Tales From Marcoth- Chapter One

it begins... as Darren sets off for his sixth year at Marcoth, he reminisces of a painful past... and shares his (often less than favourable opinions of fellow students. stick with it, it gets better.

1: Students of Marcoth

 

Darren Cole lit himself a cigarette; it had just become his default response to stress by this point.

 ‘Oh, put that out, Darren! They’ll do nightmares to your health.’

  Darren groaned. ‘Mum, I’m sixteen now. Can’t you just let me make my own decisions for once?’

  ‘Well, I just don’t think you should be doing it is all. What on earth would your father think?’

  Darren grunted. He had given up caring what his father thought a long time ago.

  ‘Oh, but listen to me natter away’ his mother said, looking at her watch ‘you’d better be getting on your train; you’ve only got half an hour’

  ‘Mum, it’s not going to take me half an hour to get through a ticket barrier.’

  ‘Well you never do know’ his mother said, looking upset. ‘What if there was to be a problem?’

  ‘What amount of delay could possibly cause me to take that long?!’

  ‘Well you never do know!’

  Darren wasn’t listening anymore. He had just seen something that was making his stomach do double backflips; an exceptionally pretty girl in a rather unflattering Space Invaders hoodie was waving at him from the ticket booth. He prayed his mother wouldn’t notice, but knew it was in vain; mums noticed everything.

  ‘Ooh, who’s that?’ his mum inevitably asked ‘she seems to waving at you’

  Darren shrugged ‘some girl called Venessa’

  ‘Oh, you mean Venessa Booth? Yes, I remember her, she was in the same kindergarten group as you; I met her mum recently at my coffee group’

  Darren whipped round. ‘How is it you always know more about my friends than I do?’

  ‘Oh, so she’s your friend then?’

  Darren shrugged gain. ‘I guess. I’d better get going.’

 ‘Try not to get in any trouble this year.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Darren rose from his mother’s slick black BMW with the air of the most pretentious man on earth; which, he thought, he probably was. Reaching nonchalantly to his pocket, he pulled out a pair of exceptionally cool pitch black shades he had bought for £2.50 at his local Tescos; these, he was sure, would raise his street cred significantly.

  But he never got them to his face. An instant before they reached his chin, Darren caught a flash of blonde and red chequers fly past him at least eighty miles an hour, sending his sunglasses crashing to the ground, where the lenses split against a paving stone

  ‘F**k’ he muttered, and looked to see what idiot had just barged past him, but he already knew; Taylor Hackman, stylish blonde berk of the century, had just sped past him on his admittedly incredibly trendy red-and-black skateboard, idiot best friend and no.1 Taylor imitator Marc Holloway close behind, somehow looking twice as cool as Taylor did; he suspected it was the hat that did it.

  ‘Sorry, Darren’ Taylor said in his usual joyous, carefree tone that never failed to grate on Darren’s nerves, not stopping as he rubbed his unnatural athleticism in everyone else’s face by propelling himself off his skateboard and up the mid-height flight of stone steps that led up to St. Albans station. Darren groaned. He hated Taylor. He couldn’t understand how someone like that could be such a genius.

  Darren and almost everyone he knew would meet here annually on the first day of September to catch the once-a-year express train that would take up into the northernmost parts of Scotland, to a certain infamous private school in Iverness-shire that went by the name of Marcoth; infamous in Darren’s eyes, anyway, for being the absolute worst private school in the country.

  It was practically a comprehensive, or as close as a private school could get to it, anyway; the tuition fees lay at a measly three thousand or so a year, good for the lower middle classes, he supposed, but for the highest of high that Darren was, it simply didn’t make sense. Well, it did, but Darren wished it didn’t.

  Darren’s father was an incredibly wealthy businessman with stocks in all the major companies who had married a middle class woman out of love… and had loved her for all of about twelve years, before dumping her and her eight-year-old son to continue his life of ludicrously rich solitude. He did, however, leave one parting gift; three quarters of his massive fortune were given to Darren, for him to spend as he wished once he was old enough to understand how money worked. His mother, supposedly wishing the best for him, had decided that in order to better preserve his money for his later years, he would find him the cheapest private school available to them; that, and because it was the only place that the Sanchezes could afford.

  Darren, who had spent all of his pre-school years learning from his father about the vileness of the working classes, had been dismayed at learning that he had to spend the primary school years of his life in an ordinary school; until he met his best friend. Michael Sanchez, a boy from one of the poorer districts of St Albans, had not been a popular boy at school. Not by a long shot, though this was greatly in contrast to his twin sister, Juliet, who even at that age was considered to be unrivalled in her beauty; she was truly perfect, apart from her obnoxious and commanding personality. Not even Darren could resist her, but he did, for the sake of his friendship with Michael. The friendship, ironically, that had both saved and ruined his life. The friendship that had caused Darren’s father to abandon him.

