‘It’s not the end of the world.’
‘It’s the end of the country. Where are you going to live?’
‘I’ve told you before, darling. I’ve got a teaching job in London.’
‘But you hate cities. You’re mad. This whole thing is mad.’
At which point Aunt Patience had pursed her lips and clicked shut her laptop and pronounced those impossible grown-up words, ‘Well, I think it will be good for you.’
Nor had Barney been any help.
‘Sorry, Alicat,’ he said, when she burst into his room to beg him to change Aunt Patience’s mind. ‘You know she never listens to me. Besides,’ he added as she threw herself into his arms, ‘Scotland’s not so bad. And I’ll come and visit, I promise! Here, look …’ He reached into his pocket for his phone and tapped something into Google. ‘There was this place, I remember, an island – what was it called? Nish! That’s the one – it was awesome. There were puffins, and a castle with a moat. I used to pretend I was the king.’ He waved his phone like an imaginary sword. ‘Pow! Wow! Take that, vile intruder!’
He held out his phone. Alice looked, and saw a photograph of thousands of gulls flying above a stormy sea.
The Isle of Nish is a paradise for ornithologists and seabirds, she read.
Was this suppopsed to make her feel better?
‘An ornithologist is someone who studies birds,’ Barney said. ‘Isn’t that great? I’ll take you there! We’ll be king and queen together!’
‘I know what an ornithologist is,’ Alice said. ‘I want to live with you.’
But Barney, it turned out, was going travelling. On tour, he said, and she pretended to believe him. She had not protested again, but brooded on her fears alone.
Now, standing on the train at Euston that was going to carry her through the night to the place of horrors, where she would have to wield hockey sticks, and be forever surrounded by people rather than the safe familiar solitude of Cherry Grange, and probably sleep in a dorm with dozens of other girls who would force-feed her midnight feasts when she wanted to write, and possibly be petrified by a wizard – she couldn’t believe it was happening. She buried her face in Barney’s chest, inhaling the familiar smell of him, the smoky caramel of his leather jacket, the spiced lemon of his aftershave.
‘When will you come?’ she asked in a tiny voice.
A whistle blew before he could answer. He leaped off the train after Patience, then reached up his hand. Alice leaned out of the open window to take it, but already the train was pulling away, and he was running alongside it, shouting something she couldn’t hear.
The train rounded a bend and, just like that, he was gone.
Alice pulled her head back inside and, very carefully, closed the window against the hot metallic air.
Soon. That’s what she had heard. She was sure of it.
Soon, soon, soon …
Be careful what you wish for.
CHAPTER THREE
Fluffy and Soft and Covered in Penguins and Unicorns
The train trundled through stations, past suburban terraces and sharp-angled office blocks. Alice and Jesse saw nothing.
Alice sat on her bunk with her back to the window, furiously writing a marvellous story about a girl who ran away to join a circus and fly about on the high trapeze over a pit of starving tigers, while in the berth next door Jesse lay on his back, staring at the ceiling and hating his brothers.
But adventures start in all sorts of ways.
Jesse knew that in his place his brothers would not have felt humiliated. They would have laughed at Alice’s horrified face and boasted about how much they weed. But Jesse, unlike them, was shy, and sensitive, and easily embarrassed. He worried what other people thought of him. He imagined Alice right now lying on her own bunk, laughing at him.
If she were not to laugh at him forever, he would have to be brave, and explain.
He swung himself off the bunk, bowed (it helped to pretend he was entering some sort of jousting tournament), stepped out into the corridor and knocked on her door.
*
Each child thought the other terrifying.
Alice, who hated to be interrupted when she was writing, opened the door with a black scowl that struck dread in Jesse’s heart. And even though Jesse was the gentlest of souls, his mere presence – a real boarding-school boy! – was petrifying for Alice. He wasn’t to know that strangers always rendered her mute. Faced with her silent stare, he was convinced that she despised him. And she could not guess that the choking sounds he made were meant to be friendly. She heard only growling, like the tigers in her story.
