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Epub ISBN: 9781473530621
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BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
BBC Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © Guy Adams 2016
Cover photographs © Shutterstock
Cover: www.headdesign.co.uk
Guy Adams has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This book is published to accompany the television series entitled Class first broadcast on BBC Three in 2016. Class is a BBC Wales production.
Executive producers: Patrick Ness, Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin
First published by BBC Books in 2016
www.penguin.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781785941863
To my favourite nephew, James.
Who always ensures the cats will be fed.
Bizarrely, the first thing out of Poppy’s mum’s mouth when she hears the news is ‘But she hasn’t passed her test.’ They say shock does strange things.
It’s true. Poppy has been saving up for her lessons, working weekends and evenings to get the money together. In fact, in saving up her cash, she showed exactly the sort of single-minded determination that is in full evidence when she punctures the betting shop window with the bonnet of a stolen car. It’s the only thing she does that evening that’s true to character.
Poppy has always been fastidious. Her friends mock her for the obsessive way she keeps her room tidy, everything in its right place. There’s no sign of that as she hangs through the shattered windscreen of the car, bloodied and dusted with crystals of shattered glass, head like a stomped-on jam doughnut. Still, if the confetti of betting slips that twirl around her as she dies upset her, she doesn’t show it. She’s laughing through a ruptured throat, a wet explosion of humour, spluttering its last across the chrome paintwork of the bonnet long before the ambulance arrives.
Stephen Patrick is still sore from his chosen horse limping its way around Aintree as if it’s diseased or suicidal. He hates that laugh. It reminds him of childhood nightmares. A creature in his bathroom sink. Gurgled death threats from beyond the U-bend. ‘She weren’t right in the head,’ he tells the investigating police officer.
‘No kidding,’ thinks WPC Delano as she scribbles down his comments in her notebook.
WPC Delano draws the short straw and is forced to tell Poppy’s parents why their daughter won’t be coming home. Ever. She sits on their immaculate, floral-patterned sofa in silence while they stare, argue, stare some more and then eventually cry. Throughout all this Delano is barely there, her head replaying the sight of Poppy being pulled back inside the car by the SOCOs, her loose face flapping and squeaking on the car paintwork.
Delano’s next job is to trace the full stop of the crash back to wherever the incident started. It isn’t difficult. Poppy – mousey Poppy, insecure and nervous Poppy – tore through Shoreditch like a weather front.
Ten minutes before she dies, she’s in the middle of her shift behind the ‘oven fresh’ counter of Morefields, the supermarket where she works. Her skin and hair are oily from the grease of the roast chickens that slow-dance around the rotisserie.
She’s never given any sign of hating the job, it is what it is, a way of making money. A short cut to a car and better nights out.
According to the department manager, she simply stops what she’s doing, takes off the plastic trilby hat staff are forced to wear, its brim turned slightly yellow from poultry fat, and flings it into the air like a cheap frisbee. She then climbs over the counter itself, feet crushing steak bakes and cheese and onion slices, and walks out of the shop, leaving slowly diminishing, meaty footprints behind her.
The department manager catches up with her at the automatic doors but she ignores his angry questions, shoving him into a display of chocolates and making her way out into the car park.
If anyone suspects this isn’t the first time Poppy has stolen a car, the meal she makes of it sets them straight.
After twenty seconds spent trying to break the driver’s window of a silver Honda with a small stone and a lot of screaming, she should, by rights, end her sudden streak of rebellion right there. But the woman who rushes over to stop her is holding her own car keys in her hand. Three vicious punches later and Poppy is running towards the open driver’s door of her new ride, its owner howling on the ground with a broken nose.
Roar of ignition, crump of metal as she reverses back into the car parked behind her and then a squeal of petrified tyres as she’s tearing out of the car park at fifty miles per hour. Behind her, the car she rammed is blaring out its alarm like an indignant old lady, unable to quite believe the sheer audacity of the behaviour she’s just witnessed.
It’s pure good luck that there’s a break in the traffic as Poppy pulls out onto the road. Fortunate too that the solitary pedestrian on the zebra crossing is quick enough to throw herself out of the way before Poppy hits her.
The sluggish traffic is bothering some people, tutting and complaining, offering frequent insults to the traffic lights. It doesn’t bother Poppy. Poppy doesn’t seem bothered by anything as she hammers the horn and straddles the white line, other cars veering out of her way as she refuses to slow down.
