Wicked! (63 page)

Hearing a sob, he glanced round to find Dora’s sweet plump face dissolving in misery.

‘Dora, darling.’ Pulling her inside, he shut the door and patted the bed.

‘It’s very cruel to have fur rugs.’

‘I am very cruel. Now, whatever’s the matter?’ Cosmo stroked her blond hair and retied the blue ribbon on one of her plaits.

‘I loathe my mother, I’m sure she shopped the Cartwrights to Poppet, implying they’d been using Bagley money kitting out Paris, whereas Patience has paid for everything out of some money her aunt left her.’

‘Patience Carthorse,’ drawled Cosmo. ‘She ought to be pulling beer barrels round London.’

‘She’s lovely.’

‘Not the word I had in mind. You must be blind and deaf.’ Cosmo handed Dora a Bacardi and Coke from his fridge and relit his spliff. ‘What else is the matter?’

‘Paris is in love with Bianca.’

‘And the rest.’

‘He told me to fuck off. I gave him a new duvet cover today and earlier a video of
Macbeth
.’

‘Young Alvaston needs sorting out,’ said Cosmo thoughtfully. He had been reading in the
Observer
that Cherie Blair was offering to defend school bullies in court. What an admirable woman. His mission this term was to make Paris Alvaston’s life hell and with Xav as his buddy . . . what an opportunity to kick the shit out of both of them.

It was also high time he bedded Vicky Fairchild.

61

Vicky was not enjoying her first term at Bagley. The workload was appalling and there was no Sam Spink to fight her corner. After cajoling the lovely flat and bathroom out of Ian Cartwright, her charm objective wasn’t working as well as she’d hoped. So many of the masters were gay or married and tied up with families. Piers, the head of her department, was rumoured to be having an affair with Rufus’s wife, Sheena. Vicky and Jason had seen through each other long ago. Emlyn, easily the most attractive, and with a strange relationship with Oriana from which Vicky was sure he could be detached, was polite but cool, which exhausted the best heterosexual bachelors.

Hengist and Sally were kind, but Olympian and remote, like Jupiter and Juno, and hadn’t invited her to a single dinner party.

There were enough boys in the school in love with her and girls, madly admiring, to feed her ego, but she wanted a husband or a steady partner to love and cherish.

Vicky found her thoughts straying rather too often to Cosmo Rannaldini, sexy little beast, with whom she had gone much too far on the field trip. Now he sat, staring at her, a wicked smile snaking round his full lips, unnerving her as she tried to initiate him and the rest of Middle Five B into
The Pardoner’s Tale
. Anatole and Lubemir, meanwhile, were playing poker. Milly was painting her nails; Amber was writing to one of her numerous boyfriends; the Chinless Wanderers were studying the
Sun
, deciding which horses to back, except for Lando, lazy great beast, who was asleep.

‘Can you tell me, Lando, what Chaucer is trying to say here?’ she asked sharply.

Lando opened an eye. ‘Can you tell me who the fuck Chaucer is?’

The class fell about.

‘Don’t use horrible language, Lando, that’s another fiver for the swear box. And don’t be so obtuse.’

Lando stretched out a large polo-stick-calloused hand for the Collins dictionary. ‘What does “obtuse” mean?’

Vicky’s lips tightened. She found the Middle Fifths very difficult and not nearly admiring enough – particularly Paris, who, as they had both come from Larks, should have supported her. His stroppy behaviour was becoming the talk of the staffroom with Hengist showing a curious reluctance to put the boot in.

Vicky showed no such reluctance when in the Middle Fifths’ next English lesson, three days later, she asked them to describe a happy family experience in the holidays, using simile, metaphor, oxymoron and personification.

‘Please, Miss Fairchild,’ whispered Milly, ‘Paris doesn’t have a family.’

‘Of course he does. He has the bursar and his wife, his new foster family,’ said Vicky, so that everyone looked at Paris. ‘You could write a most interesting essay on adjusting to your new placement, Paris, and how Bagley compares with Larks.’

