Even the most rebellious Stormy Lockers (yes, that is what they call themselves) feels a thrill of pride on showing off the Entrance Hall. True – rather like Cherry Grange – it has seen better days. Two panes of the twelve tall windows are still boarded up after that ill-advised indoor cricket match last summer. The stag heads hanging gloomily on the wall are almost bald, those suits of armour flanking the foot of the staircase are more rust than metal. And don’t get me started on the dust – all the housework at Stormy Loch is done by Lockers themselves and they’re just not very interested. But Lockers do love those suits of armour, which go by the names of Lord Alastair and Lord Hamish, and every night when they go up to bed they pat the stags (which may account for the baldness). As for the rest – look at the sweeping staircase, like something out of a film! The ceiling decorated with coats of arms! The vast stone fireplace with its leering gargoyles! You could fit a whole class in that fireplace, if you stuffed a few of the littler students up the chimney. So – gloomy, a little. Not very clean, I grant you. But awesomely impressive?
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Alice – wet, humiliated, confused – tried not to let these splendours cow her. The boys led her in and, as everyone always did for new visitors, stopped reverently just inside the front door, expecting the usual gasps of admiration. Alice kept her small nose stuck in the air and said nothing.
‘Well, here’s the gong,’ said Jesse, awkwardly. He led her to an alcove to the left of the fireplace, where a giant brass disc stood suspended in an oak frame almost as tall as Alice, a mallet with a brown leather head the size of a tennis ball hanging from a hook beside it.
‘Reveille’s OK, really,’ he said. ‘It’ll be better this term, because it’s light in the mornings. Last term it was dark, and freezing, especially when the boiler broke down …’
Alice folded her arms and stared at the ceiling. Jesse, not noticing the wobble of her lower lip, wished that it was yesterday again, and that they were back on the train, and she was asking him about school. ‘There’s this race,’ he would say, and today they would have run it fair and square, and he would almost certainly have won it, but properly, and now they would still be friends.
Timidly, he picked up the mallet and held it out to her.
‘You hit the gong three times, as close to the middle as you can,’ he explained. ‘Do you want to try?’
Alice passed him without a word.
Sometimes you can wish all you like, but it won’t change anything. Jesse, silenced, followed her meekly up the stairs.
*
The first-floor landing had a bare wooden floor and scuffed walls, one painted red, the other blue.
‘Cost saving!’ Fergus, who (as Jesse had said on the train) did like to show off, but also wanted to make amends for his idiotic behaviour, took up the role of tour guide. ‘The major gets people to donate paint. He says it doesn’t matter what colour. He thinks it’s cheerful. Observe, the brightness of the red! Behold, the soothing nature of the blue!’
Alice scowled. Fergus tried not to feel discouraged.
On they went, down a pink and yellow corridor – See how it resembles the icing on a cake! – up one narrower flight of stairs and then another as Fergus rattled off information, pointing out classrooms and labs, common rooms and dorms, until finally they reached the top floor, and a lilac corridor with a lot of green doors.
They stopped in front of the last door.
‘And this,’ announced Fergus with a bow and a flourish, ‘is your room.’
Homesickness slammed into Alice the moment she walked in.
Until now, it had felt almost like a story happening to someone else. The train, the mad drive, the insane race … But the quiet little room she now found herself in felt real.
It wasn’t unpleasant. The walls were painted the same soft lilac as the corridor, the bed was narrow but covered in a thick squishy duvet, the view outside her small casement window was impressive. It was just those words – your room.
Your room belonged to a completely different place. It belonged to Cherry Grange.
Alice puckered her brow as tears threatened to well.
‘You’re very lucky,’ Jesse hazarded. ‘Most Year Sevens sleep in dorms, but this room just happened to be free. The girl who had it before you was in the sixth form.’
‘She was expelled because she kept setting the chemistry lab on fire,’ said Fergus, looking up. ‘I guess she tried to burn this too.’
