Stags 2, p.2
STAGS 2, page 2
‘Do you really believe that?’ asked Nel.
‘I have to,’ he said simply. ‘Because the alternative is that you and me and Greer spend our last year here obsessing over this, playing Sherlock Holmes and trying to reveal the machinations of a centuries-old cult – and if we do that we are going to mess up our exams.’
I straightened up and gazed moodily ahead at the massive hulking shadow of Honorius, the house that Henry was in when he was at STAGS. ‘Maybe this is one of those times when your best friend dies and then you get all A-stars.’
Nel said, ‘It was a year ago, and I don’t think Henry would qualify as anybody’s best friend.’
Shafeen gave me a funny look. ‘Or would he? Anyway, I can’t rely on that. I don’t know about you, but I want to get my Probitiones. I need three As, Greer. I’ve got to concentrate on that.’
Probitiones were the final exams at STAGS. They were pretty much identical to A levels, but of course, being STAGS, no one called them A levels (except for me); it had to be something ancient and Latin. You took three or four Probitiones in the second year of sixth form, i.e. this year for us. Shafeen was right. Shit was getting real. He wanted to read medicine at university and he needed the grades. Nel, in contrast to (or perhaps because of) her dad’s hi-tech world, had found a love of history and classics. I knew I wanted to be a director, but I’d agreed with my dad that I’d get a degree first, so I was going for drama. We all needed to work hard.
Determinedly, I moved my eyes away from the blond heads in front of me and looked instead at the stag window above the new Abbot’s head. STAGS was my school and it was the only one I had.
Shafeen was right.
It was time to get my head back in the game.
Scene iii
It’s funny to think, looking back now, that none of what happened would have happened if only I’d liked Shakespeare.
I’ve seen a fair bit of Shakespeare – admittedly on film. I’ve seen a trio of Hamlets – Kenneth Branagh (weird), Mel Gibson (weirder) and Laurence Olivier (weirdest). I’ve done the obligatory GCSE play (Macbeth in my case). But I could never get on with it. I don’t know if it was the language, or the unfunniest comic characters in the universe (step forward, Porter in Macbeth. And you, Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.)
The whole point of this Shakespeare rant is that I had to direct a play for my drama Probitio. See what I always said about STAGS being different? In what other school would you be allowed to direct a play in a replica Jacobean theatre as part of your exam? Luckily for me, most of the drama folks were hell-bent on acting. No one was about to challenge me for the director gig, even though it was the director who was given the choice of what play we did. The problem was that the play couldn’t be modern. The chosen text had to be old school, to fit the Renaissance theatre.
The Sunday morning after the Abbot’s Requiem Mass I had a meeting to discuss the play I’d chosen. The problem was, I still had less than no clue. I had researched and read, but still not found anything that floated my boat.
As I walked through the grounds to my drama meeting, working out what I was going to say, it was a late-October day, cold, with the sun shining and the leaves turning all shades of flame. STAGS really was an amazing place. Shafeen was right: if we were going to leave, we should have done it a year ago. Maybe with Henry gone, and the Abbot gone, this most vicious of cycles could be ended, and we, the new Medievals, could make it a good place. Buildings couldn’t be bad in themselves, could they? Bricks and mortar couldn’t be made from murder.
I walked from my room at Lightfoot, all Tudor splendour and diamond windows, across Bede’s Piece iced with frosty grass, avoiding the hideous sporty types rushing about with lacrosse sticks, to the long, low medieval buildings of the library. I swished through the lovely quad to the English Schools, where I was due at 10 a.m. to discuss the practical element of my drama Probitio. I wasn’t sure who’d be taking the meeting now, probably some BTEC friar who’d been parachuted in to replace Friar Ridley now that he was Abbot Ridley. But when I knocked on the ancient studded oak door of the English Schools and went in, it was Abbot Ridley himself who was perching on one of the desks, tapping his foot with a metre ruler. He looked completely different again to his chapel self, the strong leader who’d taken the reins of the school without missing a beat. He looked younger again. More approachable. Funner. He laughed at me.
