Skulk Read online

  I crossed to the lockers and slipped my key into number fourteen.

  “Hey, Mags,” Ameera called over. I spun, my face probably shining with guilt. “Don’t you want to see?”

  “Yeah, coming,” I said. “Just dumping some stuff.”

  I opened the locker and slipped the stone in between my history homework and my secret sketchbook. I heard the soft thonk as stone hit metal, and swung the door shut and locked it.

  As I stepped back, something scuttled across the top of the lockers, and I leapt back, flailing stupidly. Another spider.

  Great. I bet the building’s infested.

  I turned, quickly, and crossed to the window.

  “So, what’s going on?” I asked Ameera.

  “Some guy got stabbed or something,” she said. I tried to see over her shoulder, but nobody was making room. “Apparently he like, climbed over the wall and did a bunch of graffiti and got stabbed.”

  “Gang stuff,” said Lauren, nodding wisely.

  I sighed. Some imaginary ASBO-toting scum was always going to get the credit for my work. I suppose I’d rather it was the Fox Man. It could be like my gift – after all, I had nothing I could give him that would make up to the value of his last gift to me.

  And then Ameera finally budged aside and let me get to the window and look down. There was the white tent and loitering policemen, familiar from a thousand episodes of CSI, but much less attractive – and there were men in overalls wielding long-handled paint rollers, scrubbing over the back wall with white.

  I clenched my fists and tried not to swear out loud.

  All that effort, for nothing. Nobody – except the police – even got to see it.

  I backed away and sat down on a nearby desk with a huff of frustration. It was just my luck, just my shitty, stupid luck. I’d been planning this one for months. It was supposed to inspire people – to wind them up, to make them think. Even if they thought “that art is a bit crap” – I didn’t care. I’d have put something into their ringfenced, exam-panicked, automaton minds.

  Outside the window, all my hard work was vanishing under a curtain of safe, empty white paint.

  And, and, there was another bloody spider climbing over the edge of the desk, feeling for the surface with its thick black legs. I clenched my fists and then snatched up a piece of paper and took a swipe at it.

  “Get off!” I hissed, not even caring if anyone noticed me sulking and talking to a bug.

  Although I did care a bit, deep down, when nobody did.

  “Oh my Lord, Mags,” Ameera said, as we headed for Classics together after registration. “Last night was epic. I am so hungover!”

  She didn’t look all that hungover. She’d obviously had the time and energy to do her makeup that morning, and choose shoes that went with her handbag – blue and white, with a wedge heel – and do whatever it was she did to her hair that made it so glossy and bouncy.

  She nudged me, amiably, in the ribs.

  “You should come with! You know when you don’t come drinking with us, the terrorists win. Why do you hate freedom, Mags?”

  That got a snigger out of me, and she grinned in triumph.

  “Yeah, see? You can’t be good all the time.”

  I don’t know why I never tried to explain to Jewel and Ameera that I wasn’t spending my evenings studying, or reading War and Peace, or whatever else they thought “being good” meant. I don’t think they would’ve thought less of me for creeping out at night and artistically vandalising stuff. I just never wanted to share that part of my life – except as Thatch97, on graffitilondon.com. I told myself I was quite happy living a bunch of totally separate lives.

  “Oh, crap,” Ameera stopped abruptly in the middle of the corridor and her shoulders sagged like a puppet with its strings cut. “Forgot my Ovid. It’s in my locker.” She rolled her eyes dramatically and turned on her heel to head back to our form room.

  A cold twist of nerves hit me right in the gut, and I found myself saying “I’ll come with you,” before I really knew what I was doing. Ameera looked at me with a questioning twitch of her eyebrow, and I shrugged. “I left my notebook, might as well pick it up now. Plus, you’re so hungover you might wander into the wrong room.”

  My excuse made her smile, and I followed in her wake as she made her way back against the stream of people heading to their first lessons.

  It wasn’t that I believed Ameera was going to go into my locker and find the stone. I knew, with every rational part of my mind, that she wouldn’t.

