Chapter Twenty-Five #2
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 my mother’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 to celebrate 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 us unpack 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.
The next morning, while the rest of them slept off the night before, I went for a walk through the nearby fields, looking with the eye of a forager as I went: gooseberries, horseradish, and then a huge field of mushrooms. I knelt down and inspected them; they were field mushrooms, I’d know them anywhere.
I collected them up in my sun hat and took them back to camp.
The others weren’t very keen when I first showed them what I had, so I took one, raw, rinsed it off and ate it, right there in front of them.
There were gasps and a whisper of “suicide,” but they needn’t have got their hopes up.
I had one moment of hesitation, just before I swallowed it, wondering if I had somehow missed a telltale speckling of a death cap stem or the gills and skirt of an early destroying angel, but I hadn’t. I knew I hadn’t.
I swallowed it and the others stood in silence, waiting for me to collapse, clutching my throat, or my heart, or my stomach. I stared back at them.
“The poison from a mushroom takes hours to work,” Maisie Brookes said in the end. She was top of the class at science and planning to become a doctor. “It has to get to your liver first. Nothing to see here.”
With a palpable air of disappointment, they set to work getting breakfast—without mushrooms—ready. I looked for a pan for my fungal treats, but they said there was nothing to spare.
Then Katie stepped up and said she had eaten mushrooms picked by me or my mum and she would like some too. Katie’s word, it seemed, was good enough and it turned out there was a frying pan available, after all, although in the end only Katie and I ate them.
The rest of the day passed peacefully, with just occasional glances over to see if either of us was about to bite the dust and, the following morning, I was woken by someone poking me in the eye to see if I was still alive. But yes, I was alive, so was Katie, and we were not just alive, but well.
I began foraging each morning for the bits and pieces you could find to eat in June, the others ate what I found, and it seemed that the week was going to pass peacefully. Suspiciously peacefully.
On the final evening, it began. Samantha asked us all, “Who wants to play Truth or Dare?”
I sighed. Who, in their right mind, would want to play Truth or Dare? It was a horrible game. Yet, predictably, I was in the minority on that one.
I offered to spend the time tidying up the camp, so that it was all shipshape and easy to pack up the next morning, but they wouldn’t hear of it.
“Come and have some fun!” But one girl’s fun is another girl’s nightmare.
I tried saying that, simply, I didn’t want to play, but Euan said, “Come on, we’ve brought you all this way; just join in, for god’s sake.
” And that was the end of my fight. A few minutes later, I was part of a circle, ready for the first round of Truth or Dare.
At least Katie was to my right, so I knew the questions wouldn’t be too bad.
As soon as Euan had finished handing out lagers, we began.
Samantha started by asking Lauren, “When’s the last time you cried?”
“The last day of school,” Lauren replied—for god’s sake!—and turned to Maisie. “Have you ever stolen something?”
“No,” Maisie said and turned to Philip Whitaker, on her left. “Would you sell your pet for a million pounds?”
“No,” he said and turned to Euan. “Would you sell your brother for a million pounds?”
“Yes,” Euan said and turned to Katie. “How would you rate your looks on a scale of one to ten?”
Slightly embarrassed, Katie gave herself a modest five and asked me, “Who would you choose to help you hide a body?”
Unwittingly, I got the answer wrong when I said, “You.” Although I didn’t exactly choose to hide a body with James. I turned to my left and asked Tyler Carson if he had ever cheated on a test. He hadn’t, apparently.
Soon after that we had our first dare when Philip Whitaker was asked if anyone had ever walked in on him pleasuring himself. He chose a dare—why didn’t he just lie?—and was sent to shout “Geronimo!” into the neighboring camp.
The next dare saw Lauren going to the campsite office to tell the site manager she loved him and soon after that, Katie had to swallow a teaspoonful of pepper.
We returned to truths, until Samantha announced that the game was boring, which it was, and we should mix it up a bit. She fetched an empty bottle and put it in the middle of the circle.
“We’ll do it like Spin the Bottle,” she said and spun. As it came to a stop, it pointed at me. The circle went quiet. Samantha smiled. “Daisy,” she said. “Who’s your dad?”
No one spoke. The summer breeze suddenly sounded loud in the trees; by my knee, an ant scaled a blade of grass.
“You have ten seconds to answer,” Samantha said. “Or it will be a dare.”
“Dare,” I said.
Samantha and Lauren leaped to their feet. “What shall we tell her to do?” Lauren asked, but Samantha already had an answer.
“Do a striptease.” Some of the others laughed, some of them groaned. I said nothing.
“Give her something else,” Katie said. “She’s not going to strip, is she?”
“You have to do the dare that is set,” Euan said. “I’ll get you some music.” And he ran off into his tent.