by Juno Dawson
I’m in!
And I’m not alone.
There’s a curse and a gasp and a scuffling of feet. My light clearly illuminates two pale, naked bums; two guys frantically pulling their pants up. And between them, on her knees, is Megan Jones.
Great. That’s perfect.
Chapter 12
‘Sorry!’ I squeak and slither backwards out of the cave opening. I land awkwardly with a thud on my butt, but my desire to be as far away as possible overrides the pain. ‘I didn’t see anything, I swear!’ I shout into the hole before seizing my backpack and clambering over the rocks, trying to get back onto the embankment. I throw a glance over my shoulder to see if they’re chasing after me, but I don’t see anyone.
Oh God, I could just die. I probably will.
This time, I don’t climb down to the water’s edge. Instead I follow the stream from the path running alongside the top of the gorge until I find the first of my marked trees. I break into a run, desperate to get back to the farm.
Maybe the stream is full of evil fairies. It certainly seems to be cursed. Dead bodies. Naked bodies. Of all the people in all the world it had to be Megan bloody Jones. Well, of course it was. Thanks for having my back, universe. The ‘chatter’ of the stream now sounds like mocking laughter.
I run from marker to marker, the forest spinning wildly around me like a giddy green carousel. I keep looking over my shoulder, sure Megan and her boyfriends are coming to kill me. I daren’t stop. When the edge of the woods comes into sight I allow myself a brief rest. I keel forward, hands on knees. My stomach lurches, but I’m not sick. For the first time, the farm feels like a safe haven.
As I stagger up the garden path, out of breath, Margot is feeding the chickens. She casts an eye over me, my jeans and jacket covered in mud, my sodden Kickers ruined forever. ‘I did warn you about those woods, didn’t I?’ is all she says, before turning back to the chickens.
I don’t reply. I just want to be in a bath.
Rainy percussion on the shed roofs has kept me up for most of the night and the spiteful weather shows no signs of stopping. Water gurgles and splatters from the broken guttering outside my window to the flagstones below and, to make this miserable Monday morning worse, today Bronwyn and Danny are on a geography field trip without me. How am I meant to face Megan without them? I think about feigning illness, but that requires effort and I always think to throw an effective sickie, you have to lay the groundwork the night before … making a great show of slinking off to bed early or pretending to have no appetite at dinner.
I kick the quilt off and cling to the faint glimmer of hope that Megan doesn’t know it was my head that popped into the dark cave. Oh, who am I kidding? She’s going to crucify me. I feel like I might actually hurl.
Margot, meanwhile, has invented a new torture treatment. I’m starting to suspect she stands at the bottom of the stairs actively wafting crispy bacon in the direction of my bedroom. Well, I’m not caving in. Over breakfast we say few words, but I pointedly smear butter and jam onto my toast, ignoring the flesh mountain of bacon and sausages in the middle of the table. I mean, who is she even cooking it all for? Mum eats like a sparrow. She might as well mount pigs’ heads on pikes and just have done with it.
I decide, in the absence of any friends, to take Margot’s diary to school. I’ll find a spot in the library and continue to read it. I think about trying to tally up the dates with the local papers too, or matching it to the timeline of the war to see if everything adds up. I guess now that I know the cave exists, there’s no real reason to doubt its contents, but I’m totally being pulled back in time like it’s a magic portal or something. I want to know more; I want to see Margot’s Wales; I need to know what happened next.
I read it on the bus into school, still pointedly avoiding Dewi. In the next instalment, Margot gives a brief update as to what happened with Reg: he was freed two days after Margot’s outburst at the station. Apparently the police managed to track down the runaway boy, who’d been rehoused with a family in Swansea. He told them the reason he’d fled, confirming what both Margot and I had suspected. I’m grateful that Margot didn’t include any gory details. Geraint Tibbet was arrested for ‘indecency’, and Reg released.
Worryingly, even Tibbet’s arrest didn’t stop speculation about the ‘Negro’ in Llanmarion. Poor Reg. Oh well, at least Bess was thrilled to have him out – and it was Margot who got much of the stick for being a ‘darkie-lover’. To her credit, Margot didn’t seem to care what the people of the village thought about her, and neither should I. I sat up a little straighter in my seat.