  It was just that I’d remembered that she could, and now I couldn’t stop the vision from playing over and over in front of my eyes. All she’d have to do was jiggle the door just the right way. All the lockers in the school were the same, pathetically unsecure, possibly in a calculated attempt to stop us bringing in anything illicit. I’d learned that one the hard way, when Cath Forbes planted a porno mag in there the day before end of term inspection. Out of pure luck, I escaped a fate worse than detention by a margin of about thirty seconds. I took the moral high ground and didn’t retaliate, which is Liar for “I couldn't think of a good enough revenge that was worth the inevitable escalation”.

  I’d never have left anything valuable in my locker if I’d thought about it for more than two seconds. I felt like an idiot for even considering leaving the stone there. My blood felt like it was running hot, super-heated by my relief as I reached into my locker and my hand closed over its cool, smooth surface.

  For a second, while Ameera dug through enough Starbucks receipts to wallpaper my house looking for her Classics textbook, I ran my fingers over the smooth surface of the stone and felt its weight in my palm. It wasn’t particularly heavy, and yet...

  Perhaps I was imagining it, but the stone felt as if it was weighing me down, anchoring me to the ground, as if gravity wasn’t what it used to be and if I put down the stone I would just float away on the breeze. It made my fingers twitch.

  I pocketed it, swearing I’d find a better hiding place later.

  Despite the detour, we made it to the Classics room before the teacher, and I got out my Ovid and started doodling over the back cover.

  “Also, you need to get laid,” Ameera said, glancing over my shoulder at the swirls and jagged lines.

  I’d been hoping she’d forgotten about trying to get me to go out. I felt the heat rise in my cheeks, and hated myself for it. I made a sort of non-committal “Eehhh,” sound.

  Unsurprisingly, Ameera wasn’t put off. “Falco’s was crawling with hot guys last night. You’ll have no problem hooking up with someone. Me and Jewel’ll totally be your wingmen,” she pressed.

  “Where is Jewel, anyway?”

  Ameera didn’t seem to mind me changing the subject. “She was even more wasted than me,” she shrugged. “She’s probably lying down in a darkened room. I wish I was.” She ran a hand dramatically over her face, although not so hard she smudged her eyeshadow, and groaned.

  Jewel did turn up, eventually. She floated in halfway through double English, just as Mr Strummer was gearing up to launch into Henry IV, Part 2. Her sunglasses seemed fused to her face, two deep greenish pools beneath a sweep of choppy black fringe. She clutched a can of Red Bull in one hand and a piece of folded paper in the other.

  Mr Strummer looked up from his preparations, smoothed back his floppy grey-brown hair and held his other hand out to receive the note. When he’d read it, he harrumphed, but didn’t question her.

  “All right, sit down,” he said, “and take those shades off. You’re indoors now.”

  Jewel sighed, deeply and loudly, and reached up to take off the sunglasses with all the urgency of a particularly unbothered sloth, shaking her hair forwards over her face.

  She sat down beside Ameera, and Mr Strummer found his place in the text and drew in a deep breath.

  “Ahemhem. Open your Eares!”

  Which was our cue to do the exact opposite.

  Ameera waited a prudent thirty seconds before
turning to Jewel.

  “You OK?”

  “No. I’m dying.” Jewel squinted across the desk at us. “I ought to be in bed – or preferably a coffin.”

  I turned my eye roll into a glance up to check on Mr Strummer. He was still droning on, his voice rising and falling unevenly over the poetry and fifteenth century puns. We think he’s a failed actor – he’d always rather act our set texts out than have us work on understanding them for ourselves. If you were careful, you could talk right through his performance and never bring him back from his private Bard-world.

  “How come you came in, if you’re so sick?” Ameera asked.

  Jewel shrugged. “Ugh. Mark bribed me with a family emergency note and a shopping trip if I’d get out of the flat so he could have the Duchess round for lunch.”

  “Is he still going out with her?” Ameera winced.

  “Don’t even.” Jewel waved a hand weakly, as if gossiping about her brother’s girlfriend was just too much for her delicate constitution. To be fair, she looked a lot sicker than Ameera. Her eyes were bleary under her fringe.

