The City's son

CHAPTER 4

At the front of the class Mr Krafte was rambling on about The Lady of Shalott, but Beth wasn’t listening. As she doodled, a punked-up warrior princess emerged from under her pencil, blowing a mirror into fragments with her bazooka. Out of the window, she could see the tarpaulin the staff had draped over last night’s work. The portrait had still been uncovered when she and Pen had arrived, other students had been crowded around it, whooping with laughter and snapping it with their phones.

Beth had felt a hot rush of victory and squeezed Pen’s hand. Pen had squeezed back nervously.

‘It’s okay,’ Beth had said, ‘there’s no proof it was us.’ They’d even buried their backpacks and paint-stained hoodies under a tree near the railway, in case of a locker search.

‘We’re safe. I’ll find you at the end of the day,’ she’d promised, before letting Pen go.

‘Miss Bradley!’ Mr Krafte’s voice jarred her out her reverie and her pencil snapped.

‘Yes, boss?’ She looked up warily.

The old English teacher eyed her with mild perturbation as he folded a piece of paper between his fingers. His face was as dark and wrinkled as the skin on old gravy. ‘Go to Mrs Gorecastle’s office, please. She’d like a word.’

A muttered ‘ooooh’ went round the classroom and Beth’s throat tightened, but she shrugged, trying to look unflustered. She spent a few seconds folding the warrior princess drawing into a paper plane, and sent it on a kamikaze nose-dive into the bin before she got up.

Okay, Beth: here goes. Time to put on your innocent face. She glanced at her reflection in the window and sighed. If she’d been holding up a board with a date and time of arrest on it she couldn’t have looked guiltier. She grimaced and swung out into the hall.

The door to the headmistress’ office had a little round window in it and Beth glanced through it as she approached — and stopped cold.

She could see three figures behind the wired glass: the headmistress, Gorecastle herself, gaunt and dressed all in black, Dr Salt, who, frankly, looked better flat on the tarmac, rotting flesh and all…

… and a tall, slim girl standing in the corner, worrying at her headscarf.

Fury boiled up through Beth, along with an urge to get in there, to stand between Pen and the teachers, to shield her.

Pen’s disciplinary record’s spotless — what the hell? she thought. But then she saw the mud-splotched backpack on Gorecastle’s desk and the dented spraycans arranged next to it and her indignation withered inside her. Beth suddenly felt very vulnerable, and very cold.

The headmistress opened the door and pursed her thin lips. ‘Ah, Miss Bradley. Do join us.’

Beth pushed past her to the desk, grabbed the backpack and swung it onto her shoulder. She glowered at the headmistress, her face burning. There was nothing to do now but own it.

‘So,’ the headmistress said. ‘Do you have anything to say for yourself?’

Beth stayed silent, but inside her head a stunned voice was repeating one impossible phrase: Pen gave you up. Pen gave you up.

Pen…

‘This is very serious, Elizabeth,’ the headmistress was saying. ‘You will be suspended while we investigate this matter, and that may well lead to expulsion. It is only Dr Salt’s personal request that stops me involving the police further. You should be very grateful to him, frankly. Do you have anything to say?’

Beth kept her mouth shut and stared dead ahead. She’d show the traitor in the corner how it was done.

‘Very well, then,’ Gorecastle said. ‘I have some telephone calls to make. Julian, a word?’

Dr Salt escorted her from the room.

Beth couldn’t make herself look at Pen. Maybe if she didn’t look, it would somehow become someone else who’d betrayed her. She felt intensely, painfully weary and she dropped herself into Gorecastle’s office chair. A sudden wave of anger went through her and she kicked the desk so hard it screeched back over the floorboards.

Pen looked at her incredulously. ‘B, you’re mental-’

‘How much more trouble do you think I can get in, Parva?’ Beth snapped. She chewed out the syllables of Pen’s real name; the first time she’d called her that in three years of friendship.

Pen gulped, and something glittered on her cheek: a tear.

Pen’s crying. Instinctively Beth reached up to hug her, and then dropped her arms. They felt so useless by her sides.

‘Beth, I’m-’

‘ Don’t say it,’ Beth snarled. ‘If you tell me you’re sorry, Parva Khan, I swear I will kill you dead. Just… just — ’ There was only one question, branded on her mind. ‘ Why? ’

‘He said he’d-’ Pen’s voice went scratchy. She tried again. ‘He said he’d-’

‘ What! ’ Beth demanded. ‘ What did he say?’

But Pen didn’t finish; instead she huddled into herself and pulled her scarf around her.

‘You made it worse, B,’ she said miserably. ‘You made everything worse.’

Beth gazed into her best friend’s face and for the first time in years she couldn’t make sense of it. Pen’s eyes were like slammed doors. A spidery feeling of wrongness crept into Beth’s throat. ‘Pen,’ she whispered, ‘Pen, what does that even mean? What happened? Pen? ’

Pen hugged herself in silence, and Beth realised that for the first time in years, she couldn’t read her. It was a shattering thought. I don’t understand, Pen.

And if she didn’t understand Pen, she didn’t understand anything at all.

Gorecastle returned a few moments later. ‘Parva,’ she said, ‘thank you for your help. You can go back to class.’

As Pen bundled herself from the office the headmistress eyed Beth. ‘Get up,’ she ordered coldly, and as Beth rose slowly from the chair behind the desk, never breaking eye contact, she sighed. ‘Children like you, Elizabeth,’ she said wearily, ‘ children like you ‘Perhaps I should just have just let the police have you.’ She picked up a form. ‘I have left a message for your father; you will wait here for him to pick you up. I shall take the opportunity to discuss this matter with him.’

Beth’s heart, which had been hammering at a million beats a second, suddenly slowed and a sick feeling welled up in her. She started to stuff her spray-paints back into her backpack. ‘We’ll be waiting a while then,’ she whispered.