Kisses and Lies (13 page)

NOTHING’S FAIR

“What’s going on here?” Callum McAndrew yells. He draws level with his girlfriend and slams to a halt. The heavy, wood-framed pictures on the dark green walls can’t possibly be shaking just because one seventeen-year-old boy strode down the corridor. But it feels as if they are. Callum’s fury is so powerful that it’s displacing a lot of air in the gallery. It takes a lot of courage for me to stay exactly where I am, rather than shrink back into the protective embrasure of the window seat.

Lucy looks up at him imploringly.

“Cal, I was just defending you,” she says.

“God, Lucy, why can’t you leave this alone?” Callum snaps.

“Because it’s not fair!” she protests, sounding suddenly very young.

Callum grunts.

“Fair,” he says bitterly. “Nothing’s fair.”

He’s standing next to a portrait of a long-dead McAndrew in a kilt and velvet jacket, both hands planted in front of him on the hilt of a sword, lowering storm clouds brewing thunder in the gray sky behind him, a strike of lightning splitting an oak tree in the background of the painting. The long-dead McAndrew, who was clearly painted in a very bad mood, is the spitting image of Callum, from the dark brows pulled down over the gray-green eyes to the stubbornly set jaw, even the stance of the broad shoulders and legs planted wide enough to withstand a gathering storm.

And I think of Dan, Callum’s twin brother, dead and buried, and Callum standing here, so alive that lightning practically crackles in the air around him.

Callum’s right. Nothing’s fair.

He turns to Catriona. “And you shouldn’t be encouraging her.”

Catriona, quite unintimidated by Callum’s looming presence, leans back in the window seat, wrapping her arms around her knees, and sighs:

“Cal, you can’t go round policing what everyone talks about. Scarlett just got here. Of course she wants to talk about Dan, that’s what she’s here for.”

“She’d better not be saying anything bad about him!” Callum narrows his eyes at me threateningly.

“If you bothered to say a word to me, you could ask me what I’ve been saying,” I snap at him, really annoyed that he’s talking about me as if I weren’t here. “I haven’t got anything negative to say about your brother at all.”

Quite unexpectedly, Callum covers his face with his hands. “I can’t do this,” he groans. “Mum and Dad—everyone talking about Dan, and we’re expected to be able to—God, sometimes I wish I were the one who’d died. I really do.”

He turns his back, and it sounds like he’s crying. Horrified, I can’t move a muscle. I know that the biggest humiliation for someone as tough as Callum McAndrew must be to burst into tears in front of his girlfriend, his sister, and the girl he thinks killed his brother.

“Cal, come with me.” Lucy puts her arm round his shoulders and guides him back down the corridor.

“Just tell her to stay away from me, okay?” Callum says in a voice now thick with tears. “Please? Just get her to stay away from me.  .  .  .”

They vanish round the corner of the gallery. I’m torn between pity for Callum’s obvious pain, and anger at his attitude toward me. The latter emotion is winning out: I can feel myself bristling up. I haven’t exactly been seeking Callum out, and he’s making it sound as if I’m following him all round the castle, pushing my unwanted company on him.

I look at Catriona, who’s still curled up, hands wrapped around her knees. It could be a defensive posture, but she seems more comfortable than frightened. I have the feeling Catriona has seen this scene (without my participation, of course) quite often in the months since Dan’s death. She pulls a face at me, a cross between a grimace and a grin.

“Lucy and Callum have been going out for two years,” she explains. “She’s really protective of him.”

“I can see that.”

Catriona grins, a proper one now.

“Yes, she doesn’t exactly make a secret of it, does she? I think it gets on his nerves quite a lot. But Dan’s death made Lucy go into overdrive—she fusses around Cal like a mother hen.” She looks thoughtful. “It’s weird—I didn’t think they were getting on well at all before Dan died. In fact, I was sure they were going to break up. They don’t have that much in common, really. But they’ve got closer and closer ever since. It’s like his death brought them together.” She shivers. “Everything in this family falls into before and after Dan died. That’s the only way we classify anything anymore.”

I nod. “That’s exactly the way it is for me, too. Exactly.”

We sit in silence for a few moments, each of us lost in our own thoughts.

