Excitement was growing by the day at Sweetheart Abbey as the winter holidays approached, for it signalled the end of term which meant the annual inter-house cross-country race, a trip to Edinburgh’s Christmas Market and the traditional Carol Concert attended by parents, friends and supporters of the school.
The general chatter in morning assembly was at a slightly higher volume than usual but it ceased abruptly as headmaster Dr Andrew Collins rose from his seat on the school stage. The passing of each year presented both a mixture of sadness and relief and, as he walked towards the wooden plinth to address the school, he adjusted his master’s gown and gave a reassuring pat to his school tie.
“These final two weeks promise to be extremely hectic but I would urge a little moderation in all things from you, boys. Surveying the room, he continued:”Remember each and every one of you here today is an ambassador for Sweetheart Abbey, so let’s try and maintain a modicum of decorum.
“No running in the corridors for instance, Swithers,” chided Dr Collins who was nearly knocked off his feet when the excitable Ninian ran headlong into him on his way to assembly a few minutes earlier.
“If you have ambitions to be a prop forward for the school’s team, go and ask the rugby coach Mr Swain for a trial.”
There was a frisson of exaggerated laughter at the head’s comment, especially among the first and second-year prep boys who sat cross-legged in front of the school stage. It was always a relief to laugh at someone else’s expense. Their beaming, fresh faces swivelled around to try and spot the embarrassed Ninian Swithers who by this time was squirming in his chair in the front of the third-year rows.
Duncan Dewar, sitting next to his roommate, struggled to keep a straight face and avoid the laser-like stare of the headmaster who had, by this time, locked on to his scarlet-complexioned friend with the electronic precision of a guided missile.
The dramatic moment was only interrupted as Collins’ side vision detected a slow, deliberate jaw movement nearby; it was the telltale sign of a piece of chewing gum being sloshed around in a pool of saliva in the mouth of Timothy West. With his eyes still fixed on Swithers, The Doc lifted his arm slowly and deliberately, clicked his fingers and pointed in the direction of the unsuspecting West: “Remove that gum at once and see me after assembly, West. You know the rules,” said the headmaster who by this time had darted his eyes to the right focussing on West.
Dr Gideon McKie tilted his whole body slightly towards Dr Liam Wallace and, in a schadenfreude-laced whisper, said: “Not a good day for Plato House.” Wallace, whose lips were pursed tightly, was barely able to disguise his displeasure.
“I’ve also received complaints from the village of boisterous behaviour outside The Abbey Arms Hotel on Sunday afternoon,” continued Dr Collins. "So will the pupil who performed circus stunts on his bicycle in the hotel car park present himself to me at 10 am in my study?
“The festive spirit is much in evidence with all four houses making a great effort, I’m told, in producing eye-catching nativity scenes. As usual, there will be a prize for the most outstanding. However, today’s judging has been suspended after housemaster Dr Samuel Shinwell informs me that someone has stolen the Baby Jesus from the Boethius crib and left a ransom note. I want him returned by tea time today before serious consequences are set in motion.”
After assembly, the boys headed to their various classrooms speculating who could have stolen the Baby Jesus from Boethius and who was doing wheelies in the hotel car park.
“Old Shinny’s on the war path because he is convinced someone is trying to sabotage our entry,” said Ali Reza as he prepared some equipment in the chemistry laboratory. “But it was rather funny to find a ransom note in the crib, almost as funny as you knocking ‘the Doc’ down in the corridor, Ninny!”
Ninian Swithers scowled: "I didn’t knock him down, Ali, and I got the bigger fright. Imagine hurtling in to the Doc and now I’ve got to go to his blasted study in thirty minutes to hand myself in for doing a wheelie outside the hotel. Life is so unfair. I wonder who grassed me up. It’ll be that awful manager, I bet.
"I was showing off to some girls at a wedding and one asked me to do some tricks, so I did a wheelie and landed right in a puddle. How was I to know the bride’s mother would pop out for a fag and stand in the wrong place?! That’ll teach her to smoke even if it was one of those perfumed e-cigarettes.
“Today’s turning in to a nightmare and it’s not even 10 am!” he exclaimed. “What else can go wrong?” As if to answer his question, a flame from his Bunsen burner singed his shirt cuff. Poor Swithers was exasperated and excused himself from the chemistry lesson so he could change into a clean uniform before his encounter with the eagle-eyed Doc.
He ran through the courtyard and into Plato House to the room he shared with Duncan Dewar but as he approached the door, a furtive choirmaster emerged looking startled as Ninian came into view. “Can I help you Mr Jones, Sir?” enquired Ninian cautiously but he just grunted, shaking his head in the negative and walked off.
“Bloody hell!” exclaimed Ninian under his breath: “I wonder what Drac wanted?”
The room looked largely undisturbed and then he remembered his meeting with the headmaster so quickly changed and headed for Mr Collins’ study. By the time he got there, Capella boys James Darling and Willie Carmichael were also standing outside the head master’s door. “What are you two doing here?” enquired Ninian.
