Gifted and Talented (10 page)

The first expression to cross Amber’s smooth, brown face was of absolute indifference. But then came another, more speculative one. Then the lovely face darkened again, the eyes welled and the brows drew together in anguish. ‘You’ve
lost
my dog?’ Amber gasped.

‘Yes, and I’m so sorry, Amber,’ said the wretched Isabel. ‘I don’t know how I can ever make it up to you.’

Amber was weeping again, heartbrokenly. She looked up through her tumbling golden hair. ‘There is one way,’ she sniffed. ‘I don’t suppose that you could fill me in on those books, could you? The reading-list ones.’

‘Fill you in?’ Isabel repeated the phrase slowly, weighing its meaning. ‘You mean – tell you what was in them?’

‘Seriously, would you? That would be absolutely angelic.’ Amber was smiling broadly, apparently quite recovered from her grief. ‘I’ve been madly busy all summer, you see. I helped build a school in Mexico.’

Surprise filled Isabel at this unexpected evidence of altruism, especially as Amber had, according to the newspaper, spent the summer in Mustique. Ellie had built a Mexican school too, of course. Isabel was about to say so, to remark on the coincidence, but a brown arm shot out and grabbed her own.

‘So you absolutely promise me?’ Amber pressed, her face very close, her expression demanding.

‘Promise you what?’

‘That you’ll write me a bluffer’s guide to the reading-list books?’ Amber’s eyes seemed to be getting ever larger, her pupils drilling into Isabel’s.

‘But why?’ Isabel asked, curious despite everything. ‘Why don’t you just read them? Who are you bluffing, anyway?’

Amber was fiddling with her hair. Through the golden strands, she darted Isabel a sly look. ‘Prof Green. She’s demanded to see me. Assess my motivation, or something.’

Isabel looked down, suddenly fearful. Amber was asking her to help fabricate a fraud. Another one.

‘Look,’ Amber impatiently broke in. ‘I
would
have read them, OK? But with this school thing taking up all my time, what could I do? I couldn’t leave the poor little things with the place half built, could I?’

Isabel said, leadenly, that she supposed not.

‘Good,’ Amber said briskly. ‘You’d better start now then. I need it by – ooh, let me think – four thirty?’

Isabel’s mouth dropped open. ‘Today?’ To give Amber some idea of what she needed to know would take hours. She could not possibly set aside that amount of time. Not when she was going to the fair with Ellie. ‘I’m very sorry but I can’t do it right now,’ she said, trying to sound firm despite the fact her hands were shaking.

Amber glared. ‘Izzy! You promised, you
promised
.’

Isabel stuck doggedly to her guns. ‘I’ve arranged to go to the freshers’ fair with my friend.’

Amber’s expression became scornful. ‘But how unbelievably dreary. I mean, why bother?’

‘To see if there are any societies I want to join,’ Isabel replied, with spirit.

‘Well, of course there won’t be,’ Amber sneered. ‘They’re all ghastly. You don’t need clubs, anyway. I’m your friend now, aren’t I? I’ll introduce you to everyone who’s anyone.’ She put her head on one side. ‘You have to help me,’ she wheedled. ‘I’ll probably be sent down otherwise. And you
have
lost
darling
Coco. You owe me.’

Isabel had almost forgotten about Coco. Yes, she had lost the dog. But . . .

She raised her chin in the air. ‘You did leave Coco behind,’ she pointed out, rather desperately. ‘And you didn’t say you weren’t coming back.’

The Piggott nostrils flared. The eyes flashed, then narrowed. ‘
You lost the dog
,’ Amber reiterated, through clenched teeth.

Isabel’s heart was thumping. She was not used to confrontation, particularly with someone like Amber. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep this up.

‘Have you any idea what a dog like Coco costs?’ Amber hissed, mercilessly pressing home her advantage.

Isabel thought quickly. She would square it with Ellie somehow. She must. Perhaps they could go to the fair on another day, or later on that evening. And, anyway, Ellie might sympathise, once she heard about Amber at the Mexican school.

