A Royal Mess (20 page)

So there we were, his insecure Royal Highness and me. He sat on the loo and I sat on his lap, and after a nice bit of pulling, he took my chin in his hands and turned my head to his own. I was forced to look into his eyes, which always gives me this melted-chocolate feeling. ‘I am sorry, Calypso.’

I nodded mutely, staring into the gorgeousity of his face.

‘Oh shit, what kind of king will I make? I always seem to get the wrong end of the stick. And I didn’t even think about what you must be going through with your parents separating. God, are you okay?’

I nodded. ‘You know ’rents.’

‘Yes, my parents are the ones responsible for the security dopes I’m always trying to shake.

I giggled. ‘I think you should count yourself lucky. Mine are just plain nuts.’

‘Well so are mine, but at least I let you meet mine. You, on the other hand, didn’t want to subject your mother to the horror of me! How do you think I felt when you legged it down the lane? I presume you’ve told her all sorts of horrible lies about me.’

I went so red I thought my eyes would start bleeding. ‘No, it wasn’t you, it was her. Sarah’s gone completely mad since she left Bob. She’s started reverting. I couldn’t subject you to that.’

‘Reverting?’

‘Regressing, you know, talking to me like I’m three, and, well, you don’t want to hear about my problems.’

‘See. This is what I’m talking about. You are maddening, Calypso. Of course I want to talk about your reverting mother. I want to talk about everything with you. But you’re always sending me these mixed signals.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. You’re never doing what you’re meant to be doing, never where you’re meant to be, and you never even say what I think you’re going to say. And after all that phone confusion rubbish before half term, it’s like mixed signal after mixed signal. I feel like I can never relax. I know loads of our problems were down to Honey, and we’re over that, but despite Star’s opinion of me I actually do get insecure where you’re concerned because you won’t let me get to know you properly. You really are like Cinderella, disappearing every time I feel like we’re getting close, and all I’m left with is a glass slipper that doesn’t fit anyone else.’

Then he kissed me for a very, very, very long lime. When we stopped I wiped a wet tentacle of hair from his forehead.

‘You’re not like any other girl I’ve ever met, Calypso. Apart from being madly stunning and adorable, you are the singularly most infuriatingly difficult girlfriend a boy ever had.’

I was about to kiss him again, but he pushed me away.

‘No, I will not be distracted from my prepared speech,’ he teased, laughingly. ‘I’ve thought about this a lot while I’ve been sulking, and the truth is (he did a nervous throat-clearing thing) I love you, Calypso, and everything you do drives me crazy.’

Shocked didn’t even come close to how I was feeling at that moment, but before I could form an articulate sentence, we all heard the
tap, tap, tap
of Miss Bibsmore’s stick coming down the corridor towards us. The duct tape must have fallen off her carpet-square silencer.

I grabbed Freds and dived out of the en suite. Star looked at me. Kev looked at Freds. Indie looked at Malcolm.

‘She’s going to come in here,’ Star hissed, looking around at all of us, her eyes large saucers of terror.

I looked outside, where it had started to hail.

‘They haven’t got time to make it out,’ I said, as Miss Bibsmore’s stick could be heard outside our door.

‘Here,’ Star told the boys, chucking clothes from
Honey’s drawer at them in bundles and shoving them into the en suite.

She had no sooner slammed the door on them when Miss Bibsmore entered our room in her awkward little shuffle. ‘I’ve brought you some sweets, Miss Kelly,’ she said as she passed a bag of jelly beans over to me. ‘I know this gating is difficult for you an’ all, what with the fencing competition, but discipline is discipline.’

I heard noises coming from the en suite, and so I shook the packet of jelly beans loudly in the pathetic hope of drowning out the boy’s racket and cried, Thank you, Miss Bibsmore, you’re soooo sweet.’

Why were boys so loud, even when they are supposed to quiet? I had to keep rattling on. ‘Yes, Miss Bibsmore. Thank you, Miss Bibsmore. That is sooo, kind, Miss Bibsmore,’ I said, as loudly as I could without shouting.

Star and Indie joined in with ‘Aren’t you a duck, Miss Bibsmore! You are the best house mother ever! So kind. Poor Calypso. She just loves jelly beans.’

‘All right, all right! I might be crippled, but I is not deaf! Leastways not last time I heard,’ Miss Bibsmore cried, holding her hands over her ears.

The boys in the en suite began to giggle.

‘What was that?’ asked our house spinster. ‘Have you got company?’

Indie dived to the rescue. ‘Just a few chums from an upper year. They came down to, erm, help us with erm –’

‘Some hard sums,’ added Star. Talk about a lame excuse,
normally Star is razor sharp when it comes to quick-thinking excuses.

‘Their bathroom was blocked, so I said they could use mine,’ I explained.

‘Oh yes, well, very generous of you, Miss Kelly, I’m sure.’ But she didn’t look totally convinced.

Then the boys giggled even louder. Thanks, guys.

Placing one of her arthritic hands on the doorknob of the en suite, Miss Bibsmore demanded that the ‘girls’ show themselves. Please, please, please I thought, you
have
locked the door!

But they hadn’t locked the door. Of course they hadn’t done anything as sensible as that. What was I thinking? They were boys.

‘Out you git,’ Miss Bibsmore clucked, poking her stick into the en suite to hustle the boys out.

Malcolm, Freds, and Kevin wriggled out, deftly dodging the blows of Miss Bibsmore’s stick. Each had a towel wrapped around his head as a turban, each with a face smeared with makeup a three-year-old child would be proud of. Malcolm was wearing his robe, while Freds and Kevin were each dressed in Honey’s trackie bums and hoodies. They looked like transvestites who hadn’t quite found their way around the makeup counter yet. Malcolm had daubed body glitter all over his face.

