And then she squinches up her eyes, crinkles her nose, and pokes her tongue out at me in an unmistakeable grimace of contempt. I’ve seen Luce pull this face at people before: a girl in one of our gymnastics competitions who tried to do what Taylor would have called trash talking, or a bus inspector who lectured us about having proper ID to prove we were under sixteen and entitled to free fares (as if any of us looked our ages back then).
But she’s never done it to me.
It’s achingly familiar, and it really hurts. I’m shocked at how painful it is. Luce looks really embarrassed that she did something so childish; she goes bright pink and whips away out of the room, dragging Alison with her, saying something to her urgently. Tears actually spring to my eyes at the sight of Luce and Alison scurrying away from me.
“She should be more careful,” Sophia observes behind me, her tone serious. But since Sophia’s tone is always serious—she has no discernible sense of humor—I pay little attention to this comment.
“What do you mean?” Lizzie, perpetually curious, instantly asks.
“Lucy,” Sophia says, clicking her tongue in disapproval. “She was sent to therapy last term, for anger issues. She should be careful not to look angry in front of the teachers.”
It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking about Luce.
“Really?” Lizzie is immediately agog, and so am I; I sidle toward Lizzie and Sophia, ears pricked up, whipping open the Holyrood information leaflet that up till now has been scrunched up, ignored, in my hand.
“Yes,” Sophia informs her. “After Dan died”—I sense Sophia and Lizzie look sideways at me, and I pretend to be utterly absorbed in the map showing Holyrood’s layout—“Plum was very nasty with Alison and Lucy. You know, because they were Scarlett’s friends. Not straight after the party: it started a few days later, after Scarlett was expelled. Plum never left them alone. They called Scarlett the Kiss of Death girl in the newspapers, of course, so Plum would get everyone to make kiss noises at Alison and Lucy.”
“Well, that’s not so bad,” Lizzie starts hopefully, but Sophia’s flat voice cuts right across her.
“Because Dan died of an allergy,” she continues, “like a poisoning, Plum was pretending that Alison and Lucy might be poisonous too. No one would sit with them at meals, or near them in class. It was quite bad for them. All the younger girls copied it too—they would scream if they walked close to Alison and Lucy in the corridors. Only the teachers didn’t know what was happening. Everyone else knew.”
That’s so unfair! I’m screaming in my head. Alison and Luce didn’t have anything to do with Dan dying! They weren’t even there! And then I’m struck by the timing—it started “after Scarlett was expelled.” That would mean just after I went back to school to clear out my locker: once the inquest verdict on Dan (death by misadventure) had come in, the headmistress of St. Tabby’s asked me to leave (I wasn’t expelled, technically) because of all the press camped outside the school. Plum confronted me, with her posse behind her, and I humiliated her in front of them, slamming her into a locker, seeing naked fear in her eyes for the first time ever.
She took it out on Alison and Luce, I realize slowly. I made her look weak in front of her sidekicks, and she took it out on my best friends. I went off with my stuff, free from her for a while, at least. And she promptly turned round and tortured Alison and Luce, until Luce snapped with “anger issues.”
“She pushed Plum down a flight of stairs,” Sophia’s telling Lizzie now. “Plum landed on Mam’selle Bouvier and twisted her ankle.”
Good for Luce! I think, grinning from ear to ear, but still pretending to be deep in concentration on the leaflet. Bet Plum stopped giving you a hard time after that! Plum’s scared of physical confrontation: I saw that when I held her against that locker. And tiny though Luce is, gymnastics, with all the conditioning that we do, means that she punches far above her weight.
And then the penny drops. She pushed Plum down a flight of stairs.
My breath stops. My heart sinks.
“So they call in Lucy’s parents and say she has anger issues and must go to see a therapist,” Sophia says.
Lizzie snorts.
“Sounds more like she has Plum issues!” she comments.
“Hah! That is very good. Yes, she has Plum issues,” Sophia says approvingly.
“Come on, girls,” Miss Carter says, bustling up behind us, chivvying us along. “The best is still to come—don’t you want to see Mary’s private rooms?”