Her heart, even so, sank at the thought of all the work ahead of her. She could hardly recall what was in some of the books herself. And the arguments were complex, not easy to précis. And perhaps this would just be the start of it, there would be more demands, Amber would keep holding her to ransom. All because of the dog . . .

If only she could find it. How, Isabel wondered, did one set about finding a lost poodle?

As Amber drifted off, singing, towards her room, Isabel went to find Ellie to break the news.

‘Come in!’ Ellie was sitting on her bed, cross-legged, humming along to a CD. She turned it down as Isabel came in. ‘Look!’ she said excitedly, holding out a notepad. ‘I’m making a list. I’m going to join the cordon bleu society, if they have one. I was president of the one at my school. I’m desperate to get cooking. Oh, and the wine ones, of course . . . What’s up?’ she finished, noticing Isabel’s unhappy expression.

‘I’ve got some work to do,’ Isabel began, awkwardly.

‘Fine, we can go later,’ Ellie sang. ‘It’s open until five, I think. Do you think there’ll be anyone from the Bullinger there?’

‘What’s that?’

‘That secret society. Haven’t you heard of it? A friend of mine from school had a brother in it. They have wild parties in stately homes where they pour champagne over each other.’

‘What?’ Isabel was surprised enough to be distracted for a moment.

‘With dwarves,’ Ellie giggled. ‘And strippers.’

‘You’re joking,’ Isabel said. ‘That doesn’t really happen here. Not any more, surely.’

Ellie put her head to one side. ‘You don’t think so?’

Isabel bit her lip. All this, of course, was beside the point. ‘I’m so sorry, Ellie. I can’t come later either.’

The eyes from the bed were wide, uncomprehending, disappointed. ‘Why not?’

Isabel explained in a miserable monotone about Amber and the reading list, citing the school in Mexico as the excuse. She left out the dog; it was all too complicated and incriminating.

She saw the sympathy drain out of Ellie’s face as she listened. The soft, pink-and-white features became hard. ‘Amber’s lying,’ she told Isabel in a tone which brooked no argument.

‘I know it sounds a bit unlikely,’ Isabel agreed. ‘But she says she didn’t have time to read the list; she was working at this school for poor kids in Mexico on her gap year. Just like you! It might even have been the same place!’ She looked brightly at Ellie. But Ellie’s expression was even stonier than before.

She rubbed her face and stared at Isabel through splayed fingers. ‘It was the same place.’

‘Really? So you knew her, before you got here?’

‘You could say that. Although I have no intention of renewing the acquaintance.’

Isabel was puzzled at Ellie’s bitter tone. ‘But – Amber
did
help, she
was
there?’ She wondered why Ellie had not mentioned it before, during the night of the DVDs, for instance.

Ellie looked scornful. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘for about five minutes. Literally that. Just long enough for her photographer – she actually brought one with her – to get some pictures for her audition reel, she said.’

‘Audition reel?’

‘For some TV programme about compassionate celebrities, or something,’ Ellie said caustically. ‘She seemed desperate to get into telly. Not sure
that
one ever got past first base, though.’ She shook her head, irritated at the digression. ‘The point is, Amber was using what we were doing for her own ends.’

Isabel bit her lip. She’d got the point.

‘She stayed on the school site five minutes and didn’t pick up as much as a trowel the whole time. Oh, actually, that’s not true.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Isabel asked, hope leaping within that there might be some redeeming aspect.

‘No, it’s all coming back to me, she brought her own spade with her. It was painted pink and she posed with it on the building site whilst wearing a leopardskin bikini. Raised the morale of the construction workers, if nothing else,’ Ellie added dryly.

Isabel had closed her eyes. Could it get any worse? Yes, it seemed.

‘Then she said she had to go, she was going to visit some friends nearby,’ Ellie said. ‘We thought they must be Mexican, to do with the charity, but it turned out they were on Mustique. Just up in the West Indies, a hop, skip and a jump by private plane. Needless to say, she never came back.’

Isabel swallowed nervously. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, confused. ‘I don’t know what to say. Or do.’ She looked at the other girl in dismay. ‘But I promised her.’

‘Yes, but you had an arrangement with me before that.’ Ellie’s tone was stern.

The dog, Isabel thought. The dog. If only I hadn’t lost the dog.