Dewi collars me as I step off the bus, hovering at my shoulder. ‘Hey … Are y-you cross with me, Fliss? Is it about D-D-D-Danny Chung? Look, I shouldn’t have said what I said, OK? I wasn’t thinking, like.’
My face can appear a little condescending at the best of times, but right now I’m actively switching it up. ‘No. You really shouldn’t. There’s nothing big about being a bigot, Dewi.’ I’m satisfied with my little play on words. Feisty.
For someone so towering, he suddenly looks like a shamefaced little boy. ‘I know … I don’t know why I said that, like. It was stupid. I was stupid. I actually really like Danny. He’s a laugh.’
‘Oh yeah? “Some of my best friends are gay”?’
‘What?’
‘Oh, never mind.’ Haughty.
‘I j-just thought that if you fancied him, you should know he’s a gay.’
No way! He’s jealous of Danny! It’d be cute if it weren’t so sad. ‘I don’t fancy anyone right now,’ I say, making myself very clear. He looks hurt and I feel bad for kicking the puppy. I soften my tone. ‘Look, I’m just looking for some friends. People haven’t been too welcoming if you hadn’t noticed.’
Dewi perks up a little. ‘If anyone gives you any hassle, you tell me, like. I’m soft as shit, but my size confuses people.’ He gives me a wonky smile. ‘I can … can always sit on them if all else fails.’
I laugh, forgiving him for now. There’s a warmth about Dewi, not just his cuddly exterior, but something toasty from inside too. I think his heart’s in the right place. What does that even mean? How can your heart be in the wrong place? You’d like totally die. Now that he’s forgiven-ish, we walk to registration together.
First period is maths. At St Agnes, I was quite average at maths, but here I’m top of the class. I don’t think my private-school teachers were any better; it’s just that in my old classes there were only seventeen of us. Here there’s thirty-two. It’s a painfully slow double period of trigonometry before break and then I head for the library, Margot’s diary in my arms.
I’m walking down the alleyway between blocks when there’s a tug on my ponytail. Ow! It really, REALLY hurts like it’s coming out at the roots. My head yanked back, I manage to twist around before my neck breaks to see Megan’s shoes.
It’s time then.
She drags me up against the wall and bangs the back of my head against the bricks. My brain rattles inside my skull painfully. My eyes flick left and right searching for a saviour. Why is there never a teacher around when you need one?
Megan gets right up in my face, her breath stinking of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum and Red Bull. ‘Did you tell anyone?’
‘No!’ I squeal and she relaxes her grip on my hair. If nothing else, at least she’s alone this time. Not that that would help in a fight. She’d pulverise me.
‘Are you gonna tell anyone?’
‘I didn’t see anything, Megan.’
‘Too fucking right you didn’t, bitch,’ she snarls. ‘You know what’ll happen if you say a word? Do people get bottled in London? Be a shame to mess up such a pretty face.’
My scalp scrapes against the wall again. ‘I won’t say anything. I promise.’
Megan takes a step back and I let out a shaky breath. ‘Don’t come near me, slut. I might fuck you up just for fun, yeah?’ She spits in my face, and I feel a thick globule of phlegm dribble off my nos
e. Scowling, she stalks away.
I can’t stop shaking. It must be adrenaline left over in my veins, but my hands are vibrating and my legs feel rubbery. As soon as I step into the library, Thom Deacon stops what he’s doing and comes out from behind his counter. ‘Fliss? Are you OK? You look awful.’
‘I’m fine,’ I say, but my legs almost buckle under.
Thom steadies me and guides me to one of the tables. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s nothing.’ Tears fill my eyes, but I blink them back. I don’t want to cry on him. Not hot.
‘It’s obviously something, Fliss.’
The library is pretty much empty, with half the year out on the field trip, but I still don’t want to say anything. If he reports it and Megan finds out, I’m dead. I don’t trust myself to speak so I just shake my head.