Darling explained: “Both Willie and I were in New Abbey on Sunday afternoon on our bikes. We’re stymied, see, because Collins didn’t give a name of who was doing the wheelie and since we both did, we thought we may as well hand ourselves in. And you?” Ninian shook his head in dismay: “Well, this is a to-do for sure. I thought it was me. Maybe I should go.”
Darling grabbed him, saying: “You can’t, what if it is you?”
Unknown to all three, John Russell from Boethius House was already inside the dreaded study as Dr Collins sat behind his Victorian desk, gently tapping his forefinger on the tooled green leather inset as though he was knocking out a Morse code while simultaneously making notes on a yellow post-it note. Russell stood quietly in front of the desk as he completed the paperwork.
The room was deadly silent apart from two noises, the ominous tick-tock of a grandfather clock behind him and the irritating scratching sound of the head’s fountain pen as it travelled across the paper on which he was writing. Then there came a third noise. It was the beating heart of Russell which seemed to be pounding inside his head rather than his chest.
His mouth went dry and his palms became damp as he continued to stand nervously in front of Dr Collins. Russell tried shifting the weight on his legs when the noise of the scratchy pen stopped without warning. “Right, Russell. Tell me what you were doing to incur the wrath of the locals in New Abbey, then?” he asked.
Russell cringed as he explained how some girls in the hotel car park had goaded him in to performing acrobatics on his mountain bike. It would be a variation on a theme the amused headmaster would hear three more times, for Russell, Swithers, Darling and Carmichael had all performed wheelies at some stage during the day in the hotel car park.
The young girls were guests at a wedding and, bored by the proceedings inside, had gone into the car park in search of a distraction by way of local boys. To their delight, a string of ‘posh ’uns’ from Sweetheart Abbey crossed their path on their way to the cake shop.
After listening to all of the evidence, he realised the original guilty party was indeed Ninian Swithers who had inadvertently splashed the mother of the bride when one of his bike stunts backfired. “I’d just done a track stand and was trying to perform a nose wheelie when I ended up pile driving myself and, then…”
Dr Collins interrupted him: “You may as well be talking in Swahili. I did not understand a word of that Swithers and nor do I have any desire to know about the intricacies of such trivial matters. Suffice to say I want all four of you to return to here at 4 pm when a suitable punishment will await.”
“More sweating, more nerves. I tell you that man must have trained under the Gestapo or whatever was around when he did his training. I’ve aged about ten years today,” Russell told his three co-defendants as they speculated the nature of their punishment.
This time, all four were called into The Doc’s office together. “Each one of you brought the school into disrepute with your hubris and misguided self-importance, and so I have decided that the village will be off limits to all cyclists until the end of term.”
Darling began to heave a sigh of relief but was interrupted before he could fully exhale as Dr Collins added: "Furthermore, I want a thousand-word, handwritten essay from each one of you on the consequences of narcissism and the dangers of excessive interest in or admiration of oneself in the presence of the opposite gender.
“You can submit your work collectively tomorrow at 4 pm. Dismissed.”
As the boys turned to leave, Dr Collins coughed and said: “I imagine you will need to copy this… It’s the title of your essay but I am warning all four of you now, that beyond the title I do not expect to see any repetition from any of you. In other words, no collaboration, conferring or duplication.”
Ninian reached out and took the yellow note. Crestfallen, the boys returned to their various common rooms as word spread about the ‘wheelie punishment’ and the bike ban in the village, which everyone agreed appeared to be excessive. “One thousand words and I don’t even understand the question,” moaned Ninian as Duncan walked in and offered him a Jethart Snail to chew.
Duncan then fell back on his own bed but felt something alien underneath the quilt. He pulled back the covers and exclaimed: “Jesus!”
His roommate turned round and said: “What do you mean, ‘Jesus’?”
Exasperated Duncan repeated his words: “Jesus! It’s bloody Jesus, the baby. It must be the one taken from Boethius, but who would plant it here?”
Ninian stood up and gulped for some air but then started flapping around and panicking. “What? What is it, Ninny? For God’s sake man, spit it out!” shouted Duncan who was getting highly irritated by his friend’s overly theatrical antics. Then he suddenly realised this was no game; in all of the excitement, Ninian was choking on the Jethart Snail which had lodged in his throat near his windpipe.
Duncan smacked his friend on the back several times using the flat of his hand before opting for abdominal thrusts to get rid of the boiled sweet. He tried several times without success as Ninian hammered his fists against the wall.
His eyes began to roll and he felt his body becoming weak and almost limp. Duncan tried one last time but the effort resulted in both him and Ninian crashing against another wall causing a maths book to fall from the bookshelf in the neighbouring room shared by the Volkov twins.
“What the hell is going on?” bellowed one of the Russian twins who stuck his head round the door to complain about the noise.
