I close my eyes. No doubt I’ll soon be wishing I was dead, but sleep would do for now…
“Look, there’s a sheep. Look, there’s a corrugated iron shed. Hey, Lottie, there’s a boat just like Uncle Davy’s. Look, a beach! Look, a dog – it’s a chihuahua.” Ned can’t be quiet. It’s impossible for him.
“Shut up!” I say, jamming sweet wrappers into my ears, but Ned’s too loud, so I go back to staring out of the window. After twenty-seven raindrops have crossed the glass, we turn off the motorway and the landscape changes to moorland with small wooded patches. We leave the rain behind and the coach plunges down narrow-hedged lanes that brush against the windows. Finally, we burst out on to a grassy sunlit cliff, hanging over the blue sparkling sea stretching away towards France.
Miss Sackbutt struggles forward along the bus to talk to the driver and nearly sits on Ned, her huge bottom barely missing his rucksack. On her way back, she peers at Miss Wesson in the same way that she peered at the scorpion.
Miss Wesson’s looking at her phone but hiding it from Sophia. She’s either playing some rubbish arcade game, or sending secret codes.
They’re definitely connected. I wonder if she’s Sophia’s personal bodyguard. Perhaps Sophia is actually a Sardinian princess and Miss Wesson fights off all unsuitable suitors.
The coach driver swings around a corner and we have to hang on to our seats. I hear Sarah-Jane not hang on to hers.
Maybe Sophia’s dad just loves her so much he doesn’t want her to come to any harm. I think of the elegantly suited man in our kitchen and I revise my opinion from meat spy to racehorse trainer, and then to racecourse owner.
Or he is a secret service agent and she’s the living code to some terrifying discovery. In Sandwiches for Satan the main character’s hair contains a DNA sequence code that activates the American nuclear deterrent.
I wonder. Whatever it is, I suspect that Sophia could prove to be a first class mystery. In fact, I’m sure of it.
Bream Lodge is a dump. Actually, it’s only half a dump because the other half slipped into the sea years ago. Since we last came, the ballroom’s gone – or half gone. Someone must have built it on the cliff a hundred years ago without thinking and now all that stops you following are some flappy orange strips of plastic. It’s not a lethal cliff, because it doesn’t plunge straight into the water; it’s a crumbly thing covered in broken toilets and half a swimming pool sliding gently to a big sandy beach.
The coach stops well away from the sea, among the green and blue chalets. Someone’s painted them up since last year, and it looks as if they’ve built a new assault course further inland. In fact, the whole thing seems to have moved inland, including the crumby collection of fairy lights that makes the whole place even sadder.
I wonder what Sophia thinks.
I wonder what her dad would think.
He’s probably settling into his first cappuccino on the flight to New York, flashing a glance at his Rolex and selling racehorses over his iPad. Or talking to M and picking up his first assignment. Or perhaps he’s already got the builders in at Irene’s house and they’re busy knocking through the wall of the walled garden. I’m surprised by a stab of sadness as I imagine one of the apple trees hoisted high in the air on a digger bucket.
No. It couldn’t happen yet – could it?
Our mum and dad are almost certainly still trying to leave the house; in fact, they probably won’t manage it for another day because it’s almost impossible to find anyone to look after the hens. I lean against the window as everyone else pours off the bus, and try to work out if I’d rather be here or at home.
It’s like choosing between two shades of brown.
“Come on, lazy bones!” Ned dumps my rucksack in my lap. “You want to get the best bed, don’t you?”
I don’t care, all the mattresses are lumpy and flea-ridden, but I lug the stupid bag off the stupid coach and drag it across the gravel. The girls are always in the blue cabins, the boys in the green, and it occurs to me that the blue cabin on the right is better because you can’t hear the boys. I change tack and lug the bag faster over the grass.
Miss Wesson’s dog comes with me, exploding out of a dog basket and racing between my legs. He spots something in the bushes and charges off along the cliff.
I hope very much that he and his owner are going to sleep somewhere else. I hate dogs and I don’t like Miss Wesson. She’s scary and he’s smelly.
