Monster (6 page)

W
hile my form was busily black-bagging up their desk contents and lockers and cleaning the classrooms, I was sent to Mrs Saul-Hudson’s office for a ticking off about my attack on Clarice.

And that was all I got. A ticking off. I didn’t even receive a billion Blue Tickets for Tudor House or a detention or anything. Just a long monologue about how my parents would ‘have to be told’, how ‘fighting’s never the answer’ and how it was ‘understandable with the amount of stress I was under with my brother’s situation’.

And that was it.

The reason for my lack of punishment had little to do with what I’d done to Clarice, and everything to do with what I knew about the Saul-Hudsons. I was the secret keeper, you
see. I’d been Mrs Saul-Hudson’s right-hand man for a long time. I had intimate knowledge of their private apartments and I knew stuff about them that they definitely wouldn’t want spreading around. Punishing me was a risk they couldn’t take, despite breaking a golden rule of the school.

Maggie was incensed.

‘You break a girl’s face and you get nothing? It’s so unfair! Not that Clarice didn’t deserve it or anything, cos she actually did, but you got nothing? Actual factual nothing?’

‘I know. This school is fundamentally flawed, Maggie,’ I told her as the break-time bell rang out in Long Corridor. ‘It’s the reason why you’re still here.’

‘Must be.’

The three of us hotfooted it across the frosty front lawn, up the flint steps into the valley where the Landscape Gardens began.

On hot summer weekends, being at Bathory School was heaven. I loved being a boarder. We could go outside to do our prep or take the three-mile walk into the tiny village of Bathory for ice cream, and we were sometimes allowed to swim in the pool to cool down. We could sit beneath the hazelnut tree on the Orangery lawn in our vests and shorts or play croquet.

But on winter days like this one, we were rarely let outside, except to walk Brody or go up to the Chapel for prayers and Sunday service. The swimming pool was frozen over and the hazelnut tree bare and stark without its leaves. Our noses glowed red and our breath left cloud trails on the air. I was still glad of something to take my mind off Seb. When I thought about him, I felt myself starting to lose my mind. Bathory just wasn’t the place to lose your mind. You might never get it back.

‘It’s just up here,’ said Regan, as she led Maggie and me towards the Temple, right at the top of the bank and up into the woods.

‘It’s not far now.’ She led us deeper in, where the tops of the trees were alive with birdsong.

‘Is this really worth it?’ said Maggie. ‘If we’re late, we’ll miss the fit work experience boy pruning the Quad hedge.’

The Quad was the square expanse of grass separating the French room from the corridor to the Science lab. ‘He’s finished,’ I said. ‘He’s not back again till the spring.’

‘Aw what?’ she groaned. ‘He was the one good thing about being here.
Je suis
desolate.’

‘He wasn’t that fit anyway.’

‘He bloody was. Didn’t you see him take his top off in the summer? Holy Mary Mother of Abs.’

‘There’s more to boys than abs and pecs.’

‘Not much more,’ said Maggie. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t get horny, Nash. You must crave it, we all do. Have the odd fantasy about Keith the bus driver or Mr Saul-Hudson in his golf trousers. Or out of them …’

I couldn’t even fake a laugh at that one.

‘No, I know who
you’ve
got the bubbles for,’ said Maggie. ‘Charlie the Shop Boy.’ She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.

‘Shut up.’

Regan looked back at us blankly, and Maggie ‘explained’: ‘Nash fancies the boy who works at Bathory Basics.’

Regan carried on walking in silence.

Maggie gave the back of her head a dirty look. ‘God, what a sulk fest.’ She stopped to catch her breath. ‘Oh come on, let’s go back. Bet you any money she’s taking us to So-Not-Worth-It-Town.’

‘We won’t know until we get there, will we?’ I said, picking up the pace.

Pretty soon, we were up in the highest part of the valley, where a sloping dirt track, worn by centuries of wooden carts transporting ice from Grace’s Lake and Edward’s Pond up to the now overgrown icehouse, led to the Temple.

Maggie and I stopped walking. Pigeon-toed, Regan stumbled gingerly through the prickly bushes and crouched down behind the folly.

‘Come on,’ she whispered, beckoning us with her hand. Maggie looked at me then shrugged, and together we fought our way through. Partially hidden by rotting leaves and damp twigs was something that looked like a long knobbly stick covered in school Bolognese.

‘What the frig is that?’ said Maggie, batting away an errant branch. ‘That’s disgusting.’