If it hadn’t been for Jesse’s brainwave, the whole thing would have been a disaster.
With a sort of yelp, he dived back into his berth. With renewed courage, he returned, bearing a Thermos flask and a large Tupperware box.
‘Picnic,’ he said, firmly, and squeezed past Alice into her berth.
And so it began, quietly, with tea and cake and sandwiches.
Cross-legged on Alice’s bunk, they ate and drank together in cautious silence until Jesse (still too crushed to mention his brothers) asked politely what brought her to Stormy Loch halfway through the year. Just as politely, she said that it was her aunt’s idea. She is banishing me, was what she really wanted to say. Like the queen in Snow White. Or the stepmother in Hansel and Gretel. She’s basically a witch.
But these were far too many words.
‘What is school like?’ she forced out instead.
Sometimes, the simplest questions are the most difficult to answer, especially if you want to be truthful. Jesse, who like Alice wasn’t much of a talker, pondered his reply. He could see that ‘OK, actually’ or ‘Fine, if you like that sort of thing’ would be unsatisfactory, but there was a lot to say about Stormy Loch, and he really had no idea where to begin. Instead, he produced an old smartphone of Jared’s and pulled up the school website. On the screen, a group of teenagers and a strapping helmet-haired woman, all dressed in workmen’s overalls, stood flourishing paintbrushes in front of a low stone building, each stone of which was painted a different colour. The caption beneath read ‘Exploding Butterfly’.
He held out the phone. Alice stared at it, baffled.
‘They’re Art Talents,’ Jesse explained. ‘That’s the art teacher, Frau Kirschner. She’s experimental.’
‘Art Talents?’
‘Everyone has a talent. That’s what the major says. Major Fortescue,’ he clarified, ‘founded the school. He’s all about helping people find their talent. Tap on another photograph.’
The next picture was of a messy-haired red-headed boy with sticking-out ears and train-track braces, holding up a silver cup and grinning so widely Alice could not help grinning back. Jesse’s expression darkened.
‘Fergus Mackenzie. Talent, Schoolwork.’ He spoke with all the feeling of a person for whom schoolwork is not a talent but a burden. Of all the people to be on the school website, no one could have annoyed him more than Fergus. ‘Showing off because he won the stupid Maths Challenge. He’s always showing off.’
Alice, who could have been good at schoolwork but whose daydreaming drove her teachers mad, asked sympathetically what Jesse’s talent was.
‘Running,’ Jesse mumbled, gloomily, because being able to run faster than anyone in your year when you had the longest legs didn’t feel like much of a talent at all, especially when your brothers, when they were at school, forever came first in everything. Then he brightened, remembering. ‘But it’s the Great Orienteering Challenge this term – that’s something else about school, they love Challenges – and I’m really good at that. It’s like a massive orienteering competition for the whole year, and I’m pretty sure I can win.’
Alice (who had only a vague understanding of what orienteering was) said kindly that she was sure he could win too. Jesse, considerably cheered, asked what she was talented at.
‘Writing, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Stories. Not schoolwork.’
‘That’s amazing!’ said Jesse (who had never written a story in his life). Then, because this was what he had come for, and she seemed nice, and if he didn’t say it now he never would – ‘About earlier,’ he gabbled. ‘What my brother said. You know, the weeing thing. It was only once, and I was five years old, and already bursting. I promise I don’t do it all the time.’
And because he had shared his picnic with her, and told her she was amazing, she didn’t laugh but replied, very seriously, ‘Once, when I was little, Dad tickled me so hard I had to change my pants.’
They had a long way to go, before they could really call themselves friends. There would be at least two betrayals, and a few lies, and a couple of near-death experiences. But they didn’t know that yet. They just knew they felt a whole lot better than when the journey started.