“Lottie,” says Miss Sackbutt. “Lottie – this way.” She’s standing on a small concrete post, waving her arms at me. “You’re in a curtained-off cubicle with me, dear, isn’t that nice? Girls together.”
WHAT! Someone’s just chucked a bucket of imaginary iced water over my head.
WHAT? A cubicle with Miss Sackbutt? Our beds touching, her pale yellowness rubbing off all over me. Eeeew!
“But—”
“Well, Miss Wesson thought she’d share a cubicle with Sophia as neither of them know anybody much. So I need to share a cubicle with someone, and I thought, Charlotte – she’s the girl for me.” Miss Sackbutt has this utterly stupid grin on her face.
“NO!” I say. Then, “Yes – I suppose so.”
“But I don’t want to share with you!” It’s Sophia. I turn. Miss Wesson has Sophia by the elbow; she’s definitely dragging her towards the cabin. Sophia is flapping her arms in an attempt to escape, but Miss Wesson appears to be made of solid oak; there’s no way Sophia could escape her.
“Ah!” says Miss Sackbutt, her grin twisting into a wince. “No physical contact, Miss Wesson. Remember, dear? County-council rules? Law suits? Child abuse?”
Miss Wesson’s face goes from utter incomprehension to faint understanding, and she releases Sophia. “I only thought…”
I mentally move Miss Wesson from sports-personality-turned-security-guard into Russian assassin. Either way, she’s still a robot.
We follow Miss Sackbutt into the cabin. It has eight beds, four of which are behind curtains in the same way hospital beds are, except the curtains don’t separate individual beds, they pair them off.
In The Mystery of the Dead Moth, the murderer hides a body in a curtained booth just like these. No one finds it for days.
“Perhaps,” Miss Sackbutt says, looking from Miss Wesson to Sophia and then to me, “on reflection, you and I could get to know each other a little better, Miss Wesson?” Miss Sackbutt does her wide and stupid grin again and Miss Wesson stares in incomprehension. “Yes, dear, you and me.” Miss Wesson’s shoulders droop in acceptance. “We could take these beds, behind this curtain here. After all, what young girl wants to share with a teacher? Eh? Lump us old things in together. And get rid of these curtains here…” Miss Sackbutt pushes one lot of curtains to the side, leaving only two beds cut off from the rest of the room.
Sophia lets a broad smile spread across her face and looks almost smug for a moment. I smile, too. Miss Wesson kicks the ground, sending up a puff of dust. She’s irritated, but I sense that she can’t say anything back to Miss Sackbutt because Miss Sackbutt’s in charge. I offer an imaginary prayer of thanks for Miss S; sometimes, just sometimes, she’s a bit of a marvel.
“Oh – and you’ll have Sarah-Jane and Emily, too,” calls Miss Sackbutt over her shoulder, picking her way across the cabin like a supermodel in a fat suit. “So make sure you leave enough space for everyone’s clothes.”
Sarah-Jane?
Poo.
Miss Sackbutt and Miss Wesson leave the cabin. The door swings shut, but it’s light and feeble so it sits in the rectangular door frame without actually bedding down into proper shutness and I can hear Miss Sackbutt’s voice as she crosses the compound towards the swimming pool. Sophia and I are alone in the cabin for about ten seconds before Sarah-Jane appears. Then Emily comes in, then Sarah-Jane leaves to look in the coach for a lost trainer and Emily unpacks a long line of teddies.
“Phew,” I say, grabbing The Severed Foot from my bag and throwing myself on to the bed. Someth
ing occurs to me. I open the front cover of the book. There, in old-lady spidery writing, are the words Property of Irene Challis. So Mum’s been reading Irene’s books, and all the time I thought they were Mum’s. I lie back and stare at the missing polystyrene tiles on the ceiling and think about Mum and Irene and wonder if there isn’t something about Mum that I’ve missed somehow.
I roll on to my side and watch Emily arrange her teddies. She places them big to small, and then swaps them round the other way and goes small to big.
Sophia is packing her clothes into a tiny drawer; she glances up at me, and then across at Emily. I slip down from the bed and stand next to her, both of us staring into the tiny drawer. “Do you like swimming?” she whispers.
“Yes – why?”
