by Beth Moran
“What I want to know is…”
I never did find out what she wanted to know. At that point, a thing hurtled out of the pile of ferns to my right, tripped over my crouching form, and tumbled head over heels into a patch of stinging nettles.
My goodness. A good job Marilyn had gone already. An elite SAS commando’s pelvic floor couldn’t withstand that sort of attack out in the middle of the pitch-black woods and caught in a compromising position.
“WILD BOAR!” Marilyn screamed, careening from side to side with the torch beam, blinding me and no doubt the creature, now thrashing about and making hideous screeching noises. “Find a weapon! Run for your life! Every woman for herself! If I don’t make it back, tell the twins and James I love them!”
I quickly rendered myself decent. Marilyn picked up a broken stick and advanced towards the writhing, shadowy shape, now making distinctly un-pig-like noises like, “Ah! Aaah! Oh! Get me out!”
Definitely not a wild boar, then. And if it was a villain, they weren’t very dangerous, judging by the pathetic wails and impractical boots.
“Keep still. You’re only making it worse.” I tucked my hand inside my anorak coat to protect it from the nettles, and grabbed on to one flailing hand. Marilyn dropped the stick and took hold of the other. Together we pulled, managing not to fall into the nettle pit, and stood the filthy, matted, semi-hysterical woman on her feet.
It was a good job there were no bathrooms with mirrors for Kim to take a look at herself. Even without the gazillion red and white nettle stings bumping out all over her bare skin, she looked as though she’d been living wild in the forest for a month, not a couple of hours. Wowzers. I had looked better than that after three weeks living on the street with an infected knife wound.
“Where have you been?” Marilyn asked, incredulous. “What happened? We thought you’d gone home.”
Kim looked at her. A fat tear carved a white path through the mud on her cheek.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter.” Marilyn wrapped her up in a hug, and began walking her back through the woods. I waited for them to take a few more steps.
“Er, guys? I think you’re heading in the wrong direction.”
After a few false starts, we eventually found the path back to the tents. Once there, we stuffed Kim with hot dogs and hot chocolate, listening to her tale of woe about her search for a phone signal leading her further and further into the forest, until her battery ran out. Then the rain started, so she took shelter under a large tree. After a few minutes, she gave up waiting for the rain to stop and began wandering around aimlessly, trying to find any form of civilization, until she caught the glow of the torch in the distance.
“Do I look bad?” she asked, pointlessly running her hands through the nest of tangles on her head.
“No, no,” we all murmured. “You look fine.”
“Yeah.” Rowan wiped her friend’s face with a tissue. “You suit the I’m a Celebrity look.”
“Really?”
“How are the stings?” Melody asked, changing the subject.
“I can hardly feel them any more. Those dock leaves really work. I’m just tired. Where are the beds?”
Good question. We looked at Hester. Were we to build our beds out of soggy ferns and clumps of muddy grass? String hammocks made of sycamore boughs? Our director stared back at us, unflinching.
“There are roll up mats in the back of my car and Ebony’s, and spare sleeping bags for those who haven’t brought one. Kim may go to bed in tent one. For the rest of us, it is time to get started.”
“Get started with what?” We gaped at her. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“It is quarter to nine.”
Quarter to nine?!
“It’s also freezing, pitch black, and still drizzling, not to mention blowing a gale,” Mags pointed out.
Get started?
What could Hester possibly have planned out here?
“First, we hike.”
That did not go down well.
“What? Why are you moaning? I told you about the night hike.” Hester bristled.
“We thought that was a joke,” Uzma said in a dazed voice.
“Did I sound like I was joking?”
“You never sound like you’re joking,” Leona pointed out. “Is this a sensible idea?”
“I did this very same hike with the Girl Guides last year,” Hester snapped. “We all had a marvellous time.”
“What’s second?” April asked, shivering with a combination of cold and fear. “You said the hike was first.”
