STAGS 2, page 5
‘Oh crap,’ I said, meaning it. I knew what that look meant. It meant, You have to cast the de Warlencourts.
‘I know. But you’ve got to. They’re good.’
‘Yeah – but you know they’ve probably had personal drama lessons from Benedict Cumberbatch, and they’ve probably got their own little mini theatre at whatever stately home they live in, and Daddy probably pays for the cast of Hamilton to come and sing them “Happy Birthday”.’
Nel slumped back in her chair. ‘I know, I know. But Shafeen was right. If they are that good, and we don’t cast them, then what does that make us?’
I threw my pen down. ‘Oh Jeez. I was hoping we’d get someone else to redress the balance. Ty never turned up, did she?’
Nel checked her watch. ‘Let’s give her a few more minutes.’
We waited for as long as we could, and as the minutes ticked past I tried to swallow down the tight disappointment that had lodged in the back of my throat. Ty’d bottled it, and I would have a play peopled by pink-and-white privileged people, not exactly what I’d planned when we’d become Medievals. So much for diversity. Nel and I started chatting idly – spinning out the time until the Middle Bell rang – the 2 p.m. chapel chime that meant it was time to start afternoon lessons.
‘By the way, why’s it called The Isle of Dogs?’
‘I think Ben Jonson was a big Wes Andersen fan,’ I joked. Nel blanked and I rewound. ‘No idea. No isles yet, or dogs.’
‘Except the names,’ said Nel.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘In Latin lupo means wolf, volpone means fox and canis means dog.’ Sometimes, because Nel was so Instagram-pretty, with her nails and her tan and her hair extensions, I was guilty of forgetting how clever she was. I looked at her with respect. ‘I guess it’s some sort of allegory then. You know, when something represents something else.’
‘It’s not an allegory,’ came a voice. ‘It’s a place.’
We turned as one towards the stage. Ty stood there. She looked fantastic. The candlelight hit the angular planes of her model-face and her hair had been teased out of its cornrows and stood out from her face in this magnificent Zazie-Beetz-in-Deadpool-2 afro.
‘It’s a place,’ she said again. ‘In London.’
‘You sure?’
‘I should be. I live there.’
‘You live on the Isle of Dogs?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is it … is it posh? I mean, is there a palace there?’
She laughed shortly, almost like a bark. ‘No. It’s a shithole. But it’s my shithole.’ She sounded quite defensive, and I got that – Arkwright Road was the armpit of Manchester, but even though we’d now (literally) moved up in the world to our penthouse in Salford Quays, I still had love for it.
Ty thawed a bit. ‘There used to be a royal palace at Greenwich though, just across the river. That’s the posh part.’ And this time she smiled. ‘I’m reading for Queen Cynthia.’
She was spectacular as she strode about the stage like an expensive caged dog. She had real authority and her voice was beautiful, musical and low.
Will nothing sate this appetite of mine?
Tedious jewels, stale coins, gowns and diadems,
I consume the world with my black jaw,
Lick the chops and ask for more.
Gold cannot stave the hunger that gnaws my soul,
And now they offer me a king to match me.
Shall I consume him too and want for more?
Or shall he take my womanhood, queenship, wealth and all,
And leave me, poor bitch, in litter?
Nay. Greenwich be the only bone to satisfy this cur.
The first meat I have truly desired,
The first to be denied to me.
As soon as she left the stage, Nel and I said, in sync, ‘She’s hired.’
Nobody came for Poetaster or Canis, the less showy parts.
‘Who’s going to be them?’ worried Nel as the Middle Bell rang.
‘You and me, baby,’ I said as we packed up to go. ‘No one else, is there?’
‘Who will be who?’
I desperately wanted to be Poetaster. I was sure that the narrator’s sardonic voice was Ben Jonson’s and I’d begun to identify with the playwright really strongly.
‘I’ll be Canis,’ said Nel, to my great relief. ‘I think he’s funny.’
‘Cool.’ I took a beat. ‘I suppose you can act, right?’
‘Chester Youth Theatre for three years,’ she said. ‘Oh, and once, my dad did get the cast of The Lion King to sing “Happy Birthday” to me.’ She vanished with a white grin, like the Cheshire Cat.