  “I do not get it. She’s such a munty, sourfaced bitch,” Ameera said, loyally.

  “Last week she bought a Chihuahua,” Jewel stated, hanging her head and holding up her hands in defeat. “She called it Mr Pooches.”

  “Oh my God,” Ameera gasped. “An actual Chihuahua. Has she got like, no idea?”

  Handbag dogs are like, really 2000, you see. Everyone knows if you can’t rustle up either a sugar glider or a giant Afghan hound, you just aren’t trying.

  I turned my gaze to the window and watched the branches of the birch tree outside shake as a flock of mangy pigeons dropped in from the grey sky. For a moment they sat there, about five of them all together, twitching their feathers and twisting their necks. Then they took off again, scattering in all directions. One lone pigeon was left squatting in the tree. It glared in at the window. It was almost looking right at me.

  Could it be a person too? Could it stretch and flex its wings into elbows and fingers, until it was a naked stranger, sitting in a tree? I could visualise it more clearly than I would’ve liked.

  But it didn’t have a stone, so maybe not.

  “Right, Mags?” Ameera said, bumping shoulders with me.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re coming out with us on Saturday night.” I opened my mouth to disagree, but she didn’t stop for breath. “I’ll come over to yours and make you over and then we’ll go to Falco’s for pre-drink drinks, and then on to that new place, with the ice, and finish off at Nobilis. And if you don’t find a man in one of those places I’ll, I’ll...” she paused, and I seized the moment.

  “No,” I said. “Thank you, really, but no.”

  “Look,” Jewel leaned over, and then sat back quickly as we realised Mr Strummer had fallen silent.

  “So,” he said, snapping the book closed, which was quite impressive really since it was only a flimsy paperback, “What do we think is Shakespeare’s dramatic purpose in beginning the second part of Henry the Fourth’s story like this? Hmm?”

  I frowned at my copy, as if deep in thought, and waited for someone else to answer. Luckily, Alice Thurso accidentally caught his eye from the back row, and while he was engaged in trying to extract an answer she didn’t have, Jewel scribbled a note and passed it to me.

  If you don’t have fun we’ll never ask again, it said.

  Ameera grabbed it back almost before I’d read to the end of the sentence and scrawled an addition underneath.

  LOOKING HOT + YUMMY MEN – INHIBITIONS = A GOOD TIME OR YOUR MONEY BACK.

  She drew a little heart, and then scribbled it out and drew a cock instead. I cringed.

  Jewel seized the pencil, crossed out the cock and drew some boobs, and a question mark. I cringed even harder and shook my head.

  Jewel underscored the words we’ll never ask again, and passed the note back with a flourish of finality.

  I looked out of the window again. I tried to give the idea fair consideration, but my mind kept going blank. For a moment I just sat there, staring. The pigeon was gone. There was yet another spider on the window ledge, hanging from an invisible thread and drifting slightly in the wind.

  My stomach rumbled. The wardrobe had made me too late to grab my usual second breakfast from Mr Patak’s on the way to school.

  I picked up the pencil, pulled the paper in front of me and scrawled down FINE.

  Fine. I didn’t feel much like going out tagging right now anyway, and it’d be better than staying at home. Surely.

  As we were going out for lunch, I made an excuse about leaving my bag behind and slipped out into the playground.

  The memory of that night hit me like a falling meteorite. The bins, with the motion-sensor light. The picnic tables. The grass. The wall.

  I stared at the patch of grass by the fence, where a group of Year Sevens were sitting cross-legged eating sandwiches. That was where he fell, where his blood seeped into the ground.

  I turned and looked up at the back wall, a vision in negative of my artwork floating in front of my eyes. The men with paint-rollers had done a brilliant job. Nothing was left of all my hard work. Two year nine girls saw me staring at the wall, pulled OMG, what a weirdo! faces at me and giggled behind their hands.

  The school had won this one, but I’d be back. One day I’d finish what I started.

  A little huddle of Year Eights jumped out of their skins as I rounded the corner of the Kit Shed, and totally failed to hide their cigarettes behind their backs.