Thom Deacon moves in closer and I catch a hint of his aftershave. It’s woody and mature, distinguished. I like it and wish I could rest my head on his broad shoulder. ‘Listen, if someone’s giving you a hard time, I can help. I’ll be discreet.’
‘Seriously, it’s fine. I’ll be fine.’
He sighs, frustrated. ‘It makes me so mad. I don’t get how you can be so horrible to each other. Can you imagine if adults carried on the way some of you lot do? I’m sure it’s nothing you’ve done, Fliss. They’re probably just jealous.’
Jealous? Of what? Is he saying he thinks I’m pretty? I look into his eyes, searching for the flecks of brown in the green. Evergreen eyes, like the pines and firs in the forest. ‘Jealous of what?’
He smiles warmly. ‘You’re new and different. You stand out. It’ll get better when the novelty wears off, I promise, and in the meantime you’ve always got me. Where’s Danny and the others today?’
I inhale deeply, pulling myself together. ‘Geography trip.’
‘Oh, of course. Well, let me make you a cup of tea. You look like you need it.’
I watch him go into his office.
In the meantime you’ve always got me. Some sort of inner volcano erupts in the pit of my stomach and toasty warm lava seeps all the way to my toes. You’ve always got me.
I think about Thom Deacon for the rest of the day at school, all the way home and I especially think about him when I’m in the bath.
I can’t help it. My head is overflowing with fantasies about him, and not just the obvious sort. I imagine little, intimate moments of us together. I see him and me living in some sort of forest lodge, with an open fire and lots of exposed beams. There’re probably some antlers over the fire. We sit together on a masculine reclaimed-leather sofa, a tartan rug cocooning us both. He brings me hot chocolate and I wear one of his chunky silver rings threaded through a chain around my neck so it’s close to my heart.
He kisses my neck while we watch movies because he’s let me choose and I’ve picked Dirty Dancing again. I lovingly tell him to knock it off even though I don’t want him to.
He’d bring me breakfast in bed; we’d walk hand in hand through the forest and rub sun cream on each other’s backs in the summer; he’d buy me that thing I saw one time and mentioned in passing that I liked. And, in return, I would love him more than he’s ever been loved.
Oh God, my heart feels swollen.
It hurts. Actual aching in my chest. That’s how much I want the dreams to come true. I blow some bubble bath off the palm of my hand. Am I crazy? Could Thom, no need for the Deacon any more, really be into me? He’s not that much older than me – nine years tops, and that’s nothing really. Like you wouldn’t look at a thirty-year-old woman with a forty-year-old man and think that was weird, would you?
At St Agnes, a few years back, there was a huge scandal when Mr Parkinson, one of the physics teachers, moved in with a former pupil, Charlotte Istance-Tamblin. She was nineteen, and he was in his thirties and not a total moose to look at. They both swore the affair didn’t start while she was still at school, but they made him resign anyway. As far as I know they’re still together, so it can work.
Thom basically said he liked me. He said everyone was jealous of me and that he was there for me. We were so close in the library, almost touching. He totally rubbed my back. His hand grazed my bra strap. What does it all mean? I wonder, if those Year Eights hadn’t been there, if something might have happened. My insides are all stirred up and murky. I plunge my head under the water to try snap myself out of it.
I wrap my hair in a towel turban and put on a plush dressing gown. I can’t decide how worried I should be about Megan. I hate that she’s even taking up room in my head when I’d much rather paper the inner walls of my brain with mental posters of Thom. Strange how going back to Margot’s time feels like an escape: 1941 is about as far away as I can get from here.
My room is feeling more like mine and I light some magnolia-scented candles to settle in for the night with the diary.
Monday 3rd February, 1941
Yesterday Andrew taught me how to play chess. He thinks it hilarious that I didn’t know how, although I pointed out that it was no less queer that he’d never played backgammon.
His host, Mrs Evelyn Pritchard, is a wealthy widow whose husband, so it is said, killed himself when the stock markets crashed in the Great Depression. The official version is that it was a heart attack. She sold their London property for a tidy sum and moved into their Welsh country retreat.