‘Why that face?’
I was surprised into honesty. ‘You always turn up in places I don’t expect.’ I felt I could speak to him like a peer, not like the Abbot he now was.
He indicated a chair and I sat in it.
‘I’ve been your English and drama teacher for six weeks now. I don’t know you very well yet, Greer, but you don’t strike me as someone who is slow on the uptake.’
‘Yeah, I know, but …’
‘But what?
‘I thought, with you being the new Abbot and all, you’d have, well … bigger fish to fry.’
‘Ah. I am merely an Interregnum Abbot, made so because I have experience of headship, as we discussed. So it’s true, I do have some extra …’ he searched for a word, ‘administrative duties. But I assure you, none of those take precedence over the paramount importance of seeing my class through their English and drama Probitiones. So –’ he banged the ruler smartly on the floor, making me jump a little – ‘until graduation, you may consider yourself, if you don’t mind me borrowing your phrase, the biggest fish in my fryer at this time. “Call me Ishmael.”’
I caught the reference. ‘Moby -Dick,’ I said.
He looked pleased. ‘You’ve read it?’
I could’ve easily bullshitted, but then he could’ve easily caught me out by asking me my favourite part. ‘Seen the movie,’ I admitted. ‘Gregory Peck.’
‘Ah yes. Well, speaking of dramatic representations, let’s talk about your drama Probitio. Have you decided which play you’ll be directing for the performance element?’
He was talking like a teacher again, but I still thought it was worth chancing my arm. ‘I don’t suppose it could be a film, could it?’
‘It couldn’t. The syllabus specifies a play written before 1660.’
I mentally rolled my eyes. Typical STAGS.
‘How about Shakespeare? That would be the obvious choice.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It’s the obvious choice. And – don’t take off for Mars, but – I hate Shakespeare.’
He smiled his half-smile. ‘Then I recommend you take yourself off to the library and do some research. He wasn’t the only Renaissance dramatist. Look at Nashe, Dekker, Jonson, Marlowe. There might be something more to your taste.’
He got up from the desk, his robes falling to his feet, rippling like a superhero cloak. I did find myself wondering what he would look like out of his Abbot robes. Not naked, before you go thinking that. That would be creepy. Just in normal clothes.
I got up too, as the interview was clearly over. ‘OK. I’ll have a look.’
‘And Greer –’
‘Yes?’
‘I wouldn’t waste much time choosing. Term’s marching on. The practical element represents two-thirds of your overall drama mark. You’ll have to perform your play at Christmas. That’s a little over six weeks.’
I spent a long, butt-numbingly boring afternoon in the Scriptorium, the most ancient bit of the library. Most of the time I spent watching patterns of stained-glass-refracted light crawling across endless tomes of Shakespeare, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe and Webster. The only good thing to be said about the afternoon was that I didn’t once think about the Medievals or the Order of the Stag. Friar Ridley had really scared the bejeezus out of me about how little time I had, and there’s nothing like losing your bejeezus to really make you focus. Finally I checked out The Complete Works of Shakespeare, a huge brick of a thing, and went to Commons. I plonked myself down between Shafeen and Nel on one of the long refectory benches.
‘Any luck?’ asked Shafeen through a mouthful of cottage pie.
‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re all so stupefyingly boring. I mean, I could do yet another horrible school production of Macbeth, or Hamlet, I guess, but …’
‘But what?’ asked Nel, who was peeling a tangerine in one long, satisfying curl, aided by her perfect acrylic nails.
‘They’ve all been done to death. I mean, can you imagine someone saying, “To be or not to be”, or “Is this a dagger that I see before me?” as if you’re hearing it for the first time?’
‘Then do something new,’ said Shafeen, ever practical.
‘This is STAGS. Has to be a play, has to be from before 1660.’