“Help. Help me. He has a blocked airway. I’m trying to do that Heimlich Manoeuvre thing and it’s just not working!” shouted Duncan.
“Out of the way Shrimpy, watch me,” said Andrei Volkov. Moments later, he lifted Ninian off the ground and with a sudden squeeze, the offending sweet shot out of the boy’s mouth enabling him to breathe again.
“You saved my life, Alexei, or is it Andrei? Anyway thank you, thank you,” rasped Ninian.
“Well, I tried to save you as well. I just couldn’t get your diaphragm to work properly but I would’ve got there in the end,” said Duncan defensively.
“At your service. Any time you need help, just call for me. I’m like a Russian superman,” boasted Andrei as he pumped up his arms and posed, before he left the two boys alone.
Just then, Duncan remembered the Baby Jesus and exclaimed: “I’m really sorry if I startled you but it still doesn’t solve the problem over who planted this in my bed.”
Ninian tugged on Duncan’s arm, still rasping he said: "I think I know. That’s why I leapt up and the bleedin’ snail shot to the back of my throat. I was trying to tell you that when I came back from assembly to change into a clean shirt, I caught Drac coming out of our room.
“He looked well dodgy and shifty and when I asked if I could help, he sort of grunted, brushed me aside and disappeared.” Duncan was mystified and neither of them could work out why Drac would plant the Baby Jesus in his bed, but if it wasn’t the choirmaster, then who was it and why? Why frame Duncan?
“So what are we going to do, Ninny?” asked Duncan. "We, where does the ‘we’ come in to this? Have you seen the title of the essay I have to write for The Doc? If I don’t get this finished tonight, he’ll have my guts for garters, or something even worse.
“Let’s work something out tomorrow and steer well clear of Boethius in the meantime. Trust me, the lesson I’ve learned today is that volunteering information can backfire and honesty is not the best policy. Handing Jesus over to Old Shinny will get you some vile punishment,” advised Ninian in unusually sombre tones.
Duncan wrestled with the problem for a while but felt uncomfortable leaving the nativity figure in their room. It could be incriminating but where to hide it? If it was found in Plato, then there would be collective punishment, so he decided the best and most fitting place would be the chapel.
If the choirmaster found it, he wouldn’t dare report where it had come from without revealing the part he had played in planting the baby in Duncan’s bed in the first place, reasoned the schoolboy. He picked up the life-size infant which was swaddled in a checked Falkirk Tartan blanket. The black and white tartan, also known as Border Drab, was the theme adopted by Boethius for their nativity scene.
Duncan slipped out of Plato with the baby and headed for the chapel, keeping as close to the garden foliage as possible en route. It was a clear night with a full moon and the star-studded sky overhead was the best he’d ever seen.
As he crept inside the chapel, the hair on the back of his neck prickled and stood on end, causing him to rub his nape and the familiar little pimple or raised birthmark which cradled in the centre.
Duncan was not a particularly religious boy but as he walked towards the lightly illuminated stable and nativity scene, he looked upwards and whispered: “Please forgive me but I don’t know what else to do.”
And with that, he squeezed the tartan-swaddled baby into the already occupied crib. The eyes of the Virgin Mary seemed to follow Duncan and when he looked back, he pondered momentarily if twins might have been changed the course of Christianity.
He looked around to survey the chapel and its intricate woodcarvings and walked over to the stalls where he would sit with the choir for the carol service. He was feeling slightly nervous about the whole affair because he was to perform solo a version of Silent Night.
Towards the rear, he saw a spiral of stone steps leading to what was rumoured to be a crypt, all sorts of myths and legends telling stories of weird goings on were fuelled by the fact the entrance had been sealed for as long as anyone could remember.
Duncan, feeding his own curiosity and taking advantage of the moment, inspected all the nooks and crannies the 16th century chapel had to offer, and then he walked over to the pulpit made of oak and began to scrutinise five panels which defined its hexagonal shape.
Inside each panel was an androgynous looking being. It was almost impossible to determine the gender but in the absence of wings, Duncan concluded they couldn’t be angels. He pondered they might be saints and then he saw each panel bore a name; in an instant he recognised Benyellary, Merrick, Kirriereoch, Tarfessock and Shalloch.
They were the names of peaks in the South West of Scotland that make up Galloway’s so-called Awful Hand, an area known well to hill walkers and mountaineers. As he looked at the staircase leading into the pulpit, he noticed a sixth panel, again with a carved figure and stepped up to take a closer look.
Like the other images, it was human in shape but appeared to be neither masculine nor feminine. There was a word below but he didn’t recognise it at all and said out loud: “Salar.” His voice echoed through the chapel just as the rear door opened.
He immediately went down on his hunkers and crept inside the pulpit where the priest traditionally stood to give the sermon. Cursing his own curiosity, he heard metal-tipped footsteps heading down the aisle towards him but, mercifully, they faltered and stopped short of the pulpit.
***