painting, but knocking out and replacing the windows had left a mess inside and out. The bare plaster outside had to be sanded, sealed and painted, while the area around the windows on the inside needed new lining paper and fresh paint.
The new interior paint wouldn’t match older faded paint, so Zara had decided that it was the ideal opportunity to redecorate the entire building. Rather than the security risk of bringing decorators on to campus, the work was being done by cherubs on punishment duty under supervision of the three-man building maintenance team. Older kids like James and Kerry worked outside and did trickier indoor tasks like wallpapering. Younger miscreants were given emulsion paint and rollers to do the more straightforward painting indoors.
When lessons turned out in the afternoon, more than a dozen kids who were on punishment donned blue overalls and put in two or three hours before they washed up and went for a late dinner.
‘Missed a bit,’ James said to Kerry, as he walked along the scaffold two floors up. She sat on the edge of a wooden board, trainers dangling as she painted a window ledge.
‘Do I give a damn?’ Kerry growled. ‘Two months of this crap, just for busting up a head case … Why aren’t you working anyway? Every time I look you’re wandering up and down while everyone else is grafting.’
James pointed inside. ‘I did some papering, then one of the red shirts knocked her roller tray off the ladder. Fortunately it landed on a plastic sheet, but she got all upset and I had to help her clean up.’
‘The red shirts are a waste of space,’ Kerry tutted. ‘We spend more time cleaning up their messes than they do useful work.’
‘Must admit I kind of like it up here,’ James said, as he grabbed a metal pole above his head and swung from side to side. ‘Painting’s really mellow. It’s just you and the brush and at the end of the job you feel like you’ve achieved something.’
‘Hippy,’ Kerry tutted. ‘You only got twenty hours; you’re practically half done already.’
‘With my record, I’ll probably be back.’
‘Shakeel starts tomorrow,’ Kerry grinned. ‘He lost his temper and head-butted someone in the dojo after Miss Takada blew the whistle.’
‘Tea up,’ a woman shouted, from inside.
Kerry opened the window she was working on and checked that she didn’t have paint on the bottom of her Nikes before swinging on a pole and squeezing through on to the carpet inside. It was a typical red-shirt room, shared by a pair of young girls.
‘This is very pink,’ James said, shielding his eyes in mock disgust as he stepped around ballet tights, a dolls’ house and Barbie’s Volkswagen convertible.
They stepped out into the hallway as the tea lady – who was really one of the junior-block carers – came through with a metal trolley laid out with mugs of tea and individual Twix bars.
‘Cheers, Chloe,’ James grinned as he heaped sugar into his mug. ‘You’re looking beautiful today.’
The carer furrowed her brow. ‘Why is it if you stick a man in a set of overalls he immediately thinks he’s god’s gift to women?’
‘Beats me,’ Kerry smiled. ‘Although in James’ case you don’t actually need the overalls for him to think that.’
As Chloe moved down the corridor to serve tea to the rest of the decorators, James and Kerry went back into the pink paradise to eat their Twixes and warm cold hands on their mugs. They both had painty hands and filthy overalls, so they couldn’t sit down.
‘I hear Bruce is on his way home,’ James said.
Kerry bit the end off her Twix and nodded. ‘He touches down at Heathrow early tomorrow.’
‘You don’t exactly sound overjoyed.’
‘I dunno,’ Kerry shrugged. ‘He’s a nice guy, but …’
‘But what?’
‘No sparkle,’ Kerry said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘With you and me it was exciting. I mean, you treated me like crap, you cheated on me every chance you got, you dumped me and completely broke my heart, but if someone said you’ve won a free meal at a nice restaurant and you can go with anyone you like no strings attached, I’d still pick you over Bruce.’
James was flattered and ran the calculation for himself. ‘Maybe I’d pick you over Dana,’ he grinned.
Before James knew it, Kerry had placed her mug in the turret of a fairy castle and their overalls were almost touching. They started kissing and James could taste chocolate and biscuit crumbs all around Kerry’s mouth, which was gross and sexy