Three Strikes

by Lucy Christopher

  I haven’t done mine yet. When Sam asked me, I told him I hadn’t and he went off to bed in a huff. I’m not sure if he’s still awake – or if I’m keeping him awake with this light – but I don’t think so. Sam and sleeping go together like bread and cheese.

  Mmm.

  Bread. Cheese.

  If only we weren’t stuck a million miles from a shop.

  Maybe that’s an advantage in looking for the other camp. There might be bread there – cheese! – and it might not be mouldy.

  But I can’t move yet. There’s a new horrible-sickie-sinking feeling inside me…

  What if Lily and George disappearing wasn’t a joke? What if whatever – whoever – took them is now waiting out there for us? What if when we leave…

  Bang!

  Us too.

  ‘That’s anxiety talking,’ Pete said when I told him. ‘You need to get a handle on that – it’s hereditary, you know, anxiety.’

  And I wondered … had Sam told him about Mum? That thought made me dig nails into my palm. Another reason, maybe, why I haven’t packed my day pack yet. Maybe I don’t have to go with them.

  I can escape. Just go.

  Later I heard Pete saying to the others what I’d said to him about the shots. ‘Perhaps it was soldiers,’ he said. ‘Or warring tribes. What if it’s no joke?’

  I can’t sleep.

  Just turned the torch off and then on again. Everything feels … uncertain. I mean, we don’t even know where we are, not really. An island off the west coast of Africa they said… There must be hundreds of them, right? Maybe thousands.

  Did Lily and George tell Dieter the details like they said they would? Does he, at least, know where we are? Does Sam’s mum? Anyone?

  There’s a huge, wild, wide-open panic attack building inside me. I feel it like a tsunami. It could crash down at any moment. It would flood this whole camp if I let it. I’d be sobbing.

  I want to crawl in with Sam. I want to kiss him. Want to do more than this.

  Want. Want.

       Want!

  The knife is on the floor, still in the pocket of my balled-up shorts. I want to use that, too. It wouldn’t take much: my hand out from under this mosquito net, one slit. Then, maybe, one more.

  I’ll keep writing so I don’t do either. No cutting. No fucking. I can handle that, can’t I? If I keep writing, can I make my fingers too tired from words?

  So…

  So…

  That night…

  I was jumpy in the park, waiting for Sam. It got dark and cold. Almost like snow would come, even though it was already late spring. I thought about texting Sam again and telling him to hurry up, but what if Mum hadn’t gone to the mountain yet? If she saw Sam leaving his house and heading in the same direction as me, she might start to suspect. She might even come after him. In the mood she was in, who knew?

  My fingers turned rigid around the swing chains and I had to get up and walk around, down near the stand of oaks that separated the park from the rubbish dump. All the time, my body felt stiff enough to snap. I was watching for Sam, for Mum … anyone really. Every sound was like a footstep behind me. I thought about walking on to town and meeting Sam there. I hadn’t realised how creepy it was in the park at night, way creepier than up on the mountain. In the park, anyone could come along. Up the mountain, it was just Mum and an imaginary cat.

  I kicked at soggy pieces of a cardboard box and sent an empty plastic milk carton flying across a ditch. I wondered if Mum would light a fire on the summit, whether she’d cook something on it. I stuck another Polo in my mouth, wishing I’d brought something more substantial. I could go on to town and bring chips back, but Sam would smell them on my breath and feel the grease on my hands. He would if things went the right way, anyway. I sucked on the Polos, timing how long I could make each one last.

  Eventually, I saw Sam’s tall, gangly figure loping towards me. He had one of his brother Jake’s skater hoodies on, too big for him, with some symbol scrawled across the front. The beanie he always wore was shoved down over his ears and hair. I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life. But I tried to keep it cool.

  ‘Alright?’ I said.

  I was breathing mint fumes from all the Polos. He laughed at the way I was bouncing from one foot to the other, trying to keep warm.

  ‘How long you been here for?’

