S.T.A.G.S.

by M A Bennett

  Once I was dressed, my helpers sat me down in front of the mirror to do my hair. On a good day, my black hair falls straight and shiny as a bell, heavy fringe tickling my eyelashes, blunt edges grazing my shoulders. Today was not a particularly good day, because the rain had made it a bit crinkly, but it seemed I didn’t need to worry about that. Charlotte had quite different ideas for me. ‘Betty does hair beautifully.’ And over the next twenty minutes I have to admit that Betty did work some magic. She tonged my hair into ringlets, swept my fringe to one side, twisted the sidepieces back and secured them with tiny sprays of rosebuds the same colour as the dress.

  I did wonder if Betty was going to do my make-up too, but apparently that was all me. The maid left, no doubt to tend to someone else, and Charlotte wandered to the window to look out at the night, and started fiddling with the catch. ‘By the way, you should know that Betty’s married to Perfect. It’s really worth remembering that you should never gossip in front of the servants.’

  That was not, I felt, a rule I was ever going to need to observe outside of this house. I felt a bit bad about what I’d said, but if that poor cow was married to the headkeeper, I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. Trying to style it out I said, ‘Well, all I can say is, she’s one lucky, lucky lady.’

  I picked up my usual black eyeliner, then paused with it hovering in the air. Somehow it didn’t seem right for this dress.

  Charlotte walked over, laid a cool hand over mine and made me set the pencil down. ‘Less,’ she said. She held up a nude creamy colour. ‘How about this?’

  So I sat back and let her do it all for me. Ten minutes later, when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t recognise myself.

  Charlotte had been right about the old-rose colour of the dress – it made my cheeks glow. My grey eyes were accentuated by the creamy shimmer on the lids, and my lips shone with a little coral gloss.

  I’d been transformed.

  Emo to prom queen.

  Savage to Medieval.

  Charlotte clasped her hands to her chest. ‘Oh My God,’ she said. (She’d never OMG; she was a Medieval.) ‘You look divine.’

  It was the fricking Princess Diaries.

  chapter eight

  I was glad I’d made an effort.

  We swept down this ridiculous marble staircase, with huge paintings all around it, straight out of Wayne Manor in The Dark Knight. Then when Charlotte and I entered the drawing room (we didn’t even have to touch the doors; two footman types opened them as we approached) I could see that everyone was mega-formal – all the boys were in black jackets with long tails, and white shirts and bow ties. For a minute I just saw a blur of smart people, but then I began to recognise the faces above those unfamiliar clothes. I knew, of course, that this was the moment I’d have to meet Henry’s parents, and possibly other adult guests who’d come for a country-house weekend, but the only people I could see to begin with were Medievals. Henry with his blond head, standing, inevitably, with Lara, who was dressed in deep blue. Piers and Cookson talking to a tall dark man with his back to me, and, by the fireplace, Esme in ivy green talking to Chanel.

  Chanel.

  A waiter guy in a black waistcoat and bow tie held out a tray to me – something fizzy in tall glasses – and I was so shocked I took one automatically. Carphone Chanel. What was she doing here?

  No wonder she’d been staring out of the window in Latin; she was obviously as anxious-slash-excited as I’d been, and for the same reason. I couldn’t quite believe it. Chanel, I knew, had had it much tougher than me all term. I sipped at the glass in my hand just for something to do while I processed her presence here, and the drink, which I suppose must have been champagne, was so bitter tasting and fizzy it made my eyes water.

  Then I got the second shock of the night. The dark guy who was talking to Piers and Cookson turned round, and it was Shafeen. I watched him talking easily, standing elegantly and looking completely at home. Then he looked up mid-sentence and caught sight of me. His eyes flared a little, widening with surprise. I couldn’t quite figure out the look. It’s kind of hard to explain, but I don’t think he was surprised to see me there; I think he was surprised at how I looked. I suppose I must’ve looked OK, and it was a good job I did: the sirens – Charlotte and Esme, and, the most beautiful of all, Lara – looked amazing in their jewel-coloured couture gowns. Chanel too looked really pretty in her white dress, even though I was damned sure that the Medievals would think her fake tan was a bit too dark, and her dress a bit too pale. I felt I could hold my own beside all of them – or even if Greer MacDonald couldn’t, the princess I’d seen in the mirror could. I lifted my chin a little.

