A Talent for Trouble Read online

  Jesse wanted adventure. He had no idea that adventure had just found him.

  * * *

  Aunt Patience was sending Alice to boarding school.

  Alice, horrified, had tried to resist. She had read hundreds of books about boarding school, she informed her aunt. Even the sunnier ones involved violent sports or people getting murdered or evil wizards luring innocents to the Dark Side.

  Boarding schools, Alice had argued, were dangerous.

  “They are nothing of the sort,” Aunt Patience had responded (and oh, how she would one day regret saying that!). “Look, here’s the website. It’s a charming place. Like a storybook!”

  “It’ll be expensive,” pleaded Alice, ignoring the website.

  Aunt Patience said it wasn’t as expensive as you might think, and added brightly that all the uniforms were handmade by the students, and that the school had its own farm where they grew their own food, because they believed in being self-sufficient and in what Aunt Patience called a Well-Rounded Education.

  “Plus, it’s in a castle,” she said. “Called Stormy Loch. In Scotland!”

  “Scotland!”

  “It’s not the end of the world.”

  “It’s the end of the country. Where are you going to live?”

  “I’ve told you before, darling. I’ve got a teaching job in London.”

  “But you hate cities. You’re mad. This whole thing is mad.”

  At which point Aunt Patience had pursed her lips and clicked shut her laptop and pronounced those impossible grown-up words, “Well, I think it will be good for you.”

  Nor had Barney been any help.

  “Sorry, Alicat,” he said, when she burst into his room to beg him to change Aunt Patience’s mind. “You know she never listens to me. Besides,” he added as she threw herself into his arms, “Scotland’s not so bad. And I’ll come and visit, I promise! Here, look . . .” He reached into his pocket for his phone and tapped something into Google. “There was this place, I remember, an island—what was it called? Nish! That’s the one—it was awesome. There were puffins, and a castle with a moat. I used to pretend I was the king.” He waved his phone like an imaginary sword. “Pow! Zap! Take that, vile intruder!”

  He held out his phone. Alice looked, and saw a photograph of thousands of gulls flying above a stormy sea.

  The Isle of Nish is a paradise for ornithologists and seabirds, she read.

  “An ornithologist is someone who studies birds,” Barney said. “Isn’t that great? I’ll take you there! We’ll be king and queen together!”

  “I know what an ornithologist is,” Alice said. “I want to live with you.”

  But Barney, it turned out, was going traveling. On tour, he said, and she pretended to believe him. She had not protested again, but brooded on her fears alone.

  Now, standing on the train at Euston that was going to carry her through the night to the place of horrors where she would have to wield hockey sticks and be forever surrounded by people, rather than the safe familiar solitude of Cherry Grange, and probably sleep in a dorm with dozens of other girls who would force-feed her midnight feasts when she wanted to write, and possibly be petrified by a wizard—she couldn’t believe it was happening. She buried her face in Barney’s chest, inhaling the familiar smell of him, the smoky caramel of his leather jacket, the spiced lemon of his aftershave.

  “When will you come?” she asked in a tiny voice.

  A whistle blew before he could answer. He leaped off the train after Patience, then reached up his hand. Alice leaned out of the open window to take it, but already the train was pulling away, and he was running alongside it, shouting something she couldn’t hear.

  The train rounded a bend and, just like that, he was gone.

  Alice pulled her head back inside and very carefully closed the window against the hot metallic air.

  Soon. That was what she had heard. She was sure of it.

  Soon, soon, soon . . .

  Be careful what you wish for.

  Four

  Fluffy and Soft and Covered in Penguins and Unicorns

  The train trundled through stations, past suburban houses and sharp-angled office buildings. Alice and Jesse saw nothing.

  Alice sat on her bunk with her back to the window, furiously writing a marvelous story about a girl who ran away to join a circus and fly about on the high trapeze over a pit of starving tigers, while in the berth next door, Jesse lay on his back, staring at the ceiling and hating his brothers.

