Three Strikes

by Lucy Christopher

  A stupid phrase.

  And I was stupid enough to believe it.

  It got darker the further from town we got. I started noticing the stars through the windscreen. The curve of the Big Dipper, and the dim glint of the North Star above it. Mum had taught me them all once, lying in Gran and Gramps’ garden, back when they were still alive, back when life with Dieter in the city almost felt normal.

  I looked at Sam’s skin, saw the freckle-constellations there too.

  ‘Let’s just keep going,’ I said. ‘See how far the petrol takes us. See where we end up.’

  Sam smiled a small smile. ‘We’ve got school in the morning. And there’s your mum…’

  ‘So?’

  But Sam was already flicking the indicator for the turn-off to the quarry. I moved away from the window to wind it down and let the smells rush in. Car fumes. Manure. Pine trees. A part of me could leave our town behind and never ever miss it. A part of me could leave Mum too. Be like Dieter. I had all I needed right there in that car. I swallowed, guilt rushing in with the smells. Mum would hate this; if she saw me, she wouldn’t speak to me for weeks. For the rest of my life, perhaps.

  I thought about what she’d said, about boys only wanting one thing. About Sam wanting it too. I took off Sam’s beanie, held it in my lap. The wind from outside picked up my hair and held it for a moment. I felt the ice of it on my neck. It pulled at Sam’s jacket too. I could see the shape of Sam’s chest through his shirt underneath. I wondered what it would be like to have my hand there, between the shirt and his skin, wondered about the warmth.

  The car lurched as we hit the quarry track, the tyres spinning in the mud.

  ‘Thank God for the frost,’ Sam said, apparently oblivious to what I’d been thinking, ‘otherwise we’d really get stuck. We picked the best night for this.’

  He swerved around the old posts, driving over the wire fence that had come down in the last storm. It crunched beneath the tyres. The KEEP OUT sign was half-buried. He took a sharp left, driving cross-country until we reached the section Sam had cleared a few days ago; the place we were going to store the car. The car clunked over a rock, then stalled. Sam flicked the key, the lights, then turned to me and said in his best sat-nav voice, ‘You have reached your destination. Abandoned Quarry. Please hide your vehicle at the next available opportunity.’

  Then he stared at me, mouth still open, not knowing what to say next. I don’t think either of us did. We’d done it. We’d stolen Mum’s car. Sam had driven it all the way there. There was so much illegal about the last half hour that it was better not thinking about it.

  I thought about Sam instead. Watched him. In the near-darkness his skin looked silver, his eyes huge as a deer’s. I didn’t know what he was going to do next, but his eyes were full of thought. And something else.

  ‘Thanks for coming with me,’ he said. ‘Thanks for not going with your mum.’

  It was weird. I wanted Sam to look at me like that, I’d always wanted it, but his sudden intensity scared me, too. I looked away quickly. I couldn’t help it.

  ‘I guess we should start covering the car up,’ I said.

  Sam had already got the bracken and branches ready, and we only had to lay them across the car to make it look like a giant clump of vegetation. Sam had some crazy idea that he’d keep the car hidden until he was seventeen. Then he’d wheel it out, spray-paint it, and it would be his. It should be mine really, though. I was the one with the memories of it. And the car was technically still Mum’s after all, wasn’t it?

  But I wondered: was Mum on the mountain, somewhere not far above? Could she see down into the quarry? My stomach lurched. At least she’d have the moon for company, up there. The moon would make it easier for Sam and me, too. Through the windscreen and down the old quarry tracks, branches were swaying with the wind, and nothing else was moving.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Sam was glancing through the windscreen too.

  I shook my head, tried to laugh. ‘Mum always makes me feel so damn guilty.’

  Sam half-smiled. ‘But she’s not here now. You don’t have to worry about her for ages, do you?’

  I couldn’t answer. Glanced at the car clock instead. 10.09.

  Sam watched me look. ‘What time did you say you’d be back?’