  I have to admit Shafeen also looked amazing in the white tie and tails. He was taller than the rest of the boys, and his dark skin made a lovely contrast to the crisp white shirt and bow tie. Tonight his longish black hair was slicked back from his forehead, and his face looked really handsome and sort of noble. Prince Caspian, I thought. He certainly seemed to fit, but why the hell was he here? He’d had a worse time from the Medievals than any of us. Then I watched him a bit more; his stance, his manner, the way he held his glass. His sheer ease. My lip curled a little. He was one of them. I’d felt sorry for him all term, thinking he was being bullied with all that Punjabi Playboy stuff. But it was obviously just joshing, the Medieval version of humour. After all, everyone said Shafeen was some sort of Indian prince. I’d been a sucker. He’d obviously been friends with them all along. I couldn’t help feeling a bit let down. I don’t know why – Shafeen had been at the school since the prep bit, so he’d grown up with the Medievals. Still it was a bit of a disappointment to me, somehow, that he was one of them. He smiled at me, but I didn’t smile back.

  At eight we went through to the Great Hall for dinner. The Great Hall was a vast room, with ceilings so high that the frescoes on them receded into the dark, beyond the reach of the candlelight. The inevitable stags’ heads stared down, their antlers making crazy shadows on the walls. The long table was covered with a snowy-white cloth, and crowded with silver candelabras, crystal glasses and sort of silver cake stands piled high with pyramids of fruit instead of cake.

  As I found my place, marked by a little cream card saying ‘Miss Greer MacDonald’ in handwritten calligraphy, one of the footman dudes sprang forward to snatch up my napkin and pull back my chair. I sat down in front of more silver cutlery than Dad and I had at home in our entire cutlery drawer. Did you ever see The Remains of the Day? You know the bit where the under-butlers are all measuring the placement of cutlery on the table? I’ll bet these place settings were all measured to the millimetre by one of the many servant types who were standing all around the edges of the room.

  I looked in trepidation at the cards next to mine; no Henry (bad), no Shafeen (good), but Charlotte on one side and Piers on the other (OK, I guess). Weirdly, though, before everyone was even seated, I counted only nine places in total: for the six Medievals and the three guests. At least this gave me a conversation starter with Piers, whom I’d never, ever talked to before. I asked him the question that had been bothering me since my arrival. ‘Where are Henry’s parents?’

  Piers picked up his wine glass almost before the servant guy had finished filling it. ‘In London,’ he said. ‘They have a house in Cumberland Place; just by Regent’s Park, you know.’ He gave a little shout of laughter. ‘Rather good that: Longcross is in Cumberland, and their London house is in Cumberland Place.’

  Servant-guy came round again, putting himself between Piers and me, placing a perfectly round bread roll on my littlest plate with some silver tongs. This action gave me time to process this information. ‘So there are no …’ I didn’t want to use the word adults, or grown-ups – that would make me sound about five. ‘There are no other guests at all this weekend?’

  Piers, his mouth crammed with bread, shook his head. ‘More fun,’ he said. He attempted a wink, didn’t quite manage it, and clinked my glass. But I put down the wi
ne glass and took a gulp of water instead, trying to swallow down a sudden strong sense of foreboding. The servants were adults, of course, but they were completely bossed by Henry. It made me feel a bit funny that there was no one … in charge.

  No parents.

  Just nine teenagers in a massive house.

  Dinner was not exactly a relaxing start. We were sitting roughly boy–girl, with Henry (of course) at the head of the table. Shafeen, sitting right at the other end, chatted easily with Esme, his dark eyes sparkling, a lock of the slicked-back black hair falling over his brow. I’d never seen him like that before, talkative and sociable; quite different from the aloof, awkward loner I’d thought him. I felt, again, like I’d been fooled. Esme was showing every sign of being utterly charmed by him, her chin on her hand, laughing up into his eyes. Chanel was on Henry’s right, and he in turn was doing a great job of charming her, while his consort, Lara, talked low-voiced to Cookson. I saw Chanel’s face as she talked to Henry, and felt a pang – she was loving it, really loving the whole thing: the dinner, the company, the setting. You could see she was lapping it up. My odd feeling of foreboding returned.