‘Ah.’
Shafeen (history and triple science) had no further advice, and even Nel (who was actually doing drama too, along with history and classics) had no clue.
This sucked.
Scene iv
Nel and I walked back to Lightfoot in the dark and we said goodnight at the top of the stairs.
As Medievals we each had our own suite of rooms – no more sharing – and mine was a lovely big one with a study in the eaves of the house. Usually I would hang in the evenings with Nel or Shafeen or both in the Medieval Common Room, or in one of our rooms, or even, if it wasn’t too cold, by the Paulinus well. But tonight I needed to get this play decision made, so I sat at my desk in a pool of lamplight, poring over the Shakespeare I’d brought from the library.
I got that familiar prickling feeling that I often got when I was alone, that Henry-behind-the-curtains feeling, as if I was being observed. However hard I tried to banish him, Henry hung around in my memory, impossible to forget. I didn’t know if I felt guilt or a lingering sorrow, or whether I just plain missed him – all feelings far too complicated to share with anyone else. Particularly Shafeen. I couldn’t tell Shafeen. Things were going so well, and I really, really liked him, way too much to present him with the fact that he was sort of sharing me with a ghost.
Henry hadn’t been forgotten online either. Even though tech was still officially forbidden at STAGS (Festina Lente, right?), I would charge up my phone and check occasionally. His cult was growing. Those Oxbridge dining clubs still ate by waterfalls at moonlight in their black ties; fan pages grew in number on Instagram and Twitter. The presence of Henry’s face and name in all my timelines made me stay away from my phone and embrace the Medieval life even more. But he still intruded, hanging about in the shadows. And tonight this made it hard to concentrate, and the tiny text, the stupid names and the improbable plots swam before my eyes. I threw the Shakespeare across the desk and sat back in my chair, shoulders aching, pushing my hands into my hair. It was then that I heard the sound.
It’s funny how sounds can take you right back, like a time machine that can whisk you away to your past. That whispering, paperknife sound of something being pushed under a door transported me back a year, to The Invitation. A simple piece of card, which had set in motion the train of events that had led to the weekend of twisted huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ and, ultimately, to Henry’s death. For a moment, the dread turned me to stone and I physically couldn’t turn round, but then I told myself not to be stupid. I should get up and go to the door, and there would be nothing there.
I got up and went to the door.
There was something there.
Not a single envelope this time, but a bunch of yellowing pages, covered in black scrawl, shoved under my door.
I picked up the pages and read, with difficulty, what was on the front. It was old-fashioned script like you see written with a quill in films like Anonymous. It said:
The Isle of Dogs
A Tragedy
Acted in the Year 1597
By Pembroke’s Men
With the Allowance of the Master of Revels
The Author Ben Jonson
I turned the page and read: Act One, scene i.
It was a play.
I whipped open the door and looked frantically up and down the oak-panelled passageway. Of course there was no one to be seen. I closed the door behind me and, for some reason, locked it. I stood for a moment with my back against the hard oak, heart pounding. I was suddenly sure, surer than anything I’d known in my life, that the play was from Henry. I walked slowly back to my desk, clutching the pages, and by the time I’d got there I’d given myself a good talking-to. There was no mystery here. The play wasn’t from a ghost. There was only one person who could have given it to me, and that was Abbot Ridley. He was my drama teacher, my mentor for the drama Probitio, and the one who had been hounding me about choosing a play.
He’d obviously rooted out this copy from somewhere, thought it might be a bit pervy to actually come into my room, but, mindful of the shortness of time, decided to push it under my door tonight and give me a head start. And, since he’d gone to all that trouble, I thought I might as well read it.