‘Amber’s a notorious liar,’ Ellie said shortly. ‘Or manipulator, I should say. It’s all about her; nothing else matters. As you’ll find out, I daresay,’ she added darkly. She stood up. ‘Well, I’m going to the freshers’ fair, even if you aren’t. See you later.’

Thus dismissed, Isabel trudged back to her room and stared bewildered at the wall. What was happening to her? She had tried to do what was right but had lost not one but
two
possible friends as a result. Three, if you counted Olly.

Her throat hardened and her eyes pricked. She blinked hard; she would not cry. But everything was going wrong, and just yesterday things had seemed so wonderful, to be going so well.

It was just after nine o’clock in the morning and Olly was rummaging for some boxer shorts in the battered chest of drawers against the wall. He found a T-shirt and pulled on the jeans that had been lying crumpled and stiff with cold on the floor. He winced as the metal belt buckle touched his warm, white and tender belly with a cold shock as piercing as electricity.

Being chilly was something Olly had got used to during his three years as a student. He had only spent a week as David Stringer’s lodger but only now did he feel he understood what cold weather really meant.

It seemed, like Narnia, eternal winter inside the Stringers’ vast Victorian semi-detached villa. ‘Just stick another jumper on if you’re cold, Olly,’ David’s wife, Dotty, would sing cheerfully from above the shrunken Fair Isle straining across her unsupported chest. She teamed this with a claret beret and Afghan knee-length knitted slippers.

Dotty was teaching now; Olly could hear the thin wail of violin. Below his boxroom was the upstairs sitting room in which Dotty conducted her violin lessons. Sometimes he lay enchanted as waves of rippling notes rose through the thin blue carpet. Sometimes the tuneless scrapings had him out from under the duvet more effectively than any alarm clock.

Dotty was incurably curious on the subject of his love life. She professed to find it impossible to believe that the girls weren’t queuing up to ask him out. ‘Some day your princess will come,’ Dotty would say. Sometimes she would even play it on her violin, the melancholy waltz tune rising up through Olly’s floorboards and making him roll his eyes in exasperation.

Of course his princess would not come. Isabel had not even bothered to step outside the college sliding doors. He had not mentioned the episode to Dotty, partly from lingering resentment and embarrassment at being stood up and partly because there was a possibility that, as David taught English at Branston, he might well come across her. Olly had no wish for Isabel to know that his career had now reached the dizzy heights of being David’s cleaner. He had tried to feel cross with her but what he really felt was a remote longing, as for the lovely, unreachable heroine of a novel. His novel, possibly. He had chucked the
Brideshead
idea and had now started a sweeping Scottish romance with a red-headed beauty at the centre.

He was still working on his book. His routine at the Stringers’ was to clean in the morning and spend the afternoon writing and looking for proper employment. Cleaning was rather more fun than he had imagined, the Stringers’ standards being just above the level of their own gritty floors. Olly had not appreciated that university academics lived like this. He had imagined them all in handsome town houses with patinaed furniture and oil paintings. But the Stringer house was an incredible mess, with papers everywhere and towers of boxes blocking the light from the dusty windows. Olly, however, had found he rather enjoyed snapping on yellow rubber gloves and squirting the Cillit Bang around. It was strangely soothing; you got instant results, which was more than could be said either of the novel or his quest for work. And the Stringers were touchingly appreciative.

Dressed, Olly headed down for breakfast, passing Hero Stringer’s bedroom on the way. Her pine bedroom door was plastered with warnings: ‘No Entry’ and ‘You Are Entering A Nuclear Facility’. As this implied, and as Olly had discovered, the daughter of the house was a moody teenager who treated her parents with disdain and who went to school only when she felt like it. She never, from what Olly could tell, felt like it. Hero was rarely glimpsed outside her room, where her activities were a mystery, although, to judge from the smells seeping under the door, they included smoking and eating takeaway burgers. Olly supposed the latter a double whammy aimed at her parents, enabling Hero both to avoid eating with them whilst ostentatiously buying into the mega-corporations they despised.

