The Liar

'To church, of course.'

'But you said I didn't have to!'

'What?'

Adrian came out of his room and looked down into the hall. His mother and father were standing by the door swathed in their dominical best.

'I'm in the middle of my school project. You said I didn't have to go to church.'

His father snorted.

'Don't be ridiculous! Of course you do.'

'But I was working . . .'

'You'll put on a tie and come down now!'

III

'You're a fucking maniac,' said Tom. '

'You're a fucking maniac,' said Adrian.

'We're all fucking maniacs,' said Bullock.

They were in Bullock and Sampson's study leafing through copies of Bollocks!

The trunk they sat on felt to them like a powder keg. It contained seven hundred copies ready for. distribution.

'Come on kids,' Bullock had said when Adrian had suggested the title at the end of the previous term, 'BUM is much better. Bullock's Underground Magazine. Bollocks is my nickname for God's sake. Everyone will know I had something to do with it.'

'That's the whole idea, my little love-noodle,' Adrian had replied. 'No one is going to believe that Brainy Bollocks himself would be so stupid as to name a subversive underground magazine after himself.'

So Bollocks! it was. There was no artwork because only Sampson and Tom had much skill at drawing and their styles were too readily identifiable.

The magazine they now looked through was a simple fifteen pages of gestetnered typescript on green paper. No handwriting, no illustrations or distinguishing characteristics of any kind. It could have been done by any person or persons in any House in the school. Bullock had had no trouble typing and reproducing the stencils in total secrecy at home.

After many crossings-out and changes of direction, Adrian's piece had been sent off to Bullock's address in Highgate the Tuesday after Easter: reading it back now he found it rather tame and half-hearted next to the libretto of a rock opera on school life that Bullock had contributed and Tom's frankly hairy analysis of the heroin counter- culture in The Naked Lunch. Sampson's allegory of red and grey squirrels was simply incomprehensible.

'Now,' said Tom, 'we face the problemette of distribution.'

'More of a problemola than a problemette,' said Bullock.

'A problerama, even,' said Sampson.

'I'd go so far as to call it a problemellaroni,' said Bullock.

'It's a real cunt,' said Tom, 'no question.'

'I don't know though,' said Adrian, 'we've all been on cube calls, haven't we? We should know how to break into the Houses.'

'I've never been on one actually,' said Sampson.

'Well, I've been on plenty,' said Adrian. 'In fact, I believe I hold the House record.'

Discipline is a sensitive subject in public schools; the flogging of offenders, the toasting of small boys in front of fires, the forcing of uncomfortable objects up their bottoms, the hanging of them upside down by their ankles, all these cruel and unusual forms of punishment had died out at Adrian's school by the time he arrived. Headman sometimes flicked a cane, masters gave lines, detentions or remissions of privilege and prefects gave cube calls, but imaginative violence and cunning torture were things of the past. It had been three years since a boy had been emptied upside down in a lavatory or had his dick slammed in a desk. With this kind of leniency and liberalism in sentencing in bur premier educational establishments, many thought that it was no wonder the country was going to the dogs.

When the cube call, whose violence was bureaucratic rather than physical, had been invented, no one could say. A single cube call was a small slip of paper given by a prefect to an offender. It contained the name of another prefect, always from another House. A double cube call contained two names of two different prefects, again from two different Houses. Adrian was the only boy in living memory who had been given a sextuple cube call.

The recipient of the call had to get up early, change into games clothes, run to the House of the first prefect on the list, enter the prefect's cubicle, wake him up and get him to sign next to his name. Then on to the next prefect on the list, who was usually in a House right at the other end of the town. When all the signatures had been collected, it was back to his own House and into uniform in time for breakfast at ten to eight. So that offenders couldn't cheat by going round in the most convenient geographical order, or by getting up before seven o'clock, the official start time, the prefects on the list had to put down the exact time at which they were woken up next to their signatures.

Adrian detested cube calls, though a psychologist might have tried to persuade him otherwise, considering how far out of his way to collect them he seemed to go. He thought it an illogical form of punishment, as irritating for the prefects who were shaken from their slumbers as for the offenders.

The system was open to massive abuse. Prefects could settle scores with colleagues they disliked by sending them cube callers every day for a week. Tit-for-tat cube call wars between prefects could go on like this for whole terms. In Adrian's House, Sargent had once had a feud with a prefect in Dashwood House called Purdy. On every