“She brought a cake to the shop not long after her mum died. She wanted to see if we’d sell it,” Mrs. Thorpe had told Emma. “We had to say no, but it was only because of health and safety rules. I think she thought it was because of the incident.” Yes, I had thought that.
“Tragic accident,” Mrs. Billings said, but I would have preferredit if she’d said nothing.
Beneath the comments, Emma had surmised, were the words of a tight-knit community protecting one of their own. Then she’d got down to the nitty-gritty and the testimony of BigDreams.
“She has a vengeful side,” BigDreams told her. “She’s coldhearted and ruthless when she wants something.” And he went on to say I had been bullied at school, I had plotted my revenge for years, and when the time came I executed my plan.
***
I hated school. All through primary years, the words, “Daisy has fleas,” followed me around. It was thought, at Upper Iffley Primary, that this was an inevitable consequence of being hard up.
At secondary school, they upped the ante. There, our primary was combined with other schools from the area, and there was a pressing need to inform the pupils from these other establishments that “Daisy buys her clothes at Barnardo’s.”
I was never brave enough to say to them, “No, my clothes are not from Barnardo’s; they are your own clothes, resurrected. Or else they are your old curtains and tablecloths transformed.”
But I tolerated it in the way I always had: Maisie Brookes would make a snide comment in the morning and find her maths homework was missing in the afternoon. Philip Whitaker would have a dig at me on a Monday and find the sleeves of his jumper sewn together on a Tuesday. Samantha Gibson, now Saunders, would throw a hockey ball at me on the playing field and find her towel had vanished when she came out of the shower.
In year eight, they stepped it up another gear and the issue of my unknown dad raised its head again, along with aspersions on mymother’s character, which were then ascribed to me.
“Daisy has fleas” became “Daisy has STDs,” and humping gestures were made as I walked past.
I knew I shouldn’t care and that my Langley Hall ancestry more than made up for anything they could say, but it was hard to keep my spirits up with just the belief in a noble past and a better future.
***
I bided it until our GCSEs were upon us, at which time I begged my mum to let me either leave school or go to a sixth-form college in a town other than Tippington for A-levels. But she didn’t want me ruining my chances by leaving school early, and she wouldn’t be talked into the extra expense the bus fare beyond Tippington would incur. Not even when I offered to pay it myself with the money I made from waitressing in the King’s Head.
“That money’s for you to spend on nice things,” she said. “Or save it.”
Not going back to Tippington Comp would be a nice thing, but nothing would move her on this. She didn’t know how bad the bullying was. I could never tell her what they were saying about her.
But before A-levels was the summer after our GCSEs, a long one with exams finished and no homework. I prepared to spend it picking up waitressing shifts, raiding the mobile library, and maybe the odd day out, although sadly not to Langley Hall, as that had long since been closed to visitors.
Then there was a knock at the door. My blood ran cold when I heard my mum answer it to an ultrapolite Samantha Gibson and her henchwoman, Lauren Fisher. A moment later, I was called through.
“Hi, Daisy,” Samantha smiled. “We’re all going camping tocelebrate the end of our exams. We wondered if you’d like to come?”
I opened my mouth to say thank you, but frankly, I’d rather fry my own kidneys, and why were they inviting me, because I knew they didn’t want my company. But my mum turned to me and said:
“That sounds like fun!”
“You only need about £40 to chip in for the campsite and food,” Samantha continued. “We’ve got plenty of space in the tents. It’s just four nights. We’re going on Monday.”
My mum had never been able to afford to send me on any of the overnight school trips—which I also hadn’t wanted to go on—and on hearing how cheap this was, she was beside herself with excitement at being able to pay for me to go on holiday.
“Katie’s coming,” Lauren piped up. Katie Connelly was one of the few classmates who was never horrible to me and sometimes, in fact, quite nice.
“Brilliant,” my mum said and that was the end of the discussion.
The weekend ruined with Monday hanging over me, I packed what I could, while my mum made a list and set about borrowing various odds and ends.
“Daisy’s going camping,” I heard her tell the neighbors. “First holiday on her own.” Very nearly my first holiday altogether, in fact, preceded only by a week in Devon a few years before.
On Monday morning, off I went to meet the others, with a borrowed sleeping bag under my arm and a rucksack full of secondhand or homemade clothes on my back.
There were about twenty of us and six parents had agreed to drive us out to the campsite and pick us up again on the Friday. Into the cars we piled, and about an hour later, piled out again at a campsite not far from Weston-super-Mare. There, the parents helped usunpack and set up the tents, then they left us to our fates.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t too bad. We sat out in the sun, and no one bothered me much. Two of the older-looking boys went into town and came back in a taxi with a couple of crates of Carlsberg, and later that evening I learned that I didn’t like lager and that drunk people are very boring when you’re sober.
