‘Are you sure this is it?’ said April’s mother, rubbing irritably at the steamed-up windows. ‘This looks more like Lincoln than London.’
For once April was in agreement with her mother. She glanced over at the older woman, so sophisticated and chic with her designer wardrobe, buttery-blonde wavy hair and high cheekbones.
Where are my cheekbones?
she asked herself, miserably glancing at her mousy hair in the window’s reflection. ‘They’ll come,’ her mother always said, ‘and anyway, you’re pretty as you are.’ Tell that to all the boys who had failed to ask her out.
They were crawling along the High Street and, pressing her nose against the condensation, April took in the fifties-style chemist, the dusty window of the jeweller’s, the bent-backed pensioners -
are they allpensioners?—
fighting against the wind as they struggled home or wherever it was old people went on a Sunday night.
‘It looks so ... dreary,’ said April.
‘Well, it won’t always be raining,’ said her dad, flashing her a reassuring smile in the rear-view mirror.
‘Never mind, darling,’ said April’s mother as she flipped open a Chanel compact mirror and touched up her lip gloss. ‘You’ll see all your little friends again in the summer. Look at it this way - we’re only a few Tube stops from Piccadilly Circus.’
Eleven
, April thought miserably. Ever since her father had announced that the Dunne family was moving to Highgate in north London, she had been studying the escape routes. Of course April understood that when her dad lost his job as an investigative reporter on the
Scotsman
newspaper he would have to find another job, but why did they have to leave Edinburgh, why did they have to leave all her friends? She was English by birth, but having spent all her teen years in Edinburgh she felt no attachment to the south and had absolutely no affinity with this gloomy-looking place, that was for sure. What annoyed her the most was that she had just been about to start an A-level course at Leith College, a cool modern place with funky architecture, no uniform and
loads
of boys. Loads of boys: proper grown-up boys with cars, boys who didn’t remember you as a gawky eleven-year-old with braces. But that was all gone now, wasn’t it? She had tried her best to persuade them to let her stay, at least - with her best friend Fiona or one of her parents’ friends, even boarding school—but all her suggestions had been shot down as they insisted they couldn’t move without her. So instead she had been forced to hang around at her old school until they were ready to move and now they were carting her off to some horrid posh place in a tiny suburb a million light years away from everyone she knew. And what was worse, they were plonking her in halfway through the term: could she stand out any more? April looked around with a start as her mother snapped her compact shut.
‘We’re here!’ she trilled. Her mother -
Silvia
, as April liked to think of her, as that way she could pretend her mother wasn’t her mother - had loved the fact that April’s dad was a respected man in Edinburgh and she had enjoyed the snobby dinner-party circuit, but she had hated Edinburgh with its drab granite buildings and its unrelenting weather. She had lived in Belgravia and Covent Garden when she was growing up and used to joke that if she ventured further north than Hampstead she’d get a nosebleed. But much as she had detested being stuck in a provincial outpost, she hated William Dunne’s loss of status more. She had been giving April’s poor dad an incredibly hard time ever since he’d announced he was losing his old job and that he had been offered a new position on the local Hampstead paper. Even more of a hard time than usual; it wasn’t like April could remember a time when her mother wasn’t at Dad’s throat about something. This time, however, it had been much worse. According to her mother, Dad’s new job was a ‘major step backwards’ and ‘completely beneath him’. If they were moving to London, Silvia thought he should be ‘shooting for editor’ on one of the prestigious broadsheets like the
Telegraph
or
Times
. ‘Am I supposed to tell people you’re reporting on the local garden fete?’ she had heard her mother yell in one of her parents’ frequent rows. April had hoped that her proximity to the centre of things would make her mother a little less spiky.
April had been gutted too when her dad had lost his job. He had the coolest job of any of her friends’ parents, who all worked in IT or in banks. There had been perks as well: free books and occasionally tickets for gigs at the Playhouse or press screenings for movies that had yet to come out; Dad’s friends on the arts desk were always happy to pass them on to him. His name and photograph always accompanying his
Scotsman
stories meant that William Dunne was a somebody, and that stopped April from being a nobody.