The usual thrash metal thumped from Hero’s room; eventually, Olly knew, either David or Dotty would crack and go upstairs to shout at their daughter to get ready for school, an instruction Hero invariably ignored. He wondered why she was so rude to her parents. They seemed perfectly all right to him; better than most, in fact. They were, admittedly, slightly bonkers, but kind nonetheless and Olly appreciated the slightly rackety musical-academic, colourfully Bohemian atmosphere.

He shuffled into the kitchen now to find Dotty breakfasting alone at the varnished pine kitchen table. The violin lesson was evidently over. She wore a burgundy beret plonked over her unbrushed henna curls and she looked him up and down with interest. ‘Oh,’ she said brightly. ‘It’s you, is it?’

‘Yes, it’s me,’ Olly muttered.

‘I didn’t realise,’ Dotty said, shoving a spoonful of muesli between lips coated heavily with purple lipstick.

‘What didn’t you realise?’ Olly asked tolerantly, looking for a bowl. Dotty said strange things sometimes, not always to the person in the room.

‘That you were the Antichrist,’ Dotty said agreeably through a mouthful of oats.

‘What? Oh.’ Wearily, Olly looked down at his T-shirt. He really should get rid of it; he was sick of people commenting on it. On the other hand, had he not been wearing it, David would never have invited him here. So perhaps it was lucky.

He reached for the jar of muesli and they munched for a while in silence, broken only by the thumping of Hero’s music from upstairs. Dotty did not appear to notice it, although surely she hated it, Olly thought. He had seen her alone in her music room, unconscious of the door being ajar, playing
The Lark Ascending
to herself on the violin. Her eyes were closed and there was a rapturous expression on her face.

Olly was beginning to suspect that Hero’s music, like most other things Hero did, was a calculated attempt to irritate her parents.

David now burst into the kitchen. He was wild-eyed, clutching what looked like a list, and wore a tight Shetland jumper whose sleeves barely reached his skinny elbows. Olly had learnt early on not to give any of his laundry to Dotty. It came out either unrecognisable in colour, or fit only for a dwarf.

A muscle worked in David’s thin cheek and he pulled agitatedly at his skimpy beard. He was glancing fitfully at the ceiling, through which the music continued relentlessly to thump. ‘We agreed to just ignore it,’ Dotty reminded him soothingly. ‘That’s our new approach,’ she said to Olly. ‘The “hands-off” parent. Non-intervention.’

Olly nodded. During the seven days he had been here, Dotty and David had tried three previous new parenting approaches, each more ineffectual than the last.

‘We’re letting her anger run its course,’ Dotty elucidated brightly, glancing at her husband for corroboration.

‘But what’s she so angry about?’ Olly asked, feeling this was the nub of the question.

Dotty’s chest heaved in a great sigh. ‘She says she’s angry about everything. About society. So she’s taking a radical position and staying in her room.’

Up until now, Olly had not appreciated that university academics could be like this. The ones he had been taught by at St Alwine’s had been suave, self-confident, superior. But Dotty and David were all over the place.

David was indeed in a state of high anxiety. His fears for his career had intensified since Olly’s first encounter with him. The interview with Professor Green had not gone well and she had apparently cut some of his responsibilities. He was sitting now, at the table, muesli untouched, staring at the diminished list of students.

‘Never mind,’ Dotty said comfortingly. ‘The fewer students you’ve got, the more you can concentrate on them.’

‘I know it’s because of that Facebook page,’ David fretted. ‘But Gillian refused to believe me when I said I couldn’t upload anything, even a towel on a shelf.’

Ah yes, Olly thought. The Stringer towels. They hung stiffly on the chipped rail of the downstairs shower room – worn, thin and of a cardboard rigidity. Using them was like rubbing yourself all over with sandpaper.

He decided to beat a retreat. ‘I’ll start the cleaning,’ he said brightly. Minutes later, he was bumping the Hoover up the stairs. It was an ancient machine, like something out of a museum, with a proper old-fashioned bag to take the dust.

