A Royal Mess (49 page)

Carlotta and I saluted. My salute was the usual English casual tipping of my blade, but Carlotta actually kissed her blade and slashed it in a feverishly stylish and slightly terrifying way. The noise cut through my soul like ice as the realization hit me – I was representing Great Britain. I wasn’t equipped. I didn’t have a fancy salute. I wasn’t even British!

We masked up and ‘Pretes! Allez! Avanti!’ was called.

My Caravaggio opponent advanced down the piste like a demon. Her footwork was faultless and even before she lunged I knew I was out of my league. Though I tried to summon the spirit of Jerzy Pawlowski, the greatest sabreur who ever lived, all I heard from the president was
‘Priorite a ma droit,’
which means priority to my right. I must ‘fess up and tell you there were ever so few
‘Priorite a ma gauche.’

I was
gauche
… in more ways than one.

Actually, I was fencing very well. It was just that Carlotta was blindingly good. She was in a league of point and priority grabbing excellence such as I’d never witnessed. At the end of play when she tore off her mask, spraying the sweat from her hair everywhere, all I could do was say, ‘Bloody hell, Carlotta, you’re good. I mean,
bene!

She beamed, not smugly, not grandly. She just looked happy to hear my praise and of course for her win. I beamed back. Not even sweaty hair could dim her Renaissance loveliness. I looked over at Malcolm. His camera was still glued to his face, the lens still fixed on me, but I wondered, was he comparing Carlotta and me? I know I was. Freakishly tall, pale blonde girl versus voluptuous, stunning, glowing brunette.

And then I wondered something else. Was I jealous?

Over the course of the next two hours, I won a few bouts and lost a few more. I barely performed well enough to survive the cull from the pools, but I did survive. That
meant I would get to play in the tournament tomorrow. Unlike Jenny, who had been culled.

I know it was shallow of me, but it made me feel that justice existed after all. Sometimes, bad things do happen to mean girls.

Professor Sullivan came over afterwards and asked, ‘So how does it feel to be on the national team, Miss Kelly?’ – only he asked in French of course.

‘Yaah, it’s really cool, basically, but these girls are, like … Well they’re really, really good, aren’t they? Do you think I can ever be that good?’ I asked in my best approximation of a French accent.

And then he smiled. It was a smile that lit up the entire salle, and then something miraculous happened. He spoke to me in English for the first time ever. ‘Most definitely, Calypso. Without a shadow of a doubt, in fact. There is one thing I have always had infinite faith in, and that is your ability to be as good as you want to be.’

THIRTY
He Made It Seem Like the Most
Sensible Thing in the World …

As we came out of the salle, Malcolm grabbed my hand and pulled me aside. ‘Can we talk?’ I looked down at his hand holding mine, but I didn’t pull it away. I was feeling high and positive, and actually it felt rather nice, especially when he took my shoulder-biting fencing kit from me and put it on his own shoulder.

‘What’s up?’ I asked, but all he did was pull me behind the old Medici church and kiss me long and hard. I know when boys kiss you you’re meant to go off to a dreamy cloudland of magical warmth and loveliness, but I have that sort brain that never switches off. I couldn’t help comparing Malcolm’s kissing to Freds’. Which was totally
wrong and shallow, I know. But Malcolm’s pulling style was
molto
passionate.

Kissing Freds was cloudlandy. At the time, I always thought it the apex of loveliness, but it was different to kissing Malcolm. Malcolm took a strand of my wet hair and placed it behind my ear and smiled. I ruffled his red hair and looked into his luminous green eyes and studied his face. Just as I was memorising it, he locked his lips on mine and did that dip thing again.

Suddenly he pulled me up as a priest was walking past. He said hello to the young priest in Italian and they had a short chat. I nodded and smiled and laughed when they laughed, but they may well have been discussing trigonometry.

Eventually Father went off to do a spot of shopping – well, that was my assessment – and Malcolm turned his mega-watt personality back onto me. ‘I need your help,’ he told me seriously.

I thought he wanted to kiss me again and puckered up.

‘No, seriously. I think I’ve found the perfect subject for the film I came here to make.’

‘I thought you came here to film Billy.’

‘Did I tell you that?’

‘Yes.’

He ran his hands through his hair, and for a moment he reminded me of Freds – an older, strawberry-blond, more eccentric Freds. ‘I wonder if that’s what I meant to do. Anyway, something happened this morning. I have to
show it to you; I want your opinion. It was the maddest thing, really – the way it all came about. I went off this morning to get my nipple pierced and –’

‘Wait, why did you get your nipple pierced?’ I asked, trying to keep all judgment from my mind as I remembered my own navel-piercing fiasco in Los Angeles last summer.

‘Eyebrow piercing is so passé,’ he said, as if this should be all the explanation I deserved. Boys! ‘And well, only hippies and bikers do their ears or lips, don’t they?’

‘I suppose,’ I replied, quite glad he hadn’t said anything about navel piercing being passé.

‘And on consideration I’m pretty certain the madre would have an embolism if I pierced my face. I did consider a wrist piercing, but only briefly. The chap who did the deed, nice guy, bit of a freak, but anyway point is, he had his wrist pierced. It was the darndest of darn things. I’ve never considered piercing my wrist before. But I’m not sure it wouldn’t become a bit of a nuisance, you know with cuffs and all that.’ Then he started looking at old footage in his video camera.

‘But I don’t understand why you had to get anything pierced?’ I told him.

‘What?’ he looked up. Clearly he’d completely lost the thread of the conversation.

‘Why get anything pierced?’