One guy, still seething from a particularly lousy meeting at the head office of the marketing company where he works, decides there’s no way he’s going to be the one to back down. He’s spent the last two hours backing down. Gregson, still swaggering from the success of his pitiful campaign for a broadband supplier, had trashed every single one of his ideas until, by the end of the meeting, the oily little sod had won the damn account off him. No more. This silly cow coming up on him was going to have to be the one to swerve. He’s thinking that right up until he yanks the steering wheel at the last minute and sends his car into the back of a truck delivering building supplies. The second to last thing that goes through his head is ‘Why does today hate me so much?’ The last thing to go through his head is a piece of scaffolding. His lousy day ends with his head looking like an angry cocktail cherry.
If Poppy notices she doesn’t care. She’s now four minutes away from the window of the betting shop and a final, brief leap through the windscreen of this car.
Nobody calls the police, they’re far too busy filming Poppy on their phones. The news channels are spoilt for choice when it comes to wobbly camera footage. That evening Poppy will be a TV star, or at least the back of her head will be. There is only one, vaguely useable shot of her from the front and it shows a face that even her closest friends don’t recognise: a wild, screaming, laughing, evil face, all teeth and eyes so big they look like they’re about to bounce down onto her red cheeks.
The last casualty of the journey – other than herself – is a man trying to fit a stepladder into the backseat of his car. It’s not Poppy that hits him, it’s a car veering out of her way, slamming the back door on him so hard you could have folded his remains like a shop display T-shirt.
Two minutes away from the betting shop window.
A group of school kids cheer as Poppy goes past. To them this seems fun, a bit of action to break up the long trudge home. Something they can message their mates about later. They won’t let facts get in the way of a good story, each of them will claim they were nearly hit by the car, each of them will claim they heard her laughing as she went by (she was laughing by all accounts, laughing every minute of the way but there’s no way they could have heard it over the roar of the engine and the constant beeping of car horns). One of them will even insist they got off with Poppy at a party, as if breathlessly cupping the breast of someone who would later go on to kill herself confers magic onto them.
One minute away from the betting shop window.
The last race at Aintree has been run. Nobody’s made their fortunes. Stephen Patrick tears up his betting slip, takes a sip of cold, vending machine tea and wonders whether he can be bothered to cook tonight. Maybe he’ll just stop in at the chippy on the way home. Oh, and, by the way, what’s all the noise outside? Car horns and a revving engine. Sounds like some kind of carnival is heading his way.
When the window breaks it sounds as if someone has let a firecracker off in the shop. The air is full of noise and glass. Nobody screams or shouts, it’s all too sudden for that, there’s just a lot of confused spinning and stumbling. Seconds ago, most people in the room were cursing their bad luck. Five minutes later and they’ll have changed their minds. It’s frankly phenomenal that nobody is seriously hurt. This isn’t a big shop, in fact on major race days regular customers complain about the fact – but then they complain about most things – it certainly isn’t big enough that you should be able to drive a car through it without killing everyone. There are injuries of course, you don’t add a rainstorm of shattered glass to a room without drawing a little blood. One of the older customers dislocates his hip as he’s knocked back against the wall.
Strangely, the worst injured of all is Mandy Taylor who’s working behind the counter. She’s so shocked to see a car driving towards her inside her place of work, a building not commonly troubled by motor traffic, that she topples back off her stool and cracks her head open on the low shelf behind her. She’ll have serious concussion and a neck injury that will flare up for years to come.
‘Why do you think she did it?’ WPD Delano’s partner asks her as they lie in bed that night. The police officer’s head is still replaying the sight of Poppy as her dead body is pulled back inside the darkness of the car. It’s like prey being pulled back into a bear’s cave, she thinks, battered and beaten, softened up for easy chewing.
‘I haven’t a clue,’ she tells him. ‘Not the first idea.’
She’s not alone.
‘It doesn’t make sense. If I kick it to death will it start to make sense?’
‘Madame?’
Quill turns from the Oyster top-up machine and stares George Barker in the eye. He decides he’d fancy her if she wasn’t so terrifying. Then he decides he fancies her anyway and worries quite what that says about him.
‘You work here?’
‘I don’t wear the uniform for fun, madame.’
‘That’s not entirely my experience of uniforms.’