  ‘Said the film finished at eleven.’

  He worked out the maths. ‘’bout an hour and a half?’

  I nodded. ‘I guess it will take a while to cover the car up, though?’

  Sam’s smile wavered, and I couldn’t hold his gaze. I didn’t know what I wanted, what I should want: to be there with Sam, or go back to Mum? Now that the car’s heating had gone off, it was freezing, too. I crossed my arms over my chest.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m ready to face the cold of the woods,’ Sam said. ‘Not yet.’ His voice was so gentle. He pulled at a thread in the seat.

  I watched his long fingers, traced my eyes up his arms to his face. He was chewing on his bottom lip, suddenly nervous as anything. He looked adorable. I didn’t want to go anywhere else in the whole world, never wanted to go anywhere else again.

  ‘Hug first, then?’ I said.

  And he reached out to me before I’d even finished speaking, just like that, and wrapped himself around me. I felt my whole body tense as he did. He must have felt it too. But he kept his arms there, around my shoulders. He buried his head against my neck. I heard his breath and the way his clothes rustled. I felt the cold of his nose on my skin. And he stayed there like that, for ages.

  No other guy had been that close to me, ever. Not even Dieter. Only Mum had hugged me as intently, just after Dieter left and she was crying like a baby. It took me a while to breathe out, to hug Sam back. I placed my arms around his shoulders and sighed. Sam didn’t speak. He just very slowly placed his lukewarm, soft lips against my neck, brushed them up towards my chin. Everything inside me was jumping, my skin and muscles tense to hold it in. He was breathing quickly, slipping a coolish hand between my jacket and jumper. I shivered.

  ‘Sorry,’ he murmured.

  I almost laughed. ‘No, you’re not.’

  I could feel him smiling against my neck. ‘You’re right. I’m not.’

  I wondered how long he’d been waiting to do this, wondered what he’d do next. Is this what he did with all the girls he was friends with? He shuffled across the seat, getting closer to me. I think I stopped breathing altogether.

  Then he was right there, in front of my face, his eyes a blur, his lips almost touching mine.

  ‘Is this OK?’ he whispered.

  So, OK…

  It’s three hours later. I can’t write any more of that other stuff now.

  We’re still here, at L and G’s camp. I guess I should explain what we’ve found.

  It’s weirder than in our camp.

  This camp is more open and the clearing in the middle is bigger; it’s quieter than in our camp, too, but perhaps that’s just because there’s not so many trees so close. Or perhaps it’s because we’re not used to it. Our camp felt weird too, when we first got there. It felt horrible.

  It didn’t take us long to explore.

  There’s the first cabin we went into – the one with the steps I’m sitting on.

  Then there’s the biggest cabin in the centre of the clearing – like the big cabin in our camp, this one also has a long wooden table down the centre with benches either side. There are two faded, mothy couches at the back, and an old chest in between them being used as a coffee table. There’s a lean-to kitchen tacked onto the side.

  The third and final cabin on the other side of the clearing is a bedroom. I didn’t spend long in there exploring; it felt wrong somehow with all of us. Toilets and showers are hidden in the trees, too, like they are at ours, and there’s a small hut containing a generator. All of these are empty of soldiers and warring tribes. No Lily and George, either.

  But it’s definitely their camp, there are signs of them everywhere. In the bedroom cabin, it’s mo
st obvious. Their stuff is scattered about, including clothes I remember them wearing: Lily’s bangles, George’s bandannas, flip-flops. Draped across one wall is a colourful square of cloth, and there are stacks of books beside the bed. Pete even found a whole stash of condoms in the bedside drawer. So, I guess L and G are a couple then.

  Even in the main cabin it’s obvious they were here recently. There were handwritten notes left on the table: Lily’s writing. The pen beside them still had its lid off. Those notes were about us. Annie pinned them with a tack to the wall.

  ‘We’ll read those properly later,’ she said. ‘Once we know what’s going on.’