That told me.
Scene x
The first – and only – act of The Isle of Dogs was going really well.
Even though we had only a few scenes, there was plenty of meaty stuff for the actors to, as Shafeen would say, get their teeth into. And I was really enjoying directing, seeing everything take shape. Luckily, the interim Abbot, maybe because he was mostly busy with Abbot-ing, maybe because he genuinely thought I should be given ‘creative space’, pretty much left me to it. When he was in the theatre, he observed without interfering, only making suggestions when I asked, and in English lessons he even taught us other Renaissance plays to support our drama work on The Isle of Dogs. He became known as Abbot Ridley, to differentiate him from the, you know, dead one: who, when we referred to him at all, was simply the Old Abbot. Come to think of it, we’d never even known the Old Abbot’s name.
The twins, too, it turned out, were committed to the project – Cassandra in a particularly dedicated way.
One of the weirder things about STAGS was that they had these visiting barbers called Armstrong & Son who came to the school every week. Son was pretty normal, but Armstrong was such an old man I reckoned he must’ve cut hair in Shafeen’s dad’s time. Now, we girls didn’t really ever bother with haircuts at school – we just got ours done in the holidays, as you only ever had to wait six weeks for the next break. But Armstrong & Son had plenty of business from the boys, who constantly wanted fresh trims, and even, in the sixth form, shaves. Apparently, the ancient Armstrong did a world-class wet-shave and actually used one of those old-fashioned Sweeney Todd cut-throat razors. I wouldn’t trust him to hold it steady, myself.
Armstrong & Son would set up shop every week in the boys’ changing room, which, as you can imagine, wasn’t like a normal scuzzy school changing room, but was all oak panelling and china basins and oars hanging on the wall. Armstrong & Son would pile high hot towels and line up all these little bottles and jars of pomade and shaving soap and hair oil, and in their pristine matching white coats would cut hair all day.
Anyway, the point of all this is that I met Louis de Warlencourt on the stairs of Lightfoot one day when Armstrong & Son had been to the school. I saw the top of his head first as he climbed up towards me in the light from the diamond-paned windows. I noticed his fresh haircut straight away, burnished in the sunlight, cut close around the ears and at the back, longer and shaped and feathered on the top. At the neck the individual blond filaments of almost-shaved hair glittered against the skin, just as I’d seen Henry’s hair in close detail in chapel that time. Then he came round the turn of the stair and I saw that it was not Louis but Cassandra. I stopped in amazement. ‘Cas-sandra!’ I exclaimed.
She stopped.
‘Your hair!’
‘What?’ She tugged on the shorn lengths self-consciously. ‘Don’t you like it?’
I crossed my arms and really looked at her. ‘I love it,’ I said. I really did. ‘You look wonderful.’ With that long, blonde medieval mane she had always reminded me uncomfortably of those nasty-ass Heathers from last year, Charlotte and Esme and Lara. Now she looked fantastically androgynous and more like Louis – and Henry – than ever.
She smiled shyly. ‘Thanks. I thought … you know … for the play.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘You did that for The Isle of Dogs?’
She ducked her head. ‘Henry always used to say that if something is worth doing, it’s jolly well worth doing properly.’
It was a shock to hear his name like that. A) to hear someone speaking of him at all, but B) speaking of him with affection. When my fellow murderers and I spoke of Henry, and that was rarely (as if the very mention of him could put some kind of hoodoo on us), it was always with fear or hate or regret. So I smiled. ‘Sounds like him,’ I said.
But she didn’t smile back. Instead, her face absolutely crumpled with grief. ’I miss him,’ she said.
And she ran past me up the stairs and went on her way, leaving me standing there like a deer in the headlights.
The twins cut quite a figure around school after that. Of course, they didn’t even have the distinction of the different stockings that us Medievals could wear – Nel’s Chanel CC design on shocking pink, my clapperboards or Shafeen’s tiger stripes. They had the blood-red, standard-issue STAGS stockings under their Tudor coats like everybody else, and so were almost impossible to tell apart.