  I had the pleasure of Charlotte italicising on one side (‘So you’re from Manchester. How amazing. I’ve never been. What’s it like?’) and Piers on the other who seemed fascinated by what my ‘father’ did; it seemed in the Medieval world that this was some sort of standard by which you could judge people. Maybe this was part of the whole screening process for prospective Medievals. You see, I still believed then what Jesus had told me, that the huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ weekend was some sort of job interview for Medievalhood. How wrong can you be?

  Piers was perfectly friendly, but seemed weirdly old. In the absence of Henry’s parents, it was almost as if Piers had taken on the role of Henry’s dad, just as, earlier, Charlotte had greeted me like she was Henry’s mum. There was no way Piers, with his monobrow and his pocket watch, seemed eighteen. He was a fifty-year-old trapped in a teenager’s body. ‘And what exactly is a wildlife cameraman?’

  I threw out the idea of stating sarcastically that a wildlife cameraman was someone who points his camera at wildlife. ‘He operates the camera on those wildlife documentaries you see on the TV – David Attenborough stuff, Planet Earth, Autumnwatch, that kind of thing.’

  Even though the reality of my dad’s filming life is that he can wait three days for a gecko to come out of a hole, for just three seconds of amazing footage of a racer snake trying to eat it, most people are reasonably impressed when I tell them what he does. From Piers I got nothing.

  ‘Know a lot about wildlife, does he?’

  ‘Yes. He comes back from shooting with all these facts. He’s in Chile at the moment. Shooting bat caves.’ I was reminded of Wayne Manor again. ‘Did you know that bat poo used to be a valuable commodity in the nineteenth century? It was called guano – people used it for fertiliser, and merchants sailed shiploads of it all around the world.’

  That tickled old Piers. He laughed again in that weird way he had, like a little shout. He shook his head. ‘Batshit,’ he said. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yup,’ I said. ‘And here’s another one: if you put the smallest amount of alcohol on a scorpion, it will go crazy and sting itself to death.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘And stags …’ I said. ‘My dad told me that when they’re being chased they always look for water, and they stand in it to try to lose the hounds. It’s some instinct they have.’

  Piers raised his monobrow at me. ‘Now that one I did know,’ he said, heavy with irony. I kicked myself under the table. Of course he knew that. Stags were staring down at us from the walls and we’d be chasing one tomorrow; Piers must’ve grown up with this stuff.

  In between the Piers conversation I could hear Chanel chatting to Henry in her perfectly trained posh accent. She was getting excited and waving her hands, her flawless white nails flashing in front of her face as she became more animated. Her cheeks were a little flushed, her eyes shone and she couldn’t have been prettier as she rabbited on and on about her father, his house in Cheshire, the pool, the cinema room, the fleet of cars. Then she started to talk about the Saros 7S, and how her dad had invented the half-phone, half-tablet, and how much money it had made. My stomach shrivelled within me. Henry was looking all polite and engaged, but something in me wanted to warn Chanel, tell her to stop.

  Esme and Shafeen, as far as I could tell, were talking about some wedding she’d been to in the summer, and how he knew all the same people that’d been there. Shafeen was giving nothing away. But then again, I reminded myself, if he’d actually been friends with the Medievals all along, they’d know everything there was to know about him anyway. If the Medievals were shopping for new members, Shafeen certainly had the right pedigree.

  The one consolation at dinner was the food, which was delicious. A sort of white soup, creamy and savoury, a flat white fish in a green sauce, a slab of red meat with roasted vegetables. The meat had an interesting tang to it. ‘What’s this?’ I asked Piers.

  ‘Venison,’ he said.

  Mouth full, I glanced guiltily up at the stag heads on the wall. They looked down at me accusingly.

  Gradually I began to notice that Piers was not only acting like a middle-aged man but drinking like one too. He was getting steadily drunk. I was on the water, because just that one glass of champagne in the drawing room had made me feel quite lightheaded, but he worked his way through all the wines on offer, cycling through the colours as the courses went by; white wine for the soup and fish, red for the meat, yellow wine in little glasses after the pudding. And it was with the arrival of the port, dark as blood, that things began to get nasty.

