Wicked! (86 page)

Xav by this time had turned Peterkin round and, rejoicing he’d got his nerve back, was riding quietly home across the fields, when Rupert thundered up and whacked Xav across the face, yelling:

‘Get off that horse, you can bloody well walk home.’

As Xav slid to the ground, he felt all his fuses blow. He watched Rupert pull off his tie and slot it through Peterkin’s head collar, then began almost conversationally:

‘I know all about you.’

As Rupert paused, he went on:

‘I know how much you drugged and boozed. I know you beat up your horses and your first wife. I know you bullied Jake Lovell witless on the showjumping circuit. You’re an utterly crap role model. I don’t belong to you any more, I want a divorce.’ Xav’s quiet voice had risen to a scream of pain.

‘I dug out my secret files in the cellar. I know I was battered and left for dead as a baby because they thought my birthmark was the sign of the devil. Well, now I’m older, your fingermarks on my face are worse than any birthmark. They’re the sign of a devil.’ He spat at his appalled father’s feet. ‘The curse of being your son and a Campbell-Black.’

Hearing screams and shouts, fearful it might be Rupert after him, Feral hobbled faster. Glancing back, he saw Rupert’s drive stretched out in the moonlight like a bandage to bind up his broken heart or his totally fucked ankle. No trial, no Bianca.

Next morning, Peterkin was as crippled lame as Feral. All the late editions of the papers picked up the
Independent
’s story about Rupert taking a GCSE.

85

For the first time in her life, Bianca Campbell-Black was utterly miserable. She had always been so proud of her parents, but now her father had revealed himself as a foul racist – and after all her coaxing, Feral had shot back into the jungle again. She kept imagining his cat’s eyes shining out of the beech wood behind the house.

The Saturday after Xav’s party, she and Dora went into Larkminster to see
I Capture the Castle
, a film Dora loved because she identified with the diary-writing heroine and her large eccentric family. Afterwards, she and Bianca went on to a Chinese restaurant where, as they rolled duck, sliced cucumber and dark sweet crimson sauce in pancakes and harpooned sweet and sour prawns, Bianca relayed the events of the last few days and Dora’s eyes grew bigger and bigger.

‘Your father was horribly hassled before he left Bagley,’ she said in mitigation. ‘He’d been trapped by Joan, Mrs Fussy and my mother all evening, then he was manoeuvred into that GCSE which he’s been forced to agree to take.’

‘That was shocking. Someone must have leaked it to the papers that very night.’

‘Shocking,’ agreed Dora. ‘Some people have no principles.’ Then, hastily changing the subject – after all, dinner tonight was being paid for by the
Independent
’s cheque: ‘Do you think Feral would be caught in bed with me if I paid him? How ballistic would Mummy go? OK, OK, only joking.’

Dora vowed on this occasion not to ring any newspapers, Bianca was so desolate. She’d eaten nothing. Dora had to finish the spring rolls and prawns and bag up Bianca’s duck for Cadbury. Unable to bear seeing her happy friend cast down, she suggested they call on Feral.

It was getting dark. The Shakespeare Estate was only 750 yards away, but they might have been plunging thousands of miles into the depths of hell. Rasta music fortissimo, football commentary, shouts and screams poured out of graffitied buildings. Jeering gangs of youths roamed the streets. Tarts screamed abuse. Addicts, like corpses dug up from the grave, hung stinking and unwashed over broken fences.

‘If only Cadbury was here to defend us,’ quavered Dora as a snarling Dobermann hurled itself against a gate. ‘Shall we try another day?’

‘We’ll be safe when we find him,’ pleaded Bianca. ‘Here we are. Macbeth Street, number twelve.’

All Feral’s windows were boarded up, as though he no longer allowed himself to look out on the world. The garden was full of burnt-out cars, fridges and wheelless bikes. Running up the path, Bianca hammered on the front door, which was answered by a fat man in a filthy vest, clearly off his face with drugs. Leering, swaying, he beckoned them inside, where Uncle Harley, immaculate as ever in black leather, Feral’s diamond cross gleaming at his neck, was watching a revolting film in which a man and a woman were clearly enjoying sex with a little girl.

