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.
CHAPTER 5
They finally let Beth out at three o’clock. Her dad hadn’t called. She walked to the park and spent hours pacing, chewing at the cuticle on her right thumb and squinting at the sky until the last of the colour drained from it. She knew she’d have to face him eventually, but that didn’t make it any easier.
At last, trying to ignore the clenching in her stomach, she forced herself to head for home.
The hallway was dark and she kicked over a mountain of junk mail on her way towards the sitting room door. Her hand was trembling a little when she set it on the doorknob; she hadn’t been inside that room for weeks now. She fought down the urge to run back out into the street.
‘Just try,’ she hissed to herself as she turned the handle.
The sitting room was buried in photographs; they were tacked over every inch of wall space and strewn loose over the carpet like wreckage from a plane crash. Every chair but one was covered in more piles.
A thickset, balding man occupied the remaining chair. He was reading a paperback book; Beth could just make out the title, The Iron Condor Mystery, on the faded spine. He didn’t look up as Beth approached.
Beth’s lungs felt suddenly airless. She’d run this conversation over and over on her way home, trying to make it sound like something they could talk about rationally, but now-?
She looked down at the bald spot on top of her dad’s head and the crumbs scattered on his shirt like an invitation to the birds. All her preparations felt useless. In the end she just blurted out, ‘I’ve been kicked out.’
He turned a page; his eyes narrowed slightly as they followed the print.
The squeezing in the pit of Beth’s stomach grew tighter. ‘Dad, are you listening? Dad, please. I really need you to focus. Social Services could come around, and the police, maybe. Look, I- Dad, I fucked up, seriously. Dad I need hel-’
She broke off as he looked up at her.
One night, three years and some change before, it had been Beth’s mum reading The Iron Condor Mystery. She’d loved old Cold War spy novels, the safely sinister world of Fedoras and secret codes and briefcase-bombs. That night she’d set down the dog-eared paperback with a little regretful sigh, having not quite reached the bit she’d been looking forward to, but happy in the knowledge that it would be waiting for her tomorrow. She kissed her husband gently, turned over and haemhorrhaged while she slept.
Beth’s dad had woken with his arm curled around his wife. She’d been waxy and cold and her limbs were too heavy when he’d tried to move them.
It had been the morning of Beth’s thirteenth birthday.
Ever since that night he’d slept in his chair — Beth knew he was afraid of the bedroom, though she doubted he would ever admit that. Ever since that night he’d read and reread that same book with an almost frantic intensity, until it was all but disintegrating in his hands.
And ever since that night, he’d looked at her like this, with the same desolate, pleading exhaustion in his face.