“Talk to you later, I want to tell you something in private,” she says, just as Sarah-Jane crashes in through the door and throws her trainer at my rucksack.
A few minutes later, Miss Sackbutt comes to find us. She’s wearing a peachy-pink wetsuit. It’s loose over the top and stretched to capacity around her bum. I didn’t know such things existed, and I wondered what particularly mean shop assistant sold it to her.
“Girls, pop into your cossies, slip on some tracksuits and we’ll have a go at the assault course. I gather the mud is nice and sticky!”
Was this the swimming Sophia was talking about?
Before long, we’re lying in mud at the bottom of a wall being cajoled by a man in a tracksuit. We’ve climbed a net, swum a canal and crawled through concrete tubes with worms all over the ceiling. It was disgusting.
We’ve never done the wall before; last year I suppose we were all too small. I watch as Ned and Ollie charge at it, their fingers just brushing the top, but their feet skidding off the sides. Tracksuit man thinks it’s hilarious; I’d think it was pretty funny if I didn’t have to do it.
It occurs to me that there’s a much better way of getting over the top: Emily Cravitz used it in No Sleep Till Cairo, when she and Bab-el-Mar were escaping from the assassins. But I’m completely exhausted, and rather than tell anyone, I lie down and rest my hair in the mud. I dream of the shower afterwards, the lovely feeling as the hot water cuts through the dirt and leaves clean trails of skin behind. I’m imagining crisp white sheets, and shepherd’s pie. Warm beds, cocoa.
In my head, I’m in a luxury hotel with fluffy white towels and views over perfectly mown lawns. If I close my eyes a little tighter I can even smell the cocoa.
“Come on, Lottie – let’s do this wall.” It’s Sophia. She’s remarkably un-muddy, and she reaches her hand out to help me up. “I bet you know how to, don’t you? You’ll have worked it out.”
No one’s climbed it. Ned’s bruised his knees trying. “You won’t make it, Lottie,” he sneers. “You’re rubbish at this sort of thing.”
I’m too tired to thump him. Instead, I make a cup with my hands. “Put your foot there, Sophia – I’ll hoist you up.” She clambers lightly to the top of the wall and sits astride it. I don’t think she’s going to be strong enough to pull me up, so I look around for the next person. Sarah-Jane? No. Emily? She’s crying into Miss Sackbutt’s wetsuit. Ned? Yuk. But it’ll have to be, so I cup my hands.
“Result, sis!” And he pulls himself to the top. Simultaneously, he and Sophia lean down and grab my arms, lifting me easily until I teeter for a moment on the top and have to jump down the other side or fall.
It actually feels rather good. “Well done, Lottie – clever girl – co-operation is always the best way,” calls Miss Sackbutt from the other side of the wall.
I look up at Sophia. She and Ned are holding hands while he lowers her from the wall.
Poo.
* * *
We’re supposed to go for showers straight afterwards, but I wait for everyone to finish before I go into the shower block. I don’t want anyone to see me naked. The floor is a pool of cold muddy water and I have to tiptoe to the cubicle, hang my towel on the hook and hope that it doesn’t slip to the ground. I turn the shower to full power and look up. There’s a slug sliding over the pale blue ceiling, right above my head. It’s brown and spotty, a leopard slug like the ones in the kitchen at home.
Lovely.
The hot water streams over my hair, and the steam rises and for a few minutes I can’t actually see the slug and can pretend that I’m not at scummy Bream Lodge, I’m actually in a fabulous villa in the Caribbean, meeting James Bond before going on a top secret mission. I could possibly be the double agent in Silvergun, the one where the Russian spy actually gets shot into space, the code tattooed on his forehead.
The moment I turn off the shower, the secret mission fades and I find myself standing in a puddle on a cold concrete floor with a slug over my head.
* * *
There’s a note on my bed from Miss Sackbutt.
Lottie
The Gorge of Death. When you’re ready.
Miss S.
Oh no – this is why I hate coming to Bream.
I run through the camp, up a slight hill, and arrive panting at the bottom of a rope ladder where everyone’s already lined up. We did this last year – or, at least, lots of people did it last year. I got halfway up the ladder before coming down again.