*
When Jesse had gone, Alice undressed and changed into her pyjamas, which were too short at the ankles and wrists, but which she loved because they were fluffy and soft and covered in penguins and unicorns. It felt cosy to be tucked up in her narrow bunk, with the little light just above her pillow, safe from the dark world outside. And school seemed like maybe it would be all right, if other children were like Jesse. As she pulled down her window blind, she blew a kiss at the night sky, the way she always did when she was not with Barney. Then she picked up her notebook and carried on with her story, in which the girl in the circus made friends with a boy and freed the hungry tigers. She wrote and wrote and wrote, until she fell asleep with her head squashed against the page.
The train sped on through the night. They stopped in Crewe, then Preston and Edinburgh, but Alice did not wake until the steward knocked on her door the following morning. She opened her blind again, and caught her breath. At some point in the night, the long train had become just three carriages, now travelling on a single-track line. The glass and concrete of Euston, the terraces and office blocks had given way to mountains and heather and bracken. Alice saw a pool of water reflecting the sky, a circling bird of prey.
Deep inside her, something long-forgotten began to stir.
It was like entering a different world.
They had arrived in Scotland.
CHAPTER FOUR
They Are All Mad
A school bus was supposed to meet them at Castlehaig, but when they got off the train, it wasn’t there. As she climbed down from the train, Alice had felt cautiously optimistic. Now, standing on the deserted platform, all her fear and uncertainty returned, and if you ever pass through Castlehaig yourself, you will understand why. It is not, in the way most people understand it, a real station at all – just a grassy bit of platform with a broken bench in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but mountains all around, and an unconvincing road.
‘Late,’ said Jesse, bitterly. ‘Again. It’s always late, and it’s not fair.’
Alice looked at him curiously, and he realised with a start that she didn’t know about the First Day Challenge.
Which put Jesse in a dilemma.
The First Day Challenge rules were simple: the last person to arrive at school lost. If Alice had known about it, she would understand why the bus being late wasn’t fair. Jesse and Alice were the only two students who had taken the train. It was already past nine o’clock. School was a two-hour drive away, and the competition was getting fiercer every year, with people arriving earlier and earlier. Jesse should know – he had lost twice now, in each of his two terms at Stormy Loch. It was becoming a family joke. And if there was one thing Jesse hated, it was being a joke.
If the bus didn’t arrive soon, he and Alice would be last, and would be competing against each other.
It was only fair that she should know.
He should easily beat Alice, because he was fast and she was small. But small people could be fast too. Unlike him, Alice was wearing full school uniform, whereas he was dressed for running. With her heavy jumper and blazer and school shoes, she would be at a distinct disadvantage.
Then again …
It was very tempting not to tell her.
But also unsporting, especially for sort-of-friends. And, being shy and not very talkative and overly worried about what people thought of him, Jesse was somewhat short of friends.
‘I’m going to look out for the bus,’ he said, and scrambled up the side of a high crag to survey the road with his binoculars.
Alice’s head swum and her stomach lurched as she watched him. Years ago, she would have been climbing right up there with Jesse. A little mountain goat, her mother had called her, because she climbed everything. But since Mum died, she had been terrified of heights and couldn’t climb a thing. Feeling very small, because of the mountains, and cold, because the uniform’s lumpy jumper (bought second-hand online and hand-knitted by a former student) wasn’t as warm as it looked, and slightly wobbly because of Jesse’s climbing, she hugged her knees and watched the empty road and wondered what they should do if the bus didn’t come.
‘Could we walk?’ she asked.
Once, when she was little, Barney had forgotten to pick her up from school. Alice had waited and waited while her teacher tried to call him, then walked the two miles home on her own. He had laughed his big warm laugh when he found out, and called Alice a little trouper. Patience had been furious, but Alice had loved how proud he was of her.
‘Walking would take days.’ Jesse sighed.
‘Phone?’
‘No signal.’
‘What, none at all?’ She thought with panic of Barney. ‘What about at school?’
‘None there either.’
‘But how do you keep in touch?’
‘You write. You know, letters.’
‘Letters?’ She wasn’t sure Barney had ever written a letter. He was more a talking kind of person.
‘Or you can send emails from the library.’
‘The library?’
But a small red dot had appeared on the distant horizon, and Jesse was half sliding, half scrambling down from the crag.
