by Laura Wood
“Seeyoulaterthen, bye,” muttered Kip, as he stared intently at his shoelaces. Before I could reply, he walked slowly back in the direction we came from for a little way, obviously trying to look cool, then, casting a quick look back over his shoulder at the gaggle of girls, he seemed to give up and burst into a full sprint back towards the boys’ halls.
Well, what a moonhead, I thought. But I liked him anyway, even if he was a bit odd in the brain box. Still, I thought, here was another chance to try out my friend-making skills. I turned towards the giggling girls and plastered on my biggest grin. “Hello!” I said, sticking out my hand. “How do you do? I like your eyebrows.”
The three girls looked at me in silence for a moment; then the blonde one laughed, turned on her heel and walked off without a word. The other two girls quickly followed. What had I done wrong? I stood feeling a bit teary for a moment, then rubbed my nose briskly and straightened my shoulders. With a shrug I heaved the door open and made my way through the cool hallway back to Goldfinches.
Pushing the bedroom door open, I found that Ingrid was back, once again sitting very neatly on her bed. This time she was reading an absolutely enormous and very serious-looking book, holding the pages right up to her thick glasses.
“The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” I read the title on the front cover aloud. Ingrid jumped, having not noticed much of anything, including me standing right in front of her.
“Fascinating stuff,” murmured Ingrid in the sort of cotton-woolly voice you have when you just wake up. “Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to be there?”
Her big magnified eyes turned to me, glittering hard like the sequins on Tina and Tawna’s most glitzy costumes.
“In Ancient Rome?” I asked. “Yes, brilliant. Lions and gladiators and all that. A bit like the circus, actually. ’Cept you don’t get eaten at the circus,” I added thoughtfully.
“Oh,” sighed Ingrid, all moony-eyed, “the circus. I’d love to go to the circus. I’ve never been. My parents disapprove of them. And zoos. And playgrounds. And supermarkets.”
“Blimey, what do they approve of?” I asked.
Ingrid screwed her face up as if she was thinking very hard, and eventually, after a really long pause, her face unscrewed and she smiled. “Stamps,” she said. “They approve of stamps. They’re philatelists.”
“Fi-what-a-whats??” I asked, trying to wrap my mouth around the sounds Ingrid had just made.
“Philatelists. Stamp collectors. They’re both nutty for stamps,” Ingrid said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “They even have an 1840 Penny Black, in their collection.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as she hissed urgently, “Mint condition!”
“Wow. That’s, um … exciting,” I managed.
“Yes.” Ingrid shrugged. “I don’t really get it either. I’m a bit of a disappointment to them, missing the killer stamp collecting instinct. It’s a cut-throat business.”
“I bet,” I mumbled, unsure how to respond to the idea of killer stamp collectors.
“What about your mum and dad?” asked Ingrid.
“Oh, I don’t have a mum and dad,” I said. “I mean, I suppose I do. Somewhere. But I don’t exactly know who they are … and, well, it’s … complicated.” I stumbled a bit, not quite sure what to say. I’d never had to explain not having a mum and dad before. So I took a deep breath and launched into the whole story – the one I told you, about the blanket, and the note, and Marvin’s magic hat, and the grumpy chicken, and Pym and her Visions of the Future. And Ingrid’s giant eyes kept getting gianter and gianter behind her glasses, and her mouth had fallen open. At the end of my story she let out a big gasp, as if she’d been holding her breath the whole time, and then she started laughing and laughing, holding her sides and rolling on the bed.
I was a bit worried at first that her brain had gone a touch loopy because she’d been denying it oxygen or something, but eventually she spluttered, “And you thought stamp collecting was strange?!” And then I was laughing too, and every time we looked at each other we started laughing even harder, and it was that kind of laughing where your face and your stomach hurt so much you think you might actually EXPLODE and DIE from laughing.
“Oh, no, it huuuurts, it huuuuurts!” screeched Ingrid.
“Stop! Stop!” I gasped, holding my stomach to try and keep the laughs inside.
Eventually we both managed to calm down, and Ingrid had just started telling me some stories about Ancient Rome when the door burst open.