Her dad swung the car around to the left and into a wide square with a sort of park in the middle, pulling up in front of a narrow house with a bright yellow door. To April, it looked as if the houses on either side were squeezing it upwards.
Bullies
, she thought.
‘Well?’ said her dad, when nobody moved. ‘We’ve been in the car for most of the day - does no one want to go inside?’
They flung the car doors open and dashed up the stone path through the rain, the wind snatching at their hair and coats. They huddled together in the small porch while her father fiddled with the unfamiliar keys and then they all burst inside.
They were faced by a narrow corridor dominated by a long flight of stairs. It was dark, dusty and, frankly, creepy.
‘Isn’t this nice?’ said her dad, forcing a smile and nudging April’s arm. ‘Home sweet home, eh?’
April’s mother sniffed the air like a dog. ‘Wait until I speak to Tilda,’ she said, her mouth in a fixed angry line.
April’s dad caught her eye and gave a playful wince, which momentarily lifted her spirits. Tilda was one of Silvia Dunne’s closest friends, some sort of society player her mum had known since they shared a dorm at their posh girls’ school back in the eighties. Tilda now worked for a prestigious estate agent and had offered the Dunnes a ‘once-in-a-lifetime insider deal’ on the house, swearing it was the best thing she had ever seen in the area. April hated Tilda and all of Silvia’s friends with a passion - horrible stuck-up snobs, the lot of them - but she had revised her opinion when she had offered Silvia such a great deal on the house. Now, as they gingerly walked down the corridor, April wasn’t so sure. Shadows crept into the rooms from every corner and there was a damp, slightly earthy smell. April flicked on the lights but they did little to push back the gloom. The living room was large with a high ceiling, but it still felt cramped and claustrophobic.
‘Tilda did say she hadn’t seen the property in a while,’ said Silvia, unable to keep the disappointment from her voice. ‘She’s very busy.’
‘Why don’t you both go and unpack? The removal men put the boxes in the bedrooms,’ said William, walking over to the large marble fireplace. He had been down earlier in the week to arrange the furniture and belongings. ‘I’ll get a fire going, make it all cosy while you two go and explore.’
April knew that her dad was just trying to see the positive side - as always - but this gloomy welcome had done nothing to alleviate her homesickness for her friends and her life back in Edinburgh. Sighing, she followed her mother through the dining room and into the large kitchen at the back of the house. At least here it was well lit: fluorescent light bounced off the marble worktops and the shiny red Aga stove. Silvia pulled open the large American-style fridge.
‘I knew Tilda wouldn’t let me down,’ she said, reaching in and pulling out an expensive-looking bottle of wine. ‘Right then, glasses ...’ she muttered, opening cupboards impatiently.
‘I’ll just go and look around by myself, shall I?’ said April, knowing that her mother wasn’t listening. ‘Maybe do some drugs, or go into the cellar and get chopped up by the mad axeman, okay?’
Silvia waved a vague hand. ‘Yes, darling, that sounds nice.’
April didn’t find any axemen, just a rather tired-looking Georgian terrace house with several dingy bedrooms and a lot of very creaky stairs. She had decided the small room at the top of the house would be her bedroom, partly because it had a view across the roof to the village and partly because it was the only place she could get a signal on her mobile. The room was full of cardboard boxes stuffed with her possessions, but at least someone - her father, when he had been down the previous weekend? - had made up the bed with white sheets and an unfamiliar duvet. She sat cross-legged on the bed and speed-dialled Fiona.