  Adventures start in all sorts of ways. Jesse knew that in his place his brothers would not have felt humiliated. They would have laughed at Alice’s horrified face and boasted about how much they peed. But Jesse, unlike them, was shy, and sensitive, and easily embarrassed. He worried about what other people thought of him. He imagined Alice right now lying on her own bunk, laughing at him.

  If she was not to laugh at him forever, he would have to be brave, and explain.

  He swung himself off the bunk, bowed (it helped to pretend he was entering a jousting tournament), stepped out into the corridor, and knocked on her door.

  Each thought the other terrifying.

  Alice, who hated to be interrupted when she was writing, opened the door with a black scowl that struck dread in Jesse’s heart. And even though Jesse was the gentlest of souls, his mere presence—a real boarding-school boy!—was petrifying for Alice. He wasn’t to know that strangers always rendered her mute. Faced with her silent stare, he was convinced that she despised him. And she could not guess that the choking sounds he made were meant to be friendly. She heard only growling, like the tigers in her story.

  If it hadn’t been for Jesse’s brain wave, the whole thing would have been a disaster.

  With a sort of yelp, he dived back into his berth. Then, with renewed courage, he returned, bearing a thermos and a large Tupperware box.

  “Picnic,” he said firmly, and squeezed past Alice into her berth.

  And so it began, quietly, with tea and cake and sandwiches.

  Cross-legged on Alice’s bunk, they ate and drank together in cautious silence until Jesse (still too crushed to mention his brothers) asked politely what brought her to Stormy Loch halfway through the year. Just as politely, she said that it was her aunt’s idea. She is banishing me was what she really wanted to say. Like the queen in Snow White. Or the stepmother in Hansel and Gretel. She’s basically a witch.

  But these were far too many words.

  “What is school like?” she forced out instead.

  Sometimes, the simplest questions are the most difficult to answer, especially if you want to be truthful. Jesse, who like Alice wasn’t much of a talker, pondered his reply. He could see that OK, actually or Fine, if you like that sort of thing would be unsatisfactory, but there was a lot to say about Stormy Loch, and he really had no idea where to begin. Instead, he produced an old smartphone of Jared’s and pulled up the school website. On the screen, a group of teenagers and a strapping helmet-haired woman, all dressed in workmen’s overalls, stood flourishing paintbrushes in front of a low stone building, each stone of which was painted a different color. The caption beneath read Exploding Butterfly.

  Alice stared, baffled.

  “They’re Art Talents,” Jesse explained. “That’s the art teacher, Frau Kirschner. She’s experimental.”

  “Art Talents?”

  “Everyone has a talent. That’s what the major says. Major Fortescue,” he clarified, “founded the school. He’s all about helping people find their talent. Tap on another photograph.”

  The next picture was of a messy-haired redheaded boy with sticking-out ears and train-track braces, holding up a silver cup and grinning so widely Alice couldn’t help grinning back. Jesse’s expression darkened.

  “Fergus Mackenzie. Talent: Schoolwork.” He spoke with all the feeling of a person for whom schoolwork is not a talent but a burden. Of all the people to be on the school website, no one could have annoyed him more than Fergus. “Showin
g off because he won the stupid Math Challenge. He’s always showing off.”

  Alice, who could have been good at schoolwork but whose daydreaming drove her teachers mad, asked sympathetically what Jesse’s talent was.

  “Running,” Jesse mumbled gloomily, because being able to run faster than anyone in your year when you had the longest legs didn’t feel like much of a talent at all, especially when your brothers, when they were at school, forever came first in everything. Then he brightened, remembering. “But it’s the Great Orienteering Challenge this term—that’s something else about school, they love Challenges—and I’m really good at that. It’s like a massive orienteering competition for the whole year, and I’m pretty sure I can win.”

  Alice (who had only a vague understanding of what orienteering was) said kindly that she was sure he could win too. Jesse, considerably cheered, asked what she was talented at.

  “Writing, I suppose,” she said. “Stories. Not schoolwork.”