Sophia and Lizzie follow her, and as I walk slowly in their wake, Taylor falls in beside me.
“You hear all that?” she mutters.
I nod, not trusting my voice quite yet.
“She pushed Plum downstairs!” Taylor hisses. “I think that’s very interesting!”
She’s quite right. But I can’t manage a response; I’m haunted by the wording of that note left in our room last night. Right now, it does feel exactly as if I can’t outrun the past. My own past—my guilt about what I did to Alison and Luce. Not only abandoning them to go to a party; now, as it turns out, leaving them behind at St. Tabby’s to be tormented by Plum as scapegoats for me. I couldn’t help being sent away from St. Tabby’s, but it’s awful to know that Alison and Luce ended up paying for stuff I did. They were already furious with me for dumping them. It must have been real salt in the wound to be taunted by Plum in my name.
And then there’s my family’s past: my family’s and Jase’s, the Wakefields’ and the Barneses’. Things our parents did years ago, awful things that Jase and I are paying for in the present. My mother, according to Aunt Gwen, might have had an affair with Jase’s father, who, according to Jase’s grandmother, deliberately ran down and killed both my parents. It’s as bad as it could be. Really terrible, sad, miserable family drama.
It’s not fair, not at all, but there’s no point saying that things aren’t fair. Jase and I are stuck with them, and we have to try to work them out. Or, the way I feel at the moment, be buried alive underneath their weight.
Even the excitement of seeing the tapestry-hung bedchamber where Mary, Queen of Scots slept, imagining her walking on this very floor, sleeping in this very bed, can’t penetrate my misery. Weirdly, the only thing that helps is stepping into the tiny supper room where a brutal murder took place.
“Right here, one night, Mary was having a nice, quiet, cozy dinner with her attendant ladies and her secretary, David Rizzio,” Ms. Burton-Race narrates dramatically, “when her estranged husband, Lord Darnley, burst in on them. Mary was pregnant with the baby who would be James the First, King of England and Scotland, but her pregnancy didn’t stop her husband; he stormed in and dragged Rizzio from the table. Rizzio clung to Mary’s skirts, begging for his life, but Darnley had no mercy. Together with a group of other men, Darnley stabbed his victim to death—fifty-six times. His blood soaked into the floor of the outer chamber and he bled to death in front of Mary.”
We know this already, but only from reading about it in dry history books. Being in the place where it happened is infinitely more powerful. Gasps and squeaks of horror echo off the walls of the small turret room as we react to Ms. Burton-Race’s words. I imagine Mary, watching helplessly, probably sobbing and screaming, as her husband and a gang of thugs haul her friend away and stab him to death.
This is a horrible admission, but that image actually makes me feel better. I mean, talk about putting things into perspective. It’s like reading really gruesome mysteries, or watching horror movies. Atrocious things happening to other people—in fiction, or the distant past—are weirdly comforting. Catharsis, my classics teacher would call it. The ancient Greeks worked it out centuries ago. You watch gruesome stories onstage, you go down to the depths with the actors, and you emerge feeling lighter afterward.
I take a deep breath, feeling some of the weight lifted off me. And I manage a reassuring grin for Taylor. I must say, those ancient Greeks weren’t completely stupid.
The Holyrood
gift shop isn’t that big, but it’s very well stocked with products calculated to appeal to its visitors. One whole wall is dedicated to shiny, pretty objects with the word princess embroidered or printed or stamped onto every surface. China mugs. Teddy bears. Cushions. Jewelry. Perfect for girls who’ve just been worked into a royal frenzy by Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Darnley jewel. All the princess items are pink and gold, and all are adorable enough to have packs of girls cooing as they pick them up and show them to each other.
“My God, what is that?” Nadia says as we emerge from the gift shop, many girls clutching bags in which are resting their princess-themed purchases. Most of the purchasers mumbled excuses about buying presents for younger sisters; only Lizzie Livermore was brave enough to admit openly that the princess mug was for her own hot chocolate. I have to say, I admire her for that.
Nadia’s not staring at any gift shop purchase, though; her gaze is fixed on the large building directly across the road.
