boy on the other side of the pond has exited, sopping and furious, and dripped away while the others collapse into prolonged hysterics.
‘You think we’re all flouncing around Malory Towers having a rum old time, but underestimating this place would be a grave mistake.
Look.’ He lowers his voice, even though there’s nobody at all within earshot.
‘When I was in second year, I was coming back late from the library the night they ran the Gauntlet. That’s the sixth Trial, in the woods.
A pip came wandering out of the trees, happy as anything, but there was something .
. . odd about him, about the way he was touching his face.
I tried to ignore him, but he walked right past me. He was eating a rat.’
Briar frowns. ‘He . . . what?’
‘A rat, Jones. Stuffing it in his mouth like a raspberry croissant. It was alive.’ Briar has never actually felt their stomach turn before, but now it flips and nausea rushes up their throat.
‘Alive and putting up a good fight. It was — Mmm, actually, I can’t talk about it, or I won’t eat for a week. Makes my throat feel funny.’
‘But did he . . . ?’ So many questions. Briar isn’t sure they actually want to hear the answers. ‘Was he okay?’
‘The rat?’
‘No. The pip.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Jones, of course not. He was all . . . bitten up. Rat had taken chunks out of him. They patched him up at the hospital, God knows what it said on his paperwork, but then he . . . he didn’t come back.’
‘He dropped out?’
‘No,’ Westby says, matter of fact, rummaging in his pocket and producing a squashed cling-wrapped sandwich. ‘He killed himself.’
‘What? Fuck. God.’ Briar thinks of the pips running around campus with their anxious expressions and too-shiny shoes.
The red-faced boy they’d walked past this morning, struggling to carry a laden tea tray up the stairs, refusing Briar’s mimed offer of help with a frightened shake of his head.
They’re just children. Technically most of the scholars are, but the pips are true babies.
The wound on their face throbs, hot and tight.
‘You don’t know the half of it, and nor do I, because a good Templetonian always covers his tracks.
I’m sure he wasn’t the first death on the books here, and he won’t be the last. Imagine how much a scholar’s worth - financially, socially, some of these people are in line to the throne, even if they’re a few hundred names down the list - and know that if they’re not safe, you’re practically a freebie. ’
‘What if people just say no? Accept their place here but don’t turn up to the Trials?’
Westby has pushed through his revulsion to start eating his sandwich, thick wedges of ham smeared with radioactive mustard, picking out wilted sprigs of parsley with the kind of forensic intensity somebody might employ while excavating the bones of a once-lost civilisation.
‘An administrative error is discovered. Their place at Temple is revoked, effective immediately.’
‘Really?’
‘I don’t joke about administrative errors. Nor should anyone.’
Briar leans back, one arm trailing down the back of the bench, the wood scratchy and warm against their skin. ‘So . . . get hazed or get out.’
‘If you refuse to engage in our ancient traditions, you’re not up to snuff, I’m afraid. Only those willing to vomit on their own trousers or hand-wash someone else’s jizzy socks will be worthy of a seat in government. God, who the hell even likes parsley? Sad little soap leaves.’
‘Well, what if Mons refused to oversee the Trials?’
Westby laughs bitterly, a blob of mustard on his lower lip.
‘Refuse? Their entire ecosystem demands that the Trials happen. They live to serve the board, reap the rewards, then half of them become the board. You’re so sweet, Jones, it’s like trying to explain the art of war to that soft butch mouse, in the dungarees.
’ When Briar looks confused: ‘You know. Cartoon. With the bow. Japanese.’
It still takes Briar a moment. ‘Hello Kitty?’
‘Hello Kitty, goodbye, kitty. I have to go to History. Check the board tonight so I don’t have to limp all the way up to your quarters.’
He’s referring to a crumbling corkboard nailed up behind the door in the Eden common room; before the invention of Bluetooth, the primary way to leave messages for other scholars was to scribble something on a scrap of paper and pin it there, and scholars still use it when other methods fail.
Most of the notes say things like, Sam S, Elijah called you or someone’s mum keeps calling and asking for Zeus but I told her nobody here has a name as stupid as Zeus.
Zeus, call your mum. Katie the Dame weeds the board every day to remove the most creative swearing.
At six, tired and freshly showered, Briar comes downstairs and finds a note from Westby there that just says, Briar – my room.