‘Oh aye?’ He attempts a cheeky smile. He thinks it’s a cheeky smile, without a mirror to hand it’s hard to tell. Cheeky smiles are not something he gets a lot of practice at. By the way her expression somehow manages to get even more hostile he guesses he may have been slightly off the mark. Either that or she is entirely immune to cheeky smiles.
‘No,’ she says, ‘don’t get that look on your face you awful, awful man.’
He tries to turn the smile that may have been, but most probably wasn’t, cheeky into a look of genuine concern and sympathy. He’s not bad at that look. When you work for London Transport you tend to use it quite often. In fact, it’s probably his second most well-worn look, narrowly beaten by ‘firm but polite refusal’.
‘What look, madame?’
‘The look that suggests you’re imagining something sordid regarding uniforms. If I see it again I’m likely to punch you.’
‘We have a firm policy with regard abuse of staff, madame.’
‘I bet you do, you’d have to, working in this hellhole. You’re probably fending off justifiable assassination attempts on the hour, every hour.’ The woman relaxes slightly. ‘This stupid machine won’t top up my Oyster Card.’
‘I see, let me have a look.’
He moves to the machine and starts tapping away at the touchscreen in the sort of manner he hopes conveys extreme professionalism, the sort of manner that broadcasts his ability to Get Things Done. She just stares at the crowds around them with a slight look of disgust.
‘Look at them,’ she says, ‘they don’t have a problem. They’re all about their soya milk lattes and their copies of the Metro. I’ve led armies, fought wars, I have held dying comrades in my arms and fought on.’
‘Oh yes?’ he says, not really listening because the machine is misbehaving and trying to offer him a return to Basildon.
‘And now I can’t even get a few stops on the Central line without it all being a drama.’
‘I know what you mean,’ he mumbles, wondering why he’s now looking at a five-day pass. ‘I’m not sure the machine’s working properly.’
‘I told you that didn’t I?’
‘Yes, madame, I suppose you did. If you come to the counter, I’ll top it up there.’
‘Joy.’
The woman with too many names, none of which feel quite like her own any more, walks into the corner shop, having finally managed to top up her card and get home.
‘Hello Miss Quill,’ someone says as they walk past her and out of the door.
‘Who the hell was that?’ she wonders. They sounded infuriatingly cheerful. She’s half a mind to give chase and push them into a puddle just to teach them a lesson about life. Lesson. Yes. It was Danielle Westby, year eleven. She has tried to teach her physics. Tried to teach her physics in the same way one might try to teach a dog how to repair the engine on a light aircraft.
Miss Quill. A pretend name for a pretend human. How tedious it all is.
Once, light years from here, she had been a rebel leader, fighting the Rhodia, willing to die for freedom (or, at the very least, the pleasure of really bloodying their supercilious noses). Then she had been captured and forced into the slavery of the young Rhodian prince. They put a creature in her brain, a tiny, single-minded thing of teeth and claws. The creature will kill her unless she protects the prince. It will also kill her if she uses any weapon other than her own hands. Basically, it takes all the fun out of life and gives her the odd migraine into the bargain. Joy.
The great rebel is now bonded to the will of her enemy. Well, the only one left alive, because shortly after her capture, the Shadow Kin wiped both her and the prince’s people out and forced the two of them into hiding. The scourge of the Rhodia, now disguised and trapped on a backwater planet being forced to teach dumb children and, even worse, do grocery shopping.
She walks along the shop aisles, staring at strange food she loathes the taste of and can’t really be bothered to buy. In the old days she would simply have raided this entire building for necessary supplies, leaving a trail of blood and destruction. That was an honest way of gathering food and supplies, nobody would ask you for a store loyalty card or try to indulge in small talk. How she misses it.
Eventually, she throws a few tins of baked beans into a hand basket just to show that she can adapt to anything given time, even shopping. Deciding to really go for broke she adds a sliced brown loaf, along with something that rattles in its pack like the desiccated remains of a corpse (glancing at the label it will apparently become edible if she pours boiling water on it) and a box of breakfast cereal that manages to look healthy and yet also insufferably smug and childish at the same time. She stares at the box for a minute, hating the appalling beautiful people who are skipping along a beach while the wind makes their hair flow out behind them like banners of war. She drops the box in her basket and decides that that’s quite enough shopping for today.
‘Hello,’ says the man behind the counter. ‘Would you like a bag?’
