The Liar by Stephen Fry

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 our 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 day of one horrendous week Adrian had collected single cube calls from Sargent for absurd minor offences: whistling in his study during prep; having his hands in his pockets while watching a match; failing to cap a retired schoolmaster who had been walking down the High Street and whom Adrian had never even had pointed out to him before as a cappable entity. On each of Sargent’s cube calls that particular week Purdy’s had been the name listed. On the fifth day Adrian had sidled apologetically into Purdy’s cube to find it empty.
    ‘The bird had flown, my old love,’ he had tried to explain to Sargent when returning his unsigned chit. ‘But I did abstract Purdy’s sponge-bag from his bedside, just to prove that I was in his cube.’
    That afternoon Sargent and Purdy had fought each other on the Upper. After that Adrian was left alone.
    Of course prefects could do each other favours as well.
    ‘Oh Hancock, there’s a not-half scrummy