The Medievals were not straightforward racists; nothing so simple.
I suppose you’d have to say that they were pretty even-handed really, in that they were quite happy to make fun of anything that didn’t fit. Their other major target, besides Shafeen, was ‘Carphone Chanel’.
Like me, Chanel was new to STAGS that autumn term. I tried to make friends with her then, but she was too afraid of getting things wrong to make friends with the likes of me. She was too weak to ally herself to another outsider. Of course we are friends now: Nel, Shafeen and me, we three murderers. (I wonder what the collective name for murderers is. It can’t be a ‘murder’, since the crows took that one. Maybe a ‘conspiracy’.
Nel has French-polished nails; ten perfect half-moons of white. She has caramel-coloured hair extensions and a perfect coffee-coloured tan. But underneath all the varnish she’s really nice. Her father dropped her off in a gold Rolls-Royce on her first day, and I found out later she was more bothered by that than I was by my dad’s ancient Mini. You see, we haven’t got money. But what I’ve learned from Nel is that when you’re at STAGS there’s only one thing worse than no money, and that’s the wrong kind of money. ‘My mum called me Chanel because she thought it had class,’ she told me once in her carefully trained voice, betraying no trace of her Cheshire origins. ‘She’s got no idea.’
I knew what she meant by that. Class; it wasn’t on the syllabus at STAGS, because there was no need. It was something everyone else seemed to know, bred into their bones over hundreds of years. Where to go on holiday. What wellies to wear. How to tip your soup plate (not bowl) at dinner. None of this meant having things that were brand new. That was Chanel’s problem – she was brand new. Your shirt could have a frayed collar and buttons missing, as long as it came from the right maker in a little shop in London’s St James’s. Chanel could buy the same shirt, brand new, and still get it wrong. The Medievals called her a ‘try-hard’. But that didn’t stop her trying.
Chanel’s father had made his money from his phone empire. He had nothing whatsoever to do with the Carphone Warehouse, but this didn’t matter to the Medievals any more than it mattered to them that the Punjabi Playboy wasn’t from the Punjab. They liked a bit of alliteration and Carphone went well with Chanel so it stuck, even though about two days into her time at STAGS Chanel began to call herself Nel. In actual fact Chanel’s father had developed a phone called the Saros 7S – sort of half-tablet, half-phone – and the whole world had bought one. Chanel possibly had more money than the Medievals, and had a palatial house in Cheshire with a pool and a cinema room, but because of where the money came from she was even more of an outsider. Because one of the major differences between STAGS and The Rest Of The World was that at STAGS there were no mobile phones.
I don’t mean the school banned phones; it didn’t. The lower years used them as much as they were allowed, which was weekends and evenings. But in Six One and Six Two it became a weird point of honour to be phone-free. The Medievals were a six-person social-media backlash. YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram were looked down on as ‘Savage’. Selfies were Savage. Twitter was Savage. Facebook was Savage. Video games were Savage. For the Medievals, the tech revolution had sent evolution into reverse. They went round ostentatiously reading books. (Books were Medieval. Kindles were Savage.) The Internet was acceptable only in the library and computer room, to be used for research, not social media. (I heard that one of the Six One boys had been expelled for sneaking into the library at night and looking at porn. Poor thing; I guess he was desperate.) Very occasionally the Medievals would watch TV in the Six Two TV room, but when I passed they were always watching University Challenge, competing with each other to get the most answers.
You’d think the kids would rebel, but they didn’t. Everyone was fine with the phone-free universe, and that was because the Medievals embraced it. Such was the power of their personalities, of their little cult. Everyone wanted to be like the Medievals. Even I, in the face of such social pressure, put my phone in a drawer and let it run out of charge. I had no wish to stand out more than I already did. With no contact with my old friends I was even more isolated. I spoke to my dad at weekends, on the landline that all my floor in Lightfoot had to share, but there was always a queue of Jesus and her friends, waiting and tutting, so I could never tell him half of what I wanted to say. Plus Dad was so excited about his documentary, and filming caves full of batshit in Chile, that I couldn’t tell him how unhappy I was. If I had, he would have come home. He loves me, you see.
Apart from my dad, films were what I missed the most. I’d told myself that, even if I hated STAGS, I could just do the lessons and then shut myself away at night watching films on my phone. But I couldn’t even do that; that is, I could’ve done, but in some weird way I wanted to comply – I didn’t want anyone to think I was Savage.
Of course, I knew in my heart that the phones thing was a massive pose, as was the whole ‘Medievals’ cult. But for Henry and his cronies it was just another way of demonstrating that they ruled the school, that they could bend everything to their will. They could have imposed anything they wanted – like having to hop on one leg on Wednesdays – and everyone would have followed them. But what was clever about the phone thing is that it went with the whole ethos of the school, the virtue of being different. Maybe that’s why the Friars kissed their arses so much. Instead of spending hours on screens, kids were reading, playing sport and doing drama and music and choir and stuff. Plus everyone wrote loads, using actual pens and paper. Texts were Savage; letters and notes were Medieval. At STAGS, handwritten notes flew around like autumn leaves, written in fountain pen with real ink, from folded notes on family-crested notepaper to creamy white invitations as thick as bathroom tiles. And that’s how this all began, with The Invitation.
It was nearly half-term when the envelope came. Of course, being STAGS, they didn’t call it half-term, but Justitium. Jesus and I were in our room, getting ready for bed. And now we come to about the only time my roommate ever voluntarily talked to me. She was there when The Invitation slid silently under the door. I didn’t even notice, but she pounced on it excitedly, as if she had been waiting for it. I was brushing my hair at the time, and in the mirror I saw her read the front and droop. ‘It’s for you,’ she said, as if she couldn’t quite believe it. She reluctantly handed it over.