It didn’t take me very long – as it turned out, it was only one act, not an entire play. But it was fantastic. It drew me in immediately, because it was narrated by this sardonic poet character called Poetaster, who I was pretty sure was the playwright Ben Jonson himself, so you were seeing the whole thing through his eyes. The play was about a queen, called Queen Cynthia, who lived alone in this magnificent Longcross-esque palace on the Thames called the Palace of Placentia. She was rich, brainy and beautiful. She was also entitled and sometimes cruel, but endlessly charming. She had everything she wanted, and was bored out of her skull. She reminded me of Henry.
The play opened when the queen had, for the first time in her life, found something that she couldn’t have. She had fallen in love with a penniless noble, the Earl of Greenwich, and decided that, after many years of ruling alone, she wanted to marry. But her chief courtiers, a father and a son called Lupo and Volpone, insisted that she couldn’t marry him – if she was going to take a husband, it had to be this foreign king called the King of El Dorado. Queen Cynthia raged furiously against them like a caged animal trapped by duty. The whole thing was explosive – the two father–son courtiers simultaneously working for her and against her, and the earl sweet-talking her into making him her king. It set up this terrific power struggle at court, as well as this queen struggling with her duty versus her heart, and her love of her independent power versus her giving it up to a man if she married. The language was all Elizabethan (obvs) but somehow accessible. It was much, much darker than Shakespeare. The character of the queen was dynamite – such a strong, flawed heroine. I knew I had to direct this play. If anything was going to make me forget the events of the last year and concentrate on my work, it was The Isle of Dogs.
Without knowing why, I slept with the pages under my pillow. They crackled and whispered to me every time I turned.
Scene v
Despite being knackered from my late-night reading, I was up before the alarm and ready to go.
I had drama first thing, so I swerved the Refectory, just grabbing a banana, and went to class super-early, clutching The Isle of Dogs so hard that the buttons of my black Tudor coat bit into my chest. It was like I’d written the damned thing.
Our drama class was timetabled to be in the theatre that day, so I made my way across Bede’s Piece, the low mist still clinging to the grass, the school buildings rising over the playing fields like a mirage. The De Warlencourt Playhouse (seriously, there was no getting away from that family) was built in the 1960s, way back when Shafeen’s dad was at STAGS, but since it was an exact replica of a Jacobean theatre, even down to the thatched roof, it totally fitted with the rest of the school. If you’ve ever seen the film Shakespeare in Love, it looked just like the Globe Theatre in that, except for when you went inside: it wasn’t open to the air but was enclosed, and entirely lit (with classic STAGS attention to traditional detail) by candlelight. It was pretty weird walking in there, through the timbered doors underneath the de Warlencourts’ commemorative plaque, out of the bleak winter sunshine, into the candlelit dark.
For a moment I couldn’t see a thing, but after a bit I could make out Abbot Ridley in the middle of the stage, lighting the candles around the proscenium with a taper. The flames flowered under his hand like he was some wizard from Fantastic Beasts or something.
I was suddenly shy, something I usually am not. I walked down the auditorium, between the wooden benches. ‘Thanks for the play,’ I said, by way of a hello.
He spun round in his superhero manner, robes flying. ‘Oh, you found one?’ he said. The theatre played tricks with his voice, projecting it out over my head. ‘What did you go for? Wives of Windsor or Gentlemen of Verona?’
I held out the pages. ‘Neither.’
He came closer, squinting a bit in the low light. ‘What’s that?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Didn’t you give this to me? Didn’t you push it under my door?’
‘Under your door?’ He frowned. ‘In Lightfoot? No. No, of course not. I assure you, I wouldn’t even know where your room is.’
He seemed shocked by the suggestion and I saw then how mistaken I’d been – he was quite freaked by the implication that he’d been wandering around the girls’ house after dark. He blew out the taper in his hand, as if to extinguish the very thought. He was obviously convinced that I was one of those bunny-boiling schoolgirls who get a crush on the hot teacher, like in Wild Things.
I wanted to reassure him that I wasn’t about to go all #MeToo on him, but there was no earthly way of saying that without sounding mental. So I just said, ‘It’s a play called The Isle of Dogs.’