“Let’s conquer the first, first. Then we’ll get on to what’s second. Now, stout shoes, water bottles, and torches, choir. It was all on the kit list. Hup two three four. What are you waiting for?”
In the end, after a discussion about who got to stay that nearly turned as nasty as a boar fight, Millie and Janice pulled the old and infirm card, getting to stay behind with Kim, the sleeping twins, a lamp, and a packet of mini apple pies.
We trudged through the mizzle, stumbling over hillocks and stepping up to our ankles in unseen puddles. Barely speaking, too tired, and too busy concentrating on where we were going, we plodded on through trees and fields. Not adventurous. Certainly not fun. I wondered what the weather had been like when the Guides had done it. It seemed as though Hester had gone too far this time, and the trip would break instead of make us.
Until we hit a particularly tricky stretch along the edge of a swampy meadow.
We had to shuffle along, clinging to twigs sticking out from the hedge running alongside, leaping from tiny, slippery stone to tinier, even slipperier stone as we tried to work our way to the end of the field without falling in and sinking to the bottom of the swamp. Marilyn, familiar enough with Anton’s killer training sessions to take this walk in her stride (and even, quite possibly, enjoy being able to vault stiles and leap across brooks for the first time in years), led the way. She used the largest torch to navigate a safe path, making sure the person behind her could follow. We had to grip on to each other’s hands, and shoulders, and rucksacks, watch carefully for those who began to wobble, and call out instructions to guide those behind us, and updates to those in front. In the end, we began to get the hang of it. We switched places so the stronger among us, those more used to hiking through swamps, flanked the weaker and more nervous members of the group. We organized a system with the seven torches (six, once Leona dropped hers in) so that everyone could see when they needed to. We offered encouragement, and advice, and cheered each other on.
Would you look at that? I thought proudly to myself, as I helped Rosa breach a particularly long gap between stones. We’ve become a team.
Then from the back came a piercing shriek.
April had fallen in.
“Woman down!” cried Hester, who’d been guarding the rear.
We all froze, peering anxiously back through the darkness in the direction of the squeals and splashes. The surprise sent Mags into a dangerous wobble, and it looked like there would be another woman down until Rowan hopped forwards and steadied her.
“Right.” I looked up and down the line from my halfway position. “Marilyn, can you see what’s on the other side of the gate?”
“There’s a dirt road. I can’t see far but it doesn’t look too bad.”
“Everybody who’s already gone past me, keep going and get to the track. The rest of us can work our way back and help April.”
“I want to help April!” Rowan said from her position three people in front of me.
“Tough. If there are too many of us we won’t all fit on the safe spots and someone else will end up falling in. Come on, let’s go!”
The back half of the line hopped, skipped, and shimmied back to find April thrashing about in the mud, now up to her thighs.
“Stop moving about!” I yelled.
“She’s not listening.” Hester squatted on a larger rock, holding out a branch towards April, who was a metre or so into the field. �
�She’s panicking.”
We tried a couple more times to get her to stop moving, as it only wiggled her deeper into the mud, but to no avail.
“Is someone going to have to go and get her?” Uzma asked, wide-eyed in the torchlight.
“They aren’t going to be able to pull her back,” Mags frowned. “She might even pull them under without meaning to.”
“Hang on a minute.” Uzma took off her coat, arranging it on top of the marshy mud. Slowly laying down, she spread her surface area out as much as possible. She sank several inches into the squelch, but keeping still seemed to be working.
“Hand me the stick.”
Hester passed it over, and with a mixture of gentleness and urgency we ordered April to grab onto it. Somehow she had twisted around, in the opposite direction to the torchlight, her wails and gasps becoming more frantic.
“I’ll go round the other side.” I found a rock a metre or so into the meadow, and stepped onto it, holding on to Yasmin for balance. When I moved onto the next one, she followed me, and Rosa stepped into her place, so we were now holding on to and supporting each other like a human chain.