‘“Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it”,’ spat Paris.

‘My mother,’ piped up Amber, ‘says placement is the most difficult part of a dinner party. She always forgets to do a seating plan, and is pissed by the time we get into the dining room. Why doesn’t one learn important things like that in maths?’

‘I hardly think Biffo’d be an expert,’ said Milly. ‘It’s even worse if you’re a single woman. If my mother asks Randal to dinner, is it coming on too strong to put him at the head of the table, or will he be miffed he’s not on her right?’

‘Don’t be silly, Milly,’ exploded Vicky.

‘Silly Milly,’ echoed Jade, sticking her tongue out at Milly.

‘Write it as a play, Paris,’ suggested Vicky, ‘then we could all take parts.’

‘Or as a poem,’ quipped Cosmo. ‘Living with the bursar could not be worser.’

‘Shut it,’ hissed Paris.

‘Paris in fact is quite a poet,’ went on Cosmo, dramatically whipping out a rainbow-coloured notebook. ‘Listen to this epic about a snail,’ which he proceeded to declaim in a camp Cockney accent:

‘“O Snile, your gli-ering trile, leads from the gu-er up to anuvver gu-er on which to bang your ’orns.”’

As Paris gave a howl of rage, uneasy laughter broke out round the room.

Milly put a hand on Paris’s arm. ‘Ignore him.’

‘Here’s another little gem,’ continued Cosmo, turning the page, knowing instinctively that Vicky didn’t like Paris. ‘Here’s what our new boy thinks of Bagley:

‘Death is like a boarding school

From which you never come home

Where your name is carved on a gravestone

Rather than sewn inside your clothes.’

‘Doesn’t scan,’ complained Boffin.

‘You bastard,’ whispered Paris, turning on Cosmo.

‘I think it’s rather good,’ said Primrose Duddon with a shiver.

‘I think it’s very good,’ came a voice from the back of the class.

It was Piers Fleming, head of English, who’d dropped in to listen to Vicky’s class. ‘May I?’ He grabbed the rainbow-covered notebook and read both the snail poem and the death poem again, but in a normal and beautiful voice.

‘The second one,’ he went on, ‘reminds me of Robert Frost describing a disused graveyard:

‘The verses in it say and say:

“The ones who living come today

To read the stones and go away

Tomorrow dead will come to stay.”

‘It has the same icy hand on the heart. I’m going to put forward your poems for the school anthology,’ he told Paris. ‘We publish it every three years. You’re probably too modest to submit your own stuff, so thank you, Cosmo, so much, for drawing it to my attention.’

Cosmo was hopping.

As the bell went and the Middle Fifths packed up, Piers very kindly suggested to Vicky she might fare better with one of the less demanding sets. If Piers and Vicky had seen the Middle Fifths at their next lesson, however, they might have changed their opinion, as the entire set listened enraptured to Theo Graham introducing some of their GCSE Latin texts.

‘Poets were like rock stars around the first century AD,’ he was now telling them as, hip hitched on to the side of a desk, he puffed away on a forbidden cigarette. ‘Just as you lot might enliven an evening with a video or a takeaway or by hiring a stripagram for a party, the Romans sent out for a slave to read poetry.

‘Some poets like Martial, who was charming and very witty, recited their own poems at dinner parties, but most of them were read by slaves. You didn’t make money as a poet in those days, but people could sponsor you. Horace was earlier, of course, but he was such a good poet – we’ll be looking at his stuff in a minute – that a rich Etruscan gave him a farm and a huge estate.’

‘Just think if he’d liked your poems, Paris,’ giggled Amber. Paris grinned and gave her a middle finger.

Lighting one cigarette from another, Theo shuffled down the row and lifted a lock of Amber’s blond hair.

‘You’d have been in trouble as a slave, miss, because Italians liked blondes, so lots of society ladies dyed their hair blond, and when it fell out, they shaved the heads of the blonde slaves and used the hair as a wig.

‘That’s probably why Pyrrha in our first poem was considered such a beauty, Horace describes her as braiding her flaxen locks.’