“I’m sorry about Lucy going after you, Scarlett,” she says eventually.

I shrug. “I never thought coming here would be easy.”

That’s true enough. But I don’t think I’d quite taken in how hard it was going to be, either.

I glance at Catriona. She’s actually looking quite sorry for me. So I take a gamble and ask her the question that’s been dying to get out since she first offered to show me round Castle Airlie.

“Do you think I could see Dan’s room?”

I stand in the middle of Dan’s room, on one of the few patches of floor that isn’t completely covered with random stuff, and swivel around slowly, amazed by what I’m seeing. I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. Catriona said that Dan’s room had been left just as it was when he went down to London that last time, because their mother couldn’t bear to have anyone touch it, so I wasn’t assuming it would be one hundred percent tidy.

Believe it or not, I’ve never been in a boy’s room before. I actually had a shiver of excitement as Catriona walked me down the corridor and pointed at a door to indicate which one was Dan’s. Finally, I’m entering boys’ territory, a world I know barely anything about (no brothers, no friends with brothers of the right age). This was Dan’s room, the boy I’d had a crush on for years, the only boy I’d ever kissed. And now I’m going into his world, seeing how he lived, where he slept, what his favorite things were.

Though the only reason I’m here is because he’s dead.

It’s exciting, but morbid. I can rummage here as much as I want: Dan will never come in to catch me. I can spy on him and learn his secrets, but it’s meaningless, because he isn’t alive for those secrets to matter anymore.

Though, surveying the room as best I can, I honestly doubt that Dan had any secrets. It looks as if everything he had is on public display. Actually, it looks as if he accidentally let off some nitroglycerine in here and the entire contents of his bedroom exploded and stuck to the walls.

I don’t know where to even start describing Dan’s room. Even though the room is big and has lots of light from the two windows, there’s a dank, musty smell in here, probably from the piles of dirty clothes and smelly shoes festooning every surface, as if Dan got undressed by spinning very fast so his clothes got fired off his body in all directions. Maps are pinned all over the walls in the spaces between shelving units: London, New York, Amsterdam, Paris, Tokyo. Dan clearly had dreams of traveling the world, getting out of rural Scotland. There are stacks of CDs, tottering in precarious hand-built towers, and video games ditto, with a game box in the corner next to the old TV. Various guitars, mostly dusty, lean against the walls, with old hats propped on their heads. It should look cool, but actually I think it’s a bit pretentious, as if Dan has copied something he saw in a magazine. It feels self-conscious. I’m embarrassed for him.

There’s a corkboard on the far wall, above the desk. I pick my way toward it, nearly turning my foot on something that slides away from me, lurking beneath a pile of old jeans. The board is pinned with articles, film tickets, stubs of tickets to band gigs: Powderfinger, African Soul Rebels, Placebo, Papa Roach, and one called the Translucent Frogs of Quuup. Blimey. On the wall beside the corkboard are posters, ripped and faded: Spider-Man, a scary one for the next Batman film. There’s a European Rail timetable on the pile of stuff on the desk. It’s very thumbed about and greasy with use. I look at some of the books—lots and lots of Calvin and Hobbes comic books, arty books on graffiti. They’re all pretty bashed about too. I don’t think Dan took care of anything he owned.

On top of a pile of comic books, I see a mobile-phone charm and pick it up. It’s a miniature TARDIS from Doctor Who, the TV program, a little blue police box in a transparent plastic shell. It’s just the kind of thing I’m looking for: something small that Dan loaned me that I want to give back, my extra cover story for coming to Castle Airlie. Even if someone’s been in Dan’s room since he died, there’s so much clutter here that there’s no way they’ll remember having seen this charm on his desk. I slide it into my pocket.

Then I notice something else on top of the pile of books: a library ID card, laminated, with a photo of Dan on it. I pick it up and look at the photo. Dan’s hair flops over his forehead in that way that always made me flush, and just seeing this image provokes the same physical reaction in me now. I run my finger over the card, reading what’s stamped on it: Dan’s name, his London address, his date of birth.