  “Miss Wolfcliff’s coming,” I said, and they dropped the cigarettes and scattered like a flock of starlings.

  I knelt down on the patch of earth by the shed, and dug out the triangular plastic protractor from the bottom of my bag. It served pretty well as a mini shovel – it’d certainly never been any use to me in lessons – and I used it to dig a hole about the length of my hand by the wall of the shed. I dropped the stone in and covered it over, arranging a clump of weeds to cover the dug earth. It wasn’t all that deep, but it would do for now.

  Thump thump thump thump thump whirr whirr screech clang thump.

  A DJ in mirrored sunglasses was mangling a popular song on the raised turntables at one end of the bar, while at the other end I sat frozen on a violet leather sofa, nursing my cocktail and watching Ameera and Jewel flirting with a pair of C-list boyband singers twice their age.

  I cursed myself for forgetting that there was something else I could have done on a Saturday night: I could have taken the stone home and tried to magic myself into a fox in front of my mother. That would’ve been more fun than this.

  “Maggie?” A man flopped into the sofa beside me. I tried not to shy away. “Your friend said you were called Maggie,” he yelled, over the thump thump thump skree whinge thump.

  “It’s Meg, actually.”

  “What?”

  “Meg!”

  “What?”

  “Meg!”

  “Sure,” he nodded and smiled a blindingly white smile, as if he’d understood what I was saying, when we both knew he hadn’t. “My name’s John.”

  “Meg,” I said, under my breath. I gave him a tight smile. He seemed to expect me to say something else. I didn’t want to be rude – apart from the fact that he was obviously at least five years older than me, and he’d come up to a bunch of young girls in a bar for no reason except the obvious, and he was smiling at me like the Cheshire cat that got the cream, I had no reason to feel so wary of him.

  I just suck at this, I thought, miserably. I just don’t care about you, John, or about this music, or about this stupid drink. I just want to think if a guy’s chatting me up it’s because he’s interested in me as a person. Is that seriously too much to ask?

  I realised I’d gone silent and tried to think of something to say. “Nice shirt!” I managed eventually.

  It was a polo shirt with a graffiti motif coiling up around one arm – a bit cheap-looking, which proba
bly meant he’d paid way too much for it, but I liked it.

  “Thanks. Nice top!” he grinned, staring at my boobs. I tried to sigh without encouraging him. It’d been a whole five minutes since I’d regretted letting Ameera talk me into the bright green lowcut Roberto Cavalli dress I had hidden in a drawer and hoped never to have to wear in public again. I almost didn’t blame him for staring at my chest: it was very much the star of the show.

  “How old are you?” I yelled.

  “Twenty,” he lied. “You’re at college together, right?”

  Yeah. Except you’re thinking Oxbridge and I’m thinking sixth form. “Uh huh,” I said, not wanting to ruin it for Jewel and Ameera. After all, they looked like they were having a good time. The boyband were buying them champagne cocktails with little fizzing stars at the bottom of the glass, and when one of them ran a hand over Ameera’s bottom she wriggled and laughed.

  I never wanted to be a prude. I didn’t wake up one day and think, From now on I shall be really uptight about boys and take myself way too seriously and not think any of this is fun.

  It’s just... not fun.

  John the Supposed Twenty Year-Old was saying something about boats. I nodded and smiled, my face forming a kind of frozen death-grin.

  Oh God, please don’t be telling me about your yacht. Oh my God, you’re telling me about your yacht.

  My parents had a yacht for a while. My friends’ parents had yachts. Jewel had one of her very own, it was called Tinkerbell. I was not impressed by his yacht.

  “Are you in college?” I asked, going along with his lie about his age – I don’t even know why.

  “No, I’m in politics,” he shouted. “I’m one of their, y’know, Senior Policy Wonks.”

  At twenty years old. You really must think I’m stupid.

  “I work with the Poverty Tsar,” he declared, looking pleased with himself.

  OK, that’s it, thank you and goodnight, it hasn’t been fun.

  I stood up.

  “I’m just going to… er…” I gestured vaguely in the direction of the bathroom.