The Whispers of Wilderwood Hall (2 page)

Slap,
slap
.

Slap,
slap
.

Slap,
slap
.

I concentrate on the rhythm of the grey-brown water gently lapping the hull of the boat and feel my heart rate finally slow. It's funny, but the hollowness of the sound almost matches the song that's now playing in the background.

What is it again?

I
can't quite make it out 'cause of the clamour of chat and laughter from the celebrating crowd up on the bow. It's some old '60s soul thing, I know
that
much, since Mum and RJ bonded over their mutual love of Motown and wanted that to be the soundtrack of their wedding. Their identical taste in music is one of the million coincidences that made them totally – and ultra-quickly – convinced they were meant to be together.

“Hey, are you riding the waves again, baby?” Mum asks, assuming anxiety's got me on the run. “Remember it rolls right in, Ellis, but it always rolls back out again.”

As she reassures me, her hand begins to swirl comforting circles between my shoulder blades.

Oh, that feels good
, I think as I lean on the handrail, my eyes still fixed on the choppy Thames below.

“Actually, it's not that,” I tell her. “I knew I was going to be sick, and I didn't want to spoil your moment by vomiting on your guests.”

“Oh, Ellis! That's
my
fault,” says Mum, and immediately her hand lifts from my back. Click goes the sound of a clasp, and the next thing I hear is frantic rummaging.

“
I've been
so
busy organizing everything for today I didn't even
think
about the fact that you should've taken a travel-sickness pill! Here, have one now and it should kick in soon.”

I warily straighten up and turn to her. She might be a bride, but Mum's still a one-woman organizational wizard. From her mini patent handbag she's pulled a small packet of pills and another of wet wipes.

“Hey,
I
forgot too,” I say, and let Mum place the sugary tablet on my tongue and clean me up, as if I were still her little girl.

“Well, this
is
a pretty amazing wedding venue,” Mum says with a smile, “it's just a bit on the wobbly side, eh?”

“Uh-huh,” I agree with her as she uses another wipe on my forehead and neck to cool me down.

If I didn't feel ill, I could properly appreciate being on this boat, cruising past famous sights like the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye. (Apparently, it's something
else
that can happen when you're a successful and well-off musician; you ask your personal assistant to scour Last-Minute-But-Amazing-Venues-For-Your-Wedding.com, and magically, it's done.)

The
thing is, maybe it's not only the boat that's made me feel travel-sick. Maybe it's the speed everything's happened lately. Like…

Surprise!
Mum has fallen in love in about two seconds flat.

Surprise!
Mum's new boyfriend has asked her to marry him on their first date.

Surprise!
It wasn't just a joke, and Mum gives in and answers “yes” on their
sixth
date.

Surprise!
RJ says, “Why wait? Why not get married straight away?” Mum says, “Why not?”

The speed of the wedding in particular caught loads of people out. Granny and Uncle Ben and my cousins couldn't make it from Australia in time, even though RJ offered to pay for their flights. And RJ's eighteen-year-old daughter didn't come either, and she lives not
so
far away, in Somerset, with her mum. Though most of the time she's at boarding school, in Devon or somewhere – I forget.

But the surprises connected with Mum and RJ's love-a-thon don't stop with the wedding. There's one more game-changing surprise. Home isn't going to be a cosy flat for two in North London any more. It's going to be a dilapidated mansion for three, six hundred miles away.

A
dilapidated mansion that's going to be Mum and RJ's Shiny New Project.

Well, it's great that they've got this exciting venture to look forward to. But excuse me if I'm not so excited. Excuse me if I feel pretty miserable, giving up my life and my friends here in London.

“Wow, this time next week we'll be saying goodbye to all of this,” says Mum, as if she's only just noticed the spectacular view of world-famous tourist landmarks. “Can you believe it, Ellis?”

I don't reply. Instead I picture all those images I saw on the property website. Wilderwood Hall in all its glory – joke! It's just this huge, brooding, grey granite building, with a warren of semi-derelict rooms inside and some tumbledown stables nearby, surrounded by a forest of tall, dense firs cutting it off from the world.

Then I picture something completely different: my busy, bustling school playground. Shaniya and the other girls, sitting on “our” bench at break time, giggling and laughing without me…

“Oh, baby, you're shivering!” Mum says, pulling me to her for a hug.

It's no surprise I'm shivering; getting married on the open deck of a boat in March is perhaps a bit optimistic.

“
Hey,
Mrs Johnstone
, and the lovely Miss Harper! How's my little family?” I hear RJ ask.

Mum unwraps one arm from me and gives him a welcoming wave.

“We're good. Well, Ellis has a bit of motion sickness,” Mum tells him.

“Oh, poor you,” says RJ, frowning sympathetically at me. “My daughter's like that too. She and her mum joined us on tour in the US when she was little. She barfed her way across most of the west coast of America, I think!”

I look up at his smiling, friendly face and his floppy mess of a quiff – and I feel my tummy flip again.
This
time I don't think it is anything to do with the boat bobbing.

The thing is, from what I've seen of RJ, he's really, really nice and easy-going, but I don't feel ready for an all-of-a-sudden stepdad. It's just been me and Mum, always and for ever. And Shaniya might think I'm mad for not being ecstatic about Mum dating someone like RJ, but seeing Mum share part of her life with a person who isn't
me
is incredibly hard to get my head around.

