A Royal Match

by Connell O'Tyne

  All Miss Cribbe ever said was, ‘Oh, Misty, you are a naughty little doggins, aren’t you.’ (Miss Cribbe always spoke to Misty in a baby voice.)

  The whole of Cleathorpes smelled of wee, even though we all made a concerted effort to get Misty to run away by spraying her with Febreze.

  I lugged my trunk up the narrow, dimly lit, oak-panelled stairwell that wound around the central hall. Each of the cold stone stairs had been hollowed in the centre from about two hundred years of wear. As I struggled alone, behind all the parents, guardians and valets carrying up the other girls’ trunks, I took in the smell of beeswax and floor cleaner.

  The stained-glass window depicting Saint Theresa doing something miraculous cast a wintry half-light on the stairwell, even when it was fabulously hot and sunny outside. Bent double under the weight of my trunk, the strap of my fencing kit cutting into my shoulder, I looked up at her peaceful features – and wished she’d do something miraculous for me, like carry my wretched trunk up these stairs.

  My parents lived in LA, so I suppose they couldn’t accompany me every time, but also they claimed lugging a five-thousand-tonne trunk on my back was character building. Clearly the fact that I was going to end up looking like a hunched-up old woman by the time I was eighteen didn’t concern them in the least.

  TWO:

  Friends for Life

  Georgina’s full title is The Honourable Georgina Castle Orpington, but she was far too grand to use it (as I explained, using your title was considered vulgar). So she went by Georgina Castle Orpington. Obviously, though, Georgina was not so grand that she didn’t want everyone to know that she was titled and grand and should be treated as such.

  By far the best bed in the room was the one by the window. It had drawers underneath and a view over the ancient oak woods (known as Puller’s Woods) where all the illicit high jinks went on.

  We were only a couple of miles away from Eades. Although Eades was too grand to have a formal relationship with any girls school (especially a Catholic one like Saint Augustine’s), because we were the nearest one, we shared loads of activities. We had an amicabiles concordia, as our Latin teacher loved to call it.

  I totally hate Latin. What am I supposed to do with amo, amas, amat? We were always telling Ms Mills, our Latin teacher, that Latin is a dead language, to which she replied, ‘You’ll be dead if you don’t finish your declensions’ – even though, as a Catholic, she shouldn’t be threatening the physical manifestation of our souls.

  The teachers at Saint Augustine’s are such hypocrites – apart from the nuns, who are mostly really cool and devout (or at least old, deaf and indifferent). The dead ones are all buried in the nuns’ graveyard near the apple orchard. When I’m feeling really sorry for myself about being the form freak, I sometimes go and sit there and ponder the strangeness of their existence compared to my own.

  You couldn’t see the nuns’ graveyard from our window, but you could see the most beautiful spread of bluebells, like a carpeted pathway through Puller’s Woods.

  ‘Do you want the bed by the window, then, Georgina?’ I offered, when all the toff parents and toff valets had departed.

  I knew Georgina would take whichever bed she wanted anyway, on account of her being head of the Year Ten cool girls, but I was just trying to make conversation.

  I’ve so got to stop doing that.

  ‘Whatever,’ she replied, mimicking my American accent. Nevertheless, she threw Tobias (her ancient teddy bear) on the window bed.

  Tobias had his own mini-trunk of designer outfits and his own passport. Whenever Georgina hated something or someone, she’d say, ‘Tobias can’t bear that/them!’ All her friends found Tobias and his temperamental personality hilariously funny.

  You can see what I was up against.

  I was counting down the seconds until Star’s arrival.

  It’s not like I thought that Georgina, Honey and their kind were fantastic role models or anything tragic like that. It was just that I was sick of being the class freak. I was sick of being mocked about my accent, sick of having nasty Post-it notes stuck on my back, saying mean stuff about what a tragedy I was.

  Also, another part of me wanted to know what it was like to be part of the cool pod of girls, whose ingrained sense of entitlement both excluded and intrigued me.