  There are half-used jars of spreads in the kitchen. A bowl of cooked, hard rice (with flies) near the stove.

  So, where are they?

  How can Lily and George just disappear?

  It’s weird. Creepy, actually. And yeah, maybe I don’t think being left alone by them is a task to deal with anymore. If it were just my choice, I’d be out of here already, heading back to our camp, or maybe going further. But the others want to solve the mystery. So I guess I’m sticking here for now.

  The cabin I’m sitting in front of is the weirdest bit of this whole camp.

  I’ve been sitting here for a while, my back to what’s inside. Instead I’ve been looking out, watching Nyall and Annie run around the camp, exploring and yelling to each other. Any soldiers or warring tribes within about fifty miles would have heard us, so I guess that means there aren’t any. If I lean backwards a bit, I can see what’s in there. That cabin’s so strange, and it still smells bad too.

  It was an old sandwich in the end, the smell, nothing dead like I first thought. Just tuna and mayonnaise on white bread. At least, I think that’s what it was. The mayonnaise had congealed and there were flies and ants all over it, making the sandwich black and alive. It might as well have been a dead animal. Pete moved it because none of the rest of us would. He flung it far into the trees beyond the clearing. God help the poor animal that finds and eats that.

  But the sandwich isn’t the strangest thing in there.

  I’m listening to Pete and Sam inside the cabin. They’ve been in there for ages, fascinated – I always thought George and Lily were filming stuff, but this? This is something else.

  ‘Told you,’ I said to Pete when I saw it all. ‘Cameras have been watching us all the time.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  We counted fifteen different views altogether, all flickering across four different screens in a timed pattern. They’re small screens, placed on top of each other and making a kind of wall across the far end of the cabin. There’s a desk in front of them with paper and pens strewn across it, and an ancient-looking computer in one corner that we can’t log into. The whole room looks more like a shabby TV production room than something you’d find in a jungle hut. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if there are fifteen different images we can see, then there must be fifteen different cameras out there. Or more if not all the cameras are turned on, or some are broken.

  ‘I was SO right about the red lights in the trees,’ I said.

  I recognised most of the images that flickered across the screens. We counted six views of areas around our camp: a couple of shots of the clearing in the middle, an image each of the two bedroom cabins, and a shot looking in on the main hut. There was a shot of the path leading to the showers too. Lily and George had been spying on us. I racked my brains, tried to remember if I’d done anything stupid in front of any of these cameras, but I think I’m safe. I don’t do anything stupid anymore anyway; I skulk in the shadows.

  There are images of this camp too. Five. Pete and Sam actually went outside and looked for the cameras. From inside the cabin, the rest of us watched them. Pete waved up at the camera pointing at the clearing in the middle. We waved back, even though we were on the other side of the screens and he couldn’t see. Then Pete stuck his finger up at us. He cupped his hand and moved it up and down like he was wanking.

  Wanker.

  We all went looking for the other cameras then. The second camera we found was above the main cabin, looking out at the rest of the camp rather than pointed inside (like the cameras had to be at ours). When we found it in the rafters, I wanted to throw a stone and knock it down, but no one else said anything when I suggested it. Then there’s a camera near the shower block, and another one looking at L and G’s cabin. There must be a camera somewhere else on the edge of this camp too, as one of the screens is focused on images of the track we came in on.

  That leaves four other cameras somewhere else. And that’s the thing: these four other images we can see flickering across the screens – we’ve no idea where they are! Or what they are showing us. We looked at these pictures for ages, trying to work it out. These cameras are pointed at lots and lots of tall green plants. Thick, leafy undergrowth. Nothing else.

  Crops for food? Maybe they are. They seem to be planted in an orderly enough way, and they all look like the same sort of plant. But four cameras pointed at it? That seems like a lot of surveillance for a bit of food.

  Nyall’s convinced it’s Lily and George’s personal drug stash. But these crops don’t look like marijuana plants, I know that much.