Cassandra was so quiet it was hard to consider her a friend, but she was always perfectly nice, and softly spoken, and had an attractive shy smile. She reminded me of Henry in his quieter, more contemplative moments. Louis had the show-off side; the entitled, comfortable anywhere, privileged side. If he was anyone else you’d think he was a prick, but he had such a large slice of the de Warlencourt charm that you couldn’t dislike him. He was more flamboyant than Henry, and would wear aftershave and a fancy tooled belt and handmade loafers and product in his hair. Cassandra was less colourful than him, with less of that British ham-pink complexion. Her skin was almost translucent, with a pearly sheen to it, her eyes so slate blue as to be almost grey. But, at the same time, her features were identical to Louis’s, so bore a strong similarity to Henry’s too. Her resemblance was to a Henry wounded and weakened, Henry on the rooftop talking of a world that had gone away. It made her very appealing, and brought out in me a protective instinct I didn’t know I had. For twins who looked so identical, they couldn’t have been more different. Louis talked so much, and Cass talked so little, it was as if she and he shared a word count for the day, and because he used the allowance up, there were no words left for her.
But both the twins messed with my head in different ways. Louis’s family resemblance to Henry was so strong that once, unguarded, I spoke to him as if he was Henry. And when I’d first seen Cass in the chapel, smirking at me on the day I’d sussed that the Abbot was the Grand Master of the hopefully-now-defunct Order of the Stag, I’d thought her the natural successor to those Mean-Girl Medievals. But she was actually nothing like them. She didn’t gossip, or giggle, or send bitchy stares my way. And if she spent most of her day in silence, onstage she spoke up and did her part well. She was no Ty, who was a real find, but she interacted with Louis beautifully, allowing his Lupo to crush her utterly, while desperately trying to please him. It seemed to me their parts reflected a little of their own dynamic In Real Life. Cass always knew her lines, as did Louis. They always listened to direction, and to be fair to them never once tried to overrule me with their centuries of privilege, in the theatre that bore their name.
For some reason, this play was important to them.
And because of that, I made friends with them.
And it was a two-way street. They made friends with me, too; with all of us. They seemed to bear no ill will to the trio of people who’d been there at Longcross on the weekend when their cousin Henry had died. It was as if we’d all been best buds and they were carrying on the friendship in his name – we were part of his legacy. As far as I was aware, these London kids knew nothing of the Order of the Stag or the dangerous bloody games that had been played at Longcross for centuries.
The twins were Luke and Leia Skywalker.
They were A New Hope.
Scene xi
It was in this spirit (geddit?) that we all accepted the invitation to a drinks party in Louis’s room.
I’d never been to a drinks party before and wasn’t exactly sure what we were going to be served. As far as I knew, there was no booze at STAGS beyond the communion wine and the Abbot’s sherry, and the twins weren’t even eighteen. But since the idea was for all the cast to get to know each other better, I thought we should at least make the effort, especially since the twins invited Shafeen too, knowing how joined at the hip we were. So that Saturday night Nel, Shafeen and I walked across the Honorius quad to Louis’s room.
Honorius House was the grandest and most ancient house of the school. I knew that Henry’s room had been here, a place I’d never seen. In Honorius the rooms led off a lovely white cloister with these arched windows and delicate stone carvings that looked like they were made of icing sugar. The quad had a cedar tree in the middle that was said to have been a seedling brought back from Jerusalem and planted when the first foundation stone of STAGS was laid. We walked past this stolen tree and it kind of whispered at us as we passed. We wandered through the cloister looking for Room 7, found it, and knocked on the arched oak door.
Louis opened the door with a flourish and beckoned us all in. We shuffled in and stood in this little group, looking round, totally gobsmacked. Louis’s rooms were a-MAZING. They were oak panelled, with thick Turkish rugs on the floor, and a lovely old fireplace with a fire burning brightly in the grate. There were two leather armchairs either side of the fire, a painted screen propped against the wall, and paintings that looked so authentic as to be actually genuine hanging on the walls. There was a gramophone, one of those HMV ones with a big golden trumpet, playing some sort of 1930s jazz. There was a huge wooden globe on the desk, as if Louis owned the real thing, and a human skull upended with pencils sticking out of the neckhole. There were doors leading off this main room into at least another two rooms.
This wasn’t a bedroom; it was a suite.