I pulled my jumper cuffs down over my hands and shoved one across my mouth, trying to push images from my mind: my brother’s body, cut into pieces by guerrillas in the Colombian jungle.

Regan poked at the thing with a long twig. ‘I found it when I was exploring.’

‘You brought us all the way up here in the freezing cold to show us a sheep’s leg?’

‘It’s not a sheep’s leg,’ said Regan, standing up. ‘I don’t know what it is. What did you think you were coming to see?’

‘That’s not a sheep’s leg,’ I said behind my hand. Neither of them heard me.

‘I dunno,’ said Maggie. ‘A dead body or something? A monster’s cave? A tunnel back to civilisation? Not a frigging sheep’s leg.’

‘I told you it’s not a sheep’s leg,’ said Regan, moving closer and bending down to poke it with a twig. ‘I think it’s from a cow.’

‘I think it’s a spine,’ I said.

‘A SPINE?’ They both cried out, in a chorus of disgust.

‘Yes. Look at the bottom, there’s ribs sticking out of it. And the gunky stuff looks like intestines. It’s thick too.’

Regan levered up the end of it with her twig. ‘Is it … human?’

I shook my head. ‘No, it’s way too big. You’ve seen Bony Bonaparte in the Science lab. A human spine is much thinner than that. This looks to me like it’s come from a large animal. A cow or a horse, or something.’

‘But why is it here? Where has it come from?’ said Regan.

‘I don’t want to think about that,’ snapped Maggie, rubbing her arms. ‘I wanna go back inside, not stand here in the freezing cold, debating about some random bone. I told you this would be a big fat slice of nothing.’ Without another word, she started back through the bushes.

I waited for Regan. ‘I really think the Beast had something to do with this,’ she said.

‘It’s more likely a wildcat or something.’ I shrugged, although not even
I
believed
that
theory.

‘You haven’t seen it closely enough,’ said Regan. ‘Come here.’

I looked after Maggie, then moved closer and crouched down to look. ‘See?’ she said, pointing to the top of it.

‘Yeah.’ I put my jumper-cuffed hand up to my mouth again. ‘It stinks.’

‘But look at the bite mark on the top. Something bigger than a wildcat did that.’

‘A big wildcat?’ I said.

‘But what if it’s not?’ She stared hard into my eyes, like she could read the sell-by date under my skull. ‘You saw it on the playing field, didn’t you? That time in netball. I know you did. Aren’t you even curious about it?’

‘Regan, the Beast of Bathory is fictional, okay?’ I sighed, expelling a huge cloud of white air. ‘That’s why it’s in the myths and legends book in the library. It’s a story made up by some weirdo with an Abominable Snowman fetish.’

She wasn’t buying it. ‘Yes, but you hear about these sorts of things all the time, don’t you? Legends made up about beasts and monsters, just to keep people from going to places where they shouldn’t. Like Satan. There’s a school of thought that says he’s just made up to stop Christians from straying from the path of righteousness.’

I snickered nervously, no idea what I was actually snickering about. ‘Yeah, well, this conversation is getting a little too deep for me.’

‘Satan’s not the only one,’ said Regan, flicking a plait over her shoulder. ‘There are myths and legends in every culture, which came about to stop children being naughty or getting out of bed. The Bogeyman. Baba Jaga. Bloody Bones …’

A branch cracked somewhere in the woods.

‘What was that?’ I said, a frozen ache spreading all through my limbs.

‘Maybe it’s the Beast, come back for the spine?’

A distant
ting-a-ling-a-ling
tinkled in the distance. ‘Come on, that’s first bell.’ We were so far from Main House, I wanted to get going.

‘There has to be a reason why this spine is here and I want to know what it is,’ said Regan stubbornly. ‘Either it’s here because the Beast is real and it’s attacked a cow or a
horse—or it’s here because someone wants us to
think
the Beast is real.’

I stood up. ‘Fine, whatever. I’m going back down now, okay?’

Regan followed me as we picked our way back through the bushes. In front of the Temple, we looked over the valley—I could just see the dot of Maggie walking beside the lake. I started back along the track, but I could tell Regan wasn’t following. When I looked back, she was just standing there, outside the Temple; her stare blank and cold, her eyes appearing almost black in the wintry light.

‘Regan?’

She didn’t move immediately—then, slowly and thoughtfully, she began walking towards me.

‘You know it’s real. There’s fear in your eyes,’ she said, as she passed me. Her own eyes were as dead as a shark’s.

