Wicked! (82 page)

‘Why isn’t Janna Curtis more grateful?’ grumbled Cindy Payne.

This was because saving Year Ten was small comfort compared with the anguish of saying goodbye to the other years.

‘Why didn’t you save us as well?’ sobbed the little ones.

‘Why didn’t you march for us on Drowning Street?’

It was like working in a slaughterhouse, or a vivisection clinic, making their last moments as comfortable as possible. Janna tried heroically to remain cheerful, but on the last day, when the media poured in to photograph the death of a school, she lost it and screamed at them all to booger off.

‘Why couldn’t I have saved them?’ she sobbed to Mags and Cambola as her children set off on their last journey down the drive to St Jimmy’s or Searston Abbey or pupil referral units or to uncertain futures and no likelihood of a decent job, unless, in Year Eleven’s case, they had notched up a few GCSEs.

Janna felt more and more grateful to Stancombe who was planning to extend Appletree to include a dining room, a big hall, a gym and new labs.

‘I’d like to rename it Stancombe House,’ she told him when he dropped in with a bottle of champagne after the first day of work.

Stancombe shook his head. ‘That’ll tell everyone who funded it. It was a gift, remember?’

Although they were alone in the roofless, windowless building and could see a new moon scything its way through the soft blue twilight, Stancombe made no attempt to extract payment. At first Janna thought he was sensitively appreciating her mood of utter desolation, then he shyly confided that he and Ruth were off to Italy and that he was thinking very seriously of asking her to marry him.

When Janna hugged him in delight and urged him to go for it, he assured her that Teddy Murray, his foreman, would keep an eye on everything and told her to ring him on his mobile if she needed help.

Janna was heartbroken to lose Lance and Lydia, who both needed to work full time. She was, however, touched by the teachers who wanted to stay on: Mags, Cambola, Mr Mates, even Basket and Skunk, who she prayed would rise to the challenge. They were all taking early retirement, but were allowed to work two and a half days a week which was all that would be needed to cover the new Year Eleven’s GCSE syllabus. This suited Mags who had been only doing two and a half days a week anyway.

Among the younger teachers, sweet Sophy Belvedon had opted to stay. Wally and Debbie would both remain full time and, to the delight of the children, the Brigadier and Lily, who’d both been cleared by the Criminal Records Bureau, would respectively teach history and help Mags out with French, Spanish and German.

One of the nicest compliments came from Rowan who, having signed on for an advanced course in the summer holidays, offered to come in and teach IT.

‘I know we’ve had our differences,’ she told Janna, ‘but I want to see Larks through to the end and, frankly, anything’s better than looking after children full time.’

Gloria was staying on to take PE, so apart from maths and food technology, everything was sorted.

Everyone was being so kind; Janna couldn’t think why she couldn’t stop crying. There was the afternoon at Appletree when she was dickering over what colour to paint the new hall, when Partner shot off into the park. Janna only just had time to hide her swollen eyes behind dark glasses before he proudly led in Cadbury and Dora.

Dora was delivering a card which said: ‘Sorry about your school, good luck, Paris’, which nearly set Janna off again.

Dora was also in low spirits. She’d had to spend a lot of time recently counselling her brother, Dicky, because his hero David Beckham had moved to Real Madrid. She had continued to put sweets in Paris’s locker but he hardly noticed her. He had been so gorgeous as Jack Tanner in the end-of-term play,
Man and Superman
, it had fanned the flames of her hopeless love for him. But life must go on. Dora cleared her throat.

‘I feel one must put something back into the community,’ she told Janna gravely, ‘so I’d like to offer my services teaching media studies at Larks next term.’

Janna started to laugh and found she couldn’t stop. Dora got quite huffy until Janna began to cry, whereupon Dora rushed off to the Ghost and Castle and bought her a quadruple vodka and tonic. When she assured the landlord: ‘I’m not a binge drinker, it’s for Miss Curtis, whose school has closed down,’ he quite understood.