  My plan to start fitting in first came about when I was talking to my mom’s PA. Once he got over the hurdle of his amazement that I get teased for sounding American (‘But you sound sooo British!’), he started to come up with some really cool ideas. Personal assistants can be very wise.

  Jay had been assigned the task of looking after me on the studio lot during the Easter break. My mom’s PAs were usually Valley Girls who just wandered around the lot talking on their mobiles while I followed them around like an old dog they’ve been asked to walk. But Jay chatted away to me like I was an actual person and he even let me drive the golf cart around the lot, something my mom would never allow.

  I could tell Jay felt really sorry for me when I told him about how I locked myself in cupboards to avoid things like lunch or makeover parties where I knew I’d be excluded. I might have made it all sound worse than it was. I mean, everyone locks themselves in the cupboard sometimes – even Georgina (although she only does it to avoid Mass and lame stuff like that).

  I suppose I didn’t bother to explain to Jay that my parents sent me to boarding school because they wanted the best education for me. Also I didn’t tell him about the sacrifices that my parents make in order to send me here. Or that we would have lived somewhere nicer than East Hollywood and had a pool and a Mercedes like everyone else in Hollywood if they hadn’t had to spend what amounted to most of their salaries on flying me to and from my exorbitantly expensive school in England.

  But boarding school isn’t the ‘done thing’ in America – especially in the socially liberal world of Los Angeles – and when I told him about how unpopular I was on account of being American and having no money and no pulling history, he came up with the idea of turning my social fortunes around by posing as a worldly wise Sex and the City type, who pulls lots of fit boys.

  So this was the term when things were going to change. I was never going to be asked to be a debutante and curtsy to the Queen, I might not own a mansion in the country or a posh house in Chelsea, but I didn’t see why I couldn’t pull a boy – preferably an older, fit one.

  First step, Jay said, was all about creating the illusion that I held a fatal attraction for the opposite sex.

  ‘Hey, isn’t this great?’ Star squealed dementedly when she finally arrived. Ray, her father’s valet (enveloped in his trademark stench of patchouli), was trailing behind her with her trunk. ‘After all this time we finally get to share!’

  She was referring to me, not to Georgina, who hates Star almost as much as she hates me – and don’t worry, the feeling is mutual.

  Georgina glared as Star stumbled in and threw her arms around me in a big hug.

  I do love Star.

  Georgina pretended that she was chucking up at the sight of our cuddle and started filling up the tiny wardrobe we were all meant to share with her numerous expensive designer outfits.

  Star pulled away and said, ‘Gosh, you’ve grown again! I wish I was tall and skinny like you, Calypso.’

  Oh yes, that’s another thing – my name: Calypso Kelly. I have the crappiest name ever. My mom let my dad choose it so he could feel more ‘involved’ in the parenting process. He clearly thought giving me a freakish name and packing me off to boarding school was all the parenting he needed to do.

  Star’s the only girl at Saint Augustine’s who doesn’t make fun of my American accent, which is strongest after breaks.

  It totally sucks being an American in the twenty-first century.

  It’s not as though I was the only American in the school or anything. There were twelve Americans in the Upper Sixth, known at Saint Augustine’s as The Manhattan Apostles (because there were twelve of them). As
far as I know they never got stick for their accents, but then they didn’t really talk to anyone outside their group – not even the other Americans. They all came from the same junior school back in New York. All their school fees were paid for by one girl’s father, who didn’t want his pampered daughter to feel lonely at school in England.

  Which brings me to the ultimate DBI (Daddy-Bought-It) accessory – friends.

  My daddy couldn’t afford any friends for me.

  He couldn’t even afford to give me a decent allowance, which means I had to buy all my clothes secondhand off the girls in the year above who were always dropping by with their hardly worn designer clothes. The saying ‘Mi casa es su casa’ (my house is your house) is translated as ‘Daddy’s plastic is my plastic’ at Saint Augustine’s. My daddy didn’t buy into this philosophy – he claims not to believe in plastic!