I shivered as she left me there, wishing Maggie hadn’t been so far away.

D
ad called me from Heathrow just before lunch, just to say
I love you
and
We’ll be back soon.
I could hear everyone back in the Refectory as I put the phone down, pulling their Christmas crackers and cheering as the turkeys were brought out to be carved by staff members at the ends of the tables. It was a joyous time. I just wished I’d felt it.

I rejoined the school midway through the turkey course. Christmas didn’t mean the food got any better at Bathory, despite all the little extras—roast potatoes (hard), organic carrots (mashed), peas (frozen), stuffing (God knows), pigs in blankets (raw) and figgy pudding and custard (grim) and though the sight of it all brought bile into my throat, I took a spoonful of each, knowing that if I didn’t there was nothing else to eat until dinner. The food at Bathory had always
been bad. When I’d first arrived as an eight-year-old Pup, I’d been vegetarian. The first week, when I realised the vegetarian option was either a saucer of grated Smart Price cheese or a grey hard-boiled egg, I quickly switched back to meat to keep myself alive.

On a more positive note, Clarice Hoon hadn’t given me any more grief about Seb, aside from the odd snide look as I walked up Long Corridor. This I could handle.
First to lose their cool loses the argument,
Seb told me, and he was right. As always.

Midway through lunch, Mrs Saul-Hudson marched in and dragged Maggie out. It turned out she’d just had a phone call from a pilot at RAF Lyneham who’d done a fly-past the previous day, who’d kindly informed her that the school now had letters crudely daubed on its roof. Instead of assisting with the Christmas Fayre preparations, I gladly spent the afternoon helping Maggie to clean it off.

‘Why though? Why not expel me for this? It does NOT make sense!’ she shouted, as I scrubbed away at the second S in ‘SAVE US’. ‘Why keep giving me these stupid meaningless detentions? I mean, I’ve tried EVERYTHING to get out of this place. I’ve done it all …’

‘… even vandalised a listed building now,’ I added.

‘Yeah. I don’t know what more I can do,’ she cried. ‘Maybe I could get a boy in here. Yeah, that might do it.’

‘Why do you want to leave so badly?’ I asked. She didn’t answer immediately, so I pressed. ‘Seriously, you can tell me.’

‘I just wanna go home, that’s all. I don’t need an education.’

‘But they’ll only send you somewhere else, won’t they?’

‘Fine. Then maybe they’ll send me back to my old comp
where I was happy and settled and didn’t have to wear this cheap scratchy boy-repeller.’ She loosened her tie like it was hurting her neck.

‘I’d miss you,’ I told her.

‘Yeah, right.’

‘I would. You’re the thing that’s keeping me going at the moment.’

‘Yeah, well, you’ll get over me eventually.’

She carried on scrubbing. I felt no padlock on my urge to tell her any more, so I just said it. ‘They’re paying double the fees.’

‘Huh? Who?’

‘Your parents.’

‘WHAT?’ she cried, standing up and slamming her scrubbing brush down on the flat roof where a thousand soap bubbles flew up into my face. ‘What do you mean? How? How do you know that? Are you joking me?’

I shook my head, wiping little flecks of foam from my nose and cheeks. ‘Your file was out on her desk when I was in there a few weeks ago. I wasn’t going through it or anything, I was just putting her cocoa down. And it was there, in your file. I read it.’

Maggie sat back down on the roof. ‘Double fees? That’s really why I’m still here?’

I nodded. ‘There was a letter in the file, open, from your dad. I only read a bit, as I said, it was just there on the desk. He wants you to get your GCSEs here so you can go to a good Sixth Form or get a good apprenticeship when you leave. He doesn’t want you sponging off them like your sister does. And because you were kicked out of two other schools, Mrs Saul-Hudson agreed to keep you here, come
what may. He thanked her for it. But that was it, that was all I read.’

Maggie shook her head. I sat down next to her. She looked beaten down. Flattened. Lost. ‘I can’t believe he’s done this. He knows how much I hate it here. I’ll run away.’

‘No you won’t.’

‘I will.’

‘You won’t, Maggie. You’d have to walk at least ten miles to the nearest train station.’

‘I’ll hitch.’

I looked at her. ‘Maggie, don’t.’

‘Why not? My parents clearly don’t give a toss. He’s leaving me here all Christmas, that’s how much he loves me. Git.’