81

Bianca Campbell-Black was so dazzled that Feral had defended her with a real gun at the public meeting, she sent him a new violet and Day-Glo yellow football, a diamond cross and ear studs, did no work through the summer term dreaming of him and throughout the holidays bombarded him with cards inviting him home.

Feral longed to accept. Time and again he hitched a lift or ‘borrowed’ a car to drive over to Penscombe. On his first visit, he mistook the dear little lodge at the bottom of the drive for Bianca’s home and thought how cosily he and she could live there. But when he knocked and was told by an ancient retainer that Bianca lived in the big house at the end of an avenue of chestnuts, whose trunk shadows striped the drive like an endless old-school tie, he turned round and went home.

On subsequent visits through the baking summer, he had borrowed Lily’s binoculars and paused on the road out of Penscombe village. Here he had gazed longingly across the valley at fields filled with horses and the long lake squirming in the sunshine beneath Rupert’s big, golden house, in the hope of catching a glimpse of Bianca, but knowing there was no way of him ever affording her, particularly as he had a court case pending, and if it was held in September he would be sixteen and named in the paper.

Nor had life in the big golden house during the holidays been peaceful. Xavier had got an even worse report than Bianca, indicating that he hadn’t a hope of a single GCSE unless he did four or five hours’ work every day in the holidays.

Shut away in his bedroom, ostensibly wrestling with
Macbeth
and the Russian Revolution one stifling mid-August afternoon, Xav looked up at the posters of Colombian beauty spots and fine-looking Colombian Indians, which his mother had had specially framed to make him proud of his origins.

Xav was very aware of the blood of his Indian ancestors flowing through his veins, blood tainted by an excess of drink and drugs, both of which he was now illicitly indulging in. Drunk or stoned, he felt capable of anything; the sadness and terror ebbed away. He forgot he was thick, friendless and had grown fat and spotty by stuffing himself with cake and chocolate when he was coming down.

On the wall hung a little wooden Madonna hollowed out inside to smuggle cocaine. These had been on sale in the Bogotá convent from which he and Bianca had been adopted by Rupert and Taggie. Rupert had nicked one as a souvenir and later given it to Xav, little realizing that Xav was putting it to its original use and, because Rupert himself indulged so rarely, that Xav had been regularly helping himself to his father’s stash of cocaine.

At first, Xav had assumed people disliked him at Bagley because he was black, but seeing everyone swooning over Bianca when she arrived, he realized it was just him they didn’t like. This was reinforced when Feral, who was much blacker than Bianca, had rolled up, so agile, beautiful and larky that girls fell for him in droves, so Xav could no longer blame his colour for his not getting a girlfriend.

Formerly his great passion and bond with Rupert had been horses, but after a horrible hunting fall in the Easter holidays, when he had smashed his elbow, he had lost his nerve and the one way he could always win his father’s respect. If he mounted a horse now, he trembled and poured with sweat. After a few abortive attempts to take him out on a lead rein, Rupert had given up and left him at home.

Finally, Xav’s beloved, endlessly wagging, black Labrador, Bogotá, was on his rickety last legs. Rupert had never had any problem with adopting black children. Xav and Bianca were his son and daughter and that was that. Chided in the nineties by a social worker that Xav wasn’t making enough black friends, Rupert had insolently bought the boy a black Labrador puppy and called it Bogotá, after Xav’s birthplace. The puppy had ironically grown up into the best and truest friend Xav had ever had. Now Bogotá, temporarily oblivious of the arthritis that plagued him, lay snoring at Xavier’s feet.

Rupert had been frantically busy all summer running the yard, politicking with Jupiter and Hengist and fighting off takeover bids for Venturer, the television company which he ran with his father-in-law, Declan O’Hara. Venturer was still very successful, but like all independent TV stations, was having an increasing battle attracting advertising.

Nor did the bloodstock market ever sleep, as emails poured in from Tokyo, Dubai and Kentucky. Despite his legendary energy, chronic lack of sleep was making Rupert increasingly ratty and preoccupied, otherwise he might have attributed his son’s mood swings to more than adolescent angst.