‘Hi, this is Fee, you know what to do ...’ said the sing-song message, followed by the beep. April was disappointed her best friend wasn’t there to listen to her moan about her new home, but it still made her smile a little to hear her breathy, enthusiastic voice. Fiona Donald—‘a good, solid Scots name’, she always liked to point out, while making gagging motions - had kept April sane since they had been allocated desks next to each at St Geoffrey’s five years ago. ‘Just imagine how wrong it could have gone if they hadn’t seated us alphabetically,’ Fee had said just before April left for Highgate. It was the only time April could remember feeling grateful to her parents. Without the quirk of fate that brought them together she might never have bonded with Fee over their love of low-quality pop music, and they might not have then shared everything from hair-dye disasters to doomed crushes ever since. April couldn’t imagine life without her best friend, but now she was going to have to try to cope.
‘Hey, babes,’ said April into the voicemail, ‘just arrived. It’s raining and everyone is old. Yep, that just about sums it up. Call me when you get this, okay?’
She snapped her phone shut and lay back on the bed. She could already hear raised voices downstairs - big surprise. From up here she could only pick out odd phrases from her mother: ‘Why didn’t you accept it?’ and then, ‘He’s only trying to help,’ and from her father: ‘Christ, Silvia, is it a crime to provide for my family?’
April knew exactly what that was all about. Tomorrow she was due to begin at the prestigious Ravenwood School on the far side of Highgate. They weren’t even giving her a single day to unpack and acclimatise to her new environment. From the little April knew about the school it sounded like some sort of freak show, one half stuffed with maths geniuses and chess masters, the other half made up of some of the richest kids in London, all there because they had been tutored within an inch of their lives or their daddies had made some generous financial gift to the school. It sounded completely intimidating and the drive past it on the way to the house had done nothing to reassure her. A huge grey Gothic monstrosity on the edge of Hampstead Heath, it had obviously been an important stately home a couple of hundred years ago and looked like it was still haunted by the original owners. But it wasn’t even the creepiness of the place that bothered April, it was the students. She could just picture the scene tomorrow: people being dropped off in Ferraris while she clumped up in her trainers. That was the big problem, of course, and the cause of the argument downstairs: Ravenwood wasn’t cheap and, given their reduced circumstances, her parents would struggle with the fees. Her grandfather Thomas, Silvia’s dad, who owned an impressive house in the backstreets of Covent Garden and had put Silvia through the best schools in the land, had offered to pay the fees, but William had refused point blank and her parents had been arguing about it ever since. So, since she was going, she assumed her dad had used his once-great name and maybe a few highly placed contacts to swing it. It wouldn’t make her mother happy either way, given the irony of the situation: finally she was getting the opportunity to shop till she dropped, and just as suddenly couldn’t afford it due to the sky-high school fees.
Sighing, April walked over to the window to look out at the village. The rain seemed to have stopped and the moon was now shining down on the wet roof tiles, although she could see that funny fox weathervane on top of the church still being jerked back and forth by the gusts.
‘Chill out, Foxy,’ she whispered.
To the left, she could see across the square and beyond that to the top of the High Street.
If the dark clouds lift
, thought April,
it might actually be quite pretty
. As she scanned the view, she saw movement in the little park - three figures walking slowly under the big trees, then perching on a bench. April squinted - definitely two boys and a girl. Her heart leapt: young people! They looked to be about her age, although she couldn’t be sure from this distance. She snatched up her phone and ran downstairs.
April walked into the living room to find it transformed. Her dad had a glowing fire popping and spitting in the hearth and had lit a load of big church candles which were dotted all over the room. It actually did look as warm and inviting as he had promised. He was already ensconced in an armchair pulled up in front of the fire, papers and open books spread all around him, stabbing angrily away at his laptop. It was no surprise to find her dad hard at work only minutes after moving into the new house, and minutes after finishing a big fight with her mother. Nothing stopped her dad working. She couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t bent over a book or a paper or barking questions into a phone. Actually, now she came to think of it, she couldn’t remember ever seeing him sleep. If he wasn’t working on some story about a corrupt government department or a drug company scandal for the paper, then he was beavering away on his books: heavy non-fiction books debunking conspiracy theories that sold almost no copies except to nut-jobs and university professors. From what April could tell, her dad’s books involved highly technical scientific explanations for ghosts and UFOs and the abominable snowman. Something like that, anyway. April was more into chick lit.