  ‘You can’t not believe in plastic,’ I told him. ‘It’s there, it exists! Like trees and grass – it’s out there, everywhere. Face it, Dad, we live in a world of plastic!’

  He told me he didn’t want me to grow up spoiled. He’s always changing the subject like that.

  My mom actually applauds the idea of me having to buy secondhand clothes off the other girls because she’s so environmentally aware (and not as rich as all the other parents who send their kids here).

  Ray, Star’s dad’s valet, dumped the trunk by Star’s bed and grunted something incomprehensible before handing Star a bundle of twenty-pound notes.

  ‘Tiger said to give you some readies.’ (Tiger is Star’s dad, but at least he doesn’t ask her to call him that.)

  Ray was wearing tight black leather trousers and a black T-shirt with Roadie written on the front and back. His long black hair hung in a limp ponytail down his back. He used to tour with Star’s dad’s band until it had its first bust-up (now a bi-annual event, as apparently it pushes up album sales). After that, Ray and all the rest of the roadies became staff at Star’s parents’ enormous Derbyshire estate. And even though they still tour every few years, once the tour is over the roadies always return to their valeting and other duties in Derbyshire.

  I sometimes spend exeats with Star, which is cool because no one supervises us – basically because they are all usually stoned.

  My dad is a massive fan of Dirge, Tiger’s band, and thinks it’s ‘swell’ that I spend time there. I’ve heard him boasting to his LA friends about it. He would totally freak if he knew what actually goes on in that house. And I’m not just talking about the perilous quad-bike racing Star and I get up to.

  Once I saw her father fall backwards off his chair at breakfast and all Star’s mother said was, ‘Tiger, I wish you wouldn’t do that.’

  I was like, HELLO, your husband is on the floor in a dressing gown with cereal all over his face. Don’t you want to do something? It was gross – his penis was peeping out of his robe – but everyone just kept munching on their toast like nothing had happened. He was still there on the floor, snoring away, when we came in at lunch and we all had to step over him.

  I am so never doing drugs.

  ‘Cheers, Ray,’ Star said as she handed him one of the twenties back. He held the note up to the light as if he thought it might be a fake or something, then gave her head an affectionate pat and told her not to drink or drug too much before loping off.

  THREE:

  My First Fake Boyfriend

  ‘Cute guy, Star,’ Georgina said, sarcastically referring to Ray as she flicked through a copy of Tatler. (Georgina had appeared in the social pages once and ever since she always had a copy on her.) ‘Is that your new boyfriend, then?’

  Star sneered. She wasn’t intimidated by Georgina the way I was. She was quite happy to get into total screaming bitch fights with Georgina and her mates if they pissed her off – which of course they did all the time.

  And now we were all going to be sharing the same room! Even more reason to start fitting in, if just for the sake of peace.

  So, while Georgina read Tatler and Star began to unpack, I nonchalantly started pinning up a large photograph of Jay and me driving around in a golf cart on the Paramount lot.

  I could tell Georgina was peering over her Tatler as I pinned up a second photograph – a glam head shot of Jay that he had given me for just this purpose.

  ‘So who’s that, then?’ she asked fake-casually, still flicking through her magazine.

  I acted as if I hadn’t heard the question and set about pinning up my pièce de résistance – a close-up shot of Jay and me, Jay staring into my eyes adoringly. (We both fell apart laughing after the shot was taken. Have I mentioned that Jay is gay?)

  ‘Oh my God,’ Georgina cried out, no longer capable of faking indifference. ‘Did you actually pull him?’ She scrambled onto my bed and scrutinised his gorgeous face more closely. She was wearing an expression I had never seen on her before. … I think it was amazement.

  I just shrugged. Not being effusive was another part of my makeover. I was determined to stop being an idiot chatterbox and be more mysterious and enigmatic like the cool girls. That was Jay’s idea too. He said that sometimes ‘less is more.’ I told him that less of Georgina and Honey would definitely be more, but he just laughed and told me to trust him.