A small black girl bounded in, her dark curly hair escaping from under a big, floppy beret. She was wearing a stripy blue T-shirt and had a fake moustache stuck to her top lip.
“BONJOUR, MES AMIS!!!!” she shouted into our faces, and Ingrid and I stared at her blankly. The girl reached back into the hallway and grabbed a smart suitcase, which she flung on to the third bed in the room.
“Off to language club now. I’m France, you see. I was Spain last year but I didn’t fancy dragging that plastic bull around with me all day. Anyway, do stop in if you have time, so lovely to meet you. Byyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeee!” She rattled all this off very fast, in one breath, and then with a slam of the door she was gone again.
“I guess that must be Letty,” I murmured, turning to Ingrid, and as our eyes met we both fell apart into giggles again.
“Ohhhhh nooooooo! Not again!” moaned Ingrid. “But she had … a … a … moustache.”
“Better than a p … p … plastic bull,” I snorted, and we both collapsed against each other, laughing and joking. I don’t know if you’ve ever laughed like that with someone, but there’s something about laughing so hard that you almost puke with another person that just sticks your hearts together like superglue. I started to think that maybe I didn’t need my friend-making techniques after all.
That night I lay in bed thinking about what a crazy day it had been and how different everything was, and how some things about school so far were better than I had thought, but some other things were just plain mind-boggling. On my bedside table was a photograph of my circus family that Pym had put in a frame for me. I asked her for an extra copy to stick in at the end of this chapter so that you can see it for yourself. I wished they were all there more than I had ever wished for anything. I know girl-detectives-in-training who are nearly twelve need to be really tough, but I don’t mind telling you that even tough detectives get a bit sad and scared. I bet even Dougie Valentine sometimes wishes someone would just tuck him into bed or make him a warm cup of milk, instead of constantly chasing him with angry alligators or fearsome badger armies.
I was just starting to feel that terrible queasy homesickness in the pit of my stomach, so I grabbed the picture and looked at it so hard that I could almost feel I was inside it. There was Fanella with snakes wound around her arms; Tina and Tawna were wearing feathered headdresses and standing on the backs of two of the white show ponies, their arms held up in the air. To one side The Magnificent Marvin stood in his spangly robes, with his arm around Doris, who was smiling and pushing her glasses up her nose. Luigi crouched at the front, his arm around Buttercup’s neck in a playful headlock. Chuckles and BoBo stood side by side in their full clown suits, and Sharp-Eye Sheila was pointing a knife right at the camera, as if aiming for the middle of the lens. In the centre of the picture, Boris Von Jurgen was holding his super-muscly arms up, and sitting in one ginormous hand was me, grinning a massive watermelon-slice grin. And right there next to me, in Boris’s other hand, with one eye screwed up and looking straight at the camera, was Pym. And just for a second, I could have sworn, she winked at me.
I turned off the light.
Chapter Six
The next morning was a jumble of alarm clocks, and lost socks, and hot then cold showers. Dressing in my new school uniform, I caught Ingrid looking at me with a frown. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Um, it’s your shirt,” Ingrid said.
“What about it?”
“Well, it’s purple…”
“Yes,” I nodded.
“And tie-dyed.”
“Riiiight,” I said, thinking we were really stating the obvious here.
“And sprayed with glitter,” Ingrid added, sounding suspiciously close to giggles.
“And that’s … bad?” I asked. “I thought it brightened it up a bit.”
“I think it’s brilliant,” Ingrid grinned, “but they won’t like it. You have to wear the regulation uniform. It’s in the rules. Here, you can borrow some of mine. My mum sent me here with hundreds of them.” She tossed a smooth white shirt at me and I quickly changed into it.
I looked at myself in my school uniform – a blue tartan skirt, knee-length white socks, a white shirt and a blue blazer with the school crest on the pocket. Ingrid had to help me tie the dark blue tie around my neck. Looking in the mirror, I hardly recognized the neat, tidy girl looking back at me. I looked like all the other girls. This made me feel a little bit better, like I really did belong, but also a bit sad. Where was Poppy Pym? If I didn’t look like me, did that mean I was already changing into someone else? I wasn’t so sure I liked that idea. Crinkling up my nose, I loosened my tie a little and pushed one long sock down around my ankle. That was a bit better. I grinned at my reflection, then stuck my thumbs in my ears, waggled my fingers around and stuck out my tongue.
