A Royal Mess (29 page)

I turned up the volume on my iPod and started humming loudly to a particularly tuneless and depressing song which my best friend, Star, wrote. It’s called ‘The Only Guarantee in Life Is School Sucks.’

I think she got the idea for the song from our three-thousand-year-old religious studies teacher, Sister Bethlehem. She’s always banging on about how there are no guarantees in life, which is a blatant lie, because you can always guarantee that Sister Bethlehem will fall asleep in class. Mind you, there are certain Old Testament books that send me off into a good snooze. Like Leviticus.

Even so, I am feverishly fond of old Sister Bethlehem. She is always teaching us useful life skills, like how to win money by betting on things – such as who cut off Samson’s hair in the Bible.

‘Yes, girls, you can win quite a tidy sum of money on that one,’ she told us once. ‘A lot of people will tell you it
was Delilah, but if they bothered to read the Good Book more closely, they’d realise she actually called for a servant to lop off his locks. Mark my words, if you’re ever short of a pound, that one will come in very handy. I won a fiver off Father Conway two years on the trot with that one.’

But back to guarantees. I could guarantee I would never, never, never tire of Freddie’s lips. So don’t start running a book on that because you will lose. The ‘rentals call it puppy love, but then again, they
are
absurdly old and quite, quite foolish.

Freds didn’t seem keen for me to visit him in his palatial grandeur initially. I can’t think why, after I exposed him to the lunacy of Sarah and Bob. But eventually, after aggressive hinting on my part (what is it with boys that they can’t take hints?), he caved and invited me to stay the weekend at Harthnoon Castle. I guess he finally realised that if he kept me and his Kiltland retreat apart for much longer, I would start growing paws from all my shameless begging.

It was all quite surreal being invited to stay with the Royal Family. Like the rest of the world, I’d seen Freds and his family in their mad kilts doing photo calls outside Harthnoon Castle. But like every other girl who has drooled over this fit prince, I never imagined in my maddest of mad dreams that I’d ever actually be invited to stay with him there. Okay, so maybe in my maddest dreams … but then, what girl my age hasn’t? Freds was the object of desire for teenage girls worldwide.

Apart from my best friend, Star, that is.

Star thought he was ‘an arrogant, boring, unworthy drip with bad taste in clothes.’ Oh, and did I mention, seriously unworthy of
moi?
Then again, Star didn’t think any boy was good enough for any girl. Not because she’s from the Isle of Lesbos or anything, it’s just that she had a much higher opinion of girls than of boys. But then if you met her father, Tiger, from the legendary rock band Dirge, you’d understand why. It’s a wonder she isn’t deeply unhinged.

Love her though I do, her snide comments about how “stuck up” Freds was were becoming très, très, très annoying. He couldn’t be that stuck up if he loved an American Freak like me, could he? Well, that’s what my psycho toff anti-girlfriend Honey said, anyway. It’s hardly ideal when I have to cite something the poisonous Honey has said to defend something as fundamental as my love for Freddie.

Star had been ultra horrible about Freds, especially after she dumped his best friend, Kev. Oh yes, that’s my latest news flash. Hold onto your knickers – my best friend had gone over to the mad side. After she dumped Kev, she started on this loony mission to get
me
to dump
Freds,
which was as maddening as a drawer of tangled tights.

My fainting attacks began when she dumped Kev. ‘You what?’ I asked as she brought me around, using the age-old tickling method. Kev was Fred’s best friend, and the symmetry of
my
best friend hanging out with
his
best friend was a vital element in the joy of loving Freds. She
couldn’t dump Kev! She couldn’t. ‘You can’t dump Kev,’ I told her.

‘Well, I did,’ said Star. ‘I told you I wanted to start the year with a clean slate, darling,’ she reminded me, referring to the New Year resolutions we’d made together in her bedroom wing while her parents and their celebrity friends rock-and-rolled the night away.

My resolutions were the normal unrealistic goals of a teenage girl; stop picking at my spots and develop more savoir-faire and va-va-va-voom. To that end, I was going to start littering my sentences with loads of foreign words and
bon mots.
I was also harbouring deep hopes of doing well in my GCSE exams and wowing them with my fencing prowess in Italy, where I would be participating in my first international tournament. I’d had a letter about the Italian trip over the break, but with Christmas, my birthday and my parents’ constant canoodling, I hadn’t had a chance to get properly excited about it. Especially as Freds wasn’t on the national team, which meant even more time I wouldn’t get to spend with him.

‘I thought you meant stuff like, erm, taking those blue extensions out of your hair and perfecting your French accent,’ I told her. ‘Not dumping perfectly good boyfriends!’

Star scoffed. ‘Calypso, don’t you ever wonder if there’s more to life than boys?’

‘No!’ I blurted. ‘I mean, of course I wonder that all the time.’

‘We’re still young, darling. Don’t you think we should be focusing on our dreams rather than spotty boys?’

I decided not to say anything lame about how Freds
was
my dream – well, my dream boyfriend anyway. But he is. And he is not in the least bit spotty!

And then in the car driving up to Kiltland, the padre said much the same thing. ‘I know you want to impress Freds and his folks, but don’t you think taking a trunk of outfits for a weekend stay is a bit over the top?’

‘You really have no idea, Bob,’ I told him, and then I brooded about whether he was right. I mean, I didn’t want Freds or the king and queen to think I was desperate to impress. Even if I was.

TWO
The Collision of Parental Culture Shock

As the ’rents drove our car of shame up to the castle, we had to pass a large crowd of royal watchers. I call it the car of shame not
just
because it’s not a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce like all my other friends’ cars. No, it has a bumper sticker that reads – this is true, by the way – HONK IF YOU’RE IN LURVE!