I managed to reach three-quarters of the way round before the stones ran out. Copying Uzma, I spread out my coat and gingerly started to lie down. The mud reached April’s hips now. Things were starting to look seriously dangerous. And every second the job of pulling her out grew even harder. Yasmin passed me a torch.
“April. You have to stop moving!” I begged her, trying to keep the fear from my voice. “Keep still!”
No response.
“Reach forwards and lean on me!” I screamed.
Then, from beyond the gate, a hundred metres away, came the voice of an angel.
“Lean on me.”
Through the mizzle, the wind, and the anxiety came a pitch-perfect harmony as the rest of the choir joined in with the next line.
As part of the stronger together theme for the competition, Hester had got us using this song for our “out with the stress in with the strength” breathing exercises and warm-up.
After several weeks, none of us could hear it without automatically dropping our shoulders, blowing out our no-good tension, and becoming still.
April paused in her struggling and cocked one ear towards the sound. Those of us near her joined in with the rest of the chorus.
“Keep breathing, April,” I called out, my words stronger now. “In and out. Breathe with me, honey. I’m here. I’m with you. We’re going to get you out.”
She splashed around to face me.
“Faith!”
“I’m here. I’m getting you out. But you need to listen to me, April. You have to stop moving and follow my instructions. Ready?”
April looked at me sprawled on my belly in the mud, her face ghoul-like in the torchlight. “I think so.”
It took about a hundred thousand hours, a swamp load of tears, and countless verses of “Lean on Me”, but together we got her out and somehow carried her to the other side of the gate.
After several hugs, more tears, a change of clothes for April, and Hester’s emergency chocolate bars for everybody, we were ready to get the heck out of the dangerous wilds of Nottinghamshire. Hester’s hike had managed to make the tents seem inviting.
“Are you sure, April? You aren’t hurt? We can call an ambulance as soon as we reach somewhere with a phone signal.” Melody took her pulse one more time.
“I’m not hurt,” April beamed. “I’m fine. You saved me. I was really scared. I thought I was going to be swallowed up into the swamp forever.”
We all took a deep breath. At one point, we had thought that too.
“Then I heard you sing. And I wasn’t scared any more. I wasn’t in the swamp alone. I knew you’d help me out. You wouldn’t leave me. So I felt happy.”
“You felt happy? Stuck up to your waist in that mud?” Uzma boggled.
“I felt happy ’cos I knew I wasn’t alone. I knew you’d get me out. All that time, that whole walk, I’d been scared in case something scary happened. But I didn’t need to be scared. You were here. All of you. My friends. My sisters. You didn’t leave me. I didn’t need to be scared any more.”
I thought about what April had told me about her family – her destructive relationship with her mum, leaving home to kip on friends’ sofas, no job, no security, no one. Until she fell in love with a seriously ill man-child fighting a drug and alcohol addiction. And then he left her, too.
I mentally threw some more of my petty, ugly jealousy back over the gate and into the depths of that swamp right then and there. Squelching my caked feet across the path, I pulled her into a hug.
“You’re not alone, sister. Don’t be scared.”
“I could say the same thing to you,” she laughed, pressing her stinky face against mine.
Marilyn swivelled round and pointed one finger at Hester. “Did you plan this?”
Hester patted her head, every spotless hair in place. Was it actually a helmet? Made of some space-age dirt-resistant technology? “I’m choosing not to answer that question. But you know by now I do nothing without asking my boss first.”
“What, Dylan?” Rowan asked. “Dylan planned this?”
Rosa rolled her eyes. “She means God, Rowan.”
Some decades later, around midnight, we stumbled back into camp. Soggy, chafed, blistered, and utterly jubilant as we sang another round of musical classics. The notes our half-frozen lungs and exhausted voices produced were no longer pitch-perfect, or even in time. It sounded fantastic.
Every one of us slept for eight straight hours. I slept for eight straight hours. No nightmares, no sweats, no chattering teeth nor trembling bones. I was not alone. I was with my friends. My sisters. I was safe.