“What are you doing, Poppy?” asked Ingrid from behind me.
“Just making sure it was still me!”
Leaving our room, Ingrid and I stuck to one another like candyfloss to a shoe. There were girls everywhere, shouting and running around, and we joined the crowd of them heading downstairs towards breakfast. One unlucky girl was trying to elbow her way back up the stairs.
“Forgot … my … tennis … racquet,” she puffed apologetically.
Ingrid and I joined the queue for breakfast. I looked around at other people’s plates, feeling pretty puzzled.
I tapped Ingrid on the shoulder. “Where’s all the breakfast food?” I whispered.
Ingrid frowned at me. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“The candy corn? The pretzels? The little doughnuts?” I asked, bewildered. “You know, the normal food?”
Ingrid started to laugh, but stopped when she saw my serious face. “Gosh, Poppy, do you really eat all that stuff for breakfast?”
“Y-yes,” I said slowly.
“Right,” said Ingrid. “Well, I think that’s more of a … circus thing. Here we eat stuff like cereal and scrambled eggs on toast.”
“Eggs?!” I said. “For BREAKFAST?!”
“Yes,” giggled Ingrid.
I shook my head in wonder. Eggs for breakfast – whatever next?
“Just be grateful we’re not in the nineteenth century.” Ingrid’s eyes took on that dreamy look of hers. “Some of their cookery books recommend broiled sheep’s kidneys for breakfast.”
“Bleugh!” I exclaimed, thinking that maybe the eggs didn’t look so bad after all. After queuing up for dollops of the dreaded eggs (which were all right, I suppose, if you like that kind of thing, but wouldn’t YOU rather have a bowl of candyfloss with marshmallow sprinkles?), we ate breakfast sitting at long wooden tables in the dining room. The room was grand in a slightly faded and comfortable way. The gold paint on the ceiling was peeling a bit, and the squeaking sound of chairs on the tiled floor echoed around, mingling in with chatter and laughter. I looked around to see if I could find Kip anywhere and noticed him sitting on the end of one of the rows, chatting with a red-haired boy. He caught my eye and smiled, waving at me, and then he said something to the boy with red hair, who turned and gave me a thumbs up.
“What was that about?” whispered Ingrid.
“No idea,” I hissed back.
I noticed Miss Susan, the very prim chemistry teacher, sitting at one table eating grapefruit with a shining silver spoon. She was talking to a very tall, thin woman with a bouncing brown ponytail, and a short, elegant woman with curled silver-grey hair and very red lipstick.
Letty was sitting opposite us, with no moustache in sight. Breaking off from chatting very fast and very loud with her friends, she caught my eye and looked over towards the teachers.
“That’s Miss Susan, the chemistry teacher,” she said. “Don’t get on the wrong side of her if you can help it. Then next to her is Miss Reed, the PE teacher, and that’s Madame Pascal with the red lipstick; she’s the French teacher. They’re both quite nice.”
“What’s wrong with Miss Susan?” I asked, feeling small and frightened again.
“Oh, she’s all right, as long as you do as you’re told in her classes. Once you’re in her bad books, you’re stuck there for life. And she hands out lines and detentions like they’re sweets.” And with that Letty turned back to her pals and I looked down at my lumpy eggs feeling like I was going to be sick. I had never been anywhere with lines and detentions before. I’d read about them in books, but now their realness swamped me like a too-big jumper.
I straightened my back and pretended I was Dougie Valentine. What would he think about detention? Pah! Dougie Valentine LAUGHS in the face of detention … Hahaha! What is detention when compared to man-eating killer sharks? NOTHING. And lines? Dougie Valentine EATS LINES FOR BREAKFAST. Who has time to care about lines when you’re busy wrestling with angry orangutans? If I was going to be tough and brave then I was going to have to stop feeling sorry for myself and just get on with finding some adventures. Still, I was happy that Ingrid was there with me. I mean, you don’t want to have adventures all on your own, do you? Where’s the fun in that?