The thing is, it’s terrifying. The ladder seems to be made of string and a few twigs and it goes straight up a telegraph pole to a small crow’s nest affair at the top. It has a rope that attaches it to another telegraph pole on the other side of a ravine. From the rope hang a series of triangles – “swings”, Miss Sackbutt calls them – and beneath that, what strikes me as a ridiculously small safety net.
I wonder if Irene had to cross any tiny rope bridges when she walked across Scotland. There probably aren’t any tiny rope bridges in Scotland. They’re probably all made of stone and porridge, and she would have been wearing stout brogues, not muddy second-hand trainers with sparkly bits.
And she was braver than me.
Just looking up at it makes me feel dizzy.
Tracksuit man is back, this time in a vibrant red outfit with matching red trainers.
“If you don’t want to do this, I totally understand, heights aren’t for everyone – but have a go, if you can.”
Ned’s friend, Ollie, clambers up the ladder, swings effortlessly from one triangle to the next, and reaches the far side. He seems utterly unbothered. Ned follows, skimming through the branches, placing his foot perfectly every time. He’s on the other side before I can summon up a rude comment.
The queue’s getting shorter. All the boys are over; now it’s just the girls.
“Come on, you lot,” shouts Ned from the other side. “Or are you scared?”
I could kill him. I really could.
Last year Sarah-Jane bottled out, but this year, although she struggles and tracksuit man has to climb to the top with her, she makes it over the ravine, her face glowing with pleasure. Emily refuses to do it at all.
Miss Sackbutt smiles at me in a concerned way. Does she think I’m going to turn into a bawling baby or something? “Lottie?” she says. “Your turn.”
I breathe deeply and put my foot on the first rung of the ladder. So far, so good. Then I try the second. This is OK. I look across; Miss Sackbutt’s head is about level with my waist. I take another breath and climb four more rungs. And then I look down.
I can see where the dye stops and the grey begins on the top of Miss Sackbutt’s head. I can see the bald patch on the top of tracksuit man’s head.
I don’t want to do this.
I can.
I don’t want to do this.
I can.
It comes with every beat of my heart, until I reach the crow’s nest. And then it stops because I am simply too scared to move.
Amanda Arnott in Say Goodbye to Life manages to clamber over the castle roof and she’s scared of heights, but – I can’t. I just can’t move.
“Lottie?” calls Miss Sackbutt. “Are you all right, dear?”
I shake my hea
d. I can’t even speak.
“I’ll come up,” says tracksuit man.
The ladder wobbles, bending with his weight, forcing me to cling on and close my eyes, but in a second he’s standing behind me, his hands on my shoulders.
“Do you want to go back down? Or go on?”
“Down,” I mutter.
“OK – that’s fine – you can always decide to have another go later.”
I nod, and we come back down the ladder, stepping on to the solid ground that I find I have to sit on in order to hold myself together. I fix a smile on to my face, but I’d like to cry. Miss Sackbutt was right about the bawling baby.
“You can cross the ravine the easy way in a minute, when you’ve got your breath back,” says tracksuit man, pointing at a short rope bridge stretched taut over the ravine.
“Sophia?” says Mrs Sackbutt. “How about you?”
Sophia glances at me and looks away quickly. Have I become an object of pity? “Oh me, yes of course,” she says, putting her foot on the first rung. “Shall I go up now?”
Tracksuit man nods. He looks all serious now, as if he’s in the presence of greatness. In the presence of a top-flight circus gymnast.
Sophia climbs the ladder fast. Her feet fly from one rung to the next. She was born to climb high things, just like I was born not to.
She leans forward, grabs the first triangle and putting her feet on the bar, swings out towards the next.
“Bravo!” shouts Miss Sackbutt. “Well done. Keep going!”
Sophia does. She swings effortlessly over the triangles, her long black plait bouncing from her shoulder with every swing. It’s rhythmical, balletic, beautiful to watch. The teachers stand below, looking up in awe.
“Bravo!” calls Miss Sackbutt again.
Sophia slips on to the crow’s nest at the other end and whisks down the ladder, her feet landing lightly on the ground and completing the impression of a circus gymnast.
Saving Sophia Page 3