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THE MYSTERY OF THEIR punishment was answered that Saturday morning when a delighted-looking dormitory cleaner gave them each a bucket, a bunch of old toothbrushes and an industrial-sized bottle of cleaning liquid.
“You have to scrub all the bathrooms in Austen House,” she said. “With the toothbrushes.”
Samantha and Nomusa groaned, but Jessie protested, “All of them? You mean, every floor? But that’ll take all day, maybe even tomorrow. We’ll have no weekend left!”
“Yes, you ladies are spoilt. You must learn about hard work,” the cleaner said and left.
“Should we divide up and each start on different floors?” Samantha asked. She wanted to get cracking immediately — the sooner they started, the sooner they would be finished.
Nomusa shook her head. “Let’s rather work together — that way at least we’ll have each other for company.”
It was hard work. By mid-morning their knees and backs were aching, even though they’d finished only one of the bathrooms. Samantha fetched her music player, and the work seemed to go a little faster as they worked to the beat of their favourite songs. Groups of girls kept walking into the bathrooms while they worked, demanding to know what they were doing. When Samantha explained that it was punishment for bad behaviour, the other girls demanded to know the full story, which she didn’t much feel like repeating.
Finally, in response to the question, “Hey, what are you girls doing?” Jessie began answering, “Having loads of fun! Want to join us?”
Apparently, no-one did.
Jessie grew more and more grumpy as the day progressed. She kept muttering complaints and threats under her breath.
“This is hard labour, this is. This is child labour! I’ll bet it’s against the Constitution!” Later she grumbled, “We should call Childline and report Grieve for child abuse. I’ll bet this isn’t even legal. We have rights, you know.”
“Somehow, I don’t think Child Protection Officers are headed this way to arrest Mrs. Grieve,” Nomusa said.
It was while they were cleaning the third-floor bathrooms in the afternoon, that they heard the door opening for the umpteenth time.
A voice sneered, “Well, isn’t this a lovely sight!”
Looking up, Samantha saw Cindy and Kitty standing at the entrance to the bathroom, smirking.
“Get out of here,” snarled Jessie, grabbing a bucket of dirty water. “Or I swear I’ll —”
“You’ll what? If you throw that at me, I’ll have to tell Mrs. Grieve. And what would she say?” Cindy’s gloating smile widened. “More to the point, what would she do? No, Delaney, I don’t think you’ll do anything of the sort.”
“Excuse us while we wash our hands,” said Kitty in a falsely sweet voice.
As she and Cindy walked to the basin, they left two sets of filthy, muddy footprints on the newly cleaned floor.
“You did that on purpose!” Nomusa said.
“Oh, puh-leeze. You think we went out of the dorm house, got our shoes coated in thick, black mud, carried them upstairs and then put them on just as we got to this bathroom so as to make more work for you? How ridiculous!” Kitty said.
“Oh look, you missed a spot.” Cindy walked over to the toilet nearest Samantha, smeared her muddy heel against its base and then strode with Kitty out of the bathroom saying over her shoulder, “Not so high and mighty, now, are you Steadman?”
Three toothbrushes hit the door. Then Jessie kicked the bottle of cleaning liquid for good measure and it bounced off a basin, squirting pungent white spray over all three of them.
“I hate her!” Jessie fumed.
“I don’t understand half of what she says,” Samantha said, wiping the cleaning liquid off Nomusa’s face. “It’s like she’s got something against me, but for the life of me, I can’t think what. Not so high and mighty, now, Steadman — what does that mean?”
Jessie bit her lip and then shuddered. “Yeugh! This stuff tastes terrible.” She spat into a basin and rinsed her mouth out several times. “I wish I had my toothbrush here. No, wait a moment,” she said, a wicked expression stealing over her face. “It’s not my toothbrush I wish I had right now at all!”
Without another word, she ran out of the bathroom, hopping lightly over the muddy footprints on the floor.
Samantha gave Nomusa a confused look.
Nomusa shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
They were both just beginning to clean the dirtied floor when Jessie skipped back into the bathroom.
“Ta-dah!” she cried, holding her fist in the air as if clutching a sword of victory. Inside her hand were a pair of toothbrushes.
“Just what we need — more toothbrushes,” Samantha said.
“Not just any toothbrushes. These two specimens belong to Cindy and Kitty. I nicked them from the toiletry bags in their rooms. And I think” — she paused to look with delight at the growing amazement on Nomusa’s face and the dawning horror on Samantha’s — “I think that they are just what we need to clean the inside of these toilets!”
She walked over to the first cubicle.
Nomusa shrieked, “Jessie!”
Samantha scrambled to her feet and dashed after Jessie who was happily calling, “Gather ‘round, gather ‘round, to witness this delightful sight!” She was just about to plunge the toothbrushes into the toilet bowl when Samantha seized her wrist and cried, “Jessie, You can’t!”
“I can!” Jessie tried to wrestle her arm free from Samantha’s grip. “And I will.”
“You mustn’t!”
“Why not? It’ll teach them not to go telling tales. And it will improve my mood no end. Let go!”
“No,” Nomusa said, joining Samantha in trying to wrest the toothbrushes from Jessie’s grip.
“Jessie! Just stop and think about it,” Samantha pleaded. “Toilets are so unhygienic! They’re full of germs. E-Coli, and... and...” She struggled to think of the names of other bacteria. “And poo germs!” she said finally. “You could infect them with something dreadful. They could get really sick!”
“And your point is?” Jessie said defiantly.
“Jessie!”
“Oh, alright!” she said, loosening her grip enough to allow Samantha to remove the toothbrushes. “But you’re a pair of spoilsports. It would have served them right!”
“I’m all for getting even, Jess,” Samantha said. “I just don’t want to be charged with murder!”
Jessie stood still and thought for a few moments. Then she said, “Well, at the very least you would agree with me that their mouths could do with a good washing out.”
“Yes, of course,” Samantha said, too relieved that Jessie had given up her plan of revenge to pay much attention to what her friend was saying now.
“Excellent,” Jessie said. She snatched the toothbrushes out of Samantha’s hand, marched over to the basins and scraped the head of each lightly over the cracked and slightly grubby bar of white soap lying there, then worked the white soap deep into the bristles. “There you go. Once I’ve replaced these, they won’t know the difference until they’re brushing away and foaming at the mouth! And there’ll be no way of proving who did it. Best of all, you don’t need to worry, Sam, ‘cos it’s completely hygienic!”