‘Not something you’d show the vicar,’ mocked the fat man.

Nearly asphyxiated by a stench of sweat, puke and fags, ready to bolt, but hearing the front door bang behind them, Dora bravely announced they’d come to see Feral.

The fat man jerked his head. ‘Next door.’

In the kitchen they found glasses and plates piled high in the sink and a woman, presumably Feral’s mother, lying moaning on the floor in a drug-induced stupor, surrounded by playing children.

Then Bianca gasped as she caught sight of Feral, stripped to the waist, shiningly beautiful in this midden of squalor, masculinity in no way diminished by the fact he was working his way through a pile of ironing and trying to feed a yelling baby in a high chair.

Bianca was still speechless, but over the lecherous cajoling of the man in the porn film, Dora yelled:

‘It’s us, Feral.’

Feral looked up in horror. Hissing like a cornered wild cat, he screamed at them to get the fuck out.

‘I wanted to say sorry for Daddy,’ sobbed Bianca, ‘and see if you were all right.’ Then, when Feral said nothing: ‘I love you.’

‘Well, I don’t love you. Get out.’ As he hobbled towards them, brandishing the iron in their faces like a riot shield, Dora caught sight of a bandage on his ankle.

Next moment, Uncle Harley had lurched into the room and made a grab at Bianca who, catching him off balance, shoved him crashing against the sink, smashing several glasses. Dora meanwhile had clouted the fat man with her bag and unchained the door, enabling them to flee out of hell. Seeing their terrified faces, a prostitute screeched, ‘Taught you a lesson, did it? Don’t mess with Uncle Harley.’

Dora and Bianca didn’t stop until they reached the bridge. Leaning against it, gasping for breath, Dora couldn’t stop shaking.

‘What an utterly disgusting, revolting place.’

Bianca couldn’t stop crying; her only emotion was sympathy for Feral living with those crackheads.

‘That’s why he’s so poor,’ she wailed, ‘and why he wouldn’t go on the geography field trip, or take up that games scholarship at Bagley. There’d be no one to look after those children. What are we going to do? I daren’t tell Mummy and Daddy where I’ve been.’

‘I’ll just call Dicky and check Cadbury’s OK. I expect they’re both watching disgusting porn on the internet too. Then let’s take a taxi to Janna’s.’ Dora put an arm round Bianca. ‘Don’t cry. She’ll know what to do.’

Music louder than any on the Shakespeare Estate poured out of Jubilee Cottage. The Brigadier had been sent a crate of red by a fan and he and Lily were teaching Janna and Emlyn the Charleston. They were all hammered.

‘I’m terribly sorry, we haven’t got enough for the taxi,’ were Dora’s first words.

After Emlyn had paid it, Bianca gazed into space shuddering whilst Dora, one hand on her hip, the other gesticulating wildly, described their adventures.

‘Poor Feral,’ she said indignantly. ‘Rupert called him a “black bastard” and chucked him out of Penscombe, although he and Bianca were only snogging, or as Mummy calls it “heavy petting”. Mind you, there are plenty of pets at Penscombe.’

Meeting the Brigadier’s eye, Lily tried not to laugh.

No one was laughing by the time Dora had finished.

‘Oh poor, poor Feral,’ whispered Janna.

‘We must rescue him,’ wept Bianca.

‘I think we’ve all drunk too much to do anything tonight,’ said Emlyn. ‘Janna and I’ll go round in the morning and sort it out.’

‘Feral’s got a soccer trial on Monday. Should cheer him up,’ volunteered the Brigadier.

‘I don’t think so,’ sighed Dora, ‘he was lame as a cat.’

‘That’s from escaping out of my bedroom window,’ wailed Bianca. ‘It’s all bloody Daddy’s fault.’

‘Better stay the night,’ Lily told Dora and Bianca to the Brigadier’s regret.

‘Shall I come with you?’ asked the Brigadier next morning, as he tried to keep down a Fernet-Branca.

‘Fewer of us the better, less ostentatious,’ answered Emlyn as he coiled his long length into Janna’s green Polo.