‘Absolutely, with the way today’s been going, I can suffocate myself with it later.’
He looks confused for a moment. ‘They put little holes in them now,’ he says eventually, ‘so you can’t.’
‘Spoilsports.’
She asks for a small bottle of vodka as well, because this amount of being dull and human demands a reward.
Shopping safely stowed away in her non-lethal carrier bag, she walks home, hoping with every step that the house will be empty when she gets there.
It isn’t. The front room is infested with annoying young people. She wonders if that awful shop will sell her a spray to deal with them.
One is the young man who is as much ‘Charlie’ as she is ‘Miss Quill’. He is the enslaver, ruler of a toppled people, prince of a dead world and infrequent tidier of his room. The other is his insufferably pretty boyfriend Matteusz. He is Polish, which, as far as Quill can tell means he’s human but uses slightly less conjunctions.
‘Have you seen this?’ Charlie is waving an iPad at her. Naturally her first instinct is to take it off him and slap him silly with it, but that’s not allowed. The creature in her brain wasn’t put there specifically to stop her hitting people with iPads but she has no doubt it features on the long list of ‘No, You Can’t Do That’.
She walks past him, ignoring the question and heads straight into the kitchen. Maybe she can just crawl into one of the kitchen cupboards with her bag of shopping, spend a quiet evening in with a loaf of bread and a bottle of vodka. Never let it be said she has no class, she’ll even use a saucepan to drink out of rather than just neck it straight from the bottle.
‘I said, Have you seen this?’ Charlie has followed her. Of course he has. She glances at the iPad and sees a news item about some girl who has stolen a car and driven it into a shop window.
‘No, should I have?’ She starts unpacking the shopping, anything to distract her from his silly, open, naive little face.
‘It’s very strange.’
‘So are skinny jeans, doesn’t mean I want to spend my time thinking about them.’
‘She stole a car.’
‘I can see that, so what?’
‘It just wasn’t like her. Then she drove it into a shop.’
Quill wishes she’d bought more things, she’s now trapped in a dull conversation with nothing to save her but an empty carrier bag. Maybe she’ll put it over her head after all, hide away in a cosy blue and white hood until everyone has gone away.
‘You knew her?’ she asks.
‘No, but April did. She said she was nice.’
‘April says everyone’s nice. It’s her disease.’
‘Fine,’ Charlie knows better than to keep trying. ‘Matteusz is staying.’
‘Of course he is, good job I bought two tins of beautiful, luxurious baked beans then.’
‘Is that all we’ve got?’
‘The shop is just down the road, feel free to use it.’
Charlie sighs and walks back into the other room. Quill relaxes a little. No doubt he and Matteusz will now be sharing looks of teenage suffering with one another. It could be worse, at least they do that quietly.
What does it matter that some girl has stolen a car and lost control of it? Is it any wonder in this crushing, stupid, insipid little world? The girl probably looked out of her window one morning and felt the horrid banality of it all, decided to do something – anything – to escape it.
‘Suicide?’ says a little voice in her head. ‘You think that’s a worthy way out of a life that’s suffocating you?’ No. She doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t. That’s why she’s still here, living in a hell ruled by an irritating man-child. Death isn’t a problem, she’s chased that often enough, but it’s a gift you’re given by other people.
She looks at her watch. It’s six o’clock. How is she supposed to fill the hours between now and unconsciousness? She picks up one of the tins. With beans? Will they make existence better? Probably not.
In the other room she can hear her jailer and Matteusz talking. It’s alright for him isn’t it? He gathers people to him like flies. Their whole world is gone, trapping them in a universe that may as well be empty. But not for him. He has new people. He’s made friends. She has nothing, her closest companion is the thing in her brain that is invisible right up until the point it kills her. What a lucky woman she is. To have fought her whole life for this. It wasn’t the deal. She gave her life to the cause, she would either win justice for her people or she would die trying. This? Who said this was something she should have to bear?
She toasts some bread, pours beans on them – cold, because she’s now so desperate to get away from the noise of Charlie and Matteusz next door that the idea of waiting even a few minutes longer is unbearable – and takes them upstairs to her room.
As she walks past they go silent for a moment. They’ve been talking about her. Great. Whatever. Miserable Quill. Unreasonable Quill. Angry Quill. All true. Deal with it.
She eats her cold beans as if they’ve done something to offend her.