‘They’re paying £18,000 a term so you can get your education, Maggie. I’d say they love you a hell of a lot. And anyway, I’m here all Christmas too so it won’t be so bad.’

‘They’re sadists. Actual, factual sadists.’

‘Why do you hate it here so much?’

‘Why?’ she repeated. ‘Look around you, Nash. We’re in the middle of actual NOWHERE.’

I shrugged, looking around us beyond school land towards the moors and the hillsides dusted with icing sugar snow and spindly black trees. Coupled with the cinnamon smells rising up from the Fayre and the tinkling of a carol from somewhere, it felt like we were in a scene from a Christmas card. It was stunning. ‘That’s not so bad. It’s quite beautiful, don’t you think? Look at the snow on the hills, on the trees.’

‘And I hate nature.’

‘That can’t be the only reason you want to leave, the isolation.’

‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘The food’s crap as well.’

‘Yeah it is a bit, isn’t it?’ I grinned.

‘And …’

‘What?’

She went to tell me something then stopped herself. ‘It’s like you said—the place is “fundamentally flawed”. Why else would we be allowed up on this very old, probably very unsafe roof, to scrub tiles. No one gives a crap about Health and Safety here, do they? No one gives a crap about us.’

‘Look, the parents are starting to arrive.’

Cars were trickling through the top gate at the far end of the driveway. There was the lightest fluttering of snow on the gelid air as a succession of Rolls-Royces, Mercedes, Porsches and Volvos rolled up the drive and parked up, their occupants following the signs through the formal gardens towards the stalls. I stopped scrubbing and walked to the West Turret roof to look down on the Orangery lawn. Stallholders had been at the school all morning, setting up their Christmas glögg, hickory smoked nuts, handmade crafts, wicker baskets, pomanders and tree ornaments. A ginger girl, Rosanna Keats, was standing at the arched entrance to the formal gardens, with a tray of glögg in little tumblers and a plate of sugared plums. Two girls standing next to her—I think it was the twins Hannah and Heather Bolan-Wood—bore fat chunks of stollen and gingerbread on little red and white napkins.

My mum and dad would have loved to see all this. They’d enjoyed it last year. Dad had gone on about his eggnog for months afterwards and Mum had bought these Hansel and Gretel tree ornaments which she said reminded her of me and Seb. Seb’d taken the piss, as he usually did at my school events, about our indoor and outdoor shoes, our ‘no whistling’
and ‘no TV except on Saturdays’ rules. He’d laughed all through the school concert, at the Pups forgetting their words and Regan Matsumoto’s tuneless trumpet recital. All the girls in my dorm kept going on about how hot Seb was. I’d just found him annoying. I’d have given anything to be annoyed by him again today.

‘Have you seen Regan recently?’ I asked, hugging the chimney pot on the Weather Station turret as the eerily distant sounds of the choir singing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ came floating upwards.

‘Huh?’

I sighed and hopped down off the turret roof to rejoin Maggie in the middle. ‘Regan Matsumoto. You know. Weird girl? Plaits?’

‘Best friend is a spine in the woods? Yeah, what about her?’

‘I haven’t seen her about this afternoon. Have her parents come to pick her up then? I didn’t see her go. She said she was staying here for Christmas.’

Maggie was clearly distracted. ‘Ssh,’ she said, not taking her eyes from whatever she was looking at on the west side of the school. ‘Come and look.’

I moved across to the Observatory turret, where she was hiding behind the chimney, and she pointed towards Edward’s Pond. A figure was walking by herself, carrying a white bag, towards the Birdcage. She looked round. It was Dianna.

‘What’s she doing?’ I said.

‘Dunno,’ said Maggie. ‘She keeps looking round, to see if anyone’s following her.’

‘She looks very furtive,’ I whispered.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Secretive. Like she’s doing something she shouldn’t. Maybe she is.’

‘Oh, she
so
is,’ said Maggie, her eyebrows going into suggestiveness overdrive. Dianna looked around again and disappeared into the trees.

‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘This is Dianna Pfaff we’re talking about.’

‘Yeah, I know. The Kate Middleton of Bathory School. Wouldn’t swear if her fanny hair caught fire. But what’s it about then? And what’s in that bag?’

I shrugged. ‘Candles for the procession or something? The route goes that way.’

‘The route’s already marked,’ said Maggie. ‘I watched Amy Sudbury and Helena Freemantle doing it this morning with white paint and gaffer tape.’