He Hoovered the upstairs hall, staring at the bookshelves as he did so. Books were everywhere in the Stringer house. Neither Dotty nor David possessed the ability to pass a charity shop without buying an armful of paperbacks. The range they had collected was enormous: Greek myth and picaresque, dense volumes of Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, histories of architecture and music, and biographies of everyone from Voltaire to Field Marshall Blucher. There were also many children’s classics, each in several editions; enough
Wind in the Willows
to constitute a howling gale and a
Garden of Verses
stretching as far as the eye could see. Even the loos – one up, one down – were bursting with books:
1000 Places To See Before You Die
,
1000 Paintings To See Before You Die
and
1000 Buildings To See Before You Die
loomed at Olly whenever he entered. This fat-spined mixture of death and compunction could have an arresting effect, although Dotty’s signature dish was obviously the answer to that.

Olly had a shelf in the fridge and another in the cupboard but was welcome to eat with the family if he wanted to. He was not sure how much he wanted to. He had discovered on the first night of residence that Dotty’s organic chilli con carne rather emphasised the chilli and the result was altogether too brisk an experience for his insides. And David’s fondness for very smelly French cheese – he seemed to actively prefer the rotten end of the spectrum – meant that opening the fridge was like encountering the breath of Grendel, the monster with halitosis in
Beowulf
.

Olly decided to do Hero’s room next. He had never yet actually been in it but suspected it was fetid. She smoked in it, for a start, and as he never saw the takeaway boxes in the kitchen bin he concluded she either ate those as well, or shoved them under her bed.

He stood before the door, Hoover in hand. Thrashing guitars and hoarse, furious yelling blared out from behind the ‘Nuclear Facility’ posters.

He knocked.

‘Go away!’ Hero shouted, much as expected.

Olly put his head round the door. The curtains were drawn and the lamps were on. Hero’s long, skinny form stretched out on the bed looking longer and skinnier than ever in her tight black jeans. Her eyes in her white face were ringed with black and her lips and hair were the same colour.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, without enthusiasm.

He was about to advertise his intention to clean the room but the powerfully vinegary scent of stale cigarettes made him cough. He waggled the Hoover pole at her instead.

‘No way,’ Hero said. But Olly had none of her parents’ fear of this trenchant teenager and advanced into the room, the soles of his trainers crunching over the crisps in the carpet.

‘Can we turn that down a bit?’ Olly bent to the volume control. ‘What are you’re listening to?’

‘Wanker.’

‘Thanks a lot.’ Olly pretended to be offended.

Hero rolled exasperated eyes. ‘No; the
band
’s called Wanker, you . . .’

‘Wanker?’ Olly supplied, good naturedly.

‘Actually, according to your T-shirt, you’re the Antichrist. Ironic, is it?’

‘No, I am the actual Antichrist,’ Olly said, ironically. He was peering into the stinking darkness under the bedframe. ‘How long is it since you cleaned under here?’

‘What’s the legal position?’

‘Eh?’ He was looking for the plug socket.

‘If someone decided to kill you.’

‘Why would anyone want to kill me?’

‘Your T-shirt. Someone might think they were ridding the world of a great evil. Imagining they were killing the Antichrist. It might be a defence, you know, against a murder charge.’

Olly was, despite himself, impressed. He had gathered from David and Dotty that Hero had, before nihilism descended, once contemplated law as a career.

He plugged the device in and poked the end of the suction pole under the bed. There was a zapping noise and, when he pulled it back out, a Happy Meal box was attached to the end. He detached it with dignity, pulled out the black bin-bag he had shoved into his belt, shook it open and dropped the box in. Then he stuck the pole under again. Five more Happy Meal boxes followed, some in the advanced stages of decay.

That, Olly decided, was enough. He extracted the Hoover pole. Whatever else was mouldering under the bed could wait until next time, although there was a fair chance that by then it would have got up and gone of its own accord. He dragged the duster out of his jeans pocket and began flicking it around gingerly among Hero’s collection of fantasy figures with coloured glass eyes and vampire wings.

‘Do you mind?’ Hero shouted as he started to pull the curtains. ‘I like them shut, yeah? This is
my
room.’

‘Yeah, and you should be out of it and at school,’ Olly retaliated.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. You learn things,’ Olly said. ‘You pass your exams; you go to university. You find out what you want to do in life. Get a good job.’