  I shrugged. ‘Mum went up the mountain, so I thought I may as well leave too.’

  Sam nodded. He knew about Mum and the mountain.

  ‘What did you tell your mum you were doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Going to the cinema, same as you. Had to make up some shit about what we were going to watch.’ His eyes held mine, laughing at me. ‘Said it was some car-chase film.’

  I swallowed the last Polo. ‘You said it was us going, you and me?’

  ‘Why not? Mum likes you. She’s always liked you.’

  I thought about it, wondered if Mum would find out from Sam’s mum that I’d lied about the group of friends I was meeting. Considering Mum hardly talked to Sam’s mum anymore, it was unlikely.

  Sam shook his head. ‘Don’t worry, I told her not to say anything; she understood. She’s told me before she thinks your mum’s too controlling.’

  There was a silence then. I was trying to work out whether I could tell Sam about the argument I’d just had with Mum. I wanted to. It wasn’t long ago that I’d told him everything like that. But something had shifted lately and I didn’t know where we stood. And anyway I didn’t know what Mum had actually said to Sam about not wanting him to see me. Mum could have been lying about it, just saying it to scare me – it wouldn’t be the first time she’d done something like that. But she might’ve really done it too.

  Sam was watching me think, reading my mind again. ‘Your mum alright?’

  I nodded, but I must have looked a bit funny because Sam came right up to me and gave me a hug.

  ‘You’re colder than an ice pack.’ His arms were so tight and warm around me and, even though his jumper smelt like Jake’s roll-up cigarettes, I wanted him to keep hugging, but instead he pulled back and took off his beanie. He tugged it down over my head. ‘That help?’

  I nodded again, grateful. The red wool felt damp over my ears, and smelt slightly doggy. Without it, Sam’s hair bounced up like a nest. He ran his hand over it, flattening the dark curls. Then he leant over to tuck a strand of my hair back up under the beanie. I felt the rough, cold pads of his fingertips against my skin. He lingered them there for a moment. I wanted to turn my cheek and kiss them.

  ‘So, we doing this thing?’ he said.

  ‘It’s too friggin’ cold to do anything else.’

  He grinned at that, chucked an arm around my shoulder. I leant my shoulder into him, hoping his body warmth would jump across to me. He sort of swaggered as I did. He was getting so confident lately, like he’d grown so much older than me as well as so much taller. All that working in his dad’s garage had made him strong too. I felt it in his arms as he gripped me around the shoulders and half lifted me across the playground. He tried tripping me up over the slide, pushing his long legs against mine to make me fall, but I held onto his waist and wouldn’t let him.

  ‘You’re like a monkey,’ he said. ‘Tiny, gripping fingers.’

  ‘If I fall, you fall too.’

  He laughed at that, corrected me. ‘If you fall, you get squashed.’

  I imagined us falling over the slide, landing in the woodchips the other side, him on top. It didn’t sound so bad. But Sam pulled us on. A group of girls was watching us as they came through the main gates. Sam leant in close to my ear, not even looking at them. That was something else that had happened to Sam lately, he got noticed. Girls no longer ignored him when he passed.

  ‘Let’s cover our bases,’ he said. ‘Go the long way round.’

  He took his arm back and grabbed my hand instead. His was warm now and huge around mine. I suddenly had the sharpest flash of memory of wa
lking exactly like this when Sam must have been half his height. We were following along behind his mum, walking to our first day of high school. Weird that we were holding hands; we were old enough not to be. Weird he never became my boyfriend then either. I chewed on my lip. Neither of us had ever said the words before to each other: boyfriend, girlfriend. But we were inseparable at school. I sent more text messages to Sam than to everyone else put together. And then, this. Surely this is what it all meant: where it was all going.

  Sam led the way through the smaller side-gate of the park. Then he doubled back, walked past the pub on the corner, and up the last dead-end street before where the mountain path began, until we got to Mum’s old car.