“That,” Ms. Burton-Race says with a thread of embarrassment in her voice, “is the new Scottish Parliament.”
“My God,” Plum drawls. “I thought it was a leisure center. With flats upstairs for aspiring yuppies.”
She and Nadia giggle snobbishly in unison. But the thing is, Plum isn’t wrong. The Scottish Parliament is a very odd building indeed. It stretches out at all kinds of odd curves and angles, with bits sticking out of it that don’t seem to do anything at all. The front of it has a cantilevered metal-and-glass roof projecting out into space, which looks like an oversized bus shelter, and the roof is covered in what looks like enormous twigs, as if a giant bird had been building a nest, got bored halfway through, dumped a whole bundle of sticks, and flew away. There are more oversized twigs stuck to the front of the building in irregular clumps. We all stand and stare at it for a while, feeling that Plum has pretty much summed it up with her leisure-center comment. You expect to smell wafts of chlorine coming out from the vents.
“There is the option of a Parliament tour,” Aunt Gwen starts, and next to me, Lizzie actually whimpers in fear. “But,” Aunt Gwen continues, looking at her reprovingly, “the word option, by its nature, indicates that the tour is not compulsory.”
Aunt Gwen’s eyes are bulging with satisfaction at having made a perfect grammatical point. This kind of triumph is meat and drink to her.
“Up there is the Royal Mile,” Ms. Burton-Race says, pointing at the street that rises up the hill next to the Parliament. “Full of nice shops. Including lots of cashmere,” she adds cheerfully, prompting murmurs of excitement from the St. Tabby’s girls.
“I hope they have Brora,” Nadia says excitedly to Plum. “I can’t get enough Brora scarves.”
“You have two hours, girls,” Aunt Gwen announces. “Be back in the Holyrood car park at one. Then we’ll go back to school for lunch.”
“I think I can see a Starbucks up there,” Sophia hisses to Lizzie. “We can get a wrap or something.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a sushi place round here, is there?” Plum asks no one in particular. “I’d kill for a miso soup.”
Only a couple of sad limp history freaks from (of course) Wakefield Hall follow Aunt Gwen and Ms. Burton-Race under the bus-shelter roof into the Parliament. The rest of us split immediately into our own little nuclei, not wanting to walk up the Royal Mile together in a solid mass. Luce and Alison, I notice, have already crossed the road and are making their way up the street. Taylor and I are hanging back to let Plum, Nadia, and Susan stroll off and put some distance between us; we’re in no hurry.
“Hopefully, Plum’ll say something rude about not finding any sushi in Edinburgh, and someone will punch her,” Taylor speculates.
“Or head-butt her,” I suggest. “That’s called a Glasgow kiss, but maybe they do it in Edinburgh too.…”
“What are you two talking about?” asks a male voice beside us, full of laughter, and I spin round to see the distinctive dark red curls and freckled face of Ewan, the Mac Attack guitarist. “Did I hear you saying you wanted to give someone a Glasgae kiss?”
I blush, even more when I see Callum behind him, raising his eyebrows in amusement.
“Already planning mayhem?” he says. “Holyrood’s made you both bloodthirsty.”
“You’re not wearing your kilts,” Taylor says to them, and I feel my own eyebrows shoot up; coming from anyone but Taylor, I would have called that comment downright flirtatious.
“It’s a wee bit chilly for that,” Ewan says, grinning down at her.
“And more than a bit windy,” Callum adds. “We don’t want to be flashing half of the city, do we?”
Ewan mimes holding down a skirt, his mouth pursing into a shocked O, like a startled Marilyn Monroe in the famous photo of her in the white dress. I giggle stupidly, and hear Taylor following suit.
We actually sound like a pair of girls flirting with a pair of boys. Normal girls, who’ve never saved anyone’s lives, or discovered dead bodies, or investigated murders. Or seen their boyfriend ride away from them on his motorbike, because he’d found out something so awful about his family that he couldn’t bear to stay a moment longer.