It’s in October. This month. I pull my phone out of my jeans pocket and check the date on the calendar: no, I haven’t made a mistake. Dan’s birthday is next Tuesday, the nineteenth.

Which means it’s Callum’s birthday too. Their eighteenth birthday, probably the most important, most exciting birthday anyone ever has. And Callum will be celebrating it alone, for the first time in his life.

I’m suddenly feeling a lot more sympathetic to Callum’s angry outbursts than I was half an hour ago.

I put the ID down and look around me once again, trying not to panic. Because I’m scared that Dan’s room is going to defeat me. There’s just so much mess here that I don’t know how to start searching it. I’ve got the charm, which is what I came for, but it seems really stupid to have the opportunity to look around for potential clues and not to take it. I start to walk toward the bed and hear something snap below my foot. When I look down, I see it’s an old alarm clock that I’ve just broken. I didn’t even notice it.

The bed is so nasty—I sit down on it and then jump up straightaway. The sheets smell as if they haven’t been washed in ages, which, considering that Dan died six months ago, must be true. I bet, from the state of the room, they were pretty smelly even before he left for London.

This is the kind of thing that would really put you off dating boys.

I find myself fervently hoping that Jase’s room is nothing like this.

Can’t think about Jase right now, can’t think about Jase  .  .  .

I bend down and look under the bed. Piles of magazines about guitars, a big shoe box containing a pair of new Timberlands, never to be worn. Nothing that could possibly be called a clue. I straighten up again and notice, on a table beside the bed, a couple of boxes that stand out from the rest of the clutter. They’re white with black writing and a yellow insignia that I’ve seen on Aunt Gwen’s prescription bottles. I pick one up and open it.

It’s full of EpiPens.

Just one of these would have saved Dan’s life.

And I realize, strange though it is, that despite the investigation of Dan’s death revolving entirely around the mystery of his disappearing EpiPen, and whose bag it was in, that I’ve never actually seen one.

Each EpiPen is packaged individually in a smaller box. I take one out and slide out its contents. It’s a clear plastic tube with bright yellow labels on it, and inside is a long stubby pen, wider than my thumb, with a gray cap on one side and a black tip on the other. Tilting it, I can see that the needle comes out of the black tip. You just put it against your body, take the cap off, and press, and the needle injects you with a lifesaving dose of adrenaline. Nothing could be easier.

If you have your pen safe in your jeans pocket, where it was supposed to be  .  .  .

Doing my best to repress the memory of Dan’s tortured face, his hands frantically scrabbling at his jeans pockets for his medicine, I slip the pen back into the box and close it up. Dropping it back into the larger box, I close the lid and replace it on the bedside table. I take a deep breath, pushing every bad memory out of my head. I close my eyes for a moment, trying to center myself, and when I open them, I’m looking at the built-in bookshelves next to the bed. They’re piled haphazardly with books, CDs, and various bits of electronic stuff: an MP3 player, a digital camera, a Polaroid camera  .  .  .

Hmm. I didn’t think they even made Polaroids anymore. Leaning in, I notice that there are a couple of packets of film for the camera propped beside it, still unwrapped and looking fairly new.

It seems a little odd that Dan would own a digital camera and still be buying film for a Polaroid. What would he need it for? I kneel on the bed and reach up to the shelf where the Polaroid is sitting. I take it down and look at it. Not much dust—there’s way more dust on a lot of the books. This camera has been used a lot more recently than other things in this room. I reach behind to the far part of the shelf, to see if there are any photos there. Nothing.

I scan the shelves, but I don’t see anything looking like a photo album. Not that I’d really expect Dan to have anything that organized. There are a couple of notebooks, but I flick through them and find no loose photos inside, just notes from what looks like research for essay projects.

I flop back down on the bed again—by now I’m getting used to the smell and the greasiness of the sheets—and look around the room feeling hopeless. I could be in here all day, going through everything, and still fail to find a few Polaroid photos: they don’t take up much room. Clothes and stacks of magazines are piled up as high as the mattress in some places: all of them could have Polaroids inside. And there’s an old steamer trunk at the foot of the bed, plus a huge wardrobe, both of which, I imagine, will be stuffed with more things of Dan’s that would explode out if I opened them.  .  .  .