A few hours pass and the evening refuses to just end. She sits in her room and stares at the wall. She tried watching TV for a bit, but it angered her more than the silence. What were soaps for? Were these human’s lives so empty of incident they had to absorb fictional ones? Someone had been shouting about a baby. Someone else had been having an affair. A third person was stealing money from the company at which he worked. All of it delivered with the sort of screaming banality that humans liked to think made something seem real. At no point did anyone shoot anyone else. The angry young woman working behind the bar in the local pub didn’t take the small knife she used for cutting slices of lemon and plunge it into the eye of the loud idiot who was sexually harassing her. Quill wonders how this species has ever got anything done. How are they still alive? How dare they be still alive? It isn’t fair. Absolutely nothing is even slightly fair.
She turns off the lights in her room, making do with the second-hand glow of the streetlights outside. She remembers another world, a world of violent skies and hot sands. A world she had thrived in, right up until it had burned.
Eventually she falls asleep and dreams of being someone else.
‘It’s a thrill, yeah?’
‘Of course it is. The biggest. The best.’
‘Should be, the amount I’m paying.’
‘It’s worth every penny.’
‘And safe? You sure it’s safe?’
‘I wouldn’t be selling it otherwise, I’d hardly stay in business without repeat custom. This isn’t something I advertise remember?’
‘No, suppose not.’
‘This isn’t something you run an advert for in the paper. A glossy flyer through a letterbox. All of my clients come to me via the recommendation of someone on my current list. No strangers. You’re all vetted. I don’t believe in unnecessary risks.’
‘Vetted?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So you’ve looked into me, yeah?’
‘Of course.’
‘And what did you find about me?’
‘Everything. But most importantly the two things that I really needed to know.’
‘Which were?’
‘You’ve got money and you keep your mouth shut.’
‘Ha! Yeah, that’s fair enough.’
‘Because you know the penalty don’t you?’
‘Penalty?’
‘For talking about this. This isn’t something you share with your mates down the pub, or in the office come the morning. This isn’t something you brag about.’
‘I know that. Like you said, I can keep my mouth shut.’
‘Good, because if you don’t – and don’t give me that look, I say this to everybody, seriously, absolutely everybody – someone will find you.’
‘Ha!’
‘No, don’t laugh, I mean it. Someone will find you and you won’t see it coming. You won’t recognise them, you won’t know them. But they will know you. And they’ll kill you.’
‘Look … I’m not paying all this money to be threatened, yeah?’
‘No, you’re paying all this money to have the most amazing experience you can dream of. You’re paying this money for something incredible. For an experience unlike anything else. And you know what else?’
‘What?’
‘After tonight you’ll be begging me to take your money all over again. You won’t be able to wait. So, you’re ready?’
‘Course I am!’
‘Then lie back, relax and be ready for the time of your life.’
Sex changes a bed. Before it happens it’s a place of potential, afterwards it can be a number of things. Sometimes it’s warm, comforting, the best place in the world. Sometimes it’s cold, awkward, a place you’re waiting to leap out of, desperate for the moment that doing so won’t make you seem awful. Sometimes, thinks Matteusz, it becomes empty, even when there’s still a Charlie in it.
Charlie’s staring up at the ceiling but his eyes are working in reverse. He’s looking inside, he’s lost in his own head. This is not the first time. Matteusz is used to self-absorbed. He’s known a lot of self-absorbed. Charlie is different. Matteusz sometimes thinks Charlie’s head contains more than he’ll ever be able to imagine.
‘You are thinking about the girl,’ Matteusz says. ‘The dead one.’
It takes a minute for Charlie to come back into the room, to hear the words and answer. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Charlie turns to look at him. ‘Why?’
‘Yes. I have to ask that now. Our lives are not the same any more. A few weeks ago we would hear about something awful, something strange, and we would think about it as …’ Matteusz thinks about this, about how to express it, ‘as something far away. Sad but not part of our life. We’d feel bad about it. Talk about it. Maybe even donate money to someone on JustGiving to help make an awful thing seem better. Now, everything horrible seems to be part of our lives. Something that we will end up living. Are you thinking about the girl as a sad thing that is far away or are you wondering if it is part of our lives?’
‘It’s hard to tell, isn’t it?’
‘See? That’s what I mean. Our lives have changed. You can’t think that everything bad that happens is something to do with us. If you do you will be miserable forever.’