  “That’s amazing!” said Jesse (who had never written a story in his life). Then—because this was what he had come for, and she seemed nice, and if he didn’t say it now he never would—“About earlier,” he gabbled. “What my brother said. You know, the peeing thing. It was only once, and I was five years old, and already bursting. I promise I don’t do it all the time.”

  And because he had shared his picnic with her, and told her she was amazing, she didn’t laugh but replied very seriously, “Once, when I was little, Dad tickled me so hard I had to change my pants.”

  They had a long way to go before they could really call themselves friends. There would be at least two betrayals, and a few lies, and a couple of near-death experiences. But they didn’t know that yet. They just knew they felt a whole lot better than they had when the journey started.

  When Jesse had gone, Alice undressed and changed into her pajamas, which were too short at the ankles and wrists, but which she loved because they were fluffy and soft and covered in penguins and unicorns. It felt cozy to be tucked up in her narrow bunk, with the little light just above her pillow, safe from the dark world outside. And school seemed like maybe it would be all right, if other students were like Jesse. As she pulled down her window blind, she blew a kiss at the night sky, the way she always did when she was not with Barney. Then she picked up her notebook and carried on with her story, in which the girl in the circus made friends with a boy and freed the hungry tigers. She wrote and wrote and wrote, until she fell asleep with her head on the page.

  * * *

  The train sped on through the night. They stopped in Crewe, then Preston and Edinburgh, but Alice did not wake until the attendant knocked on her door the following morning. She opened her blind and caught her breath. At some point in the night, the long train had become three cars and was now traveling on a single-track line. The glass and concrete of Euston, the row houses and office buildings, had given way to mountains and heather and bracken. Alice saw a pool of water reflecting the sky, a circling bird of prey.

  Deep inside her, something long forgotten began to stir.

  It was like entering a different world.

  They had arrived in Scotland.

  Five

  They Are All Mad

  A school bus was supposed to meet them at Castlehaig, but  when they got off the train, it wasn’t there. As she climbed down from the train, Alice had felt cautiously optimistic. Now, standing on the deserted platform, all her fear and uncertainty returned, and if you ever pass through Castlehaig yourself, you will understand why. It is not, in the way most people understand it, a real station at all—just a grassy bit of platform with a broken bench in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but mountains all around and an unconvincing road.

  “Late,” said Jesse bitterly. “Again. It’s always late, and it’s not fair.” Alice looked at him curiously, and he realized with a start that she didn’t know about the First Day Challenge.

  Which put Jesse in a dilemma.

  The First Day Challenge was simple: the last person to arrive at school lost. If Alice had known about it, she would have understood why the bus being late wasn’t fair. Jesse and Alice were the only two students who had taken the train. It was already past nine o’clock. School was a two-hour drive away, and the competition was getting fiercer every year, with people arriving earlier and earlier. Jesse should know—he had lost twice now, at the start of each of his two terms at Stormy Loch. It was becoming a family joke. And if there was one thing Jesse hated, it was being a joke.

  If the bus didn’t arrive soon, he and Alice would be last, and would be competing against each other.

  It was only fair that she know.

  He should easily beat Alice, because he was fast and she was small. But small people could be fast too. Unlike him, Alice was wearing full school uniform, whereas he was dressed for running. With her heavy jumper and blazer and school shoes, she would be at a distinct disadvantage.

  Then again . . .

  It was very tempting not to tell her.

  But also unsporting, especially for sort-of friends. And being shy and not very talkative and overly worried about what people thought of him, Jesse was somewhat short of friends.

  “I’m going to look out for the bus,” he said, and scrambled up the side of a high crag to survey the road with his binoculars.

  Alice’s head swam and her stomach lurched as she watched him. Years ago, she would have been climbing right up there with Jesse. A little mountain goat, her mother used to call her, because she climbed everything. But since Mum died, Alice had been terrified of heights and couldn’t climb a thing. Feeling very small, because of the mountains, and cold, because the uniform’s lumpy orange sweater (hand-knitted by a former student and bought secondhand online) wasn’t very warm, and slightly wobbly because of Jesse’s climbing, she hugged her knees and watched the empty road and wondered what they should do if the bus didn’t come.