‘Okay well—’

‘Look, there she is again,’ said Maggie as Dianna’s blonde head appeared in the gap between the trees and the path from the Birdcage up to the Temple. She still had the bag. Then we lost her. ‘Damn.’

‘What is she doing up there?’ I said aloud.

‘I’ve got to know,’ said Maggie. ‘I’m gonna go and catch her red-handed.’

‘No, wait,’ I said, holding her arm. ‘Wait until she comes back down and then go and ask her.’

Maggie was just about persuaded. I went back to scrubbing the roof while she watched and waited for signs of movement in the gardens. Pretty soon, the gorgeous sugary smell of roasting chestnuts and the sweet notes of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ came floating up to greet us from the scene below.

‘That bleeding caterwauling,’ Maggie muttered. ‘Seriously, I’ve heard better noises coming out of abattoirs.’

‘How many abattoirs have you visited then?’ I said, swilling off the last white remnants into the guttering.

‘Nash, Nash, she’s coming back, look!’

I put down the bucket and raced back over to the Observatory turret roof again, hiding behind Maggie as we watched Dianna coming back down the hill. She disappeared into the trees. When she reappeared, we saw that the white bag she had been carrying had gone.

I looked at Maggie. ‘Where’s the bag?’

‘Oh, we have sooooo got something on Princess Di.’

‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘We saw her walking into the valley with a bag. Big deal.’

‘Maybe she’s the dreaded Beast of Bathory, and in the bag are some more severed limbs! MWAH ahh AH!’

I laughed. ‘Come on, seriously.’

‘Let’s go and ask her about it now,’ said Maggie.

‘Not yet. We don’t want her to know we’re on to her. Don’t you know anything about espionage?’

‘Eh?’

‘Espionage. Spying. Look, we’re in the driving seat here—we’ve got something on her. If we go down there and let her know what we know—not that we know much—she’ll make up some feeble excuse, and next time she’ll be even more careful about covering it up.’

‘Covering what up?’

‘Whatever it is that she’s just done,’ I said. ‘No, we have to play it really cool, don’t let her suspect we know anything. Come on. Let’s go and put these back in the yard. I need to get my libretto.’

* * *

Later, as the others squealed off to the dorms to collect luggage and leave with their parents, Maggie helped me put the signs up in the Landscape Gardens saying ‘Keep Out’ and ‘Unsafe: Frozen Water’ and then we got two hot chocolates from one of the stalls and played cards in the bay window of the common room. Girl by girl, trunk by trunk, car by car, the school emptied, the Christmas smells disappearing and the chatter evaporating on the polar white air. A Pup called Tabitha Bonham, who was also staying behind until her army parents picked her up some time before Christmas Eve, had latched on to me and was sitting by my feet with a floppy toy rabbit, the ear of which was in her mouth.

‘SNAP,’ Maggie shouted and banged her hand down on the coffee table between us. I stared out of the window as she shuffled the stack. I longed to see my dad’s blue Volvo Estate beetling down the driveway, sweeping round the turning circle at the front of school. To see Mum and Dad get out of the front. To see my brother Seb leap out of the back seat and come running up to hug me. But it was so far away. They were so far away. The night grew darker and emptier.

The door to the common room burst open and Dianna Pfaff stormed in, mumbling and cursing under her breath.

‘
Bloody
stupid do this do that. Hateful …’

‘Hi, Dianna,’ I said. She did a double take.

‘Natasha,’ she said. ‘Margaret. Pup.’

‘Princess,’ said Maggie, slamming down a jack on top of my jack. ‘SNAP!’

‘Dammit!’

Maggie smiled, collecting up her cards. I had seven left. It was the third game in a row that I’d lost, but I didn’t mind.
I’d seen a bright side—me, Maggie and a fairly sweet Pup on our own with Matron over Christmas. We could make the best of it.

I looked over at Dianna, who was removing a plastic container of Rice Krispie cakes from her locker. ‘Everything okay, Dianna?’

She closed her locker. ‘No, not really. I just got off the phone to my mother. Looks as though I’ll be staying for Christmas as well.’

Then again …

Maggie groaned. ‘Oh you are fu—’

‘SNAP!’ I shouted as Maggie took her eye off the stack. Then the door opened again and the one person I wished had been oven-roasted with our reconstituted turkey strode in and removed her coat.

‘Oh, are you staying for Christmas too, Clarice?’ asked Dianna.

She looked straight at me. The sling had already gone, not surprisingly—Clarice was all about the effect—though there was still a plaster over her nose. ‘Yeah. I am.’