‘What are your names, girls?’ Miss Bibsmore asked suspiciously, eyeing up my boyfriend and his friends.

‘My name’s Octavia,’ Freds replied in a falsetto voice that could break glass.

‘Oh, my darling girl,’ Miss Bibsmore cried out, almost weeping with joy as she tossed her stick to the floor and threw her arms around my boyfriend (who loved me) with an abandon I’d never seen. ‘You’ve come back, Octavia. I knew you would. The others said you’d gone and got yourself preggers. Oh, you dear, dear, dear girl.’

After that she began to cry. ‘This little poppet here was like a daughter to me an’ all.’ She gave Fred’s cheek a big pinch. Then one day some horrible boy from Eades pitched up here on a motorbike, mind, and took ‘er off. Never saw her again.’

‘Heavens,’ said Indie, still transfixed by Malcolm,
avec
makeup and all. It was obvious she fancied him like mad.

‘But I’m back now, Miss,’ Freds squeaked. Tve only dropped in for the day, though – the little tot needs me now.’

‘Oh, so the rumours were true,’ Miss Bibsmore grumbled. ‘But maybe that’s for the best. A baby has clearly helped you to grow into a fine young woman, dear,’ Miss Bibsmore said. ‘Mind you, a girl with your looks and figure doesn’t need all that muck on her face, in my opinion.’ She patted Freds on the cheek.

‘Seems like just yesterday, Miss,’ Freds agreed, grinning stupidly.

‘I could sit here and chat all day,’ Miss Bibsmore said wistfully.

‘Oh, please stay,’ Malcolm begged in the most ridiculous
attempt at sounding like a girl I’d ever heard. It took a lot of discipline not to grab Miss Bibsmore’s stick and whack him with it, I can tell you. I don’t know what he could have been thinking. Indie on the other hand seemed deeply impressed, as if Malcolm was some sort of really talented god-like boy and not the fool he clearly was.

‘No, girls, I just dropped in to see how poor Calypso was getting on, but I can see she’s not short of a friend or two, and for that I’m pleased.’ She beamed at the boys as well as at Star and Indie as she said this. ‘No, unfortunately, I’ve promised the nuns a game of poker and I can’t let
them
down now, can I?’

‘Octavia’ and friends shook their heads as if saddened to miss out on the company of our house mistress.

Miss Bibsmore opened her arms expansively. ‘Well, then, give your Bibby a big hug, eh Octavia? And next time I see you, I don’t want to see all that muck on your face, innit.’

With that, our house mistress wrapped ‘Octavia’ in a big cuddle, said a tearful farewell and waved as she waddled off.

As the sound of her stick disappeared down the corridor, we all used pillows to smother our giggles.

‘He’s always popular with the old girls, is our Freds,’ Malcolm teased.

Freds hit him with the pillow he’d been suffocating his laughter with and after that a pillow-and-duvet-and-anything-soft-we-could-lay-our-hands-on fight ensued.

Afterwards we kissed some more, but eventually the boys had to leave. Indie gave Malcolm a kiss, on the lips, when they were leaving, which of course meant a massive grilling from Star and me afterwards.

When Honey returned from Windsor later, she asked, ‘Why is there makeup all over my pillow and duvet?’

But all we could do was laugh.

Nothing could spoil my high. Freds loved me!

NINETEEN
It’s Your Love Life or Your Life!

It’s funny, but these last couple of terms – since meeting Freds – I never imagined it could be possible to survive life without a mobile phone. Who would have thought that there were ways of struggling through? Fred’s visit helped because now I was no longer plagued by guilt that I was an inconsiderate, mean and selfish girlfriend. Also, Portia was letting me use her phone, so that was a lot easier than trekking to the public phone box, but it still wasn’t the same without txt messages to read and reread under the covers after lights out.

The real reason for my joie de vivre, though, was that Freds loved me.

Just to remind myself of this sublime fact I wrote it on my pencil case during double maths. When Star saw it, she thumped me with it over the head.

‘Don’t be such a lovesick puppy. You should be focusing on the essay competition,’ she scolded.

‘Ow,’
I said, rubbing my head. ‘I’m not going to have the brains left to focus on anything at this rate if you keep thumping me.’

Actually, I had thrown myself into the task of writing my essay. It started off quite well too, with all that pathos about being an American and coming from Hollywood and being packed off to boarding school, where I was tortured by Honey – all the obviously tragic things like that. I changed Honey’s name to Sweetie, but otherwise it was all true, just as the competition rules dictated.

But then, when I started on the part about my parents and their breakup, I began to feel that I might be showing Bob and Sarah in a rather poor light. Bob was coming across in the essay as this self-obsessed brute who put his stupid old opus over and above his family, when clearly as a father and husband he should be loving and earning money to support us. But what could I do with only 3,000 words with which to depict my agony?

Sarah wasn’t coming over too well in the essay, either. What with her regression issues, she was coming across as a bit of a spoilt child. I blamed the 3,000-word limit, which didn’t allow me to explain how genuinely kind and generous she was. I began to ramble on about how in sickness and in health she always put me first, but that had made the essay too long, so I had to cut it out.

Eventually I showed what I’d written to Ms Topler.

Ms Topler and I have had our issues over the years. She thinks literature is Charlotte Bronté and other odd bores,
whereas I think literature is Nancy Mitford. Come to think of it Nancy’s best-selling book was a thinly veiled essay on her family. Then again, some of her relatives never spoke to her again after it was published.