Speaking of Shaniya (cue another tummy flip), she's going to go
completely
crazy when she
finds
out about the wedding. She's not going to understand why I wasn't allowed to tell her, never mind invite her. She'll be
deeply
offended that Mum worried Shaniya might gossip to someone, who'd tell someone, who'd tell someone who'd stick it on Facebook, and then Mum's secret wedding to RJ would be about as secret as the name of the prime minister.

So maybe the stress of that is getting to me too. Still, whatever the reasons, I mustn't,
mustn't
be sick in front of Mum and RJ. They'd probably see it as a bad omen for their marriage, their future togeth—

“Oi! NO! NO
WAY
!!” a shout shatters the moment, followed by more shouts and a whole lot of swearing.

“What's happening?” I ask nervously, staring at the cluster of wedding guests gathering at the railing around the right side of the boat.

“God … it's the paparazzi,” sighs RJ, slapping his forehead with his hand. “How did they find out about the wedding?”

At least I know it wasn't Shaniya
, I think as my heart thunders at the sight of the speedboat growling alongside us. A comically huge lens is being aimed
up
at us, and the man behind it – his face hidden by both baseball cap and camera – click, click, clicks frantically.

Suddenly, it's all too much.
Everything
about today is too much. I'm dizzy and deafened and I grab hold of the railing.

“It'll pass, it'll pass, it'll pass,” I frantically mutter to myself, leaning over to fix my eyes on the sludge-brown waves of the Thames, hoping they'll calm me again.

But straight away, I see something.

It's a face…

A face in the water, a girl's face, dark eyes staring back up at me through the murk.

(Whirl, tilt, shift.)

No, no,
no
! I'm not letting anxiety trick me and mess with my mind. There's
no one
in the water. It's just my own reflection, distorted by the churning river.

Feeling panicked and slightly mad, I squeeze my eyes tight closed, let go of the railing and press my palms hard over my ears. It's probably next to useless, but it's the best I can do to block out everything: the angry yelling, the head-drilling roar of the speedboat, the weird hall-of-mirrors
version
of me in the water and this whole crazy, alien version of life I seem to have suddenly found myself in.

If I could I'd turn and run.

But I have nowhere, absolutely nowhere, to run to…

Thunk.

That's the sound of my heart sinking, which is quite something, since I didn't think it could sink any further than it already has lately.

It's four o'clock on a Friday afternoon, and if life had carried on the way it was supposed to, today I'd be finished with school for the Easter holidays. I'd be playing around on my iPad on my bed, planning lazy trips to the local Odeon or maybe cool Camden Market with Shaniya.

But today is Day One of our
new-look
life. And after driving for hours and endless hours, me and Mum still haven't arrived at Wilderwood Hall. Instead, we seem to have accidentally found ourselves in a tartan museum.

“
Can't we go somewhere else?” I whisper urgently as we both hesitate in the doorway of the Cairn Café.

“Ellis, there
is
nowhere else to go,” Mum whispers back. “This is the only café in the only village for miles around. Anyway, maybe it'll have wifi.”

I seriously doubt that.

Mum wants wifi to help us find our way to Wilderwood Hall, which can't be far, so that we'll be there in plenty of time to welcome the removal lorry.
I
want it because I'm desperate to find out what Shaniya's posted. She sent me a text saying
LOL LOL LOL – Instagram NOW!
before my signal died twenty miles ago. Hearing from her at all made my heart lurch; she hasn't spoken to me, not even to say goodbye, since she found out about the wedding.

Still, I reckon there's more chance of coming across the Loch Ness Monster in the Cairn Café's bathroom sink than an actual internet connection. I mean, look at the polyester tartan curtains, the plastic tartan tablecloths and the dusty dried thistle arrangements on every spare shelf and windowsill.

And what about that ancient TV balanced on the equally ancient video recorder? On the screen – in
strangely
lurid colours – a grinning, hairy man in a kilt is playing an accordion really, really badly.

This place is SO not going to have wifi.

What it
does
have is a white-haired waitress who looks like she should have retired decades ago.

There is just one customer – a bored-looking teenage boy with messy, fair hair practically down to his shoulders. Or maybe I should say there are
three
customers … two black-and-white sheepdogs are by the boy's side. While he drinks from a can of Coke, they noisily slurp from a bowl of water on the cracked lino floor.

And get this: all of them – dogs included – are staring at me and Mum as if we've just beamed in from the planet Zorg. OK, I get it. This is the sort of village where everyone's families can be traced back to the Dark Ages – dogs included – at the very earliest, isn't it? Where they consider you “new” even if your great-grandmother was born here. Me and Mum, fresh from London this morning, don't stand a chance of fitting in. We should have got ourselves those badges the people at Pixar make their visitors wear:
Stranger, From the Outside
…

I slouch on to the nearest chair and try to will myself invisible, while Mum drops a plastic folder
on
to the table and shrugs off her parka, hanging it on the back of the chair beside me. My eye catches the pretty white star she's had tattooed on the inside of her left wrist. It matches one that RJ got years ago on the inside of his right wrist.

“Hello!” Mum calls across brightly to the elderly woman behind the counter. “Could we have –”

I'm aware of Mum's pause; she was about to ask for her usual Earl Grey, I'm sure, but has just spotted a box of bog-standard teabags and a jar of instant coffee parked beside a kettle. Asking for Earl Grey in this place would probably be like asking for ocelot on toast.

“– a pot of tea and an orange juice, please?” Mum asks with a friendly smile. “And could I just use your loo?”

The woman nods and smiles and ushers Mum towards two doors. One says
Laddies
and the other says
Lassies
. We're definitely not in North London now…