has just been bitching about you. He gave her neck a reassuring squeeze as she bristled.
“Here we are,” said a triumphant voice and the woman reappeared brandishing two dusty bottles of budget brand cola, their labels faded to pink. “Found them!” They were warm to the touch and didn’t look very appetising, but Daniel didn’t want to hurt her feelings by refusing. He held out a palm full of coins, but the woman waved it away. “I won’t charge you,” she said, “seeing as they’re a bit old.”
They mumbled their thanks and turned to leave, a dozen or more pairs of eyes boring into them with undisguised curiosity, as they threaded their way between the tables.
At the exit Louie stopped, suddenly made confident by the prospect of their departure. “Do you mind?” she addressed the room. “It is actually quite rude to stare.”
Daniel bundled her out of the door on to the pavement, sweating with embarrassment. “What did you want to go and do that for?” he demanded. “Now we’ll never be able to go back in there!”
“Like we want to go back to a café that only sells water!” Louie retorted. “Or flat, warm hundred-year-old Coke.” She blew the fluff off her bottle and opened the lid – it surrendered its last remaining bubble of gas with a faint sigh. “Oh, gross. I’m not drinking that,” she said, pouring it into the gutter. Immediately half a dozen wasps materialised from nowhere.
“She was only trying to be nice.”
“I don’t like being gawped at,” snapped Louie.
“Well, stop being so loud and lairy then,” Daniel hissed, bending down to untie Chet. He’d been brought a plastic dish of water and he was drinking noisily.
Daniel looked around for someone to thank, at which point one of the girls drinking coffee at the picnic tables detached herself from the group as if taking up a dare and sauntered over, chewing. She had blonde hair done up in plaits and was wearing a dazzling white shirt and shorts. She had blue eyes and peachy skin, and if she was wearing any make-up it was too subtle for Daniel to notice. She looked – the word leapt to his mind – clean.
“Hello,” she said, turning from him to Louie as if to share herself out evenly. “You’re new, aren’t you?”
“We’re new to here,” Daniel replied.
“I’m Ramsay Arkin,” said the girl, holding out a hand to shake.
Daniel tugged her hand with its neat oval fingernails, so different from Louie’s sore nibbled stumps which she was now doing her best to conceal.
“I live over there.” She pointed vaguely in the direction they’d come from. “We’re having a sort of end-of-the-holidays barbecue tomorrow night. Come if you want.”
“Who’s we?” asked Daniel.
“A bunch of us from school. That lot.” She indicated her friends on the green. “Plus a few others. We’ll just cook sausages and play volleyball on the beach. No big deal.”
“What beach?” Daniel asked, although he’d already decided he wouldn’t go.
“Joff Bay.”
Daniel shook his head. “I don’t know it.”
“Well, you were walking on it yesterday afternoon.” She bit her bottom lip to stop herself smiling at this admission.
“Oh.” Daniel was taken aback. He tried to remember whether he’d done anything embarrassing, apart from rooting around in a bin. “I never saw you.”
“I was up on the cliff with my sister.”
“I didn’t realise it was called Joff Bay. We only got here—”
“I know. You only got here yesterday. You’re from London, and you’re staying at The Brow.”
“You seem to know a lot about us,” Louie said, bridling. “Are we under surveillance?”
She gave a tinkly laugh, revealing teeth stained bright green. Daniel and Louie tried not to look startled. “Oh, it’s nothing personal,” she said cheerfully. “It’s just the Wragge grapevine. I practically know what you had for dinner.”
I’ve got a pretty good idea what you had for lunch, Daniel thought. He’d quite fancied her until he’d seen those teeth.
“Everybody knows everybody’s secrets here,” she added over her shoulder as she went to rejoin her friends, hips and plaits swinging as she walked.
Daniel and Louie exchanged a look: you don’t know ours.
“YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
The man sitting on the other side of the desk had my file open in front of him, tilted away so I couldn’t read it. He said he was my key worker and told me to call him Alan. I thought it meant he was the one who would lock me in. That’s how much I knew.
“I meant you shouldn’t be at Lissmore,” he said. “It’s not for lads like you.”
For a second I felt hopeful: maybe they’d changed their minds and would let me go. Then a sudden plunging dread: maybe they were sending me somewhere worse.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“You’ve never been in any kind of trouble before this.” He read on slowly, shaking his head. “You’re not a Lissmore boy,” he said.
This was a compliment: they were psychos.
You know that feeling you get when you’re coming home on the night bus and someone gets on and comes weaving along the aisle, off his face, looking for a fight? You sit there trying to make yourself invisible, gazing out of the window as though there’s something out there so interesting you hadn’t noticed the psychopath on the bus. And you don’t dare stand up and go downstairs where it’s safer, because the minute you move he’ll notice you. The other passengers are doing exactly the same as you: all trying to be invisible, knowing that one of you is going to get your head kicked in and hoping like hell it isn’t them. That was the feeling I had at Lissmore. Every day.
Chapter 5
“AND IF YOU come when all the flowers are dying And I am dead, as dead I well may be…”
Fifteen clear soprano voices bounced off the high walls of Stape High’s music room and the teacher let her fingers trail across the piano keys, until the singers straggled to a halt. She had never come across a choir with such tuneful voices and yet so little musical sense. They sang as if they were reading out a shopping list. “Could we try that again with a little bit of emotion?” she pleaded. “Danny Boy is meant to be a sad song. It’s famous for reducing beefy Irishmen to tears. But not the way you’re singing it, girls.”
In the back row of the choir Ramsay was finding herself distracted by thoughts of another boy. He hadn’t turned up to the beach barbecue,