And that was what was weird. Since the strange happenings of last year, we three were the only Medievals, and as such, we had suites of rooms, and they were really nice, but not THIS nice. I knew suddenly, with absolute certainty, that these had been Henry’s rooms. Louis was the heir apparent, the next in line.
And he certainly was relaxed in his role as king of the evening. He was moving about in a practised way, putting a warm hand on elbows and the smalls of backs, welcoming everyone – the consummate host. I’m here to tell you, drinks parties are weird. For a start, everyone stands up and chats, no one sits down, and you kind of ‘circulate’, which means talking to one person and then moving on to another one in a really stilted way. Shafeen and the twins, who’d obviously been to tons of these, seemed to think this was perfectly normal and handled it with ease. Shafeen started chatting with the twins while Ty, Nel and I stood around like doofuses, smiling at each other awkwardly. There was something about that privileged environment that reduced Nel (tech heiress), me (gobby northerner) and Ty (feisty cockney) to silence.
It was Louis who broke the ice. ‘Now, ladies, what can I get you to drink?’
Ty had the nuts to speak up. ‘What you got?’ she said, calling on some Queen Cynthia sass.
‘Everything your heart could desire,’ Louis said in a mock-cheesy way, carrying her hand to his lips. This olde-worlde gesture seemed to knock Ty’s composure a bit. She smiled in a slightly dazed way and said, ‘Surprise me.’
‘Captain Morgan, I think,’ he said with a charming smile. ‘Perfect for you. Don’t worry’ – he clocked her face – ‘I’ll put loads of Coke in it. You won’t even taste the rum.’
I had no clue, so I just asked for a glass of wine to be safe.
He turned to Shafeen. ‘What’s your poison? Ah – I know just the thing – how about some Bombay Sapphire?’
Shafeen gave a tight smile. ‘Fine.’
‘Tonic?’
‘Of course.’
‘Cheeky bastard,’ murmured Shafeen out of the side of his mouth as he took the glass.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because he chose you an Indian drink?’
‘It’s not though. It’s like his diabolical cousin’s “Punjabi Playboy” thing all over again.’
I was confused. ‘But I thought Bombay …’
‘Yes, Bombay is in India. But the Bombay Sapphire, the jewel, came from Sri Lanka. That’s somewhere quite different, by the way.’ He sipped the offending drink angrily. ‘The white man doesn’t care where things come from. It’s pure cultural appropriation.’
‘Oh, give it a rest.’ I knew Shafeen in this mood. ‘You’re so prickly. Only you could turn the offer of a drink into a passive-aggressive colonial act.’ I led him away from the drinks cabinet. ‘D’you think he’s going to offer me and Nel a cup of builders’ tea because we’re from “oop north”? I suppose you think he gave Ty rum because she’s West Indian.’
‘Yes, actually. He said Captain Morgan would be “perfect for her”. It’s just offensive. The history of rum is the history of slavery.’
Luckily the twins were in a huddle with Nel, because Shafeen was getting a bit loud.
‘As if rum was the only thing she could drink, just because she’s –’
‘Er … I think it’s because I’m called Morgan,’ put in Ty quietly.
‘What?’
‘Tyeesha Morgan. Hi.’
I let out a little burst of laughter before I could stop myself, and had to take a sip of my wine to cover it. Shafeen stared but was only wrong-footed for a second. In a moment his manners were back and he extended his hand. ‘Shafeen Jadeja,’ he said. ‘We haven’t formally met.’
As Ty took his hand, I was reminded of how bewildered I’d felt this time last year when Esme shook mine. ‘Greer says you’re a fantastic actress,‘ Shafeen said, styling it out, his charm returning.
‘And I didn’t even tell him to say that,’ I quipped. And Ty and I were off, chatting away about her great-uncle who had come over to Britain from Jamaica as a boy on a ship called the Empire Windrush in 1948. Shafeen was listening politely, but because I knew him as well as I did, I knew he had tuned out. He was looking fixedly at the corner of the room, seemingly at the wastepaper basket that stood there. I wondered if he, too, was seeing ghosts. When Ty turned to talk to Louis I touched Shafeen’s hand. ‘You OK?’