  Such good friends had Michael and Darren become, bonding over their love of all things fantasy and science fiction (Michael had been handed down an incredible collection of comics by his equally nerdy older brother, the exceptionally cool Mason), that upon an ten-year-old Michael’s learning that he would not, as he had so wanted, be going to the same secondary school as his best friend (who was at that point going to a school in Lincolnshire), that he locked himself in his room and refused to talk to anyone until Darren’s mother made the decision to help pay for both the Sanchez twins (Juliet getting in on the grounds that she would not allow her brother out of her sight, a sense of responsibility she got from having been born seven minutes before him) to enter Marcoth school, suggested by Mr and Mrs Sanchez on the grounds that Mason had gotten in there a couple of years beforehand on scholarship and had apparently praised it greatly for reasons Darren still could not understand.

  And so it was fixed. Darren and the only two friends he had had up until that point were doomed to spend the next five years of their life at the worst school in the country. But it was worth it, if only for the few select friends Darren had made since he had gotten there.

  Vanessa, despite his insistence to the contrary, was one of these friends. He had made friends with her almost instantly when she sat opposite him and Michael on the train to their first year of Marcoth, after he realised she was reading a copy of ‘One More Day’. They had spent the next three hours of journey discussing everything from why MJ let Mephisto have his way to whether or not spider-like superpowers were actually possible (Vanessa was a huge fan of all things scientific), and by the end of the journey, the three of them had become firm friends.

  In spite of this, it was with great regret that Darren approached the waving Venessa. The reason for this was, of course, highly simple: Vanessa had spent the whole of the last year dropping not-so-subtle hints that she might fancy him, concluding in a rather passionate surprise embrace just before they parted at the train station. In Darren’s opinion, this was just about the most awkward thing that could have happened, but Vanessa was apparently entirely unphased by this.

  ‘Hey, Darren’ she said in her usual bouncy manner ‘you looking forward to starting you’re A-levels?’

  Darren shrugged. ‘I guess.’

  ‘Remind me what it is you’re taking again’

  ‘You already asked me like ten times last year…’

  ‘I know. I just wanted to get a conversation going. You haven’t asked me what I’m doing yet.’

  ‘Okay, fine. What are you taking?’

  ‘Geography, History, Psychology and Multimedia. There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?’

  ‘Sounds interesting’ Darren said, thoroughly bored.

  ‘Okay, stop.’ Vanessa said, walking in front of Darren just as he reached the ticket barrier.

  ‘What? Let me through, Vanessa.’

  ‘Look, Darren, I’m not stupid. I know you’re still being weird about what happened last year. And I’m sorry about that. But...’ she was starting to sound dangerously suggestive.

  ‘But?’

  ‘Look, I think we both know what I was hinting at last year. So… how about it?’

  Darren sighed. ‘I don’t know, Vanessa. I really don’t know. I mean, you’re really pretty, and really nice, but…’

  ‘But there’s someone else’ Vanessa said, sounding resigned.

  Darren scoffed. ‘Of course not.’

  Vanessa blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘I said, of course not. There isn’t anyone else. I’m not interested in being in a relationship. It’s just not my thing.’

  Vanessa looked down. ‘Oh’ she said. ‘I-I guess that’s alright as well…’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, Vanessa, I shouldn’t have �"‘

  ‘No, really, it’s alright. It’s better this way. To be honest I’ve kind of expected this. You’ve never been much of a romantic.’

  Darren laughed. ‘You got that right.’

  ‘But…’ Vanessa said ‘it would just be nice… if you were honest with me. Why didn’t you tell me that last year? I was worrying about it all summer…’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that.’

  ‘Really, it’s fine. It just… it just would have been nice to know. So…’

  ‘So?’

  ‘How about it then? Just, you know, being honest with me. Seriously, you can tell me anything, I don’t think there’s anything that can really make me hate you, not really. So what do you say? To being honest?’ She stretched out her hand. Darren shook it firmly.

  ‘To being honest’ he said. He smiled. Vanessa smiled back. Darren suddenly felt very awkward.

  ‘Hey, Darren…’ Vanessa said ‘can I hug you again?’

  Darren could not help but laugh. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, it’s just… it kind of felt really good hugging you last year. I was hoping it could become, like, a thing.’

  ‘Yeah’ Darren said. ‘Yeah, that sounds really good actually.’

  Stepping forward, he softly clamped his arms around her, and just stood there for a few seconds, the two of them locked in a deep, sincere embrace.

  Darren smiled. He got the feeling this was going to be a good year.

Author's Note

mainly here I'm interested into whether this grabs your interest: thoughts on Darren, primarily, as well as other characters... did I do a good job of introducing his past? are you actually curious about this character and how the story will develop? that sort of thing.