It was completely square, a kind of thick ivory envelope folded over on four sides, and sealed – I kid you not – with a blob of wax, the red of our school stockings. On the wax was impressed a little pair of antlers. Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, I thought.
Jesus hovered. I broke the seal, just like I’d seen in the movies. Inside was a thick square card. There were just three words on it, right in the middle of the creamy card, embossed in black ink. The letters were slightly shiny and raised to the touch.
huntin’ shootin’ fishin’
I looked up. ‘What does it mean?’
‘Turn it over,’ Jesus urged.
I did. On the back, in neat italics, was printed:
You are invited to spend Justitium
at Longcross Hall, Cumberland.
Coaches departing STAGS at 5 p.m. Friday.
RSVP
I turned the card over. ‘RSVP to who?’ I said. ‘There’s no name on it.’
‘That’s because everybody knows who sends them,’ Jesus said, with just a hint of her former scorn. ‘It’s from Henry.’
There was, as I’ve said, only one Henry at STAGS. The black embossed type jiggled in front of my eyes. I should have known. Huntin’ shootin’ fishin’. It sounded like some sort of joke; the ‘g’ was missing from all three words. But the Medievals didn’t make mistakes; if they made errors – the Punjab, the Carphone Warehouse – they were deliberate. Henry had written the blood sports like that for a reason, exactly as he said them. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Longcross is his house. You lucky beast,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the chance to be a Medieval.’
I sat on the bed heavily and squinted up at her.
‘What are you talking about?’
Jesus was so excited that she forgot herself so far as to actually sit bedside me. ‘Henry de Warlencourt always asks people from Six One to his house for the weekend at Michaelmas Justitium – hunting season. If you do well in the blood sports, and they like you as a person, then next year when you go into Six Two you could be a Medieval.’
Despite the novelty of actually having a conversation with my roommate, I was silent, processing it all.
‘You are going, right?’ prompted Jesus. ‘Longcross is supposed to be amazing. The absolute lap of luxury.’
I had the power for once, and I just shrugged. I wasn’t willing to share any confidences. If Jesus wanted to know about my stuff, she’d have to be a bit nicer to me. All the same, I did need information, so I thawed. ‘Coaches?’ I said aloud. Knowing the Medievals, I wondered if it meant actual coaches, with eight horses for each, snorting and pawing on the drive.
‘Henry sends for the estate cars,’ Jesus said. ‘You get driven to Longcross by his gamekeepers.’
I looked from The Invitation to Jesus’s jealous expression. If I’d been heading home at half-term, to see Dad, I would never have even thought of going to Longcross. But I wasn’t. Dad would still be in South America, and I was due to go to my Aunty Karen’s in Leeds. Now, I have nothing against my Aunty Karen, or indeed Leeds, but she has twin toddlers who are a total pain. That’s why I didn’t want to live with her and ended up coming to STAGS.
So, although I had never hunted, shot or fished, I seriously considered going.
I might have been academically smart, but I was monumentally stupid not to realise sooner what was going on. It’s not as if I wasn’t warned. I was, in very clear terms. The warning came from Gemma Delaney. Gemma Delaney was a girl who had got into STAGS three years ago, also from Bewley Park, my old school. She was always held up as a shining example to the rest of us – she had her picture in the Bewley Park reception next to the sparsely filled cabinet of achievements (so different from the medieval atrium of STAGS, where you can hardly see the oak panels for silverware). Gemma came to talk in assembly at our school a year ago, to encourage us to try for a scholarship at STAGS, and I’d hardly recognised her. Gemma used to have dip-dyed hair with dark roots and straw ends, and a strong Manchester accent. In assembly that day she had long honey-blonde hair, a spotless STAGS uniform and clipped vowels. I know now that she’d looked like a Medieval.
She looked very different now, outside the chapel at STAGS, clutching at my arm as we were all filing out of morning Mass. I turned to look at her. Her face was as pale as bone, her hair lank, her eyes haunted. ‘Don’t go,’ she said. The ‘o’ of ‘go’ was flat; in her urgency, her northern accent had returned.
I knew exactly what she meant at once. She meant The Invitation. She meant don’t go huntin’ shootin’ fishin’. I wondered how she knew. ‘Why not?’
‘Just don’t,’ she said, more forcefully than I’d ever heard anyone utter anything. She pushed past me, to be carried along with the crowd. I stood for a moment while students flowed around me, weighing up what she had said. But I hadn’t really absorbed it. As she disappeared into the crowd the feeling of unease faded with her.
The truth was, after weeks of being ignored and belittled and excluded, I was flattered to be wanted, to be invited by the Medievals. The night before, I’d met Henry himself crossing the Great Hall in Honorius. He too had touched my arm, and spoken to me, actually spoken to me, for the first time ever. ‘You are coming this weekend, aren’t you?’ he’d said urgently. ‘It will be such a laugh.’ He pronounced it larf.
‘What kind of laugh?’ I said laff.
He smiled again, and my insides did a little flip. ‘You’ll see.’ He squeezed my arm and I looked down at his hand where it lay on my sleeve – long fingers, square nails, and a gold signet ring on the little finger. A signet ring with a design of two tiny antlers.
So as I stood that morning outside chapel, with the pupils all flowing around me, thinking about what Henry had said, and what Gemma had said, I wasn’t really deciding anything. In my mind I was already packing. It was like that moment when you flip a coin but you already know, before the coin comes down, what you’re going to do.