  Maybe we’re staring at a new crop of drugs, something about to be unleashed on the world. But from here? I’m not sure I would’ve picked Lily and George for international drug smugglers. They look too much like pot-smokers for one thing – hippy-dippy and shambolic – and I thought serious drug smugglers were always the types you least expect. Kids. Elderly ladies. Accountants.

  We’ve stared and stared, but none of us recognise the scenery around those crops, not from what we can see anyway. But then, we haven’t been far into the trees, so how would we really know anything?

  Sam and Pete are still in the cabin now, looking for clues.

  I’ve just taken a moment to go back into that cabin.

  I peered over Sam’s shoulders for another look. In one screen, I watched Annie going through the drawers in Lily and George’s bedroom cabin. Sam, Pete and me all stayed silent as she pulled out a pair of undies and held them against her.

  ‘Oh, she’s not going to try them on, is she?’ Pete snickered. ‘On live telly?’

  ‘It’s not live telly,’ I snapped. ‘It’s just us watching.’

  ‘Who knows who else is watching?’

  That shut me up. Because I guess he’s right. I actually had no idea what Lily and George were doing with all this footage, and no idea if they were still doing something with it right now. They said at the beginning they were filming us so they could study our group dynamics, so they could help us in the best way possible; we were part of a groundbreaking psychological project. We even had to sign a piece of paper that allowed them to do it. They’d make some amazing documentary and they’d make us all famous, they said. We’d get money.

  I’m not so sure anymore. I mean, fifteen cameras, and four of them focused on tall green plants? Besides, they couldn’t use this sort of footage for TV – in the images we saw, there’s not even sound.

  We’ve been idiots.

  I’m beginning to wish we’d never found this cabin. Never left our camp. At least it felt safe in our camp, comparatively – like we were so hidden nobody could find us. But maybe I’ve been wrong about that, too.

  After we gave up on Annie with the undies, we watched the rest of the screens. A small monkey skittered through one of the images of the crops and Pete started backwards, his head banging into my chest.

  ‘Watch it,’ I growled.

  He turned around to look slowly at my tits. ‘Nothing to bump into anyway!’

  Sam whacked him across the head. ‘Stop being an arse.’

  I was glad Sam did that, though I didn’t look at him to let him know. Pete went back to studying the rest of the screens, not saying anything else. It was so weird: these places we were spying on, the life going on outside this cabin that we saw so many glimpses of. It wa
s like playing God.

  Pete started fiddling around with the few buttons there were, trying to work out if he could do anything to the footage. He tried again to crack the computer’s password.

  ‘If we could rewind the recordings, we could see what happened before we got here,’ he said. ‘To Lily and George.’

  ‘Well, duh!’ I said.

  Though there was no rewind button. Not that we could see. And the computer remained a dusty, useless brick.

  ‘What if it’s just a surveillance system?’ I said. I was thinking about Dieter, how he used to tell me about working as a carpark attendant and watching screens of cars for hours; how he’d had to watch it all himself in real time as nothing was stored in the system for more than 24 hours.

  I tried to explain this to Pete. ‘Some surveillance systems don’t store footage, not for long anyway. Sometimes it’s just the live footage on the screen.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they keep footage?’ he said. ‘We’re part of some psychology programme, remember? They’re making a TV show with us … they need the footage.’

  I stared at him, and he stared back. We were both thinking it… Are we?Are they?How much of any of it is real?

  Then Nyall walked into one of the images, and we all turned back to see. He was bare-chested, with a towel draped over his shoulder, and was heading towards the shower. We watched him look around. He must’ve been trying to work out where the camera was, trying to remember.

  ‘Stop perving,’ Pete said.

  He lashed out at me, but I avoided him easily. I folded my arms in front of my chest. ‘You’re not looking away, either,’ I said. ‘Girl, boy, monkey … I reckon you’d go for anything that moved. Even now you’re still watching him.’