  Georgina obviously hadn’t worked out that I had developed a mysterious side over Easter because she asked me again if that was my boyfriend. By this stage Star had plugged in her electric guitar and was messing about with her own blend of minor chord compositions.

  Star utterly worships Morrissey, who was this totally morose musician in the mid-eighties – I mean, she wasn’t even born then! As an homage to him, Star writes and performs her own songs about hating her life as a rich rock star’s kid and wet, suicidal afternoons at boarding school. Her father thinks she’s a total genius and lets her use his recording studio, even though her songs would make the most positive person want to self-destruct.

  Georgina gazed at my photo gallery. ‘I can’t believe you pulled someone so hot, darling!’ she announced.

  I had to hide my amazement. Georgina and Honey and their friends always called one another ‘darling.’ But she had certainly never called me ‘darling.’

  I wasn’t sure if this meant I should ‘darling’ her back. What is the etiquette on that? I wondered. So I merely shrugged enigmatically.

  Star stopped playing her guitar and peered at the photographs. ‘Nor can I!’ she agreed – somewhat disloyally, I thought.

  I disappeared into the en-suite and started unpacking my woeful little selection of toiletries and make-up. I’d managed to decant some vodka into some empty Body Shop bottles when my parents were out. I knew from experience that these were vital components to being part of any dorm party. The cool girls always take Body Shop Specials down to the woods and I wanted to be prepared for my first invite to this exclusive club of dissipation. Georgina had already claimed the entire cupboard with about ten thousand little Body Shop Specials, so I just stuck mine on the wobbly shelf above the sink.

  ‘Calypso!’ Star called out to me. ‘Is this for real? Like, did you really pull this guy when you were back with your folks in LA?’

  Star knows only too well how deeply dull my trips to LA normally are, because I’m always moaning about them.

  ‘Yaah, of course,’ I told her breezily, as if fit, older boys falling madly in love with me was an everyday occurrence.

  And then Georgina said the words that I had wanted to hear ever since I first arrived at Saint Augustine’s. ‘He’s seriously fit, Calypso. I’m impressed.’

  So that was that. I knew then that whatever else happened in my life I would always have this memory to cling to. I had impressed Georgina Castle Orpington – the most deeply unimpressed girl in our year. First she darling-ed me and now this! A little imaginary slide show started playing in my head:

  Georgina, her cool gang and me sitting together at lunch.

  Georgina, her cool gang and me climbing out of the bursar’s window for l
ate night dashes through the woods to take the 23:23 train to London to some ultracool club like Fabric.

  Georgina and me, waxing each other’s legs and giving each other facials on Saturday nights.

  Georgina and me, spraying Sun-In on each other’s hair.

  I don’t even really like Georgina, but I couldn’t help wanting to be liked by her … maybe even be a little bit like her. Because girls like Georgina lived the good life. Girls like Georgina were always at the centre of things and I was so over being on the periphery. In just over a year I would be sixteen and I had never been kissed.

  I wanted to be respected enough to be accepted by the core of girls at Saint Augustine’s who made things happen.

  I just hadn’t expected it to be this simple. If I’d known, I would have done it ages ago. I mean, how easy could this be? Three photographs and I had already impressed Georgina Castle Orpington, a girl who had never just randomly spoken to me – apart from when she was trying to flog her clothes for exorbitant sums of money or telling me what a freak I was.

  She shook her head. ‘I mean it, Calypso. I am seriously impressed.’

  I tried to look all nonchalant and casual.

  ‘Are you coming out for a fag, then?’ she asked – and she didn’t even do a piss-take of my American accent or anything. She spoke in her normal Sloaney voice, just as if she was talking to one of her It-Girl friends.

  ‘Erm, well … the thing is, erm, I don’t actually smoke,’ I replied before I could stop myself. ‘… much – that is, I’m trying to give up,’ I added, thinking on my feet. ‘I mean, cancer and all that – you know how it is.’ I gave a little cough.