Hearing a terrific bang and the frenzied barking of dogs, Xav raced out on to the landing with Bogotá hobbling after him. Down the stairwell he could see his mother running white-faced out of the kitchen to be confronted by an outraged Bianca:

‘Daddy’s shot the television because Mr Blair’s on it. I’ll just have to go and watch Sky with the lads,’ and stormed off.

Taggie clutched her head. She was desperately low both about Xav’s deteriorating relationship with the entire family and because she was quite incapable of helping either child with its holiday work. Her agonizing was interrupted by the telephone.

‘Helloo, helloo.’

Recognizing the strangulated Adam’s apple whine of Alex Bruce, which instantly recalled her own disastrous school days, Taggie started to shake.

‘Just checking you’re on for our fundraiser for the new science block next week.’

Oh God, she’d forgotten.

‘What date is it?’

‘Twenty-first of August.’

Taggie went cold. That was Xav’s birthday; he went berserk if it weren’t celebrated in style. Alex Bruce had caught her on the hop when, back in June, he’d issued the invitation, implying that Xavier’s behaviour wouldn’t be so ‘challenging’ or his learning difficulties so excessive if the parental back-up were more committed.

Riddled with shame and guilt, Taggie had weakly accepted but failed to tell Rupert, who was allergic to being gazed at by mothers and forced to put one’s hand in one’s pocket, when one was already bankrupted by bloody fees.

‘Helloo, helloo?’ Alex was still on the line. Taggie shuddered at the thought of his pursed red lips framed by beard pressed against the receiver.

‘We’ll be there,’ she bleated.

‘Randal Stancombe’s agreed to host our promises auction. How about your spouse donating a helicopter trip to the Arc, complete with hospitality, or a peep behind the scenes at Venturer Television? Some of our parents might bid quite high for a chance to appear on
Buffers
.’

‘You’ll have to ask Rupert,’ gasped Taggie and rang off.

Rupert, as she predicted, was insane with rage.

‘I’ll be in France – there’s no way I can get there before nine.’

Taggie said she’d go on ahead, which made Rupert even crosser. He loathed his beautiful wife being out on the toot without him: predators were everywhere.

But his rage was nothing to the sullen fury of Xav that they were abandoning him on his birthday.

‘I’m so sorry, darling, I muddled the dates.’

‘You should have known it was my birthday from the date. Not that it’s my real birthday – that’s why you don’t care.’

‘Don’t be bloody to Mummy,’ protested Bianca, thinking how unattractively white-tongued and covered in zits her brother looked.

‘You can fuck off,’ spat Xav, then, swinging back to Taggie: ‘Can I have a party at home that night?’

Taggie quailed. ‘Of course you can, darling.’

What the hell was Rupert going to say? Mrs Bodkin, their ancient housekeeper, was far too doddery to keep order.

‘Will you ask Feral?’ pleaded Bianca. ‘And Paris? If you ask Paris, Feral might easily come. Oh per-lease.’

‘I might.’ Xav stormed upstairs, slamming his bedroom door.

Talk about an own goal. Pushing aside a rug and raising a floor board, he lifted out a half-empty bottle of vodka and having filled a tooth mug, hid it again.

He had been so endlessly sulky and difficult at Bagley he had no friends to ask. Girls were repelled by him. Sweet Aysha would never be allowed out by her bullying father. The only reason boys might turn up was to have a crack at Bianca or because the mothers delivering the girls wanted to gawp at the house and his father. He could try the children of his parents’ friends: Junior, Amber, Lando and Jack Waterlane. Milly, Dicky and Dora might come. As a brown-nosing gesture, he could ask the hateful Cosmo, but they were probably all away.

Why did his father increasingly hate leaving his dogs and horses and not take them on holidays abroad, so they could row in the Caribbean or Mauritius like everyone else’s families? Then he wouldn’t have to have a party.

Xav took a slug of vodka, then jumped out of his skin as the door opened, but it was only Bogotá, entirely white face smiling, pink tongue hanging down like a tie, black legs going everywhere.