Trés, trés mortifying.

The fans were keeping vigil in the rain in the hope of spotting their beloved royals. Quite a few of them were holding placards with WE LOVE YOU PRINCE FREDDIE! printed on them. I had to give quite a few death stares to the more brazen girls whose signs promised all sorts of indecent pleasures to my lovely Freds.

Bob and Sarah, on the other hand, felt compelled to give the hussies a little wave as security ushered us through. My ’rentals are soooo delusional. It was as if they thought
they
were royalty or something.

I would have ducked down on the floor of the car of shame if I wasn’t so afraid of ruining my outfit, which was too feverishly stunning for words. Unfortunately, Freds had seen it before, because my cruel padre had refused to hand over his precious plastic. ‘You don’t ever give a boy the idea you care too much’ was his excuse.

To ensure I’d fit in amongst the royals at Harthnoon Castle, I’d been practising my regal walk over Christmas. I wished I wasn’t so freakishly tall, though. I know I prayed for a growth spurt a few years back, but honestly, it was getting ridiculous. I was seriously worried my long blond-ish locks would get caught up in low-hanging chandeliers.

Freds told me that he loves everything about me, but I’m sure I’ve grown ten feet since he last saw me two weeks ago. It would be a great test of his love if he could still care for me once I started swinging from his family’s chandelier by my hair during afternoon tea.

As someone wonderfully good and great in the Bible, or another heavy book, once remarked, ‘so many problems, so few solutions.’ Or maybe that was, ‘so many people, so few fish’? I was cramming so much knowledge into my brain for my GCSEs at the moment, my head was about to explode. That would teach the examination board a lesson or two.

Everyone knows how divinely fit and marvellous my prince is, so I won’t bang on too much about His Royal Handsomeness. I’ll just mention that in the beginning, I had to pinch myself that I, Calypso Kelly, onetime Queen
of the School Losers Association at the toffer-than-thou English girls’ boarding school I attend, was pulling a prince. All the other girls at Saint Augustine’s live in a world of total freedom, Daddy’s plastic, mummy’s contacts, personal manservants, chauffeur-driven Rolls Royces, bodyguards, society pages and titles that go back hundreds of years. Whereas I have a family that can trace itself back to Kentucky, Sarah and Bob, a car of shame, curfew rules and a fixed allowance.

Then again, I was the one going out with the prince.

Sometimes I even pinched myself when I was kissing him and screamed out: ‘Ouch!’ Freds found that a trifle weird. Mind you, he found a lot of things about me peculiar. But he was perfection itself, and I honestly couldn’t imagine ever breaking up with him.

Okay, so there
was
one teensy weensy fly in the ointment of our perfect love, and when I say teensy weensy, I mean smaller than an iota, so strictly speaking it’s not even visible under a microscope. The scoop is … he’s pretty, erm, normal, really.

Yes, normal, as in just like a regular non-royal-type person. Not a bit mad or even mildly eccentric in the least. But that’s a good thing, right?

Well, you try telling Star that!

I know what you’re thinking, he’s a prince, he can’t be boring. But it’s true, the most shocking secret about the royals is just how boringly, boringly ordinary they are. And I say that with the utmost love and respect. Seriously, not
only do they wander about the palace without their crowns and magisterial robes on, they do things like eat toast for breakfast! Ordinary old toast! Can you believe it? I couldn’t.

When Freds first told me this shocking news regarding his family’s penchant for toast, I had to grip onto him to stop fainting. I imagined they’d eat special royal-type food specially developed by royal scientists and organic health experts. But no, they ate normal food, chatted away about the weather and watched television like everyone else. And, oh my giddy aunt … they don’t even have cable!

I would die without cable.

The one
slight
worry I had on receiving my invite to Harthnoon was how to get out of shooting things. Freds and his family love nothing better than a good shoot at the expense of some poor creature. I’m not a big fan of shooting things, as Freds knows perfectly well. But I figured I was on display, so I had to devise a cunning plan to escape the shoot without upsetting the symmetry of this longed-for weekend.

Star warned me that if I told his family I didn’t like killing things, they would think me freakish. I feared they thought me freakish anyway after my ‘rentals, Sarah and Bob, tongue-kissed one another when they dropped me off in Scotland around noon. What if the king and queen were soooo normal they did things like peer out the curtains? I thought.
Quelle horreur!

Am I wrong to wish that Bob and Sarah wouldn’t
tongue-kiss in public? They thought I should be pleased that they were back together after their six-week separation last term. I
was
pleased. Of course I was pleased. They were hopeless without one another. All I was asking was that they stop slobbering over each other all the time.

Of course that’s exactly what they did on our arrival – kiss. What if the tabloids got a shot of my parents kissing like teenagers at the castle?

‘Stop that, you two,’ I scolded. ‘What will the royal family think of you?’

‘Chill out, Calypso, they’re just people like us,’ Bob said.

‘Just people!’ I squawked like a madder-than-mad thing. ‘Like us?’

Even the liveried footman, who was getting my trunk out of the boot, looked shocked. I was close to certain that the king and queen
don’t
pull in public – if they even pull at all.

‘Heck, do we tip this guy or what?’ asked Bob, pulling out his wallet. He actually talks like that too. Words like ‘gee,’ ‘swell’ and ‘hip’ litter his every sentence. When I was younger and more vulnerable, I used to walk on the other side of the street from him or sit in a different booth in diners. I’m a lot stronger now.