For a heartbeat, as she woke on her first morning, Alice thought she was still at Cherry Grange. Light filtered in around the curtains as it had at home, and the duvet had the same comforting snuggliness. She turned off her phone’s alarm, and burrowed back down. She wasn’t going anywhere until Patience called her for school …
School!
She opened her eyes again, and saw the sooty patch on the ceiling. The snuggly feeling gave way to dread. She looked at the time. It was six forty-five …
She groaned as she remembered, slid out of bed and went over to the window. There was the loch – almost black today – and there were the mountains, the sky and the wind-tossed clouds … She pulled off her pyjamas and pulled on her lumpy uniform. Still yawning, she stepped into the lilac corridor. And now here were the green doors, and the narrow staircase, the pink and yellow landing like a cake, the cheerful red and blue one, and here was the Entrance Hall with its patched-up window panes …
The castle was eerily quiet in the early morning – the sort of quiet that plays tricks on the imagination. What if they are watching me, Alice wondered as she passed the glassy-eyed stag heads, and did someone speak as she passed the rusty suits of armour.
Here was the gong, and was there something lurking in the shadows of its recess? She picked up the mallet. It looked old. She wondered who had been the first person ever to use it.
The clock on the wall struck seven.
Alice hit the gong exactly as Jesse had instructed, right in the middle, and as the castle exploded with its boom, and vibrations shot up her arm, she felt the thin line between reality and her imagination rip.
The stags were leaping from the wall … The suits of armour were creaking back to life …
BOOM! BOOM!
Somewhere on a three-mast ship on the open seas, a tiger roared, and a circus girl climbed the rigging with the wind in her hair. Alice swung the mallet again, harder, and it felt like all the stories she had ever written were flowing out of her, and as they swirled about her like living things, so did the emotions she had kept silent for so long – anger and sadness and fear – except they weren’t silent any more but turned into music by the mallet and the brass disc, making the air shake.
BOOM! Take that, Fergus Mackenzie, for tripping her up, and take that, Jesse Okuyo, for breaking his promise! As Alice smashed the reveille gong, she thought of every person who had ever made her furious. BOOM! BOOM! Take that, hateful Brown-Watsons, for stealing her house! Take that, Aunt Patience, for sending her away! BOOM! BOOM! The rage grew wilder. TAKE THAT, MUM, FOR DYING AND BARNEY FOR …
‘What do you think you are doing?’
The whirl of sound faded. The air stopped spinning and deposited Alice gently back on the ground, where she saw a small stout woman dressed in a puce quilted dressing-gown, her hair rolled into baby-blue curlers and her face purple with indignation.
Alice stared at her in astonishment.
‘I am Matron,’ the small stout woman announced, ‘and I am ordering you to give me that mallet! Three strikes! Did nobody explain? What you are doing now is the fire alarm! Just look at the commotion you’ve caused.’
Slowly, Alice looked up. The entire student body were trooping down the stairs in their pyjamas, some of them dragging their duvets.
Matron held out an imperious hand. ‘Young lady, relinquish that mallet!’
But Alice wasn’t ready to relinquish anything.
Alice, who never showed her emotions.
Alice, who had been so quiet for so long.
BOOM! BOOM!! BOOM!!!
Take that, Matron, with your purple face and curlers and young lady and commotion!
‘Upstairs, this minute!’ shouted Matron, snatching away the mallet.
Up Alice went, cheeks flushed but head held high, a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, as the students watched in wonder.
Her aunt wanted her to live as she wrote. It looked like Patience was going to get more than she’d bargained for. The major, standing draped in kittens in the doorway of his study, wondered if dreamy Alice Mistlethwaite might be developing a Talent for Trouble.