Chapter Nineteen
The sheep bleating in my ear woke me up. Either that or the sound of it ripping off a chunk of my sleeping bag.
Up close, sheep are massive.
Massive and filthy, smelly and sharp-hooved and massive.
Momentarily forgetting my friends, my sisters, not being alone and all that, I nearly peed my thermal pants.
“Sheep!” Marilyn called, from the other side of the tent.
“No kidding,” I growled back. “Got any bright ideas?”
“I have to get Nancy and Pete out. Sorry. Mother’s instinct.”
There was a rustle as she scrambled for the entrance, a baby in a mini sleeping bag under each arm.
“Rosa? Melody?” I called feebly to my tent-mates. “Did you know there’s a sheep in the tent?”
A bleary-eyed Rosa poked her head out of her blanket. “It’s a sheep. I think it eat your sleeping bag.”
“Yes. It’s also blocking my exit. I’m stuck here until it moves.”
“Did you try shooing it away? Like this, shoo, shoo.” She made a flapping motion with her hands. “Or like this.” She clambered to her feet and shooed again, waving her blanket up and down.
The sheep gazed at her across the tent before bending its head and taking another mouthful of my bed.
“Hang on. I go get a weapon. We can beat it out of the tent.”
Beat it out? With its hooves pinning my sleeping bag to the ground?
“Melody,” I called out, causing the sheep to waggle its head in my direction.
“Yes, my darling?” she replied, from within her separate compartment.
“There’s a sheep eating my sleeping bag.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound very good. I wouldn’t let it get away with that if I were you.”
“I don’t think I have any choice in the matter.”
Silence.
“Are you coming to help me?”
I heard a zipping noise, but Melody’s door into the main tent remained closed.
“Mel? Melody?”
My teammate, friend, and spiritual sister had scarpered out of the back entrance.
At that moment, I paused to consider how the sheep had got inside in the first place. Carefully, k
eeping the rest of my body still, I rolled my head to look behind me.
Yikes!
Another sheep, staring at me through an enormous rip in the back seam. Wearing a yellow and pink striped bobble hat.
I was surrounded.
And judging by the yelps and baas now erupting from all directions, I wasn’t the only one.
Rosa poked her head back in through the tent flap. Her arm followed, clutching a mop.
“Here. Whack it with this. On the nose. It will soon be getting the message and coming out of there.”
“Yes. Either that or it will lose its temper, bite my face, and make a smoothie out of my internal organs as it tramples me to death.”
“Faith. It is a sheep. You need to do your breathing exercise. Then show it who is boss.”
“We both know I’m not the boss.”
“I do not know that!”
“I meant me and the sheep.”
“Oh for mercy’s sake! I come in there right now to sort this out.”
“Wait! Let me get out of this bag first.”
But every time I tried, the sheep began to wave its head around in agitation, moving closer rather than further away from my all-too-squashable head. In the end, after I stopped moving for what felt like an hour at least, it stepped off the sleeping bag. I hastily wiggled past and out of the entrance, like a caterpillar sneaking out of a bird’s nest, and feeling just as vulnerable.
Straight into a scene out of a post-apocalyptic movie. Planet of the Sheep.
Tent one – admittedly our first, and therefore worst, attempt at pitching – was no longer upright. Tent three had a sheep standing in the entrance, chewing on a guy rope. The wet coats we had strung up to dry between a couple of trees now lay on the damp grass, all except for April’s parka, which one sheep now wore on its back.
Uzma reckoned that with a pair of dark glasses it could pass for a ’90s rock star.
The food supply, safely stored in tent one, now lay trampled across the clearing in various states of dishevelment.
“Honestly.” Leona snatched a packet of crumpets from the mouth of one of the smaller beasts and nearly got her fingers nipped off. “You can eat grass. Look around, you dumb animals. It’s all around you. More than you could ever need. Grass, grass, and more grass. We, however, cannot eat grass. We needed that loaf of bread. And you didn’t even eat the butter. You just trod on it.”