I remember drinking champagne with Dan last summer, and how light and bubbly and happy it made me feel, as if my head were a balloon, floating up and lifting me away. That’s the sensation swirling through me now. I feel delightfully giddy, as if nothing at all matters in the world but this moment, now, being silly and laughing and feeling, to be honest, hugely flattered that Ewan and Callum seem to have tracked us down somehow.
Because I don’t think they regularly hang round on a cold March day outside Holyrood Palace, waiting to chat up girls emerging from the gift shop with princess items in their dark blue plastic bags.…
“Funny meeting you guys here,” Taylor’s already saying. She does have a way of getting straight to the point.
“Oh, we heard your teachers saying last night you were headed to Holyrood,” Ewan said casually. “Thought we might drop by and try to rescue you from the Scottish Parliament tour.”
“Man, it’s deadly,” Callum said seriously. “It goes on for hours, and by the end you feel like they’ve sucked your brains out through your nose.”
“Like the Ancient Egyptians,” Taylor says, turning to him. “They did that with crochet hooks. For embalming.”
“Girls don’t usually know that,” Callum says, looking a little taken aback.
Ewan snorts with laughter.
“Callum!” Plum’s voice cuts through our chatter like a high-pitched chain saw. “And, uh, your friend from the band!” She swirls past Taylor and me to embrace Callum as if she hasn’t seen him for years. “What fun! Fancy seeing you here! So!” She tosses her mane of hair back over her shoulders and flashes him and Ewan her best, most dazzling smile. “We’ve got two hours to kill! What shall we do?”
Callum darts a look at Ewan, then at me and Taylor. It would take a braver man than him to tell Plum he didn’t come here to meet her, and actually, I don’t want him to. Not only would it provoke an awful scene, it would mean that, for the rest of our time in Edinburgh, at least, Plum would try to punish Taylor and me for her own humiliation. I can stand up to Plum, but it’s exhausting: I’d much rather fly under her radar than be her target. Look what happened to poor Alison and Luce.
So when Callum yields to force majeure, points up to a nearby hill, and says something about maybe grabbing a sarnie and going to hang out up there, we know that everyone is now invited. Ewan, rolling his eyes at us expressively, is already pulling out his mobile and making a call as the boys turn to lead the way, Plum, Nadia, Susan, and Lizzie clustering along in their wake.
“Should we skip it?” I say to Taylor quietly. “I mean, I’d rather have to wear a princess T-shirt to tea with my grandmother than hang out with Plum.…”
“I kind of want to,” Taylor says, and though she shrugs at the same time, I know her well enough to read her message and be aware that it’s her words I shoul
d listen to, not her gesture.
Right, I think, watching Ewan, who’s tall enough to see clear over everyone else’s heads, swivel round with flattering interest to look for Taylor and me. Talking urgently into his phone, he jerks his head at us, indicating that we should join the group, and in response, Taylor starts to follow.
Taylor likes Ewan, I conclude. Cool. Ewan seems really nice and funny. I’ve never really thought about who would suit Taylor, but I can see that a comic like him, who loves to pull faces and entertain, would balance dour, tough Taylor very nicely.
And just then, Callum turns too, making sure we’re part of the posse, and as his gray eyes meet mine, I have a sudden flash of memory once more. Of our kiss at Glasgow airport. Totally surprised that it was happening; totally surprised that I was attracted to him. And totally surprised too that grumpy, gruff Callum could kiss that sweetly.
God. Now I’m really confused. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all that Plum just elbowed her way into our little quartet.…
six
“MISFORTUNE SOOTHED BY WISDOM”
The direction the boys are leading us in is so unpromising that I start to hope Plum will decide she doesn’t want to join them after all, especially as they refuse to tell us where we’re going. We’re walking away from the Royal Mile and the shops, away from everything that looks at all appealing, up past a row of neat little modern houses, and under a nasty old railway bridge whose dripping girders elicit screams of disgust from Nadia, who covers her hair theatrically with her hands. We clamber up a flight of steep stone stairs cut into the cliffside and into a narrow little park where a couple of people are walking their dogs.
“This is it?” Nadia exclaims disparagingly, and I sort of take her point, especially as an Alsatian chooses that moment to squat down and poo on the grass, staring at us with orange eyes.
Kiss of Death Page 7