Alice followed his gaze to a large black sooty patch on the ceiling.
‘She was helping Professor Lawrence with her fireworks. Professor Lawrence is the chemistry teacher, and she’s inventing a new kind of daytime firework for Visitors’ Day, to set off from the middle of the loch. School say Melanie – Melanie van Boek, she was the girl who lived here before – had a Talent for Science, but honestly, she was a one hundred per cent pyromaniac – that’s a person who burns things down on purpose, in case you didn’t …’
‘I know what a pyromaniac is,’ said Alice, finally breaking her silence.
‘Do you?’ Fergus was delighted. ‘I’m collecting maniacs. There’s pyromaniac, of course, to do with fire. And kleptomaniac, which is a person who can’t stop stealing. And ablutomaniac, which is when you can’t stop …’
‘Washing,’ sighed Alice.
Fergus was impressed. ‘And bibliomaniac …’
‘Books.’ Alice rolled her eyes. ‘Obviously.’
Jesse had no idea what they were talking about. He only knew that it was bad enough that Alice wasn’t talking to him, without having her launch into incomprehensible conversations with Fergus. He tried to think of something clever to say – something that wasn’t shut up, Fergus – and couldn’t think of anything.
‘Dinomaniac,’ cried Fergus.
Alice pushed him out of the room. Jesse hovered, and tried to apologise again. She pushed him out too, ignoring Fergus’ cry of, ‘Dinosaur!’.
*
Fergus Mackenzie was the sort of clever that plays chess against computers, would rather do maths puzzles than watch TV, and hacks into people’s computers just because he can (remember that, it’s important). He could read fluently in English by the age of four, in his mother’s native German by five. By seven, he taught himself Italian. By the age of ten he had too many cups for debating, maths and general brilliance to display.
Nobody disputed that he was a genius. Nobody even minded. What they did mind was that he did really, really stupid things. Like put a toad in Esme’s bed, or salt in Amir’s tea, or tie Joshua’s bootlaces together before rugby practice. He wasn’t even intelligently stupid. When Fergus was bored – and he was easily bored – he became positively imbecilic, and sometimes even mean. He had tripped Alice for literally no reason other than to see what would happen and it had, he felt, been extremely satisfactory – all those people shouting at each other, and even the pigs were something new.
But, as he and Jesse showed Alice around the school – the loch which changed colour depending on the weather, the rowing boats they used to go fishing, the farm where they grew their food, the spooky old keep which housed the new music rooms – he became fascinated by her. She had remained entirely silent all afternoon. At first, he was disappointed, because he had enjoyed their brief exchange about manias, and had hoped for more. But then – I told you he was clever – he became interested in her silence.
Alice’s silence, Fergus felt, had the tightly wound quality of a kettle about to boil, or a baby about to scream, or a bomb about to explode. Which is to say that Alice’s silence was very, very loud indeed.
At dinner, which she hardly touched, he watched as she answered the questions from the other children who flocked to their table to meet her, nosy Jenny and shy Samira, little Duffy and Amir ‘the philosopher’ and spotty Zeb. He saw that she was very still, and very poised, and very careful. Not open, but not rude either – actually rather fascinatingly neutral, except for an interesting tic, her left hand moving as if she were writing. The only time she revealed anything interesting was when Jenny asked what her father did.
‘He’s an actor,’ she said, a bit too quickly.
‘Is he famous?’
‘Almost.’ And here Fergus, enthralled, saw that she actually blushed. ‘I mean, he will be. He’s really good. He just needs a lucky break.’
Fergus could guess what she was doing. He had been shocked when his parents told him they were getting divorced last year, though looking back all the signs had been there clear as day for him to see – the shouting and fighting, the constant travelling, the sleeping in separate rooms. The eye sees what the heart desires, the counsellor his parents had sent him to had said.
Whether she knew it or not, Alice Mistlethwaite was lying about her dad.
Fergus rather liked that.