  Before then we’d had little pockets of conversation – turning to one neighbour, then the other – but after the food was cleared away and the servants had disappeared, the conversation became more general, including all of us, and that’s when the bloodletting began.

  ‘That’s enough about fathers,’ Piers said as the port came round. ‘What about your mother?’

  Suddenly everyone was quiet. Everyone was listening.

  I took a breath. ‘My mother left when I was sixteen months old.’

  Piers leaned towards me, his eyes glassy, his speech slurred. ‘Why?’

  I saw Shafeen shoot him a quick, angry look.

  I straightened my cheese knife on my plate. ‘I don’t know.’ I hoped Piers would drop it now. But he didn’t.

  ‘Didn’t Mummy wuv you?’ he said in a hideous baby-talk voice.

  I shrugged. ‘Guess not,’ I said lightly, but I was praying he wouldn’t ask me anything else. I didn’t feel I could speak. There seemed to be a strange lump in my throat.

  Luckily Piers turned away from me and shouted across the table. ‘What about you, Carphone? Your mother a bitch too?’

  ‘I never said –’ I protested.

  ‘Shhh,’ said Piers, swinging back to me and inaccurately placing his forefinger on his thick lips. ‘I am asking. Carphone. A question.’ He turned back to Chanel, who had turned as white as her dress. ‘Well, Chanel? What’s Mama like? She must be a bitch to have saddled you with a name like that.’

  Shafeen dropped his knife on his side plate like a gunshot. Everyone jumped, but all eyes remained firmly on Chanel. Suddenly her answer seemed really important. I looked at Henry; couldn’t he stop this? But he was looking at Chanel too.

  Chanel sat a little straighter in her chair. She looked Piers right in the eye and said, quite clearly, ‘My mum is luvly.’

  I heard it at once.

  She’d said luvly, not lovely.

  Under all her layers of careful elocution lessons, the Cheshire accent was still there, and, in a moment of stress, it had come back. She spoke like I did. Like they did on Coronation Street. I could see, then, the hazards of pretending to be what you are not, and was glad I’d never bothered. How much worse it was to pretend to be one of them and slip, instead of speaking like
me all the time.

  The Medievals, of course, spotted it at once. The girls snickered bitchily. Cookson pretended to be all concerned. ‘What’s happened to your accent, Chanel?’ he said, as if she’d lost something. Piers, of course, was the worst. He hooted with laughter and suddenly regressed from middle-aged man to primary-school kid. ‘Luvly!’ he crowed in his best northern accent. ‘Ay oop! Where’s me flat cap? Where’s me whippet? Ma mum’s luvly.’ He got up and suddenly jumped onto the table, his great feet sending china and glasses flying. ‘Luvly, luvly, luvly,’ he sang, to the oompah-oompah tune of a northern brass band. He waved his hands around, as if conducting an orchestra. And then, unbelievably, they all started singing it, all the Medievals in a chorus, everyone but Henry. Luvly, luvly, luvly. It was nightmarish.

  I looked at Chanel, who had slumped in her chair, eyes fixed on her cheese plate, and I knew that in another moment she would cry.

  Then, urgently and loudly, Shafeen spoke. ‘My mother,’ he said harshly, cutting across the row, ‘is a wild animal.’

  Well, that got our attention. Everyone shut the hell up, their heads snapping around to look at Shafeen at the foot of the table. Piers clambered down and slid back into his chair. Shafeen placed his hands out either side of him on the polished wood and held the room’s total attention.

  ‘My father’s palace,’ he said slowly and deliberately, projecting like an actor, ‘lies in the Aravalli mountains of Rajasthan, above the hill station at Guru Shikhar. My mother tells a story of when I was a baby and had just begun to crawl. It was the hottest part of the summer and I was a thirsty little thing, so she was breastfeeding me almost constantly.’

  We were all listening intently, Chanel’s slip forgotten. Shafeen the shy, the awkward around girls, was transformed; he was quite the storyteller. His voice somehow made you see what he was saying as if you were watching a film. I found I was imagining mini-Shafeen as the haughty little maharajah from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, breastfeeding in a nappy, a silken turban and a jewel between his eyebrows.