  “Could we walk?” she asked.

  Once, when she was little, Barney had forgotten to pick her up from school. Alice had waited and waited while her teacher tried to call him, then walked the two miles home on her own. Her father had laughed his big warm laugh when he found out, and called Alice a little trouper. Patience had been furious, but Alice had loved how proud he was of her.

  “Walking would take days.” Jesse sighed.

  “Phone?”

  “No signal.”

  “What, none at all?” She thought with panic of Barney. “What about at school?”

  “None there either.”

  “But how do you keep in touch?”

  “You write. You know, letters.”

  “Letters?” She wasn’t sure Barney had ever written a letter. He was more a talking kind of person.

  “Or you can send emails from the library.”

  “The library?”

  But a small red dot had appeared on the distant horizon, and Jesse was half sliding, half scrambling down from the crag.

  “Run!” he yelled, picking up both their rucksacks and throwing her his violin case.

  “What?” She squinted toward the road. “But it’s miles away!”

  “RUN!”

  Alice ran.

  The minibus slowed down just enough for them to climb in before taking off again with a screech of tires, flinging Alice to the floor.

  “Whoops!” The driver, a twelfth-year girl called Tatiana with a Talent for Mechanics, slammed on the brakes just long enough for Alice to stagger into a seat. “Seat belts on!”

  They swung into a U-turn, then sped back in the direction the bus had come. Jesse felt a surge of optimism that maybe they wouldn’t be last after all, and he wouldn’t have to beat Alice.

  “How are your lovely brothers, little Okuyo?” asked Tatiana.

  Jesse’s optimism evaporated. Anxiety returned.

  “Just get us there as fast as you can,” he mumbled.

  The bus flew over a humpbacked bridge as Tatiana, laughing, leaned forward to turn on
the radio. A crackling pop song came on. Tatiana sang along, dancing in her seat. Silently, Alice braced her feet and gripped her armrest and thought, They are all mad.

  “. . . a unique jade figurine has been stolen from a private home in Rome,” announced the radio, suddenly clear as they crested another hill. “A . . . (crackle) . . . million-euro reward is . . . (crackle) (crackle) . . . information . . .”

  “Imagine having a million euros!” cried Tatiana, hurtling round a bend. “I’d buy a sports car. A Maserati!”

  “I’d buy a helicopter,” grumbled Jesse.

  “The carving depicts a boy riding a dragon and is about the size of a plum.”

  “Plum, tiddly plum!” sang Tatiana, swerving to avoid a sheep, and Alice tried very hard to think of her circus story, where she found her heroine had been kidnapped by the tiger tamer, who was driving about like a lunatic in search of his missing cats.

  On they drove, on and on. They entered a narrow valley. The sky darkened and hailstones the size of Ping-Pong balls pelted the minibus.

  “Stupid Scottish weather,” said Tatiana, slowing down.

  “Can we really not go faster?” asked Jesse.

  “Do you really want to die?” Tatiana replied, while in Alice’s story the tiger tamer plowed into a snowdrift and the circus girl gave up and burst into tears.

  The hail stopped as suddenly as it had started. They turned off the road into a layby fringed with dark pines and dotted with flooded potholes, with a pretty hand-decorated sign saying SROMTY LOCHE KAR PARC.

  “Painted by Agnes Bartleby in Year Nine,” said Tatiana. “Talent for Crafts. Not spelling.”

  This was where Stormy Loch students were dropped off, to be taken the rest of the way in minibuses, because the road beyond was too narrow for lots of cars going up and down.

  The car park was empty.

  Which meant they were last.

  Jesse’s heart, already low, sank further. He was going to have to beat Alice.

  Slowly now, creakily, the bus began to climb, through woods and past waterfalls, until it entered a bleak, bare valley with slopes of smashed scree and short, pale grass. The road here was straight and flat. Tatiana whooped and floored the accelerator, narrowing her eyes as the bus hurtled toward a rock face. Alice almost cried with relief after they roared through a narrow pass.