  I don’t know why she’d left it there, in that dead-end street … just the park on one side and the mountain on the other. It was like she wanted someone to steal it! For months now she hadn’t even been out of town. She seemed to have forgotten she even had a car. Must’ve been a year, at least, since she’d been inside it.

  Sam hadn’t forgotten though.

  ‘I’m having that,’ he’d said, one evening as we walked past it.

  Now he crouched down beside the driver’s door, his back to the mountain. He didn’t care that I hadn’t managed to find the key, said it was better this way.

  ‘This way, she’ll never suspect us,’ he said. ‘And I know how to get into a car.’

  I went on lookout. But really I was watching the curve of Sam’s back as he hunched over his backpack, his long fingers digging around inside it for tools. It was so much colder without his arm around me. I guess I’d dressed pretty stupidly, too bothered about wanting Sam to look at me. I think Sam liked it though. It gave him a chance to play the hero and keep me warm.

  He took out a screwdriver and a piece of flat blue plastic. I tried not to listen as Sam made the door groan and bend open, instead thinking about where Mum and I used to go in this car. To the city. To Dieter. To shopping trips in other places. Once to the airport, where we parked it and went on holiday to Tenerife.

  There was a hollow thud as the door opened.

  ‘We’re in.’ Sam chucked the backpack inside the car then turned to me. ‘You first.’

  I crawled across the driver’s seat and into the passenger one, my skirt getting caught on the gear stick. Old bits of rubbish made crinkling noises beneath me. Then Sam got in and shut the door quietly. It was weird, the smell in there. It was all Mum’s hairspray and perfume, back when she was trying to get a job and impress Dieter again.

  ‘You alright?’

  Sam’s eyes were shining in the dark, waiting for approval. But for me, right then, it was enough just to sit there. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to move the car anymore. I remembered being small, in the back, late at night when Dieter was driving and Mum was asleep beside him.

  Sam reached for the backpack, dug around in it and took out a small bunch of keys. I leant my head against the window and pretended I was still on lookout. I was worried those girls from the park would come around the corner and spot Sam instantly. But the street was empty. Too cold, I guess. Perhaps the girls had gone home.

  ‘I took the skeleton keys from the garage,’ Sam said. ‘One of them should work on a car like this.’

  He was proud of all he’d learnt with his dad. He was always talking about it, and he always had engine oil on his skin, even at school. He jiggled first one key then the next in the ignition.

  ‘Course, even if we get a key that fits, there’s no guarantee it will start,’ he said.

  But it did. First go.

  Until then, I wasn’t really thinking we’d do it. It was just something fun: a chance to sit in a dark, enclosed space with Sam, a chance of it meaning something more than just friends. But when the car started, I felt different. We were breaking the law. There was no going back, then.

  That was the moment, I guess.

  The moment I could have stopped it all. That was the ‘pause moment’ as Lily called it in those first strange therapy sessions: the place I could rewind my life to, and stop for a while to assess. Freeze-frame on Sam with his mouth open, two hands on the wheel, eyes on me. Freeze on me looking back, not sure whether to smile or scream.

  The moment where everything shifted – changed – where the world went up a gear.

  And things could have changed. If I’d got out of the car and gone back to Mum, if I’d said I’d changed my mind about the cinema and wanted to go up the mountain with her instead, or watch some crappy TV show, I wouldn’t be here. Sam wouldn’t be either. It would be some other poor fuckers.

  And Mum?

  She’d be somewhere, too.

  But we know what happens. It’s so stupidly obvious. I’m so stupidly obvious. I didn’t stop to think, didn’t pause anything. Back then I didn’t even want slow motion. Wasn’t looking for anything other than fast forward. I wriggled across my seat so that my mouth rested against Sam’s ear lobe and I whispered, ‘Let’s go.’

  I felt him shiver as I did.

  Sam woke me this morning. Guess I did manage to send myself to sleep by writing after all. I checked my arms. No cuts. By the look on Sam’s face, I hadn’t kissed him in my sleep either. No cuts, no fucks.