‘Run!’ he yelled, picking up both their rucksacks and throwing her his violin case.
‘What?’ She squinted towards the road. ‘But it’s miles away!’
‘RUN!’
Alice ran.
*
The minibus slowed down just enough for them to climb in, before taking off again with a screech of tyres, flinging Alice to the floor.
‘Whoops!’ The driver, an upper-sixth girl called Tatiana with a Talent for Mechanics, slammed on the brakes just long enough for Alice to stagger into a seat. ‘Seat belts on!’
They swung into a U-turn, then sped back in the direction the bus had come. Jesse felt a surge of optimism, that maybe they wouldn’t be last after all, and he wouldn’t have to beat Alice.
‘How are your lovely brothers, little Okuyo?’ asked Tatiana.
Jesse’s optimism evaporated. Anxiety returned.
‘Just get us there as fast as you can,’ he mumbled.
*
The bus flew over a hump-backed bridge as Tatiana, laughing, leaned forward to turn on the radio. A crackling pop song came on. Tatiana sang along, dancing in her seat. Silently, Alice braced her feet and gripped her armrest and thought, They are all mad.
The music gave way to broken fragments of news.
‘… a unique jade statue has been stolen from a private home in Rome,’ announced the radio, suddenly clear as they crested another hill. ‘A … crackle … million-euro reward is … crackle crackle … information …’
‘Imagine having a million euros!’ cried Tatiana, hurtling round a bend. ‘I’d buy a sports car. A Maserati!’
‘I’d buy a helicopter,’ grumbled Jesse.
‘The statue … a boy riding a dragon … about the size of a plum.’
‘Plum, tiddly plum!’ sang Tatiana, swerving to avoid a sheep, and Alice tried very hard to think of her circus story, where she found her heroine had been kidnapped by the tiger tamer, who was driving about like a lunat
ic in search of his missing cats.
On they drove, on and on. They entered a narrow valley. The sky darkened and hailstones the size of ping-pong balls pelted the minibus.
‘Stupid Scottish weather,’ said Tatiana, slowing down.
‘Can we really not go faster?’ asked Jesse.
‘Do you really want to die?’ Tatiana replied, while in Alice’s story the tiger tamer ploughed into a snowdrift and the circus girl gave up and burst into tears.
The hail stopped as suddenly as it had started. They turned off the road into a layby, fringed with dark pines and dotted with flooded potholes, with a pretty hand-decorated sign saying SROMTY LOCHE KAR PARC.
‘Painted by Agnes Bartleby in Year Nine,’ said Tatiana. ‘Talent for Crafts. Not spelling.’
This was where Stormy Loch children were dropped off, to be taken the rest of the way in minibuses, because the road beyond was too narrow for lots of cars going up and down.
It was empty.
Which meant they were last.
Jesse’s heart, already low, sank further. He was going to have to beat Alice.
Slowly now, creakily, the bus began to climb, through woods and past waterfalls, until it entered a bleak, bare valley with slopes of smashed scree and short pale grass. The road here was straight and flat. Tatiana whooped and floored the accelerator, narrowing her eyes as they hurtled towards a rock face. Alice almost cried with relief as they roared through a narrow pass.
They slammed to a halt. Jesse undid his seat belt and prepared to run.
Alice, speaking for the first time, croaked, ‘Are we there?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Tatiana.
Ahead of the minibus, the road dropped in hairpin bends through woods of fir and pine towards a lush, perfectly contained valley, its floor a patchwork of stone-walled fields dotted with cows and sheep and goats. To the west lay the loch, a silver sheet in which the surrounding mountains were reflected like a perfect upside-down world. To the east stood the castle, built of pale grey stone, with a pointed turret in each corner and twelve tall windows standing six aside like guards on either side of its arched front door. An ancient tower, the original keep, stood in a copse beyond the castle, ivy twisting round its crumbling walls and rooks swirling about its roof, its dark brown bricks smothered with yellow lichen. It leaned perilously to one side.
The Children of Castle Rock Page 2