‘Paris would have cleaned up as a poet
and
a blond,’ said Milly.

Feeling much happier, Paris came out of Theo’s class slap into Poppet Bruce, who was always nagging him to drop in on her and Alex and pour out his soul. Now she wanted him to go public.

‘Could you address our Talks Society next week? If a talk is too daunting, I could always interview you.’ Paris raised a pale eyebrow. ‘It would be such a broadening experience for our group to hear your views on your foster placement and being in care.’

The lad was certainly good-looking, decided Poppet, and the same age as their daughter, Charisma. She was very touched when Paris put a hand in his pocket and handed her a tenner.

‘How kind, but you don’t have to pay to join our little society.’

‘No, it’s for the two fines I’m about to get,’ said Paris icily. ‘You just want me to slag off Patience and Ian, to give you and Mr Fussy ammunition against them. So fuck off.’ Then he spat at her feet, just falling short of her grubby sandalled toenails.

Poppet didn’t miss a beat.

‘I know you’re hurting, Paris, and don’t really mean it.’

‘Hurt is a transitive verb,’ snapped Paris, ‘and I do.’

Despite half the staff competing to make him tell them if anything was wrong, Paris felt it was as weak to admit terror as to display love and dependency. And so he waited for Cosmo. Whether it was a bomb in the tube or on Big Ben, the terrorists would strike sooner or later. He had already found a rubber snake in his bed and still kept hearing rumours about the notorious Pitbull Club.

It was after midnight on the second Saturday of term. Theo, after downing a bottle of whisky in his room, had passed out, his snores ripping open the night. Smart, in the next-door cell, had long since wanked himself to sleep over a photograph of Jade Stancombe. Paris could hear the Virginia creeper flapping limp hands against the window, floorboards creaking, Tarquin’s ravishing strides, doors softly opening and closing. Just like Oaktree Court. Starting to shake, already drenched in sweat, he pulled Thomas the Tank Engine over his head. The chattering of his teeth would wake the dead.

Suddenly the duvet was wrenched off him and a torch brighter than the full moon shoved in his face.

‘Get up, pretty boy.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Get up,’ repeated the voice.

In the dim light, he could make out a hooded figure, then groaned as the torch was rammed into his ribs.

‘You’re invited to the Pitbull Club. Move it.’

Paris froze, nearly shitting himself, heart crashing.

‘Leave me alone,’ he croaked, kicking out at another hooded figure that appeared on the right.

‘Come on, Gay Paree.’ He knew that voice. Next moment its owner had grabbed his hair, tugging him viciously to his feet.

‘New boy’s initiation. Let’s see how brave you are,’ mocked another slighter figure hovering behind.

The figure on the left jabbed him with the torch again. Paris moaned, then, reaching behind him, grabbed the knife from under his pillow. Leaping at the first figure, catching him off balance, pulling him against his own body, clamping him with his left hand, he put the knife against his throat.

The torch crashed to the floor.

The muscular, almost square body, left him in no doubt about the identity of the tormentor.

‘Get out, unless you want your throat cut, Albanian pig.’

‘Put him down,’ ordered the larger of the figures on the right, who had a deep voice, and was moving in. Paris caught a waft of brandy.

‘Don’t come anywhere near me,’ he spat, then, running the blade down Lubemir’s cheek, split it open, drawing blood. ‘I’m not just shaving him. Next time I’ll cut deeper.’ Kneeing Lubemir in the kidneys, he sent him crashing to the floor.

‘Get him,’ said the smaller figure on the right – with less conviction as, in the light from the fallen torch, Paris approached with knife poised.

‘You don’t scare me,’ snarled Paris. ‘I’ll cut up the lot of you, and you’ll lose more than your plait this time, Miss Stancombe.’

Jade gave a gasp, and fled, followed by Lubemir and Anatole.

Down in the cellar, the leader of the pack in his astrakhan coat was admiring his reflection as he snorted coke from a framed mirror lying on an ancient desk. His eyes were glittering but no less cruel.