‘Something rotten in the state of Larkminster,’ he observed as Janna drove past smashed-up playgrounds, shuttered shops, shells of houses, front gardens full of junk instead of flowers, and parked at the end of Macbeth Street. Emlyn edged her inwards so he could walk on the outside of the pavement.

‘Although this is the sort of hell-hole where I should walk on both sides of you.’

At first Feral wouldn’t open the door.

‘If you’re from the social,’ observed an old biddy scuttling past, ‘they’ve gone.’

Hearing a baby crying, Emlyn continued thumping.

When Feral finally let them in, they found him alone with three young children and the howling baby, whose nappy he’d just changed. From the mop in a bucket of suds, he’d obviously been cleaning up the floor. There was no fridge. Flies were everywhere.

After a lot of coaxing and a cigarette from Emlyn, he admitted that Uncle Harley and his mother had pushed off abroad to punish him. Gradually, eyes cast down, stammering out the sentences, occasionally returning to his former hauteur, he explained how he’d stolen to feed his brothers and sisters and carried a gun to protect them.

‘Harley used my mother as a tom, kept her short of money and drugs, to make her reliant and desperate. Anyfing I earn from Lily and the Brig, she takes to feed her habit. Even if I hide it in the toes of my trainers, she finds it. Does my head in. What’ll happen to her? She’s not beautiful any more; Harley’ll kill her.’

As Feral got up to wave away a swarm of flies settling on a plate of beefburgers, Emlyn noticed him hobbling.

‘So you’re no good for the trial on Monday?’

‘Fanks to Mr Rupert Fancy-Black, I’ve gotta let the Brig down.’

‘Does Harley give you a hard time?’

Feral nodded bleakly. ‘He went ballistic I wouldn’t deal when I got access to all those rich Bagley kids. Nearly buried me when I turned down that boarding place.’

Now the howling baby was sleeping in her arms, Janna wanted to howl herself. Feral had been so proud, so brave, his constant lack of funds the only giveaway. Emlyn was being wonderful too. With one child on each muscular thigh, and the third watching, he was singing nursery rhymes to them.

‘They’re not going into care!’ Feral became almost hysterical. ‘They’ll never come back.’

‘Only for a bit, while we sort ourselves out,’ promised Janna. ‘Everyone needs a leg-up occasionally. I accepted money from Randal Stancombe to keep Larks going.’

With trepidation she called Nadine who, fired up by a new scheme to unite social services and the education and health departments, turned out to be an absolute star.

The Brigadier, who had just been cleared by the Criminal Records Bureau to teach history at Larks, had grown so fond of Feral, he asked him to stay until things got straight. Janna would be up the road with Lily next door, so Feral wouldn’t be lonely, and he could do the odd job round the house. Nadine then arranged for the children and the baby to be taken into temporary care with a good, kind family in the next village, so Feral could pop in and see them whenever he wanted. Feral listlessly agreed to everything because he saw no other way out. He loved Bianca, but like Juliet she was not yet fourteen; Rupert would always show him the door.

‘Rupert called me a “black bastard”,’ he kept telling the Brigadier.

Feral moved in, but like a feral cat, he couldn’t bear being trapped and begged the Brigadier not to lock the doors at night. ‘I’ll be your guard dog, man.’

86

Janna had worked flat out throughout the summer holidays supervising the rebuilding of Appletree, because the moment she stopped being busy, she was wiped out by guilt, sadness and despair. These feelings were reinforced by record temperatures, dire news of global warming and melting icebergs. Would there be a world at all for the children to inherit?

Despite gallant work by the remaining teachers, there had been so much disruption during the summer term that in the end only eight per cent of Larks children achieved the Magic Five. Ashton was on the telephone in seconds.

‘Dear, dear, dear,’ he gloated, ‘how lucky for you we OK’d Appletwee first. If we’d had a sight of these wesults, you’d never have got your building. I do pray you do better with Year Ten.’

The
Times Educational Supplement
had reported that the proportion of U grades was the highest ever.

‘Most of them from Larks,’ observed Ashton bitchily.

Janna had also observed a faint neglect of late. Throughout July, Hengist had frequently rolled up at Appletree around dusk to admire work in progress, before making love to her in the long, pale, dry grass of Smokers’ with the stars emerging as voyeurs overhead.