He appeared to consider this for a while. ‘I see what you’re saying. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but anyway, the point is, look, let me show you –’

I took a step back. ‘Take it away. I don’t want to see your nipple!’ I squealed. I like to think I’m a girl made of strong American fibre, but I was not a studier of fresh nipple piercings – or old ones for that matter. Star, Georgina and I had had our navels pierced last summer. It was a bonding sort of thing. But mine had gone septic, and Sarah had made me take it out after a showdown with the poor guy who’d performed the deed. No, I was off body piercing for life.

Malcolm ruffled my hair and laughed. ‘I wasn’t going to show you my nipple,’ he assured me. ‘Besides, I bottled out at the last minute.’ Then he grabbed my hand and insisted I come with him to see something ‘incredibly cool.’

Incredibly cool, incredibly cool.
I kept repeating the phrase to myself as he dragged me through the bright winter streets of Florence. I couldn’t stop wondering, what in algebra’s name would a boy like Malcolm consider ‘incredibly cool’? Not cool, mind you, but
incredibly
cool.

‘Is it a really amazing Renaissance painting? I know, we’re going to the Uffizi to see the Botticelli room?’

He laughed. ‘That’s in the other direction. Just wait and see.’

‘I know, a vinyl shop? We’re going to a vinyl shop so you can buy old eighties recordings of tragic, I mean cool, Italian bands no one else has heard of.’ Star told me that boys love obscure indie bands they imagine no one else has heard of. But then Malcolm wasn’t most boys.

‘No,’ he told me firmly. ‘Just wait and see.’

And then I saw a cinema in the distance. ‘I know, I know. It’s an arty Italian movie?’ Oh yes, that seemed likely.

‘No.’ He pulled me along faster. ‘Just wait, we’re almost there.’ We turned down a dark, narrow lane where we passed a shop that sold motor scooter parts and then a shop that did tattoos and body piercing. Malcolm waved to the guy inside, whose entire body was glinting with piercings. I began to hyperventilate, but we didn’t stop there, thank goodness.

‘I know, you’ve discovered an amazing crumbling-down old building that a mad dead Medici lived in. Everyone’s forgotten about it and stopped searching. But you’ve found it, all vine-covered, and you alone have realised what it really is, and you’ve started–’

‘You really should become an author, Calypso. Your imagination needs a larger canvas.’

Of course I was madly flattered and started walking on air. Freds had never even noticed my creative spirit. He just thought I was mad. I made a mental note to tell Miss Topler that my mind needs a larger canvas than her class.

‘We’re here,’ Malcolm said, gesturing to a shop front. ‘Now you can satisfy your curiosity to your heart’s delight.’

We were standing outside a pet shop. I looked at Malcolm’s face, but his eyes were fixed on something inside. I mean, I’m as keen on pets as the next girl, but as you can’t bring animals into the UK without inserting microchips into their ears and getting them special pet
passports. It’s not really the sort of shop you’d look out for a souvenir. Well, I don’t. I worry I’d fall in love with a kitten or puppy or a hamster, and then it would be an awful wrench, knowing I couldn’t take it home with me.

I wasn’t wildly keen on going inside and finding something too cute to leave behind, so I said, ‘So what, it’s just a pet shop. That’s hardly incredibly cool. They’re everywhere.’

Malcolm jerked me inside. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to a large wooden crate that was full of tiny paper boxes that looked a bit like Chinese takeaway boxes. They were all open and empty apart from one box where a tiny little black-speckled duckling was frantically flapping and peeping.

‘Oh bless!’ I exclaimed.

‘When I came in here this morning to contemplate the piercing, every one of these cartons here was full of ducklings. I stood here and filmed as customer after customer came into the shop and bought a duckling. I was here for, oh, I don’t know, about an hour.’ He then spoke to the pet shop owner in Italian.

The guy replied without looking up from his newspaper.

‘Yes, Giuseppe thinks it was a bit over an hour. And in that time, every other duckling was sold. Except for this little chap.’

The tiny duckling had his miniature bill in the air. He appeared to be looking and talking directly at us.
‘Peep,
peep, peep, peep!
’ Honestly, it was the most adorable sight I had ever seen. Even Dorothy wasn’t as cute as the duckling, which made me feel disloyal just to think such a thought.

‘Can we hold him?’ I asked Giuseppe in my best Italian accent. But Giuseppe didn’t seem to understand my wonderful Italianised English.

Malcolm asked the owner in Italian for me, but I could tell the answer was no because of all the head shaking and arm waving that went on.

‘Apparently he won’t let us because last month someone picked up one of his ducklings and dropped it on the floor and broke its wing,’ Malcolm translated.

All the while the little duckling was going
‘peep, peep, peep!

‘But I don’t understand. Why didn’t anyone buy him? He’s adorable.’

‘Yaah, I agree,’ Malcolm said as he filmed the duckling peeping piteously. ‘They don’t like his mottled colours, apparently.’

‘Oh, that’s soooo mean. That’s what gives him his character.’

Malcolm was taking some close-up footage as he replied. ‘I agree.’

I couldn’t bear it. I really couldn’t bear it. The duckling wouldn’t stop peeping and flapping its stunted little wings. Where was its mother? Where were its friends? Where was its pond to play in? It was horrible and I was powerless to help, so I ran out of the shop and down the lane.

Malcolm caught up with me and hugged me tightly into his chest. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. See, I’m stuck and need your help. I wanted to do a short of all the customers frantically scooping up their ducks and buying them, but then when no one scooped up Rex – that’s what I’ve named him, by the way – it went from being an art-house documentary to a tragedy.’