‘Renewed concerns for the missing teenager Emily Frost, who disappeared exactly one month ago today. Her whereabouts remain unknown, and her family have issued a new appeal for any information relating to her disappearance.’
I watched the stock footage, the familiar cliffs, the too-familiar edge. Nobody bothered to count the suicides these days. Emily had last been seen walking there, at the highest point.
‘Mum, I’m here. That isn’t me. She’s just a jumper,’ I said, reaching for the remote. ‘They always are.’
‘We just want you to come home,’ her dad said, staring down the lens. ‘We miss you, Emily. Please, please come home.’
I changed the channel and went back to sleep.
If there can be said to be an up-side to miraculously surviving a car wreck, apart from the immediately obvious, it’s that nobody expects you to go to school.
‘Not until you’re ready,’ Mum said. The therapist nodded sagely behind, a cornflake stuck to his moustache, a fat fingerprint smudge on his glasses. ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Just take your time.’
And so I did. I took my time: skipped school right through to my final exams, declaring myself ‘home-schooled’. I sat in a silent hall, surrounded by people I knew, my former classmates whispering as I walked in and right out again: ‘I thought she was dead,’ one said, pointing at me with a bloody, bitten nail.
I had already planned my future, or at least, had drawn a basic sketch. I would leave – though where to, I wasn’t sure. I’d get a job. A waitress in a quiet café, where interesting visitors would tell me thrilling lies. A bookshop clerk, offering new worlds to bored children; an assistant in a gallery, maybe. I could learn to sing, or play guitar. I could write a book, life ticking quietly along around me. It wouldn’t be glamorous, sure, but it would be enough. Anywhere, really, would be better than here, this town in which the greys of the old houses, sky and sea seeped into your heart and turned irreparably it black.
But on the day of my results, I came home to find Mum at the kitchen table, papers clenched in white-knuckled fists. ‘It’s what they would’ve wanted,’ she said, handing me the entry forms for Elm Hollow Academy – a private girls’ college on the outskirts of town. ‘It’s a privilege,’ she said: one afforded to me by the unspeakably large settlement offered by the haulage company under whose articulated truck our car had been crushed.
School, to me, was all taped-up windows, boxy buildings cracking at the edges, grey even in sunlight; freezing portacabins, graffitied bathroom mirrors and the loamy stink of teenage sweat. ‘I don’t want to,’ I said, and left.
She didn’t argue. But the papers sat on the kitchen table for weeks, and each time I passed I found myself drawn to the glossy pictures on the cover of the brochure: looming, red-brick buildings set against a too-blue sky, sunlight needling through pearly clouds behind a Gothic arch. There was a decadent, honey-sweet richness to it – one that I knew wasn’t for me, but seemed, in the flickering kitchen light, the stifling damp in the air, to be another world entirely.
And so – reluctantly, at least as far as my mum was concerned – I agreed to give it a try. Our dilapidated Volvo purred behind me at the gates, and I turned to wave her away, though she – thinking herself unobserved – was staring down at the steering wheel, grin a steely rictus beneath strings of dirty hair. I winced, and turned away, catching the eye of a passing girl watching, embarrassed for us both.
I walked towards the school quickly, looking up at the looming clock tower – the Campanile, I would soon be corrected, inspired by the reds and creamy whites of Tuscan cousins, gleaming in sunlight – and dipped under the arches, into the main building. Students gathered on the steps in clusters, whispering.
I passed wholly unnoticed, and told a stout, grey-haired woman – Boturismo made flesh – my name three times. She stared at me, blankly, through the glass partition, muddy with prints and unsettling scratches. Without a word, she slid a sheaf of papers through the gap and pointed to a row of seats. As I sat staring numbly at the endless list of extra-curricular activities and advanced classes, none of which I had any interest in taking, a girl loped by, hair bottle-red, ladders torn artfully into her tights. She waved with two fingers and smiled, a rolled-up cigarette teetering on the edge of her lip. I stared until the last second before she disappeared into the crowd, when I at last mustered a weak, lost smile.
She must’ve been smiling at somebody else, I thought. But as I looked around, back to the wall, this seemed unlikely. I sat, dazed, among the marble busts and gloomy portraits of long-dead headmasters until the bell rang, and the crowd dispersed. I waited, peering down the empty corridors, wondering whether I might have been forgotten.
A door creaked behind; I heard my name, and stood. The man in the doorway was tall, though not imposingly so, a little pot-bellied; tweed and sweater, horn-rimmed glasses; skin possessed of the waxy paleness common to those who spend too much time indoors. He stared at me, blinked, coughed; held out a hand, fingers clubbed and ink-stained. ‘Come on in,’ he said, softly.
He moved a stack of books and spilled papers from a wide, worn armchair next to the desk and I took a seat. The office was warm, if a little stuffy, books piled high under sediment layers of dust, framed prints of medieval etchings covering the walls. ‘Cup of tea?’ he said. Caught staring, I shook my head and picked at a loose thread on my folder.
‘So, let me begin with my usual spiel, and then we’ll get to know each other,’ he said, taking a seat by the desk and leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He took a deep breath: tang of stale coffee on it, sour.
‘On behalf of the faculty of Elm Hollow, I’d like to welcome you to our student population.’ He paused, smiling. ‘We’re a small school with a varied and prestigious history, and we’re proud to have among our alumni leaders across a range of disciplines, including the sciences and the arts.’ There was a brief pause as he waited for me to respond; I nodded, and he went on, his smile the kind one might offer to a well-trained dog.
‘Our teaching staff includes many of these professionals, and our students are given the opportunity to follow in their footsteps with a wide array of curriculum-based and vocational courses. My name is Matthew Holmsworth, and I’m the Dean of Students here at Elm Hollow. I teach among the Medieval History faculty, primarily, but I’m also responsible for ensuring welfare among the student body, and, of course, welcoming new students such as yourself. You can call me Matthew – though I’d suggest calling the rest of the faculty Dr Whatever-Their-Name-Is until you’ve reached that level of informality, though, to be quite honest, that isn’t likely to happen with all of them … I, however, prefer to be called Matthew.’
He paused, drew breath, and smiled again. I looked away. In the weeks and months after the crash, I’d become somewhat accustomed to people looking at me like this, the ‘tragic miracle’ look, as though the fact of me confused them. I found it nauseating. ‘So what brings you here, Violet?’ he asked, though judging by this look, he already knew.
‘I need to get my A-Levels,’ I said, flatly, voice little more than a croak.
‘Great. That’s great. I’m told you were self-taught last year – is that right?’ I heard the creak of his chair as he leaned farther forward, and looked up.
‘Yeah. I … Yeah.’
‘That’s a very impressive achievement. You must be quite proud.’ I nodded. He looked down at my file, and almost imperceptibly raised his brow. I knew, for all my teenage claims of apathy that I’d done well; better, certainly, than anyone had expected. ‘Well, I can see you’ve got an interest in the arts,’ he continued, apparently choosing not to comment. I blushed at having expected more, a knot of shame coiling, sharp.
‘We have an outstanding arts faculty – our English programme is second to none, and most of our Music students go on to spectacular things at various conservatoires here and in Europe, so both of those would be solid choices. You might also consider one of our Fine