  ‘We’ve got a plan,’ he said. ‘Going to walk down the main track, past the shower area, see where it leads. Lily and George’s camp can’t be too far.’

  I was still bleary from dreams. ‘All of us?’

  Sam frowned. ‘You want to stay here?’

  He glanced out of the door, away from me, to where the others were getting ready. I could hear them talking and chucking stuff about. The thought of Sam leaving with them, without me, even only for a few hours, was painful.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said.

  He nodded, didn’t even look that pleased. ‘Better get dressed then.’

  By the time I got out and joined the others, they were all ready, day packs and sleeping bags on their backs. I stared at them. ‘How long you planning on going for?’

  ‘Got to plan for anything,’ Pete answered. ‘Remember George said this island isn’t safe.’

  I shrugged. ‘Seems fine to me.’ I was starting to hate the way Pete always assumed he was in control.

  ‘Have you forgotten two days ago?’ Pete said. ‘The gunshots?’

  I glared at him, then I went back into the cabin, grabbed a water bottle, a hat, this book, and stuck them in a small bag. I checked the filleting knife was in my pocket, and came back out. ‘OK, I’m ready.’

  ‘You don’t have much.’ Pete looked doubtful, but Sam pushed him towards the track to get going, turning him from me.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ Sam said, but he looked back at me sadly.

  I glanced around the clearing before we left, looking again for the camera lights. I scanned either side of the track as we started walking down it. Couldn’t see anything, but Lily and George would’ve hidden the cameras well, in plants and between stalks of bamboo, deep in that thick undergrowth.

  No one spoke much. Pete led, of course. Then Nyall and Annie, walking really close to each other, practically on the same bit of track. Then Sam. Then me. I’m surprised Pete let me go last actually. Everyone knows it’s where the next most capable person goes. Perhaps he thought that since Sam was back there too it didn’t matter.

  The track led downhill. We passed the small path to the toilet, then the smaller path to the lean-to shower, then the hut that had the generator in it. Then we were on virgin territory. For us, anyway.

  After only a few minutes sweat was pouring down my face, soaking my shirt. I was glad I hadn’t brought a heavy bag, though wished I’d brought more water, a little food. My head was spinning from the heat. Occasionally we heard the crash of seed pods dropping to the ground, or animals leaping through the trees. Each sound made Pete jump – I saw it – they made us all jump.

  How many days ago was it when George had gathered us around the campfire to tell us there were fighting tribes nearby? Four days? Five? He told us to
never go beyond the immediate trees of our camp without him, said we could get hurt. It seems like a lifetime ago. I hadn’t believed him, didn’t think any of us had. I’d thought it was another trick to fuck with us.

  But as we walked down that track, I knew what we were all listening out for: more gunshots.

  I just stopped writing to peer out at this new set of trees. Still nothing. Still so loud. How can something be so full and so empty at exactly the same time? So dark and rich.

  Maybe the shots we heard are something to do with George and Lily’s disappearance. I mean, why else would both of those things happen on the same day?

  The others didn’t believe Pete at first, when he’d said they were shots. Though I knew the sound. There’s that unmistakable crack and echo that only comes from a gun.

  We’d stopped, still as the trees, stiller, listening. Two shots. Then – maybe – a grumble of engines, trucks or something. Then nothing. Silence. After a moment, I was aware of Sam breathing hard. And Annie’s breath coming back to her in a rush. Then the forest started to screech and shuffle, and everything was as it’d been.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Sam whispered.

  Nyall scooped his arm around Annie and looked up at the trees.

  ‘Guns,’ Pete said.

  ‘Someone hunting,’ I’d suggested. ‘There are probably poachers here.’

  So we’d decided not to plant the flag on the summit behind the camp (the only place George had ever let us walk) even though it was one of our tasks. We’d started off down the hill again instead. We didn’t speak as we’d walked, not even when Annie slipped a couple of metres down the slope. We just offered our arms towards her and she grabbed them, and we pulled her up. I could sense everyone getting slower as we got closer to camp. We didn’t know what we’d find.