With a shrill BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNG, the bell rang through the room, and it was as if everyone already knew what to do. I looked around, confused, and then with Ingrid dragging me by the arm, we all lined up neatly in pairs behind the teachers and started filing out of the dining hall and through to the great hall, where all the school assemblies were held. As Ingrid and I took our seats, Miss Baxter came striding out on to the platform at the front, and a hush fell upon the room. She beamed around at all of us, and her wide, freckled face glowed with friendliness. I felt my shoulders relax, and I felt as safe as I did in Luigi’s lion enclosure. (Maybe that doesn’t sound so safe to you, but when one of your best friends is a lion, trust me, there are not a lot of places that are safer than when you’re hanging out with them.)
“Welcome back, everyone!” said Miss Baxter, clapping her hands together. “I am so happy to see all your smiling faces back for another year. And to our new first-year students, an especially large welcome! We are glad to have you here at Saint Smithen’s, and we hope that you will enjoy your time at the school as much as those that have gone before you.”
I sat up a little straighter as Miss Baxter’s eye seemed to catch my own for a moment.
“As many of you know, we have an exciting year ahead of us,” she continued, and then went on to talk about the shiny new science block that they had built over the summer, and some different sports competitions and clubs and a load of junk like that. I could feel the air around me starting to crackle with anticipation as everyone waited for the big announcement they knew was coming. Stories about the exhibition seemed to have spread all over the school, and I had heard that it included everything from an army of mummies to Tutankhamen’s snotty handkerchief. I was all wrapped up in the cling film of my own thoughts when I heard Miss Baxter say, “Of course, the most exciting news of all is the arrival of the esteemed Van Bothing family’s collection of Egyptian artefacts. These will be on display here at the school for six weeks before they transfer to the British Museum.”
A hum of chatter burst out at this announcement and, to my surprise, Miss Baxter put two fingers to her mouth and let out a piercing whistle, snapping everyone back into a cr
isp silence. Miss Baxter was not turning out to be the type of headmistress I had imagined at all. “Thank you,” she said, “I agree it is very exciting news. We are very lucky that Sir Percival Van Bothing was a student here – in fact, he once sat in this very room, listening to his headmaster – and that he remembered his time here so fondly that he included this temporary donation in his will.”
Miss Baxter turned to the side of the stage and I noticed Gertrude, her hunched-up assistant, standing there with a big piece of cardboard. Gertrude’s tiny old body was folded into a giant blue cardigan today, and even though it didn’t seem as crumb-encrusted as the pink one of yesterday, I did notice holes in both the elbows and a hanky dangling out of one sleeve. Gertrude shuffled over towards the edge of the stage at a pace that would probably have her losing a race to a tortoise with a broken leg. Eventually she reached her destination and with much wheezing handed the cardboard to the headmistress.
“Thank you, Gertrude. Please do sit down and have a rest.” said Miss Baxter, looking a little worried as Gertrude tottered back to her chair. Then, hoicking the object on to the stage, Miss Baxter took great enjoyment in spinning it around with a showy flourish. In her hands was a giant poster. In one corner a photograph of a bandaged mummy in a sarcophagus loomed over the words:
And underneath this announcement was a photograph of a gigantic ruby, carved into the shape of a scarab beetle. Even in the photograph it seemed to sparkle and wink at you like a bright star in the darkest night sky – definitely the kind of thing that Dougie Valentine would uncover somewhere. But this was real, real treasure. I felt my stomach turning somersaults inside me. My nose was twitching with the smell of adventure, and something in my tingling toes was just telling me that there was a mystery here.
Miss Baxter’s face was peeping over the top of the huge poster and she carried on: “The artefacts themselves will be arriving at the end of the week, and in three weeks’ time we will be having a grand opening party before we unveil the exhibition. You are all invited, and as a special treat there will be no lessons that day.”