Andrew has rather landed on his feet. Mrs Pritchard’s home is lovely. She calls it a cottage, but it’s a handsome two-storey house set in expansive gardens and with a stunning view of the valley.
She fusses over Andrew as if he were a favourite nephew, wiping specks of dirt off his cheek and ferrying trays of biscuits to where we played in the conservatory. I didn’t like to ask where so many digestive biscuits came from. They certainly weren’t baked here, and Glynis has hinted at a black market. ‘Can I get you anything else, Andrew dear?’
‘No, thank you, Mrs Pritchard. This is all so generous.’
‘Oh, get away,’ she said. She is a rotund woman, with the air of a Pekinese dog weighed down by jewellery. ‘After what you poor children went through in that cave. I don’t know how you’re coping.’
‘Really, Mrs Pritchard,’ I said, eating a third biscuit out of nothing but manners, ‘we’re fine. It’s poor Stanley we should feel sorry for.’
She tutted. ‘You know, I always said that Geraint Tibbet was a wrong ’un. You can just tell, can’t you? If a man’s not married by thirty, there’s got to be something off, hasn’t there? Inverts, the lot of them.’
Andrew and I shared an awkward glance.
‘Right, I’ll leave you children to your game. Give me a shout if you need anything and I’ll have Marjorie whip something up.’
Andrew waited until the door was closed. ‘Thank goodness for that.’
‘Is she like that all the time?’
‘It never ends. I feel positively suffocated. At this rate I’ll return to London ten stone heavier.’
‘Still, look at this place. It’s nicer than most hotels, you jammy so-and-so.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. You seem to have done all right.’
I paused a moment. ‘Yes, yes, I suppose it could have been a lot worse …’ I stopped. He stopped. We were both thinking about Stanley, I could tell.
‘Right then!’ He changed the subject. ‘Chess! It’s painfully easy once you know how each piece moves! The aim of the game is to protect the king.’
‘How typical.’
‘Actually, tactically the queen is more useful: she can move any distance in any direction whereas the king can only go one square at a time.’
‘Again typical – the woman doing twice as much work for half the recognition.’
Andrew laughed unguardedly and I felt more relaxed than I had done in an age. He ran through each piece, but, as with all things, I found it easiest to learn through doing, so we launched into a game. I soon got the hang of the basics.
‘Do you know,’ Andrew said as he moved a pawn one
square forward, ‘that Bryn is going about telling everyone that it was he who found Stanley?’
‘I’d have expected nothing less.’
‘He’s a fathead,’ Andrew remarked.
‘Why isn’t he enlisted?’ I asked.
‘Well, Bill told me that his dear father concocted some cock-and-bull story about his eyesight and got the doctor in the village to write a sick note. I suppose that’s what you get when you’re related to the mayor.’
‘The cowardy custard! I knew it!’
‘Of course, it could be scurrilous gossip.’
‘That lump Bill Jones doesn’t strike me as a gossip.’
Andrew only shrugged. ‘It’s your turn, Margot.’
‘You know, Andrew, thank goodness you’re here. You’re like a little piece of home.’
He smiled broadly. ‘You too, Margot.’ He raised his china tea cup. ‘To Londoners abroad.’
We toasted with a polite chink.
Chapter 13
Now hang on a cotton-picking minute. Hold up – is cotton-picking minute like totally racist? No time to stress about it now because a thought has just occurred to me and it’s a biggy.
My Grandad was called Andrew.
How had that not popped into my head the first time Margot mentioned him? To me, Grandad’s name was Grandad, so I’ve never thought of him as ‘Andrew’.
I turn to the front of the diary and pull out the dog-eared photo of the hot soldier guy. I scrutinise it. It’s absolutely, definitely not Grandad. I check my clock and it’s not all that late. I listen out and hear Margot clattering around in her bedroom down the hall, getting ready for bed.
Stowing the diary under my pillow, I creep out onto the landing. The floorboards are mean and creaky. Obviously Margot doesn’t miss a trick and her head snakes out of her bedroom door after about a second. ‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
‘I’m just getting a glass of water, that’s all,’ I whisper so I don’t wake Mum.